The Priest of Blood Read Online Free PDF Page A

grandfather often led me to the edge of the Forest to teach me birdcalls, and the names of each winged creature, how to find a falcon in its nest, how to raise it from the egg and teach it to hunt for you; how to train a raven to speak several words, although I never completely mastered this. My grandfather kept doves, both for food and for companionship, and I remember him best standing on a rock at the edge of a long meadow, the white wings of his birds flapping along his arms and above his head as if they might take him to Heaven.
    Of all the children, I was the only one who took to birds.
    There were six of us, plus two girls who were babies by the time I left my family.
    You must know of the place birds had in our lives then, for they were as important as our eyes in many ways. Goshawks and falcons were hard to come by, and hard to train, and knights throughout Christendom demanded falconers to travel with hunting parties. It was said that the Duke of Brittany had a hundred falcons for his hunt; our local baron had few. But none of this mattered to me as a boy, for I took to birds, and soon enough learned how to capture a newly hatched falcon from the nest without its mother tearing at me with her piercing talons and beak. My grandfather taught me much of this. He had learned the lore of the birds and of falconry in distant lands during wartime. I suppose that, as a boy, I aspired to greatness, beyond my natural station in life, because of my interest in falconry, for poor boys were poor hunters, and the great birds of prey were meant for nobility.
    I had my eye on the baron’s household from an early age—I wanted the horizon beyond the mud that was to be my inheritance. What blood I had within me was the blood of a scrappy, dirty, undisciplined, and selfish boy, an inheritance from a long line of the scrappy, dirty, undisciplined, and selfish. But I wanted more than the dirt and the marsh and the woods. I wanted all the world could offer, for I saw it daily in the great castle upon the hillside. I wanted to know the inside of that place. I wanted to watch the nobility of the world, the knights and ladies, the great halls and the kitchens full of meat and bread.
    My grandfather fueled these fantasies of mine to some extent. He was a tall, spindly man, unusual for a Breton, with hair white as the marsh and a nose that hooked like a falcon’s beak. His eyes were warm and bright as a hearth fire, and my earliest memories of him were of his shadow, which sat beside me as I slept among my brothers. As I grew a bit, I sought him out to hear his tales of the past and of the days when the Great Forest covered the entire world—when birds spoke, when trees held treasures, and when the moon itself was a stag that crossed the night stars. Some of the elders of my childhood visited him for wisdom, for he was eldest among them and knew both the lore of the wood and field and that of the castle.
    He often told me stories when I lay down to sleep at night, on straw that crawled with lice in winter, with my younger brothers close by me, nestled in each other’s arms like cherubim.
    “Once, many years ago, we owned land, to the south, down at the great mountains,” my grandfather told us. “We are descendants of a most royal family, lost to misfortune, having crossed the sea to come to this rocky land. A woman, heavy with child, whose man had died in another land, brought up the grandfather of my grandfather’s grandfather, and kept secret the lineage. But we were once, our folk, greater than even the duke. Greater, I tell you, than the kings of men. And we may be great again. You, you Aleric, you boy of birds and hounds, may one day rule this land. You have a talent for what nobility craves, and even when you hunt down a rabbit or rat, I see the mix of your ancestral blood in you. Royal blood runs like gold beneath your skin.” He might grasp my small arm and hold it up to candlelight. “Do you see the blue there? Beneath