A loud crash shook the heavy oak door.
Yusha made his way to the entrance, his face frozen in the mask of the doctor he once was. He opened it and discovered a man drenched in freezing rain, dressed in the muddy livery of a royal messenger. Behind him, a black carriage shook, its headlights flashing like dying stars.
"I'm looking for the man who repairs what others throw away," the messenger panted, his eyes fixed on the interior of the cozy little house. "They say in town that this place is haunted by a ghost. A ghost in the hands of God."
Yusha's blood ran cold. "You're looking for a beggar. I'm a simple man."
"A simple man doesn't perform a trepanation on a woodcutter's son and save his life," the messenger replied, stepping forward. "My master is in his carriage. He's dying. If he breathes his last on your doorstep, this house will be reduced to ashes before dawn."
Zainab approached Yusha and placed a hand on his arm. She felt his pulse quicken. "Who's the master?" she asked in a calm, cold voice.
"The governor's son," the messenger murmured. "The brother of the girl who died in the Great Fire."
The irony was palpable. The same family that had hunted Yusha to death, that had reduced his life to ashes, now huddled in a carriage outside his door, begging for the life of their heir.
"Don't do it," Zainab whispered as the messenger left to collect the patient. "They'll recognize you. They'll take you to the gallows as soon as he's stable."
"If I don't," Yusha replied in a hoarse, scratchy voice, "they'll kill us both. And besides, Zainab... I'm a doctor. I can't let a man bleed to death in the rain while I'm holding a needle."
They brought in the young man, a boy of barely nineteen, with a pale face and a deep, festering shrapnel wound on his thigh, sustained during a hunting trip. The smell of gangrene filled the clean, herbal-scented room, a nauseating intrusion from a dying world.
Yusha worked in a kind of feverish trance. He didn't use the rudimentary tools of a village healer. He rummaged through a hidden compartment beneath the floorboards and pulled out a velvet scroll containing silver instruments: scalpels whose lethal gleam shone in the firelight.
Zainab was his shadow. She didn't need to see the blood to know where to place the basin; she relied on the sound of the dripping and the heat of the infection. She moved with a silent, eerie precision, handing him silk threads and boiling water before he even asked.
"Bring the lamp closer," Yusha ordered, before correcting himself, overcome by guilt. "Zainab, you need to press down on the pressure point with all your weight. Here."
He guided his hand to the boy's groin, where the femoral artery throbbed like a trapped bird. Under his pressure, the boy's eyes opened. He looked up, not at the doctor, but at Zainab.
"An angel," the boy croaked, his voice hoarse with delirium. "Am I... in the garden?"
“You are in the hands of fate,” Zainab replied softly.
As the first gray rays 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 hearth, his hands shaking, covered in the blood of his enemy's son.
The messenger, who had been observing the scene from a corner, stepped forward. He looked at the silver instruments on the table, 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 village square. For five years, a price had been offered on your head."
Yusha didn't look up. "Then finish him off. Call the guards."
