In a village where everything was uniform and tidy, Tik Tok’s house was like a treasure trove. The firelight cast shadows on the curved walls where he kept his curious collection of belongings: tiny bird skulls, feathers, a few stones that looked like any other stones but which he treasured, and a beloved collection of exotic items that had washed ashore over the years, which he had found scouring Neverland’s shores. A book, the pages stuck together, the ink blurred. A tarnished metal cup. And, most beloved of all, a box that told time—still ticking away, its mechanism having somehow survived a shipwreck or a long journey across the sea from the continent. The Englanders divided the endlessness of the world into seconds and minutes and hours, and Tik Tok thought this was wonderful.
Tiger Lily moved across the room quietly, examining the clock, the little metal bit he used to wind it, and bending her ear to the loud, steady ticktock, which Tik Tok had renamed himself after in a solemn ceremony attended by the whole village.
Now she sensed a movement, and turned to see that he was observing her.
“Well, my little beast, I hear we have a visitor,” he said, looking her up and down with an amused smile. She always managed to look like a wild beast, mud-stained and chaotic. Her hair was constantly escaping her braid to cling to her face, stuck to her, covered in dirt.
“Will we help him?” she asked.
Tik Tok shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Tiger Lily waited for him to say more, trying her best to remain in respectful silence.
Tik Tok smeared away some of the charcoal he used to line his eyes. “Have you seen my pipe?” he asked.
He stood and moved about the house, searching. He had carved it over two weeks of long intricate work, but it was the fifth one he’d made. He was always losing things. Finally he found it buried under his covers.
He turned his attention to her question, and sighed. Englanders had come to Neverland before. They’d brought their language with them and given it out as a gift to the Bog Dwellers, who had given it to the other tribes in turn over the years. But they’d also brought a strange discomfort to the wild, and they’d been loud and careless in the forest, and gotten themselves murdered by pirates, who hated their fellow Englanders more than anything else on earth and liked to kill them on sight. They’d brought fevers and crippling flus too. But it wasn’t any of this that the Sky Eaters feared.
The Englanders had the aging disease. As time went on they turned gray, and shrank, and, inexplicably, they died. It wasn’t that Neverlanders didn’t know anything about death, but not as a slow giving in, and certainly not an inevitability. This, more than the beasts of their own island, or the brutal pirate inhabitants of the far west shore, was what crept into their dreams at night and chased them through nightmares.
You never could tell when someone would stop growing old in Neverland. For Tik Tok, it had been after wrinkles had walked long deep tracks across his face, but for many people, it was much younger. Some people said it occurred when the most important thing that would ever happen to you triggered something inside that stopped you from moving forward, but Tik Tok thought that was superstition. All anyone knew was that you came to an age and you stayed there, until one day some accident or battle with the dangers of the island claimed you. Therefore sometimes daughters grew older than mothers, and grandchildren became older than grandparents, and age was just a trait, like the color of your hair, or the amount of freckles on your skin.
It was because of the aging disease, Tiger Lily knew, that the Sky Eaters wouldn’t want to help the Englander. They didn’t want to catch what he had.
But something about the tiny lone figure, floating from one certain death into another, tugged at her—I could hear it. (As a faerie, you can hear when something tugs at someone. It’s much like the sound of a low, deep note on a violin string.)
“He won’t survive without our help,” Tiger Lily said. “We’re supposed to be brave, aren’t we?” The wrinkles in Tik Tok’s face moved in response. The story they told was familiar to her.
“I’m not a stranger to your love of lost causes, dear one. But you have to be careful who you meet,” he said, stoking a pipe thoughtfully. “You can’t unmeet them.” He took a long drag of his pipe. Being near Tik Tok always gave one the feeling that everything in the world was exactly in the place it ought to be, and that rushing through anything would be an insult and a waste. “And you should be thinking of other things. You’re getting too old to run wild like you do. Clean yourself up. Brush your hair. Try to look like a girl.”
“I will, if you try to look like a man.”
He smiled wryly, because they both knew how impossible that was; he didn’t have it in him. Tik Tok was as womanly as a man could ever be, and everyone just accepted it, like they accepted the color of the sky, and the fact that night followed the daytime. Grudgingly, he gave Tiger Lily a puff of his pipe. They sat and watched the colors outside the window. From my perch on a shelf, I inhaled the unfurling wisps as they dissipated: the tobacco made the colors thick, the smells richer. Outside, visible through the window, everyone was dispersing from the fire. The girls were walking ahead and the boys were running to catch up. There was, as always, a dance going on between them, one that I’d never seen Tiger Lily take part in.
She lay on her back and pushed her feet against the wall, wiped a layer of sweat from her neck though the air was chilly. She tapped her feet at the wall in a troubled rhythm.
Tik Tok gave her a knowing look. “You’re restless. Everything is too small for you, including your own body. That’s what it’s like to be fifteen. I remember.”
There was a noise in the doorway and they both glanced up to see Pine Sap, pale, with Moon Eye behind him looking pensive and sorry, the way she often did.
“They’ve decided to let the Englander die,” he said.
I was asleep on a leaf by the main fire when I heard her come out of her hut.
She went to the river to wash, after everyone else had gone to bed. Crocs sometimes made their way this far inland, but I knew she wasn’t as scared of them as some of the others, and that she liked to swim alone, after dark. Following her back to her house, I saw there was one candle burning among the huts. Pine Sap’s. He was probably up working on a project, or thinking his deep thoughts. I knew, from nights I’d slept in the village, that he was an insomniac.
When Tiger Lily emerged again from her house and into the square, she’d gathered up a bagful of food.
She set out before the sun came up, her arrows strapped to her back.
I watched her go, intrigued, but also sleepy, comfortable and content. I fell back to sleep before I even thought of following her.
Chapter Two
Before he ran out on me and my mother for a twinkly-eyed nymph named Belladonna, my father told me a few things. He said rotten logs were the best places for mosquitoes. He told me humans weren’t to be trusted. And he warned me to stay clear of Peter Pan.
It was when he was tracing for me which parts of the island were forbidden territory, and which weren’t. He had called him Pan first. He signaled to me, in a form of language only faeries know: He can fly. He has horns. He eats men. And he will kill you if he sees you.
I learned more from the other faeries after that. My childhood friend Mirabella and I used to think about it before bed. We had never seen the lost boys; we didn’t know quite what they were—ghosts or demons or living men. They were the only creatures in the forest we couldn’t find to spy on, but they left evidence of themselves: carcasses of beasts and prey in their wake, and sometimes a pirate skull dangling from a tree. They left their tracks everywhere and sometimes left muddy handprints and the occasional curious artifact—like a papier-mâché mask or a tiny wooden sailing ship—to remind us of their presence. Sometimes the wind carried their yells and hoots to us while we lay in our cozy nooks, deep inside rotting hollow logs. They seemed to know the forest better than we did, and we knew the forest like we knew our own wings. Th
ese boys were famous for their violence; they were known to eat wild animals raw with their bared teeth, and to steal girls who wandered alone. Imagining what happened to these human girls once they were stolen made me shudder. My father had told me never to go near their territory. Faeries and tribes alike called that part of the forest “Forbidden.”
But after my father left, I had the irresistible urge to disobey every rule he’d ever given me. I’d fly all over the area I was supposed to avoid, looking for a thrilling glimpse of the boys, and when I got tired or hungry, I’d make a stop at the Sky Eaters’ village nearby, to eat the fleas that can always be found near the animals people keep.
Humans have been known to kill faeries and use us as festive, glowing decorations for certain rituals. But the Sky Eaters and a few other tribes considered the practice barbaric. I rarely felt nervous at all as I sat and ate among them, and it was always fun to observe them. They were colorful, for one thing. The women grew their hair long and fixed it elaborately, and the men—Tik Tok the shaman being the exception—cut theirs short. They had a great tradition of artistry, and made themselves beautiful clothes. They tried to listen to the gods in the trees and the clouds and the water, though they could never hear clearly exactly what they were saying.
It was during one of these visits that I first saw Tiger Lily.
The children were teasing her. That, in itself, wasn’t what captured my attention; in the typical village, children are generally almost as cruel as adults. What caught my eye was her stillness. Her absolute stony composure, as if the village could have been burning and she wouldn’t have noticed or cared. She was like a dark cloud. She stood, not eight years old yet, black hair disheveled and down to her waist, arms crossed over her chest.
The taunting escalated to pushing until finally a girl, Magnolia Bud, pushed her against a vat of cool, day-old turkey broth, and all the children suddenly joined in to hoist her into the pot, then close the lid down on her. Magnolia Bud then sat on the lid while all the children whispered excitedly to each other and the girl underneath struggled and then went silent. A group of crows nearby got caught up in the excitement and squawked at the children shrilly.
Finally, hearing the commotion, a woman (Aunt Agda, I learned later) appeared, and the children ran away. Not knowing the turkey pot contained a child, she then went off to her chores.
For several moments, there was no sound. And then the lid finally moved, and Tiger Lily climbed out, gasping for breath, shaking and exhausted. She walked home quietly. Tik Tok helped her wipe the broth and strips of turkey from her face. And when Magnolia Bud was found two days later on the village path, having choked to death on a piece of turkey from that night’s soup, and with a crow sitting on her hip like an omen, the children—and indeed most of the adults—decided that she was guarded by crows.
Whether that was true or not, I couldn’t hear deep enough into her mind to know. But one afternoon, after the children had called her crow girl and run away for fear of her, I watched her slip a raven feather into her hair. After that day, she kept it in.
From then on, I was a goner. A devoted fan. I don’t know what Tiger Lily must have thought of me. I didn’t seem to be on her mind at all. She must have noticed my increasingly constant presence fluttering along behind her, or up above her, or perching on one of her tassels, but it was as if she accepted me as part of the scenery.
And I wasn’t the only one to cling to her unnoticed. There was also Pine Sap. He’d been born skinny and a bit asymmetrical. One of his hazel eyes always seemed to squint a little, making his face appear asymmetrical too. Try as he might, he couldn’t work up the bloodlust that made the other boys flourish on hunts—he was always too busy thinking things through. Somehow as children he and Tiger Lily had been shuttled together—both misfits or, as I liked to think of them, strange exotic birds, one too fierce to be hemmed in as a girl, and the other too hesitant to be respected as a boy. Since then, she had never shaken him, though she often tried to. Still, Pine Sap wasn’t the type whose ego was wounded easily. His admiration for Tiger Lily was hard and fast and stuck, and failed to waver even when she ignored him completely.
Often when I flew past the village I saw his mother, out in front of their hut calling for him, her dark bushy hair all askew, her voice hoarse from another fight with Pine Sap’s father. Pine Sap would arrive, quiet and eyes to the ground, and wait for her to pour her anger onto him. “Look at how crooked you are! You are the shape of those crooked poplars up on the cliffs!” or “How did I produce such a strange creature!” She showed her love for him by trying to shrink him in public and private. And Pine Sap listened calmly, and nodded his head from time to time to let her know she didn’t go unheard. It was almost as if he was giving her his silence, so that all of her anger had a place to go. But sometimes, he didn’t come when she called, and where was he? Following Tiger Lily through a bog, holding the spiders and reptiles she picked up and absently discarded into his mud-slippery hands, carrying her bow for her like a servant, listening to her grunt and swear over the wrongs people heaped on her. He even listened to more than her sounds, because Tiger Lily was a girl of few words. He listened with his eyes, watched facial expressions, judged body language, and therefore he read Tiger Lily better than anyone else. Perhaps he was drawn to her for this more than any other reason: Pine Sap had a knack for spotting lies from a mile away. And Tiger Lily was the only person he knew who never pretended.
I saw her from time to time as she grew. And as she grew she hunted, she ran, she perfected her aim and her abilities with a paddle. It was like she had an instinctive awareness that she had to do a little something extra to be accepted. For a long time, she took up with the boys, going with them on hunts, dominating in mud fights. Only, she did too well at everything. She was too fast; her aim was too good. Her quiet confidence gave her a reputation for being haughty, and the boys—all except for Pine Sap—didn’t like being beaten. So by her thirteenth birthday, they told her that she couldn’t join them on hunts anymore. Without a word of complaint, she started hunting alone, in the same areas, and often ran into them with a stag or a rabbit slung over her back while they stood empty-handed.
“That child will spend her life alone,” Aunt Agda was fond of saying between cluckings of her tongue, and everyone seemed to agree, except for all the suitors. They began coming from the time Tiger Lily was seven years old (as the shaman’s adopted daughter, her rank was coveted). They came from tribes near and far: the Bog Dwellers in the bogs, the Cliff Dwellers who lived in the snowy, pine-covered mountains. Her temper at those times was a spectacle to behold. She chased them all away with a hatchet, murder in her eyes. The hatchet had been a gift from Tik Tok, though he hadn’t meant it for that purpose. (Aunt Fire, one of the matrons, had even suggested her own son, Giant, as Tiger Lily’s ideal mate, but everyone had only tittered at that, because Giant was an oaf.)
Usually, though, Tiger Lily saved her inner rage for the defense of lost causes. Such as when the boys bullied Pine Sap, who always seemed too puzzled to retaliate. Or when children taunted Aunt Fire for her wrinkles, though Aunt Fire was no friend to Tiger Lily. She’d knocked two boys unconscious in a spat over Moon Eye, and people said she’d hit both of them with one blow. She even defended me once, though it may have been coincidental. Stone was trying to kill me to make a night-light for his hut. He had cornered me in a crevice of rock, and was just moving for the blow when Tiger Lily appeared out of nowhere, hatchet in hand, and petrified him into backing away. It was the first time I ever thought she might know I existed. But her mind was so dark right then, I never knew for sure. Anyway, whether she’d meant to save me didn’t matter. She was the most interesting girl I had ever seen, and I couldn’t resist staying near her to see what happened next.
A village, one as orderly as the Sky Eaters’, wants its members to fit just so. Tiger Lily didn’t, and so gossip followed her. By the time she was fifteen, the age she was the day of the shipwreck, opinions
by the dozen landed in each hollow track left by her feet. I could hear the thoughts flying overhead, or when I was perched in a hay roof letting myself be groomed by crickets. It was rumored among the young people that at night she became her crow spirit, and they dared each other to leave piles of stones outside her door as a feat of bravery, fearing that they might peer through her window and see only a crow staring back at them. She would collect the stones the following morning, bewildered. Fear and, yes, even a bit of envy of her wild independence followed her side by side. But if she ever turned into a crow and flew away on night adventures, I never saw it.
Still, the longer I was around her, the more I could see the colors of her mind and the recesses of her heart. There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their hearts too. There was strength, and there was also just the determination to look strong. She guarded herself like a secret.
But now—even having watched her for years—I could still be surprised by her. I was carrying some clover home at dusk, and just passing the council fire when there was a buzz among the villagers, and a shadowy figure appeared. It sent the well-organized group around the fire into a shudder, and a few carefully perched bowls into the fire. She’d approached so quietly they hadn’t noticed her. She was so dirty that it took a moment to recognize her.
Her arms were piled with foreign items—a telescope, a glass, and a little wooden box. She dropped the load and stared at everyone with her inscrutable eyes, her crow feather cocked at an angle.