The Priest of Blood by Douglas Clegg Page A

your life here for my sake. I wanted this for you. You must forget you ever knew the field and its misery.”
    I blurted, without meaning to, “You must stay away from Mere Morwenna. And the Forest women. There have been demons. It is a dangerous time.”
    She smiled, as if about to laugh at me, but then thought better of it. “The demons of the world wear men’s faces.”
    As she stepped beyond the gateway, a sharp call from my master brought me back to my duties.

    5

    Corentin taunted me one night by the fire. “They say that common folk worship the Horned One. They say that those pagan demons are still in the Forest, and all of them need to be burned. I bet you are from a family of witches,” he said. “They think you want to bring the plague into the castle. Some believe that your family is unsanctified.”  
    “I was baptized just as you,” I spat back at him.
    “They say the Devil looks like an angel when he wants,” he said. “I would not be surprised if the Devil has been baptized in order to fool village folk.”
    I went to the village priest and asked for forgiveness of my sins, though I was not certain that I had many. He took my confession, although my penance was minor, and asked me why I was so vexed. I told him of the demon in the well, and how my master had changed toward me, and my mother’s words, and he began to read from the Bible in Latin, none of which I understood, but it sounded holy and magical and I felt Mary, the Queen of Heaven, with me. The priest assured me that he would light a candle for my soul.
    Kenan Sensterre remained distant from me in a way that he hadn’t been, and I never again felt his touch on my shoulder, nor a kind word from him in the hunt. I wasn’t sure then what great sin I had committed, but these were fearful, ignorant times.
    There were times when I saw Corentin walking with my master, and I felt rage and shame that my greatest enemy should take the hand of him who had once been my only friend. I wondered what Corentin had told him, what nastiness that enemy of mine had perpetrated. In those days, when I was still young, I did not understand what my grandfather had told me about the good and the bad, and so it confused me further to think bad of Kenan when he had been so good to me once.
    Corentin had grown handsome and thick of arm and leg in a way that ladies remarked upon. It was as if the sun lit his hair during the daylight hours, and in the night his face shone bright in the torchlight. I could see that he was being favored, not just by Kenan, but also by many others.
    One who favored him greatly was the baron’s youngest daughter.

    6

    Her name was unknown to me when I first caught a glimpse of her against a blood red sunset. The sky blackened from smoke from fires at some distance from the castle, beyond the haystacks, for it was a frosty autumn day, and the bonfires had been lit before a celebration. She passed by on horseback, riding as I’d never seen a woman ride, leaping over bundles of hay, and between the stacks, then up along the rim of the hill. Were it not for her garment, I would have thought her one of the gypsies who yearly came through with their carnivals and dancing, or even one of the Forest women.
    She had no attendant with her, no handmaiden, which was unusual and perhaps even dangerous, for young women of breeding were never seen without protectors around them of some kind. Her fine dress, crimson and white, was in tatters along its hem; her feet were bare and dirty. She clung to her horse as if it were a lover. I heard her laughing gaily as she rounded a curve of the road and brought her horse to jump over the low walls surrounding the sheep meadow. Although she wore the clothes of a woman born to wealth, and pearls and rubies ringed her throat and arms, her hair had torn free of its restrictive braids and flowed as if from an angel in flight. She took the horse across the barren hillside, admonishing it to go faster and