Cecily was sick twice on the road to Ashfield, once behind a hedge and once, with great dignity, into a ditch at the edge of the town while Victoria held the horses and looked at the sky.
"Better now?" Victoria asked, when she came back.
"No." Cecily wiped her mouth and took her reins. "But there's nothing left, so I suppose it'll have to do."
They rode on. Victoria said nothing for a while. Then, without looking round: "I was sick before the court at Whitcombe. Three times. Thomas never knew. I told him it was something I'd eaten."
Cecily turned her head.
"You never told me that."
"I've never told anyone. It isn't the sort of thing that helps people, as a rule." Victoria kept her eyes on the road. "I'm telling you because you're about to walk into a room and be very good, and afterward you'll think you were only good because you're made of something different from the rest of us. You're not. You were sick in a ditch. So was I."
Cecily did not answer. But she sat a little straighter in the saddle after that, and she was not sick again.
They met in a room above an inn, on neutral ground, because Cecily had refused both Bramwell's castle and Argenton on the grounds that whoever hosted would feel obliged to win.
She brought Victoria and one clerk. Bramwell brought two men and left them outside on the stair. He came in alone, and he looked older than he had at their supper table in the summer -- greyer, thinner in the face -- and he looked at Cecily for some time before he sat down.
"I had expected Master Thomas," he said.
"I know. That's much of why it's me." Cecily set down her case and did not sit until he did. "My lord, I'm going to do something a little unusual and open by telling you what I think your position is. If I've got it wrong, correct me, and we'll both save a week."
Bramwell's eyebrows went up a fraction. "Go on."
"You owe a very large sum. You've sold everything that could be sold. Your creditors have stopped accepting explanations, which is why you sold the crossings at four years' income instead of eight. Your only remaining source of real revenue is a town that pays you almost nothing under a charter drafted for a village." Her voice was level. Only Victoria, beside her, could see that her hands were pressed flat on her knees under the table. "You could bring a claim for extraordinary aid on grounds of necessity. You'd have a real case. You might well win it. And it would take three years, and cost you money you haven't got, and get you a single payment from a town that would then spend the next decade making your life difficult in a dozen lawful ways, because we are very good at that, and you have read our accounts."
"That is a fair summary," said Bramwell. "It is not flattering to either of us."
"No. I've found flattery wastes time." Cecily opened the case. "Here's what I'm offering. A permanent annual contribution from Argenton to the March, assessed on a published formula based on trade and population. Not a gift. Not an aid. An obligation. Written. Binding on this town for good, and on every lord who comes after you."
She set the first sheet in front of him.
Bramwell read it. Then he read it again. Victoria, watching, thought the thing that mattered most was that he took his time over it, and that his hand, holding the sheet, was shaking a little more than it had at supper.
"This is a great deal of money," he said at last.
"It is. It's a good deal more than the extraordinary aid you levied eight years ago, every year, for ever." Cecily did not smile. "And it is less than half of what you need to clear your debt, and I want to say that plainly now instead of having you discover it later and feel misled. This won't save you, my lord. It will make your position survivable."
Something in the man's tired face shifted.
"You are not pretending to rescue me."
"I'm not able to rescue you and I'd be insulting you to try." Cecily laid down the second sheet. "This is the formula. Victoria built it. It's published -- it'll be in the hands of every holding in this March within a month of signing, and anyone can check our arithmetic, for ever. That isn't a courtesy to you. It's the whole mechanism. The formula protects us from the next lord, and it protects you from being accused of extortion, which I suspect you'll need when your creditors ask where the new money came from."
Bramwell looked at Victoria, then. Only for a moment. Victoria looked back at him and gave him nothing at all, and he seemed, she thought, to understand that this was itself a kind of answer to something he had said to her at dawn at the tally-bench, months ago, and had not been sure she had heard.
"What do you want in exchange?" he said.
"Written settlement of every outstanding and future claim against Argenton. Your formal support for the charter as it stands, in a document we can put in front of a justiciar if we ever need to." Cecily paused. "And no confirmation review by the Crown. Ever. Not sought by us, not sought by you. That clause isn't open to negotiation, and if you press me on why, I'll decline to tell you."
Bramwell looked at her with frank curiosity.
"Now that," he said, "is interesting."
"It isn't interesting. It's a condition."
"Everything is interesting at my age, mistress, and most of it is unprofitable." He tapped the sheet. "You understand I could refuse purely to find out why."
"You could." Cecily's hands, under the table, pressed harder against her knees. She was thinking, Victoria knew, of the kitchen table, and the fire, and the two people who had asked this of her and would not tell her what it was for. "You'd be spending three years and money you haven't got to find out something that wouldn't do you any good. And I'd think less of you. And you don't strike me as a man who's enjoyed the last eight years enough to want another three of it."
Bramwell said nothing. He looked at her across the table for a long while, and something went on behind his face that neither woman could read. Then he looked, very briefly, at Victoria again.
"I find," he said slowly, "that I do not need to know why. I find I was told once, by someone, that I would not like what it cost me to look." He set the sheet down. "Very well. No review."
Victoria let out a breath she had not known she was holding.
There was a silence. Then Lord Bramwell laughed -- a short, surprised sound, as if it had been startled out of him.
"How old are you?"
"Thirty."
"God help this March in thirty years." He picked up the formula again. "I want four alterations. Two of them matter, and two are so that I can tell my creditors I negotiated instead of simply accepting. I assume you have anticipated this."
"I've anticipated six," said Cecily, and produced a third sheet.
The alterations took the rest of the day.
Two of them were as Bramwell had said -- a change to how a bad harvest year would be counted, and a clause about the Ashfield staple that was really about his pride. Cecily gave him both within the hour. The other two were real. He wanted the formula reviewed every ten years, and she would not have it, because a review was a door, and she had spent a month with Alaric learning what came through doors. They went round on that until the candles were lit. In the end she gave him a review every twenty years, by a panel of three holdings chosen by lot, with the arithmetic public, and he looked at it for a long time and said that it was a worse bargain than he had wanted and a better one than he deserved, and signed his initials beside it.
At the end of it all he stood, and bowed -- properly, to Cecily, the bow one gives an equal across a table -- and then, at the door, stopped.
"Your clause," he said, not quite to either of them. "The one you would not explain."
Cecily went still.
"Whoever asked you to put it there," said Bramwell, "asked a good deal of you. I hope they know it." He opened the door. "Good evening, mistresses."
They signed formally a fortnight later, in the council room at Argenton, with witnesses from three holdings.
Alaric read the executed settlement twice, slowly, his finger moving under the lines, and set it down, and said to nobody in particular: "I have negotiated with four lords in my career, and I have never in my life produced a document as good as that." It was the most unqualified thing anyone at that table had ever heard him say, and Cecily, who had been braced for criticism for a fortnight, went pink and then white and had to leave the room.
Victoria found her in the passage outside, leaning against the wall with her eyes shut.
"He asked a good deal of me," Cecily said, without opening them. "Bramwell. At the door. He said whoever asked me to put that clause in asked a good deal of me, and he hoped they knew it."
"They know it," said Victoria.
"I know they do." Cecily opened her eyes. "I just wanted to hear somebody say it out loud who wasn't one of them."
Victoria did not answer. She stood beside her in the passage, not touching, until Cecily was ready to go back in, and then they went back in together.
The town found out the terms the following week, when the formula went up in the tally-bench window. It did not like them.