Wendy looked up at Charlie and then at Hook, and then she ducked her head, smiling just a little. It was the smallest smile she could manage under the circumstances. Hook’s grimace was downright dour, and she did not want to antagonize him. But she could hardly help herself.
“Peter,” she guessed.
“I sent Lieutenant Abbot to request a map to this woman we’re supposed to meet with,” Hook growled, “and Pan gave him this … this …”
“Cartographical mockery?” Charlie supplied.
“This cartographical mockery!” Hook echoed.
“I see,” said Wendy.
She said nothing else, and Charlie said nothing else—because neither one wanted to say what all three of them were now thinking. More importantly, they didn’t want it to seem later that it might have been their idea in the first place and then be blamed for it when things went, inevitably, horribly wrong.
So they all remained silent for an uncomfortably long time, until Hook, as the captain, finally shouldered the responsibility and said the thing, with the exact expression one makes when one has just eaten an entire lemon slice after mistaking it for an orange, and the thing was this.
“We’re going to have to bring him with us.”
hey left at … well … at night. Because it always seemed to be night in this part of Neverland. At least the moon was still full—that had not changed either—but they packed several torches, just in case. Peter remained on the deck of The Pegasus while they were getting ready. “For consultations,” he said. But these did not turn out to be very helpful.
“How long will we be traveling?” Wendy asked him.
“I have no idea,” Peter said. “Neverland is unpredictable. We might be killed before we’ve gone even a hundred yards.” He said this in a very matter-of-fact sort of way, but then he shrugged, as though the possibility did not concern him.
“Yes, but assuming we don’t die before we get there,” Wendy tried, “how many days will it take?”
“There are no days in Neverland,” Peter told her.
Inquiries regarding the terrain they would be hiking through, the weather they might encounter, and the dangers they might face were equally unproductive.
“Every kind of terrain. It only depends which way you want to go,” Peter said.
“The weather could change at any moment,” he told her. “It hasn’t yet, since you’ve been here, but it might. It would be fun if there were a storm, wouldn’t it? That would be a grand adventure!”
“Listing the number of dangers between here and there would take a very long time. It would be much easier just to see what happens along the way,” he suggested.
This sort of talk made Wendy uneasy, and she asked if perhaps they should use innisfay dust instead and teach the men who were going how to fly.
“Could Hook fly the ship?” Peter asked, sounding surprised.
“Well, no,” she admitted.
“Then he can’t fly himself either. But we could always go without him. You and I could meet Tigerlilja together, just the two of us. It would be far less trouble.”
Wendy knew what Hook would think of that idea, so she nipped it in the bud and went below to report that, in summary, she had no idea how long they would be traveling and they should try to be prepared for anything.
At last, they gathered on deck. There were ten of them besides Peter: Hook, Wendy, John, Michael, Thomas, Gentleman Starkey, and four other men whom Wendy did not know very well. They could bring only ten, and no more. Peter had been very specific. But Nana was allowed to come along, by special permission, without counting against them.
Charlie would be in charge while they were gone, so he had to stay behind. Thankfully, Mr. Smee was overseeing the repairs to the rudder, which had been blown apart by Blackheart’s cannons, so he would be staying too.
They climbed down long rope ladders to reach the ground, and Charming decided to follow them, simply because it was more interesting than staying in Wendy’s quarters by himself.
“You can’t come,” Peter told the innisfay. “We already have ten.”
Charming hovered just behind Wendy’s right shoulder, jingled melodiously, and pointed at Tinker Bell, who was seated on Peter’s left shoulder in her natural form. Tink’s hair flashed instantly to red, and she jangled back at him with a furious expression.
“She doesn’t count,” Peter proclaimed, to which Tinker Bell replied by turning into a tiny red dragon and biting Peter on the ear.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Peter protested. “You count as a person. You just don’t count as part of the ten. We can only bring ten new people. You’ve been there before, and so have I.”
Tinker Bell’s scales slowly shifted back into gold, but she remained a dragon, just in case.
“Have you ever been to see Tigerlilja before?” Peter asked, turning his attention back to Charming.
Charming’s hair turned blue, but then it flashed in an instant to gold and he jingled merrily at Peter. When he was finished, he crossed his arms over his chest with a triumphant expression and landed on Wendy’s shoulder.
“Well, yes,” Peter agreed, “I suppose you could have flown there on your own. Since you don’t need me to show you the way, you can come. But if Tigerlilja asks, you’re only following us. I’m not taking you.”
The gently sloping valley in which the ships had landed was covered in an array of short grasses and night-blooming wildflowers. It was chilly, but not cold enough for snow—the perfect temperature for hiking at a brisk clip with a heavy pack. But the moment they reached the jungle trail at the base of the mountain, everything changed.
To Wendy, it felt like passing through an invisible curtain. On one side was a chilly alpine valley, and on the other was a tropical forest. It was night in both places, and the same silvery moon bathed them in its quiet glow. But everything else was thoroughly different—the temperature, the humidity, the scent of the air. Wendy took one step backward, and she was in the valley again. One step forward, and she was in the jungle. Backward, forward, backward, forward.
“How extraordinary!” she exclaimed.
She wondered for a moment if there was another portal right here on the ground, but that couldn’t be it. She could see the jungle perfectly well from the valley, and she could see the valley perfectly well from the jungle.
“What is?” Peter asked. “You mean the plants? I thought you would like that.” He smiled at her fondly.
“Plants? Why, no,” Wendy said. “I meant this sharp line between the valley and the jungle. How it’s one thing on one side and something different on the other. You can feel it change!”
Thomas, who had been walking behind Wendy, came upon the same phenomenon, and now it was his turn to take one step forward and one step back, over and over again. He pulled a leather-bound journal from his pack and began to scrawl earnest notes across the pages with what looked like a metal quill.
“Why, what is that?” Wendy asked. She took a step closer, trying to get a better look.
“What?” Thomas replied, distracted by his writing. “Oh, this? It’s a barrel pen. Made of steel. Present from a friend of mine. Well, more of an acquaintance than a friend, if anyone asks.”
She was about to ask if she could hold it when Peter interrupted her.
“So you haven’t even seen the plants yet?”
Wendy looked around at the varied plant life that flourished in the warm, humid air, their leaves jockeying with each other for space and encroaching upon the narrow trail. A strange, glowing insect suddenly lifted off into the air nearby, its delicate wings whirling in circles while its body hung limply below.
Peter saw that the movement had caught Wendy’s attention. “No, the plants. Look,” he insisted. “Tinker Bell, if you please.”
Tink was still in dragon form. She harrumphed without moving from his shoulder, and her golden scales took on a slightly reddish hue.
“Tinker Bell,” he said, “we talked about
this, and we agreed it would be such a good surprise. Especially the way you said you would do it. I could show her myself, but no one else would do it nearly as well as you.”
The dragon’s tiny scales glowed more brightly, gaining in intensity until she was almost painful to look at. Suddenly, she launched herself from his shoulder and flew in a long sweep over the closest leaves, leaving a glowing trail of innisfay dust falling slowly in her wake.
Wendy gasped. The moon cast only a hushed, secret sort of light as it filtered through the foliage, painting the world in grays and shadows. But when Tinker Bell flew over it, she revealed the true colors of the jungle, and they weren’t the green that Wendy had assumed. Instead, the leaves were a thousand gleaming hues of sapphire and turquoise, cobalt and opal. A blue jungle that reminded Wendy of the sea, with flowers like coral, in twisting stalks of yellow and pink and scarlet.
“Oh!” she exclaimed.
“Extraordinary!” Thomas agreed. He set to sketching in his journal, trying to capture what he could as the light of the innisfay dust slowly faded away in Tinker Bell’s wake.
“Do you like it?” Peter asked.
“It’s wonderful!” Wendy told him.
But then Hook’s voice cut through the magic—quiet and furious.
“Put. That. Light. Out.”
Peter and Wendy turned to look at him while Thomas continued muttering to himself and scribbling in his journal.
“Do you want to attract every living creature within three miles?” Hook demanded. “I said put it out!”
“I wouldn’t worry about the light,” Peter told him. “Most of those creatures can smell a lot farther than they can see. And you don’t smell like Neverland at all.”
Hook’s expression never changed, but Wendy saw John and Michael share a distinctly nervous glance just before Tinker Bell’s glow winked out.
hey walked in silence, strung out in single file, surrounded by the dim hush of the night, but as their own voices fell still, the forest came alive. Something that sounded very much like a cricket chirped somewhere to their left. A frog croaked to their right. And within a few short moments, an entire chorus of peeps and chirrups took hold, serenading them along their journey.
Birds called to each other, and a small creature raced through the treetops, chittering in annoyance. An entire troop of unseen somethings started to hoot in deep, haunting voices. Wendy found herself wondering whether they might be dark blue owls or light blue monkeys or perhaps something else altogether when a terrible roar ripped through the jungle, followed immediately by profound silence.
Wendy stopped in her tracks, as did Michael in front of her and Thomas behind. Nana growled, low and quiet in the back of her throat, but Wendy hushed her immediately. The men raised their muskets, licking their lips. Their wide eyes darted back and forth, hunting for openings in the foliage, trying to see anything beyond the thick underbrush that grew right up to the edge of the trail.
Suddenly, the sound of a desperate chase broke out somewhere off to their right. Cries of distress moved deeper into the jungle, and something large crashed through the undergrowth in pursuit. Then there was a scream, and everything fell deathly still. Moments later, the night chorus returned, trilling and squawking and warbling and hooting as though nothing had happened.
“What was that?” Wendy whispered to Charming, who was sitting on her shoulder, but of course he had no way to answer her that she could understand.
Peter, who had been walking in front, flew back to land in front of her.
“You don’t have a name for it,” he said, looking very proud of himself. “They don’t exist anymore. Except here, I mean. I have the very last one.”
“Only one?” Wendy asked.
“Only one,” Peter confirmed.
“How sad,” she said quietly. “The last of its kind left in all the world. Without even a mate, or any chance of there ever being any more.” She still had no idea what it was, but the thought of it being the last seemed very sad indeed.
Peter cast his eyes to the ground, and his shoulders slumped for just a moment, but then he grinned and met her gaze.
“You wouldn’t want another one,” he told her. “This one causes all kinds of trouble. Why, Tigerlilja and her people had to rebuild two entire houses not so long ago. And it ate one of her brother’s wolves. I doubt I’ll ever hear the end of it.”
“It ate a wolf?” Wendy exclaimed. She glanced down at Nana, who was still staring into the darkness.
“It did,” Peter said lightly, “but at least it didn’t eat Tigerlilja.”
They continued along the jungle trail for what felt like hours, flinching and spinning to point their muskets at every glow-bug along the way. Wendy heard more new calls and whistles over the course of those few miles than she had ever heard before, from the almost familiar chirps and pops of unseen tiny things to long, eerie wails that rose and fell in the twilight.
Then, about an hour after the wolf-eater, they heard something entirely different: the distinct sound of a human infant crying in distress.
“Halt!” Hook called out, and they all stopped to listen, trying to hear where the sound was coming from.
“Is that the village?” Wendy asked Peter, who had flown back to her side.
“No,” he assured her. “We’re still a long way yet. Why? What do you hear?”
“A baby,” Wendy told him. “Don’t you hear it? She’s crying.”
“She sounds like she’s over there,” Michael said, and he stepped off the trail, trying to move toward the sound. “I don’t think she’s far.”
“Wait!” Wendy called out, and she ran to stop him, grabbing his arm before he could disappear into the dense foliage.
“Why?” Michael asked, turning to her in surprise. “Don’t you want to help her?”
“Look at me,” Wendy told him. “Michael. Look at me.” His eyes kept drifting back toward the sound of the infant’s wails. They were growing louder and more insistent the longer they waited. “Michael!” she finally shouted, and he turned his attention to her fully, his eyes regaining their focus. “Captain!” she shouted, still holding his gaze. “Gather the men! Please!”
“All hands to me!” Hook shouted at once. “To me!” He strode back to her position with a pistol at the ready. “We’ll organize a rescue party.”
“Aye, Captain,” Starkey barked.
“No, wait,” Wendy insisted. She placed a hand on Hook’s arm, just above the stump of his right wrist, startling him. “Something’s wrong. It isn’t a child. Or, at least, I don’t think it is. It’s … it’s pulling us somehow.”
“What do you mean?” Hook demanded.
Peter was watching her carefully, but he said nothing, waiting for her to reply.
When they had first arrived in Neverland, the pervasive magic of everything at once had overwhelmed her senses. Nothing smelled more magical than anything else. Nothing had a direction. But as they had been trudging through the jungle, Wendy had felt her senses begin to sharpen, becoming different somehow, until she was feeling the magic more than smelling it.
She could still sense The Pegasus, despite the fact that it was now miles away, and she felt completely certain that if it moved, she would know it. She didn’t know how she could be certain, which bothered her a bit, but that didn’t change what she knew. Just as she could now feel Peter standing before her, and as she could feel the wrongness of the baby crying in the dark.
But she knew Hook didn’t put much credence in feelings, so instead she turned to Michael and said this: “How do you know it’s a girl?”
“What?” Michael asked, looking confused.
“You said, ‘Don’t you want to help her?’ Her. You called the baby a girl. How could you possibly know that?”
“I … I don’t know,” Michael admitted. He turned back toward the jungle, but this time he wore an expression of confusion rather than the intensity he had shown before.
“You can’t,” Wendy po
inted out. “I don’t think it’s an infant at all. I think it’s something magical, trying to lure us to it.”
“It’s a siren!” Peter blurted out. “I knew it was a siren, but I didn’t expect you to be able to tell!”
“A siren,” the men muttered, all clustered around them. More than one now stared nervously toward the sound of the child, but not one of them looked like he wanted to go find it. They were sailors, after all. They knew about sirens.
“But sirens lure men with songs,” Starkey protested. “That’s no song.”
“That’s a myth,” Peter told him. “Sirens don’t use songs. They use the sound of whatever you would feel most compelled to protect.”
“You’re absolutely certain it isn’t an infant?” Hook directed the question to Wendy. The fingers of his good left hand still clutched the grip of his pistol, but his eyes focused only on her, refusing to dart back to the crying that still emanated insistently from the jungle.
“Yes, Captain. I’m certain.”
Hook nodded and lifted his voice to the crew. “No man is to leave this path except upon my orders. Not for any reason, no matter what you hear or see. Is that clear?”
“Aye, Captain,” they all replied, including Wendy.
“Fall into formation. We’re moving on.”
They did as they were told. John and Michael followed Hook forward while Thomas and the others drifted back, forming a line again.
Peter lingered a moment longer. “That was very well done, the Wendy,” he said, and he smiled at her fondly.
“I hesitated, though, at least at first,” she protested. “It almost fooled me! You were never affected by it at all.”
“Of course I was,” he admitted. “I just knew it wasn’t real.”
“But how? How could you know right away?” The sound of the baby’s wails still carried over the noises of the jungle, and it left her feeling unsettled.
The Navigator Page 16
