“Yes, sir,” Valentine immediately responded and put a tightly pressed piece of coal on a small censer in the corner.

With the help of a thin candle, he set it on fire: the coal began to smoke, covering a small area of the tent with thick gray smoke. Valentine, lifting the bottom of his helmet as far as possible, began to gently blow on the flat piece until it stopped smoking, red-hot. Then Valentine put small balls of tree resin on top of it. Softening on a hot coal, the resin spread a rather specific aroma over the tent, to which one had to get used to; but this pungent smell was good at repelling insects.

“I all like the southern lands,” said Kors, “except for the abundance of all kinds of flying and crawling evil spirits. I hate insects, as well as spiders and snakes!

“Yes,” Arel agreed with him and slapped himself on the leg, trying to kill an impressive, but already sluggish from the smoke and smell of tar, mosquito.

Kors looked skeptically at Valentine, who easily straightened and wiped the jar with a stone flower hanging from the ceiling with a rag.

“Arel, why did your slave become so tall? Is he almost as tall as you? I don’t understand something?” Kors asked, watching the lanky Valentine closely.

Arel didn’t answer.

“Or am I not aware of something?” Kors looked at him with his professional gaze, which had always instilled fear in those poor fellows, who, unfortunately, found themselves in his office. “And he continues to grow. Arel, he will soon catch up with you and overtake you. Look at his legs! How long his shins are! He will be very high, I understand this. Where did you get him from?”

“This is a slave from my Estate,” Arel answered clearly reluctantly, but nevertheless he answered.

“Take off his helmet. I want to look at his face. You hide his face carefully all the time. Take off his mask.”

Valentine was very frightened and involuntarily froze, squeezing into the wall away from them. He didn’t want the sirs to look at him at all, since he was not at all stupid, despite the difficult living conditions and the mental disorders associated with them. Valentine nevertheless perfectly remembered Arel’s questions about sir Chester: he was smart enough to understand at that moment that he was sir Chester’s illegitimate child from a little slave; a bastard who wasn’t killed just because sir Chester had died earlier. And his owner Arel was his half-brother.

Valentine also realized that their father was very cruel, not only with the slaves, but also with his legitimate son. Therefore, Arel with all his soul hated his father and never pronounced his name, always calling him only “damned”. And Valentine, as luck would have it, grew up and matured in the Limit, and if now his helmet is removed… What if during this time, he became even more like the damned? And seeing the traits he hates… Arel would simply kill him!

Valentine began to shake with a small shiver: he was terrified of Arel, and this uncontrollable reaction always started when the prince paid a little closer attention to the boy. Yes, Valentine suffered from the heat in a slave helmet, but at least he was composed.

“Why have I grown and changed so much?! What for?!”

“No, I won’t take off his helmet,” Arel said.

“Valentine is Chester’s bastard? Yes?” Kors asked. “Arel, do you want to deceive me? Have you forgotten who I am? I don’t even need his face, I see his physique, and this is not the body of a peasant and a commoner. Was your father having fun with the pretty slave girls from the Estate?”

“Yes,” Arel replied reluctantly, realizing that it would hardly be possible to hide this fact from the former head of the security service, “and this girl was a little over ten.”

“Sorry,” Kors nodded knowingly. “Your father was very unrestrained. I will say more: Chester was just a pompous turkey, confident that only he was always right and only his opinion and point of view were the only true ones. He managed to quarrel with everyone! Even with Leonardo, who was initially very loyal and sympathetic to him. Yes, your father was a rare kind of shit…”

“I killed him,” Arel said calmly.

At these words, Valentine froze and shrank even tighter.

“Yes, now the owner will kill me too. Exactly.”

“You killed him?” Kors was surprised. “After all, it was an accident, a fatal coincidence: Chester burned down in a fire in your ancestral chapel, when he offered prayers to the Gods.”

“It was already afterwards,” said Arel, “first I killed him, and then he burned down in the chapel, because I set it on fire.”

“But! Arel! How did you deal with him? After all, you were at that time… mmm… no more than sixteen years old, and he was such a healthy and tall, experienced warrior.”