Serafina and the Twisted Staff (The Serafina Series) (36 page)

‘What happened?’ Braeden asked in astonishment. ‘Where’d they go?’

But Serafina could not reply.

Serafina could hear the two birds battling up in the sky. She heard the screeching and hissing noises of the owl, and the long
kak-kak-kak
of the peregrine, and then everything went
quiet.

She peered up into the sky and took a breath. One of the birds finally came into view. It was flying alone, carrying the Twisted Staff in its talons. Serafina’s heart sank when she saw
that it was the owl. It was Rowena. Serafina kept looking, but there was no sign of Kess. It appeared the falcon had lost the battle.

The owl flew towards them now. Serafina dreaded what was going to happen next. Once Rowena changed back, she could use her staff to start the battle all over again, hurling God knows what kinds
of animals at Serafina and her allies. And it was clear that Uriah had taught his daughter well. He might not have thought too much of her, but Rowena had become a powerful young conjurer in her
own right.

‘What happened?’ Braeden asked as he looked all around, his voice frantic and confused. ‘Is Kess dead? Did Rowena kill her?’

Serafina thought she must have. But then she spotted a tiny dot way up in the sky, hundreds of feet above the forest. It was Kess, flying strong, far higher than a barn owl could ever fly.
Serafina wondered what she was doing way up there. Then Kess tipped into a barrel roll and dived.

S
erafina watched as Kess dived through the sky towards the unsuspecting Rowena. The falcon tucked her wings close to her body and shot through the
air in a striking stoop, moving faster than anything Serafina had ever seen in her entire life.

‘There she is!’ Braeden gasped at the last second, just as Kess came slashing into view.

The falcon struck the owl so hard that it popped with an explosion of feathers. Serafina could feel the force of the hit in her chest, like two stones striking against each other in midair. Then
Kess pinwheeled round and raked Rowena with her talons in a second attack. The burst of white owl feathers swirled in the air. The stunned owl somersaulted lifelessly, falling towards the
ground.

At the instant of the strike, the owl released the staff. It fell end over end through the air for a hundred feet. Then the falcon swooped down and grasped it in midair.

Serafina watched the body of the owl fall, dead weight all the way down and then disappear into the trees on the other side of the river. After what had just happened, it seemed that Rowena had
to be dead, but Serafina watched and waited to see if the owl flew back up again. It did not.

‘Look!’ Braeden said, pointing up into the sky.

It was Kess. The falcon was flying towards them. She came in low and steady. Serafina could see her black mask and her bold white chest with its black bars. She was flecked with her
enemy’s blood, but she looked healthy and strong. She gave a call, a cheerful
kak-kak-kak
, as she passed overhead, still carrying the Twisted Staff.

Kess flew out past the edge of the cliff and over the river. With a few strong pumps of her pointed wings, she rose higher.

Braeden whistled triumphantly to her. At first, Serafina thought he was calling her back to him to bring him the staff, but then she realised that he wasn’t. He was calling his
farewell.

‘Goodbye, Kess,’ Braeden said softly. His dream that Kess would someday fly the world again was coming true. ‘Have a safe journey, my friend.’

Serafina watched as the falcon flew across the valley of the great river, and then up and over the rising forest towards the peaks of the mountains in the distance. Kess pumped her wings and
tilted her tail, and a few moments later, she disappeared, gliding over Mount Pisgah nineteen miles away.

Unlike the owls of the night and the hawks of the day, Kess flew and hunted both night and day. She was a peregrine, which meant she was the great wanderer of the sky. She could fly wherever and
whenever she wanted to.

Tonight she would follow the rocky ridgelines of the southern mountains and the glint of the stars and find her way southward, continuing her long journey to the jungles of Peru. Along the way,
she could drop the Twisted Staff into a blazing volcano or use it to build a nest on a cliff in the Andean clouds. But whatever she decided to do with it, it was gone.

‘I couldn’t figure out at first why Kess was flying so low down the length of the river,’ Braeden said. ‘But then I remembered that peregrine falcons sometimes hunt in
pairs, cooperating with each other to bring down their prey. She must have known that you were on her side, Serafina.’

Serafina took a long breath into her lungs and felt her heart swelling with wonder and hope.

She lifted her head and sniffed the air. There was no smell of smoke drifting through the forest. When she looked towards the house in the far distance, she didn’t see the glow of flames
rising up from its walls. Essie must have warned Mr Vanderbilt and the others in time so they could put out the fires before the house was badly damaged. Essie had done it! Biltmore was saved.

It was over.

She and her allies had won.

Her enemies were finally dead.

Her mother emerged from the underbrush, bloodied and limping from her war with the coyotes. But she had defeated them. She had cleared them from what was once again her territory. She carried
Serafina’s wriggling half-sister by the scruff of her neck, while her half-brother walked at his mother’s side. The two cubs were muddy, matted and stained with blood, but they were
bold with life.

Relieved and exhausted, Serafina finally lay on the ground to rest, draping her long, lean black body in the grass. Her mother set down her half-sister and came over to her. Serafina could see
the love and admiration in her mother’s eyes as she came towards her. She brushed up against her daughter and purred with happiness and pride. Serafina had finally done it. She’d
finally become a full-whiskered catamount. Waysa sat down beside her, batting her playfully with his paws, as if to say
I told you that you could do it!
The catamounts were united. And they
were here to stay.

Serafina gazed around her at the trees and the mighty river and the wreckage of the carriage, and tried to comprehend all that had happened. She remembered being so frustrated by her
limitations, by what she could and couldn’t do at that particular point in her life. She realised now that her life wasn’t just about who she was, but about who she would become.

She looked at Braeden. He smiled and lay down on the ground with her and the other catamounts. He obviously felt quite at home with them, among the kith and kin of his heart.

Finally, he leaned his back against the long length of her panther body. He wiped the blood from a cut at his mouth, and then he shut his eyes, tilted his head back and rested his head against
her thick black fur.

‘I don’t know about you, Serafina,’ he said with a smile, ‘but I think we’re getting rather good at this.’

She could not smile in return, but she felt a warm and powerful gladness in her heart, and she swished her tail and gazed towards Biltmore Estate and the distant mountains. She had finally done
it. She had finally envisioned what she wanted to be. And become it.

T
he next morning, when Serafina woke up in the workshop in her human form and walked outside onto the grounds, she looked across to the mountains
and came to a realisation: it was through the darkness of the blackest night that she had come to love the brightness of the rising sun.

That morning, Mr Vanderbilt and Braeden formed a work crew with nearly a hundred men from the estate’s stables, farms and fields, and they went out to the animal cages. Serafina and her pa
went with them.

The troop of men and horses encountered no difficulties on the way.

When they arrived at the pine forest, Mr Vanderbilt and the other riders dismounted and entered by foot.

They found the animals still in the cages, but the campsite had been abandoned, the fire cold, nothing but grey ash. Serafina couldn’t help but carefully scan the forest, looking for any
evidence that Uriah might have somehow survived the battle the night before, but saw nothing. He appeared to be truly gone.

Braeden knelt down in front of one of the cages, opened it up and helped the red fox crawl out of it. Recognising him, the fox came to him immediately and crawled up into his lap. Braeden held
the fox in his arms and soothed it with strokes of his hands.

‘Everything’s all right now,’ Braeden said as he petted the fox. After a few moments, the fox seemed stronger of both body and spirit and trotted off into the forest.

Braeden went to the next cage and freed a beaver from its imprisonment. As he opened the cages, some of the animals immediately ran into the forest. Others needed his care. He knelt down with
them and held them until they were strong enough to be on their way. He freed the raccoons and the bobcats, the otters and the deer, the swans and the geese, and the weasels and the wolves.

It filled Serafina with joy to see the animals running free and running strong. ‘Stay bold,’ she told them in a whisper.

As Braeden freed the animals one by one, Serafina’s pa and the other workers in the crew used their crowbars, chisels and hammers to tear out and destroy the cages so they could never be
used again.

At the end of the day, as they travelled back to Biltmore through the oaks and chestnuts, the elms and the spruce, Serafina thought that the character and spirit of the forest through which they
travelled had changed.

Scurries of flying squirrels ran up and down the trunks and glided from tree to tree. Otters played in the streams.

‘Look up there, Serafina!’ Braeden said, grabbing her arm in excitement.

She gazed upward and saw thousands of birds, streams and streams of them flooding across the clear blue sky. There were skeins of geese flying in echelons of Vs, swans and ducks in long lines
and clouds of fluttering waxwings, cardinals and jays.

‘Isn’t it magnificent, Serafina?’ Braeden asked her, his voice filled with wonder. ‘I’m so glad you’re here to see this with me because I would have never
been able to describe it. Did you ever think you would see something like this in your whole life?’

Serafina stood with Braeden watching the birds and she smiled. ‘Not like this,’ she said.

S
erafina sat in a red damask-upholstered gold chair in front of a French-style vanity table and mirror in the Louis XVI Room on the second floor of
Biltmore House. Light poured into the beautiful oval-shaped room, with its curving white walls, red draperies and golden-brown wood floor. Essie stood behind her, brushing Serafina’s long,
silky black hair.

‘I don’t know what happened to your hair, miss, but it’s beautiful,’ Essie said as she brushed it.

‘Thank you,’ Serafina said, looking at herself in the mirror. All traces of the brown were gone. Only the black remained. And it wasn’t shaggy and streaked like before, like a
spotted cub’s camouflage, but smooth and shiny and entirely black.

Her clean, bare neck and shoulders showed the scars of her past, the jagged wound she’d taken to her neck when she destroyed the Black Cloak, the bites of wolfhounds on her arms and upper
shoulders, and a new cut she’d suffered fighting Rowena and her animals: a long scratch across her cheek just below her eye. The appearance of the wounds did not bother her. They were the
scars of battles fought and battles won.