The new gardens went in within the week, Elias's survey proving more generous than even his own careful estimate had suggested — a full southern slope of uncultivated land, well-drained and well-sunned, capable, once properly planted, of more than doubling the valley's yield of everything Aldith's fever remedies required.
Thomas found himself, working alongside Wat's crew to clear the first stretch of ground, thinking less of the falling number and the growing quire of wrongnesses than he had in weeks — the plain, physical labor offering the same clean relief it always did, dirt under his fingernails and an honest ache in his back standing in for thoughts too large and uncertain to properly hold for very long at a stretch.
Elsbeth brought little Joan out to watch the planting on the second day, the child toddling determinedly along the freshly turned rows with the particular fierce concentration she brought to everything, and it was Wat, catching her before she could trample a newly seeded bed, who offered the observation that stayed with Thomas longest that afternoon.
"She'll grow up with these gardens already old," he said, settling the indignant, squirming child onto his hip with practiced ease. "Won't remember a valley that didn't have them, same as she won't remember one without the towers or the rail line. I find that a strange thing to sit with, some days — building a world so thoroughly that the next generation simply inherits it as though it always existed, no memory at all of how much it cost to build."
"Is that a comfort or a grief?" Thomas asked.
"Both, I think. Same as most things worth building." Wat set Joan back down at a safer distance, watching her totter off toward Elsbeth with fierce, wobbling determination. "I used to think a man's whole worth was measured by what he built with his own two hands, something he could point to and say, plainly, I made that. I've come to think, watching this child grow up inside a world neither of us could have imagined five years ago, that the truer measure might be what a man builds well enough that no one after him ever has to know how hard the building actually was."
Thomas turned that over, the words settling into him with a weight he hadn't expected from an ordinary afternoon's garden labor. "I think about that a lot lately. What this valley looks like once none of us are here to keep building it. Whether it holds together, or whether it needs constant tending from people who remember exactly why every piece of it exists."
"It'll hold," Wat said, with the particular flat certainty he brought to any judgment about stonework or iron. "You've not built this valley the way a vain man builds a monument, Thomas — something that only stands because everyone's too afraid to question its foundations. You've built it the way I build a wall. Every stone tested, every joint understood by more than one pair of hands, so that when I'm gone, the wall doesn't need me anymore to keep standing." He looked out over the newly planted rows, the whole slope already transformed from wild scrub into ordered, hopeful cultivation. "That's the only kind of building that actually lasts, in my experience. Everything else is just a monument waiting to fall the moment its builder stops holding it up."
They worked the rest of the afternoon in companionable silence, the last of the seed beds finished just as the light began to fade gold over the valley, and Thomas found himself, walking home with dirt still under his fingernails, thinking of Wat's plain, hard-won wisdom alongside every larger fear he still carried — the anchor, the wrongnesses, the widening plague — and understanding, turning it all over, that perhaps the truest answer to all of it lay exactly where he'd spent the whole afternoon standing: in the plain, patient work of building something that would outlast whoever had built it, tested and understood by enough hands that no single absence, however painful, could ever bring the whole of it down.