When her pa told her that, he was talking about the mechanical devices he dealt with every day. He definitely wasn’t imagining his daughter as a whispery little haint blowing primordial dust, but she reckoned the principle was the same.
By practicing over and over again, she found that she could move dust and pollen floating in the air where she wanted it. She could rustle the edge of a leaf and change the flight path of a bee. And it all made her laugh. The mere act of having an effect on something, anything, caused her immeasurable joy. It meant that, at least for a little while longer, she was real.
She went over to the bank of the stream and tried to see if she could use her hands to channel the water in a certain way, creating little turbulent eddies near the stream’s shore. She found that she couldn’t block the water with her fingers or lift it in the cup of her hands. But sometimes, if she focused on the flowing water in just the right way, she could shape its movement.
She slowly realized that one of the most important things was that she had to let go of this idea that she was a human being or a catamount with a physical body in the living world. She had to accept the idea that she was a different kind of thing now, a spirit, just thought, and soul, a tiny wave of energy and elements—dust and wind and water. And when she began to accept this, to let herself slip away with the flow of the world, she began to see the fabric that held everything together, and she could give it a little tug.
Through all this practice, she kept thinking about the terrible evil spreading across the land. Somehow, she had to fight it. But the loneliness of it all was nearly unbearable. She wanted to talk to Waysa and run at his side. She wanted to warn Mr. Vanderbilt about the coming dangers. More than anything, she wanted to ask her pa for advice about what she could do.
But of course, there was no point now. Waysa and Mr. Vanderbilt and her pa and the others couldn’t hear her words. There was no one, absolutely no one in the world, who even knew she was there.
And then she looked in the direction of the dark river she’d seen a few nights before, and she paused.
Or was there?
The sorcerer by the river, Serafina thought.
“I can’t see you, but I know you’re there,” the sorcerer had said. He’d actually spoken to her.
But it had frightened her, and she ran away like a startled deer.
If I had only known, Serafina thought.
When she tried to remember the details of that first strange night, she could still feel the fear in her heart. The sorcerer had been walking slowly through the forest by himself in the dead of night, working close to the ground. He had possessed some sort of dark power.
Serafina didn’t want to return to where she had seen him by the river. The thought of it put a twisting knot in the pit of her stomach. But the truth was, she had run out of other paths to take. Her pa had told her once that true courage wasn’t because you didn’t feel fear. True courage was when you were scared of something, but you did it anyway because it needed to be done. If she was going to get back to the land of the living, she had to stay bold.
She started walking in the direction of the river. As the sun rose toward noon, she thought she still had one more ridge and valley to go. But she heard the sound of rushing water ahead of her and soon came to a deeply flooded area. She realized this was the new shore of the river.
This river in the forest had swollen far past where it had been before, flooding the trees for as far as she could see, the roots and trunks drowning in moving water. The flooding was so deep and wide that she couldn’t even make out the main course of the river, let alone the other side of it. The dark brown current rushed by, tearing at the vegetation and carrying it along, swirling in large, twisting whirlpools, and crashing up into whitewater torrents where the water passed through the upper branches of the trees. Her mind was slow to comprehend the unimaginable: the river had filled the valley. The water was tearing away everything in its path, trees and rocks—and now mountains—everything getting swept away.
As she walked along the flooded bank, she realized that the place where she had seen the sorcerer a few nights before was long gone. She could feel the muddy earth she was standing on slipping away beneath her feet, the inexorable pull into the all-consuming current. The thought of it would have frightened her even in the best of times, but in her current state, she was terrified by the thought of getting sucked into a mudslide. She turned tail and headed for high ground.
In the afternoon, she curled up beneath the overhang of a rock to rest. A few hours later, she started awake with a sudden jerk. But when she woke up, she couldn’t move her arms or legs. She couldn’t raise her body from the ground. She tried to pull air into her lungs, but she felt the solidness of the earth against her, all around her, holding her in and pressing her down. Clenching her teeth, she clawed and snarled, twisted and bent, cracking the brittle stone around her. “Not yet!” she told the earth as she climbed out and brushed herself off.
It’s getting worse, she thought, stumbling away from the crevice of stone that had nearly caught her. I’ve got to keep moving.
As she continued her search for the sorcerer and the sun began to set, she came to a steep slope and followed it down into a wet area of bulrushes and cattails. She found her way into a mountain bog where the ground was nothing but thick layers of spongy sphagnum moss and peat, the ancient fiber of a hundred forests that had come before. The bog exuded the dense, vaporous aroma of year upon year of amassed plants and thick black soil. The moss felt damp and strangely buoyant beneath her bare feet as she walked.
Cinnamon fern and swamp laurel with dark pink flowers grew out of the wet, mushy trunks of long-fallen trees. Tiny red cranberries grew all over the leafy ground. And delicate purple and violet dragon-mouthed orchids hung spiraling down.
As she delved deeper into the bog, she stayed alert for any signs of the sorcerer.
In the puddles on the ground, yellow-spotted salamanders scurried this way and that, and small bog turtles with orange necks crawled around. Southern irises, trout lilies, and arrowhead plants were growing everywhere, along with pitchers, sundews, and other carnivorous plants.
Just ahead, she heard a faint, buzzy peeeent.
Curious, she moved toward the sound and came to a small meadow in the bog. The sun had set behind the trees just a few minutes before and a soft, dusky orange light filled the western sky.
Peeeent!
She finally saw it: a small, pudgy, well-camouflaged brownish bird with an extremely long bill sat on the ground in the center of the meadow.
It was a timberdoodle.