Aldith rode east on a gray morning with one apprentice, a girl of nineteen named Cecily who had come to the valley from a village that no longer existed, and Victoria helped load their packs exactly as she had said she would, and did not say a single further word against the decision.
The second wave arrived in Argenton eleven days later.
It came, as far as Elias could ever reconstruct it, from the southern road — a family of four traveling toward the salt spring who had passed through the checkpoint before the marks showed, and lodged two nights at the crossroads tavern, and moved on north without any of them knowing what they had left behind.
By the time the first household reported, there were already three more that hadn't.
Thomas sent riders east within the hour, and knew, even as he gave the order, that they would need three days minimum to reach Aldith and bring her back, and that three days was a considerably longer time than the fever generally allowed.
Wat took charge of the fever house in her absence, and did it competently, and hated every hour of it.
"I'm not her," he said, on the second night, standing outside the tents with his hands shaking from something that clearly wasn't cold. "I can lift a man and I can sit with a dying one and I can follow her instructions to the letter. I cannot look at a fevered child and know whether she needs the willow bark or whether the willow bark will finish her. Aldith knows that. I don't. I'm guessing, Thomas, and people are going to die of my guessing."
"Then guess," Thomas said, because there was nothing else honest to say. "And write down what you guessed and what happened, so it isn't wasted whichever way it goes."
Diccon's daughter fell sick on the third day.
Thomas was there when Elsbeth brought her — little Joan, two years old, fierce-tempered and stubborn and now dreadfully, unmistakably quiet, the rose marks already visible along her small chest. He watched Diccon's face as Wat examined her, and understood, with a terrible clarity, exactly what the argument in the council room had actually been about, and exactly what his own decision had actually spent.
"She's small," Wat said, in the flat voice he used when he was afraid. "Small's the worst of it with this one. I've seen the very old and the very young go fastest, every time."
"Aldith would know what to do," Diccon said. He wasn't accusing anyone. That was somehow considerably worse than if he had been.
"Aldith's a day and a half out, if the riders found her." Wat's jaw worked. "We do what we know how to do until she's here. That's all any of us can offer, lad, and I'll not insult you by pretending otherwise."
Thomas sat with Joan through the second night himself, relieving Elsbeth when she could no longer stay upright, and found himself doing the only thing he could think to do — talking to her, quietly, hour after hour, about a valley she was too young to understand and too sick to hear, about towers and rail lines and a woman she'd been named for who would have had absolutely no patience for any of the fuss.
Somewhere near dawn he became aware that Victoria was in the doorway, and had been for some time.
She didn't say I told you. She never said it, not that night and not once in all the years that followed, and Thomas understood that this restraint was costing her something enormous, and that she was paying it deliberately, as a gift.
She crossed the room instead and put her hand on the back of his neck and stood there, saying nothing at all, and Thomas found that he could not look at her and could not have borne it if she'd left.
Aldith arrived at midday on the fourth day, having ridden through most of two nights, and took over the fever house without ceremony or reproach.
Joan lived.
Four others did not, including the cooper's boy who had survived the first wave, and Thomas carried that particular arithmetic — one child spared, another taken, the same fever, the same house, the same exhausted hands — for considerably longer than he carried most things.
"You'd make the same choice again," Aldith said to him, a week later, when the worst had passed. It wasn't a question, and it wasn't unkind.
"I don't know," Thomas said honestly. "I genuinely don't. Ask me in a year."
"That," Aldith said, "is a considerably better answer than yes."