The plague broke in the eastern March that winter — not ended, Aldith was careful to write, but broken, the deaths falling week over week until whole villages went a fortnight without a new case.
She came home in the first thaw, two years and four months after she had ridden out.
The valley turned out for her the way it had turned out for the charter, which embarrassed her considerably, and Thomas watched her dismount at the gate and understood immediately that she had come back different — thinner, greyer, moving with the particular economy of a person who had spent two years spending exactly as much energy as each task required and no more.
"Don't," she said, before anyone could begin. "I'm tired, I'm filthy, and if one more person tells me I'm a hero I'm going to say something regrettable in front of children. I'd like a bath and about fourteen hours of sleep, in that order, and then I'd like to see how badly Cecily's been undervaluing herself in my absence."
She slept for sixteen hours. Cecily, when Aldith finally reviewed her records, was found to have undervalued herself substantially.
"You reorganized the entire fever protocol," Aldith said, going through two years of meticulous notes at the tally-bench. "Better than mine. Considerably better, in the section on early presentation — you've separated three things I'd been treating as one thing for a decade."
"They behaved differently. I wrote down that they behaved differently. That's not reorganizing anything, that's just recording what happened."
"Cecily. That is precisely what reorganizing is." Aldith looked up. "I'm going to say this once and then I'll stop, because I know you'll hate it. I taught you what I knew, and you have improved on it in two years, and the medicine in this valley is now better than it was when I left it. That is the single best thing that has happened to me in four years and I intend to be openly pleased about it whether you're comfortable or not."
Cecily went red to the ears and changed the subject.
It was later that same week, at a supper the whole council attended, that the thing happened which Thomas remembered longest.
Little Joan — five now, sturdy and fierce and entirely recovered from the fever that had nearly taken her at two — was being fussed over by Aldith, who had missed three years of her growing and was making up for it aggressively.
"You won't remember me," Aldith said. "You were a very small, very cross person the last time I properly saw you."
"I remember you," Joan said, with the absolute confidence of a five-year-old. "You held me when I was hot."
The table went quiet.
Aldith's hands stopped moving. "That was three years ago, sweetheart. You were two."
"You held me and it was dark and Da was crying." Joan said it without any particular weight, already reaching for more bread, entirely unaware that she had stopped six adults in their tracks. "And there was a man who talked about towers. He talked a lot. It was boring."
Thomas, who had sat with her through most of one night talking about towers because it was the only thing he could think to do, discovered that he could not immediately speak.
"That was Thomas, love," Elsbeth said, her voice not quite steady.
Joan looked at him with frank five-year-old assessment. "You should tell better stories."
Diccon laughed — a wet, undignified sound — and put his hand over his eyes.
Afterward, walking home under a cold spring sky, Victoria took Thomas's arm and neither of them said anything for most of the way.
"She remembers," Thomas said eventually.
"She remembers being held in the dark by people who wouldn't leave. That's what she remembers. Not the details." Victoria's grip tightened slightly. "That's what any of them will remember, Thomas. Not the towers or the rail line or the scrip mechanics. Somebody stayed with them when it was bad."
Thomas thought about a book in the counting room with a page in it about a boy who was frightened of geese, and about a woman two years east who had trained fifteen people because there was nobody else, and about his own page, unfinished, in his wife's careful hand.
"That's a considerably better legacy than the one I've been worrying about," he said.
"It's the one you've actually got," Victoria said. "I'd suggest making peace with it."