"Is he well?" Miren asked, surprising herself.
"He sleeps poorly. He works the water board like a penance that finally has tools. He asked me if your wellscale still lives. I said it supervises better than most lieutenants. He almost smiled. Almost is his native language."
When Ysolde left, she took a packet of Mistress Keld's dyed thread—soft greens and river blues—as a private gift for no one in particular. Miren suspected it might end up on a clerk's sleeve and change nothing and still be worth sending.
One late summer evening Tobin's valley woman, whose name was Briony, helped Ralla bring the sheep down early because the air smelled of storm. In the rush a lamb slid toward the creek's fast place. It was Edric's staff that braced the bank and Miren's arm that caught the wet wool, and Vetch—unexpected—dropped from a fence post to block the lamb's panic path with spread wings until Briony could kneel and gather it. Afterward Tobin tried to thank the wellscale with a strip of dried apple. Vetch took the apple, ate it, and departed as if payment had been adequate and conversation excessive.
"I think it liked you," Pip told Briony.
"I think it liked not having a drowned lamb in its water-map," Briony said, which Sibley declared the most accurate theology she had heard all year.
By the time the wheat stood gold again, the army's old lanes had softened under new growth. You could still see them if you knew where to look—like scars under skin, present, not ruling. Miren walked those faint lines with Edric the evening before the anniversary and did not speak until they reached the low wall.
"If they came again," she said, "I would still reach down the well."
"I know," Edric said. "I would still grip the staff and look for banners. And then we would still try counting before screaming."
"Grown-up," Miren said, almost smiling. "Earned. Not tidy."
"Not tidy," he agreed, and kissed her temple where red hair met dust and sun.
Spring equinox brought Ysolde's final measures: the old quarter spring ran at twice its winter-start volume. Osric's clerks recorded it. The tenth reduction held. A cartoon tyrant would have cheated; a complicated man kept the term and wrote nothing warm about it. Miren found she preferred the silence to false sweetness.