A long-faced woman whose human features are softened by the slight taper of her ears. Her skin is sun-browned, with faint pale lines where spectacles usually rest. She moves with a careful, economical economy, as if every step were being entered into a record. Her sleeves are sun-bleached almost white at the forearms, and she lines medicine bottles by height whenever she has a free hand. An unexpected detail: she wears a tiny silver thimble on a cord around her neck, polished bright from years of rubbing it while thinking. Her broad front teeth show when she laughs, and she chews tough food with a deliberate sideways jaw motion.

Sahri is warm in emergencies and exacting over routine details. She can soothe a frightened child with astonishing patience, then snap at an adult who puts a wet cup beside her labels. She likes people but distrusts institutions; when tired, she becomes brisk and procedural, while a quiet evening with familiar customers draws out her wry humor.

Sahri grew up copying petitions and death notices for the small court at Larkspur Junction, where she learned that a misplaced comma could cost someone a farm. She became a court records officer, precise and respected, until a flood damaged a box of testimony from a land-dispute hearing. Her supervisor ordered her to certify a replacement copy that quietly changed the testimony of a dead witness. Sahri refused. When a fever swept the settlement soon after, she used her knowledge of old supply inventories to help an itinerant healer prepare remedies, and discovered that practical care suited her better than obedient paperwork. She left the court and opened an apothecary in a former toll booth. The fever's surviving patients still come to her; one of them, the retired ferryman Dzhambul, brings her herbs and news. Her former supervisor, Khetvan, now pressures her to surrender the original damaged testimony, which Sahri secretly preserved. She is trying to keep the shop solvent while deciding whether to expose the court's forgery.