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“My father is dead,” Julian said quietly. “He died cursing the ‘monk’ who saved me, because he knew in his heart that no monk has the hands of a surgeon. He spent his final years trying to find this house again to finish what he started in the Great Fire.”
Zainab appeared in the doorway, her hand remaining on the frame. She wore a shawl of deep indigo, and her unseeing eyes seemed to pierce through Julian’s finery.
Julian sank to one knee on the frozen mud. The village wasted in a collective intake of breath.
“I came to pay the interest on a ten-year-old debt,” Julian replied. “The city is rotting, Zainab. The doctors are charlatans who bleed the poor for gold. The hospitals are morgues. I am building a Royal Academy of Medicine, and I want its headmaster to be the man who saved a dying boy in a mud hut.”
Yusha stiffened. “I am a dead man, Excellency. I cannot return to the city. I am a beggar. A ghost.”
“Then the ghost shall have a charter,” Julian said, standing up and pulling a heavy parchment from his tunic. “I have signed a decree. All past ‘crimes’ of the physician Yusha are erased. The Great Fire is officially recorded as an act of nature. I am giving you the power to train a new generation. Not in the art of gold-seeking, but in the art of healing.”
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