Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series) (15 page)

She hit the floor hard but strong, bracing her landing with the bending, crouching muscles of her legs and arms until she was down low on her curled feet and extended hands, her body finally
still and unharmed.

She landed on her feet.

But Gidean did not.

His body slammed onto the floor beside her. She didn’t just see it and hear it; she felt the crushing blow, the crack of bones and the whimper of the dog. She knew immediately that the
battle was over.

Gidean lay beside her, his head down and bleeding, his body broken in a thousand places. He was nearly dead.

Gidean had been Braeden’s constant companion and closest friend since Braeden had lost his family. The dog had walked at Braeden’s side wherever he went, ran with him when he rode
his horse and guarded his door at night. There had been a time when she didn’t like dogs and dogs didn’t like her, but she and this dog had worked together, fought together and defended
each other. Gidean had attacked the Man in the Black Cloak and saved her life. But now Gidean lay dying on the marble floor beside her.

When a shadow moved across the moonlit floor, she thought it must be an owl or some other creature of the night outside the Grand Staircase’s windows. She turned and looked up. It was
Rowena in a white nightgown, standing on the second floor, looking down at her in shock. Rowena’s hair was long, loose and unbrushed, her eyes wide with fear. She gripped what looked like a
pencil in her hand, or perhaps a hairpin, brandishing it in front of her like a weapon.

‘Rowena!’ Serafina shouted to her. ‘Go get the veterinarian! Run!’

Rowena did not move. She stared in horrified shock at the sight of Gidean lying on the floor in a pool of blood and Serafina standing over him with blood all over her hands. The girl did not
seem to understand Serafina’s words. She did not run to get the veterinarian. Instead, she turned and slowly walked in the direction of Braeden’s room.

What was she doing? What did she think she’d seen?

When Rowena returned a few moments later, Serafina heard the rush of frantic footsteps, but it wasn’t the veterinarian. Braeden came running down the stairs.

‘What’s happened?’ Braeden screamed as he came. He was beyond distraught.

He ran to Gidean’s side and collapsed to his knees at his dog’s side. ‘He’s badly hurt!’ he cried. ‘Serafina, what did you do?’

Serafina was too overwhelmed to answer him.

Tears streamed down his face as he hugged his dying dog. In all she and Braeden had been through together, she’d never seen him cry before. ‘Aw, Gidean, boy, please don’t go .
. . don’t go . . . please, boy . . . no . . . don’t leave me . . .’

Serafina burst into tears. But as she cried she tilted her head upward and saw Rowena standing there again. Rowena was just staring at her. She hadn’t retrieved the veterinarian;
she’d gone to Braeden.

Rowena slowly lifted her arm and pointed at Serafina. ‘I saw her,’ she said, her voice filled with trembling. ‘I saw her do it! She hurled the dog over the railing!’

‘That’s not true!’ Serafina shouted back at her.

Guests and servants flooded down the stairs from the floors above. Mr and Mrs Vanderbilt came, utterly shocked by what was happening. The balding, grey-bearded elderly man she’d seen
walking in the forest with Mr Vanderbilt made his way slowly down the steps with his cane, studying the scene. Mrs King came hurrying into the hall, along with Essie and many of the other maids,
but no one seemed to know what to do.

‘Get the veterinarian!’ Mr Vanderbilt shouted, and the butler ran to fetch him.

Serafina wiped the tears from her eyes as she looked up at the people of Biltmore. Then she saw the dark figure of Detective Grathan standing on the third floor high above. His long brown hair
hung around his head like a dark hood. Holding his spiralling antler cane in his hand, he looked down at her and the crying boy and the bloody dog on the floor between them. She wanted to snarl up
at him, to bite him, but he just stared at her, as if it were a scene he’d seen many times before. There wasn’t fear in his expression like the others. There was a knowingness in his
eyes.

Braeden looked at Serafina, his eyes filled with agony. She knew he could see the fresh blood on her face and the scratches on her body. It was obvious that she and Gidean had fought.
‘What happened, Serafina?’ he cried, tears streaming down his face.

‘I don’t know, Braeden,’ Serafina said.

‘She’s lying,’ Lady Rowena said as she came down the stairs and stood behind Braeden. ‘She was fighting the dog and then tricked it so that it jumped over the
railing.’

‘Braeden, please believe me. That’s not what happened,’ Serafina pleaded. ‘Gidean attacked me. We both fell.’

‘She didn’t fall,’ Lady Rowena said. ‘She couldn’t have fallen. She’s standing right in front of us.’

‘Gidean would never attack you,’ Braeden said hopelessly to Serafina as he dropped his head and looked at his wounded dog.

‘I – I didn’t do this!’ Serafina stammered, tears pouring out of her eyes again as she furiously wiped them away. She couldn’t understand how this could happen. How
could she be in this situation? Braeden had to believe her. She reached out to hold his arm.

‘Leave him alone! You have done enough!’ Rowena shouted, blocking her. Serafina snarled at the girl, then turned back to her friend.

‘I swear to you, Braeden, I did not do this.’

Braeden looked desperately at her. ‘He’s hurt bad, Serafina.’

‘You should leave,’ Rowena said to Serafina, her voice filled with fear and anger. ‘You don’t belong with civilised people. Look at you! You’re like some kind of
wild creature! You don’t belong here!’ Then she looked around at all the frightened onlookers. ‘How can you live with her in this house? Something’s going to happen! It
won’t just be a dog next time. She’s going to hurt someone!’

‘Braeden, no . . .’ Serafina begged him, clutching his arm.

Out of the corner of her eye, Serafina saw two footmen moving in to protect the young master.

‘Braeden, please . . .’

As Mr Vanderbilt came towards her and Braeden, he gestured for his footmen to take control. She had no idea what Mr Vanderbilt and the footmen were going to do, but when a footman grabbed her
from behind, it startled her badly. In all her anger and confusion, she twisted round, hissing, and bit him on the hand before she could stop herself. It was pure and utter reflex, an instinct over
which she had no control. Her teeth sank into the man’s hand, drawing blood. He leapt back, yelling in pain. She could see the horrified faces of everyone around her as they backed away from
her. Mr and Mrs Vanderbilt stared at her in disbelief, barely able to comprehend what she’d just done. She’d become the very wild beast that Rowena had been screaming about.

Filled with shame and anguish, tears streaming down her face, she leapt to her feet. The Vanderbilts and the guests and servants shrank away from her in fear. Gazing around at their horrified
faces, she couldn’t stand it any longer. She ran. The crowd recoiled in panic as she fled through them across the Entrance Hall. One of the women screamed. Serafina escaped through the front
doors and plunged into the darkness outside. It felt like it took forever to run across the open lawn and reach the trees. She kept running, just running, her heart pouring out of her, and still
running, into the forest, into the mountains, crying and distraught, more confused than she had ever been in her life. She had bitten a footman and snarled at everyone. Blood all over her hands,
she had snapped and hissed like a trapped animal.

You don’t belong here!
Rowena’s words stormed through her mind as she ran, echoes of her mother’s words the night before. She had been cast unwanted from place to place,
and had nowhere to go.

But, worst of all, because of her, Gidean had been hurt terribly, and she’d broken Braeden’s heart. It felt like she’d betrayed the only two friends she had ever known.

S
erafina ran into the forest and just kept running, hot tears pouring from her eyes. Her lungs gasped frantically for breath; her chest filled with
shaking emotion. She wasn’t running with direction; she was running
away
– away from the injured Gidean, away from the sight of her best friend in anguish, away from the shame of
what she’d done.

When she finally slowed to a walk, she sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand and kept walking fast and hard. As she crossed through the great oaks of the forest and Biltmore
disappeared further and further behind her, her stomach churned. The magnitude of what she was doing began to sink in. She was leaving her pa and Braeden, and Mr and Mrs Vanderbilt, and Essie, and
everyone else she knew at Biltmore. She was leaving them all behind.

When she thought about how she hadn’t even said goodbye to her pa, she started crying all over again. It broke her heart that he’d hear about this shameful, horrible incident from
the servants and from Mr Vanderbilt, that her pa would hear that she’d hurt the young master’s dog and that they’d thrown her out of the house. She could still feel in her teeth
the sensation of biting into that footman’s hand. She could still see the horrified looks on all their faces when she ran through the crowd of people. Maybe Lady Rowena was right. Maybe she
truly was a terrible and wild creature. She didn’t belong in a civilised home.

But her mother had told her that she didn’t belong in the forest, either. The words still echoed in her mind. She was too human, too slow and weak to fight off attackers.
You
don’t belong here, Serafina
, her mother had said.

She didn’t belong in the forest or at Biltmore. She didn’t belong
anywhere
.

She walked for miles, driven by nothing but burning emotion. When she saw a glow of light in a valley below her, she finally slowed down, curious. Tall, rectangular shapes rose up among the
trees, some of them dotted with dim points of light, others entirely dark. The sound of a whistle startled her, and then she saw a long, dark chain of boxes curving along the mountainside. The
metal snake weaved in and out of the trees, but as it crossed a trestle bridge over a river, a plume of white steam roiled up into the moonlit clouds.
It’s a train
, she thought.
A
real train.

She’d learned about locomotives, with their fireboxes and their piston rods, from her pa, and she’d heard tell of Mr Vanderbilt’s grandpa who’d spread his ships and
trains across America. Even from this great distance, she could feel the iron beast’s rumble in the earth beneath her feet and the pressure of its hurtling movement in her chest. She
couldn’t even imagine being up close to such a thing. But she wondered fleetingly what it would be like to leap upon such a monster and fly to distant places on long, shining tracks. It was a
foreign world down there in the city of Asheville, filled with people and machines and ways of life she did not understand, and from there an entire country spread out in all directions. What would
she become if that was the path she took?

As the sun rose, she kept moving, trekking far up into the Craggy Mountains, mile after mile. She drank from a stream when she was thirsty. She hunted when she hungered. When she was tired, she
slept tucked into a crevice of rock. A wild creature she became, full and earnest, if not in body, then in spirit whole.

Later the next evening, as she crossed through a forested cove between two spurs of a mountain ridge, the scent of a campfire drifted on the crisp autumn air. Drawn to it, she came upon a small
collection of log cabins where several families gathered around a little fire roasting corn on the cob and grilling trout caught from the nearby stream. She marvelled that a boy about her age was
playing a gentle melody on a banjo while his younger sister accompanied him on a fiddle. Others were singing soft and dancing slow, like the quiet river by which they lived.

Serafina did not approach the mountain folk, but she sat in the trees on the hillside just above them and, for a little while, listened to their music and let her heart go free.

She watched and listened as the mountain folk played song after song, all of them singing along and dancing in each other’s arms. Some of their songs were fast jigs and reels, everyone
hooting and hollering, but mostly, as the night wore on, they played the softer songs, songs of the gentle heart and the deepened soul. They drank their white lightning and their autumn cider and
rocked in their chairs, telling their stories around the campfire, stories of long-lost loves and heroic deeds, of strange occurrences and dark mysteries. When everyone started drifting off to
their beds beneath their cabin roofs or sleeping on the ground beneath the stars, she knew it was time for her to go as well, for this was not her home tonight, this was not her bed. She
reluctantly pulled herself up onto her feet and slipped away from the smouldering campfire’s glowing light.

She kept travelling, but slower now, less and less anxious to get away from what was behind her. High up into the Black Mountains she climbed, following a ridge of craggy gardens where only
rhododendrons and alpine grasses grew. She walked along a stony reach where the moonlit mist fell down the mountains like the waves of a silver sea. She trekked over a highland bald with no trees,
just the moonlight, and the geese flying across the dark blue sky. She followed a jagged-edged river and gazed upon a waterfall that fell, and fell, and fell, down one rock after another, splashing
and turning, until it disappeared into the misty forest below.