The Priest of Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

much my love for him shone above all other loves. Every crag of that face, every white hair on his head, the way a knot at his throat bobbed up and down when he spoke. I could live in the mud and the cold, put up with my mother’s darkness, which erupted now and then, so long as I could be with this old man whose wisdom and warmth raised me up and held me aloft, above all that threatened to drag me under.
    “You were once a king,” I said.
    “Not a king,” he corrected. “Not in the way you think of kings. I served a greater being than any king could offer. As did my father, and my grandfather. What we once did...” He leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. “Once upon a time, in the long ago. That world is gone. The wind has taken it to sea.” A jewel of a tear arose at the edge of his eye. “Gone. But you, you are from a great bloodline. Magnificent. That you must never forget. We are children of this Forest. We planted these trees, and our souls remain here.”
    It was a fabulous history of our clan, and no one believed it, but he clung to it, and I dreamed from it. He spun it like a spider’s web for me. I suppose that’s where I got my hunger for better things, for a finer life. Why the stink of the pigsty and the smell of the rotting fruit in the orchard vexed me. The disgusting gust of befouled odor that accompanied the fisherman’s trade when my stepfather returned from his distant journeys. After months of being away, he would arrive with the chilly rains, his eyes as round and empty as a halibut’s, his mustache like a carp’s, the malodorous stench of gutted fish on his rough hands. That life had never held any allure for me.
    But I knew of that other world, and it might have been out of reach, but early in life, I determined that I would grasp it. While my grandfather lived, I held the dream of happiness. I overlooked my mother’s ways. I sometimes saw her as a faerie princess who bestowed wishes upon wild men.
    I spent so much time with my grandfather that I soon forgot all other duties. We would train the birds. Teach the ravens to speak. Gather up the eggs in spring and keep them warm in various ways so that the hatchlings would follow us. He sold them to the baron and to the abbey in exchange for food. The geese of the abbey honked their greeting whenever my grandfather and I came onto the grounds with new hatchlings.
    When I imagine the boy that I was, I remember the smell of mud, the grass-stained tunic, the scalp that itched, and yet none of these troubled me. For my grandfather and his birds lifted me to the heavens. I flew with them above all my troubles.
    We walked along the path at the edge of the marsh, me running ahead in the exuberance of childhood, while he hobbled along, leaning into a long branch of a tree he’d carved to help him walk. He led me to a great oak that was dead and yet stood thick and tall near a gushing, clear stream. A falcon I had trained the previous winter perched on my shoulder, digging into the leather pad wound there just for protection.
    Grandfather had wanted to show me something, and had promised all winter to take me to a particular spot in the Forest “where the treasure grows.”
    At the tree, he stood upon his toes and pulled away the roots of some thick vines. He lifted me up so that I could see what he had found.
    “Put your hand inside it,” he told me.
    In front of my face, a knot in the oak.
    I reached in, my hand nearly too large to make it through the small hole. I felt around, and there was a smooth stone. I drew it out.
    I opened my hand to look at it as he lowered me to the ground. I noticed then that he was out of breath, and began to worry that I had tired him.
    The stone was a deep blue, but pale and broken at its center, and amber seemed to blossom within it.
    Taking deep breaths, my grandfather said, “I told you once of your bloodline. This is a sign of it.”
    “You must not speak,” I said. “You are tired. We can rest. I