Redmere's market was the kind of place that had everything if you knew where to look and nothing if you didn't.
Marcus walked through it with his hands in his coat pockets and his eyes moving across every stall, every face, every transaction happening in his peripheral vision.
Liz had split off toward the guild halls twenty minutes ago to ask the kind of questions that required a smile to get answered.
He'd taken the market.
He wasn't shopping.
He was observing.
Soul Reading ran quietly underneath everything the way it always did now, not intrusive, just present, brushing against the emotional residue of the people moving around him like a hand trailing through water.
Most of it was unremarkable. The usual texture of a busy market, impatience, hunger, mild suspicion, the low-grade anxiety of merchants watching their inventory. Normal human noise.
Then he passed a stall selling dried provisions and felt something that wasn't normal at all.
He stopped.
A man sat behind the stall with the practiced disinterest of someone who'd spent years perfecting the art of looking like he was doing nothing. Middle aged, plain clothing, nothing that marked him as anything specific.
But Soul Reading wasn't reading the surface. It was reading the layer underneath, and what sat underneath this man's bored expression was the particular vigilance of someone collecting information and cataloguing it in real time.
Ironseal, Marcus thought. Had to be.
He moved on without looking back.
He was passing the cloth stalls near the market's eastern edge when the shout cut through the crowd noise.
"Thief! Someone stop him!"
An old woman standing outside a fabric stall, one hand pressed to her chest, the other pointing at a figure already twenty yards away and moving fast through the crowd gaps with the practiced ease of someone who'd done this particular thing many times before.
Marcus watched the thief for exactly two seconds, tracking the route, the speed, the direction.
His hand came up instinctively callin out "Malac….".
He stopped himself midway.
Stood there for a moment with the half-formed gesture hanging in the air.
Then he put his hand down and started running.
The crowd parted ahead of the thief and closed again behind him like water and Marcus moved through it differently, not around people but between them, reading the gaps two steps ahead the way he'd learned to read battlefield formations.
The thief was fast. Marcus was faster than he expected to be.
That was the first interesting thing he noticed.
This body was stronger than it had been few days ago. Not dramatically. Just enough that sprinting felt unusually easier like he's attaining back he's usual physique.
Something had been changing quietly underneath everything else without announcing itself.
The thief ducked left into a narrow alley between two market stalls and Marcus went in after him and caught him by the collar four steps in, spinning him hard into the alley wall with enough force to knock the wind out of him cleanly.
The purse dropped. Marcus picked it up. The thief slid down the wall and sat on the ground looking up with the expression of someone reassessing their morning.
"Get out and steal no more," Marcus said as he knocked him out with a heavy blow to he's head, and walked back out of the alley.
The old woman was exactly where she'd been standing, still watching the direction her purse had gone with the resigned expression of someone who'd already written it off.
Marcus held it out.
She stared at it. Then at him. Then she grabbed it with both hands and clutched it to her chest and looked up at him with watery eyes that were building toward something emotional.
"Young man," she said. "You have no idea what's in here."
"I don't need to," Marcus said.
She opened it anyway and pressed several coins into his hand before he could decline. "Take it.
Please. My daughter's medicine money is in there. You take that and you go buy yourself something warm to eat, you hear me? You look like you haven't had a proper meal in a week."
Marcus looked at the coins. Looked at her.
"Thank you," he said, and meant it more than the words suggested.
She patted his hand twice with the firm affection of someone who had raised children and knew exactly when a person needed it whether they'd admit it or not.
He walked back through the market turning the coins over in his palm and thinking about the sprint.
The strength. The way the body had responded with more than it should have had available.
Somehow I've gotten physically stronger, he thought. Bit by bit without noticing.
He wasn't sure if that was the system, the coat, or something else entirely. He added it to the list of things to investigate when the immediate list got shorter.
Liz found him near the eastern stable twenty minutes later.
"The notice was posted six days ago," she said, keeping her voice low and her eyes on the middle distance. "By a man named Corvin. He's a traveling merchant who comes through Redmere every few weeks. According to the guild receptionist he came in looking shaken, posted the notice, refused the reward discussion, and left the same day."
"Where did he go."
"East." She glanced at him. "Same direction as the supply route he listed."
"He's following them," Marcus said.
"Or they have something of his." Liz pulled her coat tighter against the wind cutting through the stable yard. "The receptionist mentioned he'd been coming through Redmere for two years. Regular schedule, regular route. Six days ago was the first time she'd seen him look scared."
Marcus turned that over and filed it next to the name Soul Reading had flagged on the board.
"We leave at first light," he said.
"We haven't eaten a proper meal in three days."
"We leave after we eat." He held up the coins the old woman had pressed into his hand. "I found us dinner."
Liz stared at the coins. Then at him. "Where did those come from."
"Old woman. Returned her purse."
"You chased a thief."
"Briefly."
She looked at him with the particular expression she reserved for moments when he did something that didn't fit the version of him she'd been building in her head. Something between surprised and quietly pleased that she rearranged into neutral before it settled fully.
"Without Malachar," she said.
"It was good exercise."
She pressed her lips together. "Right. Come on then."
They found an inn on the quieter side of the main thoroughfare, the kind that served food without ceremony and asked no questions about the people eating it.
Marcus sat with his back to the wall out of a habit old enough he didn't register doing it anymore. Liz sat across from him and ate with the focused efficiency of someone making up for missed meals.