Cecily took her six months and then took two more, and came back to the council with a proposal considerably stranger than anything Alaric had expected.
"I went to Whitcombe," she said, laying out her papers. "Then Oakhaven. Then I spent five weeks at the cathedral school at Sherbourne, which took some arranging, and I want to start by saying plainly that they were generous with me and I learned a great deal and I do not think we should copy any of it."
Alaric raised an eyebrow. "That is not the conclusion I anticipated."
"I know. I anticipated the other one too." Cecily pushed a sheet across the table. "Sherbourne trains men to be masters. Everything about it is built for that — the course of study, the disputations, the degrees. A student arrives, spends years, and leaves certified as someone who knows things. It works. It has worked for two hundred years. It is completely wrong for what this valley actually needs."
"Explain."
"Because we don't need people who know things. We need people who do things and then write down what happened." She said it with the flat certainty that had become her working register. "Every genuine advance this valley has produced came from someone doing a job badly, noticing, and recording it honestly. Aldith's fever protocols came from failures at Millbrook. My own improvements came from writing down that three presentations behaved differently when she'd been treating them as one. Wat's rail came from watching wains stick in mud for six years. Not one of those came from a master lecturing on established authority."
Aldith, listening, made a small sound of agreement.
"So I want to build something else," Cecily said. "Not a studium. A — I don't have the word. A place where people learn by doing the actual work under someone competent, and where the writing-down is not incidental but the entire point. Every student keeps a record. Every record goes into the Codex. A student doesn't graduate by disputing a proposition correctly. They graduate by having contributed something the Codex didn't have before."
The room was silent for a moment.
"That's not a university," Alaric said slowly. "That's a guild with literacy."
"Possibly. I don't much care what it's called."
"You should care enormously what it's called, because the name determines whether anyone outside this valley recognizes it." Alaric leaned forward, and Thomas recognized the particular energy of a man who had just been handed a genuinely interesting problem. "Here is your difficulty. A studium has recognized standing because it does what other studia do. A guild has recognized standing because it controls a trade. What you have described has neither and would be entirely dependent on the reputation of its output."
"Then the output had better be good."
"That is a considerably riskier foundation than you may appreciate."
"It's the same foundation as the scrip," Victoria said.
Everyone turned.
"The scrip has no gold behind it and never has. It works because people who accept it keep finding that it holds. Its entire standing is the reputation of its output, and it has survived a blockade, a siege, and a plague on that basis alone." Victoria looked at Alaric with something close to amusement. "You told us a paper currency would need backing to be taken seriously, four years ago, and you were entirely right and we did it anyway and it worked. I'd suggest the same latitude here."
Alaric absorbed that with visible good grace. "That is a fair strike and I withdraw the objection as stated. I will note that the scrip took nine years and one royal charter to arrive at its current standing, and that Cecily should expect similar."
"I expect worse," Cecily said. "I'm twenty-two and a woman and nobody outside this March has heard of me. I've assumed from the start that the first fifteen years are just proving the thing works before anyone will look at it seriously."
Thomas found himself smiling for the first time in the meeting.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing. You said fifteen years without flinching." He shook his head. "I've spent two years unable to plan past a season. It's a genuine pleasure to sit in a room with someone doing arithmetic on a scale I can't reach anymore."
Cecily, who knew about the number — everyone on the council did — considered that for a moment.
"Then I'll do the fifteen-year arithmetic," she said, "and you do the part where you tell me which of my assumptions are wrong, because you've built four things that worked and I've built none."
"That's the deal," Thomas said. "That's exactly the deal."