Aldith left for the eastern villages a week later, better provisioned this time than either of her previous journeys, and it was the manner of her leaving — brisk, prepared, entirely without the frightened uncertainty of her first ride to Millbrook — that told Thomas plainly how much the past years had changed her.
"I've trained three more hands to manage the fever house properly while I'm gone," she told the council, laying out her preparations with the same careful thoroughness she brought to everything now. "And I'm taking two of them with me this time, rather than riding alone. Knowledge that lives in only one person's head is knowledge one bad fever away from being lost entirely. I don't intend to make that mistake again, however confident I've grown in my own hands."
Diccon offered to accompany her again, and this time it was Elsbeth, holding a now properly toddling Joan on her hip, who gently overruled him.
"You have a daughter who needs her father more than Aldith needs an extra set of hands," she said, not unkindly. "I watched you come back from Oakhaven hollow enough to frighten me, Diccon. I'll not ask you to carry that weight twice while Joan's still small enough to notice you missing."
Diccon, visibly torn, ultimately deferred to her judgment, and it was two of Aldith's newer apprentices — young, capable, considerably less battle-worn than their teacher — who rode out with her instead, carrying the valley's carefully grown surplus of herbs toward villages that had, by every account reaching them, precious little of their own preparation to meet the fever's return.
Thomas found himself, in the weeks of her absence, drawn increasingly into a different kind of work than he'd expected to occupy his own uncertain days — teaching, alongside Hamo, a small class of the valley's older children in the basics of the Codex's accumulated knowledge, a quiet effort neither of them had planned but had, somehow, simply begun once enough young, curious faces had started gathering at the schoolhouse asking questions Aldith no longer had time to answer herself.
"You have a gift for this," Hamo observed, watching Thomas explain the basic principle of clean water to a row of attentive, dirt-smudged faces. "I confess I did not expect it, given how much of your time these past years has gone toward towers and rail lines rather than teaching."
"I think I've been avoiding it, if I'm honest," Thomas admitted, once the children had been dismissed for the afternoon. "Teaching means trusting that the knowledge outlives you properly. I've written it all into the Codex, told myself that was enough. Standing here, watching them actually understand something I've explained, feels different. More permanent, somehow, than any page ever quite managed to feel."
"That is, I think, the whole difference between a book and a teacher, Thomas. A book waits patiently to be read. A person carries what they've learned forward into their own life, and passes it on again, in turn, to whoever comes after them." Hamo's weathered face carried real warmth. "You have spent four years building towers and roads and currencies that will, I have no doubt, outlast either of us considerably. I wonder if this — a row of children who understand, now, why clean water matters — might prove the more durable legacy in the end."
Aldith returned three weeks later, tired but considerably less hollow than her Oakhaven journey had left her, her two apprentices proudly reporting a village properly taught rather than merely treated.
"They'll manage the next outbreak themselves, if it comes," she said, settling wearily onto the tally-bench with evident satisfaction. "That's worth more than any single visit of mine ever could be. I've spent this whole difficult year learning the same lesson you taught this valley about currency and medicine both, Thomas — that knowledge shared widely does more good than knowledge kept close, however much safer close feels in the moment."
Thomas, listening to her account, found himself thinking of the small, growing group of children he and Hamo had begun teaching in her absence, of Wat's plain wisdom about building things that outlasted their builders, of every careful, patient effort the valley had made these past years to become something considerably larger than any single person's continued presence.
"We've been teaching too," he told her. "While you were gone. I think we're finally starting to understand what you've known all along — that the Codex was never meant to be the end of the knowledge. Just the beginning of teaching it properly."
Aldith's tired smile carried genuine warmth. "Then perhaps this valley's finally learning to do what I've been trying to teach it for years, Thomas. Building people, not just things. I can't think of a better use for whatever time any of us has left."