He just gave her a smile and a shrug.
Red emerged with a small ivory bowl: the rounded top of a human cranium. She set it on the stone bench next to Nathan and reached out to him. “Give me your hand.”
Happy that she had agreed to his request, he extended his hand, palm up. Red took hold of his fingers, stroking one after another in a strangely erotic gesture. She traced the lines on his palm. “These are your life lines, your spirit lines, and your story lines. They mark the primary events in your life, like the rings of a tree.” She turned his hand over, studying the veins on the back. “These blood vessels trace the map of your life throughout your body.”
When she stroked his veins, Nathan smiled, as if she were flirting with him.
“Yes, this is exactly what I need.” Red snatched a knife from a cleverly hidden pocket in her gray dress and drew the razor-sharp blade across the back of his hand.
Nathan yelped, more in disbelief than in pain, as blood gushed out. “What are you doing, woman?”
“You asked for a life book.” She clutched his hand, turning it over so that the red blood could run into the skull bowl. “What did you think we would use for ink?”
As she squeezed his fingers, trying to milk the flow, Nathan was flustered. “I don’t believe I thought that far ahead.”
“A person’s life book must be written in ink made from the ashes of his blood.”
“Of course it does,” Nathan said, as if he had known all along.
Nicci rolled her eyes.
The blood flowed steadily from the deep gash. Hunter sniffed the air, as if drawn by the scent of it.
When the skull bowl was a third full of dark red liquid, Nathan said, “Surely that’s enough by now?”
“We’d better make certain,” Red answered. “As you said, you’ve had a very long life.”
Finally satisfied, the witch woman released Nathan’s hand and took the bowl over to her smoky cook fire. With a blackened femur, she prodded the coals, nudging them aside to create a sheltered hollow in the ashes. She settled the bone bowl into them, so the blood could cook.
Nathan poked at his cut hand, then released enough magic to heal the wound, careful not to let the blood stain his fine travel clothes.
Before long, the blood in the skull bowl began to bubble and smoke. It darkened, then turned black, boiling down to a tarry residue.
The light slipping through the crowded branches overhead grew more slanted in the late afternoon. High above, birds settled among the branches of the expansive oak for the night. The crow scolded them for their trespass, but the birds remained.
Red ducked back into her cottage, where she rummaged around before returning with a leather-bound tome that bore no title on the cover or spine. “I happen to have an empty life book among my possessions. You are fortunate, Nathan Rahl.”
“Indeed, I am.”
Red squatted next to the cook fire and used two long bones to gingerly remove the skull bowl. The blood ink inside the inverted cranium was even darker than the soot charred on the outer surface.
Nathan watched with great interest as she set the smoking bowl on the stone bench. She opened the life book to the first page, which was blank, the ivory color of freshly boiled bone. “And now to write your story, Nathan Rahl.”
She called the crow down from the tree, and the big black bird landed on her shoulder again. It used its sharp black beak to stroke her red braids in a sign of affection. The witch woman absently caressed the bird, then seized its neck. Before the bird could squawk or flail, she snapped its neck and caught its body as it fell. The dying crow’s wings extended, as if to take flight one last time. Its head lolled to one side.
Red rested the dead bird on the bench next to the skull bowl. With nimble fingers, she combed through its tail and wing feathers, finally selecting a long one, which she plucked loose. She held it up for inspection. “Yes, a fine quill. Shall we begin?”
After Nathan nodded, the witch woman trimmed the end with her dagger, dipped the pointed shaft into the black ink, and touched it to the blank paper of the waiting first page.
CHAPTER 3
The life book wrote itself.
Red sat on the stone bench, hands on her knees, not noticing that she left a smear of dark soot on her gray dress. As she worked her spell, a guiding magic suspended the crow-feather quill upright, and then it moved of its own accord, inscribing the story of Nathan Rahl.
Bending closer, the wizard looked on with boyish delight, resting an elbow on his knee. Nicci stepped up to watch the words spill out across the first page, line after line, and then move on to the next page. Each time the ink ran dry, the feather paused above the book, and Red plucked it out of the air, dipped it into the bowl of burned blood, and placed it back on the page. The flow of words resumed.
“I recall how many times I wrote and rewrote The Adventures of Bonnie Day until I was satisfied with the prose,” Nathan said, shaking his head as he marveled. “This is far easier.”
The story flowed, page after page, chronicling Nathan’s long life as a dangerous prophet, how he’d been imprisoned by the Sisters of the Light, first to train, then to control him … how for years they monitored his every utterance of prophecy, terrified of the turmoil that could arise from false interpretations. And prophecies were nearly always misinterpreted, warnings often misconstrued. Merely trying to avoid a dire fate usually precipitated that exact fate.
“People never seem to learn the lesson,” Nathan muttered as he read. “Richard was right to disregard prophecy for so long.”
Nicci agreed. “I am not sorry that prophecy is gone from the world.”
The words flew past faster than anyone could read them, and the life book’s pages turned of their own accord. Nicci scanned back and forth, catching some snippets of Nathan’s life, stories she already knew. On the road, he had spent much time telling her about himself, whether or not she asked.
He leaned closer as a new section began. “Oh, this is a good part.”
In his loneliness in the palace, the Sisters had occasionally taken pity on Nathan, hiring women from the finer brothels in Tanimura to comfort him. According to the tale as written in the life book, Nathan enjoyed the conversation of an ordinary woman with ordinary dreams and desires. Nathan had once whispered a terrible prophecy in the ear of a gullible whore—and the horrified young woman had run screaming from the Palace of the Prophets. Once out in the city, she repeated the prophecy to others, and the repercussions spread and spread, eventually triggering a bloody civil war … all due to Nathan’s reckless pillow talk to a woman he would never see again.