The Priest of Blood Read Online Free PDF

your skin? That is the blue of nobility. We are meant for this. You are destined for great things, grandson.”
    “I can be king?”
    “King or prince,” he said. “You have the bloodline in you. Do you not talk to birds? And understand their language?”
    I laughed when he said this, for I did know the language of birds, although it was not magickal in any sense. My grandfather took me out in the spring to take eggs from the nests, and taught me to keep them beneath the pit of my arm, using a sling, to warm the eggs. When they hatched, days later, we would feed them with a worm cut and impaled upon a twig, thrust into the baby birds’ throats. My grandfather taught me in this way to train birds of all kinds, and they would follow us as we went about our day—whether geese or dove, raven or falcon. These last were forbidden to us to raise, by order of the baron, for he and his huntsman were to own all falcons and goshawks. Because my grandfather gave well-trained falcons to the baron’s household, he was never prevented from capturing and raising the birds himself.
    “In my grandfather’s day, all was different,” he told me, while we taught a young falcon maneuvers of the hunt with me crouching low to imitate a rabbit (and sometimes being cut by a young bird’s too-sharp talons!) “Folk came to him for the secrets of the earth and sky. You have his face, you know. You do. You have the pale skin and the rosy glow and the smile of him. He could read the leaves, which foretold the end of the Forest’s strength. He knew by the flight of sparrows where the storm might begin in the sky, and how soon it might arrive for us. He was a remarkable man.”
    “And my father?” I asked.
    His eyes grew shadowed. “The fisherman?”
    “My real father,” I said. “The one who has gone away forever.”
    “A scholar,” my grandfather told me. “From distant lands, and to them he returned.” The cloud had not left his face, and when I tried to speak more of my birth father, he would return the subject to his grandfather, or to my mother as a girl when she “looked like the spring itself, bedecked with garlands of wildflowers, and riding a wild horse along the marsh as if she were a Briary Maiden. And me, her father, proud of her, happy that she had so much life in her. Ah.” Sunlight seemed to shine across his face as he spoke. “You must never grow unkind to your mother,” he warned, shaking a finger at me, his eyes squinting as if searching my face for any sign of disagreement. “She has suffered much, and has done much, despite what it may seem. She saved my life once and paid a terrible price for it.”
    But I wanted to talk of more exciting things. How I wish I could go back and beg him to tell me more of my mother’s past, of the young woman I never knew who might have paid such a price that it had changed her forever, from a beautiful maiden on a horse to a wanton among the fields with children all around and begging for bread daily.
    I grabbed him around the collar and told him he was the most wonderful grandfather in the world. He, in turn, embraced me, holding me so close that I could feel his tears on my neck. “We are born to this world to find our destiny, my dear boy. You are of the bloodline of the Great Forest, and of those who knew of its gifts before even the Romans came to this land. No matter what misery the world offers you, do not let go of that love you have now. Do not let go of all that you were born to do. All is good and bad. There is no one or the other. You must look at the bad and see the good in it. And when you see the good, do not forget that it contains the bad, as well. Do you understand?”
    I murmured that I did, though I did not then have the experience to comprehend what he told me.
    “All that is good has bad in it. And if you forget this, you will feel betrayed when you should merely have understood the nature of the world.”
    I drew back from him, smiling.
    I recall how