Alias Hook (35 page)

And so with a glance all round the craggy bluffs that surround the beach, and the merest nod of my head, I turn to march back down the shore, and shove my boat back into the water. Climbing in, I paddle carefully through the shoals for deeper water without a backward glance, but alert for any sounds of pursuit. But no one follows. And as I heel about for southward in the open water of the bay, a sense of elation grips me once more, greater than the triumph of a victory, a surge of something like hope that I have never felt before in this place.

Until the night goes eerily dark and I glance up to see the brilliant moon gone as red as a pulsing heart. I can scarce keep hold of my oars. What cataclysm can this portend? A red eclipse, common enough in the old world, but a rarity here. Only once before have I ever seen its like in the Neverland.

It was on the night Bill Jukes died.

And I am back aboard the
Rouge,
taking a brace of bottles straight to my bed, intent on burning away this troubling memory for good.

No daylight leaks into the merwives’ grotto, but I come awake to the sounds of quickening activity round the pool that suggest morning—a clattering of shell goblets on coral trenchers, the animated cooing of infants, a soft hum of female voices. Yet my dream vision clings to me like the persistent tang of smoke after a bonfire. I am all but trembling with it: the pealing bell, the garden, a companion I could never name, a fleeting bond of friendship I have longed forever since. Not a dream at all, but a memory.

Something called her back to the Neverland, she said. Was it me?

3

The new day is bright and blue with foreboding, as I row down the creek in shirtsleeves, under my black hat. A pod of loreleis accompanied me all the way to the juncture of Kidd Creek, opening a swift channel for my boat. But the creek flows into the bay, and from here I make my journey alone. One person on this island has the knowledge of boy country I seek, and it will take some time to row myself to Indian Beach. But evidently, I have done it before. Stella dared to ask for the Indians’ help, and she received it. Can I do any less on her behalf?

The pink shell whistle, on a new thong, lies against my chest under my shirt. Stella’s moccasins sit in the bottom of the boat. I pause my rowing, reach down to tuck them more securely astern. And doing so, I notice some crumpled white thing, soaked with bilgewater, also stowed under the stern. Memory stirs; I draw in my oars and lift it out of the bottom. It’s an old shirt, and as I unroll it, its contents spark in the sun: a pair of crystal goblets. I smuggled them off the
Rouge,
millennia ago, only to be forgotten when I found Stella gone. Remarkably, they are undamaged, sturdy stems supporting inverted bell-shaped bowls.

What did Stella say about bells and fairies?

Only Pan and the imps know the way out, I said so myself. Stella risked all to try to contact them, and my refusal to listen, to even consider her plan, has put Stella in unspeakable danger. What did Lazuli say about conquering fear? And so I screw up my vitals, clamp hold of what remains of my sanity, and chime the two delicate rims together.

It might be no more than a speck of sunlight off the water, but for the way it speeds toward me out of the thin air. Instinctively, I draw back, close my eyes against another scorching, raise my hand to ward of the corrosive terror of fairy language, but a scent reaches me first, along the breeze. Sulfur and allspice. I have smelled it before, aboard the
Rouge,
I remember now.
Seize your chance
.

Opening my eyes, I see her hovering before me, perhaps an armspan away. Her wings buzz too quickly to be seen, her person but a blur of lavender-blue and dark hair. She is not the queen, nor is she Pan’s belligerent imp, with the fair hair and greenish habit. This one makes a formal movement of her head while the insane scree of her speech peppers the air. With a tremendous effort, I unclench my ears, allow the tiny peals of sound bubbling through my head to resolve themselves into words.

“Captain Hook,” she flutes at me.

“Thank you for coming,” I whisper. “Madam…?”

“Call me Piper,” she says, with another little nod. “Thank you for inviting me. I thought you never would.”

She hovers there, and I grope in the pocket of my coat across the thwart for my spectacles to see her more clearly. The rags she wears are the color of morning glories; strands of dry beach grass knot up her glossy black hair into fanciful loops and swirls. She peers curiously back at me.

“You once spoke to me about a chance,” I hazard.

“Twice,” she corrects me.

My throat constricts to recall how I chased her around Stella’s cabin, too afraid to listen. “The woman you spoke to on my ship that day. She is in grave danger.”

“I know she is,” the imp replies.

I suck in breath, all but crushing the goblet still clutched in my hand. “I must find her, free her, somehow. I will do whatever you ask, give you anything I have, if you will help me.”

Piper regards me in a curious manner. “You have only to ask me, Captain,” she says serenely. “How may the Sisterhood help you?”

“Sisterhood?” I echo, glancing about fearfully for an onslaught of tiny, scintilescent beings.

“The Sisterhood of the Bells,” the imp explains. “We are the order of fairies pledged to stand guard in the Neverland. We are sworn to protect the mortals here.”

“The boys, you mean.”

“Every mortal,” she corrects me. “Every mother, child, brave and elder in the First Tribes. Every merwoman and infant in the lagoon. Every boy and girl Peter brings here, Sisterhood guards attend them all. That is the bargain by which the Sisterhood and all of our race earns the right to live in this place. We protect the innocent.”

“Stella, my friend, is innocent,” I point out. “Cannot the fairies, your sisters, protect her until I—”

But the little creature is shaking her head sadly. “She is innocent no more, not as she was when she first arrived. It is no longer a matter of urgency to the Neverland if her blood is shed.”

“But … why?” I sputter. “She has harmed no one!”

“There are many ways to lose one’s innocence, Captain.”

The goblet has slid from my fingers. “But she does not deserve to be murdered.”

“No, but fairies cannot interfere with the boys,” the imp sighs. “We can urge and suggest, but we cannot prevent them doing what they please.”

“I ask for no one to act against the boys,” I tell her. “I am going there without weapons, myself. I will ask Chief Eagle Heart to show me the way.”

“Very wise, Captain,” Piper says approvingly.

I draw a steadying breath. “I pledge by the love I bear for Stella that I’ll not harm the boys—”

“Oh, excellent pledge!” the creature sparkles avidly at me. “The boys pledge their rusty knives, their sour furs; their pledges are worth nothing!”

“I only beg you, your sisters, not to oppose me should I find the opportunity to release her,” I finish.

The imp sobers, alights upon the thole pin, regards me. “Of course not. We are sworn to keep the peace here.”

I peer at her. “Some of your sisters have been derelict in their duty,” I mutter. “I have lost hundreds of men, thousands. Brutally. Savagely.”

She gazes back at me with perfect equanimity. “I too have lost many sisters in our battles, to the iron in your pistols when your men still knew how to use them, to the tiny tearing missiles you call grape. We will fight to the death to protect the innocent. But no fairy will ever use magic against you so long as you offer no harm to the boys.”

The brutal simplicity of it stuns me. How could it have taken me two centuries to understand?

“But how are my men to perceive such subtleties while under constant attack?” I protest.

“If they are under attack, it is already too late,” Piper rejoins. “Your men return here in a state of reclaimed innocence, their dreams pared down to a single longing for lost childhood. But as soon as they make war on the boys, they forfeit their innocence. They understand perfectly well what killing is. They must be guided by a wise leader who understands that their battles can never be won.”

“Eagle Heart,” I murmur.

“The First Tribes were the boy’s enemies once,” Piper agrees.

“But my men will never stand for a truce,” I sigh, even supposing Pan would grant them one. “Battle is the only vestige of manhood they possess.”

“Then they must die.”

“And Pan’s fairy?” I venture. “Does she obey your rules?”

“Kestrel is a rash, strutting, wayward little thing, with no more sense than a flea, and just as irritating. And she is foolish about the boy.” Piper huffs as deep a sigh as her miniscule lungs can emit and flutters up again to look me in the eye. “I may say these things because she is my sister. My blood sister.”

By God’s vitals, I’ve just revealed my intentions to the sister of Pan’s ferocious imp! Have I cost Stella her life?

“But she is a fierce and loyal caregiver who takes her duties very seriously,” Piper goes on. “We are of the Zephyrae clan, Kes and I, as old as the West Wind. We will never dishonor the laws of this place. Offer no harm to the boys, and Kes will not oppose you.”

I grasp one oar and hook up the other. “Then I’d better go.”

The imp flutters up out of the way of this activity, watching me. “Kestrel cannot injure your friend, but she will do as the boy commands,” Piper tells me. “If you find the woman bound by fairy magic, this will break the enchantment: say something to her that stirs the heart. The mortal heart where fairies have no power.”

I nod in gratitude, dip one oar to come about, but the imp continues hovering just above me.

“You cannot mean to go all the way to Indian Beach in this clumsy mortal device,” she scoffs.

“I have no other,” I point out grimly.

“I can get you there faster,” Piper suggests.

My arms convulse with longing. “What must I do?”

“You must trust me, Captain.”

It’s like dreaming, an effusion of random sensation: tinkling laughter, points of sunlight dancing crazily on the sea, a tang of salt and allspice in the air, a constant, shuddering vibrato, deeper than normal hearing, like a huge swell just before it breaks, or a gust freshening into a gale. Then silence, and the warmth of the sun on my face. Glimmersailing, she called it. And I sit up woozily in my skiff, in the shallows off Indian Beach, the sun scarcely any higher in its vault toward its zenith than it was moments ago when I was speaking to the fairy, Piper.

As my boat drifts in on the tide, I haul off my shirt and make the last of my preparations. The tiny metal buckles burn my fingers, heated like pokers in the intense sunlight, but I unfasten the last of them and shake the apparatus into the bottom with a dull, wet thunk. Pulling on my shirt again, I rummage for my black hat and clamp it on my head, dispelling some of the sun’s sizzling glare.

The white sands of Indian Beach stretch out before me as I glide round the last of the steep gray rocks guarding its entrance. And strung across the shore like sturdy palm trees planted in the wet sand, a dozen braves await me with arrows nocked and tomahawks raised.

Chapter Twenty-eight

SUITE: BRAVERY

1

“You risk much coming to me.”

Eagle Heart’s lodge house is nothing so grand as the palace of the Fairy Queen; it is a simple rectangular structure of hewn logs, reeking of crushed pine and leather. Here the tribespeople gather for feasts, disputes are heard, and the shaman chants his visions; I have seen it in my dream.

“I can’t let them hurt her,” I tell him.

The young chief sits cross-legged on an animal skin thrown over the dirt floor, elbow propped on one knee, fingering his chin, considering me with his cool, impenetrable eyes. “Why do you think I will help you?”

I kneel before him in the dirt, my guard of braves ringed close around me, should I entertain any thought, much less make any motion against their chief. “I helped you once. I did what you asked,” I remind him.

“The danger now is not so great,” he fences.

“I know her life no longer matters to the survival of the Neverland, the Dreaming Place,” I nod. “But you are a just man. And my cause is just.”

He sits back, palms flat against the knees of his buckskin trousers, gazing at me. “What would you have me do?”

“Take me to the boy’s lair.” No sound at all greets this absurd request, although tension crackles like St. Elmo’s Fire among my warrior guards. Nor does it slacken when I slowly, slowly raise my arms, the fingers of my hand spread open, my other shirt cuff still partially draped over the ghastly flesh of my ruined wrist, naked of its customary appendage. “I bear no weapons,” I tell them all. “No harm will come to the boys.” I lift my chin, hazard my last and only trump. “I’ll never again raise arms in malice against the boys or the braves, from this moment on, if you help me get her back.”

Half of my guard of braves are dispatched back to their watching posts among the cliffs and crevices above the beach. Those remaining have grudgingly culled from their own stores the leathern trousers and moccasins I now wear. I keep on the shell necklace, of course, and sport a long, fringed vest, open down the front, to cover the worst of my scarred torso. One of the silent warriors takes it upon himself to twist my long hair into warrior plaits. He’s just tying off the second with a rawhide thong when Eagle Heart comes to me with a band of beaded leather dripping with fringe. He cinches it below the elbow of my ruined arm, so the long fringe covers my deformity, then steps back to view the effect.

“Your skin glows like Indian Beach,” he sighs. “Stay in the middle and no one will notice.”

The eyes of the whole of the village follow us from behind the flaps of their conical tepees, from around the rumps of their ponies in the corral, from amid the tall stalks of corn in their planting ground, as we parade out of the lodge house with Eagle Heart in the lead. Like the other men, I carry a bow and wear a quiver, although mine is devoid of arrows. We march down to the side of a lake, Moon Lake, as it is called, and take passage in three long, narrow canoes for the lot of us. We follow a meandering channel out of the lake, out of Indian Territory, and down into the dark, woody forests of boy country.