On the fifth morning—the first official day Mina’s market-door clinic opened for business—Pera arrived thirty breaths after sunrise. The veteran caravan guard had spent the past forty-eight hours visiting every wagon driver yard and escort barracks along the river docks, telling the men and women she had worked beside for fifteen years how Mina’s left-foot warmth cue and three-count pause had brought her out of the Hollow Summit with her own breath intact.
Behind Pera stepped three weathered Coal and Flame caravan escorts in dusty leather coats, each of them nursing the kind of nagging spirit vein strain that road guards usually hid behind cheap pepper-spirit draughts for fear an upper-ward sect physician would mark them unfit on the guild rolls.
“Three paying consultations, Mina,” Pera announced proudly. She set three honest copper-and-silver fees on the pine desk. “None of them wants a miracle pill, and all three of them promised not to lie about how much cheap wine they drank on the marsh road.”
At the small side desk beside the window sat sixteen-year-old Halin in a clean linen smock. He held a ruled wooden slate and a sharpened charcoal stick.
Halin had first asked at the shepherd’s hospice to become her apprentice rather than train as a combat fighter. Then, Mina had laid down one foundational rule before accepting him. For his first six months in the clinic, Halin was forbidden to touch a single spirit vein needle, apply a healing wrap to an open channel, or even…
