‘Braeden, come on!’ Rowena called, shouting for them to retreat as she struggled to rein in her terrified, thrashing horse.
‘We have to keep going!’ Braeden screamed, desperately determined to help Cedric and Gidean, but finally even he was forced to pull back with the others.
Many of the men who had been thrown from their horses fled in terror on foot. Those who’d managed to stay in their saddles yanked their reins round and charged away. But the coyotes pursued them, snapping at their horses’ legs and haunches, trying to corner and trap the lumbering animals in the heavy brush.
As the hunting party retreated in disarray back towards Biltmore, Serafina hunkered down to the ground at the base of a tree. She didn’t know what to do. She found herself in a dark, quiet patch of the forest, all alone. She watched and listened to the chaos as it receded into the cloak of the forest’s mist. A bout of hopelessness swirled through her. She couldn’t fight off an entire band of coyotes. She couldn’t settle the spirits of those panicked horses or bring calm to those struggling men. A lump formed in her throat when she caught one last glimpse of Braeden, Rowena and Mr Vanderbilt as they pulled away. She desperately wanted to follow them home. The thought of being left behind in this place terrified her.
But she did not move.
A dark and frightening thought crept into her mind. The only way she could save Gidean and Cedric was if she carried on alone, sneaking and crawling beneath the black limbs of the pitch-covered trees while the men battled the coyotes in the distance. Her only hope was to creep unseen and unheard into the dark lair of her enemy.
As she developed her plan in her mind, she heard something moving slowly towards her. At first she thought she heard four feet on the ground, but then she realised it wasn’t a stalking coyote or wolfhound. The front two legs were softer of foot, more careful. The back two trudged along, sounding heavier. It wasn’t four feet. It was two hands and two knees.
Braeden’s head poked through the underbrush.
‘Aw, Braeden, you shouldn’t have come back!’ Serafina said in exasperation. ‘What did you do?’
‘I fell off my horse,’ he said, trying to sound innocent.
‘You liar,’ she said. ‘You never fall off your horse!’
‘But coyotes were attacking!’
She shook her head. ‘No, that wasn’t it. I saw you, Braeden. You didn’t fall off your horse!’
‘Fine,’ he admitted finally. ‘I broke off from the main party, but my horse was too scared to come back up here. I couldn’t convince him to go any farther, but I didn’t want to leave you out here, so I slipped off and let him go back with the others. He’ll be all right.’
‘It’s not the horse I’m worried about!’ she said, perturbed. ‘You should’ve stayed with the others.’
‘I didn’t want to leave you alone out here in this terrible place in the dark.’
‘The darkness is where I belong,’ she said. ‘But you don’t.’
Braeden gestured towards the stand of pines. ‘I may not be able to see in the dark like you, Serafina, but if our dogs are in there then I have to help them.’
‘What happened to Lady Rowena and your uncle? Are they all right?’
‘Yes. They stayed with the rest of the hunting party.’
‘And that’s where you should be.’ She stared at him, angry at his stubbornness. He had no idea what he was getting himself into. But she knew there was no talking him out of it.
‘All right,’ she said finally, and crawled over to him. ‘We’ll go in together, but you must stay close to me, and you must be absolutely quiet.’
The two of them ducked below the lowest limbs and crept together into the thick stand of pines. The trunks and the branches and the ground itself were coated with sticky black sap that exuded like dark blood from the bark of the trees. The sap permeated everything with a reeking, sickeningly sweet smell. The upper boughs of the trees blocked the moon and the stars, cloaking the area beneath into a murky black world. Even she had trouble seeing.
She had to put her hand out in front of her to keep from running into dead hanging branches, but each time her fingers touched something in the darkness, the viscid pitch stuck to her fingertips, slowly coating her hands with an oily mucus. Her feet and hands kept sticking to the ground, making little sucking and snapping noises as she moved.
She knew that Braeden must be utterly blind, so she took his hand and put it on her shoulder. ‘Just hold on to me as we go through,’ she whispered. She could feel his hand trembling even as he held her. She couldn’t imagine how terrifying it must be for him to creep blindly into this terrible place.
As they crept forward, moving from tree trunk to tree trunk along the pitch-coated ground, her nostrils wrinkled at a foul smell. At first she thought it must be the smell of rotting pine sap, but then she realised that it was the smell of animals, of animal waste. Then the smell got much worse.
She heard a hissing, gurgling, boiling sound just ahead and saw the orange flickering light of some sort of cooking fire in the distance.
‘What is that?’ Braeden whispered uncertainly, finally able to see something.
‘That’s where we’re going,’ she said.
They crawled forward into the smoky haze of the fire, and Serafina’s hand inadvertently touched a cold, flat, slimy surface that she thought was a rock. Looking down, it took her several seconds to realise that it wasn’t. It was a gravestone, flat in the ground, so old that the letters and numbers had worn off and nothing was left but a blank surface.
In front of the gravestone, in the area of ground where the body lay below, there was an old mort safe – a heavy, bolted iron cage sank low into the ground, long and narrow in the proportions of a body. She didn’t know whether mort safes were intended to keep grave robbers out or dead bodies in, but it was now being used for an even more horrifying purpose. A small door had been constructed at the end of the iron cage. Inside the cage lay a doe and two spotted fawns, staring out at her, crumpled down so low that they couldn’t even stand.
Looking to the right and to the left, she saw that there were many of these old gravestones and iron cages, hundreds of them for as far as she could see. She had encountered the cages here a few nights before, but she hadn’t realised they’d been constructed from the iron mort safes of an old graveyard. There was an entire cemetery beneath the thick forest of pine trees. The graveyard had been abandoned long ago and the forest of pines had grown on top of it. She looked around her. The cages were filled with animals of all kinds. In the next cage over, a mink ran back and forth, back and forth, desperately looking for a way out. The cage near Braeden held a friend of his: a small red fox, curled up tight and trembling in fear, its eyes staring at Braeden pleadingly.
‘We have to let them go!’ Braeden said, his voice shaking.
‘Wait,’ she whispered. Seeing all these caged animals, she knew her enemy must be near. They had only so much time to do what they’d come to do. As they crept through the cages towards the fire, they passed a weasel and a family of raccoons. She could feel her pulse starting to pound in her temples and her limbs starting to shake. She looked all around her, scanning the cages. Somewhere out there in the swirling mist, trapped beneath the low, dripping limbs of the pine trees, she knew that Gidean and Cedric lay helpless.
Suddenly, Braeden’s hand gripped her shoulder so tightly that it hurt. She caught her breath when she saw the silhouette of the man walking in the distance. It was the grey-bearded man of the forest in his boots and his long, weather-beaten coat. He moved with strength and purpose, focused on his work. As he pushed handfuls of branches into the fire, swirls of sparks roiled upward. The blaze snapped and hissed with the new supply of burning sap. Then she saw the source of the terrible smell: the man was boiling something in the black iron pot resting in the fire.
Serafina’s muscles jumped and buzzed. She wanted to run away. But at that moment she heard a tick-tick-ticking sound, and then the terrible his
sing scream as a barn owl flew in. She shoved Braeden flat to the ground, cowering in fear beneath the searching eyes of the owl as it flew low beneath the branches of the pines, right past them, and over to the fire and the bearded man. The owl dropped a crooked twig at the man’s feet and then kept flying.
In response to the passing owl, the bearded man raised his chin and chattered a frightening cry, uttering the tick-tick-ticking sound followed by a low, self-satisfied hiss. She saw now that the owl wasn’t just his familiar, or a servant under his command. There was alliance in that hiss, a dark and horrible love.
‘We shall burn that place down!’ he shouted to the owl. She could see his leathery, craggy face. He was a man possessed by a hatred and insanity more murderous than she had ever seen.
Braeden trembled beside her, his face as white as a ghost, his mouth gasping for breath. She clutched him to give him courage.
The man bent down and picked up the twig the owl had dropped. She thought he was going to throw it into the fire with the rest, but in the next moment Serafina caught a flash of darkness out the corner of her eye, and the small twig became as long and stout as a walking stick. It was the staff of power that Waysa had told her about. The Twisted Staff was blackish, thorned and deeply gnarled, with what looked like a slithering snake or vine curling round and twisting along its length. And at this moment the staff seemed to possess a seething, pulsing, demonic power, as if it sensed that soon it would gain even more.
At the man’s feet lay a dark pile of skinned fur, black and brown and white, the remnants of animals that he had used in his terrible concoction. She couldn’t imagine what horrible thing he was doing, but then he raised the Twisted Staff upward and dipped it into the pot, coating it over and over again with the thick, viscous liquid as he mumbled words she could not understand.
Then he drew the dripping staff from the putrid mixture and went over to one of the nearby cages. Serafina looked over and saw with horror what was inside. It was Gidean! Her friend crumpled down onto his haunches, his teeth snarling with anger, but his eyes filled with fear as the man approached. The man pointed the staff at the cage. The cage door flung open. Gidean, his whole body trembling, crawled out of the cage towards the man. Bite him, Gidean! she wanted to scream. Bite him and run! But Gidean could not. The man was using the Twisted Staff to control him.
As she reached back to clamp her hand over Braeden’s mouth, she knew it was too late. Seeing Gidean under the staff’s control, Braeden made a sound of anguish. The bearded man’s neck snapped round, and he looked straight at Braeden, his silver eyes blazing.
Serafina sprang into attack. She charged straight at him, knowing that her only chance was to take him down before he could lift his hand and throw a spell.
But the man raised his hand to his lips and blew across his open palm.
She felt the breath of death shoot through her. Her body went cold. Her muscles went limp. And she collapsed to the ground.
Braeden collapsed behind her.
Lying on the ground with her breath stolen and her heart stopped, the side of her face in the dirt, she gazed out through unblinking eyes. Braeden lay flat out on the ground beside her, just a few inches away, his eyes wide open, glazed and unmoving, staring at her in terror. She could not turn her head, but on the trunks of the pitch-blackened trees she saw the flickering shadow of the bearded man moving towards them.
Serafina slowly became aware that she was awake, but she could not open her eyes and she could not move. She could feel the cold earth beneath her and air moving ever so slowly into and out of her lungs, but she could not utter a sound.
She smelled dead pine needles and the sap-covered earth where her face lay against the ground. She tasted dirt in her mouth.
She was lying on her side, her right arm up by her head, her left arm bent beneath her body, twisted behind her at an unnatural angle, her legs crumpled up close to her. She sensed the crawling sensation of the wet sticky pitch on the bare skin of her legs, her arms and her face, but she could not lift herself from it.
She could hear nothing but the faint and desolate sound of wind in the trees.
Is this how I’m going to die? she thought. And then she thought that it must be. She felt herself sinking down into darkness.
‘Serafina!’ someone whispered urgently to her, as if determined not to let her lose hope. The voice had no body, no face. It was not Braeden’s voice, nor her pa’s. And soon her certainty that she had heard the voice drifted away with the wind.
She lost consciousness again and then came back. Time went by. She wasn’t sure how long. It could have been a few seconds, or a few minutes, or a few hours.
When she was finally able to open her eyes, she still couldn’t lift her head. She saw mostly blackened ground, and just above that a crisscross of bolted iron bars and wire mesh, and through the cage to another cage that contained one of the white swans she had seen on Biltmore’s lagoon a few nights before.
‘Serafina!’ the voice called again.
The sound was coming from the other side of the swan.
She slowly managed to lift her head.
It broke her heart to see a brown-skinned boy with long, shaggy dark hair in the cage there. He looked so small and weak in the cage that she almost didn’t recognise him, but his brown eyes were looking back at her, his spirit fierce and unbroken, like a caged feral cat.
‘Stay bold, Serafina!’ he said, his voice filled with ragged emotion.
‘Waysa . . .’ she tried to say, but she barely heard her own dry, croaking voice. As she tried to get up, her head bumped against iron bars that held her to the ground. The bearded man had caged her to a grave in an iron mort safe like all the other animals.
Craning her neck and peering between the iron bars, she looked out of her cage. She could see the bearded man working in his camp a short distance away. Her body jolted with fear at the sight of him, but the cage held her. She could not escape. The hissing, crackling fire glowed with flickering orange light, the sparks rising upward in a swirl and the haze of smoke drifting through the crooked branches of the trees.
The man moved around the fire, slowly feeding it fuel as he tended the iron pot. Splinters of scattered images poured into her mind as she remembered everything she had seen: the owl, the staff, the wolfhounds, the carriage, the horses, the rats, the coyotes. What did it all mean? The man dipped the Twisted Staff into the mixture over and over again, infusing it with its terrible power.
‘What happened to you, Waysa?’ she whispered. ‘How did you get here?’
‘I had to save the cubs,’ he said, his voice grave. Serafina imagined that when the bearded man attacked, Waysa had turned to fight him rather than run from him, giving her mother and the cubs the split second they needed to escape.
A fierce wave of emotion filled her muscles with a little bit of strength. She tried to turn her body.
The eyes of a wolf peered at her through the iron bars of one of the adjacent cages. It was her old companion that she’d seen on the mountain ridge. Despite his valiant efforts to lead his pack to the safety of the highlands, they’d never made it out of the forest. As the wolf gazed at her from behind the bars, her heart sank. There was nothing she could do for him, nor he for her.
She was both relieved and heartbroken that Braeden lay in the cage next to her, his body face down and outstretched beneath the iron bars of the mort safe. He looked like the corpse of a boy who had crawled out of his grave but could get no further, trapped beneath the bars. His body looked utterly lifeless, his skin pale and clammy, but his eyes were open, staring out in bewilderment.
‘It’s me, Braeden,’ she whispered over to him, trying to bring him around. She was pretty sure he was alive, but the conjurer’s spell had hit him hard. ‘Wake up! It’s me! It’s Serafina!’
But even as she tried to rouse him she wondered what they would do. What would come next? She was surrounded by caged animals. She was a caged animal. The bolted iron bars and the
wire mesh in between were far too strong for her to break through. She pushed and pulled against the cage. She kicked at it and rammed it with her shoulder. But it made no difference. She could not get out.
Serafina tried digging down into the ground, past the pine needles into the dirt. She dug until her fingers bled, but it was no use. The mort safe went deep into the ground. If she dug down deep enough, she’d find nothing but rotted boards, bones and body.
The iron bars of the mort safes were close enough together to keep an adult human from getting through, but on many of the cages, including the one she was in, the bearded man had installed wire mesh to make sure smaller animals could not fit between the iron bars and escape.
‘I’ve tried to get through the wire,’ Waysa said as she examined the mesh on her cage. He started kicking the wire mesh with all his strength. It barely moved, but as Serafina saw the wire mesh flexing from the pressure of his kicks, she had an idea.
She pressed herself close up against the lower side of her cage. The wire mesh consisted of squares just big enough to fit several fingers through. She grabbed one strand of the mesh tightly in her fingers and bent it. Then she bent it back. She bent it again. And then back again. Over and over again.
‘What are you doing?’ Waysa whispered.
Serafina did not answer – she just kept bending that one strand of wire back and forth, back and forth. Her fingers were getting raw and her muscles ached. But finally she felt the wire heating up. She kept bending and bending as fast as she could. Then it snapped! She’d broken the strand!
She couldn’t help but smile when she saw the astonished look on Waysa’s face. She had just broken metal with her bare hands. She was magic.
She immediately started on the next wire, bending, bending, bending, until it snapped in her fingers. ‘Thank you, Pa!’ she whispered to herself as she moved on to the next wire. Working on one strand at a time, she slowly peeled back an area of the wire mesh close to the ground where the space between the iron bars was largest. She tried to crawl through the hole, but it was very tight. She couldn’t get through.
Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series) Page 20
