Cecily's school opened in the autumn with fourteen students, no charter, no recognized standing, and a name Alaric considered actively unhelpful.
"The Works," he said, for perhaps the fourth time. "You cannot call an institution of learning The Works. It sounds like a foundry."
"It is substantially a foundry, among other things, and I'd rather it sound like what it is than like something borrowed from Paris." Cecily was entirely unmoved. "Anyone who arrives expecting a studium and finds a foundry will be disappointed. Anyone who arrives expecting a foundry and finds that we also teach them to read and write and argue will be pleasantly surprised. I would rather run that direction than the other."
The fourteen were a strange assortment. Six were valley-born, including two of Wat's builders and a weaver's son who had been pestering Cecily about the fever protocols for two years. Four came from Whitcombe, sent by the physician's apprentice who had written that first frightened letter about rose-colored marks a decade earlier and was now a physician in his own right with students of his own. Three came from villages in the eastern March, sent by people Aldith had trained during her two years there.
The fourteenth was a girl of sixteen from Oakhaven who had walked most of the way and would not say why, and who turned out, within a month, to be the most gifted natural mathematician anyone in the valley had ever encountered.
"I have taught her everything I know about calculation in five weeks," Hamo reported to the council, with an expression somewhere between delight and alarm. "That is not a figure of speech. I have exhausted my competence. She asked me a question yesterday about the behavior of the flume gearing that I did not understand well enough to answer, and when I admitted this she seemed pleased rather than disappointed, which I found unnerving."
"What's her name?" Thomas asked.
"Maud. She does not volunteer information about herself and I have not pressed."
Thomas met her a week later, in the undercroft, where she had come to look at the rotor and had been standing in front of it for what one of Wat's apprentices estimated was upward of two hours.
"You're Thomas," she said, without turning round.
"I am."
"It's not turning true." Maud pointed at the walnut armature, still running at its patient ninety-two revolutions, as it had for a decade. "There's a wobble. It's very small. It's about one part in three hundred and it's on the same axis every time, which means it's the shaft rather than the bearing, and it's been getting worse for — I don't know how long, I've only watched it for two hours. Has anyone written down the revolutions over the years?"
"Every week for eleven years."
Maud turned round for the first time. "Can I see that?"
Thomas gave her the ledgers, and she found the degradation in an afternoon — a decline so gradual that eleven years of weekly measurements had recorded it faithfully without a single person noticing the trend, because nobody had ever plotted the numbers against each other rather than reading them one at a time.
Wat, shown the finding, was quiet for a long moment.
"Eleven years," he said. "I've inspected that shaft twice a season for eleven years and called it sound every time, because it was sound every time I looked at it. It only isn't sound compared to itself a decade ago." He looked at the girl with genuine, undisguised respect. "That's a real catch. That'd have failed in another four or five years and taken the whole undercroft's supply with it at whatever moment it chose."
Maud, entirely unbothered by the praise, was already asking about the bearing material.
Thomas walked home that evening thinking about a school four weeks old that had already produced something the valley's founders had missed for a decade, and about the specific way that had happened — not through brilliance exactly, though the girl was plainly brilliant, but through the simple structural act of somebody new looking at the record with fresh eyes because the record existed to be looked at.
"That's the whole thesis," he told Victoria. "That's Cecily's entire argument, demonstrated in a month by a sixteen-year-old who walked here from Oakhaven and won't say why."
"Are you going to ask her why?"
"No. Hamo's right that she'd tell us when she wants to." Thomas considered. "I am going to make sure she has whatever she needs for the next forty years, though. I'd like that in the succession document specifically."
It went in that week, as a named line item, and remained there.