Zainab turned to her father. She didn’t need to see him to feel the withering greed emanating from his pores.
“You don’t understand yet, Father,” she said, her voice cold as a bell. A deal is what you make when you value things. We value our lives. Today, we buy our silence with a life. It’s the only currency that matters.
She reached out and took Yusha’s hand. Her skin was cold and her spirit exhausted.
“Return to your hut, Father,” she ordered. The soup is in the fireplace. Eat and be grateful for the mercy of the ghosts of this house.
That afternoon, as the sun set behind the mountains, painting a sunset Zainab would never see but could feel like a fading warmth on her skin, Yusha rested her head on his shoulder.
“One day they will return,” she whispered. The child will remember. The messenger will speak.
“Let them come,” Zainab said, running her fingers over the scars on her palms: scars from the fire, scars from years of pleading, and the fresh cuts from last night’s operation. We’ve lived in the darkness long enough to know how to get out. If they come for the doctor, they’ll have to pass the blind girl first.
In the distance, the river continued its tireless journey, seeping through the stone, proving that even the softest water can break the hardest mountain if given enough time.
The air in the valley had become thin with the arrival of a brutal winter, ten years after the night of the cursed carriage. The stone house had been expanded, adding a small wing that served as a clinic for the untouchables: lepers, the poor, and those the city doctors deemed “beyond recovery.”
Zainab moved through the infirmary with a ghostly grace. He didn’t need eyes to know that Bed Three needed more willow bark tea for the fever, or that the woman at the window was crying silently. I could hear the salt falling onto the pillow.
Yusha was older now, his back slightly bent after years of bending over trembling bodies, but his hands were still the steady instruments of a master. They existed in a delicate, hard-won balance until the sound of silver trumpets broke the morning mist.
This time it wasn’t just a carruaje. It was a procession.
The village elders hurried toward the dirt road, bowing so deeply their foreheads touched the frost. A young man, wrapped in charcoal-colored silken skins and wearing the Provincial Governor’s signet ring, stepped onto the frozen earth. He was no longer the broken child with the rotten thigh; he was a ruler with a gaze as sharp as a winter wind.
“I seek the Blind Saint and her Silent Shadow,” the Governor’s voice rang out, though there was a hint of reverence beneath his authority.
Yusha stood before the clinic door, drying her hands on a stained apron. She didn’t bow at all. She had faced death too many times to be intimidated by a crown.
“The Saint is busy changing a bandage,” Yusha said in a deep voice. And the Shadow is tired. What does the city want from us now?
The governor, named Julian, stepped onto the porch. He stopped three paces away, staring at the man who had once been a ghost.
ADVERTISEMENT
