This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

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LOAM

Tears purge a man of sorrows; so, too, does death.

-Erdu Proverb

I will describe the people of Loam as such. All have light to dark brown skin. Those in Anantium, which is by the sea, tend to have lighter brown skin, while those out in the country, (mostly farmers) have a more earthy, leafy complexion, a mix of browns, mostly darker, with a hint of orange or grey.

-Report of Haramae, Guardian Missionary to Loam,
First Contact Report

CHAPTER 0

BARON RHAUDIUS

Dirt clung to the side of the girl’s petite face. Baron Rhaudius thought she looked sixteen or seventeen, and he had been told her name, but he’d forgotten it. It wasn’t important. It was her younger sister, Violet, who was the focus now
.

The Baron glanced at Violet on the raised platform where she stood, hands tied behind her small frame, a throng of soldiers surrounding her. She was twisting away from them, and the dead bodies of three Erdu men on the platform beside her.

The eyes of the farmers were on this girl. The large gathering of the Baron’s laborers filled the streets of the market all the way back to the blacksmith shop. A grim silence marred their faces as they waited to see what would happen to the younger sister.

The dead girl at his feet had been old enough to know better, not that her age mattered. The fear that her death put into the farmers’ hearts—that was what he was after. Her youth and beauty, and the image of her head as it rolled from the wood block, would leave a long lasting warning in the minds of every man and woman who dared to watch her last breath.

Baron Rhaudius stooped and picked up the girl’s head by her long black hair and hefted it up. He was always surprised by the weight of a severed head. He smelled fear as he surveyed the crowd before him. Fear, and a palpable anger.

“This tragedy did not have to happen today,” shouted the Baron. “Do not think you can send your children off to escape into the woods with the Erdu. The contract between you and I does not mitigate the penalties by age.

“Do not try to leave this valley! You or your children. I plead with you—do not make me take such young and beautiful lives from you. Loam is a world of law and order, and I will hold you to that law.”

He lowered the head back onto the platform and shouted, “Let us finish this and be done.”

Rhaudius waived to his guards and they pushed the younger sister over to the wood block where his axeman stood. His soldiers had been fortunate to have caught the sisters before the Erdu had taken them deep into the woods. The three forest dwellers who had aided the girls had fought his men fiercely. Four of his soldiers were felled before the three Erdu lay dead and the girls were back in his hands again. The Baron knew that if anyone escaped deep into the heart of Erdu country, retrieval would be impossible.

As long as the farmers didn’t know this, and they saw only the dead bodies of the mountain people, and not his soldiers, it might just quell their hope in the Erdu.

The girl began to whimper as she was pushed nearer to the block. A soldier forced her to her knees and pressed her head down. Another soldier put his knee on her back and gripped her hair, pulling her face up for the crowd.

The silence was thick. Rhaudius could feel the fear back in the air as the farmers’ hearts caught in their throats. He took in a long breath. The energy of the moment filled his lungs. A sense of anticipation almost brought a smile to his face, but he stayed in character.

Slowly, the executioner’s thick metal axe lifted into the air—up and back, over the man’s broad shoulders, his muscles like a squeezed spring.

“HOLD!” yelled Rhaudius, moving over to the girl.

The executioner stared at him, arms still raised, just as they had rehearsed.

“Stop!” the Baron yelled again. “Stand her up!”

A sound unlike any other rose from the farmers. A raucous hum of voices overflowing with sudden hope. There was weeping. Pleading shouts—even praises.

It was everything he’d hoped for and more.

Rhaudius walked up to the executioner and feigned a whisper in his ear. The girl had been helped to her feet and was standing beside him, gasping in great quantities of air. Gently, the Baron placed a hand on her back as he surveyed the gathering.

“I find myself today given to a little mercy,” shouted the Baron. “Violet here is beautiful, like her sister. Burying two headless girls robs you of the ritual of observing the dead. I will not steal Violet’s loveliness. You may have her back whole.”

The Baron turned to the executioner.

“Break her neck.”

CHAPTER 1

AVEN -
Two months later

Aven glared at his twin sister. Why
did she insist her visions remain a secret?

Winter was seated beside him at the table opposite their parents. She was hunched over a bowl of dark amber broth, eating contentedly, as if the evening were any other.

Usually her revelations were insignificant, random—birds making a nest above a neighbor's hovel, the promise of coming rain, Father grabbing Mother’s backside behind the sape vines—but Winter’s visions had turned dark again. She told him of little yellow ants coming up from the baseboards of a white plaster wall. The ants, she said, were hungry and had caught the scent of blood. That was strange. The farm hovels in their valley were underground with only rock and dirt for walls and floor. The ominous image was the second one that week, but not the worst of the two. Darker was the vision of dead bodies she’d had five days earlier.

Winter put the bowl down and hummed a short, satisfied melody. Her gaze lifted to meet Aven’s. Her lips held straight while she tried to reassure him with her eyes.

Winter’s hand found his under the table and her fingers tapped out a silent language, one they had created as children to keep secrets. “
Stop. You may bring it to pass
.”

Aven stared at his soup. It was the dreaded phrase she used to paralyze him.

In four days, their family would be running for their lives, and she wanted him to keep her gruesome vision silent? What if her vision was a warning, but they did nothing? Their escape and the images Winter saw in the eye of her mind had to be connected. The one thing that held his mouth shut was her logic. As twisted as it seemed to him, it felt possible.

For good or for bad, to tell is to change the future. By telling, we may bring it to pass.

Those words were a noose around his neck.

Aven’s father pushed away from the table, and the grinding of the chair legs chased away Aven’s dark thoughts. “We have nothing to fear but fear,” said Father. “A few more days of this and then we’ll be gone. The Baron’s watchers haven’t caught wind of anything. Pike still hasn’t the slightest suspicion. Like I said, nothing to fear. We’ll all get our appetites back again.”

“Winter never lost hers,” said Aven.

His sister smirked. “You’re only nervous because you’re seeing Harvest tonight.”

He bent a withering eyebrow at his sister and harshly tapped out, “
Mouth shut. You’ll feel the same one day
.”

“
Until then I get to hound you. Practice kissing your hand today
?”

Thinking of Harvest added one anxiety atop another. When it came to Harvest, it wasn’t fear that pressed upon him, but the weight of knowing she was a more worthy girl than he deserved. What did he have to offer other than his devotion? She seemed happy to be matched with him, as if his faithfulness was enough, but he wanted to give her more. He felt like a brook beside a powerful river. She was mature, and that only served to make her beauty all the more radiant to him.

And tonight—tonight was special. It was the third day of nuptials, and he’d clumsily transgressed them the day before!

“Twelve more days until you’re wedded,” said Mother rising from her chair. She stood beside Father. The stress lines were gone from her face. “That means tonight is First Kiss.”

Aven nodded with a stiff smile.

“She was my first choice,” continued his mother, and Aven knew by her tone she was about to say what she always said as a wistful smile pinched her cheeks. “She is a hard worker. Runs double shifts when her mother is sick, and is just as productive in the field as the best pickers in our plot. I never hear her complain. Just like her parents. And she’s god-touched in beauty. Her father wanted you or no one. That’s what he told me.”

Winter smirked at Aven and scooped up his soup bowl. “It sounds like Father’s going to have a hard time finding me a mate to match Aven’s.”

Father winked at her, then took Mother’s hand. “We can talk of weddings and matchings tomorrow.”

Aven’s parents ascended the ladder to ground level. The large hatch that led outside was embedded at the foot of an old bulge oak. The massive root structure covered the ceiling of the main room. Ornate, meandering patterns curled and stretched down along the walls and spread throughout the small sleeping spaces in the hovel. The roots of the bulge oaks drank in the rain and kept their home dry and, underground, the heat of the summer was kept at bay and the cold of winter lost its sting. The farm hovels were not large, but they were cozy, comfortable.

His mother looked back down through the opening. “You sure you don’t want to come with us?”

“I want to walk alone,” said Aven.

BOOK: Her Dangerous Visions (The Boy and the Beast Book 1)

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