The North Reaches were as cruel as they were beautiful—towering pines, jagged cliffs, and endless gray skies. For most, it was a place of exile. For Uthred, it became home.
The ruined watchtower where Jorlan and Eamon had brought him was once a border outpost in the old days of Eldhame's expansion. The stone was cracked, the upper rooms long collapsed, but it stood high above the Vale of Thorns, commanding views in all directions. That alone made it valuable.
Jorlan called it The Roost. It was the only place they could live unseen, and its solitude forged the foundation of the man Uthred would become.
Uthred was eight when he first broke a bone. It was winter, and Jorlan had decided he should learn to fall—off rocks, logs, anything above a man's height.
"You won't be the strongest," Jorlan said. "But if you're the last one standing, that's enough."
The boy fell twenty times that day. The twenty-first cracked his wrist. Eamon wanted to rest him, but Uthred refused. He tried again the next day with his arm bound in cloth. He learned to fall with his left.
Pain became part of the routine.
So did survival.
The Reaches weren't empty. Bandits moved through the valleys. Wild animals tested the perimeter. Uthred learned early to sleep lightly, sword beside his bed. On the first night a bear tried their stores, Jorlan stabbed it through the throat while Uthred lit a torch to drive it back.
"Fear is natural," Jorlan told him after. "Cowardice is not."
Eamon, meanwhile, made him study. Scrolls, old texts, stories of Eldhame's founding. He taught the symbols of noble houses and made Uthred recite treaties from memory.
"Know your allies," he said, "but know your enemies better."
The nightmares didn't stop. Uthred would wake in the cold, heart racing, eyes searching for flames that weren't there.
Eamon gave him tea for sleep. Jorlan said, "Let the dreams train you. Fight in them. Make them fear you."
That year, Uthred started running at sunrise. Not because Jorlan ordered it, but because he couldn't sit still. His anger was growing.
"Why did they kill us?" he asked one night, voice low.
Eamon stirred the stew slowly. "Because they wanted what your father had."
"What did he have?"
"A crown. A legacy. A people who believed in him."
Jorlan added, "And enough pride to die on his feet."
Uthred didn't speak. He understood something then. He didn't just want revenge. He wanted to become someone worth following. Someone who could lead others the way his father did.
That night, he asked Jorlan to teach him more than swordplay.
"Show me how to win a battle."
Uthred was eleven when Jorlan began teaching tactics. Not with books—Jorlan hated books—but with the terrain.
He had Uthred scout deer trails, follow hawk patterns in the sky, and build ambushes using nothing but stone and snow. He made the boy command imaginary troops across a frozen pond using pebbles.
Eamon supplemented it with military theory. Old campaigns. Mistakes that cost kings their lives.
Uthred started to see war not as chaos, but as a puzzle. Everything had a rhythm: timing, terrain, fear. Learn the rhythm, and you controlled the dance.
By the first snow, Uthred led his first "campaign"—a mock ambush on Jorlan during a supply run. He used smoke from burning sage to mimic wildfire and frightened Jorlan's horse into a shallow ravine. The man returned laughing, half-covered in mud.
"He's learning," Jorlan told Eamon with a grin. "Faster than I like."
They couldn't stay hidden forever. A wandering hunter stumbled onto the tower in late autumn, a young man with a longbow and sharp instincts. Uthred spotted him first, trailing his movements through the woods. He lured the man into a trap, disarmed him, and brought him to Jorlan.
The hunter, named Garret, was no threat. He'd come from the Free Valleys and despised the Viking rule as much as they did.
Over mead, Garret spoke of rumors: a boy-prince said to be alive. The son of Aedric. A ghost in the mountains.
"People believe?" Uthred asked.
"They want to," Garret said. "And belief is dangerous."
Eamon agreed to let Garret live—in exchange for silence. But before he left, Garret knelt and said, "If you're really him, I'll fight for you when the time comes."
Uthred watched him disappear into the trees.
The world was beginning to whisper again.
At twelve, Uthred was faster than most grown men. He could shoot a longbow, throw an axe, and climb sheer rock. But Jorlan hadn't yet given him a real sword.
"Steel is a promise," he said. "Not a toy."
That changed the day a group of bandits attacked a nearby hamlet. Eamon heard it from a tradesman he occasionally met in the lowlands.
"They took three girls. Burned the fields."
Jorlan looked at Uthred. "Want to help?"
"Yes."
They struck at dawn. Uthred was a shadow, slipping into the bandit camp, cutting the captives free while Jorlan fought. When a guard spotted him, Uthred buried a dagger in his thigh and drove a broken spear shaft through his chest.
After, Jorlan handed him a sword—the blade his father had wielded.
"You've earned it. Just don't worship it. It's a tool. You are the weapon."
Uthred didn't sleep that night. He sat outside, turning the blade in his hands.
He was beginning to believe he could reclaim what was lost.
On his thirteenth birthday, Eamon presented Uthred with a ring. Silver, old, engraved with the lion and snake crest of Eldhame.
"It belonged to your father. Recovered by a loyal servant in secret."
Uthred slid it onto his finger.
"This is your birthright," Eamon said, "but it is also your burden."
That night, they lit a fire beneath the stars. Jorlan brought out a bottle of Blackroot mead. They drank, and Uthred spoke.
"I swear by the blood of my father and the fire of my home: I will take back Eldhame. I will make our enemies bleed. And I will be the last flame they ever see."
The stars blinked above, silent witnesses to the birth of a vow that would shape history.