Serafina and the Twisted Staff. Robert Beatty
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Название: Serafina and the Twisted Staff
Автор: Robert Beatty
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Учебная литература
Серия: The Serafina Series
isbn: 9781780317557
isbn:
She knew who it must be.
‘I need your help,’ she whispered.
But what emerged from the forest jolted her with a shock of fear. A mountain lion she had never seen before came straight at her. He was a young lion, with dark fur, but he looked strong, unafraid and hungry. He was not at all the creature she was expecting.
Serafina tried to get up to defend herself, but it was no use. The beast could easily kill her.
Then, even as she tried to figure out how she was going to fight this unknown lion, a second lion emerged from the trees.
She breathed a sigh of relief. It was a lioness, full-grown and full of power; a lioness she knew well.
When her mother was in her lion form, she was more beautiful than ever, with a thick tan coat, huge paws and the muscles of many hunts. Her striking face and golden eyes glowed with intelligence.
‘I’m so glad it’s you, Momma,’ Serafina said, surprised by the tearful desperation in her own voice.
But in that moment, before Serafina could make out any sort of answer in her mother’s eyes, the lioness suddenly turned her head and looked across the river.
Then Serafina heard it too. The wolfhounds were upon them. And it wasn’t just two any more. The five were united again, growling and barking and snarling. They would be here in seconds.
Serafina’s mother moved quickly towards her and flattened herself beside her. Serafina didn’t understand what she was doing. Then the darker lion came and nudged Serafina’s body with his head. At first, she thought the lions were trying to rub against her and disguise her scent with theirs, but then she realised their true intention.
Serafina climbed onto her mother’s back, clutching her neck and shoulders. With the lioness carrying her and the dark lion close at her side, the three of them moved into the trees, slowly at first, and then more quickly. Serafina felt her mother’s fur against her face, and the force of her mother’s lungs, and the power of her muscles. The lioness began to move more swiftly through the forest. Soon they were running.
It was the most incredible feeling, streaming through the night at high speed, propelled by the undulating rhythm of the lioness’s bounding stride, so strong and quiet and fast, the dark lion running beside her. Serafina had dreamed of running like this many times, but she had never moved this fast in her entire life. What amazed her was how smooth it was, how agile her mother’s movements, how quickly she could change direction and speed, with both grace and power at her command.
When they reached a prominence of high ground, the two lions paused and looked down towards the river. They watched as the five wolfhounds followed Serafina’s scent to the edge of the river, then crossed it. But they went straight across, not realising she had been swept far downstream by the powerful current. At the time, it had felt like a catastrophe that the river had pulled her off her feet and carried her away, but now she realised that it had saved her. The wolfhounds sniffed the ground, circling in confusion. They’d lost her scent. And when they ran up and down the edge of the river looking to find her trail, their confusion mounted.
They can’t find me, Serafina thought with a smile as she clung to her mother’s back. All they can smell is mountain lion.
Suddenly, the lions were moving again, running through the forest at high speed, leaping small ravines and creeks, dashing through ferns. The branches and trunks of the trees flashed by. The whistle of the wind filled her ears.
They ran for so long through the night that Serafina’s eyes closed, and all she could feel was the movement of the running, the coolness of the air above her, and the warmth of her mother beneath her.
Serafina awoke a short time later on a bed of soft bright green grass that glowed in the moonlight. She felt the warmth of nuzzling fur and the deep and gentle vibration of purring. Her mother’s two cubs snuggled up against Serafina, kneading her back with their tiny paws, so happy to see her that they were giving her a back rub. She couldn’t help but smile. She could feel their little noses pressing against her shoulders and their whiskers tickling her neck. Over the last few weeks that she’d been visiting the cubs at her mother’s den, she had come to love her half brother and half sister, and she knew they had come to love her too.
She reached up to feel the cut on her head. It had been dressed with a leafy compress that had stopped the bleeding and numbed the pain. The wounds on her arms and legs had been treated with poultices of forest herbs. She didn’t want to, but she was pretty sure she could move if she needed to. She had noticed in the past that pain didn’t slow her down like it did many other people. She had surprised her pa in this regard more than once. Cold weather didn’t affect her either. Like her kin, she seemed to have been born with a natural toughness, the ability to keep going even when she had been battered and bloodied. But, even so, the medicine on her cuts and punctures was a welcome relief.
Feeling a gentle hand on her shoulder, she looked up. Her mother was in her human form – with her golden feline eyes, strikingly angled cheekbones, and long light brown hair. But the most striking feature was that whenever Serafina looked into her mother’s face she knew that her mother loved her with all her heart.
‘You’re safe, Serafina,’ her mother said as she checked the dressing on her head.
‘Momma,’ she said, her voice weak and ragged.
Looking around her, Serafina saw that her mother had brought her deep into the forest, to the angel’s glade at the edge of the old, overgrown cemetery. Beneath the cemetery’s dark cloak of twisted and gnarled trees, thick vines strangled the cracked, lichen-covered gravestones. Straggly moss hung down from the dead branches of the trees, and the darkened earth oozed with a ghostly mist. But the mist did not seep into the angel’s glade itself, and a small circle of lush grass always remained perfect and green, even in winter. In the centre of the glade stood a stone monument, a sculpture of a beautiful winged angel with a glinting steel sword. It was as if the angel protected the glade in a cusp of time, making it a place of eternal spring.
Her mother had been raising her two new cubs in a den beneath the roots of a large willow tree at the edge of the glade. And on a very different night from tonight, it had been the battleground on which Serafina and her allies had defeated Mr Thorne, the Man in the Black Cloak.
Find the Black One! the bearded man with the wolfhounds had said earlier that night. She could not help but gaze around the glade for signs of the Black Cloak that she had torn to pieces on the razor-sharp edge of the angel’s sword. She’d been sure that she had destroyed it, but she should have smashed its silver clasp and burned the leftover scraps of cloth. She looked towards the graveyard, with its tilting headstones and its broken coffins, and wondered what might have happened to the last remnants of the cloak.
For as long as she could remember, she had prowled through Biltmore’s darkened corridors on her own. All her life, she’d hunted. It had been her instinct. She had never known why СКАЧАТЬ