The Brotherhood: Blood Read Online Free PDF

Karussa.”
    A Halfling? Ectris thought. But how?
    Stunned and unsure of not only himself, but the woman in his midst, Ectris reached forward to take the baby from Karma’s grasp, then steadied the infant against his chest. In response, Odin let out a slight hiccup the moment his adoptive father’s hand strayed to his back.
    “How am I going to raise a child like this?” Ectris asked, turning his head to stare into his baby’s blood-red eyes. “What will the people think?”
    “He will be different,” she said, “and he will be mistreated, possibly even neglected by those who would see him better off without their sons and daughters, but grow his hair long and you can hide the thing that sets him apart so much from the others.”
    “But what about his eyes?” Ectris asked. “How will I hide them?”
    “They will think him part albino. Nothing more.”
    “An albino doesn’t have black hair.”
    “Maybe he’s special,” Karma said, parting her hand through the baby’s black locks. “Actually… I lie. He is special.”
    Ectris smiled.
    The baby turned his head to stare him directly in the eyes and offered a slight laugh that seemed to warm his heart all the more.
    “It’s been long since I’ve nursed a child,” the midwife said, “but for him, and you, I’ll do it.”
    “Are you capable?” Ectris asked.
    Karma nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”
     
    She came once every day to feed Odin personally from her breast and eventually fell into a rhythm that Ectris found both calming and settling. He would, as she fed his son, sit in the corner of the room and watch the art of infant care as though he himself were a student of medicine. Sometimes he read, others he watched, but throughout the entire process over the next several weeks he found himself growing fonder of the child more than he could have ever possibly imagined.
    One night, while Odin slept soundly within the cradle Joseph had personally made for him, Ectris stood next to Karma looking down at the baby and tried to imagine what life would be like in the coming years as a father to a child that was not his own.
    “Karma,” he said, turning his eyes up to look the woman straight in the eyes.
    “Yes?” she asked.
    “You don’t know how much it means to know that you’re doing this for me.”
    “I try to help every child I can,” the midwife said, gesturing Ectris from the room and into the hall, where she led him into the kitchen and poured glasses of tea for the two of them. “It’s in my blood.”
    “Your compassion knows no bounds.”
    “It doesn’t, to be quite honest.” With a slight smile, the woman lifted her tea to her lips and took a long, mighty tip. Shortly thereafter, she set the cup at the end of the counter and braced her hands against it, looking him straight in the eyes in a way that he found calculating and almost unnerving.
    She can see right through me, he thought, nodding, sipping his own tea before he, too, set it down. She knows what’s bothering me.
    “I guess there’s no point in dodging around the specifics,” Ectris laughed, seating himself at the table in the area sectioned off as the dining room before looking up at the midwife.
    “I can tell you’re uneasy with this.”
    “I never thought I’d be a father.”
    “You’ve not a woman in your life?”
    “Not for a while, no.”
    “Tell me how he came to you,” Karma said.
    Ectris explained in short, brief detail how no more than a month ago he had opened the door in the dead of a stormy night and found a shadowed figure cradling to his chest the baby that now slept in the other room. A knife at his belt, his heart pounding in his chest, he told of how he’d threatened to disarm the creature were it not to leave his property and found, shortly thereafter, that the being, whatever it was, would not leave. It was then—in pure, meticulous detail—that he explained the moment their hands touched: when, beneath his fingers, he felt the