Morning arrived gray and cold over Norvale.
Cassian sat near the inn's single window with a cup of tea he hadn't touched, watching the village wake up.
It was a habit from early in his career - stillness before movement. Letting a place reveal itself before asking it questions directly. People in motion told you things they would never say sitting down.
A merchant opened his stall across the road. Two children chased something through the mud near the well. An older man repaired a cart wheel with the focused patience of someone who had done it many times before.
Normal.
All of it aggressively, stubbornly normal.
He picked up his tea finally and drank it cold.
The morning passed in small conversations. He was careful about how he approached them - never the same question twice, never anything that sounded like an interrogation. He bought bread he didn't need. Asked about roads he had no intention of traveling. Listened more than he spoke.
Norvale talked freely about the curse.
That surprised him slightly. He had expected reluctance - the particular silence of people who had survived something and weren't ready to name it aloud yet. But Norvale had apparently decided collectively that the curse was behind them, and behind meant discussable.
They talked about the progression. The stages. How it had moved through families slowly, then faster near the end. How some had already reached the later stages before the rain came.
The rain.
Everyone mentioned the rain.
Crimson. Warm. Gone within an hour. And afterward - nothing. The progression simply stopped. Reversed. People who had lost their sight woke the next morning able to see. People who had begun losing their hearing heard birdsong for the first time in years.
No one fully understood it.
But everyone had a theory about the herbalist.
Clara, they called her. Just Clara. The way people said a name when they assumed everyone already knew who they meant.
She had been treating the progression for years, they said. Slowing it. Not curing it - she had never claimed she could cure it - but slowing it enough that people had time. Time to say things. Time to prepare. Time to keep living without completely falling apart.
Cassian listened carefully each time her name appeared.
She was well-regarded. Deeply so. Not in the way authority figures were regarded - not with formality or distance — but with the particular warmth reserved for someone who had shown up consistently and asked nothing in return.
"Does she live in the village?" he asked a woman near the market stalls, keeping his voice casual.
The woman paused, seemingly surprised by the question.
"She's just… around," she said eventually. "You see her when you need her."
"But her home-"
"Somewhere in the forest, I think." The woman shrugged slightly. "She never said exactly. We never asked."
Cassian nodded and moved on.
He heard variations of the same answer three more times before midday.
Clara was known. Genuinely, warmly, thoroughly known. And yet not a single person in Norvale could point him toward a door or a path with any confidence. She existed in the village's memory more than its geography - present when needed, otherwise simply elsewhere.
Deliberate, he thought. Not reclusive. Deliberate.
He was standing near the well considering this when an older farmer stopped beside him to fill a bucket, glancing at him briefly.
"You're asking about Clara," the man said without looking up.
Cassian hadn't thought his questions were that obvious. Apparently they were.
"Among other things," he said.
"She had someone with her recently." The farmer lifted his bucket. "Young woman. Stayed a few days. Quiet type - didn't talk much to anyone outside of Clara."
Cassian kept his expression neutral.
"Do you know her name?"
The farmer thought for a moment.
"Don't think she gave one. Not to me anyway." He shrugged. "Clara seemed to know her well enough though."
He walked away without further comment.
Cassian stood by the well a moment longer.
Two names. One address between them.
He had come to Norvale expecting a phenomenon — something vast and ancient and difficult to categorize. Instead he had found something considerably more inconvenient.
A person.
Possibly two.
One of them known to everyone and findable by no one. The other known by name to a blind woman and by reputation to an entire kingdom's worth of old records he couldn't quite place.
He picked up his coat from the inn an hour later and settled his horse for the road back toward the capital.
He had enough now.
Not answers. Not yet.
But the right questions - which in his experience was almost always more dangerous.