I spent the morning thinking about what would make Sera Voss look up from her work.
Not charm. That had already been established as useless. Not injury either, I had used that once and repeating it would make me look clumsy or, worse, transparent.
What I needed was something that sat inside her area of expertise, something with enough genuine complexity that dismissing me would cost her more than engaging.
The answer came to me while I was watching a dyer's apprentice across the street struggling with a vat of something that had gone the wrong colour. The boy kept adding to it, trying to correct the shade, making it worse with every addition. His master was going to be furious.
I turned it over in my mind for a few minutes. Then I went to find a specific kind of problem.
***
It took me until midday to locate what I needed. A stable hand on the western road who had been dealing with a horse that would not eat, losing weight steadily over two weeks despite no visible injury or fever. The man had tried everything he knew, which was not much, and was quietly worried about telling his employer
I gave him four silvers for an hour of his time and a detailed account of every symptom he had observed. Then I went to the Merchant Quarter.
Sera was at the stall. She was always at the stall in the middle of the day. I was beginning to understand that she ran it alone, which meant she had no one to cover her and no reason to leave during trading hours. That was useful to know.
She saw me coming and said nothing, which was its own kind of acknowledgment.
I stopped at the counter. "I have a question that is not about me."
"That is a change," she said, without inflection.
"A horse. Two weeks of appetite loss, no fever, no visible injury. Coat has gone dull. The animal drinks normally but will not take feed, not even grain it previously liked. The stable hand says it stands with its head lower than usual and is slow to respond when called."
Sera had stopped what she was doing.
Not obviously. She had not put anything down or turned to face me fully. But the small movements of her hands had paused, and her eyes had shifted from her work to the middle distance in the way of someone running information through a process.
"How old is the animal?" she said.
"Seven years."
"Any change in its water source recently? New trough, different well."
"The stable hand said they moved to a new yard about three weeks ago."
"Before the symptoms started."
"By about a week."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she turned and went to the lower shelf at the back of the stall, scanning the labels with the quick certainty of someone who knew exactly what was there.
"New yards sometimes have soil contamination that gets into standing water," she said, pulling two small jars and setting them on the counter.
"Certain mineral concentrations, copper in particular, accumulate in horses slowly. They keep drinking because they are thirsty but the body starts refusing food as a response. It looks like a dozen other things which is why it gets missed."
"Is it treatable?"
"If it has only been two weeks, yes. Clean water source immediately, that is not optional. These two," she tapped the jars, "ground together and mixed into a small amount of feed paste once a day for five days. The animal will not want to take it the first time. Press it to the back of the gum if you have to."
I looked at the jars. Then I looked at her.
"How did you know it was mineral contamination?"
Something shifted in her expression. Just slightly. The particular shift of someone who has been asked a question they find genuinely worth answering.
"I did not know," she said. "I suspected. The combination of symptoms with the timing of the move made it the most likely cause. If it is something else the treatment will not make it worse, but it will not fix it either. In that case come back and tell me what changed."
"You want to know the outcome."
"I want to know if my reasoning was correct," she said. "Those are different things."
She said it without self-consciousness, the way someone states a fact about themselves they have never thought to obscure. It was the first thing she had said to me that felt like the actual texture of who she was rather than the surface she kept between herself and the rest of the world.
I paid for the jars without making anything of it.
"I will let you know," I said.
She had already turned back to her work. "See that you do."
***
I delivered the jars and the instructions to the stable hand and walked back through the Merchant Quarter slowly, turning the conversation over in my mind.
She had not smiled. Had not softened. Had not given me anything that could reasonably be called warmth. But she had engaged, fully and without the flat efficiency she had used the first two times. The question had been real and she had treated it as real, and at the end of it she had told me something true about herself without meaning to.
She wanted to know if she was right. Not for any external reason. Just because being right mattered to her and being wrong mattered more.
That was something I could work with.
Not by flattering her. Not by performing admiration. But by continuing to bring her problems that were actually problems and letting her be exactly what she was without asking her to be anything else.
The system pulsed.
Target A: third contact established. Neutral shifting to cautious attention.
She told you something true. Most people go weeks without doing that.
The System notes: you did not push. That was correct.
I knew it was correct. Pushing Sera Voss would be like pushing a door that opened inward. The harder you pressed the more firmly it stayed shut. What it responded to was patience, and genuine interest, and the slow accumulation of visits that asked nothing from her except her expertise.
She was beginning to expect me.
She did not know that yet. But the fact that she had told me to come back and report the outcome meant that some part of her had already accepted that I would return, and had decided that was acceptable.
That was enough for today.
I went back to the inn, ate what Mira put in front of me without being asked, and spent the evening thinking about Renn Vaudo and the shape of the board and how many more moves it would take before all of it started to connect.