The fever house's overflow tents held thirty-one souls within the week, and Aldith moved among them with an exhausted, unyielding thoroughness that Thomas understood, watching her, was the only thing standing between the valley's careful preparation and genuine catastrophe.
"It's not slowing," she told the council on the seventh day, her voice raw from too little sleep and too much grief already accumulated. "Six dead so far, all children or the very old, exactly the pattern I feared from what I saw at Millbrook. The rest are holding, some improving, but I don't have the hands to properly nurse thirty-one people the way I nursed Osbern alone, two years ago, and I don't know how much longer that gap is going to cost us lives we might otherwise have saved."
Victoria's face carried the particular flat determination of a woman calculating a crisis that had finally outgrown every careful preparation the valley had made against it. "How many more hands do you need?"
"Twenty, properly trained. I don't have twenty properly trained hands in this whole valley, Victoria. I have myself, and three apprentices, and a great many well-meaning volunteers who don't yet understand the difference between comforting a dying person and accidentally carrying the sickness home to their own families afterward." Aldith's exhaustion was plain, but so was the fierce, unbroken resolve beneath it. "I need people I can teach quickly, and trust completely, and I don't have the luxury of being choosy about where they come from anymore."
It was Wat, unexpectedly, who volunteered himself first, over Victoria's immediate and visible objection.
"I've buried a wife to a fever with no name and no cure," he said, his voice carrying a rough, unshakeable certainty. "I know what waiting helplessly outside a sickroom costs a person, Aldith, better than anyone else in this valley besides yourself. Teach me what you need taught. I'll not pretend I've your gentle hand, but I've strength enough to lift a grown man who can't lift himself, and patience enough, God knows, to sit with the dying when nobody else can bear it."
Diccon followed him within the hour, against Elsbeth's tearful, understandable fear, and it was Elsbeth herself, in the end, who gave him the permission neither Aldith nor the council had been willing to demand of him.
"Go," she said, her voice unsteady but resolved. "I watched you come home hollow from Oakhaven, and I was glad, selfishly, that you'd come home at all. I won't ask you to stay behind this time, Diccon, however much it frightens me. Joan needs a father who lives by the same principles he's spent his whole life learning from this valley. I won't be the reason you abandon them now, when they matter most."
Thomas found himself, watching the valley's own people step forward one by one to fill the gap Aldith's exhausted honesty had named, thinking of every careful lesson the past four years had taught him — that a town built on shared knowledge and shared risk survived its worst hours not through any single person's heroism, but through exactly this: ordinary people, frightened and grieving and unprepared, choosing again and again to show up for each other regardless.
He volunteered himself as well, and it was Victoria, this time, who raised the objection Wat had voiced against her own earlier volunteering.
"You have a falling number in your tunic, Thomas, and a fever house full of exactly the kind of sickness that preys hardest on the already weakened. I won't pretend I'm not frightened of what exposing yourself to it might cost, on top of everything else already threatening you."
"I know. I'm asking anyway, because I don't think I can stand at the edge of this crisis directing other people into danger while I hold myself carefully apart from it." Thomas met her eyes, and found the old, familiar courage steadier now than it had been in the earliest days of his private fear. "I've spent months learning to build the days I have left instead of hoarding them out of caution, Victoria. I don't think that lesson stops applying the moment it becomes genuinely dangerous to practice."
Victoria held his gaze a long moment, and Thomas watched her weigh her own fear against the plain truth of what he was asking, before finally, reluctantly, nodding.
"Then we go together," she said. "I won't stand behind while you risk yourself, any more than you'd let me risk myself alone. Whatever this costs either of us, Thomas, we face it exactly the way we've faced everything else — side by side, honestly, and together."
They walked to the fever house together that same evening, Aldith already preparing the careful instruction that would turn a blacksmith and a valley's founders into nurses, and Thomas found, crossing the threshold into a building thick with fear and fever and the particular hard, necessary work of tending the suffering, that the courage he'd found across the past difficult year finally had somewhere real to be spent.