Hearthlight Inn is thriving — four hearths, four partners, a trade route running clean through Whiteport. Which is exactly why the household can't look away when the harbor's only bathhouse keeper starts skipping meals to cover a lease that doubled overnight.

Chamylla treats dockworkers' broken hands and failing knees for whatever they can pay, which is often nothing, and has never once applied the same mercy to herself. When her landlord's new terms threaten to take the roof, the license, and the only affordable care forty families in Whiteport have left, Edric shows up at her door the same way he's shown up at every door since he first got one of his own. Chamylla doesn't want rescuing. She barely tolerates being fed.

The timing isn't an accident. Whiteport's trade fair is three weeks out, and the delegation won't recommend an inn without real wellness service behind it — which means Hearthlight's whole reputation now runs through whether one exhausted herbalist can keep her bathhouse standing. Thalia, Isabel, and Vestele know this shape of trouble by heart. The plain, crestless seal on Chamylla's lease looks exactly like the one that's followed them before.

What nobody expected: the gentler Chamylla lets herself be cared for, the stronger her tonics work — as if rest itself were an ingredient she's been brewing without, her whole life, and never knew to add.

In this book

• A healer who'll treat anyone but herself
• A villain whose patience is somehow worse than violence
• A household that's done asking permission to care about someone
• Magic that only works once you let yourself rest