The Mist and the Lightning. Part 19

He is too small, he is probably not yet five years old. Maybe a little more, but even for five years he looks small and thin, and the expression on his face is so serious and adult, not at all childish. Cheekbones are clearly distinguished on a thin face, there is no roundness and plump cheeks that are often inherent in babies. Pale face with harmonious features. Nik is very handsome, despite the fact that his face is grimy, as if smeared with earth, and his lower lip has already been ruined, rings stick out of it. His lips are black, also in soil. Did he eat soil? Nik’s hair is not cut or combed, it’s tangled and dirty, however, as always. His crown is also dirty with soil. He is badly dressed. He is wearing a short jacket and torn pants. This is frank rags, so old that it seems decayed. Nik is sitting on the bare dirt floor in this crypt-like closet where there is nothing else but him. He sits alone, dirty, covered in soil, thin, lonely. Kors involuntarily remembered Shagezh’s childhood memories. Zaf also always kept him in a closet. What kind of wild methods of upbringing do you unclean ones have?

Or do you only treat the “wrong” children this way? Like Shag and Nik? Nik’s hands are tied wrist to wrist. His hands are brought together, palm to palm, he somehow strangely presses them to his chest, and then the rope goes to the ring in the wall. Why did the witch tie a small child in a dark room alone? Why did she tie his hands together? “She didn’t treat you that well, Nik!” — Kors thinks bitterly. But his son never said a bad word about her, and always called her “my foster mother”, or simply mother. He didn’t say “witch”, didn’t call her by name, he said — my mother. And Kors sees now that Mara clearly didn’t deserve this title.

Nik shudders a little, as if he is listening carefully to something, but total silence reigns around. Shaking his head slightly, he removes his hands from his chest and suddenly begins to scrape the dirt floor. The floor is hard, but Nik must have had enough time, because the hole he scratched in the floor is quite deep. He slowly and somehow mechanically stupidly scratches the ground with his nails. There is neither a mug of water nor a bowl of food nearby. Maybe the poor boy really its soil. Nik scratches, scrapes the ground, and, as if angry, in some desperation raises his hands tied at the wrists, clenches his fists and nervously taps them on the top of his head. How familiar is this movement to Kors! Son, why are you digging the soil? Are you trying to dig a tunnel? To dig your way to freedom? Kors is overwhelmed with emotions of love for Nik and resentment for the witch. How could she treat his son like that! Animals are better treated, and he was a child! Kors’s heart is filled with such pain that he can no longer look at this simple and at the same time unbearable picture.

“Gods, son! Son!” he screams in some kind of frenzy and sees that Nik is shuddering, raising his pale face, his empty eyes staring into nowhere. His lips move barely perceptibly, not a sound comes out of them, but in Kors’ head it clearly flashes: “Father?” It's like Nik is putting it right into his brain, without using his voice or language. Only emotions. Again and again, with such surprise, he seems to ask: “Father? Father?!"

Kors freezes in surprise, emotions overwhelm him, and he begins to “fall out” of the past. The picture gets blurred, but he still manages to hear a sharp cry: “Dad, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!"

And Kors falls out of his strange state. He wakes up, realizing that he is lying on a camp bed in a tent, but in his head, full of despair, it still continues to sound:

“Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me! Don’t leave…”

No, it couldn’t happen! It just couldn’t happen! Nik couldn’t feel him there at that moment and hear him, because Kors was just seeing through t the past. And the witch couldn’t treat his son so badly, she needed the child. She herself bought him for the Demon to share his body. So it’s not even the past, but a bad dream. It’s just a nightmare. Just a bad dream! Bad. Dream. Forget it!