The request from de Vesci arrived in early summer, carried by his own hand rather than any courier, and the weight of what he was asking showed plainly in his weathered, careful face before he'd spoken a single word of it.
"The fever's reached three more villages along the eastern road," he said, once the council had gathered to hear him properly. "Poorer holdings than Oakhaven, with no physicians of their own worth the name, and nothing resembling the preparation your own valley spent two years building. I have come to ask, honestly and without the standing to command it, whether Argenton would share its stores of the fever herbs, and spare hands enough to teach the remedies properly, to villages that have nothing at all to offer in return."
The council's silence, following the request, carried a weight Thomas recognized instantly — the particular tension of a decision that had no clean answer, whatever direction it eventually settled toward.
"We built those stores for our own protection," Wat said finally, his voice carrying real reluctance rather than any easy refusal. "If we give away the herbs, and the fever finds its way back to our own gate before we've replenished them, we'll have traded our own safety for a stranger's, and I don't know that's a trade I'm prepared to make lightly, however much I hate saying so aloud."
Aldith's response came swift and unyielding. "I stood in Millbrook, and in Oakhaven, and watched people die who might have lived if someone had reached them in time with knowledge we already possessed. I will not sit safely behind our own walls while villages two days' ride away burn through their own dead simply because we decided our own stores mattered more than their survival."
"Nobody's suggesting that, Aldith," Victoria said carefully, though Thomas could hear, in her measured tone, the same difficult calculation Wat had voiced more bluntly. "I'm suggesting we think honestly about what we can actually spare, and what we genuinely cannot, before we commit to a decision that might cost this valley its own protection when the fever comes calling here again."
"When, not if," Hamo observed quietly. "You've already conceded the danger hasn't passed us by permanently."
"I have. Which is precisely why I want us thinking carefully, rather than generously, about exactly how much we give away." Victoria's voice carried no coldness, only the hard, practical weight of a woman who had spent four years learning to hold both compassion and caution at once, however uncomfortably they sat together. "I am not arguing against helping, Aldith. I am arguing for helping wisely, in a way that doesn't leave our own children exposed to the same danger we're trying to spare someone else's."
Thomas found himself caught between the two positions in a way that felt, turning it over, uncomfortably familiar — the same tension he'd once resolved with Genoa's trade request, sharing knowledge freely rather than hoarding it, except considerably higher stakes now, measured in actual lives rather than mere advantage.
"I think," he said slowly, "we're asking the wrong question. Not whether to give the herbs away, but whether we can grow more of them, faster, so that giving doesn't have to mean leaving ourselves exposed. Elias, how much of the valley's uncultivated land could be turned toward the herb gardens Aldith's already established?"
Elias considered it with his usual careful precision. "Considerably more than we currently use. I would need to survey properly, but I believe we could double our yield within a single growing season, if we committed the labor to it now rather than later."
"Then that's my proposal," Thomas said, looking around the gathered council. "We give de Vesci what we can spare today, honestly assessed, without leaving our own stores dangerously thin. And we commit, starting this same week, to growing enough that the next request doesn't force this same difficult choice on us again."
Victoria considered it a long moment, and Thomas watched her weigh the compromise against her own careful caution, before finally, slowly, nodding. "That I can support. Growth rather than sacrifice. I'd still rather we grow faster than we give away, Thomas, but I won't stand against sharing what we can genuinely spare, if the plan includes making certain we can spare more of it properly next time."
Aldith's relief was plain, though her voice, when she spoke again, carried a grave seriousness that hadn't been there before. "I'll go myself, to teach the remedies properly. I won't send herbs alone into villages that don't understand how to use them."
"You've already given so much of yourself to this fever, Aldith," Thomas said gently. "You don't have to be the one who goes every time."
"I know I don't have to be. I choose to be, because I've watched what happens when knowledge arrives without someone present who actually understands it, and I'm not willing to let that happen again if I can prevent it." Her voice carried no doubt at all, only the same fierce, unshakeable resolve that had carried her through Millbrook and Oakhaven both. "This is the whole reason the Codex exists, Thomas. Not to be hoarded here, safe and unused. To be carried out into a world that needs it considerably more than we do."
De Vesci, listening to the whole difficult exchange with evident respect, offered his own quiet gratitude once the council's decision had finally settled. "I did not expect an easy answer to a request this large, and I am glad, in truth, that you didn't offer me one. A town that weighs its compassion this carefully is a town I trust considerably more than one that gives freely without ever counting the cost."
Thomas watched him go, thinking of the growing herb gardens still to be planted, of Aldith's coming journey, of every careful, difficult balance the valley had learned to strike between its own safety and the wider world's genuine need — and understood, turning it all over, that this particular lesson, hard-won and uncomfortable as it was, might prove the truest measure yet of everything the valley had actually built these past four years.