“What about you, Rowena?” she asked gently. “What do you want to do?”
Rowena shook her head, clenching her jaw, but did not reply.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Serafina urged her.
“It doesn’t matter what I’m thinking,” Rowena said.
“But I can see you’re gnawing on something…”
Rowena shook her head again, annoyed that Serafina was pressing her. But then she began to speak.
“I didn’t know my father for the first thirteen years of my life,” she said. “When I was four or five years old, my mother used to tell me stories about him, that he was traveling in other countries searching for the ancient lore, but I didn’t understand what her words truly meant, and she died before I was old enough to ask.”
“So you were born with…” Serafina began to say.
“I sensed there was something inside me, but I didn’t know what it was or how to control it,” Rowena said. “All I knew was that I was different from others, that I could do things. When my mother died, the authorities put me into an orphanage, but the adults there couldn’t raise me any more than a fly can raise a wasp.”
As Rowena spoke, the others listened in silence.
“Years later, my father came to the orphanage and retrieved me. I didn’t know him, but I thought that everything I had endured up to that point in my life had been the darkness, the twisting, painful birth of what I was, and that now, with my new father, my life would truly begin.”
“Is that when you came to America?” Serafina asked.
“Not at first. First, he trained me how to use the powers within me that had been such a mystery to me all my life. Then he brought me here, back to these mountains where he was born. He’d come to fight his old enemy, and he set me on a path. I followed it gladly. I was appreciative of the chance to help him, hungry for his attention and approval. I wanted to become everything he wanted me to be.”
Rowena hesitated, seemingly lost in the shadows of her own story for a moment, but then she continued, her voice ragged with her determination not to falter. “Trapping animals in cages, killing a man with snakes, hurling a dog from a staircase, throwing a boy from his horse, dragging him over the stones, striking him with wounds, fighting, always fighting, and the blood on the Loggia…” Her words dwindled into nothingness and she looked down at the floor. And then, after a long pause, she lifted her eyes to them and said, “What do you do when you realize you are the monster in your own story?”
For a moment, they were all still. And then Serafina answered, “You rewrite the story.”
Rowena looked at her sharply, almost malevolently. “The past cannot be changed.”
“But the future can,” Serafina shot back.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Rowena said, turning away from her.
Just as Serafina was about to argue that it does matter, she realized that Rowena didn’t actually believe the words she had just said. It wasn’t a trick or a lie, but a shield, and Serafina had heard these words before. It doesn’t matter now, Rowena had said when they first spoke at her lair, just the ramblings of a troubled soul, nothing of consequence.
Serafina looked up at Rowena. “It was you. You came to my grave to speak to me about all this…The voice I heard…You were the one who woke me…”
Rowena did not turn, did not look at her. For a moment it seemed as if she was going to walk out the door and never come back.
But then Braeden stepped toward Rowena and touched her arm. It was like he had cast a spell on her and she could not move. “What do you mean it doesn’t matter?” he asked. “Of course it matters. What are you saying, Rowena? You’re going to stay with us, aren’t you?”
And that caught her. Rowena slowly turned and looked at him.
Serafina could see in Rowena’s eyes an awareness of all the suffering she had caused. A troubled soul, nothing of consequence, she had said of herself. Somehow Rowena had found a path through it all. But Serafina could see a deep hopelessness in Rowena now, as if the sorceress knew there was no way to make things right, no way to protect Braeden or herself or any of them from her father, that feelings didn’t matter, it was all going to end in the same way no matter what she did.
Serafina moved toward her. “You change, Rowena,” she said firmly. “If you don’t like the way you are, you make yourself different. That’s what you’ve done. That’s what you’ve been doing. You’ve been hiding from your father, finding a new way. I know you’re discouraged and scared. We all are. But you can rewrite the story. You determine what needs to be done and you do it, whatever it is, no matter how difficult it seems. There’s no choice here. You do what’s right.”
“No,” Rowena snarled at her. “That’s exactly my point, cat. There is a choice. You have a choice between right and wrong at every step you take…There’s always a choice.”
“And you’ve made your choice, and you’re going to keep making it,” Serafina said, refusing to back down. “You’ve chosen to fight with us.”
“Yes, I made my choice,” Rowena said, her voice strained. “And now we have a war. We surprised my father up there on the mountain. We wounded him. But he’ll come back for us now, hunt us, because vengeance, more than anything else, is what drives him. He shifts, he adapts, that’s what he does—he’s a snake that sheds its skin—but I’m warning you: my father is going to come for us for what we did last night. And he will kill us all. Starting with me.”
Waysa stepped toward her. “You are one of us now, Rowena. We’ll all fight this together. We’re going to stop him before he can hurt you or any of us.”
Braeden listened to Waysa, and then looked at Serafina and Rowena. “But we’ve already fought him and struck him down repeatedly, and he keeps coming back. We threw everything we had at him last night, and lost many good friends, and he still defeated us. How are we going to kill an enemy who can’t be killed?”
The room went quiet.
No one had an answer. The young sorceress didn’t storm from the room, but she didn’t speak, either. She seemed even more distressed by their failure to defeat her father than the rest of them.
When Rowena noticed that Serafina was looking at her, the sorceress turned toward her and said, “Mark my words, he’s going to come after us.”
Rowena’s words echoed in Serafina’s mind. She was sure she was right. But Serafina had no solution to the problem, no attack or defense, and neither did her companions. None of them knew what to do.
While the others got cleaned up, found some more food in the kitchen, and rested after the long, difficult night, Serafina went downstairs to the workshop to see her pa. She found him cooking up some breakfast in the black iron skillet.
“That was a jenny-wallop of a storm last night,” he said, as she walked in. “Me and the rest of the crew were workin’ most the night, repairin’ what damage we could. Where’d you hunker down?”