“What are you doing?!”

“Nikto, you’re all on fire! You have an infection. You cannot go marching with such a temperature and in such a condition! You need to be cured. I don’t understand why your people don’t help you? Can’t they see that you feel bad? I noticed it immediately. I’ll get a doctor right now.”

He called him “Nikto”, not Nik, as now. And now would he have turned his tongue to call his boy Nikto?

Very soon, Kors returns with doctor Cassiel.

“He’s on fire,” Kors explains to the doctor, “and it looks like he’s not used to being taken care of by anyone.”

The doctor looks at the punctured hands of his son, shakes his head and asks:

“Does he take Black Water?”

Cassiel addresses this question not to Nik himself, but to Kors, and Kors is not surprised or embarrassed, he is lying:

“Yes. As far as I know, he fell into slavery to the unclean ones, and they put him on the “water”. He was crippled. Then he ran away.”

“And when did he take it for the last time?”

The doctor asks all these questions to Kors, who looks inquiringly at Prince Arel, and he gets lost under his stern gaze and answers uncertainly:

“I don’t know… he tries to take it as little as possible. He stretches greatly the time between doses.”

They talk to each other, they are black, and Nik is a half-blood, he is nobody, and he is not asked about anything. But Kors sees and understands the whole absurdity of this situation only now.

“Everything is clear,” the doctor draws his conclusions, “even now, although he already needs “water”, he endures to the last.”

“Do you have “water”?” Kors again turns to Arel.

“Y-yes.”

“Well, thank the Gods!”

“I can try to restore him so far without the help of “water”,” the doctor suggests, “these new drugs are very powerful, and he is a “white” half-blood, as far as I understand, judging by the color of his hair. Does the blood of the Upper ones flow in him?”

“Yes,” replies Kors, it is very unpleasant for him that his son is a half-blood, but, of course, at that moment he is sure that no one will ever know about it.

“We’ll support him and take more time. Maybe even for a couple of weeks or a month.”

“Are you serious? Of course!”

And the doctor gives Nik a couple of injections, and then, turning to Kors, he says: “I think he needs a bandage over his scar.”

“Do it,” Kors says.

Having received the permission of the black master, Cassiel applies a healing ointment and seals the scar, tightly wraps Nik’s head with bandages. Nik is in a semi-conscious state, he doesn’t resist. Kors is not surprised, it is natural that Nikto accepts the treatment, Kors is sure that with gratitude. How else can it be? After all, the benefactor Vitor Kors took care of him!

At that moment, Kors had no doubt that he was providing invaluable assistance to Nik. He didn’t even pay attention to this small nuance of communication, but Nik probably noticed everything. He realized that he was being treated like a dumb animal and didn’t object to it. Kors was sure he was doing a good deed. It never occurred to him that it might be humiliating. He sincerely believed that he was showing mercy and that no one had to be grateful to him and appreciate this generous gesture. “How does it feel when people ask questions about you next to you, but as if you are not there?”

Kors thought that, in fact, trying to find a good black master was the only chance for the half-blood to somehow lift its head out of the shit. Both Lis and Nik served stupid prince Arel simply because he was superior by birthright, and their privilege was only that the prince considered them worthy to serve himself and thus raised them above other commoners.