Darkness
Chapter 1

March 22, 1812

Natchez, Mississippi Territory

Gregor

I hear the little snuffling noises that the baby is making as he nurses, breaking into my disturbing dreams, and I am confused when I open my eyes. Before I can orient myself, figure out where I am, I feel a hand caress my face, and to my shame, I flinch.

“I’m sorry, Gregor,” Rosalind says at once, retracting her hand.

I reach out and take back her hand, bringing it to my lips, kissing her fingers. “Please, Rosalind, never apologize for touching me. Or for anything else, for that matter. I was just dreaming….” I don’t want to tell her what I was dreaming about.

“She guessed from how much you were twitching,” Wolk whispers, my invisible Guardian hovering nearby. Oh no, I was twitching?

I can’t seem to stop making a spectacle of myself. The dream was about what happened yesterday, saving Moses, being bound to the whipping post, the dog dying at my feet, Smith behind me not with the whip, but slashing me with claws, transformed by my sleeping subconscious into an enormous and inhuman monster, not the irritating little man he truly is.

Why was I dreaming such an awful thing? Have I ever had a real nightmare before? Not that I can remember. I have scarcely even dreamed before. For that matter, I have hardly ever slept. This is all very unusual.

“Your body is still healing,” Wolk explains to me. “You needed the sleep.”

“How long was it?” I think silently to him, realizing that the sun has already risen outside the windows. I don’t think it was even dark yet last night when I fell asleep.

“Fourteen hours.”

What? How is that even possible? That has certainly never happened before.

“As I said, your body needed the sleep. You are substantially healed now.”

I sit up and roll my shoulders, realizing that my back is no longer burning with pain, although I can still feel the stiffness, the tenderness. I wouldn’t have thought that thirty-nine lashes would cause so much damage.

“Do you remember what I told you yesterday?” Wolk asks as I walk to our side room to use the chamber pot. He seems to want to tread lightly with our conversation. I’m not sure what he said, and try to think back. Yesterday is really a blur. “I believe your own healing was delayed because you exerted all of your effort in healing Tiger. It seems that is why you slept so long, because your body was trying to re-adjust and take care of your own needs.”

Well then. I suppose that knocking me out was the only way to accomplish that. Wolk snickers, back in his usual wolf form. I have a flash of memory of him yesterday, dissolved into a cloud, nothing but an anxious mist floating next to me as I was flogged. He regards me sadly. He remembers too.

I return to bed and sit myself up against the headboard, next to Rosalind, as she holds our son to her breast. She winces and sucks her breath in through her teeth, and her hand darts out again involuntarily. “Should you be doing that?” she asks, touching my shoulder.

Oh, right. The skin of my back does feel a little tender. I lean up and twist sideways so she can see it. “I think it’s all right. How does it look?” She’s my wife, I’ll let her be in charge of this decision.

I feel her fingers very lightly stroking down across my flesh, and I try unsuccessfully to suppress an involuntary shiver. “Does that hurt?” she whispers.

“No,” I say, despite realizing how sensitive my newly healed skin is. But I look at her flirtatiously, and say, “your touch always does that to me.”

“Pfsh!” she snorts out, and Vernon lurches back from her breast and stares at her. It makes us both chuckle, and somehow it feels strange to me, as though I had never expected to do that again.

She gets him reattached, then looks back over to me, her face the very picture of concern. “It’s healing,” she says, “but you still have a lot of very angry looking red lines all over you.”

I shrug and lean back against the headboard. “Well, as long as it’s not bleeding I won’t make a mess,” I try to joke, and she just wrinkles her nose at me. I wish we could move past what happened yesterday. It’s over. Can’t we just get back to normal? Although I have to say that I’m probably lucky that I can’t see behind myself. I’ll bet it looks awful.

“It does,” Wolk says, seeming more unsettled than usual.

What is going on around here? Why do my wife and my Guardian both seem so concerned? Because I slept for so long?

“I’m sorry I left you alone all night,” I tell her, reaching over to rub my hand against her arm. “How many times did Vernon wake up?” I’d like to discuss something mundane.

“A couple,” she murmurs. She looks like she is hesitant to say something.

I look over to Wolk and he remains silent. He’s no help. I turn back to her. “What is it, darling?” I ask her, realizing that they aren’t telling me something. I realize also that I am finally starting to get over a strange drowsiness that has stayed with me. “Is there something else?”

Vernon finishes eating, and she goes to lift him to her shoulder. “May I?” I ask, reaching over. She hesitates, which is the strangest thing of all.

“What is it?” I repeat. “Is there something I should know about?” Did I miss more than I realize?

She hands Vernon to me, and I lift him to my shoulder and start patting his back. Ahhhh. It always feels so nice to hold him. I look into her eyes, and she hesitates. I lift my eyebrows at her, waiting.

“Um… you… I….” She stops speaking, frustrated. “Ask Wolk! I wanted to ask you the entire time what was happening but I couldn’t. I wanted to hear from him what it was!”

I gape at her. It was a whipping, obviously. “What it was?” I look back over to Wolk, thoroughly confused. He remains silent again, seeming weirdly uneasy. Ugh. He’s really being no help, which is extremely uncharacteristic. I’ll have to rely on my wife. “Rosalind, I don’t understand. Wasn’t it clear what was happening? I assume you were watching the whole thing, at least after Tiger came running back. What else is there to know?”

She stares at me incredulously. Vernon gives a tiny burp, and I want to thank him. At least he’s acting normally, unlike these two.

There’s a beat of silence while I transfer Vernon into my arms and cradle him against my bare chest. Rosalind and Wolk are both staring at me.

“Will somebody please tell me?” I say to both of them. “Apparently something else happened while I was… well… distracted.” Even I realize this effort at humor is not a bit funny.

She lifts her shoulders helplessly and says, “I’m not sure I can describe it. While you were being… well, during it, everyone felt very… um… just very emotional. Not only me. I think everyone was crying. The women, the men, some of the slave patrol even. Some people started screaming and ran away.”

What? The whipping seemed a lot worse to me than others I have observed, of course, because I was the subject. But I can’t imagine that for casual observers it seemed particularly unusual, except for the dog trying to jump in and getting shot. “You mean,” I ask, puzzled, “because they were worried about Tiger? Or maybe because they knew the slave patrol was whipping someone who wasn’t a slave? That’s why they were upset?”

She huffs, and rolls her eyes, and to my surprise addresses my Guardian directly. She is perfectly aware that I can see and hear him, although she of course cannot. “Wolk! Help me out here! I knew this all had something to do with you, but I couldn’t ask. Just tell him!”

My eyes must be huge as I turn them on my Guardian. “Spit it out, Wolk. What is she talking about?”

The wolf looks at me, and reluctantly says, “The crowd was able to feel your emotions. I was unable to maintain control over the shield.”

“Ohhhhh,” I whisper. It’s starting to make sense. “Like what happened at Forks of the Road?”

“Exactly, although this time it was more involuntary. I truly did lose control.” He seems embarrassed, as if that is possible for a Guardian.

I can tell that there is more that he needs to tell me, but Rosalind interrupts.

“Look you two,” she says, “do you really think it’s fair to be whispering behind my back? Gregor, I know you still have secrets to keep, but please, can you just tell me what he is saying about yesterday?”

Oh. She is totally right. This is so unfair to her. I look into her eyes, feeling Vernon squirming and waving his hands. I glance down for a moment while I lay him on the bed between us so he can stretch out, then return my gaze to hers. “I am so sorry, Rosalind. You are correct. It is not fair for us to be whispering without you. You deserve to hear everything, just as much as I do. He said that everyone in the crowd could feel my emotions because he couldn’t control the shield.”

“What do you mean, shield?” she asks, perplexed.

I think back. I don’t think I’ve ever explained this part to her. “It’s something I didn’t tell you before, not because I wanted to keep it as a secret. I genuinely don’t mean to keep secrets from you any more. You’re my partner, you should know everything.” Her face wrinkles with emotion, and I feel bad that I had not made that clear to her before. “Really,” I go on, “I want to be an open book with you. But I didn’t tell you about the shield because I didn’t think it would ever really matter to you. Wolk keeps me hidden from other Guardians. He creates a sort of shield so that they can’t hear our thoughts.”

She tilts her head sideways. “Why?”

“Well, when I was younger we realized that other Guardians were always staring at me. Knowing that I could see Wolk made them uneasy sometimes. If a Guardian is uneasy, it can unknowingly make their human uneasy, and that caused problems for me on occasion. So Wolk learned how to prevent it by just hiding my true nature from them. It turns out that it also hides my feelings from humans.” I’m probably not making this very clear.

“Hides your feelings? I don’t think you’ve ever been very good at that,” she notes wryly.

I have to chuckle a little. “Well no, I’m not, not with you. You’ve always been able to tell how I feel. But it’s more than that. Wolk has told me that since I’m a Seer my emotions tend to spill out into the world.”

She stares. “You’re a what?”

Oh. Rosalind is the first normal human that I have divulged my secret to, but apparently I was not very thorough when I did it. “Wolk calls me a Seer. Didn't I tell you that before? I guess it just means a person who can see their Guardian.”

“Seer,” she repeats in a whisper. “Yes, I think you told me that once. It’s more than that, though, isn’t it,” she adds. “It's not only that you can see Wolk. You’re different in other ways, too. You heal fast, you can heal others, you claim that you’re an old man.” She smirks at me, exaggeratedly looking at my bare chest which admittedly looks barely older than she is. I’ve never looked any older than a person in their early twenties.

“I suppose so,” I say, holding Vernon’s dear little foot. “Wolk thinks that it’s all part of the same thing.” I shrug. “Anyway, part of it is that if I am very emotional, people around me can feel it, and Wolk tries to cover it up for me.”

“But he couldn’t yesterday?” she asks.

“I am so sorry darling, but your emotions were quite overwhelming, and I was distraught, and I failed to maintain the shield, especially after Tiger was injured. It was too much for me. I failed you.”

“It’s all right, Wolk, I forgive you,” I tell him aloud, figuring there is no point in not just letting Rosalind hear my part of the conversation. I can repeat what Wolk is saying to her, but why have to repeat myself as well? I look over to Rosalind. “He says that after Tiger was injured we were both so upset that he wasn’t able to maintain the shield, and that’s why I guess the other people were upset too.”

She nods, considering. “It felt so strange. I was already crying, I couldn’t stand seeing you hurt.” I know my brow furrows, hearing her confirm exactly what I had been afraid of. This was precisely why I didn’t want her watching. I can still see the shadow of pain in her eyes. I didn’t want her to have to suffer through it with me. She goes on, disregarding my expression, lost in her memory of yesterday, “But then it was like I felt so much worse all of a sudden. Like the sun was covered, and there was a storm of sorrow washing over us all. And I could tell everyone was feeling it. People started sobbing out loud. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“A storm of sorrow?” I repeat. “What a description. My goodness, I didn’t want the whole bloody town to feel that.”

“I did,” Wolk says darkly, and I look at him in surprise. “Once I knew that your emotions had all blasted out through the shield, I just wanted everyone to feel your despair and your pain. I thought they should know what they had done. They deserved it, all of them,” he adds.

Oh. “Um, Wolk says he was glad that everyone felt it. I guess he thought they deserved it for getting me into the fix I was in.” I certainly don’t think so - nobody deserved to feel that, not me, definitely not all those poor townsfolk who had nothing to do with any of it. Wolk shakes his head at me. I don’t think I’ll change his mind on that point.

“So he couldn’t hide your emotions,” she repeats, “I guess I understand that. And I agree with Wolk. A lot of those people really needed a good dose of grief about what was happening. But, then what was the other thing?”