Chapter 1

Amir, Nineteen Years Later

“Wake up, Roland. Open your eyes, you lazy boy.”

Slowly, Roland’s eyelids flittered open. More because he smelled freshly cooked porridge than the words spoken by his mother. She waved the porridge just out of reach of his hand.

“It cannot be morning already,” he grumbled, stretching on his sleeping pallet.

“It is.” His mother was a rather short, plain woman with graying hair and round cheeks. She walked over to the small table in their dwelling and set his breakfast upon it. “The field needs plowing, Roland. You can nap when it’s done.”

Rubbing his hand over his face, Roland sat up and gazed around the tiny two-room hut he shared with his mother. His mother slept in the other smaller room of the hut while he slept in the main part. His father had passed a few years prior. He put his linen chausses on over his braies and then stood and went outside to relieve himself.

The morning air was crisp and the dawning sky clear. Birds chirped their usual good morning. When he went back inside, his mother was seated on the bench at the table eating her own porridge.

“It’s going to rain later today so it’s best you get an early start,” she declared.

“It’s clear.”

She shrugged and held up the bowl to her lips.

Roland rolled his eyes and guessed her aches and pains had decided it would rain. He gulped his food down in just a few swallows. He seemed to always be hungry. His mother pushed her unfinished bowl at him.

“No, you need to eat,” he said.

“I’ve eaten. Finish it, Roland.” She rose and went about tidying up the hut.

He bit his lip. He was hungry, but he hated her habit of giving him her food. Someday, perhaps, they would have more food than either of them could eat. A dream only. He finished her porridge and rose, grabbing his discarded tunic from the day before and slipping it over his head.

“I’ll be back in the afternoon.” He stopped to kiss her cheek and left for the fields.

Amir was a small village. Hardly anyone was foolish enough to live there. Roland didn’t quite understand why his parents had settled there. They were poor, he knew, and lived off the supposed generosity of the landowner, but surely there were better villages than Amir.

Their crops had always grown well enough, but most of what they could sell at market went to the landowner. Roland had never even met the man. He always sent a man in his stead to collect his coins.

Besides their hut, there were only five others in Amir and none of them were particularly close to each other. He knew the others in the village by sight, but he didn’t speak with them much. His parents didn’t encourage socializing with others. In fact, on those rare occasions when he had stopped to talk to others from Amir his parents had become quite agitated. They preferred to keep to themselves.

Their plot of land was a little to the right and behind Amir, on the way out or into the village. A very short walk from there was the stream Amir’s villagers drew their water from.

Roland grabbed the hoe he’d carried with him and plowed, stopping to mop his brow with the sleeve of his tunic, glancing at the sky every once in a while to see if the clouds his mother predicted would arrive. They hadn’t, but she was most often right.

When he had finished, he walked to the stream. The water was icy this time of year so he did not linger, but he stripped and washed the sweat and soil from his body. He hated being dirty.

Roland decided he would nap under the trees next to their plot. Last time he fell asleep in the sun he woke up with his skin flamed red and the pain excruciating. It was in dreams he could escape the dreary life God had given him. And so, when he was not working the fields, Roland slept.

* * * *

When the village, Amir, finally appeared in Magnus’s sight it was as achingly ugly as the last time he had seen it when he was only a child of ten.

He pulled his horse to a stop and surveyed it. Not much to see. Mayhap even less than when he had been sent away by his father to foster with a wealthy baron immediately after the babe had been brought to the village. His instructions had been to not return to Amir until the prince would be old enough to fulfill his destiny. It had been difficult not to see his father for all these years, but Magnus understood the way of things.