Zainab appeared in the doorway, her hand resting on the frame. She wore a shawl of deep indigo, and her unseeing eyes seemed to pierce through Julian’s finery.
“And you?” she asked. “Did you come to finish his work?”
Julian sank to one knee on the frozen mud. The village gasped 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.”
The offer was everything Yusha had once dreamed of—restoration, prestige, and the chance to change the world. He looked at Zainab. He saw the way she tilted her head toward the mountains she had come to know by their echoes.
“And what of my wife?” Yusha asked.
“She will be the Matron of the Academy,” Julian said. “They say she hears the heartbeat of a disease before a doctor even touches the patient. She is the soul of this operation.”
