Lin visits Domna Delores, a dying patient with the unmistakable signs of late-stage consumption. Lin confirms what Delores’s appearance and pulse already suggest, then prepares morphea grains to ease Delores’s pain because no cure remains possible.

Before Lin can finish explaining the medicine, Delores asks whether Lin is Ashkar. When Lin says she is, Delores reveals that she too was once Ashkar, but was exiled from the Sault after falling in love with a Castellani boy. Delores married him and lived near the Sault’s walls, close enough to see what she had lost but barred from family, friends, and community.

Delores describes a lonely life after exile: her Ashkar relatives refused contact, Castellani neighbors kept their distance, and after her husband died at the Arsenale, she supported herself with needlework. She found comfort only by lingering near the Sault and listening to the music and holy responses carried over the walls.

Lin offers to ask about Delores’s family, but Delores refuses, saying it is too late. Instead, Delores asks about the Sault itself, and Lin gives her a gentler medicine: memories of almond trees in the Kathot, the gold Shulamat, the physick garden, children climbing walls, and holy-day food and music.

As Delores smiles and rests, Lin resolves to bring her honey cake or raisin-studded egg bread on the next visit. Lin knows sweetness cannot undo exile’s bitterness, but she hopes it can offer Delores a small comfort before death.