The council sat for two days and found a third road, and it was Cecily who found it, which surprised nobody who had been paying attention for the past twenty years.
"You're both arguing about whether to ask the Crown," she said, on the second morning, when the thing had gone round four times without moving. "Seek confirmation and expose ourselves to commissioners, or refuse and fight Bramwell's claim on reputation. Those are the two roads. I'd like to propose that they're the same road looked at from different ends, and that neither of them is the one we should take."
"Go on," Alaric said.
"We're treating Bramwell as the problem. He isn't. He's a symptom." Cecily stood, which she rarely did. "The problem is that Argenton generates enormous revenue and pays almost nothing to the man whose fee it sits in, and that this is indefensible the moment anyone with real need looks at it honestly. It has been indefensible for twenty years. We've been protected by having lords who didn't need the money."
Victoria set down her quill.
"We've been free-riding," Cecily said. "I'd like that said plainly in this room. This town uses the March's roads, the March's peace, the March's courts. We pay a fee farm to the Crown and effectively nothing to the March itself. We were a poor valley of a thousand when that was negotiated. We are eight thousand people and the wealthiest holding in four counties, and we are still paying on terms drafted for a village."
"Those terms are lawful," Alaric said.
"They're lawful and they're wrong, and I think we've known they were wrong for a decade and haven't said so because nobody forced us to." Cecily looked around the table. "I'd propose we go to Bramwell. Not to court. To him, directly, and we offer to renegotiate -- a standing annual contribution to the March, assessed on a formula Victoria designs and publishes, permanent, in exchange for a written settlement of all outstanding claims and his formal support for our charter as it stands."
"You want to pay him," Cecily's own deputy said, incredulous.
"I want to pay the March. That he's the March at the moment is inconvenient and temporary." Cecily did not waver. "And I want to do it on a published formula so that when he's gone -- and Alaric tells me his creditors will see to that within five years -- the next lord inherits an arrangement he can't reopen, because it's already fair and everyone in four counties can see the arithmetic."
Alaric was very quiet.
"That is," he said slowly, "a considerably better idea than either of the two I have been arguing between all week, and I am finding it difficult to say so gracefully."
"You don't have to say it gracefully."
"No. Evidently not." He rubbed his forehead. "There are two objections and I will make them both. The first is that we will be paying a very large sum to a man who has spent seven years attacking us, and a good portion of this town will find that intolerable, and they will be entitled to."
"Yes," Cecily said. "They will. That's a real cost and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. I'd rather be resented for a decision I can defend than admired for one I can't."
"The second objection is more serious." Alaric looked at her. "It concedes the principle. Once this town accepts that it contributes to the March on an assessed formula, it has accepted that its contribution is assessable. Every future lord will argue about the formula rather than about whether there is one. We will never again be able to say that Argenton is exempt, because we will have stopped being exempt."
"I know," Cecily said. "I think exemption was always going to end, and I'd rather it ended on a formula we wrote than a writ somebody else wrote."
Thomas had not spoken all morning.
"Thomas?" Victoria said.
He took a while to answer.
"I'm thinking that I've been in this room for the best part of twenty-five years," he said, "and that the argument I just heard is better than anything I'd have come up with, and that it's built on a piece of honesty I've been avoiding for most of that time." He looked at Cecily. "We have been free-riding. You're right. I've known it and I've told myself it was legally sound and let the discomfort sit, and it took someone who wasn't here when we drafted it to say it out loud."
"That's not an answer," Alaric said.
"No. Here's the answer: I support it, and I want it to be Cecily's proposal rather than mine, and I want her to negotiate it." Thomas sat back. "Not as a courtesy. Because Bramwell has spent seven years constructing a picture of me specifically -- the founder, the man with no history, the anomaly -- and he has never once had to deal with a thirty-year-old headmistress who is simply, obviously right and has the figures to prove it. I'd like him to have that experience."
Cecily went slightly pink and did not deflect, which Thomas noted with approval.
"I'd want Victoria for the formula," she said.
"You'd be a fool not to."
"And I'd want it understood that I might fail. He may not want a settlement. He may want a victory."
"He may," Alaric agreed. "Men in his position frequently prefer one. But he brought thirty witnesses to a visit, Cecily, and he told us his intentions in front of a dozen people rather than ambushing us with a writ." He tapped the table thoughtfully. "I have been trying for a week to determine what that behaviour means. I wonder now whether it means he was hoping to be offered something."