Zainab fled. She didn’t use a cane; she ran instinctively and desperately, her feet finding their way back to the hut out of sheer desperation. She sat in the darkness for hours, the cold earth penetrating her bones.
When Yusha returned, the air felt different. The scent of woodsmoke now smelled like burnt deception.
“Zainab?” he asked, sensing the change. He placed a small package on the table—maybe bread or a piece of cheese. “What happened?”
“Have you always been a beggar, Yusha?” she asked. Her voice was hollow, like a reed crackling in the wind.
There was a long and heavy silence, full of unspoken questions.
“I told you before,” he said, his voice devoid of poetic warmth. “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 stay in the shadows. Tell me the truth. Who are you? And why are you sitting in this shack with a woman you were paid to take?”
She heard him move. Not away from her, but toward her. He knelt at her feet, his knees hitting the hard-packed earth with a dull thud. He took her hands in his. They trembled.
“I was a doctor,” he whispered.
Zainab stepped back, but he held her.
“Years ago, an epidemic broke out in the city. A fever. I was young, arrogant. I thought I could cure everyone. I worked until I went mad. I made a mistake, Zainab. A miscalculation of the tincture. I didn’t kill a stranger. I killed the daughter of the provincial governor. A girl no older than you.”
Zainab felt the air leave the room.
“They didn’t just take my title,” Yusha continued, his voice breaking. “They burned down my house. They thought I was dead to the world. I became a beggar because it was the only way to disappear. I went to the mosque to find a way to die slowly. But then your father came. He spoke of a daughter who was ‘useless.’ A daughter who was a ‘curse.’
He pressed her hands to his face. She felt the wetness of his tears—not her own, but his.
“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 if I could protect you, if I could make you see the world through my words, maybe I could get my soul back. But then I fell in love with a ghost. And that was never part of the plan.”
Zainab sat transfixed. The betrayal was there, yes—the lie about his identity—but it was wrapped in a truth far more painful. He wasn’t a beggar by fate; he was a beggar by choice, a man living in a self-imposed purgatory.
“Fire,” she whispered. “Aminah mentioned fire.”
“My old burning,” 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. Hence the extra copper. That’s how I bought your medicine last week.”
Zainab reached out, her fingers trembling as she traced the contours of his face. She saw the bridge of his nose, the hollows of his cheeks, the moisture in his eyes. He wasn’t the monster her sister had described. He was a man shattered by his own humanity, trying to piece it back together with hers.
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