Her Dangerous Visions (The Boy and the Beast Book 1) by Brandon Barr Read Free Book Online

thousand and eleven soldiers before departing, with twelve women, and twice as many fatherless boys from fourteen to sixteen years of age.
    It was the sight of the young men that disturbed her. She saw in their eyes the determination to avenge heroes. A father, sometimes an older brother or two. Masked on each smooth, boyish face were fears dragging like fingernails across their souls—their imagination warred between the youthful sword play of yesterday and the new reality of the Nightmares encroaching from the lands gone dark. It was that remnant of innocence that consumed Meluscia. Devoured her intimately every time she saw them . After one patrol eight years ago, she’d stood on this very balcony, a young woman of fourteen, barely out of girlhood, and watched, waiting for a particular young boy to return. He never did. Never would.
    Hearth was a cruel world and war had raged like an unquenchable fire since the dawn of their history, blindly consuming men and women. Hearth, a world out of order, as the sacred writings said.
    She gently fingered the leather grip of her sword. She would be twenty-three by the end of summer and, according to sword master Haruuz, though she was graceful, she was far too meek to ever be counted among the fighters. Her father insisted that if she desired to follow after him as Luminary of their people, she had to be acquainted with the sword. She would continue to learn just to please him, but it would never go beyond pretense.
    She saw hope in other paths for her realm. The restoration of broken alliances and the healing of old wounds between kingdoms. It would come at the cost of her people’s pride, land, and honor, but it was honest. Persuading the people of Blue Mountain Hold to travel such a radically different road was a concern that kept her up nights. Change, she was growing to discover, was a leap from a gallows into the unknown.
    But there were many things that kept her up nights—her body was housed by an anxious spirit. As much as she both cherished and feared the role of Luminary, closer to her inner heart, she feared the tradition that accompanied being a woman and a Luminary—a Luminess.
    She could never marry. Such were the customs since the beginning, and only Kayia —a Luminess whose name had become a byword for prostitutes and licentious girls—had broken this chain.
    Unless she forsook her responsibility as heiress, she could never experience the love of a man. Such was the duty of a Luminess. For her, it would be a hard path, feeling more and more like a curse, as her swelling passions and longings were screaming for her to surrender. A curse which, in the beginning, she believed in and embraced as good, but now, as desire wore on and her heart panged for a companion, she began to doubt
    Meluscia turned back to the books lying open on the table inside her room. Sunlight warmed their leathered pages.
    “Lava brains!” she cursed aloud. She hurried to shut the heavy grey curtain. The approach of her father’s army had distracted her and, unthinking, she’d exposed the manuscripts by throwing open the curtains.
    They were the oldest copies of their titles in the Hold. One was thought to be an original from the hand of the unnamed woman who penned it. Such was the opinion of her friend, Scriptorian Katlel. Though if he knew his young acolyte had taken them from the Scriptorium—or worse, that she’d exposed them to the sun—the last of his grey hair would go white.
    With care she placed the books in a basket lined with fox fur, then left the tower with her precious cargo, making her way down the steep staircase by shaft light above. The entire fortress-hold was but a gigantic worm tunnel of interconnected rooms woven together by cold, black passageways. Blue Mountain Hold had been hewn by many thousands of years of slow and steady expansion, by the will of Luminaries of five millennia.
    She doubted whether her father, or any of the oldest servants, had explored a