The Prince of Skylar

ONE

Every once in a while, when my mind lingered long enough in the mystical place between consciousness and sleep, I was taken back to the time that the child still hiding somewhere within the depths of my soul still yearned for.

Fleeting memories of my past brushed feather light against the outermost regions of my mind. My father baking sourdough in the masonry oven below the bedroom in which I slept. The pitter-patter of my four year old brother as he clambered down the stairs. And my mothers sweet, carefree laughter as she joined the pair, unable to peel her eyes off of either one of the two men in her life, each of whom she loved unconditionally.

I wished more than anything now that I had gone to join them more often. Had I known that our time together was almost over I would have followed in my mother's footsteps and spent every spare moment committing each of their faces to memory. If I had, perhaps the blurred outline of what I thought they looked like would still have been clear.

War snatched them cruelly away from me before I was ready to part with them. The soldiers tore through my hometown without a shred of mercy for its inhabitants, massacring the villagers and burning every last household to the ground. My tenth birthday might as well have marked my twentieth as I packed what little was left of my home in a bag I sewed together from scraps of burnt curtain and fled into a world I was not acquainted with. Frightened, lost, and utterly alone.

I wondered back and forth across the Kingdom for many years in search of a place that might somewhat resemble the home I had once had, however the vicious war raging along the borders as a result of the Kings brutal murder had ensured I never had. I had come close once, but with that singular, fleeting moment of hope, came a bitterly cruel end. A married couple who had never been able to have children of their own were eager to take me in at first, but come winter I was quickly reduced to noting more than an extra mouth they couldn't afford to feed. That was the only time. The other encounters I'd had over the years were too terrible to speak of.

The rejection, the cruelty, and the abuse left its mark on me, gradually shriveling my young and innocent mind into one of weary skepticism far beyond my years. The damage couldn't be seen on the outside, but it was there. My days of trusting strangers disappeared as fast as night in the waking dawn; as did the days of even daring to hope I would someday find happiness.

My soul had been hardened to the cruel world around me, and yet it was only when I was on the verge of losing myself completely that I was saved.

It was on a crisp spring morning during my eighteenth year that I stumbled across the prince and his royal party. He was returning home after many long years of fighting on the frontlines, where he and his seemingly undefeatable army had taken back more land from the rebels threatening to overthrow the Kingdom than anyone thought possible. His thirst for blood and vengeance had driven him to achieve the impossible, but the time was fast approaching for him to honor his fathers dying wish and take his rightful place as King.

I was woken early that morning by the painful, yet all too familiar grumbling of my empty stomach. Winter had arrived early that year, snatching away what ought to have been another month and a half of autumn. As a result food was scarcer than ever, and skyrocketing levels of theft had forced all but the poorest of the surrounding towns to close their gates to lone travelers such as myself. For the past few days I had lived on the sides of roads, foraging what I could from the land during the day and thieving from fellow travellers at night. The previous evening had been particularly cold, and I had been hasty to take what I could from the first wagon I came across.

Too hasty, it seemed, for the owners of the food I had attempted to steal from turned out to be two burly slave traders, whose watchdog sniffed me out and made my presence quickly known.