Aldith's apprentice came back from the east alone.
She rode in on a borrowed horse in the second week of summer, and Thomas, seeing her at the gate from the tally-bench window, understood before anyone had told him anything — Cecily had ridden east with Aldith three months before, and had been due back with her a fortnight ago, and was arriving now by herself with the particular hollow expression of someone who had rehearsed a thing all the way home and still did not know how to say it.
Aldith was alive. That was the first thing Cecily said, before dismounting, before anything else, because she had clearly understood exactly what the valley would assume the moment they saw her alone.
"She's alive and she's staying," Cecily said. "She sent me back with letters and with — with instructions, and with a great deal I'm meant to teach here. She isn't coming home yet."
The whole council heard it together an hour later, and it was, Thomas thought afterward, one of the strangest meetings the valley ever held — good news and bad news so thoroughly braided together that nobody could quite decide how to feel.
Aldith's letter was characteristically direct.
I am needed here more than I am needed there, and I have spent four weeks confirming that before writing this, because I knew how it would read. The eastern villages have no one. Not fewer people than they need — no one at all, in three of them. I have trained eleven women and four men in what I know, and I am not finished. Cecily is better than I was at her age and can hold Argenton competently, which she will not believe until you all tell her so repeatedly.
Thomas — you overruled Victoria to send me. I want to tell you plainly, in writing, that you were right and she was right and those are not contradictory. Your valley paid for my absence. It paid in Cuthbert and three others, and I have thought about that every single day since Cecily brought me the news. And I have counted, since arriving here, one hundred and forty souls who would be dead if I had not come. I do not offer that as an excuse. I offer it as the arithmetic, honestly, so that neither of you has to guess at it.
Do not send anyone to fetch me. I will come home when there is someone here who can do what I do. Tell Wat I said he is a considerably better nurse than he believes he is and that his handwriting in the fever notes is an atrocity.
Wat, when this was read aloud, made a sound that was not quite a laugh and left the room for several minutes.
Cecily proved, over the following months, to be exactly what Aldith had promised — a careful, quiet, relentlessly observant young woman who did not have Aldith's authority and did not pretend to, and who compensated by writing down absolutely everything, cross-referencing it against the Codex, and asking questions of anyone who would answer them.
"I'm not her," she said to Thomas early on, with the flat honesty of someone stating a fact rather than fishing for reassurance. "I want that understood plainly by everyone before there's a crisis and someone discovers it at a bad moment. I know the remedies. I don't have her judgment yet. What I have is a very good memory and no pride at all about asking for help."
"That's considerably more than most people bring to a job like this."
"It's what I've got." She hesitated, then added, more quietly, "My village died. All of it, in nine days, before I came here. I was fourteen. I have wanted, every day since, to be the person who could have stopped that, and I am aware that wanting it does not make me capable of it. I'm working on the capable part."
Thomas found himself thinking about that conversation for a long while afterward — a nineteen-year-old girl holding the medical care of an entire town, entirely aware she wasn't ready, doing it anyway because there was nobody else and because she had decided, at fourteen, standing in an empty village, exactly what she intended to spend her life on.
The valley did not have another outbreak that year.
Cecily said, afterward, that this proved nothing about her competence and everything about luck, and refused, with considerable stubbornness, to be congratulated for it.