Prince Erik, The Woodsman

The first winter in the mountains was a bitter teacher. Prince Erik of Hrafnnes, aged ten, stood knee-deep in a drift of snow so pure it hurt his eyes, his small fingers too numb to properly work the knots in the rabbit snares Sigurd had shown him. The old forester’s voice, when it came, was not unkind, but it was as immutable as the granite peaks around them.
“The cold does not care that you are a prince, boy. It only cares that you are slow.”
Erik’s lips were chapped, his stomach a hollow, aching thing. He had missed the evening’s catch. Supper had been a husk of tough bark-bread and a swallow of icy water. He hadn’t cried. Not then. The shame burned hotter than any fire.

But Sigurd had been right. The cold did care. And Erik, shivering in his inadequate furs, began to listen.
He learned the language of the forest not in words, but in signs. The particular slant of sunlight on a pine that meant a hidden gully, not safe ground. The way a jay’s alarm call changed pitch—fox, not wolf. The subtle difference in the crunch of snow underfoot: a heavy beast, a creature, or nothing at all, just the settling of the world. Sigurd would point, silent, and Erik would have to decipher the story the forest was telling.

His hands, once soft for holding scrolls, became tools. He learned the drag of an axe head, the patient rasp of a drawknife, the feel of green wood splitting along the grain. He built his own lean-to, a crouching shelter of poles and branches that drank the wind’s fury. He failed at the first fire, his tinder damp, his sparks lost in a flurry of snowflakes. Sigurd watched, arms crossed. “Again,” was all he said. The boy tried until his hands were blistered and the scent of burnt tow and his own frustration filled the air. Then, one evening, with a spark catching in a nest of dry inner bark he’d spent hours gathering, a tentative flame bloomed. It was a tiny, greedy thing, but it was his. He had coaxed it from the cold. He fed it pine knots until it roared, and the glow pushed back the immense, star-pocked dark.

He learned to hunt, not with the polished spear of palace guards, but with traps of sinew and cunning. A deadfall for squirrels, a snare that tightened with a whisper. He learned to gut and skin, the visceral work stripping away the illusion that meat came from the market stalls. One day, he caught a grouse, plump and stupid in its brush trap. He took it to the stream, scaled the fish he’d trapped earlier, and cooked them both on a green-wood grate over his fire. The taste of that hot, oily fish, seasoned with wild herbs Sigurd had shown him, was a sacrament. It was earned. It was his.
Erik’s world shrank to the radius of a day’s walk, but its depth became infinite. He saw the first green shoots of spring push through frozen earth and knew it was time to move camp. He heard the thunder of a distant avalanche and understood the mountain’s anger. He felt the shift in the wind before a storm and readied his shelter. Sigurd’s lessons were woven into his bones: Observe. Adapt. Provide. Survive.

Yet, even in this self-imposed exile, the kingdom touched them. A few times each season, a messenger, clad in the royal livery of the black raven, would ascend the treacherous path to their high clearing. He would stand, breath frosting in the air, and bow stiffly to the boy who was his prince.
“His Majesty inquires after the health and progress of the Prince Erik,” the messenger would intone, eyes fixed on the worn handle of his axe, never quite meeting Erik’s gaze.
Sigurd would accept the small bundle of news—a sealed scroll from the King father, a few precious candles, sometimes a block of salt—and give a curt nod. “The Prince is strong. He learns.”
The messenger would leave, descending back toward the world of stone halls and soft beds, and a profound silence would settle. Erik would watch him go, a pang of something complex—longing, shame, a fierce, new pride—clenching his chest. His parents could not see him. The gods had decreed his absence, his trial. Their love was a distant star, visible but untouchable. His reality was the smell of pine resin and cold iron, the feel of rough wool, the constant, vigilant hunger.

“Why?” Erik finally asked one night, the fire crackling between them, the air thick with the scent of burning juniper. “Why can they not see me? I am not sick.”
Sigurd poked the fire, his face a map of wrinkles illuminated by the flames. “Because this is not about what they can see. It is about what you must become. The errand of the gods… it is not a journey to a place. It is a journey to a self. A self who does not need a crown to be a king. A self who does not need a father’s hand to find his way.”
Erik understood, then, in a way that went beyond words. Sigurd was not being cruel. He was performing a sacred, terrible surgery, cutting away the prince to find the man. Every missed supper, every blistered palm, every silent hour spent reading the wind—it was a stitch in that new, harder skin.