The Grown Ups' Crusade

by Audrey Greathouse

  Her heart pounding as she witnessed this miracle, Gwen hardly noticed as Rosemary continued to christen the redskin statues. She watched more and more of them starting to move, as if only encased in a thin layer of clay.

  They spoke with urgency in their own, gibberish-sounding language while Running Fox and Storm Sounds welcomed them into the world.

  Chief Dark Sun watched with satisfaction as his newborn braves began to walk and run around the gorgeous maple tree—its leaves as beautiful and red-brown as the clay he shaped his tribe from.

  “Tomorrow,” he announced, “we will fight for Neverland.”

  Chapter 14

  The afternoon found Gwen brooding alone in the underground home. She felt completely, utterly, and almost comically useless. She couldn't help the children build their traps—she didn't have enough confidence in her command of Neverland's magic. She couldn't assist with digging tunnels or building the sandcastle fortress on the beach. In fact, the children often complained that the work was harder or ran into strange obstacles in her presence. She hadn't even helped Old Willow with stories for the redskins. Gwen was already too old, and she wondered if she shouldn't just fly home and get it over with. She sat on her bed and clutched Jay's sketchpad, its unreliable tally of time etched on the back. Her days in Neverland felt numbered whether the children won their battle or not.

  She opened the sketchpad and paged through it from the beginning again, lingering a moment on every picture. She'd almost gone through the entire book, and she turned some of the final pages revealing a still life with fruit, a portrait of a dog, a smudged sketch of a cafe…

  She turned one more page, and gasped. Her mind moved fast with its thoughts, like fingers with the final pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In retrospect, she would never remember in what order she realized these things.

  The small boy was Jay, much younger. The older boy must have been his older brother, Rodger. The four people were copied from a family portrait, a photograph Gwen had seen before. She remembered noticing the framed picture on her way to Jay's bedroom during his party, and she had passed it in his house's blue hallways since then.

  The man in the portrait was Jay's father, but Gwen knew him from somewhere else.

  With a sudden feeling of idiocy, Gwen remembered what Jay had told her the last time she had visited his house. “He’s working a night shift… He works in electrical maintenance. Basically, he gets paid to be a really smart guy who stands around in case something goes wrong.”

  The very next night, infiltrating the Anomalous Activity's research facility, Gwen had made something go very wrong for Andrew Hoek. She had known she recognized the engineer who apprehended them. At the time, she hadn't connected his face to the man she'd seen in Jay's family photos.

  She wanted to cry, and she didn't even understand why.

  Magic attracted magic. Was that why she had pulled Jay into this mess so easily? Did his father track home the same magical residue that Mr. Hoffman had brought home and attracted Peter with? Mindless hypotheticals flooded her, and she wondered what would have happened if only Peter had come a few years sooner. Maybe he would have whisked both her and Jay away to Neverland.

  The eleven-year-old Jay in the charcoal portrait looked so cute. Gwen's imagination pained her with the impossible image of a pre-adolescent paradise with Jay. The thought that she might have had enjoyed Neverland with Peter and Jay possessed a toxic allure. She shut it out of her mind, returning to her feeling of hopelessness and uselessness.

  No. She would not wallow underground anymore. She might have gotten stuck in all the wrong middle grounds, but that did not make her useless. Thinking of the engineer, she remembered everything he had said about the advance of technology predicated on magic. If adults—full-blown, boring, salaried adults—could make magic work for them, Gwendolyn Hoffman could certainly come up with something. She stuffed Jay's sketchpad away and began raiding the underground home for supplies.

  She ransacked room after room, digging through toy chests and sorting through shelves. She found a cardboard shoe box and some markers, which gave her a good start. She discovered a jack-in-the-box, and saw its potential. Breaking it open, she yanked out its spring. She found a plastic straw and impaled it in the box like an antennae. She had ear-buds inside her purse, and knotted them onto the spring before twisting the coil into the box. She found push pins and stickers to smack on the shoe box, then used the markers to label it all.

  While rooting around, she remembered Irene's spool of string, which Dawn had given her after Tiger Lily's book club meeting. Gwen had held onto the invisible thread ever since she'd used it to first track down Piper. The enchanted string had not been useful since returning to Neverland, but maybe that was only a failing of Gwen's imagination.

  She pocketed the string and headed above ground with her cardboard contraption. She would fly to the shore. There, she would have the closest, most unobstructed shot to the adult fleet, surrounded by children working on the sand castle.

  She nursed her plan as she flew. She would have to present it perfectly, without a trace of doubt.

  The children's efforts to build a defensive sand castle had yielded splendid results. Almost three stories high, it stretched across the small section of Cannibal's Cove that allowed for easy beach landing. The only other feasible landing sites rested on the opposite side of the island, and the Grammarian and her crew would make sure the adults never reached those.

  The golden fortress rested behind a preliminary wall and deep trench. Turrets were built into castle and low windows gave the children perfect openings with which to play sniper. The castle had no staircases, not even into the dungeon, and the high windows offered the only way in or out. The sand might as well have been dried concrete for how stable the castle seemed. It had started much smaller and softer, but every night it grew, and every morning it had doubled in size.

  Gwen flew into the castle from one of the larger windows in back. Walking through the long and sandy hall, she ignored everyone. She knew the best way to get a child's attention was to ignore them for something else. She carried her contraption with such pride and authority that by the time she reached the end of the hall, she had a trail of three children following her like a train of ants. She set the cardboard device on a window ledge and popped her earbuds in. She adjusted the spring. She moved the straw up and down. She pushed the thumbtacks.

  “What are you doing?” one of the boys asked. Dillweed had come with him and fluttered around, trying to get a view of the box that would reveal its purpose.

  She took the silent earbuds out of her ears. “Sorry, I couldn't hear you. What?”

  “What are you doing?” he repeated.

  “Oh—you wouldn't understand. It's kind of a big kid thing.”

  She went to put the earbuds back in, but he objected, “I'm a big kid! You can tell me!”

  “Nu-uh, Oat,” a taller boy contested. “I'm bigger and older than you. She should tell me.”

  They were about to start bickering, but Gwen kept their attention on her. “This is really, really important. You shouldn't bother me.”

  All three children closed in on her.

  “Just tell us what it does!”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I promise I won't break it!”

  Gwen sighed and looked contemplative. The children held their breath. “Well, okay,” she decided. “I'll tell you what it does: it's a radio interceptor. It picks up the communication between the ships. I'm listening to their conversations so I can figure out their secret plans.”

  The girl oo'ed with delighted. Dillweed buzzed in confusion.

  “I want to see inside of it!” Oat exclaimed.

  “No,” Gwen insisted. “It's very delicate. Opening it up would break all the pieces inside.” Or reveal it's just an empty box… she thought.

  “Can I listen?” the taller boy asked.

  “No fair, Jet! I saw it first.”

  “Yeah, but
I asked first.”

  “There's two headphones, right?” the girl asked. “That means we could listen with you, Gwen.”

  “Hmmm, I guess so,” Gwen admitted. “Who has the best hearing to help me hear them?”

  A short squabble ensued before they decided the girl, Goose, would go first. Oat continued to pout, so Gwen gave him a secret mission. Whispering in his ear so the other two wouldn't hear, she told him to find some tin cans, and promised he could use the radio inceptor as soon as he got back.

  Oat bolted out of the sandy corridor and flung himself through a window in order to hunt down the secret supplies. Jet breathed down her neck while Goose sat down and plugged in an earbud.

  “I don't hear anything,” she complained. Next to her ear, Dillweed strained to hear, too.

  Gwen listened to her earbud, as silent as ever. “Hmm. I must have lost the frequency. Let me see. Listen carefully, and tell me when you hear it.” She fidgeted with the push-pin controls again. After a moment of this, Goose gasped, “I can hear them!”

  Taking over, Goose adjusted the controls further and went wide-eyed.

  Gwen plugged her earbud back in, but heard nothing.

  “What are they saying?” Jet demanded.

  “They're talking about… con-tin-jin-cy plans?”

  Contingency was not in Goose's vocabulary. Gwen still couldn't get anything from her ear bud, so she offered it to Jet.

  “If they can't get through the sand castle defense, they say they have to route south,” Goose announced. Dillweed objected to this remark, and Goose agreed. “Silly grown-ups. There's no south in Neverland.”

  Jet plugged his other ear to ignore Goose. “They're arguing about how reliable their information about the coastline is—and something called a C-A-O.”

  The Chief Anomalous Officer, Gwen thought. The children now overheard information they couldn't have imagined, and they confirmed each others' statements. If they knew the adults planned to veer south and not north around the island, that would be valuable information for Starkey and his pirates.

  “The bossy one says he thinks their informant is lying,” Goose announced.

  The children thought Gwen smiled because they relayed valuable information, but the older girl was glowing with pride for her functioning invention. So caught up in this success, she forgot what she even needed cans for, until Oat returned with half a dozen old tin cans in his arms.

  Chapter 15

  The day passed fast for the industrious children, but the evening dragged on. So consumed with last-minute defenses and final preparations, no one had remembered or volunteered to manage dinner. With the help of Spurt and Fish, several of the girls cooked a big stew as fast they could and served it over rainbow rice—the only grain Gwen had ever seen grow in seven different neon colors.

  Twilight hoisted the weight of the night onto the sky before they had even finished cooking, and the children grew cranky. Their apprehension for tomorrow's impending battle coupled with their empty stomachs did not make for an agreeable combination. They were even starting to get short with the fairies, who responded by getting haughty and flitting into the tree tops. in Mint and Inch began fighting over which one of them had accidentally bumped the other, Jam crossed her arms and refused to talk to anyone as she squatted in a temper, and Jet led many of the boys in their griping and repeated inquiry: is it dinner time yet?

  Gwen also felt the exhaustion catching up with her, but she'd spent too many breakfast-less days plodding through classes before lunch to get grouchy about a late dinner. As the only one benefiting from this maturity, she felt obligated to put out all the many fires and fights cropping up among the children. She couldn't keep up with all their meltdowns, however, and eventually resorted to the one solution that would occupy everyone until dinner. “Who wants a story!” she asked.

  Cranky faces lit up and fussy voices piped down. This question drew the children toward her like magnets to metal.

  “Before dinner?” Newt asked, intrigued by the novelty.

  “About Margaret May?” Rosemary asked.

  “Yeah!” Yam chimed. “Do we finally get to hear what happens to Margaret May?”

  “Yes, we'll finish the story tonight,” Gwen answered. “Everybody gather around the fire so the cooks can hear, too.”

  Peter, who had eaten a very large and late imaginary lunch and was not hungry, hung upside-down in one of the grove's short trees. He hung upside-down often when he wanted to send blood to his head to help him think. He must not have been deep in thought, or else his thoughts had little consequence, because he flew out of his tree and landed right in front of Gwen so he would have a front-row seat for the final installment of the story. The fairies, intrigued, decided to grace the children with their company again, and clumped around Peter to hear the end of Margaret May's story.

  While everyone got comfortable, Gwen asked, “Do you remember where we left off?”

  Everyone was keen to answer, especially Peter, who remembered the least. “The old elf woman had given Margaret May her music box!” he exclaimed as the others began chattering.

  “And then they heard the raven witch and had to run away.”

  “She found the raven tree with the music box!”

  “There was a dress in her egg.”

  “No, it was a gown!”

  “A gown is a dress, Newt.”

  “Oh.”

  “Alright, alright… this is what happened next.” As soon as Gwen began speaking, the children hushed and nestled into the grass. “Margaret May gathered the gown off the ground and wondered if the elfin music box might guide her out of the woods now that she had her gown. Before she could test her theory, she turned around and saw an old woman in a heavy black cloak standing behind her.”

  “The raven witch!” Rosemary gasped. The children exchanged frightened mutterings.

  “Yes,” Gwen confirmed. “The raven witch had found her, and followed her to the raven tree. 'How dare you steal from my raven tree!' the witch accused. 'What right have you to take from my secret magic? You, the child and blood of the villain who banished me for that very magic!'

  “Margaret May was scared, but she did not run away. She pulled her lucky feather out of her pocket, and held it for comfort. 'Alas,' the witch cried, 'You have the feather I gave that silly innkeeper—you have the blessing of its enchantment and I cannot harm a hair upon your head. But curse you for stripping my tree of its fruit!'

  Margaret May felt very afraid, but she was still a very brave girl, and she challenged the witch, 'What right have you to accuse me, you who stripped me of my natural parents and noble birthright?'

  “'Do not be angry with me, child—I have spared you a horrible fate. You have never known the cruel heart of Westera's King, as I and your changeling have. I gave you to two kindly souls, for whom charity and compassion are second nature.'

  “'I will be angry with you!' Margaret May proclaimed. 'I will head straight to Prince Jay's coronation and meet my true parents. I will tell them what you have done and show them our family music box. When I become a princess, I will care for everyone who has ever shown me kindness—but not you.'

  “'I have done you the greatest kindness of all, child. You are a fool to dismiss it,' the raven witch replied.

  “Margaret May shook her head and went to leave, but as she stepped forward, her foot snagged on a claw-like root and sent her stumbling. She reached out to stop her fall, but all she reached was the raven tree's trunk. Although it stopped her fall, one of the many beaks on the bark snapped at her hand and cut it open.”

  “Eww!” Inch squealed, burying her face in her hands.

  “Cool!” Newt and Sal cheered. Hollyhock shushed them all, too curious to let interuptions slow the story.

  “It wasn't a big cut, or a deep cut, but the raven witch began laughing at poor, bleeding Margaret May. 'Now you have done it! Now your fate is sealed!' the old witch jeered. She continued to laugh, but the laughter began to sound like
cawing and she transformed into a giant, black bird that flew off into the evening.

  “Whoa,” Wax whispered.

  “Margaret May shuddered, but did not have time to waste. Night had started to fall, and she needed to escape the woods before anything befell her. To her great relief, the music box lead her out of the forest. She wound it and listened to where the music seemed come from until she reached the edge of the woods. She emerged far from home, for she had found the elves' shortcut to Eastan. On the edge of the kingdom, she hurried to a lodging house with her music box and gown.

  “She had no money, but she offered the master of the lodging house her lucky black feather in exchange for a night's stay. The coronation ball would happen the very next evening, and she would have a long ways to walk the next day to make it to the castle. He accepted the feather as payment, and thus Margaret May gained admittance to an inn, and some bandaging for the wound the raven tree had left on her hand. She did not imagine she would need her feather now that she was a princess.

  Jam interrupted, “Being a princess is better than being lucky.”

  “That's exactly what Margaret May thought,” Gwen replied. “The next morning she set out for the castle and spent all day walking to arrive by nightfall. A kind old couple of farmers gave her a ride in their wagon part of the way, and shared their lunches with her. She thanked them, and promised herself she would reward them once she was a princess.

  “She arrived at the castle just after the ball had begun. The reluctant guards did not want to let her in, until she showed them the music box with the royal crest of Westera. They welcomed her in, and she changed into her gown before heading into the ballroom to find her parents, and congratulate Prince Jay.

  “Everyone noticed when Margaret May entered. She was a beautiful young lady in a dress as dark as night and as sparkling as the stars. She looked as though she had been covered in diamond dust, and she caught Prince Jay's eye in an instant.”