Tiger Lily (28 page)

Maeryn pulled her fingers away and dug a shell out of the mud, studying it. “I have a friend who wants the same things you do,” she murmured, glancing up from the shell. “I can introduce you, if you like. Though I think you may have met briefly before.”

Tiger Lily didn’t answer. I knew the name before Maeryn said it. I flew up to Tiger Lily’s ear and perched on her earlobe. I felt like I was on fire with the weight of what I knew and couldn’t say.

“His name is Reginald Smee,” Maeryn said.

I bit Tiger Lily, as hard as I could. I don’t know how I thought it would help. Faerie bites are worse than wasp stings—they pierce and burn and ache all at the same time. At best, I knew, I’d be swatted away, and at worst she might crush me by accident in her sudden reaction to the pain. But what happened was worse. She didn’t even seem to notice it at all. It was like Tiger Lily herself wasn’t even really there.

“He’ll wait for your fire, up on the plateau, every night at dusk until he sees it.”

For a moment, Maeryn’s eyes flicked to me. I could see in that one look that she saw my alarm, and it amused her. Tiger Lily stood up to leave, and all I could do was follow.

She didn’t go to Reginald Smee that night. Instead, she woke Pine Sap from his spot on the floor of his house, late. In his sleep, the first thing he did was hug her. He held her tight, despite her stillness, despite her body never softening into his. He knew her well enough to know he needed to hold her anyway.

“I need help,” she said.

In the morning, in the comfortable shelters the tribe had given to them, the visitors woke with an inkling that something was off. I happened to be in Phillip’s tent at first light, scouring for dust mites.

He sat up in bed, and saw the feather lying on his blanket, just on top of his chest. He turned it around and around in his hand, curious, startled that it could have arrived in the night without him knowing it. And then he heard the scratching on the roof.

Some of the others had already come outside.

No one screamed. But one man fainted. I had to stay well hidden, but through the cracks of his shelter, I watched.

There were so many crows. Crows on the roofs. Crows on the path. Crows perched on every bare surface, so that all the paths through the village were black instead of brown.

The villagers began to mutter to each other. They knew what it meant, even if the Englanders didn’t.

They were sure—even before they saw her, standing in the square, her hair cut as short as Tik Tok’s had been—what it meant. Their gods were back. Tiger Lily had called them. And the Englanders were doomed.

T
he Tiger Lily I knew had disappeared. I listened and listened and heard nothing inside her. I don’t know where she went during those days. But her body remained and did things I couldn’t predict.

I followed her one night into the dark forest, setting a path for the plateau. I felt her tremble. I thought she was scared of things she couldn’t see. But later, I realized, she was scared of herself.

What could I do? I threw acorns into her water jug, stuck leaf stems in her ears, shoved a jagged pebble into her nostril, all to get her attention. But nothing slowed her steady pace. For the first time, I thought about going back to my swamp after all. I wanted to be somewhere where I didn’t have to watch.

Up on the plateau, she lit a fire and waited, her back against a boulder, and far below in the darkness we could see the lights of tiny fires, all of different settlements across the island: her own village, and even the distant fires of the Cliff Dwellers. The lights would have been comforting on another night, but knowing what we were there for kept me on edge. Tiger Lily waited, her hand near her knife, dull eyed and still. I listened to her heart but it was a black pit; it sounded like the sky at night when it was too cloudy to see the stars.

The woods below were quiet. Animals had retreated into their burrows. The whole world seemed to be sleeping. Back home, I thought with sudden longing, the faeries would be gathered around a warm sulfurous spring, lounging and huddled together.

It must have been hours before we heard the sound of a pair of feet climbing up the last rise.

Smee appeared on the edge of a jagged, rocky area at the side of the meadow. His eyes flicked to Tiger Lily’s knife as he approached. She watched him, expressionless. When he reached the circle of the fire, he crouched across from her and stirred a stick in the flames.

“You’re willing to help us?” he said.

“Yes,” Tiger Lily said, without hesitating.

“Bad things may happen to them.” As he said this, visions of strangling Tiger Lily played in his head. He was tempted to lunge for her now, but he knew if he did, he’d be a dead man. Better to wait until the moment she was off her guard, when the time came. “You know that, don’t you?”

Tiger Lily nodded. Her eyes were trained on the fire. “You promise me they’ll happen to the girl, too?”

Smee nodded. Even he could see something had changed in her. He studied her face, and none of the fierceness and compassion he’d seen and admired was there. She was cold and empty. He wondered if maybe she wasn’t worth killing after all.

Then suddenly, a flicker of the old Tiger Lily appeared, just for a moment. “But none of the boys. Only Peter and Wendy. Anyone else, and …” She gave him a warning look. She didn’t have to finish.

Smee swallowed deeply, visibly afraid. But also, though Tiger Lily didn’t see it, eager.

She drew a map for him in the dirt, tracing it all with a steady finger. Of course, Smee already knew the lagoon.

“We’ll need you for bait,” Smee said. If Tiger Lily had been more herself, she might have sensed the trap. But she only nodded, agreeing. Peter had abandoned her, but she knew he wouldn’t abandon her to die.

She didn’t see how intently Smee studied her face in the firelight. “They can’t swim,” she said finally. It was enough.

They arranged when and where they would meet. And then Smee turned and trudged back down the mountain, breathing heavily from the exertion. She watched him go, then sat in silence, listening to the crackle of the fire.

As Tiger Lily walked home, I pricked at her, I stung her, I pulled out several of her hairs. But she flicked me away easily. Still, I kept on trying.

Because there were two things I knew. Neither of us could ever really see Peter drowned and survive it. And it wasn’t Peter that Smee planned to destroy.

“T
hey say there are pearls at Whitestone Beach.”

Tiger Lily was standing amid the boys at the new burrow. Peter and Wendy had gone for a walk. They wanted all of the alone time they could get, Tootles said, while Nibs gave him an exasperated look. Of all of them, Nibs was the only one who really understood. From a tangle of bushes, Tiger Lily herself had watched them leave, their hands entwined, her heart cold as stone.

“Your hair,” Slightly said. “It’s … it’s horrible.” Nibs elbowed him, but Slightly’s eyes were glued to Tiger Lily’s scalp. “Did it catch on fire or something?”

“Why would we want pearls?” one of the twins asked. He was bouncing Baby on his knee. In the many months that she had known them, she realized, Baby did not seem to have gotten any bigger. Was he stuck in infancy forever?

“To make a gift for the Wendy bird,” Tiger Lily said. “She loves pearls, didn’t you notice?” Only Nibs looked suspicious. “She might be so grateful she’ll take you to England with her.”

The boys all shrugged. “Okay,” said Curly, unable to resist rushing into anything that seemed vaguely foreboding.

I tried to get in their way, but of course they dismissed me. Slightly said I was having “lady’s hysterics.” One of the twins mentioned something he’d heard about women going crazy twelve times a year. Nibs pointed out that that was impossible since I wasn’t a lady, and that insects were just irrational and you could never know why they did the things they did.

Tiger Lily led them through the forest, to where the path changed from dirt to loamy mud, trailing through scrubby little bushes that were spaced enough to leave natural footpaths. Finally, they reached the shore. This was a quiet inlet; the sand white and warm. And indeed, the ground just below the waterline was covered by beds of thousands of oysters.

They secreted Baby in a basket in the bushes, and waded in the water. Immediately, Tiger Lily plucked off her necklace and dropped it into the water, where it would probably never be found.

For many reasons, her one pearl no longer seemed as beautiful as it once had.

The boys hauled their oysters into the shade to shuck, sand stuck to their feet and calves. Never was there a group more relaxed, and happy to have something new to do.

Tiger Lily had brought two jugs of caapi water, packing them in on her back, and now as they sat in the shade of a palm tree, she offered it around. I sat on the bottle and tried to sting anyone who handled it, but they brushed me aside.

Tootles drank first. Then Slightly. Nibs looked suspicious, but took a sip. They all sat and talked and waited for the effects of the water to set in.

“I feel weird,” Slightly said, and grinned.

“I feel fine,” Tootles said solemnly. “But it’s crazy that that tree’s smiling at me.”

“You’re a real piece of work, Tootles,” Nibs said.

“Don’t say
work
,” one of the twins said. “Bite your tongue.”

Tiger Lily let their every word tattoo itself on her. Tomorrow, she would be a stranger to them; they would hate her. She knew this in a vague, distant way, as if she were watching herself from above, with no power to change things.

Finally Tootles slumped back and yawned. The others soon followed. The boys talked and fell asleep, one by one, until every last one of them was peacefully passed out in the shade, the soft lapping of the water lulling them. When she was sure they were all asleep, Tiger Lily stood quietly. She was tempted to forget everything and stay on the beach all day, until they woke up, and laugh with them like she used to. She had the sudden urge to kiss each one’s cheek, but the gesture would have been too strange to her. She only patted Nibs’s hand, as affectionately as she could, before she stood and walked back into the forest.