CHAPTER 0
BARON RHAUDIUS
Dirt clung to the side of the girl’s pretty 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, that 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 women 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.
“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
all they saw was 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. He could feel the fear
back in the air as the farmers’ hearts caught in their throats. Rhaudius 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 had to stay 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!” he 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
Why did she insist her visions remain a secret?
Aven glared at his twin sister, Winter, who 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. All 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.
A nostalgic smile grew on his mother’s face.
“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 her mother 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
farmhovels 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
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. Had seen the bodies of the Erdu
who’d helped them 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 out of 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 at
all. 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 them always 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 creature was a reminder of his sister’s uniqueness, her
choseness, 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. “And tonight, I do feel a sense
of danger surrounding it. 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
little 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. Sometimes her visions did not come to pass because she intervened,
and sometimes because they did 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 for all I
know.” 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 little
smile pulled 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.”
