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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.
“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.”
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 her 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 snout, 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 gently.
As the first gray 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.
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