A thunderous knock shook the heavy oak door.
Yusha moved to the entrance, his face hardening into the mask of the physician he once was. He opened it to find a man drenched in freezing rain, wearing the mud-splattered livery of a royal messenger. Behind him, a black carriage stood trembling, its lamps flickering like dying stars.
“I seek the man who mends what others throw away,” the messenger gasped, his eyes darting to the interior of the warm cottage. “They say in the city that a ghost lives here. A ghost with the hands of a god.”
Yusha’s blood turned to ice. “You seek a beggar. I am a simple man.”
“A simple man does not perform a cranial trepanation on a woodcutter’s son and save his life,” the messenger countered, stepping forward. “My master is in the carriage. He is dying. If he breathes his last on your doorstep, this house will be ashes before dawn.”
Zainab moved to Yusha’s side, her hand resting on his arm. She felt the frantic vibration of his pulse. “Who is the master?” she asked, her voice steady and cold.
“The Governor’s son,” the messenger whispered. “The brother of the girl who died in the Great Fire.”
The irony was a physical weight. The very family that had hunted Yusha into the dirt, that had burned his life to a cinder, was now huddled in a carriage at his door, begging for the life of their heir.
“Don’t do it,” Zainab whispered as the messenger retreated to fetch the patient. “They will recognize you. They will take you to the gallows the moment he is stable.”
“If I don’t,” Yusha replied, his voice a jagged rasp, “they will kill us both now. And more than that, Zainab… I am a doctor. I cannot let a man bleed out in the rain while I have the needle in my hand.”
They carried the young man in—a youth of barely nineteen, his face ashen, a jagged shrapnel wound from a hunting accident festering in his thigh. The scent of gangrene filled the clean, herb-scented room, a foul intrusion of the dying world.
Yusha worked in a feverish trance. He didn’t use the crude tools of a village healer. He reached into a hidden compartment beneath the floorboards, pulling out a velvet roll of silver instruments—scalpels that caught the firelight with a lethal glint.
Zainab acted as his shadow. She didn’t need to see the blood to know where to hold the basin; she followed the sound of the liquid’s drip and the heat of the infection. She moved with a silent, haunting precision, handing him silk threads and boiled water before he even asked.
“Hold the lamp closer,” Yusha commanded, then corrected himself with a pang of guilt. “Zainab, I need you to put your weight on his pressure point. Here.”
He guided her hand to the boy’s groin, where the femoral artery throbbed like a trapped bird. As she pressed down, the boy’s eyes fluttered open. He looked up, not at the doctor, but at Zainab.
“An angel,” the boy croaked, his voice thick with delirium. “Am I… in the garden?”
“You are in the hands of fate,” Zainab replied softly.
As the first grey light of dawn filtered through the shutters, the boy’s fever broke. The wound had been cleaned, the artery stitched with the delicacy of a lace-maker. Yusha sat in a chair by the hearth, his hands shaking, covered in the blood of his enemy’s son.
The messenger, who had been watching from the corner, stepped forward. He looked at the silver instruments on the table, then at Yusha’s face, now fully revealed in the morning light.
“I remember you,” the messenger said. “I was a boy when the Governor’s daughter died. I saw your portrait in the town square. There was a bounty on your head that stayed for five years.”
Yusha didn’t look up. “Then finish it. Call the guards.
