My name is Cary Veris.
Even that is a lie. I begin this account with a lie, but a lie of innocence, not malice.
Veris means truth, the Master told me when he gave me that name for my sixteenth birthday. "You're full of the truth, Cary," he said. "You invite the truth."
But what is the truth, really? Even that birthday was a lie. I could never remember my real birthday, so the Masters and Mistresses chose one at random, and then changed it every year to suit their whims. No truth there, in that world of shifting allegiances and quicksand moralities.
If my name isn't Cary Veris, what should it be? My mother raised me until she no longer could. Should I use her name? Should I be Caraig Hanno? Or did that truth die with the tinker caravan that fell prey to a vampire band so long ago?
Should I be Caraig Valerian, and use the name of the father I never knew at all? That would possibly be the greatest lie of them all, for all that I have his hair and his face. Or so I've been told. But perhaps that is also a lie.
Perhaps I could slyly claim the name of my current benefactor, the Lord Diarmuid Stewart, and reshape myself into Cary Stewart, a rightful part of the keep instead of the shadow on the stairs, the face at the doorway, the tinker lad under the caravan, watching the hungry faces dreaming of freedom and happiness.
That would be no truth at all.
My name is Cary Veris, and my life is a lie, but I am sworn to the truth.
Is it any wonder I wander in the darkness?
A truth should begin this account, so here is one: My mother was Mairead Hanno, of the Hanno tribe of southern Eire. My father, as I found out years later, was Harald Valerian, a duke in one of the northern counties where the Northlander blood was still strong, which accounts for my hair.
The hair made me an oddity in the Hanno tribe, a typical deeply tanned and habitually dirty tinker lad crowned with an atypical mass of pale gold curls. It also made me too noticeable to be much use as a lifter, although my Grandda began to teach me anyway when I was no more than six years old. I can still remember the day Gram stopped him.
Grandda was showing me and a couple of the younger boys the beginnings of the art of the distracting bump, the friendly arm touch, the soft feathertouch to the pocket, the use of the tiny sharp blade on purse strings and pouches. I was about to try a bump and lift, hoping to do it better this time and avoid a good-natured but still painful cuff on the head, when Gram's fragile voice stopped everything, as it always did.
"Caraig's no lifter," she said. "He's mine."
The exact words have stayed with me all these years. It was one of those "solid" moments that happen sometime in life, when you're completely alive and completely conscious and paying complete attention to your world. It was late afternoon on a fall day, the sun just barely clearing the trees around the small opening where we were camped. Musty smoke from the peat fires spiraled gently upward.
Tiny Gram was caught in an odd slant of light that gilded her from the back, leaving her face in shadow. "Caraig's no lifter. He's mine." I remember that at the moment her voice let go of the word "mine," a ball hit the side of one of the caravans and some child shouted, "That's it. We're all dead," and laughed.
Grandda stuttered a few words of objection, as he always did, but Gram was the untouchable power of the tribe. She was our fortune-teller, our heartsinger, our magic. The "tinker witch," townspeople called her, with awe, derision or fear in their voices, and sometimes all three. But neither awe, fear nor derision kept them from her wagon in every town we visited. Hers was probably the second most visited of them all. The one I shared with my Ma and her friends Pol and Cait was visited most, almost always at night. At those times I wandered the camp and sometimes the nearest town, watching and learning from the shadows.
Gram said I had the Sight. Full strength, she said. Much more than her. Shiloh told me later that my grandmother Valerian was, in his words, "a spooky old woman who gave everyone the fair shakes." I'm thinking she was a witch, too, maybe, which might explain why I have the power.
But that's guessing, and has no place here in this record of truths.
The truth is that I was a happy child. I ran with my friends, and got into trouble, and sometimes sneaked peeks into Ma's tent while she was entertaining. I whispered a farmer's plow horse when I was seven and had a wild night ride of it before Needle Niall hauled me down and tanned my britches. Ma bespoke me seriously about the dangers of whispering in the towns we were camped near, but her green eyes danced the whole time and I knew she was proud of my prowess.
In late summer when I was eight or nine, Gram began to teach me the old ways, a bit at a time, not enough to disturb my carefree existence. Not long afterwards, a blue norther ripped through the camp, beating in the roofs of two caravans with its hail and nearly catching Cait with a bolt of lightning. We eased out into the chill air in its wake, surveying the damage, and I dashed to the horse lines to check on my favorites. So it happened that I was the first one to see the soaked lone stranger riding up to the camp on a bedraggled pony, not bothering to pick his way around puddles but splashing straight through them wearily.
That was how my brother Shiloh arrived to the Hanno tribe, in the wake of a storm. And Shiloh was very true.
Here another truth must be placed, and admired in its proper setting: Those years when Shiloh lived with us were the best of my life.
I was the perfect age for hero worship of this wonderful stranger turned brother, and I think he was probably the perfect age to appreciate being a hero. He'd had rough times between leaving his home at sixteen and arriving to us some five years later, but he never let those bad times cloud his soul.
In short order, he'd charmed all the women of the tribe, and was rarely seenwithout at least one child trailing after him, and usually more than one. Shiloh then was what I recognize now as a rarity: A true free spirit, dedicated to laughter and finding beauty and humor in the smallest of things.
Not that he was a layabout, mind. Needle Niall taught him riding, and Grandda said he'd make a rare fine lifter, which Shiloh found endlessly amusing. Old Padraig taught him the dagger toss and started him on juggling, which Shiloh loved. It became an ongoing challenge for the young ones of the tribe to find ever odder things for Shiloh to juggle. Pinecones, pouches, pendants and even small pies found their messy way into his whirling hands, much to our entertainment.
He'd a fine way with a harp, and a striking voice, and many's the night he sang us a long Northern ballad before the time we were packed off to our beds.
And he was fearless. Beyond fearless and into reckless, Gram said, voicing some of her rare disapproval of our newest adopted son. "Tis not bravery to know no fear," she told me one day as we sat on the warm ground beside a caravan, watching the tribe's men play a bone-cracking game of ball on a heather-drenched meadow. "Tis foolishness." I feared to look at her, knowing that her icy blue gaze was locked on Shiloh running free, laughing loud, taunting the others with the ball raised high over his head.
To my eyes, he was the bravest of all, one with Brian Boru and CuChulain. Shiloh feared nothing and no one, and I felt safe in his shadow.
In the meantime, I learned more of the old ways from Gram, a bit at a time, never enough to be disturbing. Small charms to deflect attention, whisper horses, make flame dance -- they became second nature to me. And as I grew older, she gave me more of herself: an ability to see the true colors of a person's soul, the knack for searching out the most possible future in a random spill of runes or a carefully placed array of cards, and small impositions of my will on that of the world.
Seasons passed, summers of travel, winters of huddling around peat fires against cliffs and near caves. Surely the entirety of that time could not have been as relentlessly happy as I recall it. We buried fine people, and saw babies die abirthing, and suffered through endless romantic tangles among ourselves and the occasional rift with townspeople. These things I know full well.
And yet....
And yet....
It was a happy time. Three full turns, maybe four, as Shiloh became an integral part of our tribe, and I shifted inexorably from a mere lad to near a man.
Perhaps only the darkness that followed throws the memory of those days into near-blinding light. Perhaps. But it was a time of the light, with Shiloh my sun and Gram my moon, and a universe full of stars to whom I was connected by blood or by heart.
And I was happy. That is truth.
Here is another truth, although it may be an uncomfortable one now, for some people.
Shiloh it was who first introduced me to the power of the blood.
Not so very long after he came to live with us, I asked him about the gold necklace he always wore. The tiny man on the gold cross interested me, as I could not understand why Shiloh would wear a charm of a sad, hurting man.
With a child's open curiosity, I asked this adored older brother about the man on the cross, and in turn heard a most astonishing story about a god becoming a man, and choosing to die as a punishment for the evil of others. He took their place, Shiloh said. I thought it sounded most unlikely, and if it had happened at all Shiloh's must be a most unusual god. The gods I knew were sometimes difficult and easily riled, but they could be understood, for the most part. The notion of a god who would die by choice, with no daring last-minute rescue, no clashing battles of titans, no promise of return with the next moon or the next turn of the earth ... well, it was a most odd notion.
But the blood was the strangest of all to me, at that time.
Shiloh said that the power of this strange god was in the blood. He said that the blood of the god gave men eternal life, that they would never die, thanks to the blood.
Where does one find the blood of a god, I asked him, fascinated.
He frowned at that, I recall, golden brows drawing down for a long moment, then lifting in a grin. "Another time," he said, then took off for a game of ball or a ride with Niall or another toss with Cait in the trees.
Days passed, and months and years, and Shiloh fed my fascination with the blood with such ideas as he thought I could understand, muttering now and then about trans-something and witch earl canaballism. Since I knew many people called Gram a witch, I asked her about the witch earl canaballism, but she'd never heard of the like and wanted to know where I'd gotten such notions. I told her about Shiloh and the gold god Jesus on the cross and the blood that made you live forever, and she frowned and told me not to bother Shiloh with such silly questions.
It was not long after that Shiloh and Gram had their first fight. Gram, who never raised her voice, who could freeze your blood with a whisper, shrieked at Shiloh like a frustrated child, the tone of her voice carrying across the camp though the words were lost. My best friend Seamus and I stared at each other in the firelit, and Seamus whispered something about it being ill luck to anger a witch.
A short while later, Shiloh slammed out of Gram's caravan with a face like thunder, and rushed to the horse line without a pause. In a few moments, hoofbeats pounded off into the night, and I knew my hero was gone. With a sudden horrifying fear that he would never return, I jumped up and ran to Gram's caravan.
She met me at the door, her wizened face perfectly revealed by the dancing firelight, and I've never from that day to this seen an expression of more perfect despair. Her flint-black gaze found mine and she wiped the despair away in a blink, replacing it with the smile she always gave me. She forestalled my question with its answer. "He'll be back, Caraig. Dinna ye worry."
"Have ye seen it, then, Gram?" I asked, meaning his return.
"Aye, that I have," she said near absently, gaze shifting to search the direction Shiloh had ridden off in, and I felt strongly that she meant something else entirely. Then she looked back at me, with a stab of firm authority. "But there'll be no more talk of that bloody god."
"Aye, Gram," I near stuttered, having heard that tone before and knowing that it brooked no argument.
Shiloh returned, as Gram said.
And there was no more talk of the power in the blood.
