The town heard about it the way towns always hear about things, which is to say badly, sideways, and a week before the council was ready.
A weaver in the lower parish lost a standing order from a Whitcombe merchant. Another lost two. A carter who ran the southern road mentioned the new fees at the crossroads tavern, and somebody else mentioned that the lady had ridden to Whitcombe herself, which she never did, and by the end of the week the version circulating in the lanes was that Argenton was being ruined, that the council knew, and that nobody had said a word.
"They're not wrong," Cecily said. "About the last part."
"We didn't have anything to tell them," Diccon objected.
"We had this." Cecily gestured at Victoria's wall of figures. "We've had it for a fortnight. We were waiting until we had an answer to go with it, and they've found out without the answer, and now it looks like hiding."
So they called a meeting, in the schoolhouse, because it was the only room large enough, and nearly three hundred people came, which was more than anyone had expected and considerably more than the room could hold. They stood along the walls and in the doorway and out into the yard, where somebody propped the shutters so those outside could hear.
Victoria laid it out. She did it well — plainly, without adjectives, in the voice she used for accounts. The crossings. The fees. The merchants going round by the long road. The margin that paid for the school.
The room did not take it quietly.
"So pay him," a woman said, from near the front. Thomas knew her — Hawise, a weaver, fifty or so, who had come to the valley as a girl in the second year and had never once in all the time since said anything at a public meeting. "Whatever he wants. Pay him and be done. I'd rather lose a tenth than lose the whole of my orders."
"It isn't a sum he's asking for," Victoria said. "He hasn't asked us for anything. That's the difficulty. There's nothing to pay."
"Then why's he doing it?"
"Because it works."
A man by the wall — one of the dyers — called out that it was the account that had started it. That the council had poked the bear with its clever columns, and now the whole March was laughing at the man, and the town was paying for the laugh.
Alaric started to answer. Cecily put a hand on his arm and he stopped.
"That might be true," Cecily said. "I'm not going to pretend it isn't. We chose to publish that account and we knew he'd not like it. If it's made him worse, that's on this council, and I'd rather you said so to our faces than in the tavern."
The dyer, who had been braced for an argument, did not seem to know what to do with an agreement, and sat down.
It was Hawise again, after a while, who asked the question Thomas had been dreading since the council first sat on it.
"Master Thomas." She had turned to find him, at the side of the room, where he had stood deliberately so that he would not look like he was leading anything. "You've always had something. The wire. The fever house. The court at Whitcombe. Every time this town's been in trouble you've had some clever answer nobody else thought of." She folded her arms. "So what is it this time?"
Three hundred people turned to look at him.
Thomas had thought about this moment on the walk down. He had considered a number of things he might say, some of them reassuring and one or two of them almost true. He found, standing there, that he did not want to say any of them.
"I don't have one," he said.
The room went very quiet.
"I've been waiting for one for two years," Thomas went on. "I've sat in that council expecting something to occur to me, the way it used to. It hasn't. I think I got lucky a few times when I was younger, and I let this town believe it was something more than luck, and that's my fault and not yours." He met Hawise's eyes. "I'm sorry. I'd rather tell you that than stand here and pretend."
Nobody said anything.
Then Victoria, beside him, spoke — not loudly, but in a voice that carried to the yard.
"He doesn't have one. Neither do I. Neither does anyone on this council." She let that land. "What I have is this. I've written to someone outside the March, who looks at money from a place none of us can see it from. I've asked for help. I don't know what will come of it." She paused. "That's the whole of what we have, and you're owed it in full."
It was not, by any measure, a satisfying meeting. People left grumbling. Hawise left grumbling. The dyer left saying loudly that he'd known all along the columns were a mistake.
But nobody left saying they had been lied to, and Cecily, walking home with Thomas afterward, said that was the only thing she had actually hoped for.
"They'll trust us more for that," she said. "Not now. Now they're frightened and angry. But in a year, whatever happens, they'll remember we stood up and told them we didn't know."
"I hated it," Thomas said.
"I know. You looked like a man walking to a gallows." Cecily glanced sideways at him. "Victoria told me something, a while ago. That you'd admitted to her you'd been waiting for a trick that might not exist. She said you should tell the council in exactly those words." A pause. "You told the whole town. That's rather more than she asked for."
"It felt like the same thing."
"It wasn't," said Cecily. "It was harder. It was also right."