The Piper's Price

by Audrey Greathouse

  Oxalis buzzed ahead of Gwen, dissatisfied with her pace no matter how fast she walked or jogged. After a while, she gave up trying to please him and went at her own pace. The fairy was in a flustered fury for a moment after, but had no option but to put up with it. They didn’t see any drones, which was good since she didn’t know whether she could have run all the way to the swamp in this darkness.

  Once they were in sight of one of the spider-silk-covered hollow trees the fairies congregated in, a fairy beelined for Oxalis’s blue sparkling and began fussing at him. She escorted him the rest of the way to the tree, thanking Gwen profusely for bringing him home safely. Oxalis continued to brood.

  That taken care of, Gwen toyed with her thoughts as she walked home. She considered searching for Rosemary to make sure she’d not fallen into a misadventure with the island’s dangerous crocodile, but it was a futile thought. She could go charging into the jungle on this noble impulse, only to get herself lost or entangled in a worse fate than capable young Rosemary would be in. Looking after her sister would be responsible and mature of her, and Neverland never favored the responsible or mature.

  Oxalis had led her to the fairy tree nearest the shore, and she was not far from the beach. Gwen wasn’t ready to head back to the underground home yet. Just because the night was dark didn’t mean it was not still young.

  She veered off her course to the underground home and headed out toward the water.

  Navigating was hard without Oxalis. The jungle floor was treacherous when wandering in the dark. A fairy companion provided the perfect amount of luminosity to light the way, but Gwen wouldn’t have wanted one anyway, considering whom she was going to go meet.

  She could see a fragment of the moon through the crooked branches and odd trees of the forest, but it was still low to the horizon. She lifted off her feet to avoid tromping on strange plants or stranger creatures, and hovered through the forest for a moment to get back in the swing of flying before she shot up into the treetops. She reached the other side of the canopy in one swift motion before she had time to question herself. Leaping to the tallest branch that could support her weight, she paused. Taking in the nocturnal landscape, Gwen saw little lights flickering where fairies gathered for the night, and could still see the last of the redskins’ fire glowing in the darkness. The moon, easing toward fullness one night at a time, was steady in the sky even as it danced in the water. She imagined that she could feel the breath of the island as she stood on one of the many trees that created its splendorous fresh air. In the moonlight, there was no color to the forest beneath her feet, only the texture of leaves like carpet.

  Gwen felt a noise inside of her trying to get out. Was she scared? Was her body telling her to scream, to call for help? Was the sadness of knowing she would be leaving in mere hours demanding she cry?

  She bounded forward to the next branch, but it was not strong enough to support her adolescent body. It didn’t matter. As it snapped beneath her, she pushed off it and shot as high as she could into the sky with that momentum. She came down on the next branch but didn’t even put her full weight on it. Half skipping, half flying, she touched down for the token sensation of feeling something under her feet as she raced over the top of the forest… running on the leaves as easily as solid ground. She felt miraculous, as if she were walking on water, and the noise inside of her finally choked itself free. She laughed, loud and unrestrained. No one was there to hear her. She was so used to using laughter as a social queue and communicative expression, she had forgotten how good it felt to laugh for sheer joy.

  As the ground became sandy and infertile, the trees grew sparser and shorter. She could have flown down to the ground, but Gwen descended the treetops in the smallest steps possible. She walked down the tree branches as simply as she would have a staircase. Once on the shore, she kicked her bare feet and sent sand flying with every step. In fantastic spirits, she plopped down at the edge of the waves. Her toes dug into the wet sand and the moonlit waves lapped at her feet while she searched her purse. The warm air was pleasantly still. Back in reality, it would be November… or was it December now? Time had a funny way of standing still and slipping by in Neverland.

  The scale was in its usual place in her satchel, and she dropped the thin, coin-like token into the shallow waves and watched it dance under the water… bright enough to retain its multicolored sheen even in the strictly silver glow of moonlight. A forceful wave pushed forward, sending Gwen scooting back to avoid getting her dress wet. The mermaid scale vanished. A moment later, the mermaid appeared.

  “Hello there,” Lasiandra called, out where it was deep enough for her to tread water. “Fancy meeting you this late.” She held her scale out of the water and chucked it back to Gwen.

  She caught it easily; Lasiandra always had deadly aim. “It’s been a busy day,” Gwen told her, “and I’m leaving tomorrow.” She wiped the scale dry on her dress and tucked it into her purse again. The mermaid had explained to her how the scale would scream in the water, calling her to the shore of whatever body of water it landed in. The mermaid always returned the noisy enchantment back to human hands as soon as possible.

  “Leaving again?” Lasiandra teased as she swam closer and pulled herself up to the shore. “How do you suspect that will go for you this time?”

  “I’ll come back after a few days,” Gwen assured her, but even she could hear the hesitation in her voice, trying to chisel away her good mood. “It’s just part of Peter’s plan to find the Piper.”

  Lasiandra lay on the sand, propping herself up on her elbows and letting her tail rise and sink on the slight waves that washed in. Her curiosity and confusion were muted by her dispassionate face. “Peter’s planning to spend days on the mainland?”

  “No, he won’t be staying. Just me.”

  A slender expression of amusement pricked up a corner of Lasiandra’s mouth. It still made Gwen uneasy how the excitable mermaid tried to obscure her feelings. She wondered if Lasiandra would ever get comfortable enough around her to respond with candid emotions. They had been meeting every few days like this, often rendezvousing away from the lagoon. None of the other mermaids gave Gwen any reason to trust them, and she did not want word getting back to Peter that she was regularly visiting a mermaid.

  “Why would Peter want you alone in reality?”

  “I won’t be alone; he’s taking me to some sort of ally he has.”

  “Who?”

  Gwen traced shapeless lines into the wet sand. “I don’t know. He hasn’t told me.”

  Lasiandra brushed her hair over her shoulder to keep the sopping blonde locks from falling back into her face again. “And so you’re just going to go linger in reality until he lets you come home?”

  “The aviator told him the only way to find the Piper is if he has someone who has heard his song. He needs me because I’m the only one he knows who has heard the Piper’s song.”

  “Eelgrass!” Lasiandra exclaimed. Following that expression or expletive—Gwen could not tell—the mermaid explained, “Piper got his song from the mermaids. It’s an old melody from the ancient sirens. Every mermaid knows it. If that’s all it takes to find Piper, why, I could manage it.”

  She knew it wasn’t a lie, but she also felt Lasiandra was trying to shepherd her to some duplicitous conclusion. Mermaids couldn’t lie, but they could ask all the questions they wanted. She considered this before figuring out what question to follow with. “Does Peter know this?”

  “Certainly. We might not be able to sing it the convincing way sirens do, but mermaids knew it well enough to teach it to Piper.”

  “Mermaids taught the Piper his song?” In Gwen’s mind, the mermaids didn’t intersect with anything but Neverland. “Why?”

  “He made a deal with a mermaid for it,” she answered.

  The Piper seemed so powerful to Gwen; she couldn’t imagine him divorced from his musical magic. She couldn’t imagine what price such a gift came at, either. “What did he have to
give in exchange?”

  “That’s between Piper and the mermaids,” Lasiandra responded, her tone dark as if Gwen’s question had been inappropriate. Her voice lightened as she continued, “He’s lucky, though. If he hadn’t had mermaid magic, he would have been done for when they caught him the first time.”

  The moonlight sparkled on the shore as much as it did on the glassy water, but it was a broken sort of light as it reflected off rippling waves and specks of sand. “What do you mean?” Gwen asked, unsure as to whether she even wanted to know.

  “The mainland is after magic, and they’ll take it however they can. They would rip every plant and creature from Neverland if they could. Whatever their process is, it can kill a fairy, or turn a myth into a man. A great many battles have already been lost, closer to reality than Neverland is. If you’re heading to reality, I’m sure you’ll see their handiwork for yourself, soon enough.” Lasiandra threw her hands up in exasperation, and they splashed back down into the water as she declared, “But no one should need to venture to reality and risk that. The mermaids knew the song well enough to teach it to him, and well enough to send for him with it… so why would Peter want to send you away? Vanda’s magic still binds him to us.”

  “Who’s Vanda?”

  “The mermaid who made that mediocre musician a magnificent myth.”

  While she didn’t know how old the myth or reality of the Piper might have been, Gwen knew it originated hundreds of years ago. “How old is Vanda?”

  “Oh, she’s naught but seaform now,” Lasiandra replied. “She died at three hundred years, same as all mermaids.”

  “Mermaids live three hundred years?” Gwen didn’t know, in the scope of Neverland, whether to regard that as a long life or not.

  Lasiandra laughed. “I suppose that sounds like a long time to a human, but it’s really not so long, considering our circumstances.”

  Gwen didn’t want to be insensitive, but everything Lasiandra said just prompted more questions. Hoping it wasn’t a socially awkward thing to do, she asked, “What do you mean about your circumstances?”

  Lasiandra shrugged, water still rolling off her bare, moonlit shoulders. “Just that we are so soon forgotten by our kind, and mistaken for fish-tales by mankind. There are no books underwater, no scribes or any inks to write with. All we know about our ancestors is what little the stars tell us…” She gazed off at the horizon, where the night sky and dark sea met but never mingled. “But we tell stories. We remember songs. We know how to find the one Peter seeks.”

  Gwen didn’t know what troubled her most out of all this new information. Her stomach churned and she answered, “Peter’s been very distant lately. Ever since we returned from reality.”

  As her spirit sank, Lasiandra’s compassion seemed to rise. “He’s been very busy. You said the aviator gave him riddling instructions for how to find Piper… Do you think it is something more?”

  She took a deep breath and looked to the stars. If the stars trusted the mermaids enough to whisper their secrets to them, surely Gwen could at least share her apprehensions. “Promise you won’t mention it to Peter?”

  “Of course. I’ve promised you I won’t tell anyone—Peter or otherwise—about our talks.”

  Gwen hated to doubt her friend, but the guilt was small in contrast to the relief she got from hearing Lasiandra give her word on these important matters. She was so grateful for Lasiandra. Neverland was full of comforts and joys, but so few of the things that made Gwen feel at home. Having another girl she could talk to made Neverland’s other failings seem inconsequential. None of the children would be able to understand the finer points of social relationships and hormonal mis-logic. Somehow, Lasiandra had no trouble wrapping her mind around Gwen’s problems, even when it involved concepts as foreign to the ocean-dweller as school and boys. Halfway between human and fish, Lasiandra was familiar with in-betweens and the limitations that came with occupying an unusual middle ground.

  “I think he’s disappointed in me,” Gwen confessed. “When he found me at Jay’s party… it was like I wasn’t just going home for Mom and Dad. I think I betrayed him in a way that he hadn’t been betrayed before. I didn’t go back to some nebulous sense of future and comfort… I went someplace with loud music, alcohol, and boys.”

  “But you came back! Doesn’t Peter appreciate how important Neverland must be to you that you abandoned the man you love?”

  Gwen winced. That sounded so over the top and cliché. She had a crush on Jay. She doodled his name in her notebooks and tried to think of witty things to say around him. They’d kissed, but what had that done but confirm that the infatuation was at least mutual? Love was a word so strong it couldn’t help but sound silly when applied to her indecisive heart. Besides, she didn’t want to believe Jay was a man. He was just an older boy. That was part of the reason she liked him. He just wanted to play football and video games, draw and make jokes with everyone. He was as childlike as a young man could afford to be.

  All that was irrelevant to the conversation. “I’ve never mentioned Jay to Peter.”

  “Why not? Are you worried he’d be jealous?” Lasiandra seemed scandalized by the thought.

  “No. I mean, it’s Peter. I don’t know that he’d understand, and either way, I don’t want him to think my alliances are based on who I’m kissing. There’s so much more involved in my decisions.”

  “Clearly.” Lasiandra flopped over onto her back to enjoy the feeling of the little waves flooding around her. “Do you make any decisions without agonizing over them?”

  Her question hit too close to home for Gwen. She was painfully aware that she gave her important decisions a level of scrutiny the lost children usually reserved for deciding whether they’d rather be a rock star or race car driver, or where to tuck themselves away during a game of hide-and-seek. It was the inconsequential decisions that deserved attention. When they faced important issues, the choice was always clear for them.

  “No,” Gwen moaned, “and I’m worried I never will.”

  Lasiandra sighed and let the stars fill up her blue tide-pool eyes. “You’re never going to be happy until you figure out what you want.”

  Gwen scooted back another few inches. The tide was coming in, washing away the meaningless scribbles she’d left in the sand. “Actually, I think I’m fantastically happy.” It was counter-intuitive, but it was true. “If anything, if I ever figure out what I want, it’ll probably disrupt the balance and just make me miserable wishing for it.” Gwen was full of desires, but there was an unexpected blessing in that. When they all finished canceling themselves out, she never found herself pained by longing for anything.

  “You forget that you don’t have to pine for your heart’s desire,” Lasiandra told her, reaching over and patting her leg. “You’ve got a friend in a mermaid. As long as that’s true, you can know that things will work out for you. Someday, we’ll get our hands on a sky glass and have everything we could wish for. Reflected starlight contains secrets only mermaids can read, and once we find one, we’ll get the last of the magic that stars usually hold back from us. Sky glasses can’t be as rare as Peter says they are.”

  Gwen didn’t react to Lasiandra’s comments about mirrors—much less let her know that she had a compact mirror sitting in her purse at that moment. She only trusted her friend so much. Lasiandra had exacerbated Gwen’s irrational fear that Peter might be sending her to reality as a sort of banishment, but she had unintentionally led Gwen to another idea. Peter might be sending her because—unlike the mermaids—he trusted her.

  Lasiandra sat up on her tail and stretched her arms. “I should go. You caught me at a bad time—I don’t want to miss the star chatter in Orion tonight.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.” Gwen wished they had a better system for meeting than just screaming into the water until Lasiandra came.

  “Don’t be sorry, silly girl,” she laughed. “I’m happy I could come talk to you for a bit. I hope we can spe
nd more time together soon. Don’t be afraid to call for me, no matter where you are.”

  “Yeah—I’ll definitely catch you later.”

  She wiggled her way back into the water until it was deep enough for her to begin swimming again, but before she left earshot, she made sure to give Gwen some parting advice. “Good luck finding Piper… and if he gives you any trouble, Gwen, just mention Vanda. If you tell him you know us, that’ll stop him in his tracks.” She laughed with cheerful malice and bobbed under the water, sinking like a stone into the dark waters she called home.

  Flying back in good spirits and a fluttering sundress, Gwen didn’t even entertain the thought she might be unstable in the air. Such concerns seemed beyond crossing her mind after this encouraging evening. The stars were winking at her as she glided over the treetops. Her flight was perfectly stable, until an unexpected stimulus interrupted her.

  “Gwen!”

  Her name shot her down. She was no longer a force among the sky, but sixteen-year-old Gwen Hoffman. She twisted around in time to see Peter’s face before she began her unglamorous descent.

  She fell like a rock sinking through water, but not so fast that she could not compartmentalize the awkward stages of it. First, she cut through the leaves, and then the twigs snapped. A stronger branch broke under her, and she thrust her hands into the patchwork darkness, reaching for anything that she might be able to grab hold. She knocked her head hard against one branch, and then slipped further down.

  In the course of those short seconds, Peter had already zipped into evasive action. She felt his hand on her elbow, and then another at her opposite arm. With this leverage, he pulled her awkwardly until he had counteracted the pesky force of gravity and could get a better grip on her. He set her down on the nearest tree branch. The position was not comfortable for either of them. She rubbed her sore elbow and watched Peter hover in front of her, his arms crossed.