The council met on the second Thursday of April and Thomas did not attend, and nobody sent for him, and he found out about it later that week.
He had known about the meeting. He had intended to go. Edmund had been awake from two, and Victoria had taken the first half of the night, and at some point after dawn Thomas had sat down in the chair by the fire with the baby on his chest and had woken late in the morning with a crick in his neck and no clear memory of the intervening hours.
By then the meeting was over.
He went to find Alaric that afternoon, apologising before he had properly got through the door, and was waved into a chair with an impatience that surprised him.
"You are the fourth person to raise this with me and you are the only one who was actually absent," Alaric said. "Sit down. I want to show you something."
He produced the minutes.
They ran to two pages. Seven items. Thomas read them twice and found, with a peculiar sensation he could not immediately name, that he had no objection to any decision recorded there, that three of them were better than what he would have proposed, and that one — a change to how the works allocated apprentices — was a genuinely elegant solution to a problem he had been vaguely aware of for two years and had never troubled to think about properly.
"Whose was the apprentice arrangement?"
"Cecily's, refined by Diccon, who understands the works much better than either of us and who has been quietly correcting your assumptions about them for about six years." Alaric took the minutes back. "I want to ask you a question and I want a truthful answer. What did you feel when you read that?"
Thomas considered lying and decided against it.
"Redundant," he said.
"Good. That is the correct feeling and I would ask you to sit in it for a while rather than resolving it." Alaric folded his hands. "May I tell you what I have observed over twenty years in this March and eleven before that in a rather worse household?"
"Go on."
"Every institution I have encountered has a man at its centre who believes he is necessary. In most cases he is correct, because he has arranged it so. He holds the relationships, or the knowledge, or the authority to settle a dispute, and he does this without malice and frequently without noticing, and the institution functions beautifully for exactly as long as he does." Alaric's voice was entirely level. "Then he dies, or falls ill, or is disgraced, and it comes apart within two years, and everyone says afterward that he was irreplaceable. And they are right. That is the accusation, not the eulogy."
"And here?"
"Here, a man with a colicky infant slept through a Thursday and seven items were decided competently by people who did not think to send for him." Alaric permitted himself something close to satisfaction. "I have spent my entire career watching the first kind of institution. I have never seen the second. I would be grateful if you would resist your instinct to interfere with it."
Thomas sat with that.
"There's a version of this where I'm being managed," he said.
"There is precisely that version and it is the accurate one, and I have been doing it since April of last year, and Cecily and Victoria have both been complicit." Alaric did not blink. "Your portions were redistributed. You were not consulted. I have told you this before and you have twice failed to absorb it, which I attribute to fatigue and to a mild vanity you are generally good at suppressing."
"That's—"
"Would you like me to stop?"
Thomas opened his mouth, and closed it, and thought about it properly.
"No," he said.
"Good." Alaric returned to his papers. "Then I will tell you the rest of it. Cecily and I have agreed that your reduced portions are permanent, not temporary, and that we will not be restoring them when the child sleeps through the night. You will keep the school, which you are good at and which nobody else can do, and the Codex, which is yours. You will keep a seat and a vote and the right to be consulted on anything you ask to be consulted on. You will not resume chairing, and you will not resume the correspondence, and Victoria has already agreed and did so eight months ago."
"She what?"
"Your wife has been managing your retirement from the operational business of this town since before her confinement, in consultation with me, without telling you, on the grounds — and I quote her directly — that you would agree to it in principle and then fail to do it in practice." Alaric finally looked up. "She is not wrong about you. I have known you twenty years and she is not wrong about you."
Thomas walked home the long way.
He found, somewhere along the lane, that the redundancy had shifted into something else that took him most of the walk to identify, and which he eventually decided was relief with a considerable amount of grief mixed into it — the specific feeling of setting down a weight you had been carrying so long that your shoulders had shaped themselves around it.
Victoria was in the garden when he got back, with Edmund on a blanket, doing nothing at all.
"Alaric told you," she said, without turning round.
"Alaric told me."
"Are you angry?"
Thomas sat down on the grass beside her, which his knees objected to, and looked at his son attempting to eat a fistful of nothing.
"No," he said. "I'd like to be. I've been trying to be since about the crossroads."
"You'll manage it eventually. Probably in about three years, over something trivial." Victoria leaned against his shoulder. "I'll apologise then. I'd somewhat do it retrospectively and be right than do it in advance and be overruled."