As the first grayish light of dawn filtered through the shutters, the boy’s fever subsided. The wound had been cleaned, the artery stitched with the delicacy of a lacemaker. Yusha sat in a chair by the fireplace, his hands trembling, covered in the blood of his enemy’s son.
The messenger, who had been watching from a corner, stepped forward. He looked at the silver instruments on the table and then at Yusha’s face, now fully illuminated by the morning light.
“I remember you,” said the messenger. “I was a child when the governor’s daughter died. I saw your portrait in the town square. There was a reward for your head that lasted five years.”
Yusha didn’t look up. “Then finish it. Call the guards.”
The messenger looked at the sleeping child, heir to a province, saved by the man they had condemned. He looked at Zainab, who stood like a sentinel, her blind eyes fixed on the messenger as if she could see the rot in his soul.
“My father has died,” Julian said softly. “He died cursing the ‘monk’ who saved me, because deep down he knew no monk has the hands of a surgeon. He spent his last years trying to find this house again to finish what he started in the Great Fire.”
Zainab appeared in the doorway, her hand resting on the frame. She wore a deep indigo shawl, and her blind eyes seemed to pierce through Julián’s finery.
“And you?” he asked. “Did you come to finish his work?”
Julian knelt on the frozen mud. The town held its breath.
“I came to pay the interest on a ten-year-old debt,” Julian replied. “The city is rotting, Zainab. The doctors are quacks who bleed the poor dry for gold. The hospitals are morgues. I’m building a Royal Academy of Medicine, and I want its director to be the man who saved a dying child in a mud hut.”
Yusha stiffened. “I’m a dead man, Your Excellency. I can’t return to the city. I’m a beggar. A ghost.”
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