Four days after I provided the medicine.
The baker's daughter was running around the yard behind the bakery when I went to check on her.
Her mother stood at the back door watching her with the expression of someone who had spent four days in quiet terror and was only now beginning to let the tension out. She looked at me when I came through the gate and said nothing for a moment, just nodded once in the way of someone whose gratitude was too large for the available words.
"The barrel was open," she said finally.
"I assumed."
"My husband has covered it now. And moved it away from where she plays."
"Good. Keep giving her the mixture for the full five days even if she seems completely recovered. The yellowing needs time to clear."
She nodded again. Then she pressed a wrapped parcel into my hands, still warm, smelling of bread and something sweet inside it, and went back through the door before I could object.
I stood in the yard holding it and watched the girl chase a cat across the cobblestones with the complete physical abandon of a child who had no memory of being sick.
Then I went to tell Sera.
***
She was serving a customer when I arrived. I waited at the side of the stall without interrupting and watched her work. She explained a remedy to the customer with the same flat efficiency she used for everything, answered two follow-up questions without impatience, and sent the woman off with a small wrapped packet and change from her coin.
Then she looked at me.
"The girl," she said.
"Running around her yard this morning. Her mother covered the barrel."
Something moved through Sera's expression. Small and quick, the particular satisfaction I had seen once before when the horse had recovered, but slightly warmer this time. Slightly less contained.
She turned back to her stall and began restocking a row of jars with her back to me.
"You went to check on her yourself," she said.
"I wanted to be sure."
"The treatment was correct. The outcome was predictable."
"Predictable is not the same as certain."
A pause. Her hands kept moving.
"No," she said. "It is not."
She set the last jar in place and was quiet for a moment. Then, without turning around:
"Her mother did not need to send anyone to tell me. She could have just let it go."
"I know."
"You came anyway."
"I said I would."
She turned around then. The grey eyes held mine for a moment with an expression I had not seen on her before, not the flat professional assessment, not the careful nothing she kept between herself and everyone else. Something quieter than that. Something that did not quite have a name yet but was not nothing.
Then a new customer arrived at the stall and she turned to them and the moment closed.
I left without pressing it.
Outside the system pulsed once, soft and certain.
Target A: something is shifting.
She looked at you differently just now.
***
I heard about the trouble with Sera three days later.
Not from her. She would not have said anything. It came from Aldric Fenn, who came to find me at Mira's inn in the late afternoon with the careful expression of a man delivering information he thought I would want but was not sure how I would receive it.
He sat down across from me and folded his hands on the table.
"There is a man named Castor Drel," he said. "He runs a private supply operation out of the western quarter. Specialty compounds, things that licensed apothecaries will not make because they sit close enough to the line that a formal shop cannot afford the association."
"I know the type," I said.
"He has been pressuring Sera Voss for two weeks. Wants her to produce a compound for him. Something for sleep, he says, but in a concentration that has nothing to do with sleep. She has refused him three times."
"What has he done about the refusals."
Aldric's expression tightened slightly. "Visited her stall with two men behind him. Suggested that an apothecary operating without the backing of a guild or a patron is vulnerable to the kind of complaints that get a market license reviewed. He has not touched her. Not yet. But the visits have become more frequent and the suggestions have become less subtle."
I looked at the table for a moment.
"How do you know this," I said.
"One of my consortium members has a stall three positions down from hers. He has seen the visits. He mentioned it to me because he knows I know your name." Aldric paused. "She has not asked anyone for help. I do not think she would."
"No," I said. "She would not."
I picked up my cup, found it empty, set it down.
"Tell your consortium member to keep his eyes open but stay out of it," I said. "This is not his problem to manage."
"And whose problem is it?"
I stood up.
"Mine," I said. "As of now."