Torsten sat in the window seat in his bedroom.  Half of the stained glass window was flung open and sitting so near the window, he gave the whole court something to see.  His beauty was rare and rich as he was the youngest son of the King and Queen.  He was a prince.  However, he had a very different fate from the other princes of the kingdom.

He shook out his blond hair, blinked his coppery eyes, and hated everyone so thoroughly it should have melted the glass in front of his eyes and burned the seat under his bottom.  The hate flared through him so utterly that it should have caused him to spit acid, breathe fire, and puke poison.

However, nothing happened.

Instead, he sat there and the world stayed the same around him.  The world did not care if it was unfair to him.  The wind still blew, the sun still shone, and flecks of dust hung in the air like time stood still.  For everyone else, it was an ordinary day, but not for him.

For him… it might be the last night he slept in his bedroom.

Ever since Torsten was a little boy, he had known he was different from his older brothers.  They were trained to fight as knights, and given lessons in strategy so that they might lead armies.  In contrast, Torsten was taken with his sisters to have his hands groomed.

When he was little, he thought it was because he was too young to engage in warfare, but as he grew older, his schedule didn’t change.  

Instead of being taught how to sharpen a sword, he was taught how to read and write.  Not just the basics, but how to read aloud well and how to write in long curling letters.  When he was thirteen, he was sent to apprentice to a painter to learn how to paint.  He would have liked it better if his brothers had been included in the exercise, but instead, they were beating dummies in the courtyard while he was instructed to keep his hands free of paint and kept apart from them.

The only lessons he was allowed to attend along with them were the riding lessons.  He was taught alongside them how to groom and care for a horse.  It was then that he realized that he was three inches taller than his older brother.  He would have realized it sooner, but they rarely stood side-by-side.

“Mother, why am I not being trained in warfare?  I have a better body than Callum,” he complained.  “I can see the top of his head.”

She turned and looked at him with sorrowing eyes.  “Darling… this is a special time that you get to spend with me.”

Torsten did a double take.  He was fourteen years old and it had never occurred to him that no matter what activity he did, he was always kept close to his mother.  He had sisters.  They were near her too, but not as close.  If his mother reached out at any given time, she could touch him.  He sat next to her at the dinner table.  His room was closer to hers than any of his other siblings.  He would have asked his father his question, except he rarely saw him.  He was off with Torsten’s brothers.

Something was wrong.   

Maybe, he had always known something was wrong.

But he hadn’t discovered what it was until the day he spat hatred out his bedroom window.  He was nineteen.  He was more than a man and his clean hands painted and wrote.  His trained voice spoke and sang.  His gloved hands handled a horse well and his clothes were unstained in his own blood, which set him apart from his brothers.

Earlier that day, the answer to Torsten’s evaded question had been revealed.  A bird had arrived at the watchtower.  They used carrier pigeons and falcons at the castle, but the bird that perched on the battlements was neither.  This bird was yellow with a long tail like a flag, black stripes on its face, and black blots on the tips of its wings.

At its arrival, Torsten’s mother fainted and the truth came out.  She was taken straight to her bed and the King took Torsten to the armory… a place he had never been admitted to before.

He didn’t know what his father was going to say, but he knew that the bird meant the time he had to spend with his mother was over.  All children had to part from their parents at some point.  Some were sent to rule smaller parts of the kingdom, some were married off in diplomatic alliances, and some… Well, a lot died.  He knew he had a sibling who had died… a younger brother who hadn’t quite made it. Torsten barely remembered him.  What would have happened if his little brother had lived?  Would Torsten have avoided the fate of the youngest son?  Would Torsten have been taught to fight with his older brothers instead of learning to paint?

 Inside the armory, the King closed the door to give them privacy.  He was a gruff man with a strong voice, but no way with words.  He began by saying something neutral.  “That bird was more than an omen.  It was a message with no parchment attached to its ankle.  Its arrival itself was enough to convey the message.  Do you know what it means?”

Torsten shook his head wordlessly.  

His father looked sorry.  Sorry for everything… but he wasn’t a coward and he explained.  “In all our fuss about warfare and defending our kingdom, have you ever noticed that we are never attacked from the north?”

Torsten had not noticed.  They fought the Barbarians to the east and the Pagans to the south, and they had an alliance with the Mustards to the west, but he had never even thought that they faced a possible invasion to the north.  The land northward was wilderness, thick forests, jagged mountains, wild beasts, and monsters everywhere.

“If you need every soldier, Father, I am ready to fight,” Torsten said roughly, trying to echo the way his father spoke instead of the way his mother had taught him to speak.

The King’s unsettled eyes rested on Torsten’s copper ones and he slowly looked down at his frame until his gaze lingered on his son’s boots.  He put a hand on his shoulder.  “I see that you have been raised properly by your mother.  I couldn’t be prouder that those words are the ones you chose as a response.  It is true that I will need you in our dealings with the northern kingdom.”

Torsten’s chest swelled with pride.  Finally, he was going to get what he had always desired—a place with his father and brothers.

“But we will not need to fight them,” his father said slowly.  “That isn’t how we deal with them.”

Something caught in Torsten’s throat.  “How do we deal with them?” 

His father’s eyes glazed over in something like a stupor.  “They ask us to sacrifice one of our princes to them once a generation.”

Torsten's eyes went wide.  It was going to be him.  It was always going to be him.  

He backed away from his father, taking two steps before he got a grip on himself and cleared his throat.  “They’re going to kill me?”

“I don’t know,” his father said, shaking his head like a dazed person.  “I know that my father sent my brother away with their knight.  The knight came in the heaviest, most beautiful armor I had ever seen.  He bound up my brother’s wrists, put him on the back of the strangest creature I ever saw come out of the woods, and then he was gone.  There was no explanation about what was done with him.  The only thing I knew was that he would never come back and we would never hear of him again.”

“What was the creature like?” Torsten asked, rushing for details.  

“It was like a dragon from a fairytale.  It had green scales, horns that parted like an elk’s, and fangs that protruded from its mouth.  If I had come across it in the woods, I would have run rather than try to kill it.  What if it had a kinsfolk nearby?  We would all have died.  The knight had tamed it and rode a yellow beast—golden—of the same type.”

“And you?” Torsten asked.  “What do you remember about your brother?”

“I remember him,” the King insisted.  “I just don’t like to talk about him. If I say anything at all, it feels like my father was wrong to send him away.  I can’t think my father’s choice was wrong.”

Torsten nodded.  “I see.  Grandfather can’t be wrong because you have to do the same thing.”

The miserable, dejected look on his father’s face immediately stripped the King of any regality he’d ever possessed in Torsten’s eyes.  

“When will the knight come for me?” the young prince asked crossly.

“I don’t know.  Once the yellow bird appears, it could be any day.”

Torsten turned from his father and grasped the handle of the door.  

“You’re not going to try to run away, are you?” the King asked, suddenly sounding like the victorious warlord Torsten had always believed him to be.

The idea did cross the young man’s mind.

“If you run,” the King said.  “It will be an act of treason.  You said you were willing to be a soldier for your country and whether or not you were aware of it at the time, that pledge means you were willing to die for our kingdom.  That’s still true, isn’t it?”

Torsten felt like spitting.  “I need what time is left to accustom myself to the idea.  I’ll prepare myself.”

If he was honest, Torsten didn’t know what that meant.  He had read the words he said to his father in a book and that moment seemed like the correct place to insert them, but he didn’t know if what he was saying was true.  He hoped he’d be able to gain control of himself, but he didn’t know if he could.  He was too angry.

“I want you to know that what we’re asking you to do is important.  You know how many quarrels we have with the Barbarians and the Pagans.  I do not need to come to blows with the Hollowmen.”

“Is that what they’re called?” Torsten asked.

“It’s what we call them because we aren’t allowed to utter their true name.  I don’t even know it.”

Torsten bet they could fill a library with what his father didn’t know.  

He nodded, kept his back to his father, and sped across the castle knocking things over as he moved.  

He needed to check on his mother.  He needed to hear what she thought of everything that was happening.  She had obviously known his fate and she had chosen his education and lessons accordingly.  What was she thinking and feeling?

He came to her bedroom doors, only to be met by several of her ladies-in-waiting.  They instructed him that the Queen was ill and she needed to be left alone to recover.  

He looked at their faces, each face, each woman, and he suddenly felt sick.  This was the part of the castle he knew best.  These were servants he knew best.  He had never once been denied entry to his mother’s rooms.  He might have been asked to wait as she changed her clothing.  He might have been asked to return when she had awoken from her rest, but the way the women phrased their reply, he suddenly understood that his mother was not going to see him again before he left.

For her, he was lost to her the moment the bird arrived.  When she emerged from her bedroom, he would have been taken by the knight of the Hollowmen.

And that was why he was sitting in his window seat furious at everything and everyone.  It was lucky he was an educated man because he knew more curse words than the soldiers were taught in the army and he could use them all to express himself quite accurately.

The Extra Tail in the Fairy Tale

The truth was that the King, who had once been Prince Rollo, had been so enraged that his parents had given his brother, Kallisan, to the Hollowmen for their sacrifice that he had stormed out of the castle, mounted his horse, and given them chase into the north woods.  He knew he could catch up to the two dragons and the knight if he hurried.  He had no fear of slaying two dragons or of killing the knight who had come to take his brother.  One knight was only one knight and he had already vanquished a fair few on the field of battle.

However… 

Even though he saw the place where the procession of two entered the forest, even though he dove in straight after them, even though everything should have made sense—nothing did.  Within ten minutes of entering the forest, Prince Rollo was completely lost.  Not only could he not find the knight and his brother, but very soon, it became obvious that he would not be able to find his way out of the woods.

What then began was something more harrowing than anything the prince had seen on the battlefield.  

He was trapped in the forest for six weeks before he found his way out.  In the meantime, he had to kill and eat monsters he’d never seen before.  He used his cape to hang from a sturdy tree branch to make a kind of hammock.  He had to sit up inside it to sleep.  He also had to map the entire forest, but that never helped.  He found his way out of the forest one day completely by accident.

On his arrival back home, his father, the King at that time, beat him soundly and used him as an example to the entire royal family that war with the Hollowmen was suicide.  Not only that, but their powers were so far above them that any attempt to rebel against the Hollowmen’s request would be considered treason.

“They don’t even ask for a weighty financial tribute to keep the northern border safe,” the King ranted so loudly that he spat in Rollo’s face (Torsten came from a long line of spitters).  “One royal child every twenty years is a small price to pay.  I’d send one of you to each of our enemies in the south, the east, and the west if that would settle things.  Except it wouldn’t!”

A sounder lesson was never taught.