I was nine when my father died. Until the day it happened I didn't believe it was possible, not really. Father was a general. He went to the battlefield often, sometimes for entire seasons, but he always came home. I knew the risks. They had been drilled into my head for as long as I could remember, but they never felt real to me, because father always came home …Until the day he didn't.
It was… To say it was a shock is an understatement and yet I should have expected it because I knew that time was different, we all did. There was something in father's face when he came to say goodbye to me, something in the way he held me so tightly and kissed my forehead and told me that he was proud of me and that I should remember that always. Then he pressed a letter into my hand and told me to save it. He gave me one for Ruslan too because Rus was only five and couldn't read yet. He told me to keep that one for him and that for mine I would know when to read it and then he hugged me again just as tightly.
That final night before he left I couldn't sleep, something about father’s letters troubling me too much for peace to come, so when I heard the voices in the sitting room I snuck down the hall and put my ear to the door.
“I'll talk to him again! I’ll swear any oath he wants! I'll let him banish me from court! I’ll…”
“Dia stop, it's alright.”
Father's voice, warm and gentle, cut through my older brother’s desperate words and I stood there, pressed against the door, shaking like a leaf. I've always looked up to my older brother, half-brother really, but that's never mattered. Dia is seven years older than me, clever and collected and he always has a plan for everything. I've never heard him sound like this before, I've never heard him sound anything like this before. I knew there was something going on of course, how could I not? The changes in him in the last year were far too obvious, all those days spent poring over dusty books or going out at strange hours or talking quietly with father and mother and our cousin Jamal, staying cooped up in his room even on the good days when he would usually want to go riding with me. I'd be lying if I said I hadn’t been worried. I'd be lying if I said I hadn’t been upset by it. But this… This was so much more than whispers, so much more than late nights or missed rides. This was… I had no idea what this was but it terrified me.
“The king has made his decision.” Father continued. “We're just going to have to make the best of it.”
“I'm sorry. I'm sorry I dragged you into this! I'm sorry I didn't think! I'm sorry… I…” Dia’s words came out between gasping sobs and I had to clench my hands into fists to stop myself from barging into the room and demanding to know what was wrong. What could be wrong enough to make my brother cry like this?
There was the slight rustle of fabric from beyond the door and I imagined father or mother or possibly both had pulled Dia into a hug.
“This isn't your fault, Dia.” Mother's voice was oh so gentle and to my mounting terror I realized I could hear tears in it too.
“Your mother is right.” Father's voice was just as warm. “I knew the risks so don't blame yourself. I'm the adult, remember? I didn't have to go along with what you asked. This was my choice and no one else's.”
“But I… I was wrong. I shouldn't have asked. If I talk to him again maybe…”
“He won't listen.” Mothers voice was noticeably shaking now too. “I also tried talking to him. The orders have been given. There's nothing we can do.”
“And you weren’t wrong.” Father cut in quickly before my brother could speak, his voice firm in the way that always means he's about to deliver an important lesson. “If anything what he's doing now only proves that you weren't wrong, that man cannot be trusted with the throne, so don't do anything reckless Dia. You might have lost this battle but you haven't lost the war.”
I didn't understand the words at the time, didn't understand all that they implied, but when the falcon flew in with the letter saying that my father had been killed in action fighting at Mi Lor and I looked at a map and saw what a dangerous and isolated position Mi Lor was… It started to make sense, a horrible, gut twisting, kind of sense. My father was a seasoned general. If, using what he taught me, I could tell at nine, that Mi Lor was a foolish place to defend then how much better would he have known it? But it was in order, an order from the king to defend Mi Lor. Could he have been unaware what that order meant?
Impossible.
The king must have known.
The king sent my father to die.
And as for why…
Putting together the words I heard that night it wasn't hard to figure out. Dia is my brother but he is also the king’s son, the eldest heir to the throne of H’arn, disinherited the day the Queen's daughter, Princess Emira, was born.
He did something, it's obvious from what he said and what father said, he did something to displease the king, displease him so much that the king took my father's life, the life of his own general, to punish him.
Why?
What did Dia do?
Why take it out on our father?
And what about what father said? That Dia had been right, that this had been father’s choice, that the king wasn’t fit for the throne?
Dia tried to move against him somehow, he must have, and mother knew and father knew and father helped him and father died.
Father said that Dia lost the battle but not the war and If I've learned one thing in my life it’s that wars never end.
Dia will try again.
Ever since I realized that I have been terrified because if the king killed one of his best generals to teach my brother a lesson then how much longer will being the king’s son keep Dia safe?
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