A Second Opinion

Everyone in Everwell already knows what cursed the mason. Dr. Nell Hadley is the only person in town who checks. One clinic, one class that cannot cast a single spell, and one more patient Everwell would rather not look at too closely. Jem Cartwright has paid for three uncursings this year, and none of them took, because a curse was never the problem. The town's herbwife, Osla Marden, has spent decades keeping this street alive on remedies and territory, and she does not think much of the doctor who showed up asking questions instead of buying her tonics. What the two women find on the mason's wall is not a curse at all, it is a fraud, cheap sand sold off in place of good stone, and underneath the fraud, one stone that really is cursed. Real evidence and real magic, solved by the same method, side by side. By the time the case closes, Osla trusts Nell enough to open a book she has kept sealed for forty years, and somebody in the Guild's own gray wool has started watching the clinic door. For listeners who came for Episode 1's no-nonsense diagnostic mysteries and want the found family to keep growing, one stubborn ally at a time. A real magical curse, diagnosed with the same rigor as a real fraud The herbwife rival from Episode 1 becomes the clinic's first true ally A forty-year-old secret, and a man who has started watching the door