Tiger Lily (13 page)

“Moon Eye’s the spindly one. Pretty. You didn’t tell me you were the daughter of the shaman.” Peter petted the pup and leaned in to hold his nose to its fur, smelling it and giving it one small, gentle kiss.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“I spied on the village.” He ran a hand through his hair and pushed it lopsided, stretched out his long legs. “I’ve been spying for a while. Ask the wolf, he knows.”

He went to move the wolf’s lips again, but Tiger Lily cut him off. “People in my village think you’re a monster,” she said. She didn’t add that they thought she was a monster too. She also felt both proud and irked that he thought her friend was pretty. “You have to stay away.”

“I’d rather not.”

Tiger Lily frowned at him. She didn’t understand why she felt so suddenly protective of him. “I can make you.” She was serious, but Peter grinned.

“With what?”

“With this,” she said, and moved her hand to the hatchet at her waist. But Peter only looked pleased.

He studied her face, and pondered for a few moments.

“So you’re a brave girl?” he asked.

This startled her, made her nervous. She nodded, unsurely. “Yes.”

Peter smiled now, triumphant. “Good. Then I want to show you something.”

She didn’t have to go. But she tucked the pup against her skin, in a fold of her tunic, and let Peter lead her.

I fluttered up into the trees to escape the eyes of a kite that had just come to circle above the meadow, and caught up with them a few minutes later, walking through forest I was vaguely familiar with, skirting a bog and a tangle of low, impenetrable bushes. From the sound of it, the river was nearby, but hidden in a crevice. They ducked under a massive, felled tree that I had passed in my hunts before. Its trunk protruded over a waterfall, its roots disappearing behind it.

Tiger Lily peered over the edge of the falls. The water poured out and pooled far below, deep indigo blue and white froth inside a ring of jagged rocks. “Can you dive?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes.” She and Pine Sap had practiced as children, day after day. But as a girl, she wasn’t allowed.

“Can I see?” he asked quietly.

“Yes.” Tiger Lily nodded.

She handed him the pup. She hesitated for a moment, unsure of why he’d made the request. The drop was enormous. And then she stepped up onto the fallen tree, edging to where it hung over the abyss. She sucked in her breath, a few times, for she did feel a little bit of fear. And then she dove. She looked like a sparrow dipping for a mosquito, so graceful and smooth.

She hit the water with a splash, and her head emerged a minute later. Up above, Peter stepped to the cliff’s edge to get a better view. And then he began climbing down to meet her as she climbed up the steep hill back toward the top.

When they met, they were next to a crevice that disappeared behind the waterfall.

Peter was quiet. Tiger Lily was soaked and catching her breath and she showed her white teeth to him in a rare smile. The water was dripping down her face and she pushed her hair back, coiling it behind her. With her cheeks flushed, she was almost girlishly beautiful.

Peter studied her for a moment, looking perplexed. “None of the boys will go in here,” he finally said, gesturing to the crevice. “They’re scared they’ll get swept away.” He scooted onto the ledge that led behind the curtain of water.

“It’s a terrible offense to a waterfall god, to look upon its face,” Tiger Lily said.

Peter grinned. “No gods behind here. Come on.”

Tiger Lily had never heard anyone say this. To Sky Eaters, gods living behind all waterfalls was a matter of fact. But she clearly didn’t want Peter to do something she wasn’t brave enough to do.

He led her inside. She didn’t know why, but she followed, tucking the wolf pup tight against her.

The water crashed just beyond their shoulders with immeasurable force. It was hard for someone my size not to help imagining what it would be like to be one drop in the deluge, flung from the cliffs above into an uncertain landing.

Peter smiled at her reassuringly. The air smelled thickly of dirt and earth and roots and wood and wet stone.

“I can’t stay,” Tiger Lily said, heart beating, moving to return the way she’d come. The place felt sacred.

“We can get out on the other side,” Peter said. “This way …”

He walked her out where they had to duck. He tried to help her, but she climbed herself. It was darker here, and from the crevice above them I could hear Tiger Lily’s breathing, and his. He was right behind her.

“Sorry. Are you scared?”

“No. I like it,” she said, though she didn’t say why. She liked that it was beneath the ground, where nothing seemed to change. She turned and smiled at him, and he smiled back, but more uncertainly.

They walked for a few minutes more, but increasingly there was something different, a charge in the air. The silence became heavy.

Peter moved to help her through the narrow upward tunnel, help she didn’t need, and the sound of the water became muffled now. The light was trickling down on her in two narrow slices, and as his hands moved to boost her he brought his face to her neck, almost as if he was bumping into her by accident, only he kissed the skin of her neck, just quickly. I don’t think he’d been planning to do it, or that he’d even thought of it until that moment.

She went still as an underground lake, and waited for him to pull away. And when he did, looking surprised at himself and slightly embarrassed, Tiger Lily didn’t meet his eyes but kept her face tight. She coolly hoisted herself out into the open air, and walked away on silent feet, clutching the pup to her chest. I fluttered behind her. I could hear that he didn’t follow her.

Somehow, it seemed Giant would know. It was the tangibility of his maliciousness, which could lead you to believe he had ears in the forest. So when I saw the ruckus in the village, people running around and everything disheveled, Moon Eye wringing her hands at the gate and everyone watching for Tiger Lily, then tugging at her clothes to pull her in, I knew with a heavy heart that they all knew what had happened behind the waterfall, and that Giant could have her killed for betrayal.

So I didn’t feel the confusion and shock of such a greeting until I saw the object of the chaos: it had walked into the village through the gates, held its hands above its head in surrender, and brought with it more danger than Peter ever could.

He was kneeling on a blanket near the fire. No one had dared go near him to try and put him back together, though he was clearly broken. He was emaciated, and it seemed that if the rags of his clothes came apart, he would, too.

Miraculously, his spectacles had arrived intact with him. When he spoke to Tiger Lily, she swayed on her feet.

Because before he spoke, she knew him. The Englander. Phillip. Alive.

I
n those early days that he was with the tribe, Phillip spoke to people we couldn’t see. He tossed and turned as if his body was a burden. But it was no wonder. I had never seen something so mostly dead and still walking.

Tiger Lily was, of course, chosen to take care of him, though the villagers’ curiosity was quickly winning out over their fear now that he was in their midst. They admired the foreigner’s courage; following his tracks down to the ocean, Stone and some of the other warriors learned that he had been living in a cave, probably unable to climb to higher ground because of a broken leg and broken ribs, eating what shellfish he could find. Walking into the treacherous woods must have been an act of desperation, and he’d been lucky to find the tribe. But they would not go near him. They established him in a house on the edge of the settlement, far from the river’s edge.

Tik Tok could not watch someone suffer and not try to heal him. So together, despite Tik Tok’s fears of aging, he and Tiger Lily concocted potions and salves, soups and broths, and began to try to nurse the Englander to health. They stayed up nights so that if he needed someone, they were there.

Pine Sap insisted on visiting too. “If you catch something, I want to catch it too,” he said one night to Tiger Lily, when they stood outside the dim hut, arguing. Moon Eye hovered at the doorway and watched with big eyes but was always too scared to enter, the wolf pup—whom she’d named Midnight—tucked into her apron. As Phillip’s hut was the most interesting place to be in all the village, I took up residence in a clay cup near his bedside.

Beliefs in the village could be a funny thing. Curiosity inspired the villagers to wonder if they didn’t want to believe in the aging disease after all. It was whispered in some circles that its contagion was just a superstition, and the earliest converts to this way of thinking were able to summon their courage enough to spy through the windows of Phillip’s room. The village was so small, with people so tight-knit, that when an idea took hold, it took hold of everyone. Which did make it easy, sometimes, to convince them of something all at once.

Finally, three days after he’d come, Phillip woke from his haze, focusing on the room around him. Tiger Lily knelt by him in relief. Moon Eye scurried away like a mouse.

I knew Tiger Lily was thinking about the kiss. She thought about it when she was washing her hair and when she was cleaning Giant’s room, when she was breaking thread with her teeth for her clumsy weaving and when she was walking to the house and feeding Phillip soup.

For the next couple of weeks she held Peter like a secret in her heart, lying right under her necklace. I could see him written on her face, and Tik Tok, too, seemed to catch shadows of him, because he’d stop to stare at her, puzzled, as if he’d just seen the boy flit across her eyes—seen the ghost of the kiss lingering for a second on the skin of her neck before disappearing.

“What are you thinking of?” Tik Tok asked one of these times, when she was sitting with her back against the wall. He was embroidering her interminable wedding dress, though they were still in the thick of the rainy season, and the day of her wedding seemed an eternity away. He was wearing a regal woman’s feather headdress and a dress of deep scarlet. That morning, he had felt sure enough of Phillip’s recovery to turn some of his attention back to his hair, which he’d left loose and messy for days. Now he had braided it, plaiting the braids and wrapping them all around each other in waves so that the back of his head looked like a rolling, glossy sea.

The blush on her face was the color of the cave behind the waterfall, the inside of the crevice, the backs of Peter’s hands.

“Nothing.”

Tik Tok stared serenely down at his work, the bone needle poking out from between his lips.

“Why is the Englander here?”

“We rescued him,” she said, with a slow, questioning smile.

“No, why is he here, in Neverland?”

“I don’t know.”

“He never told you?” he asked.

Tiger Lily shook her head.

Tik Tok nodded thoughtfully. “Make sure he feels comforted. He has lost everything.”

Tiger Lily turned her mind back to Phillip for a moment. “Before, in the stone house, he said that a ship would come looking for him.”

Tik Tok took this in. “I hope for his sake that that’s true and for our sake that it’s not.”

He laid his work on his lap and smiled softly. “You’ll be a sight to behold in this.”

She studied the dress, so feminine for her sleek frame, its lines of shells arching above each other like white waves. “Everyone will think I’m ugly.”