“The father married his daughter, blind from birth, to a beggar — and this is what happened next…”

Zainab approached Yusha and placed her hand on his arm. She felt his pulse quicken. “Who is 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 very family who had hunted Yusha to death, who had reduced his life to ashes, now stood huddled in a carriage outside his door, pleading for the life of their heir.

“Don’t do it,” Zainab whispered as the messenger walked away to fetch the patient. “They’ll recognize you. They’ll take you to the gallows as soon as he’s stabilized.”

“If I don’t do it,” Yusha replied in a hoarse, raspy voice, “they’ll kill us both. And besides, Zainab… I’m a doctor. I can’t let a man bleed out in the rain while I have a needle in my hand.”

They carried the young man inside – a boy barely nineteen, his face pale, a gaping wound from shrapnel in a hunting accident, which was becoming infected on his thigh. The smell of gangrene filled the clean, herb-scented room, a nauseating intrusion from the dying world.

Yusha worked in a kind of feverish trance. He did not use the rudimentary tools of a village healer. He rummaged in a compartment hidden under the floorboards and pulled out a velvet roll containing silver instruments: scalpels whose deadly 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 and unsettling precision, handing him silk threads and boiling water before he even asked for them.

“Bring the lamp closer,” Yusha ordered, before catching himself, a pang of guilt creeping in. “Zainab, I need you to press with all your weight on its pressure point. 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,” croaked the boy, his voice thick with delirium. “Am I… in the garden?”

“You are in the hands of destiny,” Zainab replied gently.

As the first gray glimmers of dawn filtered through the shutters, the boy’s fever subsided. The wound had been cleaned, the artery sutured with the delicacy of a lacemaker. Yusha sat on a chair by the hearth, his hands trembling, 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 placed on the table, then at Yusha’s face, now fully revealed 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. A bounty had been offered for your head for five years.”

Yusha didn’t look up. “Then finish him off. Call the guards.”