Serafina and the Splintered Heart

by Robert Beatty

  “I had to save as many of the wolves as I could,” he said, shaking his head. “But finally the hawks pulled me out. I still can’t believe we lost. I thought we finally had him, but…we lost so many of our friends. My horse, and many of the crows and the wolves…”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. She knew he was hurting.

  He shook his head sadly, even as he held her. “I told them all how dangerous it was going to be, but they wanted to fight anyway. They were very brave.”

  She hugged him a little tighter before she let him go.

  “Our friends fought with great honor, and you led them well,” Serafina said. “We fought against our enemy the very best we could.”

  She and Braeden followed Waysa as he carried Rowena toward the house. Braeden went ahead and opened the front door for him, and then led them upstairs.

  Serafina had seen many strange and wondrous things at Biltmore, but this was a sight she had never imagined: a dark-haired Cherokee catamount boy carrying a redheaded young English sorceress up the Grand Staircase of Biltmore Estate at sunrise.

  “Let’s take her up to the South Tower Room on the third floor,” Braeden said, leading the way. “My uncle was worried about my aunt’s condition, so he took her into Asheville while the road was still partially clear. We have most of the house to ourselves.”

  But just as he was saying this, a young dark-haired maid in a black-and-white uniform came bustling down the staircase, clearly not expecting to encounter anyone so early in the morning. Serafina was delighted to see that it was her old friend Essie Walker. Essie seemed so flush and full of life as she bustled down the stairs.

  “Oh dear, y’all, pardon me,” Essie said in surprise, catching herself up short as she came to an abrupt stop in front of them. Essie caught eyes with Waysa first, and seemed to snag there for a moment, but then she immediately moved her attention to the unconscious girl he was carrying. “Oh my, what’s happened to the poor girl? Is she badly hurt?”

  But then in the next instant, as Essie’s eyes lifted, she noticed the young master Braeden and then Serafina beside him. Essie’s eyes widened, like she was seeing a haint. Not anymore, Serafina thought.

  “Essie, it’s me,” Serafina said, smiling as she moved toward her old friend.

  Essie’s face lit up. “Eh law, Miss Serafina, it’s you!” she cried. “Where’d you get off to all this time, girl? It’s been so long! I’m so glad you’re all right! Your poor old pa is going to weep buckets when he sees you!”

  Braeden quickly led them all up to the South Tower Room. It was a large, elegant, oval bedroom with an elaborate crown-canopied bed, hand-carved ivory-white molding running along the arc of its curved walls, and a domed ceiling.

  As Waysa set Rowena gently down on the bed, Serafina noticed that Essie was staring at him intently. When the catamount boy stepped away from Rowena, Essie’s eyes followed him. It was like she had never seen anything like him—neither inside the hallowed walls of Biltmore or out in the wider world—and what she saw now fascinated her.

  When Waysa lifted his brown eyes and looked at Essie, she said, “Oh lord, pardon me,” and turned aside, her face red. “I’ll fetch some warm water and towels right away,” she said as she hurried out of the room.

  Braeden sat on the edge of the bed beside Rowena, attending to her the best he could as he tried to examine her wounds. Her head was bleeding and there was a scrape on her shoulder, but there were no gaping cuts or obviously broken bones.

  “She’s been unconscious since Uriah threw her against the rock, but otherwise, she doesn’t seem to be too badly hurt,” Braeden said.

  When Essie returned with the supplies, Braeden dipped one of the towels in the basin and then wiped Rowena’s head and face thoroughly with the wet cloth, trying to clear some of the blood away.

  Serafina gazed at Rowena lying unconscious in the bed. Through all the riddles and sharp talk, in the end, Rowena had been true to her word: the sorceress had brought her back into the living world. And Rowena had betrayed her father. But what struck Serafina most was the memory of Rowena leaping into the path of the fireball to save Braeden’s life. There seemed to be far more to Rowena than Serafina had realized.

  The passing of time and Braeden’s attentions with the damp cloth seemed to have an effect on Rowena. She stirred with a groan, and then appeared as if she was slowly coming to. Finally, she opened her eyes and looked around at the four people staring at her.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Did the plan work? Is he dead?”

  We failed, Serafina thought as she sat in the South Tower Room with the others. We failed to defeat Uriah. They had developed a plan, gathered all their allies, and attacked in force, but they had still failed.

  Serafina looked around at her three companions.

  Rowena, battered and disoriented, rose from her bed and began to pace back and forth, rubbing her face anxiously, worried that her father was still alive.

  Waysa went over to one of the room’s three sunlit bays, pulled aside the elegant curtains, and opened the window to the outside. He stood looking out across the forested valley of the great river to the misty blue mountains of the southern range. In the distance, toward the rising peak of Mount Pisgah, the dark shapes of storm clouds gathered on the horizon. Serafina thought that he must be keeping a watchful eye for their enemy, but ever since their arrival at Biltmore that morning, Waysa had been restless. As a catamount who had lived all his life with his family in the forest, he wasn’t used to being indoors. He didn’t trust the smooth, flat ground or the closed-in walls in these unnaturally quiet caves, this place without tree or fern, without the sound of birds or insects, without the feel of the wind in his hair, and he hated not being able to see the sun or moon.

  For her part, Serafina was happy to take advantage of the shelter of the room. When Essie brought in a tray of food for them and set it on the fine mahogany table in the sitting area in the center of the room, Serafina gobbled it down with the others.

  “Essie, this is my friend,” Serafina said. “His name is Waysa.”

  As Waysa turned and stepped toward her, Essie said, “Howdayado,” and curtsied nervously.

  “It’s very good to meet you, Miss,” Waysa said, clearly trying to sound as kind as possible.

  “I’m so happy to see you, Essie,” Serafina said smiling and hugging her. “I looked for you earlier. Why weren’t you in your room on the fourth floor?”

  “I’ve been promoted!” Essie said, filled with pride, but then she quickly remembered everyone else. “I’ll tell you all about it, but I’ll let y’all talk first.”

  “Thank you for everything, Essie,” Braeden said, as Essie left the room. He, too, seemed relieved to be back in the comfortable routine and relative safety of Biltmore’s sunlit rooms.

  But they all knew they couldn’t truly rest here.

  “So, now what are we going to do?” Braeden asked, looking around at the others.

  “We have to go back out there,” Waysa urged.

  When Braeden lowered his head, Serafina knew that he was thinking about his horse and the wolves and his other friends who had died in the battle during the night.

  Seeing Braeden’s sadness, Waysa said, “I don’t wish to fight, but none of us—including our allies in the forest—are safe until we destroy him.”

  Serafina glanced over at Rowena, who had stopped pacing and was looking at them now, her face clouded with fear and uncertainty. She glanced at the door and then the windows as if she thought her father was going to crash into the room at any moment.

  Serafina tried to think about what they should do. She knew that if she stood up right now and called for an immediate attack against Uriah that they would probably join her, and she wanted to do just that, she wanted to fight, but deep down, she knew it would be a mistake.

  Finally, she turned to the sorceress.

  “What about you, Rowena?” she asked gently. “What do you want to do?”

 
; Rowena shook her head, clenching her jaw, but did not reply.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” Serafina urged her.

  “It doesn’t matter what I’m thinking,” Rowena said.

  “But I can see you’re gnawing on something…”

  Rowena shook her head again, annoyed that Serafina was pressing her. But then she began to speak.

  “I didn’t know my father for the first thirteen years of my life,” she said. “When I was four or five years old, my mother used to tell me stories about him, that he was traveling in other countries searching for the ancient lore, but I didn’t understand what her words truly meant, and she died before I was old enough to ask.”

  “So you were born with…” Serafina began to say.

  “I sensed there was something inside me, but I didn’t know what it was or how to control it,” Rowena said. “All I knew was that I was different from others, that I could do things. When my mother died, the authorities put me into an orphanage, but the adults there couldn’t raise me any more than a fly can raise a wasp.”

  As Rowena spoke, the others listened in silence.

  “Years later, my father came to the orphanage and retrieved me. I didn’t know him, but I thought that everything I had endured up to that point in my life had been the darkness, the twisting, painful birth of what I was, and that now, with my new father, my life would truly begin.”

  “Is that when you came to America?” Serafina asked.

  “Not at first. First, he trained me how to use the powers within me that had been such a mystery to me all my life. Then he brought me here, back to these mountains where he was born. He’d come to fight his old enemy, and he set me on a path. I followed it gladly. I was appreciative of the chance to help him, hungry for his attention and approval. I wanted to become everything he wanted me to be.”

  Rowena hesitated, seemingly lost in the shadows of her own story for a moment, but then she continued, her voice ragged with her determination not to falter. “Trapping animals in cages, killing a man with snakes, hurling a dog from a staircase, throwing a boy from his horse, dragging him over the stones, striking him with wounds, fighting, always fighting, and the blood on the Loggia…” Her words dwindled into nothingness and she looked down at the floor. And then, after a long pause, she lifted her eyes to them and said, “What do you do when you realize you are the monster in your own story?”

  For a moment, they were all still. And then Serafina answered, “You rewrite the story.”

  Rowena looked at her sharply, almost malevolently. “The past cannot be changed.”

  “But the future can,” Serafina shot back.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Rowena said, turning away from her.

  Just as Serafina was about to argue that it does matter, she realized that Rowena didn’t actually believe the words she had just said. It wasn’t a trick or a lie, but a shield, and Serafina had heard these words before. It doesn’t matter now, Rowena had said when they first spoke at her lair, just the ramblings of a troubled soul, nothing of consequence.

  Serafina looked up at Rowena. “It was you. You came to my grave to speak to me about all this…The voice I heard…You were the one who woke me…”

  Rowena did not turn, did not look at her. For a moment it seemed as if she was going to walk out the door and never come back.

  But then Braeden stepped toward Rowena and touched her arm. It was like he had cast a spell on her and she could not move. “What do you mean it doesn’t matter?” he asked. “Of course it matters. What are you saying, Rowena? You’re going to stay with us, aren’t you?”

  And that caught her. Rowena slowly turned and looked at him.

  Serafina could see in Rowena’s eyes an awareness of all the suffering she had caused. A troubled soul, nothing of consequence, she had said of herself. Somehow Rowena had found a path through it all. But Serafina could see a deep hopelessness in Rowena now, as if the sorceress knew there was no way to make things right, no way to protect Braeden or herself or any of them from her father, that feelings didn’t matter, it was all going to end in the same way no matter what she did.

  Serafina moved toward her. “You change, Rowena,” she said firmly. “If you don’t like the way you are, you make yourself different. That’s what you’ve done. That’s what you’ve been doing. You’ve been hiding from your father, finding a new way. I know you’re discouraged and scared. We all are. But you can rewrite the story. You determine what needs to be done and you do it, whatever it is, no matter how difficult it seems. There’s no choice here. You do what’s right.”

  “No,” Rowena snarled at her. “That’s exactly my point, cat. There is a choice. You have a choice between right and wrong at every step you take…There’s always a choice.”

  “And you’ve made your choice, and you’re going to keep making it,” Serafina said, refusing to back down. “You’ve chosen to fight with us.”

  “Yes, I made my choice,” Rowena said, her voice strained. “And now we have a war. We surprised my father up there on the mountain. We wounded him. But he’ll come back for us now, hunt us, because vengeance, more than anything else, is what drives him. He shifts, he adapts, that’s what he does—he’s a snake that sheds its skin—but I’m warning you: my father is going to come for us for what we did last night. And he will kill us all. Starting with me.”

  Waysa stepped toward her. “You are one of us now, Rowena. We’ll all fight this together. We’re going to stop him before he can hurt you or any of us.”

  Braeden listened to Waysa, and then looked at Serafina and Rowena. “But we’ve already fought him and struck him down repeatedly, and he keeps coming back. We threw everything we had at him last night, and lost many good friends, and he still defeated us. How are we going to kill an enemy who can’t be killed?”

  The room went quiet.

  No one had an answer. The young sorceress didn’t storm from the room, but she didn’t speak, either. She seemed even more distressed by their failure to defeat her father than the rest of them.

  When Rowena noticed that Serafina was looking at her, the sorceress turned toward her and said, “Mark my words, he’s going to come after us.”

  Rowena’s words echoed in Serafina’s mind. She was sure she was right. But Serafina had no solution to the problem, no attack or defense, and neither did her companions. None of them knew what to do.

  While the others got cleaned up, found some more food in the kitchen, and rested after the long, difficult night, Serafina went downstairs to the workshop to see her pa. She found him cooking up some breakfast in the black iron skillet.

  “That was a jenny-wallop of a storm last night,” he said, as she walked in. “Me and the rest of the crew were workin’ most the night, repairin’ what damage we could. Where’d you hunker down?”

  “Didn’t get much sleep,” she said, sitting down at the little table where they ate their meals.

  “Everything all right?” he asked, concerned. “You’re lookin’ a little worse for wear.”

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  “But I can see your gears are a-turnin’,” he said as he put a plate of food in front of her.

  “I just have a question, is all,” she said, picking up and chewing on a piece of ham. “Somethin’ I need your help with.”

  “Put me on the scent of it and I’ll be off on the bay,” he said, using his favorite expression about barking coon dogs to say he was happy to help if she told him what it was about.

  “What do you do when you’re working on a machine, or some other kind of problem, and you just can’t fix it? It just seems impossible,” she asked.

  Her pa looked at her. She was pretty sure that he could see that it was something important to her.

  “When I’m faced with what seems like an unsolvable problem,” he said, “I do all that I can do, and when that’s not enough, I stop, and I step back. I study it real careful-like, look at it from different angles, try to think about it i
n ways that I never thought of before, and maybe nobody else has either.”

  “And does it work?”

  “Sometimes. But the main of it is that the most important tool in your toolbox isn’t the screwdriver or the wrench. It’s your imagination.”

  Serafina was listening to her pa’s words, but he must have seen the quizzical expression on her face.

  “Let’s try it,” he said. “Give me a ‘for instance.’”

  “Pa?”

  “Put me in a fix and let’s see how I get out of it.”

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s say you want to hammer a nail into a board. You line up the nail, you hold it with your fingers, and you hit the nail on the head with your hammer repeatedly. It goes in a little bit, just enough to stick, but it doesn’t go in all the way. You strike the nail with your hammer again and again as hard as you can, and still it doesn’t go in. You even get three of your friends to help you, but no matter what you do, no matter how hard you pound, the nail won’t go in. So what do you do?”

  “I set down the hammer,” he said.

  She smiled, thinking he was joking, telling her that he’d just give up, but then she realized he wasn’t playing. He meant it.

  “I set down the hammer,” he said again. “I’d take a step back, you see, figure out what I’m truly tryin’ to do, and figure out a mend that doesn’t involve a hammer. Or maybe even a nail.”

  Serafina gazed at her pa and tried to reckon his words. She wasn’t certain, but she thought she maybe understood.

  As they finished their breakfast and washed up the plates, her pa said, “I gonna be fixin’ one of the jammed-up coal chutes. It’s been leakin’ storm water somethin’ awful down into the basement every time it rains. I don’t know what the rest of the day holds, but I’ll be around.” Then he looked at her, his eyes steady on her. “What about you?”

  “I’ll find you,” she said, and that was what he needed to hear to know that she’d do her best to keep herself safe, and that he’d see her soon.