In the mornings, before the sun blazed onto the horizon, when the world was calm and quiet was when Amiti liked to wake. He laid in his bed for just a moment, eyes glittering in the low gray light, and looked toward his window. Today was nothing in particular. There was nowhere pressing that he had to be, though of course he would go to the temple. Sitting up, he swung his legs out of bed and then lowered himself to his knees. He bowed his head and murmured his prayers, facing the direction of the temple in Jerusalem as he did it. Once done, he stood, washed his face and hands, and dressed for the day.

He took care with his nails, ensuring there was no dirt, that the lengths were even, and that his general appearance was above reproach. With careful, methodical strokes, he brushed his beard and his hair before checking himself one last time in the looking glass. None of this was vanity - at least, not in the sense that he found himself to be some sort of adonis for people to admire. No, he wanted to make sure that when judgemental glances were shot his way, he would be impenetrable.

The kitchen servant was awake and beginning the task of preparing food for the household, but it would not be ready for an hour or two yet. Usually he went to his study to read but this morning he was stopped and told that the servant responsible for taking care of the animals was ill. Being particular about the way his donkey was dealt with, Amiti elected to take care of the chore himself. He was not too good, after all, to do it.

This sort of thing kept a person humble.

He nodded to the servant who’d informed him of the ill man and thought for a moment. Though the son of Tzephaniah had faults enough, he was not a cruel man. The doctor would be summoned for the servant and he decided to be the one to do it, though, that meant he needed to go and see how bad the illness was. This would also tell him how contagious.

A brief look confirmed that the man did need a doctor but beyond that was out of Amiti’s scope of knowledge. The problem was that his donkey needed to be cared for first. Obviously he could dispense with brushing the coat for now, but not food and water. That task must be done.

He sighed to himself and then headed out to the stables. They were not the wealthiest men in the city but they certainly weren’t poor. In the stables outside his home, they were able to house and feed three donkies that had to be shared between the brothers and their father. Amiti had gone to the trouble to secure his own, which meant that if any of the other men in the house wanted to use the animal, they must come to him and ask.

He was just seeing to the last of the feed for the donkey when he perceived someone’s presence in the stable with him. Because this could have been any number of people, he did not look up from where he was tying off the feed bag until a woman’s voice he did not recognize commanded his attention.

From where he stood, inside the stall with the donkey, he was nearly entirely hidden from view. It wasn’t until he rose up that he spied the figure that he could not immediately identify. He squinted his dark eyes at her but widened them again when she introduced who she was. “Ah,” he answered, searching his own memory and attempting to grasp at how this woman would even come to be here and why, especially at this hour.

“Where is your husband?” he asked immediately, noting the man did not appear to be with her. Without drawing closer to her, he gave her his full attention as he rested just the tips of his fingers on the stall’s edge.

His squint only narrowed as she explained that her husband had not asked her to come and that she’d done this on her own. This was already a strike against her and, by extension, her husband. Though, Amiti prided himself on being a fair man and decided internally to hear what she had come to say before sending her away completely.

“I will hear you,” he said carefully. “But I warn you now that I do not pass a kind eye on what he is attempting to stir up among the people and neither does my father.” Amiti, to be completely truthful, hadn’t heard all of it. One of the men he’d been walking with yesterday was the one much more familiar and had pushed him to speak to Gilit and demand he quit making trouble. Trusting his friend more than the stranger, Amiti had done exactly that. He’d heard enough to convince him that while not wrong, exactly, this was definitely calling for more than a normal Judean was prepared to give toward a cause.