Wat's hands had been failing for two years and he had been managing it for eighteen months of that, and the management was in some ways more impressive than the work had been.
He had stopped doing fine joinery and had let it be understood that this was because the apprentices needed the practice. He had stopped holding a punch for anyone else's hammer and had let it be understood that his eyes were the problem. He had moved his own work to the mornings, when the ache was least, and had constructed around this a whole architecture of reasons — the light, the forge temperature, a preference he claimed to have always had.
Thomas had watched the entire performance and had said nothing, on the theory that a man was entitled to arrange his own decline.
The winter of Alys's second year took the theory apart.
It was a hard one. The cold came early and stayed, and Wat's hands in cold were not a matter of ache but of function; there were mornings when he could not close them properly for an hour after waking, and the household eventually learned to hear it — the specific pause at the cottage door, the longer-than-usual business with the latch.
He arrived one December morning and could not manage the latch at all.
Thomas heard it and went and opened the door, and they looked at each other, and there was a moment in which the whole polite arrangement of eighteen months could have continued.
"Cold morning," Thomas said.
"Don't." Wat came in and sat down heavily. "You've been letting me get away with it for a year and a half and I've been grateful and it's done. I could not open your door, Thomas. That's not a morning. That's where I am."
Thomas poured him something warm and did not say anything comforting, which he had learned was the correct approach.
"Can you still forge?"
"Aye. Mostly. Not the fine work and not for long, but I can still make a thing that holds." Wat wrapped both hands around the cup, which Thomas understood was for the heat rather than the drink. "That's not what's finished. What's finished is that I cannot show a lad how to do it anymore."
"You teach every day."
"I talk every day. That's not the same and you'd know it if you'd ever stood at an anvil." Wat's voice was flat with something that was not self-pity. "You cannot teach a man to weld by describing it. You take the hammer off him and you do it slow while he watches and then you give it back. I've been describing it for eight months because I can't hold a hammer slow enough to demonstrate. My hand jumps. They're learning from a man telling them what it ought to look like, and half of them are too respectful to say they've not understood."
He drank.
"Ralf said it," he added. "Three weeks back. He's the only one with the nerve. He said Master, I don't know what you mean by let it come to you, I've been nodding for a year."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him to find Osgar at the second forge and have him show it, because Osgar's forty and his hands work." Wat set the cup down. "And then I went home and sat down for a bit."
They were quiet for some time.
"What do you want to do?" Thomas asked.
"That's the question, isn't it." Wat looked at his hands as though they belonged to someone else. "I've thought about it since Ralf. There's three roads. I keep on as I am, and the lads get worse, and I get to carry on calling myself the master. I stop quite, and I sit in a chair for however long I've got."
"And the third?"
"The third's the one I don't like." Wat's jaw worked. "I stop being the man who shows them and I become the man who watches them being shown. Osgar demonstrates, I stand behind, I say what's wrong. I'm not the master anymore. I'm the eye."
"That's not a lesser thing."
"It's a different thing and I'd thank you not to tell me how to feel about it." He said it without heat. "I've been the best pair of hands in four counties since I was thirty-one, Thomas. That's not vanity. It's a fact and it's been the whole of what I am. You're asking me to be a man who stands behind someone else's hands and comments."
"I'm not asking you anything. You came here."
"Aye. I did." Wat let out a long breath. "I came here because Victoria's the cleverest person I know and you're the only one who's already been through it, and I couldn't work out which of you I wanted."
Thomas thought about that.
"Through what?"
"Stopping." Wat looked at him directly. "You had a thing in your pocket for fourteen years that was the whole of what made you different. Then it went dark and you were just a man in a valley. I watched you that year. You were not good."
"No," Thomas agreed. "I wasn't."
"So how'd you manage it?"
Thomas took his time.
"Badly, for about eight months," he said. "And then Cecily told me to come into the schoolhouse, and I found I was useful in a completely different way that I'd have refused if anyone had offered it to me at the start." He met the old man's eye. "I didn't reconcile myself to it, Wat. I want to be honest about that. I got distracted from it by something I turned out to care about. That's the whole mechanism. It's not dignified and it's not wisdom."
Wat sat with that for a long moment.
"The eye, then," he said.
"The eye."
"I'll want it understood that I'm furious about it."
"Nobody will be in any doubt," Thomas said.