This man… handing him a bowl so nonchalantly, as if he had not just risked the wrath of a prince!
Arzhen took the bowl. The liquid was dark, almost black, and it steamed in the cooling air. He drank. The potion burned down his throat, spread through his chest, settled into his bones.
But it was not the burning of fire. It felt like the burning of something being cleansed. Something being healed.
His mind, which had been fogged with the particular haze of days spent unconscious, cleared. His limbs, which had been heavy with exhaustion, felt lighter.
This… this medicine was good. He felt it immediately.
"You…" Arzhen's eyes widened. "I have never drunk anything like this before."
This man was valuable.
A healer who could cure madness, who could bring a man back from the edge of delirium, who could make a prince forget, for a moment, that he had seen the face of a god and been sent home like a child.
