My Worst Enemy and Best Friend

I am King Roy’s worst enemy and best friend.

Back in our younger days, I was the boy who lived by the river, who jumped another boy watering his beautiful horse, pushing him into the cold river I knew was mine.

Prince Roy came up sputtering, angry. I laughed, but helped him out.

“You arse!” Prince Roy proclaimed, soaking wet. “Do you know who I am, peasant?!”

I smirked, as I always have. “You’re a spoiled little twat that doesn’t keep his head up in the Wyld,” I told the boy I did not know, then shoved him back into the river.

Splash!

“See what I mean?” I said, laughing, and pulled him out of the river again.

“You peasant arse!” Prince Roy yelled…then latched my arm and gave me a toss over his knee, sending me tumbling into the river, too. “Two can play this game!”

I was Prince Roy’s best friend and teacher of how the real world and the Wyld outside his shining castle really worked.

In turn, the Prince was my best friend, as well, and taught me how to be a noble, and, most of all, behave myself–when it was called for.

We trained together in our teenage years, under the hand of his father’s best knights, until both of us were ready and rearing for war.

I served as Prince Roy’s most trusted adviser, right-hand, and bodyguard during the Wyld War: keeping the Prince safe from assassins, reminding him to be kind to the wild men who surrendered, and to be kind and empathetic to the plight of those whose suffering had led to the uprising in the first place.

Prince Roy’s father, the King, whose policies of oppression and taxation wrought the uprising, did not agree with me. Nor did the King’s court or his advisers, but a Prince’s word and oath of friendship overrules that all, and I stayed by his side–until he needed a Wyld Lord to rule over the Wyld and their wild kind, helping the once rebels rebuild.

With the Prince’s constant support in the King’s court, I became a successful Wyld Lord, for I knew these peoples and their plight very well. For, before I became a friend of the Prince, I was one of the Wyld’s own, as well.

And, one night, I slipped the King poison in his meal, slaying the tyrant, for the Wyld, and for my much gentler Prince Roy.

The now King Roy knew it was me, for I confessed that night, during the chaos and his mourning.

King Roy raged, but he did not strike me down.

The new King understood the old was old and mad, tyrannical, depressed and sad.

It was for the best.

He let me flee back to the Wyld.

I am the Wyld King Lars.

I am King Roy’s worst enemy and best friend.