Rising Dark (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 2) (31 page)

She’s betrayed
me
. She kept repeating it over and over
again.

Confused, my heart went out to her and
I moved out of the deep dark provided by the tree and into the
moonlight.

She is dead, Lina. That is
not a betrayal
.

She merely snorted, though I saw tears
glistening in her eyes before she threw something out of the
window. She closed the window and then I heard her get back into
bed. But she remained wide awake, her heart in turmoil and her
thoughts churning endlessly.

I moved to the small object she threw
out of the window. It was a small leather-bound journal. I opened
it and the first words were like a lance, the pain of Luna’s death
deepening.

My name is Luna and my
tale begins on a dry summer evening in 1807
.

I closed it and placed it in my
pocket. With one last look at Luna’s grave, I left. Lina didn’t
want me there. And all that lay there was Luna’s corpse, she was
gone.

I spent the rest of the night by the
lake. It was so still and peaceful, a direct contrast to the
roiling river of pain and despair rocking me.

I remained there even when it began to
snow and a soft blanket of snowfall painted the landscape white. I
didn’t want to go back to the mansion where the memories of her
would surely kill me, but at dawn, I stood up to go and found
myself standing at the chapel door. I spun round to see Mama Akosua
standing in the middle of the clearing watching me.

Usually I saw Mama in dreams and she
was always a faint, gossamer echo of the woman I had known in life.
But on this occasion, she was almost completely solid, the
strongest she had ever appeared to me since her death. I walked
toward my old friend. The fact that she should appear now in my
darkest hour was some comfort to me.

“
Mama?”

She gazed at me carefully and there
was something weary about her stance.

“
I have fulfilled my
promise to you, but she is still angry. You have to remember that
and tend her anger like you would tend seeds, otherwise it will
rise up and strangle the good you have sown.”

“
Mama, I do not
understand.”

“
Go home,
Wɔfa
Avery.” She placed
a hand on my cheek and a small tired smile touched her lips
briefly. It was quickly replaced by apprehension. “Be
careful.”

She was gone and I was standing alone
at the foot of the lake. Confused, and with a strong sense of
foreboding, I ran back to the mansion.

The heartbeat was the first thing that
filled my ears when I materialised out of the ether some distance
from the mansion. Amidst a sea of snow was a small figure standing
before the mansion. I had to look carefully over every inch of the
figure. First the slim brown legs in battered men’s boots. Up at
the slender body in a faded blue dress that was too small and the
grey blanket that was wrapped around her. She looked incredibly
forlorn and vulnerable as she shivered against the cold. At last I
gazed at the face peeping over the blanket she held up to her
neck.

I was looking at Luna’s face, the
young, fresh face I had seen during those years in the wilderness,
and the one I saw for the very first time when she wandered out of
the chapel to the stream all those years ago. There were tears in
her eyes and a wistful half smile as she gazed at me.

I found I could not move. I was scared
to move, to do or say anything that would break the spell and
render me out of whatever dream I was clearly in.

She reached out a trembling hand and
took a shaky step forward, and before I realised I had moved, I was
standing before her, reaching out to clasp the proffered hand even
though I still believed it must be some kind of trick or
illusion.

“
Luna? Is it really
you?”

“
Yes,” she whispered
reaching up to touch my face as if in disbelief, tears falling onto
her cheeks. “Yes, Avery.”

I gathered her small, trembling body
to mine. That was when I realised with a jolt that the years of
despair were at an end.

She had returned to me.

And in my exhilaration, Mama and her
warning were completely lost to me. But the seed of what would
eventually destroy us were there even then.

She was so beautiful, her raven eyes
shining with unshed tears and the pain of those forty years of
separation from me.

“
I thought I’s gonna die
without ever seeing you again,” she said, her voice trembling with
intense emotion. “But I still ain’t give up on you. You has to
promise that you ain’t never gonna leave me again. You has to
promise, Avery, ‘cause I ain’t gonna let you do that to me a second
time.”

“
Nothing will ever keep us
apart again,” I promised.

There was a clear threat behind Luna’s
words that morning, but I mistook it for passion. And I continued
to be blind to the little manifestations of it over the years, and
just as Mama had warned, the seed grew until eventually it overran
our little garden of love.

So I turned to the Garden of
Love,

That so many sweet flowers
bore;

And saw it was filled with
graves,

And tombstones where flowers should
be;

And Priests in black gowns were
walking their rounds,

And binding with briers my joys and
desires.

–
William Blake,
The Garden of Love

In the beginning we were very happy.
That first week, Luna and I rarely left the red velvet room, which
had been redecorated along with the rest of the mansion. It was not
so much about our need to slay our physical desire for one another.
Often it was merely to hold each other, as it was still so
difficult to believe that after so, so long, we were together
again. So we stayed in her room—which was now our room—and mainly
lay in silence in each other’s arms, bathed in the other’s
thoughts. Now she could read my thoughts as easily as I could read
hers, we achieved an intimacy that few mortals will ever have the
privilege of experiencing.

I discovered much during that first
week. I saw the years she spent with Jupiter and how she pined
desperately for me. I also saw the dream that had terrified her, a
dream in which she saw me shrouded in darkness whilst some
nameless, faceless evil descended on me. She had lunged at the
threat only to be caught in a circle of flames and then awoke in
bed with Jupiter, her agonised screams piercing the
night.

There was no denying the fact that
Luna had been the one to save me from Onyx. And it was during those
first few days that the mystery of how I came to see Luna’s face
all those years ago was revealed to me. Luna had been able to
somehow reach into the past, to reach me in those years spent in
the wilderness, and tell me to wait for her.

My Luna, my immortal beloved. There
simply would never be another like her.

Luna was here with me and I had all I
waited in the wilderness for, and so much more. So I returned
Luna’s journal to her old home and left it outside on the porch for
Lina to find. For it had been written for her, a way for Luna to
perhaps explain her actions in seemingly abandoning
Lina.

We experienced a kind of paradise
during those first few months. Our days were spent sleeping in
large, bed-sized chests, our nights spent reading, walking,
talking, and sometimes travelling through North America. The world
was ours.

One night I sat and watched her read
for over an hour, marvelling at her extraordinary beauty. Her skin
was like beautiful dark wood that had been buffed to perfection,
her hair an ebony halo around her face. And her eyes, there was an
ancient magic in her eyes, a dark light that shone from them,
keeping me captivated. Such beauty was simply—

“
Hush, Avery. I’s trying
to read.” She looked up, a small crease lining her brow in such an
adorable sign of irritation.

“
But I’m not doing
anything.”

“
How you expect me to read
with all that chatter?”

“
My thoughts? Of course. I
will think quietly,” I said with a smile.

She scowled and battered her eyelashes
at me.

She was simply adorable when she
became irritated. And her voice. Ah, it was like rich, smoky, warm
honey. I could listen to her talk for hours, the—

“
Avery!” She brought a
finger to her lips. “Shhhhhh.”

“
Of course, whatever you
want, Luna.”

But I continued to sit there,
marvelling at the way she sometimes bit her bottom lip, her brow
creased in concentration when a book had completely absorbed her
attention. And her hands, with those long, slender fingers. I loved
that her nails were long now instead—

She slammed the book shut. “Avery!
Would you—”

“
All right, all right. I
will go for a walk and leave you in peace.”

I kissed her on the cheek, letting my
lips linger for much longer than was needed, and then
left.

Outside in the cool crisp night air, I
sighed, already bored. I had no interest in travelling to some town
nearby and drinking my time away in an anonymous tavern. It was too
late now anyhow, so I decided to spend a few hours by the
lake.

I made my way to the lake, already
disgruntled at being forced away from the object of my affections.
I would stay there for a maximum of twenty minutes and then return
to tell her it was simply objectionable to have her out of my sight
for such a long period of time.

I almost reached the lake when I heard
something out by the water. I spurred myself onwards breaking out
of the trees and onto the grass by the lake. A smile lit up my
face. Who should I see sitting before me on a blanket with her head
bent over her book?

Luna.

She looked up as I came to sit before
her, a smile dancing around her eyes. She held an index finger
briefly to her lips before her gaze returned to the book. It wasn’t
long before more complaints were voiced regarding my noisy
thoughts.

We were so in love, our bond unique
and enduring. But Luna returned to me at the point in time when
slavery still thrived and a union between a white man and Negro
woman was against the law. So we hid ourselves away at the mansion
and on the rare occasions we were burdened with the presence of
others, she pretended to be my slave. But it was a thorn in our
union that stung both of us, the fact that we could not legally
call ourselves man and wife.

I didn’t give Mama’s warning any
thought at all, but I soon had reason to recall it. One evening, I
awoke before Luna and left the mansion to search for flowers for
her. I returned shortly after to see her pacing the bedroom in a
state of wild panic. When I materialised in the bedroom, she simply
stared at me, her eyes hooded with some unnameable anxiety, and
then she burst into tears. Shocked, I went to put my arms around
her, but she pushed me away, and as she still had not learned to
adjust to her superior strength, the force of the push sent me
flying backwards and I hit the wall.

“
Where was you?” she
cried, decades of repressed anger springing to the surface in all
its ferocious intensity.

“
I...I...”

In the end, I merely held out the
flowers I had picked for her. She ignored them. She moved to the
window and placed her hands against her head.

“
I only wanted you to wake
up to the scent of flowers, Luna.”

“
I thought you’s never
coming back.”

“
Luna, you know why I let
you go all those years ago. I love you so much. You
know—”

She turned from the window and
disappeared, reappearing a few feet from me, anger a dark shadow,
like a third person, peering at me from behind her eyes, even as
tears coursed down her cheeks.

“
Yes! But I never even
knowed where you was, Avery. I thought I’d die never seeing you
again.”

“
I am sorry, Luna. I am
sorry,” was all I could say, simply overwhelmed by the anguish I
saw beneath the anger.

She continued to cry, recounting the
times she came out to the porch at dusk, hoping for a glimpse of
me. And of those nights she was frightened out of sleep convinced I
was in mortal danger. It was only hours later I managed to calm her
down enough for her to let me hold her as she wept in my
arms.

She could also be extremely changeable
and sometimes volatile. We did not venture into town often during
that first year, and while she was extremely antagonistic toward
whites—which I understood—she was even more so toward Negroes,
which I could not understand. As always, her emotions were
conflicting and difficult to decipher. She was angry when we came
into contact with Negroes, especially when she looked into their
minds and saw the hardship and degradation they endured on a daily
basis. But undermining that anger was a fine sheen of contempt.
Perhaps she could not reconcile what she now was, a powerful
superhuman being, to what they were and what she used to be: A
helpless slave.