Behold the Dawn Read Free

palfrey stood stomping at flies.
    “Hey. Where is it you’re off to?” Marek craned a look over his shoulder.
    “To find out what he’s after.”
    “How about me? Don’t you think I want to see the count throw him out on his ear?”
    “You’ll wait here.” He tightened the girth and drilled Marek a look. “And when I say wait here, I mean wait.”
    “You always say that. But what if there’s extenuatin’ circumstances you’re not foreseeing?”
    “Your extenuating circumstances always end up sounding like excuses.” He took the reins and swung aboard. “Just stay here. I’ll be back before night falls.”
    Marek huffed. “Well, when Heladio does decide to throw Master Gethin the Baptist out of town, please don’t go trying to rescue him and get us all into trouble.”
    Annan’s heavy hand on the reins choked the palfrey back to a halt. In his veins, his blood grew thick. “Gethin?”
    “Gethin the Baptist. That’s what they’re calling him back in the town.” Marek shrugged. “You weren’t thinking his name was John, now were you?”
    Annan let his breath out. “Stay here,” he said and spurred the palfrey.
    The name rang in his ears. Wasn’t it one he had once known as well as his own? For sixteen years, it was a name he had believed belonged to a dead man. Had Marek told him John the Baptist had indeed walked across the centuries to resume preaching, the numbness in Annan’s soul could have left him no colder.
----
    At the city gates, Annan found him. The tourney crowd swarmed around and beneath the gate arch, laughing and yelling. Filmy twilight was falling over the city, and the gay festival colors had reverted to everyday grays and browns. A few men, already deep in their cups, staggered and swore, looking for one more fight before the day ended.
    Just outside the gate, his back against the sand-colored bricks of the wall, the dark-robed monk stood atop the overturned half of a barrel. The shadow of his cowl hid his face, and his hands buried themselves in his opposing sleeves. At his feet, a score of people had gathered, faces upturned to hear him speak. His voice, deep almost to the point of hoarseness, rumbled across the distance, audible in tone, if not in word. He stood as if cast in stone; he did not move, did not gesture. Only the rise and fall of his voice held in check the throng that surrounded him.
    Annan reined the palfrey to a halt just beyond the crowd. As the monk had watched him at work on the tourney field, he now watched the monk. His heart thudded against his breastbone, swelling until his chest seemed to hold nothing but its beat.
    This monk, this Gethin the Baptist, could not be the man he had known. The Gethin he had once loved as a brother had died. He had been killed, murdered, cast out to feed the ravens and the dogs. For sixteen years, Annan had known this as certainly as he had known the weight of his sword in his hand. It could not be him.
    He dismounted and led the palfrey to the edge of the crowd. He towered over the townspeople, the line of vision between himself and the Baptist unimpaired as the Baptist’s growl floated through the crowd to reach him.
    “Thus saith the Patriarch, ‘By thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve thy brother; and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck.’” A white scar slashed the Baptist’s dark lips, twisting them into perpetual mockery. “And thus saith the Prophet—” The shadow of his hood tilted across his face, flashing a glimpse of shriveled, waxen horror. “‘Hear ye this, O house of Jacob, which swear by the name of the Lord and make mention of the God of Israel, but not in righteousness, not in truth .’”
    The Baptist looked up, his eyes blazing with all the furor of a hunting falcon’s, and Annan’s blood stopped pumping. He knew these eyes. He knew this man.
    The scar across the Baptist’s lips twisted harder, carving a serpentine