She slowly got up to her feet and tried to think it through. She knew that she had to be smart and she had to be bold. But, more than anything, she knew she had to follow the path of her heart.
Standing in the cave with Waysa, Serafina tried to imagine all that had happened when the conjurer attacked her mother and the cubs – the bearded man casting his spells and twisting vines. The cubs must have been terrified.
‘Is that why he attacked?’ she asked Waysa. ‘Did he want the cubs?’
‘He’s been capturing animals of all kinds,’ he said. ‘That’s why they’re fleeing. They sense the coming danger. And that’s why you and I must take the cubs and leave this place, Serafina. As soon as you are rested enough to travel at speed, we must follow your mother’s path and join her.’
Waysa’s words were a shock to her. She longed to see her mother again, but her heart ached painfully at the thought of leaving.
‘We can’t fight this darkness, Serafina,’ Waysa warned, seeming to sense what she was thinking. ‘We must flee these mountains.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ Serafina said. ‘Tell me what’s going on. Why is all this happening? Why did my mother send me back to Biltmore?’
‘Your mother loves you and her cubs more than anything in the world. She thought you’d be safe at Biltmore. But she was wrong.’
‘Is Biltmore in danger?’ Serafina asked in alarm.
‘Everything’s in danger. Especially Biltmore.’
‘What?’ Serafina said. ‘Then we need to help them, Waysa.’
‘We can’t,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘He’s far stronger than we realised. He’s even stronger than when he killed my family three weeks ago. He’s gathering more and more power as he comes this way. His power is tied to the land, to the forest and the people and animals he controls within it. But Vanderbilt and his vast estate stand in his way of controlling this region for himself.’
‘But who is he? Who is this man?’ she asked, panic building up inside her.
‘He’s a shifter, like the catamounts. He can shift into a white-faced owl at will. But he uses his power for evil, to try to control the forest, to steal from it, to take its animals and its trees and the magic within it and bend them to his will. My people call him the Darkness, for he is a future through which they cannot see. Shifters inherit their gift, pass it down from one generation to the next, but he has taken his power further. He has spent years learning to twist the world we know, to throw curses and cast spells. He wants to control this forest, to make slaves of us all, from the smallest mouse to the largest bear, and everything in between. He hates the catamounts most of all because he cannot control us. We stand against him. He will destroy anything in these mountains that gets in his way.’
‘Are you saying that he’s going to attack Biltmore?’
‘I don’t know by what path or trickery he will come,’ Waysa said. ‘He’s a conjurer of the dark arts. He does not fight with tooth and claw like you and me. He does not fight straight on. He uses subterfuge and deceit to weave his way. He flies silent. He watches like an owl and keeps himself hidden at a safe distance. He concentrates his power into weapons and then sends in his demons to do his bidding.’
Serafina tried to understand. ‘Do you mean . . . a weapon like the Black Cloak?’
Waysa nodded. ‘The Black Cloak was a collector of souls, one of the first concentrators of dark power that he ever created. I do not know all the different spells he will cast this time, but the tearing of the Black Cloak wrought a terrible new fury in him. That’s what started all this. That’s what brought him here.’
‘Are you saying the creator of the Black Cloak has come alive? Not Mr Thorne, but the cloak’s actual creator?’
‘He’s never been dead,’ Waysa said.
‘I don’t understand. Where does he come from?’
‘My father told me that the old man of the forest lived in these mountains long ago. He was born with unusual powers, but he yearned to develop and control the powers he possessed. He travelled to the Old World, where he learned the dark arts from the necromancers there. By the time he returned, he had become a powerful conjurer. He found a shadowed cave in which to live, like a spider building a nest. He cast spells on the people in the nearby village and enslaved the animals of the forest. He –’
‘Why didn’t anyone try to stop him?’ Serafina interrupted.
‘They did. The catamounts rose up against him and fought him in a great battle. They nearly defeated him. He lost his strength and became but a ghost of what he was. He’s been far away from here, gathering new skills and powers in foreign lands, but now he’s come back, more powerful than ever. Even as we speak, he’s hiding like a rattlesnake beneath a log, letting his venom build up within him, biding his time before he strikes again.’
‘Then we need to fight him!’ Serafina said.
Waysa grabbed her by the shoulders so quickly it startled her. ‘Listen to me, Serafina,’ he said, looking into her face. ‘He’s made a staff of twisted purpose to focus his power. It allows its wielder to control animals, to do his bidding against their will. And, not only that, he has a new ally, a conjurer with power frighteningly similar to his own. The two of them working together will be unstoppable. They see this as their land – their forest and their mountains – and they plan to take it all back. And the more they take, the more powerful they become. We cannot fight them!’
‘My mother will beat them!’ Serafina blurted out before she could stop herself. But even as she said it, her chest filled with a dreadful realisation. ‘My mother already fought the conjurer before, didn’t she . . .’
Waysa nodded slowly.
‘That’s why she won’t fight him again . . .’ Serafina said.
‘That’s right,’ Waysa said, but then hesitated.
She looked at him. ‘What is it? Tell me.’
Waysa lifted his eyes and met her gaze. ‘Twelve years ago, the conjurer killed your father,’ Waysa said softly.
‘My father?’ Serafina asked in astonishment. ‘My true father?’ She couldn’t even imagine this. ‘But how? Why? How do you know about my father?’
‘Your father was a catamount like us. All the catamounts knew him. Your mother hid it from you because she didn’t want you to follow in his footsteps, but he was a great warrior, the fiercest fighter and strongest leader the catamounts have ever seen. My mother and father and all the creatures of the forest fought at his side against the conjurer twelve years ago. That was when the conjurer was nearly defeated. Your father led the fight against him. He was the one who taught my father the expression that my father taught me.’
‘The expression?’ Serafina asked in confusion. ‘What expression?’
‘“Stay bold!” your father used to say when the others lost heart. It has been the mantra of the catamounts ever since. “Stay bold!”’
‘My father started that?’ Serafina asked in bewilderment. ‘But what happened to him?’
Waysa shook his head in regret. ‘Your mother and father rallied all the allies of the forest and led an attack against the conjurer. They weakened him severely, draining nearly all his power. They almost destroyed him entirely. But it is the way of his kind that even when he seems to be dead he is not. His spirit lives on. He hides in a darkness the rest of us cannot see. At the very last moment of the battle, your mother was absorbed into the Black Cloak and your father was struck down. Your father stayed bold to the very end. He saved the catamounts and the other creatures of the forest in that battle. But he lost his own life.’
‘What?’ Serafina said. ‘How could all this be true? My mother did not tell me any of this.’
‘Your mother wanted to protect you, Serafina. She didn’t want you to fight battles that you couldn’t win. She thought you would be hidden and safe within Biltmore’s walls. But it’s clear now that all is lost there too. We cannot win this war.’
‘But who is he, Waysa?’ she asked again. ‘Who is the old man of
the forest? And who is this Mr Grathan? Is that the other conjurer you spoke of? Or is it one of his demons?’
‘I do not know by what names or forms he and his allies come this time,’ Waysa said, ‘but I know the conjurer has returned. And he will kill anyone who resists him. As fiercely as your mother has always defended her territory, she knew that no matter how dangerous it was she must leave this place behind, that she must go forth as quickly as she could to search out a new territory for her and her cubs. She has gone deep into the Smoky Mountains, scouting ahead into unknown forests, talking with the catamounts there, looking for a new place for us to live. We shall find new territory in those distant mountains, a place bright and free, and we shall guard it well. The Great Smoky Mountains will be the last bastion of our kindred, Serafina, the last homeland for those few of us who have survived.’
Serafina listened to Waysa’s words in amazement. She knew the danger he was talking about. She’d experienced the conjurer’s spells firsthand. She remembered what it felt like to have the air pulled from her lungs. And she’d witnessed his staff of power at work. But, as tantalising as it was to go with Waysa and the cubs to join her mother in the mountains far away, the path with them was like the city she’d seen in the valley, and the train on the mountainside, and the wolves travelling the ridge to distant peaks: even as these new paths opened up to her, she knew they were not the paths of her heart. She wanted to go back to her pa and Braeden, and to Essie and Mr and Mrs Vanderbilt. Biltmore was her home. If the old man of the forest could steal breath and control animals, there was no end to the harm he could do. He could force Cedric to turn on Braeden. He could kill Mr Vanderbilt with the bite of a wolf. His spy, Mr Grathan, had already squirmed his way into the house like a rat through a sewer pipe. Maybe it was Grathan who wielded the staff of power that Waysa spoke of, like Mr Thorne had wielded the Black Cloak. She didn’t know exactly what their plan was, but she had to stop them.
‘Somehow, we must figure out a way to fight,’ she said fiercely. ‘I will not turn my back on the people of Biltmore.’
‘Serafina, you’ve seen his spells and his demons,’ Waysa argued. ‘We cannot fight that. I saw the very breath pulled from my sister’s lungs even as she tried to say goodbye to me. Come with me and the cubs to find your mother. We’ll go up into the Smoky Mountains, and we’ll be safe there. There are trees and valleys and rivers for hundreds of miles.’
‘I’m sorry, Waysa,’ Serafina said, shaking her head. ‘I have to go back.’
‘You told me that the people of Biltmore said you don’t belong with them,’ Waysa said. ‘You told me that you ran away from there. You’re a catamount, Serafina. You have us now. You don’t need them any more!’
Waysa’s words crashed into her, but she tried not to listen. She couldn’t listen. She knelt down and hugged her little siblings. ‘Go without me,’ she told Waysa. ‘Take care of the cubs. Follow my mother’s path like you planned.’
‘Serafina,’ Waysa said, his voice strong, ‘you don’t need them!’
Serafina felt the emotion welling up inside her, almost too much to bear. She stood and embraced Waysa. She held him tight for a long moment. And then she let him go, knowing that it might be the last time she ever saw him. ‘But I do need them,’ she said. ‘And, more than that, they need me.’
She looked at her catamount kin one last time, then turned and headed towards Biltmore.
‘You can’t save Biltmore all by yourself!’ Waysa shouted after her as she slipped into the underbrush.
‘I won’t be alone,’ she said.
Just before dawn, Serafina crept through the darkened forest that surrounded Biltmore. In the morning’s slow change from darkness to light, there was no breeze, no sound, just a stillness in the cold air and the breathing of the earth. The mist floated like long-stretching grey clouds among the branches of the trees. She was eager to find her way up to the house. But then she spotted the silhouette of what looked like a robed, hooded figure in the haze. She ducked down, squinting through the morning fog, trying to figure out who or what she was seeing. Was she too late? Was the conjurer already here?
The figure appeared to be a grey-bearded man with a walking stick moving slowly through the trees. As she studied him, he seemed to drift in and out of the mist, disappearing for several beats of her heart, then re-emerging again. Was it the old man of the forest? Then she saw him poke his walking stick into the ground, take something small out of his satchel, kneel down and bury it.
As she crept closer, she saw he wasn’t wearing the robes she’d thought she’d seen before, but a long, lightweight coat against the morning chill. It was the elderly stranger she’d seen walking into the forest with Mr Vanderbilt. And she’d seen him again standing with the other guests the night she fled.
She watched him, trying to understand what he was doing. He walked another twenty feet, then looked around, seemed to make a decision, and then knelt down again. It took her several seconds to realise that the small things he was pulling out of his satchel were acorns. He was planting trees.
Memories flooded into her brain like water that had been blocked behind a dam for many years. He wasn’t a stranger at all. She had watched this man years before. His name was Mr Frederick Law Olmsted. He was the landscape architect who had designed the grounds of Biltmore Estate, and he was one of Mr Vanderbilt’s closest friends and mentors. Biltmore had been his last and most ambitious project before he retired. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen him. Was it three years ago? Four? Mr Olmsted’s face was far older than she remembered, and his body more frail, like something had happened to him while he was gone.
When she was just learning to prowl the grounds, she had seen Mr Olmsted supervising hundreds of men constructing the gardens and the grounds according to his design. But there had been other times, quieter moments like this, when she saw him by himself, when he didn’t think anyone else was watching, walking alone with his knobby cane in his hand and his leather satchel over his shoulder, seeming to wander the fields and woodlands, planting tree after tree after tree, as if shaping the very future of the forest. It was as if he could envision in his mind what it would look like a hundred years hence. And while he was a famous man who worked on a grand scale with hundreds of workers at his command, sometimes, secretly, he still liked to plant certain seeds and saplings himself, as if to touch the soil for touching’s sake. A hickory here. A rhododendron bush there. Somehow, he could see the future.
It was hard to imagine now, years later, with Mr Olmsted’s young forest flourishing all around them, but when Mr Vanderbilt and Mr Olmsted first came to this area, most of the trees had been cut down, the farms had been spoiled and the terrain had been what her pa called a scald – treeless, ruined land. Her pa had told her that it was Mr Olmsted and Mr Vanderbilt who had decided to change all that.
As Mr Olmsted made his way through the forest, Serafina realised that he must be heading out towards the Squatter’s Clearing, one of the few remaining areas of the estate that had not yet been planted with either garden, farm or forest. She was relieved that the elderly wanderer was Mr Olmsted, but she wondered why he had come back to visit Biltmore again after all his years away. And what was this normally peaceful man so determined to do that it got him up in the morning before the sun even rose?
Leaving Mr Olmsted behind her, Serafina slipped quietly through the darkness into the Biltmore gardens, past the pond, along the azalea path and to the conservatory, its thousands of steamed glass panes glistening in the morning starlight. She remembered one time, when she was eight years old, her pa had come over to repair the hothouse’s boiler and she had prowled among the exotic plants, pretending to be a jaguar in the jungles of South America.
Making her way up into the shrub garden with its meandering, crisscrossing paths, she smelled the winter bloom of the Carolina jessamine. Coming with the season’s crisp air, and the explosion of green and red holly and mistletoe in the surrounding woods, th
e yellow flower of the jessamine always reminded her that Christmas would soon arrive. But never mind gentle Mr Olmsted, and the mistletoe, and Christmas, she thought, catching herself. There’d be no Biltmore at all if she didn’t stop Mr Grathan and the dark forces she’d seen in the forest.
She crawled through the airshaft at the rear foundation of Biltmore House and climbed up through the metal grate. After being away for several nights, the dark, quiet, secluded corridors of the basement were a welcoming home.
The smell of the pastry kitchen and the warm sheets in the laundry and all the other things she’d grown up with brought a swirl of fond memories back into her heart.
She made her way to the workshop, past the benches and tools, and back into the supply racks, where she found her pa sleeping on his mattress, gently snoring. She thought about going to her own mattress to sleep, but she didn’t. Without making a sound or disturbing him in any way, she curled up beside her pa. She’d never been so happy to be home in her life.
She did not wake him, because she still felt ashamed of the incident that had caused her to run away. She didn’t know how he would react to her when he woke. But she was sure that as he slept he somehow knew that she was there, curled up beside him, that she was still alive, still prowling the shadows of the house and forest, and that she still loved him with all her heart.
When her pa opened his eyes, he roused himself from his cot and looked at her as if to be sure that he wasn’t dreaming.
‘Pa . . .’ she said softly.
He swept her up into his arms and pulled her into his great chest and swooshed her around the room, as if to capture her and never let her go.
‘I was so worried about you,’ he said, relief flowing through his words. As she felt her heart breaking free with joy, she knew she was finally home.
When they settled down, she explained to her pa everything that had caused her to leave, that she never meant to hurt anyone. And as her pa started making their breakfast, he gave her a bit of a gentle talking-to.
Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series) Page 14