Years later, an old woman with lines weathered into maps of memory sat in the medicine house and watched apprentices learning to wash hands the way she had once insisted. Outside the window a pomegranate tree shook its small red fruit in the sun. She drank warm broth and tasted, faintly, a spice that connected then and now.
She had not become an empress; she had not built a throne. She had, in quiet ways of hand and heart, remade a place where medicine could act as a neutral, where the life of a patient could not be traded as a pawn. There is a form of triumph in that.
In the afternoons the wind carried the scent of herbs through the window, and the city moved on. She would think sometimes of the fluorescent lights of her earlier life, and of the instruments that would never exist in her adopted time. She would think, always, of the hands she had held and of the faces she had seen return to the world. That, she believed, was enough.