The Priest of Blood (12 page)

I nodded and said, all too proudly, “My father was from another land, I am told.”

“A Norseman?”

“I have heard he was Saxon,” I said, “though even that may not be true.”

His fingers lingered too long in my hair. “Turn around,” he said. I did as I was bidden to do.

He had a peculiar gleam in his eye when I looked at him again. I went to dress. He watched me the whole time. It made me feel dirty and lower than my station, which was low enough as it was. I did not like putting myself on display for this man, nor did I enjoy his fish-eyed stare.

Then, he rang a bell for a servant, who came and escorted me to quarters beneath the abbey, where my mother and her friend were imprisoned.

To call them “quarters” was too kind, for it was little more than a tunnel into the earth. Without windows, and with very little light, my mother and Brewalen might have been buried alive down there.

I was able to bring them out into a room above to talk. I felt my heart gladden when I saw my mother’s face, for she seemed to have hope and some sense of purpose, the like of which I’d never seen before in her. She held my face in her hands and told me not to be afraid for them. “The Lord will help us,” she said. “I am certain.”

Brewalen was less faithful. She began to talk of Katarin and the baby with another body attached, and how, in the old days, this would not have been considered amiss.

“You killed the child, then?” I asked, surprised by her manner.

She nodded, her pockmarked face filled with hate. “As would any of these Brides of Christ. She was to die if that baby were to live. And that baby would die before it reached its first morning of life after the mother died. We had to. I used an herb called by some the Beautiful Lady, and I put it in my mortar and crushed it with the juice of the mandrake root. This is not sorcery, Aleric, this is simply healing.”

“It is not healing to kill an unbaptized newborn,” I said.

She gave me a look of scorn. “You are too much like the baron himself. I knew you as a little boy. I saw in you a terrible future. I saw on your forehead a mark, and it meant something too awful to contemplate then. But now I see it more clearly. It is the mark of the betrayer, Aleric. You may yet wash it clean off.” Then she put both hands on me, as if seizing me to throw me. This was somewhat laughable, as she was a thin, frail hag, but I felt strength in her hands as she grasped me.

“Even the anchoresses, when in the birthing room, will smother a newborn child if it has deformity. They will not baptize the child, so Katarin’s child would also have not been anointed with your Church’s sanctity. It was a terrible choice to make. But there was no choice. If I had to do it again, knowing what that woman and her sister did, the charges they brought, I would have let her die and saved the child, though that child would have been dead before sundown. But had I done so, and brought that child to the baptismal font, our priest would have dashed its brains against the stones beneath his feet. And now, I am afraid, I will be murdered simply because I did what was necessary to protect a life.”

Her eloquence was startling in its simplicity. Her anger had not made her thoughts ragged. She let go of me, then went to my mother and put her arms around her. “Do not weep, Armaela, my sister, do not shed one tear for these people who do this to you.”

“I have come to save my mother,” I told Brewalen. “Perhaps I can save you, as well.”

Brewalen smiled then and nodded to me, as if she acknowledged that I had some small spirit. Then she said, “It is already written that I should die, Aleric. My body has dark humours within it now, and I awake with blood and sleep at night with pains. I am not afraid for my own life, for I know that my spirit will return to the Forest and I will awake a moment after the death of this body. But for your mother, who has children, whose body is not ready to die, she needs your protection. Do what you must.”

Then she retreated to her prison, and I was left alone with my mother.

“Your brothers and sisters need you,” she said. “Please help them. I don’t know what they will do. I don’t know how they will eat...”

“I will make sure they have what they need,” I said. “And you, as well.”

“Son,” she said, her voice a bare whisper, “there is so much I want you to know. So many things I have hidden from you. I did so to protect you, as the life I have led has not been one of purity or sanctity. But everything I have done, it was so that my children might live a better life than I have. And I am proud that you are here now, favored of His Lordship, with skill and talent.”

I felt a chill as she spoke. It had not simply been skill with birds, or any natural ability of mine, that had secured my fortune of working for the baron. She herself had done something to help ensure my placement. I tried not to remember the men whom she had bedded, thinking that she had even done that to help her children. Had she slept with Kenan more than once simply to ensure that her children would find work and food? I recalled the phrase my grandfather had once used, “a terrible price” that she had paid when a maiden. What had it been? I longed to ask her, but knew this was not the time for it.

She held my face in her hands as if I were still her little boy. “You must not be near me when I die. You must keep your distance, for you may lose your position if you show me affection. You’re the child of an accused witch. You don’t need to lose all you have for my sake.”

“I don’t care about position,” I said, willing my own tears to remain within my eyes. “I do not care about them. I’m not one of them. No matter how much I want to be. We’re different. Grandfather said we were of a bloodline of forest priests.”

“If you speak about that,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, “they will, one day, burn you as well. Forget the past. Forget our home. You have younger brothers and sisters to feed. Although Annik and Margret will take them in and others will help, they will need their older brother’s favor in the castle to survive.”

“I will do all I can,” I said, and no longer held back my tears.

She began weeping as well and covered her face with her hands. Then, her tears dry, she took my hands in hers. “They will burn me. Or drown me. Or they will keep me in that burial chamber beneath this floor until I die of plague. I am not afraid of death for myself. I only wish that I might take care of my children who still need a mother. I have been changing how I’ve lived. The crones of the Forest have been teaching me the skill of midwifery and of healing plants. I am an outcast of the world, but not of the Forest. If I die...”

I shushed her and promised her that I would find a way to gain her release, and, God willing, Brewalen’s as well.

“No,” she gasped. “Please, Aleric, do nothing for me. You cannot risk this. I did not do all I did so that my sons would return to the dirt.”
 

“I will do what I must,” I said.

Then I kissed her and bade her pray so that God’s light might shine upon her and bring a spirit of grace to her and her companion.

6

I rode home across marshes and along fens, and kept to the path by the light of the moon. But as I crossed a narrow way, at a crossroads between the road that led beyond our homeland and the one that led to the castle, I saw a strange figure with a small bundle in its hand. I tell you, I felt it was a phantom of some kind, for its cloak was long and hung in front of its face like a mask. Beside it, another cloaked creature that was only a few feet tall.

My first reaction was to ride by fast, for crossroads were terrible places where the unbaptized were often buried and where oaths to the Devil were made. But as I rode near, I heard a woman’s voice call out my name.

I brought my horse to a slow trot and turned about. The moonlight struck the face of the figure. It was not a stranger at all, but Mere Morwenna herself. Beside her, that misshapen changeling stepchild, now perhaps ten years old, clinging to her like it was a monkey. I dismounted, and the crone shambled over to me. The child, veiled from head to foot, clutched at Mere Morwenna’s skirts as if afraid that I might bite it.

“Your mother,” Mere Morwenna said. She reached to embrace me, and I fell into her fragile arms as if she truly were my blood kin. “I am sorry.”

“I’ve just been to see her,” I said. “And Brewalen. While they are in good spirits now, the charges against them are serious.”

“Yes,” Mere Morwenna said. “My child saw this.” She glanced down at the veiled creature. Her child pressed closer into her cloak and skirt as if trying to disappear there. “She has the Sight. She told Brewalen of the trouble that might come.”

I looked from the veiled child to the crone. “Why, then, did Brewalen take my mother to midwife the newborn?”

Mere Morwenna said nothing. She drew back from me and took my hand in hers as she had many times when I had been a little boy. She turned my hand over so that my palm caught the moonlight. With her index finger, she followed the curves of slight lines on my hand and pressed an area between my thumb and fingers that causes me slight discomfort. “There is much that can be seen of the future. But it is like these crossroads. We know the destination of each, but to get here there are a hundred choices that must be made first. You are still the boy of birds. I see a crossroads ahead where you will rise up like a dragon. Or you may not, Aleric. You may instead marry the girl you love and live far away from here. But wait, I see in your future something entirely different—you will die at the hand of a beautiful woman. You will have a child. A boy. No, a girl. Your child shall die. No, your child of some future year lives.”

She looked up at me from behind her veil. Her small eyes seemed shadowed and bright all at once. The wrinkles of her forehead and around her eyes seemed deep, drawn creases. “Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“The Sight offers the crossroads, and the destination, but does not always follow the journey we expect.”

“Is there nothing that can be done?” I asked.

The veiled child stepped out from Mere Morwenna’s moon-shadow, and said, in a voice that was older than her years and yet still of a young child’s timbre, “You stole a relic from a great oak. You brought up the winged demon and had it slaughtered. Your destiny is dark, Falconer, and your journey will be on a thorny path. I see a hundred fires along these marshes. I hear the screams of women and men. I smell the burning flesh and smell the wood of ancient oaks as they blacken. And from your loins comes the fire.”

I shivered as I heard her words. I wished my mother had never grown close to these Forest witches and their Old Ways. I could not get back on my horse fast enough. I did not want to think what deviltry they were up to in the marshes, where the roads met. I snapped, “What is your name, little accursed one?”

“She is called Calyx,” Mere Morwenna said. “For she was born from her mother’s side with a caul covering her body, and, within its bloom, a child who brought with her the wisdom of another world.”
 

“Is this why she is a misshapen thing?” I said, feeling bile and bitterness in my throat. “Who is her mother?”

“Her mother is dead,” Mere Morwenna said. “She gave her life that this child might live. She is born from the Veil itself and brought into this world as a cupbearer for the goddess.”

“She is no changeling,” I said. “She is deformed. Children are often killed at birth, so your friend Brewalen tells me, when they have these deformities.”

“I may be deformed on the outside,” the cloaked girl said, “others hold their misshapings within. Some are like castles—beautiful and fair at a distance, but within the walls themselves, there is pestilence and poison that has not yet been torn at by the ramrod. Do you trust the outer beauty or the inner? Do you look for that which will corrupt with time, which hides darkness, or what is timeless?”

“You disgust me,” I said and glared at Mere Morwenna, also. “You and your kind are truly witches and lovers of the Devil. How else would my mother be accused of such a crime if she had not fallen in with your lot? How many other peasant women go to your herbs and healings and come away with the mark of the Devil upon them?”

The rage that filled me, the wanting to blame them for my mother’s imprisonment, grew from an enormous fire within me that I needed to expel in order to breathe the night air without feeling the smothering burden of helplessness. I felt as I hadn’t in years—on the verge of tears, yet I would not let them fall from my eyes. “Had she kept to her life, though it were the life of the lowest whore in Christendom, she would not await a terrible judgment, both here and in the world to come.”

Mere Morwenna drew back from me as if she had encountered a viper.

The veiled one called Calyx stepped forward, pointing her finger nearly up to my face. “You have seen a demon yourself once. You have seen what you are meant to know.”

Mere Morwenna reached out, clutching the girl, drawing her back to the folds of her cloak.

“If you are a witch, then work spells to release my mother from prison. Bid the Devil free her!” I shouted as I returned to my mount.

“Give your mother peace,” Morwenna said before I rode off.

When I returned to the castle, Alienora stood along its slender parapet, as if she’d been there all night, keeping watch. Her beauty against the torchlight inspired me with affection and took away much of my anger. She was purity. She was love.

In her form, I saw all that could be made right of this world. I left behind that Forest world of witches and devils, and hoped that the purest light of love could overcome the darkness.

7

I first sought out Corentin, and found him drinking before the hearth in the Great Hall surrounded by hounds. I leapt upon him, nearly pressing his face into the fire. His eyes glowed with the flames, and I saw fear in his soul.

“What have you done?” I asked. “Why have you turned my master against me? Of what crime am I accused by you?”

“The crimes of sodomy, and blasphemy, and thievery,” he said, and then began laughing. “And should you kill me now, all would know of it. Kill me here, by the fire, with drink in my hands, so that it might be known that you are vermin. That you are the monster that I have said you are. That you are the murderer, like your mother. It is in your blood, Mud-hen. That is what I have said of you. But do not be so angry with me, fair one, for although I said the words, it is your master who believed them because he knows your true parentage. He knows from what sin you are born. He knows the stain that is upon your brow that causes you to be a twisted soul.”