"Up, Dumani. Up."
King Kani struck the boy's shoulder so hard the bedframe rattled. His scowl deepened as Dumani's frame spilt at his feet, all long bones and spinal knots pushing against the thin skin of his back.
"Stand."
Dumani rose to his elbows, then sniffed. He didn't shudder, even as a welt crawled across the back of his shoulder, but a fat tear rolled down his nose and splashed on the floor between his forearms, darkening the clay. Because he was smart enough to cover the stain with his knee, Kani spared him a second rude awakening. His son stood as tall as him, though half as heavy and too full of the pitying ways of lesser men.
"Great King. Be welcome."
"Your brothers were caught at the long-gate," Kani said. "They reeked of pillowspice."
Dumani swallowed, his eyes on the whip coiled on Kani's hip. "Papa-- Great King, I was home, in bed the entire night."
"Of course you were. Your brothers smuggled themselves off to Falsedune to leave beer and whore stains on my household, without guard or guidance, across the desert at night... and you were home, in bed."
"I know your laws."
Kani cupped his fist behind his back. "You also knew they were going."
"Papa?"
Dumani's voice rose when he said the word, and Kani's chest swelled with the type of anger fathers feared to name. His vision blurred with it, blotting out everything but the thin length of his son's neck, the sheen in his eyes, the fine bones in his face that girls praised half in mockery. And then that clear, frail voice of a man still staring back at childhood. All things he could ignore when his teeth weren't gnashing hard enough to squeak.
"Lifa and Kani told me he invited you on their outing."
"I declined, Papa. On my life, I declined."
Kani nodded. "Yet you told no guards."
"No." Dumani's eyes rose to meet Kani's, widened, dropped again. "I didn't want to get them in trouble. Brother's law."
"Brother's law? I've no such law, but I know what you're saying."
"Am I forgiven, then, Papa?"
Kani uncoiled the whip and pushed it into Dumani's hands. "No."
The boy held it a while, his long fingers refusing to curl around the lacquered hide. His expression started somewhere close to fear, then confusion when he realised Kani had no intention of using the whip on him. But for all the boy lacked in flesh, he had a mind that -- if stripped of its meekness -- might have had the seed of cunning. He blinked as he stared at the whip, then his face slackened.
"The punishment for any Inner Plainer caught sneaking through village borders is five lashes," the King said. "You'll give Lifa his stripes first because he is oldest, but you'll make Kani's bleed, so Lifa also knows the price of misleading a younger brother."
At last, Dumani's fingers closed around the whip. He made to hand it back but Kani had a look in his eyes wrought for cowing stray dogs too rabid to kick away.
"I can't, Great King."
"No, I suppose you can't." Kani rubbed the thick bridge of his nose, the tension in his back only partially easing. "You truly believe that."
"Have I disappointed you?"
"You couldn't bring yourself to go with your brothers, but you couldn't bring yourself to report them either. Disappointment covers part of it. Hand me the whip, boy."
Dumani did as he was told, quickly and obediently, and somehow Kani found it in him to hate that too.
"Too weak to follow a boy's folly, too cowardly to make a man's decision." Kani went to the shutter and threw it open to the desert morning. Amber sunlight speared into the room, bright against the dull clay floor. "A difficult choice put off today becomes impossible tomorrow. Go call your brothers, I'll whip them here."
"Yes, Papa."
Kani had his back to the boy, and all he heard was that voice that seemed to draw all the unmotivated indifference of the world into itself.
"And when I'm done, they'll give you five lashes of their own, for your inaction."
"Yes, Papa."
Kani's jaw twitched at the lack of a reaction. "Six lashes."
"Yes, Papa."
He spun on his heel, ready to curse at his son with his Yes, Papas and his downturned eyes, but those eyes were up, waiting for Kani's to meet them. There was a moment that lasted no longer than the flutter of a startled heart where Kani searched his son's eyes and found it. That thing that either shattered boys from within or left them men capable of breaking nations. When that flutter passed, Dumani seemed to pull that thing deep within himself and hide it behind the gaze he dropped to Kani's feet.
The boy's voice was glass, but his face had been a mirror just now.
"Are you ready to take the whip now?" Kani asked.
"No, Papa. Whip them yourself, then I will take my twelve."