The Priest of Blood Read Online Free

center of the wood (as all legends went) an ancient ruin of a castle rose up from fern and thicket, home to a Celtic queen who once ruled all the forests of the world. An old Roman wall, half-torn, half-lost, ran among the overgrowth. There were legendary fountains and lost treasures buried centuries before; other great tales of magick and history mingled in its green darkness. Although the duke claimed the woods, and, of course, the baron, partially, in the name of the duke, there was not a family I knew of that did not occasionally risk the punishment for poaching in order to feed themselves. And although there was a great cry from the abbots and priests and nuns, there were still known those who practiced fortune-telling and healing within the Great Forest.
    When my mother had taken sick, I often accompanied her with my grandfather on a journey into the woods, where he knew how to call the crones of the wood. They would come with a poultice or a tea for my mother to drink to help with her fever. When I cut my foot on the edge of an adz, which was a kind of ax that we used then for woodcutting, my grandfather carried me deep into the Great Forest to the crone that I knew as Mere Morwenna.
    She gave me something that tasted like licorice and mint, then had me eat a disgusting chunk of rye bread covered with gray-green mold. The candy-flavored treat helped me swallow the pieces of bread, and within two days the infection and its accompanying fever had vanished. Like all the Wise Women, she wore a thin veil that seemed to me to be made of spider web, for once, when I touched it, it seemed sticky to my hand.
    We of the fields knew them as the Forest Women or the Wise, but they called themselves the Women of the Veil, and so they wore this to cover their faces from the nose to the chin. Mere Morwenna had a young child whose entire body was veiled, for it was said that too much light would kill it. It was little more than a baby when I was a boy. My mother told me that it had a great deformity of some sort and that Mere Morwenna had to bathe it hourly in a bog at the center of the Forest, a bog in which grew berries that cured the ill or poisoned the healthy, and which was only known to the Wise Women. “Her baby needs these hourly baptisms to cure it, or else it will surely die,” my mother said. “She is a very good woman, despite what villagers say.”
    Once, out of curiosity, I drew back the veil slightly and looked at the baby’s face. It had a level of ugliness I’d never before seen, although its eyes were like pools of clear blue water. I heard the word “changeling” now and then, and that the child was not truly Mere Morwenna’s but had been discovered tucked into the opening of an oak that had been split by lightning. The Forest women’s stories were all like this—there was nothing of the ordinary about their world, and I loved every visit to them.
    We knew then that sorcery and witchcraft were outlawed, but those who lived outside the castle, out in the mud, did not turn against the Wise Women of the Great Forest. Brittany was not so rigid in its thoughts, nor were its people far removed from the Celtic ways of old. While the world of Christendom was our life, and the Christian gospel our salvation, although none could read it save the monks, the fever to destroy that Old Religion had not yet arisen in as violent a way as it would, soon enough.
    Mere Morwenna was our midwife, and with her assistant sisters, Brewalen and Gwenvred, would come to a home when the cries of labor had become too great. They were of value to us country folk, and they did not curse the priest or the Holy Mother when they were spoken to about matters of the spirit. Mere Morwenna had a hand that felt like fire when it was cold, and her eyes were small black rocks at the center of a wrinkled but kind face. Her hair was white from age, and when I was very young, she’d rock me on her lap after my mother had fallen asleep with my new