The woman arrived three days after the fever broke.

She came on foot from the settlement south, carrying a large basket and moving at the pace of someone who had been walking long distances for a long time and saw no reason to hurry or to stop. She asked the first person she met for directions to the healer's grain store, got them, and came directly.

Maricel was in the middle of a dressing change when she appeared in the doorway.

She didn't announce herself. She stood in the doorway and watched.

Maricel finished the dressing, told the patient what to watch for over the next three days, sent him out, and then looked at the woman in the doorway.

Sixties. Square-built. The hands of someone who had delivered a lot of babies — strong through the palm, the knuckles work-worn in a specific way that came from that particular kind of sustained physical work. She carried herself like a person who had not been uncertain about anything in several decades.

She was looking at Maricel with the assessing attention of someone forming an opinion.

"You're the one from Panlaot," she said.

"I'm in Panlaot," Maricel said. "Yes."

"I heard you handled the fever cluster last week."

"Four children and two adults. Waterborne source upstream. All six recovered."

The woman's eyes moved to the grain store — the layout, the shelves, the preparation area, the way the space was organized. She took it in with the speed of someone reading something familiar in a new arrangement.

"Ina Petra," she said. "I work the settlements between here and Lagbas. Thirty years."

"Maricel," she said. Then: "Doktora, here."

The village had given her the title and she had kept it. Maricel was who she was inside. Doktora was what she was to them. Both were true and neither was a lie.

Petra looked at her.

"Which is it."

"Both," Maricel said. "Sit down if you want. I have two more patients this morning."

---

Petra sat.

She sat in the corner near the preparation area with her basket on the floor beside her and watched Maricel work with the focused attention of a practitioner evaluating a method, not a visitor being polite.

The first of the two remaining patients: a woman with a skin condition on her forearm that had been present for two weeks. Maricel examined it, identified it as contact dermatitis from something in the woman's work — she cleaned a specific kind of shellfish for trade, and the residue from the shells was the likely irritant. She prescribed a preparation to reduce the inflammation and told her to cover the forearm when she worked.

Petra said nothing during this.

The second patient: an older man with chest tightness and a persistent dry cough. Maricel started asking the standard questions — onset, duration, whether it worsened in specific conditions — and was partway through her assessment when Petra spoke.

"Which nets does he use."

Maricel looked at her.

The man looked at Petra. "The deep-sea ones. The ones soaked in the dark preservative."

Petra looked at Maricel. Not pointedly. Just informatively.

Maricel looked back at the patient. "How long have you been using those nets."

"Eight months. Since I joined my brother-in-law's boat."

Eight months. The same timeline as the cough.

She asked three more questions. The answers built the picture. The cough was worse at the start of a fishing run, better after two or three days away from the boat. It didn't follow the weather the way Tandoy's had. It followed the net exposure.

"It's an irritant response," she said. "Not inflammation from weather or infection. The preservative compound is irritating your airway on contact."

"I know the compound," Petra said. "The men who use those nets for more than a year tend to develop it. There's a preparation that helps — different from what you'd use for weather-cough."

She reached into her basket and produced a small wrapped bundle without being asked.

Maricel looked at it.

She looked at what she'd already been reaching for on her own shelf.

She put her own choice back.

"Show me the preparation," she said.

---

They worked through it together at the preparation table — Petra laying out the components, Maricel asking about rationale, both of them talking through the mechanism in the different vocabularies they each carried.

Kiko was in the corner making notes on bark.

He was very quiet about it, which Maricel had come to understand meant he was paying maximum attention.

Petra noticed him after about ten minutes.

"Who is this," she said.

"Kiko. He assists."

Petra looked at the bark notes. Then at Kiko. Then back at Maricel with an expression that didn't say anything but said several things.

She went back to the preparation.

---

The second disagreement came in the afternoon.

A woman came in with cramping that Maricel assessed as early-stage labor — the woman was at thirty-seven weeks, technically within the full-term window, and everything Maricel could check suggested the presentation was normal.

She reached for the preparation she'd been using for labor support. It was a compound she'd built from three local plants, tested for consistency, cross-checked with what she knew about the active components.

"Not that one," Petra said from across the room.

Maricel looked at her.

"At that dose. Not from the plants you have on that shelf."

"The preparation is correct for the stage and presentation."

"The preparation would be correct for inland plants." Petra crossed to the shelf. She picked up the bundle Maricel had been reaching for and turned it over in her hands. Her thumb pressed along the stem end, feeling something Maricel couldn't yet read by touch. "These are coastal-grown. In the wet season, from this soil, they run about a third stronger than the same plant from inland. I've been dosing down for twenty years."

Maricel was quiet for a moment.

She went into Marisol's memory, looking for anything that confirmed or contradicted this.

What she found: nothing. The memory didn't have that level of specificity. It wasn't the kind of thing a noble household's surface knowledge tracked.

What she had from her own training: the principle of variable potency in wild plants based on growing conditions was real and well-documented. She had no specific data on this plant in this soil in this season. Petra had thirty years of specific data on this plant in this soil in this season.

If the plant ran a third stronger, the dose she'd been about to give was too high for the stage of labor. Not dangerously so — but enough to push the preparation past what the body needed, and too much of the right thing was still too much.

She adjusted the dose.

She caught Kiko making a note.

"Write down the seasonal adjustment range," she told him. "Coastal, wet season, this soil type. We need that in the reference."

He wrote it down.

Petra watched this without comment.

The patient did fine. She left with what she needed and instructions to send for Petra or for Maricel when things progressed.

---

By late afternoon the patient load had slowed.

Petra was still there. She had moved from the corner to a stool near the preparation area and was sorting through Maricel's herb supply with the systematic focus of someone conducting an honest inventory. She held things up to the light. She smelled things. She set some aside and left others in place.

Maricel let her.

Inang Cora had appeared at some point around midday with food for both of them and had exchanged a long look with Petra that conveyed something Maricel didn't have enough local context to fully read. Recognition, probably. Petra had been working these settlements for thirty years.

"You found a good one," Inang Cora said to Petra.

"I haven't decided yet," Petra said.

Inang Cora made the sound that was almost a laugh and went back to the preparation area.

The two older women had sat together briefly after that and talked in the way of people who shared a professional world and were catching up on the parts of it that mattered.

Maricel had treated three more patients in that time.

Now the grain store was quiet. The light was going late-afternoon gold through the east window.

Petra set down the last herb bundle.

"Your supply has three gaps," she said.

"I know. I haven't found good local sources for two of them and the third I can approximate but not replace."

"I can bring the first two from Lagbas. The third one grows up the hillside north of here, above the tree line. You'd need a guide who knows the path."

Maricel looked at her. "You'd bring them."

"I come down this way every two weeks. It's not out of my route."

This was, Maricel understood, an offer. Not framed as one. Just stated as a logistical fact.

She understood the framing.

"I'd appreciate that," she said.

Petra nodded and began repacking her basket with the methodical efficiency of someone who had a system for how things went in and out of it and didn't deviate.

"The fever cluster," she said, without looking up. "You investigated the water source yourself."

"Yes."

"You traced it to upstream contamination."

"Dead animal at the bank. Four to five days prior to onset."

"Most practitioners I know would have treated the symptoms and prayed." She said it without judgment. Just accurately. "They wouldn't have known to look upstream."

"Treating symptoms without knowing the source just means more sick people," Maricel said.

"I know. I've been saying the same thing for thirty years." Petra closed the basket. She looked up. "Where did you train."

Maricel had been waiting for this.

"A place you wouldn't have heard of," she said.

It was not quite a lie. It was not quite a sufficient answer either, and she knew it. She watched Petra process it — the slight pause, the assessment of whether to push, the decision.

Petra let it go.

"The training shows," she said.

She said it the way she said everything — directly, without elaboration, as if it were simply the accurate thing to say and therefore required no decoration.

She picked up her basket.

"I'll be back in two weeks," she said. "I'll bring the two plants. If there's anything else you need from Lagbas, write it down for me before I go."

Maricel found a piece of bark and wrote the list. She handed it over.

Petra looked at it. Looked at the handwriting.

She didn't say anything about the handwriting, which was Maricel's own, running through Marisol's hand in a script that was visibly not the soft formal style of a noble daughter's education.

She put the list in her basket and left.

---

Maricel stood in the grain store after she'd gone.

Kiko was still in the corner. He had several pieces of bark covered in notes.

"She knew about the nets," he said.

"Yes."

"You didn't."

"No."

He considered this. "Are you going to know next time."

She looked at him. "What do you think."

He looked at his notes. "Yes," he said. "Because I wrote it down."

She turned back to the shelf she'd been reorganizing.

She was thinking about the two words Petra had said before she left.

The training shows.

Nobody in her other life had said it quite like that — plainly, without hedging, without comparing it to someone else's training or situating it in a hierarchy of credentials. Just: the training shows. As if the thing itself was visible and naming it was sufficient.

She didn't know what to do with it.

She put it somewhere and went back to work.