Lavender first. Then something sharper underneath it — vinegar, or whatever these people scrubbed their floors with to keep them from smelling like everything that had bled or sweated or died on them. Zelene's body noticed it before her mind caught up, the way it always did now, some instinct baked into muscle and lungs that had belonged to someone else first.
Still not used to that. Probably never will be.
Inside, the front room was modest but orderly — shelves of labeled jars, a low counter, a young apprentice sorting bundled herbs who looked up at their entrance with polite, unhurried interest.
"Can I help you?"
"We're hoping to speak with whoever oversees your records," Corvin said, easing into the measured, unbothered cadence of someone used to being granted access rather than questioned about it. "A matter of some medical curiosity. Nothing urgent."
Nothing urgent. Her mouth almost twitched at that. Nothing about any of this had been urgent, right up until the moment it was, and by then it was usually too late to call it anything else.
The apprentice hesitated, glancing toward a door at the back. "That would be Master Hallis. He doesn't usually see visitors without—"
"We'd be glad to wait," Zelene said, before the sentence could finish itself into a no.
They didn't wait long. Master Hallis turned out to be an older man, silver-haired and precise in his movements, the sort of person who seemed to measure even his greetings before spending them. Something in Zelene's chest recognized the type instantly — not with the strange, unbidden warmth Corvin or Nym described when recognition of that kind struck them, but with something more mundane, more hers: the flat, practical certainty of someone who'd read enough court intrigue in another life to know exactly what this man was.
Careful. Methodical. Keeps three sets of records — the official one, the honest one, and the one he'll never write down at all.
"Medical curiosity," Hallis repeated, once they'd been shown into a small back office lined floor to ceiling with ledgers. "That covers a great deal of ground. You'll have to be more specific."
"Unusual cases," Corvin said. "Records that don't match what people remember. Debts for treatment that vanished from the books. Diagnoses that were written down one day and gone the next."
Something flickered across Hallis's face — brief, controlled, the expression of a man deciding how much truth was safe to hand a stranger.
"We see clerical errors from time to time," he said carefully. "Every guild does. I wouldn't read too much into it."
"Of course not," Corvin said, matching his caution with an ease of his own. "Though I imagine a guild as careful as yours keeps track of the more unusual errors regardless. For your own sake, if nothing else."
Hallis studied him a long moment before answering. "We do. Some of them." He crossed to a locked cabinet along the wall, produced a small key from within his coat, and withdrew a slim ledger, setting it on the desk between them without quite pushing it forward — the particular gesture of a man offering something and taking it back at the same time.
"I'll tell you plainly what I tell the guild's own apprentices," he said. "There are three cases in the last two years I cannot explain through ordinary carelessness. A woman's outstanding debt for a season of treatment, gone from the books entirely, though I recall entering it myself, in my own hand. A diagnosis of a wasting illness in a young man, struck clean from his file the week before he was to be turned away as incurable — and he lived. A record of malpractice against one of our own healers, vanished, though three witnesses swore under oath they'd seen it filed."
"What do they have in common?" Zelene asked, though something low in her chest already suspected the shape of the answer before he gave it — that particular, sinking certainty of watching a familiar shape assemble itself out of unfamiliar pieces.
"Nothing, on the surface," Hallis said. "Different patients, different circumstances, different years, even. The only thread connecting them is that the records didn't fade or get misplaced the way records sometimes do. They were removed. Cleanly. As if they'd never existed at all." He paused, his fingers resting lightly atop the closed ledger, as though it still held some heat he didn't fully trust. "And all three, when pressed, recalled a stranger passing through the guild shortly before the record disappeared. None of them could describe this person with any consistency. Tall, then short. A man, then possibly a woman. One insisted afterward he couldn't quite remember the visit at all — only that he was certain, somehow, that it had happened."
He closed the ledger with a soft, final sound.
"I don't put much stock in ghost stories, Miss. But I've stopped dismissing this one outright."
Umbral.
The name surfaced in Zelene's mind unbidden, cold and certain, settling into her chest the way a held breath finally lets go. Not recognition — not the kind Corvin and Nym had described, the heat and the pull and the sense of being known. Just plain, ordinary understanding, the sort that came from having lived through this exact shape of mystery once already, in the cavern, with a boy who could hear stone remember what people wanted forgotten.
Someone here erases the parts of a person's history that would ruin them. And they've been doing it long enough that even the man keeping the records has stopped being able to prove it happened at all.
She kept her face carefully still. Some things weren't hers to say aloud yet — not until she was certain, and certainty, in her experience, rarely arrived on the first knock.
"May we speak with any of them?" Corvin asked. "The patients."
"Two have since moved from town," Hallis said. "The third — the woman who nearly drowned—"
He caught himself.
Zelene's attention sharpened instantly. "Drowned?"
Hallis's expression shuttered, just slightly, the way a door closes when someone realizes they've said more than they meant to. "A different matter. Not part of what I've just described. Forgive me — long day."
That's not a slip, Zelene thought, watching him reach for the scrap of paper anyway, watching his hand not quite steady as he wrote. That's a second thread, tangled into the first one, and he doesn't even realize he's just handed it to us.
"Mira Kell," he said, sliding the paper across the desk. "Ask for her at the mill. She works there most days. And — Miss." He hesitated, looking at her properly for the first time since they'd sat down, something almost like an apology in his face. "Whatever you're truly here for. Be careful who you ask about it."
"I'll remember that," Zelene said.
I always do. Whether I want to or not.
They left the guild with the name folded carefully into Corvin's pocket, the afternoon light beginning to slant lower over the rooftops, gold going amber going the particular grey that meant evening wasn't far behind it.
One thread pulled, Zelene thought, falling into step beside him. There's always another one waiting right after. Should be used to that by now. She almost laughed at herself — narrating her own life like she was reading it secondhand, like some part of her still hadn't finished believing she was inside the story instead of watching it from a safe distance. That habit hadn't faded in months. She doubted it ever fully would. Two lives stitched into one body left seams, and seams showed, if you knew where to look for them.
They'd barely turned back onto the main street when she nearly walked straight into a child.
The girl couldn't have been more than seven or eight, small and wide-eyed, clutching a scrap of cloth to her chest like it was the only thing keeping her upright. She looked up at Zelene with the particular, unguarded hope of a child who has run out of adults to ask and has decided, out of sheer necessity, to start asking strangers instead.
"Have you seen my mama?" the girl asked. "She said she'd be right back. That was two days ago."
Zelene crouched down without hesitation, some instinct older than either of her lives guiding her hands to steady the girl's shoulders. Wasn't in anything Hallis said. New thread, or the same one, wearing a smaller face.
"What's your name?"
"Wren," the girl said. "My mama's name is Della. She sells fish by the bridge. She never leaves that long. Not ever."
Zelene glanced up at Corvin, and whatever he saw in her expression, he didn't argue with it. He only nodded once — the same quiet, immediate agreement he'd given her outside a cavern days ago, when she'd decided to walk into the dark for someone else's sake without waiting to be asked twice.
"We'll help you find her," Zelene said, turning back to the girl, her voice steady despite the sudden, cold weight settling behind her ribs. "I promise you that."
Behind them, unnoticed, an older woman drawing water from a nearby well paused just long enough to glance toward the child — a brief, uneasy look, gone the moment she realized she'd been seen — before hurrying on with her bucket, saying nothing at all.
Somebody in this town knows something, Zelene thought, watching her go. They always do.
The trick is figuring out who's finally tired enough of staying quiet to say it.