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.”“Then the ghost will have a charter,” Julian said, rising and pulling a thick parchment from his robes. “I have signed a decree. All of Dr. Yusha’s past crimes are absolved. The Great Fire is officially recorded as an act of nature. I give you the power to train a new generation. Not in the art of gold-digging, but in the art of healing.”
The offer was everything Yusha had ever dreamed of: restoration, prestige, and the chance to change the world. She glanced at Zainab. She saw her tilt her head toward the mountains she had come to know by their echoes.
“And what about my wife?” Yusha asked.
Continued on next page
For complete cooking times, go to the next page or click the Open button (>), and don't forget to SHARE with your Facebook friends.
