The Brotherhood: Blood Read online

  Blood

  The Brotherhood, Book 1

  Kody Boye

  Blood (The Brotherhood, #1)

  By Kody Boye

  Copyright 2012. All Rights Reserved.

  Kindle Edition

  Cover art and design by Philip R. Rogers

  Edited by Helen Bibby

  Interior formatting by Kody Boye

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronically, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the proper written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  For my family, whose unwavering support has kept me writing.

  In memory of

  Grandpa Jim, Grandpa Larry and Grandma Shirley

  Also by Kody Boye

  Amorous Things

  The Diary of Dakota Hammell

  Sunrise

  Forthcoming

  Sword (The Brotherhood, Book 2)

  Utopia

  Wraethworld

  Foreword

  There’s something incredibly romantic about writing a book that was originally not supposed to see the light of day again. It’s like seeing a star fall—you watch it soaring across the horizon, but you never necessarily have plans to go find where exactly it crashed: where its remnants, fallen to the earth, now lay like shining fragments of metal. Of course, there’s always someone who wants to chase stars. For that reason—and for the fact that, like those star chasers, I blindly run forward into writing without abandon—I think it’s incredibly suiting to write an introduction for this novel.

  Blood, or the Brotherhood Saga in its entirety, was conceived in the Fall of 2005. Halfway to fourteen years of age and fully immersed within the fantasy genre, I broke off from the traditional science fiction elements I’d been using in my previous stories to write a tale of magic—where, here, there was fantasy, no other worlds (that the characters know of,) no space travel, radical shift of society and people, etc. Instead, this story told the tale of a young man who wanted to enlist in the military, his biggest dream to one day serve beneath his king.

  I wrote the trilogy of this story in a span of a year, from late 2005 to late 2006, in three books. To this day, my mother still refers to the story as ‘Odin’—the tale of a young man who flees from his misunderstanding father to seek his own place in the world. It quickly became her favorite thing I’d ever written and she demanded more, even though I never got around to printing the original story in its complete form.

  You’ve probably already guessed that this isn’t the original document, story or prose that I wrote some five or six years ago. Why, you question, did you decide to go back to the story if it was so old? Well, my friends, the answer is simple.

  In late 2008 and early 2009, I had a series of vertigo attacks that would leave me crippled for days at a time. When the second and most violent of the attacks occurred at the beginning of January, my parents were advised by medical professionals to take me to get an MRI to see if there was a more serious problem lying beneath the surface. I did just that and within a week was told to come in for a consultation.

  At that consultation, the neurologist in the clinic said a few choice words that shattered my sense of reality: You have a lump on your brain. Given it was only an MRI and not a cultured sample, I was given no further instruction other than to visit the head neurosurgeon at Utah State University to seek surgery so medical professionals could take a sample of the ‘lump’ on my brain. The paranoia within my family was astounding, as one word crept cautiously in the corners of their minds—cancer. It was not, however, the idea of cancer that scared me, but the idea that I would never be able to write again.

  This bump, as it was called, was positioned on the language processing portion of my brain.

  Let that settle with you a moment.

  For someone who is artistically driven—whose sole desire in life is to write stories—to be told that their language processing portion of the brain may be effected by surgery is like being delivered a death sentence.

  In the days prior to my visit with the neurosurgeon, I began to internally debate just what it was that would happen to me after surgery. Would I be able to write, I wondered, or would I simply be reduced to nothing? I had, in fact, been told that my mood would be different for about ‘six months.’ Half of a year is a long time, but in terms of writing, it’s much longer than what anyone understands. The heart, the energy, the power and the desire poured into a book—that takes hours upon hours, weeks upon weeks and months upon months to culminate, and the idea that I would not be able to write terrified me to no end.

  Fearing that I would lose my creative talents, I decided to write the one thing I knew would secure me within my family’s hearts and minds should something happen and I not be myself again.

  That’s why I started Blood.

  Obviously I survived. The first checkup deduced that this ‘lump’ was actually a ‘bruise’ on my brain. The second and third entailed me going and receiving a free pass. The fourth time that was scheduled I decided not to go in. I was, in every sense of the word, healthy.

  During all the stress that 2009 provided for me, with both my supposed ‘brain tumor’ scare and my slowly-emerging Bipolar Disorder, I wrote Blood and tried my best in order to make it great. At the time, I did believe it was great. I’d reinvented and recreated this world in a way it had never been before, but upon a second examination (after it came back from my editor the first time,) I realized that the writing in this book and in that of the sequels did not match up. After having the first conception edited, I decided to rewrite the book in full. I now wholeheartedly believe this is one of the best things I’ve ever written.

  Fantasy has been called my niche. I grew up reading books by Susan Fletcher, Brian Jacques, Tamora Pierce, Christopher Paolini and Garth Nix, as well as experiencing the height of fantasy films such as The Lord of the Rings (which inspired me to dream big.) This solidified my love for fantasy and, eventually, transcended my love to an all-out obsession.

  When I rewrote this book for the third time in 2009, I wanted to do one thing and one thing only—create an exciting, character-driven story, and a fully-fledged, blossoming world. In reading this novel, I do believe I did just that.

  For all you fans of fantasy, I hope you enjoy this book and the story of one young man whom, being so radically different from his peers, eventually runs away to join the military. My love of medieval settings and fantasy literature was what inspired this novel and ultimately made it what it is today.

  Well… I guess there’s nothing more I can say about this. All that’s left for you is to read the book and see whether or not you enjoy it.

  Thank you.

  Kody Boye

  1/15/2012

  A Note on the eBook Edition

  If at any time you are confused by a term, you may refer to the Index at the very end of the novel by clicking on this string of text.

  Prologue

  The cloaked figure ran. Darting around trees, jumping over bushes, ducking under branches that seemed to reach out in a feeble attempt to catch him—it could have been described as something akin to madness, given the rain that was pouring down from the sky and the hellfire that currently pumped through his veins, but in that moment, nothing mattered. No. To think anything mattered other than what he currently held wit
hin his grasp was to deny the fact that no more than a few moments ago, a child had been born.

  Fingers curled to prevent his long nails from hurting the baby, head downturned and arm shrouding the infant in his cloak, the immense hulk of the creature stopped to examine his surroundings. Thin nostrils flaring, hidden eyes searching and dark lips pursed into a twisted sense of confusion, he looked upon the clearing he currently stood within and tried to remember just what it was that had happened no more than earlier that night.

  No, he thought.

  It couldn’t be.

  How long ago, he wondered, had he ran, since the woman impregnated with his seed had given birth to what some would deem a monster? It seemed no more than but a few scant moments, after which his hands had been stained with blood and his mouth placated with the taste of dying flesh. He’d severed the umbilical cord with his teeth in a dire attempt to free his son from his mother’s dying body, and while placenta had warped his hands, the rain had disguised all, shielding both time and essence with its hellacious wrath.

  Right now, he knew, time didn’t matter.

  At that very moment, he needed a man—a surrogate father to whom he could leave his orphaned son.

  “Shh,” he whispered, voice rumbling up from his wide chest. “Don’t cry.”

  The baby, still tangled within his cloak, uttered a slight sob and pawed at his chest with its tiny hands.

  Until that moment, he hadn’t considered that his voice could have been the cause for his baby’s distress. At this, he took a slow, deep breath, then closed his eyes.

  He hadn’t cried in such a long time. Why now?

  Still your thoughts. Find a father.

  Finding such a man he deemed appropriate to raise his son would be no easy task. How was he to know whether his beneficiary toiled in poverty or brewed his madness? It would take more than just a simple look to discern the information, to take into account the idea that so many things could be happening at any given time, but how was he to know whether his son would grow into the man he was supposed to become with a simple woodcutter for a father?

  No. Let fate take its course.

  Of so many children he had sired throughout his entire life, why did this one have to be so different? Of all the sons and daughters that had come into the world, why did this boy, this infant child, seem so special?

  “Because you are.”

  Once again, the baby cried.

  Be silent, he thought, pressing a palm to the child’s chest. You are not in danger.

  Purple-pink light the color of stark magenta pulsed from his hand and into the baby’s chest. The child, whose eyes had not yet opened, squirmed, though whether his antics were in pleasure or discomfort he could not know.

  Of anything that was most obvious at this moment, he knew he had to get the child out of the rain.

  Lifting his head, he set his eyes on the small village of Felnon, crested just below the highest hill he stood upon and trembled before the distant marshlands as if it were a very testament to society itself. If he so wanted, he could take the child there, but where, if not there, would he go? Could he leave the baby with a traveling carvan in the hopes that a trader would take care of him?

  No. My son is not meant to be with traders.

  “Guide me, Mother,” he whispered. “Guide me.”

  The figure came to a small house at the bottom of the hill and sensed within his body an urgency that led him to believe that this was where the baby would go. Heart faltering, breath silent but chest heaving, he stepped toward the door but paused in midstride, only to look down and upon the child that he now carried within his arms.

  “You’re here,” he whispered, bowing to set the baby on the porch. “Goodbye.”

  Before he could fully crouch, the door opened.

  Hurling himself back, taking the child to his chest, he tore his cloak around his body and shielded the baby from the view of the human who stood directly in front of him.

  No, he thought. I couldn’t have—

  Panicked, instantly, by the idea that he had harmed the baby with his nails, he searched the infant for wounds while the occupant who had opened the door stared.

  “Who are you?” the human man asked “If you have no purpose here, leave.”

  “No.” His voice, though a mere whisper, rumbled throughout his chest and deepened the sound to a more audible pitch. “My child—”

  “I want nothing to do with something I cannot see.”

  That in itself was easily understandable. Here he was—a giant in a cape with only the pale skin of his chest exposed—before a man whom could see nothing of the figure who stood upon his doorstep. He had to look strange, even frightening in a way. Humans feared what they could not see—those in the dark, the ones in the woods, the things that landed on the mountains and screamed on full moon nights. Had he expected any different, especially from an ignorant human man?

  “Please,” he said, stepping closer. The human tensed almost instantly, then reached for something at his side. The idea that the man could possibly have a weapon forced him to pause in midstride. “I can’t promise you fortune or goodwill. The mother… she died.”

  “By your hand?”

  “NO!” The baby whimpered at such an outburst. The figure whispered to it, drawing his cloak around his body to shield it from the cold, before turning his eyes back up at the man standing in the doorway. “She died during childbirth. Please, good man—there was nothing I could do. Would you let an innocent child freeze in the cold?”

  The human said nothing.

  When the figure sensed that the man would say no more, he took one step forward.

  Unlike before, the human made no move to draw any concealed weapon he might be holding.

  “Will you?” he asked once more.

  In response to his statement, the human examined him with eyes so dark they could barely be seen within their sockets, likely trying to gauge just what it was that stood on his doorstep. By nature, a human’s eyes could deceive them immensely on several different levels, so to think that this man could be seeing several different versions of what he happened to be was no understatement. Did he see a monster, a fool, a pathetic creature who stood in the rain offering a baby no more than a few hours old, or did he simply see something in trouble—a creature that, by all respects, was asking for help he could not give himself?

  The human man took another step forward.

  The figure opened his arms. “Thank you,” he said, ready to offer the child.

  Just before the human could reach forward to take the baby into his arms, the figure stopped.

  Bending forward, he pressed his lips to the baby’s forehead, then whispered, “You’ll find me again. Odin.”

  A spark of pink light shined between the child’s brow, then disappeared.

  When the mortal man accepted a baby whose origins he could not be sure of, the figure turned and fled into the woods, forever disappearing from sight.

  *

  “Odin,” the human man by the name of Ectris Karussa said, looking down at the pale, translucent-skinned child.

  After the figure had mysteriously disappeared into the woods, he had taken his place at the kitchen table and wrapped the child in a fire-warmed blanket in order to combat the chill dwelling within his body. Eyes downcast, lips pursed in confusion and heart still fluttering in his chest, he pressed a hand against the blanket the baby was wrapped within and tried to imagine just how such a young child could have survived outside the womb without its mother.

  Does it matter? he thought.

  Though knowing in his heart that it truly didn’t, he couldn’t help but ponder over the reality of the situation.

  The baby, who’d since been quiet for the last little while, began to cry.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered, drawing his hand up and along the baby’s face.

  The moment he offered a finger, the baby’s eyes opened.

  Panicked, Ectris attempted to dra
w himself away from the child, but stopped before he could do so.

  It’s all right, he thought, staring into the baby’s harsh, blood-colored eyes. It’s just… odd.

  He’d heard of such children before—when, while seated beside his grandfather when he was still alive, he’d been told that such children had once been proclaimed as monsters some time ago and oftentimes killed for that very reason. Only the intervention of mages had saved them in the long run.

  Mages.

  Shivering at the idea, he allowed the baby to suck on his thumb and tried to imagine just what it was the creature had done when he’d pressed his lips to the baby’s brow. He’d sensed, within the air, the all-too-familiar signs of magic—a static which, when met with skin, could send the hairs on one’s arms on end. What the creature had done he couldn’t be too sure, but the fact that the creature knew magic, much less was capable of using it on his own son was unsettling in the least.

  What could he have done?

  Not willing to dwell on the idea that this child could have been instilled with something that could harm him come time when he eventually learned to walk on his own two feet, Ectris looked up and at the rain before bowing his head back to the baby lying beneath him.

  Later, once the rain calmed, he could go to the young farmer and ask for a warm bottle of milk. He wouldn’t let this baby go hungry.