“Didn’t get much sleep,” she said, sitting down at the little table where they ate their meals.
“Everything all right?” he asked, concerned. “You’re lookin’ a little worse for wear.”
“I’m all right,” she said.
“But I can see your gears are a-turnin’,” he said as he put a plate of food in front of her.
“I just have a question, is all,” she said, picking up and chewing on a piece of ham. “Somethin’ I need your help with.”
“Put me on the scent of it and I’ll be off on the bay,” he said, using his favorite expression about barking coon dogs to say he was happy to help if she told him what it was about.
“What do you do when you’re working on a machine, or some other kind of problem, and you just can’t fix it? It just seems impossible,” she asked.
Her pa looked at her. She was pretty sure that he could see that it was something important to her.
“When I’m faced with what seems like an unsolvable problem,” he said, “I do all that I can do, and when that’s not enough, I stop, and I step back. I study it real careful-like, look at it from different angles, try to think about it in ways that I never thought of before, and maybe nobody else has either.”
“And does it work?”
“Sometimes. But the main of it is that the most important tool in your toolbox isn’t the screwdriver or the wrench. It’s your imagination.”
Serafina was listening to her pa’s words, but he must have seen the quizzical expression on her face.
“Let’s try it,” he said. “Give me a ‘for instance.’”
“Pa?”
“Put me in a fix and let’s see how I get out of it.”
“All right,” she said. “Let’s say you want to hammer a nail into a board. You line up the nail, you hold it with your fingers, and you hit the nail on the head with your hammer repeatedly. It goes in a little bit, just enough to stick, but it doesn’t go in all the way. You strike the nail with your hammer again and again as hard as you can, and still it doesn’t go in. You even get three of your friends to help you, but no matter what you do, no matter how hard you pound, the nail won’t go in. So what do you do?”
“I set down the hammer,” he said.
She smiled, thinking he was joking, telling her that he’d just give up, but then she realized he wasn’t playing. He meant it.
“I set down the hammer,” he said again. “I’d take a step back, you see, figure out what I’m truly tryin’ to do, and figure out a mend that doesn’t involve a hammer. Or maybe even a nail.”
Serafina gazed at her pa and tried to reckon his words. She wasn’t certain, but she thought she maybe understood.
As they finished their breakfast and washed up the plates, her pa said, “I gonna be fixin’ one of the jammed-up coal chutes. It’s been leakin’ storm water somethin’ awful down into the basement every time it rains. I don’t know what the rest of the day holds, but I’ll be around.” Then he looked at her, his eyes steady on her. “What about you?”
“I’ll find you,” she said, and that was what he needed to hear to know that she’d do her best to keep herself safe, and that he’d see her soon.
Reluctant to separate, the two of them embraced, held each other for several seconds, and then said good-bye.
“I’m glad you’re home, Sera,” he said softly.
“Me too, Pa,” she said in return. “Thanks for the help.”
“You stay dry, now,” he said.
As she went back upstairs to find Braeden and the others, her mind was filled with thoughts of her pa and what was ahead of her.
She knew Uriah was coming for her and her friends. She knew they had to defeat him. But how? The same question kept rattling around her head: How do you destroy an enemy who can’t be destroyed?
She knew she had to stay bold no matter what, but the problem before her seemed impossible. She wasn’t strong enough to fight Uriah, and neither were her friends.
But then, deep in the most shadowed recesses of her mind, something began to lurk. The faint movement of an unseen shape. The shaded trace of an idea. It was a dark path, fraught with dangers that could lead to the deaths of her and her friends, and ultimately the destruction of Biltmore.
In many ways, the idea seemed to make no sense at all.
And therein lay its beauty.
Set down the hammer, she thought.
Serafina and Braeden walked together toward the Conservatory, the greenhouse with its tall, arched windows and its slanted glass rooftops shining in the morning sun. Many of the glass panes had been broken by the night’s storm, but the brick structure was still standing.
As they entered the thick heat and steaming moisture of the building, the sun filtered down through the palms, ferns, and bromeliads that grew all around them and up over their heads, shading them in a junglelike canopy.
Serafina and Braeden quickly made their way through the plants of the central palm house to join Rowena and Waysa in the orchid room, where they met in the shroud of hundreds of delicate blooms.
They all knew they were there to figure out their next move against Uriah, but Rowena repeated the challenge that they had already faced many times: “How are we going to kill an enemy who can’t be killed?”
“I think the trick is that we don’t,” Serafina said.
They looked at her in confusion.
“We can only hide for so long before he comes for us,” Waysa warned.
“I don’t think that’s what she has in mind,” Rowena said as she studied Serafina.
“We can’t hunt Uriah down and fight him with tooth and claw,” Serafina explained. “We can’t beat him in a battle. And even if we do, he won’t stay dead.”
“But we have no choice,” Waysa said.
“I think there may be another way,” Serafina said slowly. She looked at Braeden. “In the angel’s glade, the night you freed my spirit, I gave you something to keep safe…”
“The silver clasp,” Braeden said.
“Do you still have it?” Serafina asked.
“I asked a hellbender in the marsh to hide it in the mud where no one could find it.”
“Oh dear,” Rowena said, shaking her head. “My father’s going to be looking for that.”
But Serafina smiled. It was perfect. The hellbender was a gigantic, two-foot-long, atrociously ugly brown salamander. The mountain folk called it a grampus, a snot otter, or a mud-devil. If there was anything that could hide the silver clasp, it was the hellbender.
“But what are you thinking about, Serafina?” Waysa asked.
Serafina turned to the sorceress. “It depends on Rowena.”
“Do tell,” Rowena said.
“If Braeden can retrieve the silver clasp,” Serafina asked, “can you use it?”
“Use it to do what?” Braeden asked in alarm.
But Serafina kept her eyes on the sorceress. “Can you do it, Rowena?”
Rowena stared back at her in disbelief. “Well, you little rat catcher…” she whispered, her voice filled with the devilish conspiracy of it.
“What?” Braeden asked. “What’s going on?”
“You want to remake it…” Rowena said.
“Remake what?” Braeden asked, his voice strained with apprehension.