The schism, when it came, did not arrive over anything as dramatic as Thomas had always half-expected.
It arrived over a copy request.
A guild in Whitcombe — cloth merchants, well-established, entirely respectable — wrote to the council asking to purchase a complete copy of the Codex. Not the medical sections, which the valley had been giving away freely for three years. The whole of it. Metallurgy, the wire, the scrip mechanics, the water systems, the rail specifications. Everything.
They offered a considerable sum.
"We don't sell it," Diccon said, before anyone else had spoken, and Thomas registered with some surprise that Diccon had spoken first, and with more surprise how angry he sounded. "That's the entire principle. Knowledge shared, not knowledge sold. We've said it in every letter to Genoa and every conversation with Anselm for five years."
"We've also never had anyone offer to pay for it before," Victoria said mildly. "Which means we've never actually had to decide what we think about payment specifically, as opposed to sharing generally."
"There's nothing to decide."
"Diccon, there is a great deal to decide, and I'd ask you not to close the question before the council's had it." Victoria's tone was patient but firm. "We give the medicine away because withholding it kills people. That's clear. Does withholding the rail specifications kill anyone? Does a cloth guild in Whitcombe learning our loom improvements represent the same moral case as a village learning to boil water?"
"It represents the same principle."
"It represents a different principle, which is that this valley's knowledge belongs to everyone equally. And I'll tell you plainly that I have doubts about that one, and I've had them for two years, and I've kept quiet because it seemed a poor season to raise them." Victoria looked around the council table. "We are a town of nine hundred people that has, at present, no walls, one lord who happens to like us, and a set of techniques that half the powers in Europe would consider worth taking by force. Every time we hand out another piece of it, we make ourselves marginally less necessary and marginally more merely valuable. Those are not the same thing, and the second one is considerably more dangerous."
The room was quiet.
"You want to hoard it," Diccon said.
"I want to think about it, which is not the same accusation, and I'd thank you not to make it." Victoria's patience thinned audibly. "I have given four years of my life to spreading this valley's knowledge as far as it will reach. I am asking whether there is a limit, and whether we might benefit from finding it deliberately rather than discovering it the hard way."
Alaric, unexpectedly, sided with Diccon — arguing, with the peculiar authority of a man who had once tried to destroy the valley by legal means, that a body of knowledge with a price attached to it became a thing other powers could reason about acquiring, whereas a body of knowledge given freely to anyone who asked was strangely, counterintuitively harder to steal.
Wat sided with Victoria, on the plain grounds that he had built most of the physical works himself and did not care to see the specifications sold to a guild that had contributed nothing.
Elias abstained again, and this time was audibly frustrated about it. "I map things. I have no idea what the correct answer is here, and I would rather say so than pretend a vote makes me qualified."
Cecily, newly given a council seat in Aldith's continued absence, listened to the entire argument without speaking and then asked a single question that reframed the whole thing.
"Has anyone asked what happens to the medical sections if we start selling the rest? Because I can tell you what I'd assume, if I were a village reeve two days east who's been receiving free copies for three years and suddenly hears Argenton is charging Whitcombe merchants for the metallurgy. I'd assume the medicine is next, and I'd start being considerably more careful about what I told you I needed."
Nobody had an answer for that.
They declined the guild's offer in the end — not on principle, which Thomas found interesting, but on Cecily's practical grounds. Victoria drafted the refusal herself and included, at her own insistence, an offer to send the requested sections free of charge to anyone in the guild who would come to Argenton and learn them properly in person.
"That's not a compromise," Diccon said afterward, still not entirely mollified. "That's just the original principle with extra steps."
"It's the original principle with a condition attached that lets us see who's actually learning and who's merely collecting," Victoria said. "You may call that extra steps. I call it the first genuine limit we've ever put on this, and I'd note that I proposed it and you didn't."
The argument did not fully resolve. Thomas noticed that, and noted it in the Codex, and understood — with the particular clarity of a man who had been told he had three of something left — that he was watching the beginning of a disagreement his valley would still be having long after he had stopped being present for it.