Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,46
the forest, determined to put as much distance as possible between her, the cemetery, and the mountain lion’s den. She vowed to never return to that terrifying place.
When she finally stopped for a moment to catch her breath, she looked around her. Nothing looked familiar. It was then that she realized that she was completely and utterly lost.
Serafina kept moving and soon found herself traveling along the top edge of a rocky, tree-covered ridge. In her panic to escape the lioness, it seemed that she’d run halfway up a mountain.
Exhausted, she finally stopped to rest and check her wounds. Her clothing had been torn. The length of twine that once held her pa’s shirt around her body had broken and was gone. Claw marks sliced her arms and legs. Her head hurt. Several tooth marks punctured her chest. She was pretty torn up, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as she had expected.
It hurts, but I’m gonna live, she thought. Assuming I can find my way home. She had thought that the forest couldn’t be nearly as bad as her pa described, but it turned out to be a far darker, more dangerous place than she’d ever imagined. With everything she’d seen so far, she didn’t think she could survive another night here. But she was still miles from the house, stuck on a ridge, and she didn’t even know which direction to go.
She looked up at the dark, cloudy sky, trying to find the position of the sun, then she scanned the surrounding landscape for clues and landmarks. With no compass, no map, and no idea where she was in relation to Biltmore Estate, how could she make sure she was going in the right direction?
She was already cold when it started raining.
“Oh, great,” she said, shouting up at the clouds. “Thank you! That’s really nice, you stupid sky!”
She hated getting wet. This was a miserable place. She just wanted to get home. She missed her pa something awful. She longed for a glass of milk, a piece of fried catfish, a warm little cook fire in the workshop, and her dry, cozy bed behind the boiler. Yesterday she’d been slinking gracefully across the plush carpets of Biltmore’s elegant rooms, and today she was stuck out in the cold, wet, stupid, raining world.
As the rain poured down, she tried to hide under the boughs of a pine tree, but it didn’t help. The big drips onto her sopping head and neck just made her more miserable. Rivulets of water flowed across the rocky ground beneath her. Wet and bedraggled, she clung to the trunk of the tree, terrified that she’d slip down the steep slope of the mountainside. She wanted her pa to get his ladder and rescue her like he had when she was little, but she knew he wouldn’t even know where to look for her.
Then, as she watched the water trickle across the ground, a thought occurred to her.
Water runs downhill. Downhill, and into rivers.
She had been following the contour of the ridge because it had been easiest, but now she had a different idea. What if she climbed straight down the steepest slope of the mountain and used the trunks of the trees and the branches of the rhododendrons as a sort of ladder? She’d get down a lot quicker.
She stepped closer to the edge and peered tentatively over the cliff. It was a long way down, but she grabbed the first branch to see if it would hold her. Suddenly, her foot slipped in the wet leaves, her fingers broke free from the branch, and she plummeted down the mountainside.
The swooping sensation of free fall instantly filled her entire body. She slid down feetfirst, screaming. She tried to stay upright and reached out for the bushes to break her fall, but then she hit a tree trunk, and it knocked the wind out of her. She pitched in one direction, then the next, hurtling down the mountain. She hit a branch. She spun. She hit a rock. She plunged. Suddenly, she was somersaulting end over end. All the while she fell, tumbling down the mountainside in a great wave of autumn leaves. The rush of speed and the wind against her face made her feel like she was flying, but then she hit another tree, the force slamming a painful grunt from her chest, and she flipped and rolled until she finally crashed, breathless and hurting, at the bottom of the ravine.