Her Dangerous Visions (The Boy and the Beast Book 1) (2 page)

The moment the hatch closed, Winter slipped into her room.

Aven followed after her with his thoughts churning. Harvest’s parents were hosting the meeting tonight. A member of the Erdu had passed information to Sky, Harvest’s mother. The Erdu were the key to surviving. They knew the forest. They knew how to elude the hired trackers that were sure to pursue them. The Baron maintained his power only if he held a grip of fear over the farmers.

But two months back, the Baron’s Watchers had caught the two sisters from Plot 5. He’d been there, at the gathering, and saw Coriander and Violet breathe their last breath. He’d seen the bodies of the Erdu men crudely piled upon the platform as if they were animals.

The images he’d seen that day haunted him.

There were a handful of others over the years who had tried to leave in various ways and failed. All who tried to run or find asylum from their contract were killed one way or another.

Harvest’s family and his were going to break the Baron’s contracts and attempt to escape into the wilderness. The Baron’s brutality had earned him a long time of quiet. No one had attempted anything in years, until Coriander and Violet had dared to try. Fear was always in the air but, for Aven, until his father broke the plans to him and Winter two weeks ago, the fear had been intangible. Now he could taste it as bile in his throat and feel the burn in the shortness of breath that came upon him in the dark.

Winter’s room was the smallest in the house. He had to stoop beneath a root to pass inside. She mostly disliked being inside. Even at night. Winter preferred the aboveground, whether in sunlight or moon’s glow. Even in the rain, she had her places to hide away or sleep. Everyone said she was a girl of the wilds. Her black hair was usually braided with green reeds, twigs, and an array of feathers from an aven, the large sleek bird he was named after. He understood why she wore the feathers. It was the same reason he never took off the bracelets she made him. They were outward reminders that the other mattered so dearly, a symbol of their closeness was always to be worn.

Seated upon his sister’s shoulder was the butterfly—the seer spirit she’d named Whisper—given to her by a Maker. The insect opened and closed its tiny blue wings that were only a little larger than his thumbnail. The butterfly was a reminder of his sister’s uniqueness, her chosenness, and that she had loyalties to what Aven felt were strange, and even dangerous, beings. At present, he wished the insect would flutter back to its rookery in the roots above.

Winter looked up from her work. Her fingers were busy constructing a new bracelet for him, this one out of laussifer roots. She had their father’s crooked nose and their mother’s soft mouth and delicate chin. Her blood-orange eyes seemed to smile at him. “Thinking about it won’t help them or us,” she sighed. “I don’t like seeing you worry. It doesn’t help.”

“Don’t you hate not knowing who it is you saw?” Aven asked. “The smoke and the dead bodies—you had to see what they were wearing.”

“I couldn’t. The smoke was too thick.”

“How do you know the people were dead?”

“They were. I felt it.” Winter paused her work and looked up at him, concern etching her face. “I do feel a sense of danger tonight. Perhaps you should stay home.”

Aven’s jaw tightened. Her visions could be so vague. “You
feel
the danger? I should have told them at dinner. You would have understood. I never break promises, but this time—”

“If you had told them,” said Winter, “their reaction might have done more harm than good. We’ve discussed this already; unless you have reasons, we must trust our decision.”

“First it was the bodies and the smoke. Then the ants and the scent of blood. You’ve never had these kinds before. Not this dark.”

“They’re possibilities,” said Winter. “They’re not real. Our freedom to choose, that’s what’s real. You remember the spider and the hopper?”

Yes, he did. Over a year ago he and Winter had been in the fields harvesting sape when she had had a vision of a juvenile grasshopper resting on top of the stump of their hovel. She saw on the side of the stump a web where a white and blue spider waited. She’d sensed that the grasshopper would jump into the web and the spider would pounce and fill it with poison. Aven quietly left work and ran to the stump. There was the little hopper, just as she’d said. He readied his hand to lunge and grab it, but the hopper felt his presence and jumped. Just as Winter had sensed, it landed in the web and was instantly bitten.

But there were other times when what she saw didn’t happen because she intervened, and yet she’d grown to prefer doing nothing. But doing and saying nothing felt wrong now. Their parents would not hop into the Baron’s web like mindless insects. They would take precautions. Even if they hadn’t taken her seriously at nine, when she was first given the gift, they would now, when she was almost seventeen. It was time they found out their daughter was a seer.

Aven watched his sister’s fingers work gracefully at twisting and weaving the root. “Why do you have this gift?” he asked. “If it's truly from a Maker, then what’s the point if we can’t use it?”

“Stop calling it
my
gift!” said Winter. Her eyes lifted from her work to probe his face. “I need it to be
our
gift. We’re twins, made in the same womb, the same sacred space. You have to help me make the decision. And we decided, together, not to tell anyone.”

Aven slumped against the earthen wall. “I wish there were no dark ones,” he said. “Animals and coming rain and Father or Mother grabbing each other, I’ll take those kind.”

The touch of a smile lit Winter's face, though something restrained it. “One way or another,” she said, “my actions will cause the vision to occur or prevent it from happening. We don’t know which way it’s going to go. I don’t know whose bodies I saw. I don’t know whose blood the ants were coming for. Maybe they're from another valley or another world.” She sighed. “I know the Maker gave us the gift for a reason. I just have to figure out our role.”

She stopped to read his face. Was she hoping to have eased his mind somehow?

Aven stood. “If you want me to sit and do nothing, next time don’t tell me. Keep it to yourself. I can’t stay here when everyone’s in danger, not if I have the power to stop something bad from happening. Even if it’s only a
potential
bad.”

He left her in her room, took his cloak, and climbed the ladder. He swung open the hatch to a sea of stars and the silhouettes of sag trees and oaks.

Winter’s voice called to him from the bottom of the ladder. “You understand, don’t you?” Her tone was pleading. “I need to tell someone about them, especially the dark ones. Who else do I have? We have the bond of the womb.”

Aven poked his head down to look at her. “I know,” he said.

Of the few people he was close with, Winter was the only one who held his soul. She knew him like no other, just as he knew her.

“Are you truly worried my going out will change something?” he asked.

“I’m not too worried,” said Winter. A small smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “Besides, it’s First Kiss, I can’t expect you to miss that. Just don’t do anything out of the ordinary, and what will happen will happen.”

“Great. That’s very comforting.”

“Be careful.”

CHAPTER 2

AVEN

Careful.

The word disturbed Aven’s thoughts as he walked the starlit road to Harvest’s farm. The moon dodged in and out of the trees. A racket of chirps sounded from every bush and rock where crickets sang their songs.

Careful
. He was being careful. As god-touched as she was, Winter could be so timid, tinkering in her mind with possibilities and meanings. She wanted to be so sure of things before acting. The one danger she continued to take was telling the visions to him.

Their mother and father had only an inkling of Winter’s gift. When she first began talking openly of the things she saw, they treated it as nothing more than the wild imaginings of a nine-year-old.

Their parents were just farmers. They kept things simple. They preferred tradition over novelty. Aven was much more like them. Although he knew Winter had a gift, he was wary of it and the Makers. All he wanted was a farm to work. A family. Harvest would be his wife. He envisioned the love he and Harvest shared to be much like his parents’ love. A soft, ever-present respect between them, playful, and sensual. It filled him with pride every time he detected the hidden passion that entwined his parents. It was another layer of love that tightly bound their family together.

Like the love that burned in his heart when he and Harvest kissed in the wooded darkness above her home.

It had happened last night, a day earlier than it was supposed to. It was like an uncontrollable pull gently drawing them toward the other. He didn’t want to leave and neither did she. They’d talked until the moon had passed through the Star Sage’s constellation. Asking deeper questions than the weeks before. Discovering who the other was. What made them laugh. What had caused them pain. What their dreams for life were. It was all part of the farm peoples' tradition, starting the month before the nuptials. Right down to the kiss that was supposed to have been tonight.

Yesterday’s kiss had been a first for them both. Slow starting and a bit clumsy, but Harvest never laughed. He could feel the intent in her every movement. The serious passion she would bring into every part of their marriage. In weeks past, they’d expressed words with their mouths, revealing who they were to each other. Now their mouths expressed a new thing, a soulful thing. Harvest’s tongue spoke a new language, one he could feel and taste with his own tongue. The warmth of her body so close, the brush of her nose against his face, the hush of the forest surrounding them.

It had been a glimpse of the hidden fires that held his own family together. It echoed of a simple, beautiful life that awaited. The uncomplicated life of a farmer and the joy of family.

Work hard, earn food for the stomach, love your mate, your family, make friends of your neighbors. That was the life his parents had forged. It seemed a warm and satisfying life, and it was all that he wanted.

It was what Harvest wanted too, but there was something else consuming her—especially with their looming escape.

She wanted her brother back.

Aven glanced into the trees at the thought of her brother, Pike. Her half brother, really. He was supposed to be gone tonight and the next. Pike was a watcher for the Baron. A traitor as far as any farmer was concerned. But, then, none of the farmers knew Pike was the Baron’s son by rape.

Harvest had told him the ugly truth. What had happened to her mother many years ago. How the Baron had taken Pike aside and told him the truth about his lineage. Pike then turned on Gar, who had loved him as his true son his entire life, and for reasons Aven couldn’t understand, Pike had embraced the Baron even though he knew what the Baron did to his mother.

What did the Baron give him that was worth spitting on the face of his family?

On the night of their escape, Harvest’s father, Gar, would bind Pike’s hands as he slept, then wake him and tell him their plan to leave. Pike would be asked to make his decision then: stay with his family, or continue eating from the Baron’s table while the farmers ate scraps.

Aven came around a bend in the road and saw the small open acreage where Harvest lived on the eastern border of Plot Eight. Rows of sape vines hung from trellises. The vineyards, once believed to be a pathway to independence for the farmers tending Rhaudius’s land, were now only a symbol of the Baron’s wealth. The sun-beaten wire trellis on which the sape berries hung was a more fitting symbol for the farmers.

Harvest’s hovel was at the base of a bulge oak, like his own, only the trunk was larger. Light poured through a circle outline in the middle of the hatch. Aven knelt and knocked on the illumined wood. A moment later, Gar eased the door open. It was a vulnerable position, standing on a ladder, looking up through the wooden hatch to the unknown dark.

“It’s Aven. I’ve come for Harvest.”

Gar grinned, but his voice was rough as dirt. “You’ve come to kiss my daughter?”

“Yes I have,” said Aven, poised. He’d grown acquainted to Gar’s bluntness when he worked under him as a picker in the vineyards. There was often a joy behind the man’s grinding words. In the field he was not the type of man to talk poorly of the work, instead he came alive when sweat ran down his face, as if work was what he loved to do.

It was an attitude that had touched Aven profoundly.

Gar disappeared, and then
she
was there, climbing the ladder, swift and graceful, the red flower he’d given her the night before tucked into her curled hair. At the top of the steps, she looked up and smiled.

Aven took her hand and, before he could speak, she was out and pulling him off through the rows of trellises.

In the middle of the vineyard, Harvest steps became less hurried.

“I have so much to tell you,” she said. “But first, how are you?”

“I’m well. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you since breakfast.” Aven grimaced, his words sounding so formal. It had been more than two months since his mother and Harvest’s father had arranged the marriage, and still he couldn’t seem to get past the first few moments of talking to her without being awkward.