After that, Zenos took Lily to a restaurant on the outskirts of town.
“This is so good!” she exclaimed in delight as she tasted the tender rabbit stew.
The young girl dug into her steaming bowl, munching away like a small puppy. A bit of onion was stuck to her cheek.
Lily tilted her head at Zenos. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“No, I’m full,” he replied. “Just water’s fine.”
That was a lie. Truthfully, he didn’t have enough coin to buy them both a meal. When he’d traveled with his former party, Aston had hardly given him any share of the profits, and he’d used his “severance pay” to buy Lily’s freedom. His meager traveling stipend was barely enough for a single bowl of soup.
He’d figure something out later.
He had more pressing concerns to worry about, such as where to leave this child. He couldn’t leave her at the town’s church without a reference, and as a poor man, he didn’t meet the qualifications for that. An orphanage in the slums might’ve taken her in, but those were hot spots for human trafficking. The mere thought of how an elven child might be treated at one of those places made his stomach churn.
“Hey Zenos,” Lily interjected, interrupting his worries. “Where do you work as a healer?”
“Well,” he said, scratching his head, “I actually just got kicked from my party, so I don’t have anywhere to go.”
Spoon in hand, Lily grinned brightly at him. “So you’re just like me, then!”
“I guess so, yeah.” Zenos watched her carefree smile for a while, then slowly began to speak once more. “I’ve been thinking...”
“About what?”
“I want to open a clinic.”
Without a license, he couldn’t do it by the books and register it as an official business. It’d have to be done on the down-low, making him a shadow healer of sorts.
“When I healed you back there, you thanked me,” he said. “That made me kinda happy.”
Originally, he’d taught himself healing magic both out of a desire to help the oppressed people of the slums and because of an encounter with a certain healer. Gratitude was a feeling he’d long forgotten after Aston’s party had used him without uttering so much as a single word of thanks.
It was Lily who had made it resurface.
At his words, the young girl looked straight at Zenos and said, “I wanna help too!”
“You what?” he asked.
“I’ll help at the clinic! Being a shadow healer sounds cool! And you’re cool too.”
“Well... But... I mean...” he stammered.
Starting a healing practice without a license was, put simply, illegal. Zenos himself might’ve had nothing to lose, but he couldn’t stomach the thought of dragging an innocent child down with him.
Lily seemed to have no intention of backing down, though. “You bought me,” she said. “That makes you my master, so I’m coming with you!”
“I bought you to help you, not own you,” he protested.
“Oh, I see,” the young girl said quietly. “That’s awful. You bought me just to dump me somewhere...”
“Don’t put it that way. That’s not what I meant.”
Her less-than-palatable phrasing aside, it was true that he couldn’t simply leave a rare elven child on her own. In the end, under the condition that it would be strictly until he found her a safe place to stay, Zenos decided to take her under his wing.
Lily’s eyes lit up at the news.
“Really?! Yay! I’ll do a real good job serving you, master!”
“Can you, like, actually mind your phrasing, please?”
A moment later, the door to the restaurant opened with a loud noise, and a man stumbled in.
“Excuse me!” he shouted, his voice trembling as he grimaced in pain. “Please, I need water!”
On closer inspection, his left arm was red and swollen from the shoulder all the way down to his fingertips. Some parts of it seemed charred, burned to a crisp. No other customers were present, just the owner, who rushed in from the back just to stand there too stunned to move.
“What happened to your arm?” Zenos asked as he rose from his seat.
“Well, it’s kinda...” the man trailed off. “Please, water...”
Scales dotted the man’s cheeks, and a green, reptilian tail swished behind him. He was a lizardman, one of the so-called “demi-human” races.
Instead of giving him water, Zenos held out his hand over the man’s arm.
“A bullet wound and extensive burns,” he said. “A magical gun, huh?”
“Yeah. I was careless and got shot. I know this arm’s as good as useless now, but if I could at least do something about the pain...” the man mumbled. “I need water—”
“This isn’t a big deal,” Zenos cut in. “I wouldn’t call this just a scratch, but it should still heal quickly.”
“What?” the man asked, incredulous. “The hell are you talking about?”
Severe or not, the wound had reached the deeper tissues. To ensure it healed fully, it was safer to use an incantation along with the spell.
“Cure,” Zenos chanted.
A faint white light enveloped the man’s arm, and when it faded, the burn marks had completely vanished. Utterly astonished, the man was rendered speechless for a moment.
When he found his voice again, he said, “What did you just do? Who the hell—”
“Zenos is a super great shadow healer!” Lily cut in, huffing proudly.
“I don’t actually have a practice yet, though,” Zenos clarified.
“Oh! Right,” the young elven girl said.
“Zenos, the shadow healer,” the lizardman repeated. “Holy hell. I had no clue an amazing healer like you existed. You saved me, dude.”
The man reached into his pocket, whipped out a number of silver and copper coins, then pressed them into Zenos’s palm. “I’ll remember you.” With those parting words, he hastily left the shop.
He’d come suddenly and gone like the wind, leaving the bewildered healer silently holding on to the dirt-streaked coins.
“Why so quiet, Zenos?” Lily asked.
“Oh, I mean...” the healer replied. “Cooks get paid to make food for people. So...healers should get paid for healing people.”
“I think that’s pretty normal.”
“Yeah, guess so.”
Zenos had forgotten even such an obvious thing. With some of the coins the man had given him, he paid the bill, then offered the young elven girl an encouraging smile.
“All right. Now we need to find a suitable location,” he said.
After his party had expelled him, Zenos had lost everything. But now, he had a new companion, had the objective to open a clinic, and had made some money as well.
He was determined to start his life anew.
From now on, he would live as he pleased, without worrying about what others might think. He would do what he could and get paid what he needed. And if he could make someone happy in the process, well...
That wasn’t such a bad way to live, was it?
As they walked out of the restaurant, the night breeze seemed to push firmly against Zenos’s back, as if encouraging him to move forward.