He came up the ridge road on foot in the third week of the thaw, and the tower watch reported him a full hour before he reached the gate, which gave the valley more than enough time to recognize exactly who was arriving.
Alaric identified him first, from the tower platform, and said nothing for a long moment.
"That's Cade," he said finally. "One of the two brothers. The men the Baron kept on his privy purse."
Thomas felt something cold go through him. "You're certain?"
"I served eleven years in a household that man moved through. I am certain." Alaric's face had gone very still. "He's alone, and he's walking, which means he has no horse. I would not read that as a threat, Lord Thomas. I would read it as a man who has run out of everything else."
They met him at the gate — Thomas, Alaric, Wat, and a half-dozen of Wat's men standing back at a careful distance — and Thomas understood, seeing him properly, exactly what Alaric had meant. Cade had been, by every account, a hard and capable man. What arrived at the gate was gaunt and filthy and clearly ill, though not, Aldith determined at a cautious distance, with the fever.
"Starvation," she said. "And exposure, and whatever else a man collects walking a hundred miles through a March that's stopped feeding anyone."
Cade didn't ask for anything at first. He simply stood there, swaying slightly, and looked at the valley behind them — the towers, the smoke, the ordinary rhythm of a place still functioning — with an expression Thomas found difficult to read.
"Renfrew's dead," he said eventually. "Fever, in a village east of here, four weeks back. Wasn't anyone left to bury him proper." He looked at Alaric. "You'll be wanting to hang me, castellan. I'll not argue the right of it."
"I hold no such authority anymore," Alaric said flatly. "And this town does not hang men on my preference."
"Then whoever does." Cade's voice was entirely without self-pity, which somehow made it worse. "I burned your dye shed. I paid the boy to burn your flume. I'd have burned more if the Baron had kept paying. I'll not stand here and pretend I've come to be forgiven for any of it."
"Why have you come?" Thomas asked.
"Because everywhere else is dying and this place isn't." Cade met his eyes with something close to contempt — not for Thomas, Thomas realized, but for himself. "I walked past four villages to get here. Two of them had nobody left standing to tell me to move on. I heard, three days back, that Argenton was still feeding people. I came because I'd rather be hanged fed than die in a ditch hungry, and that's the whole honest truth of it."
The council argued for two hours.
Wat wanted him gone — not hanged, but gone, escorted to the boundary and left there. Alaric, unexpectedly, argued the same, on the plain grounds that a man who had tried twice to burn the valley did not become safe merely because he was hungry.
It was Aldith who argued the other side, and she argued it in terms nobody had quite expected.
"I've spent this whole year going into villages to treat people I'd never met, because I decided a long time ago that suffering doesn't require me to like the sufferer first." Her voice was flat with exhaustion but entirely certain. "I don't care what he did. I care that he's starving at our gate. If we've built a place that feeds strangers but not enemies, then what we've actually built is a place that feeds people we approve of, and I want no part in pretending that's the same thing as mercy."
"He tried to burn the flume with people sleeping above it," Wat said.
"He did. And if he tries again, we'll deal with it then, the way we dealt with it before." Aldith turned to Thomas. "I'm not asking you to trust him. I'm asking you not to send a starving man back into a dying March because his crimes were against us specifically."
Thomas, who had spent the last month learning exactly what it cost to be wrong about a decision like this, took considerably longer to answer than he once might have.
"Feed him," he said finally. "Outside the walls. A shelter, food, whatever Aldith judges he needs to recover. He doesn't enter the town proper, he doesn't go near the works, and Wat sets whatever watch he thinks necessary." He looked at Cade directly. "That's not forgiveness. That's not a place here. That's food and a roof until you can walk, and then you'll be moving on."
Cade absorbed that without visible reaction. "Why?"
"Because I've watched nineteen of my own people die this year of something none of them deserved," Thomas said, "and I've discovered I no longer have much appetite for adding to the count on purpose."
Cade stayed six weeks. He did not attempt anything, and did not become a friend to anyone, and spoke perhaps two hundred words in the entire time. When he left, in the first proper week of spring, he did it without announcement, leaving behind only the shelter swept clean and the blankets folded — a small, exact courtesy that Thomas found himself thinking about, on and off, for a considerable time afterward.