The Priest of Blood Read Online Free Page A

little brother or sister. She told me of my birth, and how she had not been there to deliver me, but that once I was brought to her in the Forest that she had foretold great things for me. What were these great things? I asked her often enough.
    “A prophecy told to the one who must fulfill it is a destiny interrupted,” she said more than once.
    “But you must tell me,” I insisted.
    She took my hand then, when I threw a fit over not knowing of my destiny. She kissed the center of my palm and peered over the whorls of my fingers and the lightly creased pathways between fingers and down to the heel of the palm. “All I can see that can be told is this: from the smallest, greatness may come.”
    “Will I be great? One day?”
    “Perhaps,” she said, peering into my eyes. “We live in a world where those who seem weak are the strongest. And those who seem strong are without true power. Someday, when you seem to have great power, you must remember this, for it is at your greatest moment of strength that you will also be at your weakest.”
    I laughed at her, for I was too young to understand this, and she laughed, too, and went back to cradling her little veiled baby in her arms.
    Mere Morwenna told me more tales of the Forest of an ancient well and a great, fearsome beast with wings that had been trapped by some hero of old of a fountain that was hidden from all men, but from which waters flowed that could heal the sick and make those who drank of it either die a sudden painful death or remain eternally young; there were streams within the Forest that went underground, into the caverns beneath it, and ancient drawings adorned the rock walls in those dark, dank places, telling of other worlds that had yet to be remembered; the trees themselves were thousands of years old, far older than mankind, planted by the giants that once walked the Earth, the same giants who brought the giant stones that existed along the plain at the center of the Forest. She also told me of the Faerie Queen whose castle still stood by the golden lake at the center of the Forest, although I had never ventured far enough to see it. I could well imagine a lake of gold, and she told me that if the wrong person put his boat upon the lake, it became a lake of fire. “Seven princesses sleep in the castle, waiting for seven youths to come and break the spell,” she would tell my brothers and sisters and me as she tended my mother’s birthing fever. “Each night, the princesses turn into ravens and fly up from the Forest, out to find the brave youths who will risk the lake to rescue them.”
    She told us on one occasion a tale of the True Bride, which made sense to me even while I did not entirely understand it.
    “So the maiden went to live in the great castle, and married in the church the handsome prince. When the moon waxed, she would return to garden in the moonlight. She would stand beneath the pear tree and call to the golden bird. Soon enough, the bird would fly down from the sky, carrying in its beak her silver wedding dress. And she would wear this at night, for those who came to her knew that she was the True Bride. But when the prince’s father, the king, returned to his home after many years at war, he did not like his son’s choice of wife. So he had brigands tie her and put her in a great cauldron. This he sealed, and bade them throw it into the deepest pit they could find. Then he went to his son, the prince, and told him that his wife had been unfaithful. He brought another maiden to him, this one rich, and lazy, and spiteful. She would glance at a person and judge him without thinking twice. When the prince, after many years of waiting for his bride to return, finally agreed to marry her, she became more demanding of him, and of the entire kingdom. But we should not hate her. She was from another land, and she missed her people. Still, she caused much heartache and only some good. Her jealousy enflamed, she would have her husband