Alias Hook (38 page)

I dart her a puzzled glance, and strike another tiny spark. This one catches in the little bundle of grass.

“You might have let the boys kill me at their trial.”

I’m so startled, the flint fumbles out of my grasp.

“The merwives told me what happens if innocent blood is shed here,” she goes on. “You’d have had everything you ever wanted. The destruction of the Neverland, and all your enemies. The release you’ve always craved.”

My fingers are trembling as I slip them under the smoldering little nest of grass.

“You could have let the boys have their way.” Stella’s voice is as soft as the wisp of smoke beginning to curl up out of the grass. “Didn’t you ever stop to wonder why you interfered?”

I lift the little bundle and blow into it gently, gently, until it glows, breathing the fragile flame into life. It never, ever occurred to me to let Stella die to set myself free.

“Because I’m a fool?” I whisper.

Stella rustles closer, presses her shoulder to mine in a gesture that is affection, forgiveness, homecoming all in one. “That makes two of us, Maestro.”

“Folie à deux,” I sigh.

“Absobloodylutely,” she agrees. “So save your horror stories about what a monster you are for the more gullible Wendys. I know better.” She shifts closer still. “I’ve always known.”

I slide the warm little bundle back into the pit as tiny threads of grass begin to blacken and burn, and we gaze into the fledgling flame. We might smother it through carelessness, we might blow it out in a rage, or maybe, just maybe, we might nurture this tiny, stubborn, luminous thing that is so much stronger than both of us.

When I glance again at Stella, she is looking at me, her expression unbearably tender in the warm light. I slide my ruined arm round her waist and she lays her head on my shoulder.

“It meant so much to me, that someone was kind to me when I was most alone,” she says. “No wonder I always felt something good was waiting for me here.”

“You deserved to go home, and it gave me such enormous pleasure to see that you did. I don’t know why. But for an instant it was as if the whole of the Neverland were holding its breath for something…” I shake off this inarticulate thought. “But … it’s fantastic, Stella,” I begin again, still shaking my head. “You said yourself no Wendy would ever come back.”

“For Peter, I said,” Stella corrects me. “I came back for you.”

At this moment, a man with red blood in his veins might sweep her up with passionate declarations, followed by passionate lovemaking. But the cold light of reason has stolen in upon us with our newborn flame; our situation is as perilous as ever.

Stella reaches out to lay another stick over our tiny blaze. “It was crazy for you to come after me, James. You’re the one Peter was after.” She glances again at me. “When I was under that spell, it was like being a little tight, I didn’t really know what was going on. But now and then I could hear them, understand them. ‘He will come for her,’ someone said. Peter’s fairy, I suppose. ‘And you will have your greatest victory,’ she said.”

I recall the urgency in the imp’s plea,
Kill him now,
and Pan’s refusal. “But he might have murdered me again at any time, if that was all he wanted. His imp kept begging him to do it.”

“And that would hardly be his
greatest
victory,” Stella agrees. “He’s, well, killed you dozens of times. Unless the fairy thought it was possible to … really kill you. Forever. But maybe it wasn’t possible. Yet.”

“Not until the curse is broken,” I suggest. “Until the third sign is seen.” Even could we solve the riddle of escape, assuming Eagle Heart doesn’t order me drawn and fricasseed first, Proserpina’s curse continues to bind me here.

It must have been a sizeable beast, but no less than a grizzly would do for the boy. It stinks of game and smoke and rancid grease, but the toast-colored fur is thick and soft. I’ve spread the hide over a woven mat next to the fire pit for Stella; she’s been nodding against my shoulder for a quarter of an hour, having had no natural sleep since she left the merwives. I’ve urged her to rest while I keep watch, should the braves come back for me.

The loreleis’ serene
contrappunto
harmonies are wafting down the river. Cold blue moonlight leaks in through a hole between the hides at the top of the dome, at the place where the sapling poles are roped together. When Stella drifts off, I go pluck a silvery log from the woodpile and add it to our little blaze. I find a basket of Dream Flowers giving off a sweet, earthy scent, and I toss one of those on the fire as well. A plume of smoke dances up for the opening in the skins, and out into the night. The Neverland stars are just beginning to rise above the fluttering jungle shadows, glittering like Pan’s eyes.

I sit again, draw up my knees, still clad in buckskin, cross my bare arms over them, gaze into the fire. It may be true, what Stella once told me about praying to the wrong gods. A more pervasive power than the boy rules in this place, a power to which I might yet appeal, should I muster the courage to play wisely and well.

2

Stinging smoke forces my eyes closed. I lower my head on my arms, give myself up to regret, that most useless of all emotions.

My scarred thigh has given me not so much as a tremor of rheumatics in the centuries since Proserpina nursed me. How poorly I repaid her. That insulting song I played to prove to my men I was still fit for war and murder, my cruel words flung at her in anger, centuries of resentment in this place before I had the wit to see what she’d done for me, how bitterly I’ve wronged her. The clamor of these memories prod me bolt upright where I sit. White smoke moves sinuously in the air, and something else seems to laze and stretch in the shadows beyond the fire pit.

I know her by her stillness, the purposeful way she holds herself – alert, yet relaxed. She wears the same vibrantly-colored headscarf, muslin chemise, blue apron over a ruffled skirt, the same strings of turquoise and coral and ebony beads round her neck that I remember so well. Proserpina the witch, unchanged in two hundred and twenty-six years.

Her chocolate eyes gleam at me, her expression cool. “Why do you call me?”

I almost smile; as if I had the power to conjure a flea. “I’ve never offered you a word of thanks for the care you took of me once upon a time,” I say quietly. “Were such a thing possible, I would tell you how grateful I was.” She nods but says nothing. “I repaid you with scorn and abuse,” I go on. “I am bitterly sorry for it. Can you ever forgive me?”

She regards me for a long time through the shimmering smoke. “At last you ask the right question,
Capitaine,”
she murmurs.

“I wronged another woman,” I continue. “Caroline. I was too eager to believe a lie that might have cost her a lifetime of happiness. I would beg her pardon if I could.”

“She could not have satisfied you then,
Capitaine,
” Proserpina observes calmly. “No more could I.”

“You sent me here to save the Neverland,” I hazard, and she nods again. Stella’s theory was correct. “To save myself.”

“When I was alive, I loved you,” she tells me. “You were a man in my arms. But you craved childish things, murder, revenge, a warrior’s fame. You were ruled by the fire of your rage. The
loas
warned me of a brutal, terrible end, your spirit doomed to eternal misery, if you did not change. I thought if you saw what endless childhood is like, you would not want it so much.”

How right she was.

“I cast a spell to suspend your life. I could not let it end before you paid for the wrongs you had done.” She sighs and shakes her head. “I did not now how long it would take you, longer than my own mortal life. I did not know what cruel game he would play to keep you here.”

“How did you know of this place?” I ask her.

“My ancestor told me. She lived long ago. She loved somebody once, a boy she met in a dream, and then forgot. But her spirit remembers. From the time beyond, she knew this boy and this place of dreams were in danger. ‘Send your man there,’ she told me, ‘until he tires of childish games. Let him wash the blood off his hands.’”

And it comes to me again, the hypnotic fragrance of jasmine, Pan’s favorite, permeating my dreams, ghostly voices in the dark. “Zwonde,” I whisper.

“My ancestor,” Proserpina agrees. “The first girl ever carried off to this place of dreams to care for him. We, the daughters of her tribe, have been healers ever since.”

“The first Wendy,” I marvel.

“Her spirit does not forget. That is what it means to love.”

I gaze at Stella, prone on her fur skin in the shadows beside me. Sorrow like molten lead pumps through my veins at what I must do. “I know now why I’m here,” I say to Proserpina. “But Stella has wronged no one.”

“Why say this to me?” Proserpina demands.

“You sent me here. Is there not some voudon, some bargain we might strike, you and I, to send her safely home? I know your spirits require some balance to be struck between their world and the living.” I draw a breath. “I will stay here forever if you let her go.”

Her laughter is like low, rolling ripples in a very deep pond. It stings like grapeshot to have my offer ridiculed, for I do not make it lightly. It will deaden me beyond any despair even I have ever known to lose Stella again, but if a trade, a barter is required, I will forfeit my one chance at escape in exchange for Stella’s freedom. What else of any value have I to offer? Yet the witch chuckles on, tilting her head to one side, gazing briefly over at Stella, then back to me.

“La,
Capitaine,
she is free to go at any time,” Proserpina says, with a careless wave of her hand.

I gape at her. “Then why is she still here?”

“That is her choice,” breathes the witch, with a rustling of her skirts. “You give me more credit than I deserve, eh? Poor, foolish man. I have no power over your life. Only you have that power.”

I frown into the fire. “That has not been true in a long time.”

She lifts her shoulders, round and glossy above the low décolleté of her chemise. “It has always been true. When you left me, I make a spell. I bury it in the earth,” and her hand dips low to the dirt floor. “I cast it into the sea,” and she mimes this action as well. “I breathe it into the wind,” and she spreads wide the fingers of one hand before her mouth. “Do not break, I say to my spell, until he open his hand in kindness, open his heart to love, open his eye with the wisdom that comes of the other two.”

“That’s all?” I whisper. “That’s all you wanted?”

“That is everything,” she rebukes me gently, dark eyes glittery in the firelight. “Kindness freely offered that asks for no reward, love that values another above yourself, the wisdom to live without fear. This is the best of life.”

“You give my wits more credit than they deserve,” I say dryly.

“But not your power to love,
Capitaine,”
she murmurs, with another glance at Stella. “You prove it beyond all doubt. I hoped it would be me,” she goes on, with a hint of her old saucy smile in her black eyes. “Alone in this place of childish things, I hoped you might come to think more fondly of what you left behind. That you would tire of this game, break my spell, and I would call on the power of my ancestor, Mama Zwonde, to bring you back. But he changed the game, trapped you here in fear, kept you here far, far beyond my own mortal life.”

“So—your voudon brought Stella here?”

But she shakes her head. “I am dead. I have no more power in the living time. Only my spell remains. The earth, the sea, the sky keep watch over my spell.” She eyes me with an insouciant tilt of her head. “They say your chance has come.”

Shock rattles through me. I scarcely dare to breathe.

“You play well,” she smiles at me. “I knew you would, one day.”

“Thank you, Pina,” I whisper.

“I am glad you end this game,” she says, with an airy sweep of her hand. “The
loas
ask a price, it is true; I find I cannot take root in the time beyond until you free yourself. All this confusion, back and forth,” she sighs again. “I would leave the living time to the living. So take back your life,
Capitaine.
Spend your love. Use it well.”

I scarcely stammer any response before she waves me off and fades into the shadows, as if she has no more substance than a wisp of woodsmoke. Scrambling to my knees, I peer up and out of the hole, thinking to see her whirling away into the sky like a most formidable fairy, but she is simply gone.

I sit back with a thud against the earthen floor, jittery with an excitement I dare not define, panting as if I’ve run a race. I feel muscles stretching under my skin, nerves humming though my body, blood pumping, hair growing, lungs shuddering in, out. Water wells in my eyes from the stinging smoke; my blink is like a clashing of armies. Every blink, every breath, every glance is cataclysmic, reverberating like an earthquake, a riotous
concerto grosso
of all my physical parts led by my thundering heart.

Life! Genuine life crackling inside me, tender, fragile, finite, explosive life. I am walking dead no more. The endless chasm of eternity no longer yawns before me. Joy nearly bursts out of me like an aria—only to crash like tideburst on a rock to see Stella sitting up on her bearskin, watching me, her face full of reproach.

“I’m not going without you, not this time,” she exclaims. I might have known she would see my hallucination in her dreams. “Why do you think I came back?”

“You did find the way out,” I breathe, rising to my knees.

She nods. “Grandmother Owl spoke to me in a dream. She told me all about it. The dreampath, that lovely bit of poesy? It’s a real thing, James, a tunnel, a conduit through the enchantment that binds this place. Every dreamer who comes to the Neverland, Wendys, boys, your men, each one forges a dreampath between the two worlds to get here, if their dreaming is strong enough. When Peter comes for the dreamer, fairy magic opens the dreampath, so the dreamer can get in. That’s the only way out again. When a dreamer is ready to leave, a fairy leads them back through it.”