Gwen, who had much more confidence in Peter's reality than the lawyers' reality, dropped out of the tree. It didn't even surprise her when she fell perfectly into Peter's arms. “See?” Peter asked. “Easy as pie.”
“Easy as pie,” she repeated, stepping out of his arms as he let her down.
“Now come on,” he told her, already tugging at her hand and starting to run. “These grown-ups' are worse than I thought. We need to find the fairies and get to the Never Tree.”
Chapter 36
For all that they'd bushwhacked and wound through the jungle, the lawyers hadn't even gotten close to the protective perimeter the lost children maintained around the Never Tree. The lawyers had a long way to go yet through the dauntingly magical forest, which confused Gwen since Peter seemed gripped by a sober immediacy.
“What's the plan, Peter?” Tried to read his expression, glancing at his face as often as she could afford to while racing full tilt through the jungle. Running without watching ahead of her in unpredictable Neverland could be just as disastrous as distracted driving. Her feet pounded against the spongy earth, sinking into the dirt with every heavy, heart-racing step.
“Plan B,” Peter told her, not risking so much as a glance in her direction.
“Why Plan B?”
A thin twig of a branch whacked Gwen in the face as she blew past it, and she spit out a leaf as Peter told her, “Because the pirates have sailed off, the redskins are falling, the lawyers are unstoppable, and if those adults and their shadows don't get us first, the will-o-the-wisp will.”
His utter resignation shocked Gwen. “You make it sound like they've already won!”
“Oh no,” Peter promised. “They won't win. But it is time for Plan B.” He had such vehement and grim certainty, Gwen couldn't help but wonder what the next few hours in Neverland would look like. She wondered what it would like from the sea, too, from Jay's perspective aboard his ship. Certainly he wouldn't come ashore into the unraveling chaos of the island's last defenses—she hoped.
They did not look back as they ran—they couldn't afford to worry about anyone else as they wove toward the Never Tree. Hurrying through the woods and twisting through the obstacle-course route Peter had obscured the path with, they continued ducking under specific branches and veering around particular trees. Gwen couldn't shake the horrible feeling that someone was following them. She looked behind her several times, and tried to reassure herself when she only ever saw her own shadow loyally trailing behind her.
Eventually, they found the fairies.
Or rather, the fairies found them. Peter slowed to a stop. Looking around, seeing nothing but sensing everything. Traipsing through the ferns and staying light on his feet, he stuck two fingers in his mouth and let loose a trilling whistle.
Gwen neither suspected nor could have guessed how many fairies watched them from sneaky hiding places. Peter's whistle signaled safety, however, and they exploded out from every nook and cranny of the forest. From under leaves and out of tree hollows, they popped up from tall grasses and spilled out from behind trees. A hundred little, living lights sprung into existence and began drifting around Peter and Gwen.
Hollyhock broke their intricate formation in order to speed straight to Peter. She latched onto his nose, embracing it in a full-body hug. He shook his head and tried to wave her away, but she didn't let go until her tingling, glittering fairy dust forced him to sneeze and sent her tumbling back.
The other fairies' voices formed a melody-less chorus of questions.
“I'm afraid so,” Peter announced, seeming to answer them all in the same moment. “The adult forces are on there way here, slowly overpowering our charms. They will be to the Never Tree within the hour, I suspect.”
The fairies buzzed with a flustered and fearful fury.
“It's alright,” Peter said, calming their agitated rainbow. “We have contingency plans. We just need to hide everything better. Gwenny-Lyn and I are heading to the Never Tree now. We need you to alert everyone and evacuate them out of the jungle. We need a team to alert the aviator—” Bracken and Thistle zoomed forward, their red and pink glows shining as they volunteered.
“How can Antoine help?” Gwen asked.
“He's the only help we're going to have,” Peter told her. “We need someone to find Old Willow, too. Hollyhock, can you manage that?”
With a contrary noise, Hollyhock latched onto his index finger.
“You can't stay with me,” he told her. “It'll be dangerous.”
She didn't budge.
Hawkbit flitted forward and promised to find Old Willow.
“Alright,” Peter agreed. “The rest of you, spread out and find all the lost children you can. They'll need to follow the aviator's lead, but the more children we get in the air, the safer a landing we'll have when we come back down. They'll need every ounce of fairy dust you can spare if Neverland's magic becomes unreliable.”
The fairies buzzed like an electrical storm, nervous and excited as they rocketed off in every direction. Now they spread out, each embarking on a stealth mission to find children without letting adults spot them.
Hollyhock still clung to Peter's finger. He tried to shake her off, but she wouldn't budge. “I suppose you can stay for a bit,” Peter told her. “But I'm going to need to send you off on a secret mission in a few minutes.”
Deeming this a reasonable compromise, and curious as to what secret mission she might perform, Hollyhock gave up her death grip on Peter's index finger and floated beside him.
“Come on, you two,” he told his companions. “We're nearly there.”
The forest got deeper, darker, and stranger as they continued. Yet Gwen felt a familiarity about the place. She had never been to the Never Tree, but she felt she had visited this place. The heavy canopy shaded the ground cover, but the vibrant flowers and their infinite colors seemed born of the richest sunlight. The purple lilies and golden daisies seemed to glow alongside luminescent trillium flowers and clusters of bluebells that jingled and rang as she and Peter stepped over them.
A sudden bird call pierced the silence. The creature called again, sounding like a song bird in distress. Peter answered it, his noise identical but for the tonal pattern. He waited for a response, and in a moment Old Willow stepped out from behind a tree they had just run by. Gwen had no idea how they had managed to pass Old Willow without noticing her.
Her glorious walking stick in hand, she approached and told him. “Hawkbit has told me the unspeakable time has come.” She wore her hair down—Gwen had never seen the old woman's stiff braids undone. The stony grey hair waved like water over her shoulders and down to her hips. She seemed peaceful. In the combative insanity of this day, Gwen had forgotten what calm looked like. No one today was tranquil. How could Old Willow find a mellow peace in her mind, even as she spoke of the unspeakable event consuming everything around her?
“What does that mean?” Gwen asked.
Old Willow smiled at her. “It is time we unmake what Raven has made, and build it again for ourselves.”
“That doesn't sound good,” she replied, unsettled by the cryptic comment.
“Do not worry,” Old Willow told her, putting a soft and wrinkled hand to Gwen's face to reassure her. “Worlds are made and unmade all the time. Only the foolish fear it.”
“These adults,” Peter told her, “I've never seen any like them. I didn't know they would be so powerful. I didn't know they could undo Neverland.”
Old Willow hunched over and kissed his forehead. “You have done well. You have served Neverland with admirable valor.”
“But now horrible things are happening to it!” he objected.
He thinks this is his fault, Gwen realized. For more than a century, he had defended his home and governed it, too. He couldn't have anticipated the strength or nature of the black coats' invasion, but he grown used to priding himself on maintaining Neverland. Did he blame himself for this?
Old Willow shook her head.
“No, Brave Peter. Nothing horrible ever happens. Good and bad do not befall us; we choose between them, and you have always chosen the good.”
Peter nodded once to affirm her words, but didn't look as though he believed them.
“Don't forget that, Peter. Now hurry: save the Never Tree and all will be well. I will do my part, and you can rest assured that they will follow you no farther after they find me. May the wind ever kiss you and the stars ever smile on you, until we meet again, in worlds not yet made.”
“May you enjoy such blessings yourself, Old Willow,” Peter answered.
“Goodbye, Brave Peter.”
He was already running again, and dragging Gwen with him and forcing Hollyhock to keep pace on her jittery golden wings.
She let him pull her by the hand but glanced back. Old Willow stood in the forest, stock still. “What's she going to do? How is she helping?” Gwen asked him. She couldn't imagine the stoic elder doing anything to slow down the lawyers, let alone stop them from pursuing Gwen and Peter to the Never Tree. Hollyhock answered, but Gwen didn't understand the intricate response.
“She's going to trick them,” Peter replied.
“How?” Gwen glanced back again, but Old Willow had disappeared. With abrupt confusion, Gwen stopped running and forced Peter to let go of her hand. Where Old Willow had stood seconds ago, a small, gnarled tree now grew, and grew fast. Gwen watched as it visibly fattened, its bark expanding out at the same time that its trunk stretched up and began unfurling long, tendril branches.
“They're looking for an old, magical tree,” Peter told her. “If they think they've found it, they'll stop looking. Now come on. We've still got to save the Never Tree.”
He took off running, and Gwen followed for fear of getting left behind and lost in the impossible tangle of the jungle's depths. “But Peter!” she objected, horrified at this strategy. “The adults want to cut down the Never Tree!”
Peter, his voice brewing with pain, confidence, heartbreak, and victory, reminded her, “Old Willow is not afraid to be unmade in this world.”
Gwen felt her eyes watering, but something kept her from crying. She felt empty, like a dried up well. She had cried so much for Tiger Lily, and so many other little tears had escaped her today. Tiger Lily had returned to Neverland to fight, just as unafraid of her unmaking. The redskins were so brave. Was that because they had been dreamed into existence by rowdy children who wanted an exotic face to attach to their ideals of courage and cunning? Or was death just less frightening when you didn't really exist to begin with? Maybe Tiger Lily and Old Willow had not passed into the oblivion that people spent their lives in apprehension of, but back into the imaginations from which they'd come. The redskins had been summoned to life in a made-up world. Maybe the difference between existing and not existing wasn't so stark, so terrifying, for them.
Peter paused, and Gwen—so distracted by her own mind—almost ran into to him. He looked around, examining a spread of slimy vines. The ground had become muddy, almost swampy, and they stood in the muck while Hollyhock helped Peter determine the exact place to cleave through the curtain of vines.
“We're here,” he whispered, parting the vines and holding them open for Gwen.
Chapter 37
At that moment, Gwen realized she had visited the Never Tree before. The aura of familiarity this place carried made so much sense. Months and months ago, she had followed Peter through the night to this place. Fairies had collected in the dark marsh, and the mud had even glowed beneath her feet. She remembered, with melancholy clarity, the night after the bombing that killed Bramble, when the fairies had gathered at the willow tree for his funeral and sent his pyre drifting across the marsh. She and Peter had danced together that night, floating on the air beside the Never Tree by the glow of fairy light. As sad as the night had been, the memory itself carried a pleasant sense of comfort.
They stepped into the swampy openness that surrounded the tree and listened as the vines fell shut behind them, like a beaded curtain secluding them in this epicenter of Neverland's magic. An intuitive feeling told Gwen that her ability to fly had returned to her, but she felt too in awe of the Never Tree to employ it.
The Never Tree did not look quite as she remembered it from that night with the fairies. The magnificent tree stood straight and beautiful, its branches cascading like a willow's, but among its thin leaves brilliant fruit flourished. Like pomegranates or apples, the fruit seemed an imaginary cross between the two. The mud around it seemed drier, and the bark was rougher and gnarled, too. As she approached, Gwen saw the bark looked almost like barnacles, or beaks.
She had wandered here so many times before.
The mud was not as red as it had been yesterday, but she picked up a handful and molded it in her palm. The redskins had been shaped from this slightly transformed clay. What's more, it was her little sister's raven tree, too. She remembered preparing for her mission to find Piper, Rosemary drawing her to this place and twisting it into her vision of an utterly magical tree—a vision born of Gwen's own stories.
No wonder the Never Tree could hide so well—it changed its nature like the sky changed its weather. It shifted and regrew to meet the needs of whatever native inhabitant desired its magic, whether that was the redskins, the fairies, Peter himself, or…
Rosemary? An inkling of confusion morphed into several questions for Gwen. How had Rosemary known how to find the Never Tree on her own? How had she managed to compel it into such a strange form as the clucking raven tree?
Gwen had no time to spare on these questions as she and Peter approached the sacred source of Neverland's magic. Little vines of waxy ivy wrapped around the trunk, its leaves like polished emeralds. Its roots digging deep into the moist ground, it towered in the marsh with a majesty usually reserved for royalty.
She felt breathless standing before it, reveling in the extent of its power. “It's so beautiful.”
“If only grown-ups could let beautiful things be,” Peter sighed. Turning to Hollyhock, he instructed make sure no lost children were left in the perimeter before she went and found Rosemary. Gwen wasn't paying attention, she was captivated by the tree.
She leaned down and touched one of the sprawling roots. The fibrous pattern on the root looked like letters or runes from some ancient alphabet, just like on the root specimen they'd given Piper. The poor Never Tree, wounded by that amputation at such a critical moment in Neverland's history.
“I can't help but feel there's a story in this old tree…” she remarked.
“Oh, there is,” Peter answered. “The oldest story.”
“Which one is that?” Gwen asked.
“Don't you know? What kind of cut-rate storyteller are you?” he asked, his playful contempt no longer something Gwen took offense at.
“I don't know,” she told him.
She noticed Peter counting his paces. Not wanting to interrupt him, she waited until he stopped and dropped to the ground. He started digging through the goopy earth until he found, buried in the shallow marsh mud, a metal pail. Half-emptying it of mud, he explained, “The story of how grown-ups' lost the Never Tree. A couple of them found it once, a long time ago, but they boggled it up so bad the Never Tree had to go somewhere they'd never reach it.” Peter picked up the bucket and carried it by its wire handle. His eyes went to the branches of the Never Tree. “One of these fruits is different than the rest,” he told her. “We need to find the branch that has the odd fruit.”
With such vague instructions, Gwen doubted her ability to assist. Still, she turned her eyes to the task and scanned the hundreds of fruits shining on the branches above. For as lush and ripe as the fruit was, none had yet fallen or rotted on the ground. “How did they boggle it up?” Gwen asked.
As she and Peter lifted into the air and circled the tree, searching for the stray fruit, he told her the story of the Never Tree. “The same way these brainless grown-ups aim to: they tried to use it. They tried to take what it had for themselves i
nstead of appreciating it for what it was. It wasn't enough for them to have it. They wanted to understand it, know it, and control it. Of course, it wasn't all their fault. This was before mermaids slithered off to the depths of the ocean, back when the first mermaid had only just been born of a falling star.”
Gwen tested the fruit in her hands. They all had the same tomato-like squishiness, but none of it fell off in her hand. “There was a time before mermaids lived in the ocean?”
“There was a time before there were oceans for them to swim in,” Peter told her. “You have to remember, when everything is made-up, there's always the moment before anyone made it up.”
“But not everything is made-up,” Gwen replied.
“Then where did it come from?” Peter asked.
Gwen didn't know if she was stumped, or just not following Peter's fanciful excuse for logic. The matter fell out of her mind when she sighted a tiny red fruit, no larger than a marble and ten times as glassy. The skin of the fruit shone, iridescent and glossy. “Peter, I think I've found it!”
He zipped over and followed to where Gwen pointed. “Good golly, Gwenny, you have! Good eyes! This is just the branch we need.”
Peter grabbed the slender branch in his hand and broke it where it forked off a larger branch. The leaves shook and shuddered, but neither they nor the solitary fruit fell from it. “Anyway,” he continued, planting the branch in his bucket of mud, “mermaids were just as dangerous back then as they are now, only nobody knew it yet. If it weren't for the mermaid, those grown-ups might have left well enough alone and not gotten it in their heads that messing with the Never Tree was a good idea. The truth is,” he confessed, “grown-ups aren't so bad, except for when they're trying to do good.” He and Gwen drifted back down to the ground, and Peter clutched his bucket with the cutting. “Mermaids, on the other hand, you always have to watch out for.”
A voice came from behind them.
The Grown Ups' Crusade Page 22
