The valley's first indication that de Vesci was failing came, as such things generally did, in the form of a clerk.
He arrived in the eighth month of Victoria's pregnancy — a neat, pleasant, quite unremarkable man of about thirty named Osbert Fenn, carrying credentials from the March administration and a request that Argenton's council make available, for review, its charter, its toll schedules, its scrip issuance records, and a full accounting of the school's foundation and funding.
Alaric read the request three times.
"This is not a review," he said. "This is an inventory."
"It's phrased as a review," Cecily said, leaning over to read the letter, and Alaric shook his head.
"It is phrased as a review because that is how an inventory is phrased when the person conducting it does not wish to alarm you. I have written perhaps forty of these in my life." He set the letter down. "Note what is being asked for. Not the accounts, which would be ordinary. The charter itself — its terms and its grants. The scrip issuance — the mechanism, not the balance. The school's foundation and funding, which is not a matter the March has ever previously expressed any interest in whatsoever."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning someone is establishing what this town's legal position actually rests on, and where it might be weak." Alaric looked around the table. "I would like to be clear that this is not necessarily hostile. It is what a careful administrator does when a lord is nearing the end of his tenure and the succession is uncertain. But it is precisely what a hostile party does first, and the two are indistinguishable at this stage, and I would recommend we treat it as the second while hoping it is the first."
De Vesci was seventy-one and had been unwell for a year. Everyone knew it. Nobody had discussed what came after, because there was nothing useful to discuss — the March would pass where the Crown sent it, and Argenton had no voice in the matter at all.
"How bad could it be?" Cecily asked.
"That depends on the man." Alaric's tone was carefully neutral. "Argenton's position is strong. You have a royal charter, confirmed tenure, a justiciar's ruling in your favour, and forty years of unbroken good conduct. A reasonable lord will find nothing here worth disturbing." He paused. "A lord who arrives in debt, or with favourites to reward, or with a conviction that a self-governing town of three thousand within his fee is an affront to the natural order — that lord will find a great deal here worth examining. And he will start exactly where this clerk is starting."
They gave Fenn everything he asked for.
Thomas made the decision himself, over Cecily's objection and with Alaric's grudging approval, on the grounds that a town with nothing to hide gained nothing by appearing to hide it and lost a great deal.
"We are quite in order," he said. "Every figure in those books is true, every term of that charter has been honoured, and the school is funded out of our own revenue and always has been. Let him read the lot. If he's honest, he'll report that we're the least troublesome holding in this March. If he isn't, he'll have to invent something, and inventions are rather easier to fight than facts."
Fenn read for the best part of a fortnight. He was polite throughout, asked intelligent questions, thanked people appropriately, and left with four volumes of copied material and a manner Thomas could not fault in any particular.
"Well?" Victoria asked, that evening, uncomfortably arranged in the only chair that currently suited her.
"He was faultless. He was pleasant to everyone, he didn't press anyone, and he copied precisely what he asked for and nothing more." Thomas sat down heavily. "Alaric is deeply unhappy about it."
"Why?"
"Because a man sent to find something would have pressed. Fenn didn't need to press. He knew exactly what he wanted before he arrived, and he got it, and he left." Thomas rubbed his eyes. "Alaric's position is that the clerk was not investigating. The clerk was collecting, for someone who had already decided what mattered. Which means somebody who has never set foot in this valley already has a considered view about it."
Victoria was quiet for a moment.
"That's the first genuinely bad news we've had in four years," she said.
"It might be nothing."
"It might. Alaric doesn't think so, and Alaric has been right about the shape of a threat every single time in twenty years, including the time it was himself." She shifted, with visible discomfort, and Thomas got up to help her and was waved off. "How long does de Vesci have?"
"Cecily says a year. She says it as a guess and she's not usually wrong."
"Then we have a year." Victoria pressed a hand to her side and grimaced. "And I intend to spend a considerable portion of it doing nothing at all, because this child is enormous and I have decided that the March can manage without me for one season."
It could not, in the event, manage without her.
But it managed for six weeks, which was the longest continuous interval Victoria had taken away from the ledgers in fifteen years, and she spent all of it in the cottage above the flume, and Thomas remembered that particular stretch of weeks for the rest of his life as one of the happiest of it.