The Debt He Ran Up

While his father and Esfandiyar are fighting, the Shahnameh has Faramarz and his uncle attack the prince's camp and kill two of his sons. Rostam apologises for it and offers to hand the culprits over; Esfandiyar fights on regardless and dies of the tamarisk arrow. Then, at the deathbed, Rostam swears to bring up the dead man's surviving son — and his own brother warns him in so many words that he has taken in a lion's whelp, that it will turn first on the man who reared it, and that from this boy evil will come to their country. The poem plants the ending there and leaves it for decades.