“Go back to your hut, Father,” he ordered. “The soup is on the fireplace. Eat and give thanks for the mercy of the ghosts of this house.”
That afternoon, as the sun set behind the mountains, painting a sunset that Zainab would never see, but which she could feel as a warmth dissipating on her skin, Yusha rested his head on her shoulder.
“They will return someday,” he whispered. “The child will remember. The messenger will speak.”
“Let them come,” Zainab replied, running her fingers over the scars on her palms: burn scars, scars from years of begging, and the recent cuts from the previous night’s surgery. “We have lived in darkness long enough to know how to get out of it. If they come for the doctor, they will have to go past the blind girl first.”
In the distance, the river continued its tireless journey, carving its way through the stone, proving that even the gentlest water can break through the hardest mountain, given enough time.
The air in the valley had thinned with the arrival of a brutal winter, ten years after the night of the bloody carriage. The stone house had been enlarged, with the addition of a small wing that served as a clinic for the untouchables: lepers, the poor, and those whom the city doctors considered “unrecoverable.”
Zainab moved through the ward with a ghostly grace. She didn’t need eyes to know that bed three needed more willow bark tea for the fever, or that the woman near the window was weeping silently. She could hear the salt falling onto the pillow.
Yusha was old now, her back slightly bent after years of tending to trembling bodies, but her hands were still the steady instruments of a master. They lived in a delicate balance, hard-won, until the sound of silver trumpets broke through the morning mist.
This time it wasn’t just a carriage. It was a procession.
The village elders hurried toward the dirt road, bending so deeply that their foreheads brushed the frost. A young man, draped in charcoal-colored silk furs and wearing the Provincial Governor’s signet ring, stepped onto the frozen ground. He was no longer the wounded child with the rotting thigh; he was a ruler with a gaze as piercing as the winter wind.
“I seek the Blind Saint and her Silent Shadow,” echoed the Governor’s voice, though there was a touch of reverence beneath his authority.
Yusha stood at the clinic door, wiping her hands with a stained apron. She did not bow. She had faced death too many times to be intimidated by a crown.
“The Saint is busy changing a bandage,” Yusha said gravely. “And the Shadow is tired. What does the city want from us now?”
The governor, whose name was Julian, walked to the veranda. He stopped three paces away, his gaze fixed on the man who had once been a ghost.
