11. A son’s duty

“You have disappointed me, son.”

The low voice flowed slowly, icy and frustrated.

“Didn’t your patrol comrades call you the Prince of the Sand? I let you alive for you to accomplish your duty. They injure you, and you die like a dog, lost in the middle of the steppe! Is that all my heir could do? Kill an ill man to protect a Shalussis’ whore and let himself be killed like a miserable rat?”

Dashvara bowed the head, remorseful. He was furious with himself. Furious at his own powerlessness. He heard voices around him, but his father’s, wreathed in mist, was the strongest.

“I’ve tried, father.”

Lord of Xalya’s misted face got closer, and his disappointed expression hurt Dashvara more than any wound.

“Get up,” Lord Vifkan mandated. “I forbid you to die until you have accomplished your duty. Get up.”

Dashvara coughed, and an acute pain spun through all his mind to the point of letting it off. He wanted to get up, but he couldn’t. There was nothing more than death. Only death…

Damn it, get up yourself, he thought, irritated. His own wheezing breathing alarmed him. He had the impression of having plunged down into a well full of bubbling water.

“Will he live?” a voice asked.

“He has lost a lot of blood, and the wound is getting infected,” another one said.

Dashvara was still seeing the face of his father, who stared at him imperiously, with a flare of vengeance in his eyes.

I will kill them, father. I will kill them, Dashvara repeated. He moaned, and his breathing hastened. I haven’t forgotten my duty.

Like a bolt, darkness ripped the fog, and his father’s face frayed like a memory. Like smoke. Like life.