Prologue
As the sun set behind the mountainside and the snow began to fall softly over the forest valley below him; Iain McCrown held the fallen raven in his tiny hands. He had never witnessed Death before, he being was only five winters old. It was the King’s Year, 632, the year War finally ended in The Land of Yarmon.
Little Iain with his forever tousled ginger-brown hair, and ears that curled over at the tops was the village Cearganton’s youngest resident. The youngest by sixty years, to be be exact. Before he was discovered strapped to a hinder mule in the meadow, Gettie Stalraup was the youngest in town. Her sixtieth birthday was the morning, the infant Iain arrived.
No one knew what to make of it except to be flabbergasted by the sheer state of the baby boy. Emaciated, sun-scorched, and covered with bleeding peck wounds where the crows tested his meat. Lucky for little Iain, they preferred their meals rotten and long dead.
There was a note attached to the mule’s collar with the lad’s name, Iain Douglas McCrown. At least that was the village’s obvious conclusion. The mule was deemed to be from Frigot’s Gleen in Norh Valley, and collar and straps from a Highborne girdler from Jessup. All of which was located in the Sovereign’s Circle, some twenty five stones-throw aways. Quite the heavy travel for both hinder mule and babe. Rumors tend to scatter fast in a town of retired elderfolk. Although, as the years moved on, and new Elders replacing the old, Ian’s origins were didc
Tears streams down the young boy’s ruddy cheeks and landed on an exposed wing of the raven. To Iain’s astonishment, he caught the flutter of a single feather, then its eyes once void of life twitched into existence once again. The bird began to plash about in the tiny puddle of tears formed in Iain’s cupped hands.
To Iains’s utter amazement, the raven stretched out his ebony wings and suddenly took flight, circling around the boy’s head like a blackened halo. It cawed in a delightful pitch with every rotation as if to thank Iain for his sudden mending. Iain’s childlike awareness of the world could not possibly comprehend what had occurred but was simply happy for the bird’s recovery.
“I will call ye Beaks!” He said aloud and the raven accepted his name by landing on Iain’s tiny shoulder.
