The letter from de Vesci arrived three weeks after the last death, and it split the council more thoroughly than anything had in four years.
The eastern half of the March is failing, he wrote. Two villages are effectively gone — not emptied by death alone, but abandoned by those well enough to run, which has carried the sickness further and faster than the fever could have managed on its own. I am told Argenton lost nineteen of fifty-three. I am losing, in some villages, better than half. I ask you plainly, as your lord and as a man who has no better option available to him: send me your people. Not your book — I have your book, and it has not been enough. Send me the hands that used it.
Aldith wanted to go. That surprised nobody.
Victoria refused, and that surprised everyone.
"No," she said, and the flatness of it stopped the council's murmuring cold. "Not this time. Not while we're this depleted."
"Victoria—"
"Let me finish, because I intend to say this once and properly." She set down the ledger she'd been holding, and Thomas saw, with genuine alarm, that her hands weren't entirely steady. "We lost nineteen people. We have four trained nurses left standing, two of whom are barely recovered from the exhaustion of the last six weeks. Our herb gardens are stripped to nothing — I've counted them myself, twice, because I didn't believe the first count. If a second wave comes here, and Aldith is two days east in someone else's village, this valley will lose people it did not have to lose. That is not a hypothetical, Thomas. That is arithmetic."
"And if we don't go," Aldith said quietly, "half the eastern March dies of something we know how to slow."
"Yes." Victoria didn't flinch from it. "I know exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying I would rather that happen than watch it happen here."
The room went very quiet.
"You've spent four years arguing the opposite," Thomas said, carefully. "Knowledge shared outlives knowledge hoarded. That was your position on Genoa. That was your position on the fever book going to Whitcombe."
"It was. It still is, in every season where sharing costs us surplus rather than survival." Victoria met his eyes without any of her usual composure to hide behind. "I am not arguing a principle, Thomas. I am arguing a season. We do not have surplus. We have four exhausted nurses and an empty herb store and nineteen fresh graves, and I am the one who counted every one of them, and I am telling this council that we cannot give away what we no longer have."
Wat, to Thomas's genuine surprise, sided with her. Alaric, more predictably, sided with Aldith. Elias abstained, saying plainly that he did not consider himself qualified to weigh lives against lives and would not pretend otherwise.
Which left Thomas.
He sat with it a long moment, aware of every face turned toward him, aware — with a clarity that had grown considerably sharper since the falling number had taught him what it actually meant to have limited time — that this was the kind of decision that would sit in him for whatever years remained.
"I think you're right about the arithmetic," he said finally, to Victoria. "And I think Aldith's right about what happens if we act on the arithmetic alone."
"That isn't an answer."
"No. It isn't." He turned to Aldith. "How many hands could you take east and still leave this valley genuinely covered? Not comfortably. Genuinely."
Aldith considered it with the honest thoroughness she brought to everything. "Two. Myself and one apprentice, and only if Wat and Diccon stay, and only if we return the moment anything appears here."
"Then that's what goes." Thomas looked at Victoria, and made himself say the rest of it plainly rather than softening it. "I'm overruling you. Not because your count is wrong — it isn't, and I want that in the record. Because I think a valley that survives by refusing help to people dying two days east of it becomes something I don't want to have built. I'd rather be wrong about the arithmetic than right about that."
Victoria's face did something complicated, and she was silent for a long moment.
"Then write it down," she said at last. "In the Codex. Both positions, in full, and whose they were. If this costs us lives here, I want whoever comes after us to be able to read exactly what we knew when we chose it, and exactly who argued what, and to judge it honestly." Her voice was steady, but only just. "I'll help Aldith pack. I want that in the record too. Losing an argument doesn't mean I stop working."
Thomas wrote both positions into the Codex that same night, hers first and in full, and found, doing it, that he was less certain of his own than he had been three hours earlier in a room full of people watching him decide.