When Yusha returned, the air was different. Its woodsmoke smell now smelled of burned deception.
“Zainab?” he asked, noticing the change. He placed a small package on the table: bread, perhaps, or cheese. “What happened?”
“Have you always been a beggar, Yusha?” she asked. Her voice was hollow, like a reed rustling in the wind.
The silence that followed was long and heavy, heavy with unsaid things.
“I told you once,” he said, his voice lacking the poetic warmth it once had. “Not always.
My sister found me today. She told me you were a lie. She told me you were hiding. That you were using me, my darkness, to remain in the shadows. Tell me the truth. Who are you? And why are you in this hut with a woman they paid you to take away?
She felt him move. Not away from her, but closer. She knelt at his feet, her knees hitting the hard earth with a dull thud. She took his hands in hers. They were shaking.
“I was a doctor,” he whispered.
Zainab stepped back, but he held her back.
Years ago, there was an epidemic in the city. A fever. I was young, arrogant. I thought I could cure everyone. I worked myself to exhaustion. I made a mistake, Zainab. A miscalculation with a dye. I didn’t kill a stranger. I killed the provincial governor’s daughter. A girl no older than you.
Zainab felt the air leave the room.
“They didn’t just take away my title,” Yusha continued, her voice cracking with emotion. “They burned my house. They declared me dead to the world. I became a beggar because it was the only way to disappear. I went to the mosque looking for a way to die slowly. But then your father arrived. He spoke of a daughter who was ‘useless.’ A daughter who was a ‘curse.'”
He pressed his hands to her face. She felt the wetness of his tears; not his, but hers.
I didn’t take you because I was paid, Zainab. I took you because when he described you, I realized we were the same. We were both ghosts. I thought… I thought that if I could protect you, if I could show you the world through my words, maybe I could get my soul back. But then I fell in love with the ghost. And that wasn’t part of the plan.
Zainab froze. The betrayal was there, yes—the lie about his identity—but it was wrapped in a far more painful truth. He hadn’t become a beggar by fate; he was a beggar by choice, a man living in a self-imposed purgatory.
“The fire,” she whispered. “Aminah spoke of a fire.”
“My past burns,” he said. “I have nothing left of that man, Zainab. Only the knowledge of how to heal. I treated the sick in the village at night, in secret. That’s where the extra copper comes from. That’s how I bought your medicine last week.”
Zainab reached out, fingers trembling, caressing the contours of his face. She found the bridge of his nose, the dark circles under his eyes, the tears. He wasn’t the monster her sister had described. He was a man torn apart by his own humanity, trying to reconcile it with her own.
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