JODI LYNN

ANDERSON

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 HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Tiger Lily
Copyright © 2012 by Jodi Lynn Anderson
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part
of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews. For information address
HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers,
10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
www.epicreads.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anderson, Jodi Lynn.
Tiger Lily / Jodi Lynn Anderson — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Fifteen-year-old Tiger Lily receives special protections
from the spiritual forces of Neverland, but then she meets her tribe’s most
dangerous enemy—Peter Pan—and falls in love with him.
ISBN 978-0-06-200325-6
[1. Fairies—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Magic—Fiction.] I. Barrie,
J. M. (James Matthew), 1860–1937. Peter Pan. II. Title.
PZ7.A53675Ti 2012 2011032659
[Fic]—dc23 CIP
AC
Typography by Erin Fitzsimmons
12 13 14 15 16 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
❖
First Edition

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 Prologue

She stands on the cliffs, near the old crumbling stone house.
There’s nothing left in the house but an upturned table, a ladle,
and a clay bowl. She stands for more than an hour, goose-bumped
and shivering. At these times, she won’t confide in me. She runs
her hands over her body, as if checking that it’s still there, her heart
pulsing and beating. The limbs are smooth and strong, thin and
sinewy, her hair long and black and messy and gleaming despite
her age. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, that she’s lived long
enough to look for what’s across the water. Eighty years later, and
she is still fifteen.
These days, there is no new world. The maps have long since
settled and stayed put. People know the shapes of Africa, Asia,
and South America. And they know which beasts were mythical
and which weren’t. Manatees are real, mermaids aren’t.

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 Rhinoceroses exist and sea monsters don’t. There are no more sea
serpents guarding deadly whirlpools. There are pirates, yes, but
there is nothing romantic about them. The rest is all stories, and
stories have been put in their place.
Now, the outsiders keep their eyes on their own shores, and we
keep our eyes on ours. Too far off route, we’ve been overlooked, and
most of us don’t think about the world outside. Only she and I are
different. Every month or so she comes here and stares toward the
ocean, and all the village children whisper about her, even her
own. It has become such a ritual.
And when she surfaces from her dream, she calls me by my old
name, though no one uses it anymore. And she turns to me, her
eyelashes fluttering in the glare that surrounds me, and whispers
to me in one short syllable.
Tink.

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 One

et me tell you something straight off. This is a love

L story, but not like any you’ve heard. The boy and
the girl are far from innocent. Dear lives are lost.
And good doesn’t win. In some places, there is something
ultimately good about endings. In Neverland, that is not the
case.
To understand what it’s like to be a faerie, tall as a walnut
and genetically gifted with wings—who happened to witness
such a series of events—you must first understand that
all faeries are mute. Somewhere in our evolution, on our
long crooked journey from amoeba to dragonfly to faerie,
nature must have decided language wasn’t necessary for us
to survive. It’s good in some ways, not to have a language.
It makes you see things. You turn your attention, not to

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 babbling about yourself, broadcasting each and every
thought to everyone within earshot—as people often do—but
to observing. That’s how faeries became so empathic. We’re
so attuned to the beating of a heart, the varied thrum of a
pulse, the zaps of the synapses of a brain, that we are almost
inside others’ minds. Most faeries tune this out by only
spending time with other faeries. They make settlements
in tree stumps and barely venture out except to hunt
mosquitoes. I get bored by that. I like to fly and keep an eye
on things. That was how I saw it, from the beginning. Some
would like to call it being nosy. That’s what my mother would
say, at least.
That morning, I was on my way to see about some locusts.
They’d invaded and eaten all the good parts of a faerie
settlement near the river, and I had never seen a locust
before. I was flying along on a curiosity mission when I
passed the girls in a manioc field.
They were out cultivating the tubers—in the tribe, a
woman’s job. All in their early teens: some of the girls were
awkwardly growing but still thoroughly in their skin, with
gangly limbs that expressed their most passing thoughts,
while others were curvy, and carrying those curves like new
tools they were learning. I recognized Tiger Lily instantly;
I had seen her before. She stood out like a combination of a
roving panther and a girl. She stalked instead of walked. Her
body still held the invincibility of a child, when at her age it
should have been giving way to fragile, flexible curves.

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 These were Sky Eaters, a tribe whose lives were always
turned toward the river. They fished, and grew manioc in
the clearing along its shore. A Sky Eater wandering far into
the thick, unnavigable forest was like a faerie wandering
into a hawk’s hunting territory. It happened only rarely. So
when they heard the crashing through the trees, most of the
girls screamed. Tiger Lily reached for her hatchet.
Stone came through first, splitting through the branches.
The other boys rallied behind him. And Pine Sap, last and
weakest of them all, brought up the rear. They were all
breathless, shirtless, a muscular and well-organized group
with weedy Pine Sap trailing at the back.
Stone gestured for the girls to come with them. “You’ll
never believe it.”
The girls followed the boys through the forest, and I
grabbed a tassel of Tiger Lily’s tunic because I, too, was
curious, and she ran faster than I wanted to fly. And then we
cleared the last of the trees leading to the cliffs, and the way
to the sea was open, and I heard a noise escape Tiger Lily’s
lips, a little cry, and heard it on the other girls’ lips too as
they arrived behind her. There upon the water was a large
ship, a skeleton against the sky, collapsed and flailing into
the rocks close to shore, broken apart and drowning. The
scene was all deep blues and grays and whites and the wild
waves lifting it all like deep gasping breaths.
Looking closer, I could see little pink people—tiny, falling
and clinging. I knew right away they must be Englanders, a

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 people we knew of from across the ocean.
“They’re dying,” one of the girls breathed—a reedy thing I
knew to be named Moon Eye—gesturing with her thin arms.
Between the ship’s decks, the rocks soared. Pieces of it
raced into the sea and disappeared. Little people dropped
from it in droves.
Pine Sap elbowed Tiger Lily’s arm; he pointed, his finger
snaking to trace a line farther in. One little rowboat moved
toward shore like a water bug, but we could see that it was
caught in the breakers.
It had only one occupant—a fragile figure, a lone man.
He was making for the shore with all his might and getting
nowhere. As we looked on, the waves buffeted him, until
finally he was knocked from the boat, though he somehow
managed to cling to its bow. He looked to be as good as dead.
But seconds later, he hurled himself back on board.
The tiny boat looked fit to capsize, was half full of water
already, and the man was not an adept seaman, constantly
turning the boat broadwise when it should have been
pointed vertically against the waves. Still, he rowed, and
rowed, and despite everything, and to our utter surprise,
the boat suddenly lurched its way out of the breakers and
into the calm waters by the beach. He collapsed down and
forward for a moment, as if he might be dead, and then
began to row, calmly, toward the shore. Several people in
our group let out their breaths. I did too, though no one
would have heard me.

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 To me it seemed like he was trading one deadly place
for another, and that drifting back out to sea was no less
dangerous than walking into the island without knowing its
dangers. The forest would eat him alive, even his bones.
The young people of the tribe were all looking at each other
with a combination of exhilaration and fear, except for Tiger
Lily, stony and unreadable, her eyes on the man below. Pine
Sap grabbed her hand and pulled her back from the cliff’s
edge; she had been standing so close the wind might have
blown her over.
“They’ll be deciding what to do about him,” Stone said.
Because all Neverlanders knew what danger Englanders
brought with them.
The children raced home to see what the village council
would do. I stayed and watched the ship floundering in the
waves for a while longer, then flew to catch up.

That was the beginning, or at least the beginning of the

beginning, of the changes that were coming for Tiger Lily:
the arrival of one little man on one little lifeboat. By that
day, I had known of Tiger Lily for years. I also knew a little
of her history: that Tik Tok, the shaman, had found her
while he was out gathering wild lettuce for medicine, under
a flower—either abandoned there or hidden from some
peril by someone who didn’t survive to come back for her.
He’d named her Tiger Lily, after the flower she was under,
bundled her into his arms, and taken her home. When she’d

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 grown old enough to seem like a real girl, he’d built her a
house next to his down the path that led to the woods and
moved her into it. He didn’t want her borrowing his dresses.
Tik Tok lived in a clay house he’d built himself—the most
intricate in the village. It was my favorite home to sleep in
when I was passing through, because it had the best nooks,
and a faerie always likes to sleep in tight places for fear of
predators. He’d seen the same constructions done in one of
the other tribes on the island—the Bog Dwellers, who lived in
the mud bogs among the old bones of prehistoric animals—
and he’d dragged the whole rib cage of a beast home piece by
piece to make the frame. With a craftsmanship possessed
by no one else in any village, he’d fashioned shelves and
windows, to create a dwelling that put the rest of the tribe’s
simple houses to shame.
Now he was sitting by a warm fire inside, as the sun was
setting and the night was growing cool, as it often did at the
end of the dry season. He wore a long dress of raspberry-
dyed leather—his favorite—and his hair braided down his
back, a leather thong tied around his head with a peacock
feather in back. His posture was straight and graceful as
any woman’s. His eyes were closed in concentration, and his
lips moved in a conversation with the invisible gods that,
as shaman, he visited in trances. Out of breath, Tiger Lily
moved into the room soundlessly and hovered, waiting for
him to finish.
In a village where everything was uniform and tidy, Tik

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 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.”

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 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 got-
ten 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

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 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

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 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

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 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.

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 Two

efore he ran out on me and my mother for a twinkly-

B 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.

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 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. These 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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.

* * *

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 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,

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 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.
Standing there, hair pasted to her back, covered in sweat,
blood on her shoulders where a freshly killed rabbit lay,
arrows pointing above her head, she was a triumphant and
fearsome sight. No one could have guessed the way her heart
pounded.
“I’ve saved the Englander,” she said. Everyone scattered.

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 Three

he following dusk, the familiar music of Pine

T Sap’s mother berating him with words like “you’re

a mistake” and “you are just like a girl” drifted
through the village. The Sky Eaters tried to respect each
other’s privacy, but at times like these, some curled in their
toes and ground their teeth in frustration and pity. One
or two even chuckled cynically and muttered that it would
build Pine Sap’s character. Tiger Lily found him on the path
near the dusty chicken yard, feeding the baby chicks.
He looked up at her. As she took a step forward, he stopped.
“Don’t worry, I won’t get too close,” she said. All day
Tiger Lily had been watching her hands, looking for signs
of aging. Sifting through her long black hair looking for
grays. Everyone in the village seemed to have adopted the

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 same notion. Walking to and from the central square, or
past her on the paths, they parted way for her like she was
a cold breeze, afraid of catching the aging disease now that
she had been with an Englander. They whispered about Tik
Tok having let her run wild for as long as he had, and how
that had contributed to her betrayal. Everyone was part of
the debate on how she should be punished. But so far, she
had managed to ignore them all. Except Tik Tok, who wore a
dark face and a darker mood as he made his visits around the
village, delivering medicine, saying the necessary chants,
and simply sitting to listen to those who needed an ear. It
wasn’t like him to be angry, and Tiger Lily had watched him
with guilt.
“I’m not worried,” Pine Sap said. Then he looked back
down at the chicks. “Their mother takes such good care of
them, doesn’t she?” he said, gesturing toward the mother
hen, who stood proudly above her brood, picking up worms
for them.
A current of compassion moved through Tiger Lily. And the
momentary impulse to go terrorize Pine Sap’s mother. She
wanted to tell him something encouraging, but the words
wouldn’t come to her. She looked down the path thoughtfully,
and was surprised to see Aunt Fire leaning on a fence and
looking at her, a strange smile playing on her lips.
I had grown to dislike Aunt Fire over the years, almost as
much as I disliked her oafish son, Giant. Her mind was a blur
of bold colors and bright malice. And Giant’s house—the

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 fence of which Aunt Fire was leaning on now—was one of the
only ones I wouldn’t sleep in, because of the horrible noises
and smells the man produced in his sleep. He would be seen
sometimes sitting outside, sucking his teeth, picking out
the pieces of crumbs and examining them, or eyeing the
girls. He had grown into his fiftieth year before his aging
had stopped. Everyone suspected his taciturn disposition
of keeping him aging for so long—after all, when you were
that cantankerous, it was hard for something important
to happen to you. At fifty, his brother was eaten by a beast
while out hunting, and that seemed to be the same time that
Giant finally stopped aging for good.
The village was small, but there were big personalities that
set it wobbling, and Aunt Fire and her son were two of those.
They were tolerated because everyone born to the tribe was
part of a family, for better or for worse. The matron’s gaze
made Tiger Lily feel unsettled and hemmed in.
“Bend?” she asked Pine Sap.
“Yes.” He just started walking, and she fell in step beside
him.
They walked to the river bend, stripped down, and waded
in. It was their secret, because the village would have been
in an uproar at a boy and girl swimming naked together,
even two as much like siblings as Tiger Lily and Pine Sap. In
the water, unlike on land, Pine Sap was graceful. He kept his
distance from her, and she was careful not to go near him.
“What was the Englander like?” Pine Sap asked.

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 “He had no hair. He was very sick,” she said. Pine Sap
couldn’t have been hoping for much more; Tiger Lily wasn’t
one for sharing. “I need to get back to him.”
The village council and, more importantly, Tik Tok, had
forbidden her to go anywhere until they decided how to
punish her.
“And now they’re all scared to touch me,” she said. “They
should be, I guess.”
Pine Sap twisted onto his back to float. Tiger Lily noticed
that in the water, unencumbered by the weight of his body,
Pine Sap was as good a swimmer as anyone.
Alighting on a floating leaf, I dipped a toe into the water;
with the night growing cool, it felt warm and inviting, but
I didn’t go in for fear of getting waterlogged and stuck to
its shining surface. Many a stronger faerie than me had
drowned in that way.
The village, slices of it visible up through the trees, gave
an orange, flickering glow from the many fires. The sounds
of talking echoed down the hill, as did the smell of meat
roasting on the main fire.
Tiger Lily was trying to say something, but had to think
several moments before she did. “You’re not a mistake,” she
finally offered.
Pine Sap waded. “Thanks. I know. I just . . . I don’t know
what else to do but be patient with her. Everyone has their
own reasons for being the way they are, I guess.”
He looked so sad that Tiger Lily provoked him into a race.

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 They splashed back and forth across the river, and then
sat at the water’s edge and ate some berries Tiger Lily found.
Panting, they ate, Tiger Lily ravenously.
It had become a habit for her to spend hours with Pine
Sap like this, even though she didn’t think she cared for
him much. It was as if he were a piece of herself that she
couldn’t misplace for very long. I hovered near his shoulder.
In the dusk his squinty hazel eyes took on a pale gleam that
looked like tiny candle flames. The sparkle of it gave him
the appearance of being in on a joke that no one understood
but him.
They dried off carefully, and as they walked up, they
passed Tik Tok. He barely looked at them.
All through dinner, the villagers made sure to sit far from
Tiger Lily. Many people wouldn’t even look at her, for fear
they could catch aging through their eyes. Only Aunt Fire
seemed to study her unblinkingly and without fear.
The next morning, Tiger Lily was up before dawn, braiding
her hair sloppily and inserting her crow feather, and I was up
catching my breakfast among the bugs that hovered around
the light of her lantern. The morning light brought noise
and activity, and the peace of the predawn vanished rapidly.
When the sun was just peaking the treetops I followed her
out to go sit by the fire with the women and girls, as Tik Tok
had recently been urging her to do.
As she sat, they all moved down their logs and scuttled
closer together. They would have protested if she weren’t Tik

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 Tok’s daughter, but Tik Tok was a man who, present or not,
commanded their respect. The smell of dust and grass and
dry leaves floated on the air.
Aunt Agda, Aunt Sticky Feet, and Aunt Fire were the
matrons at the fire. Aunt Sticky Feet was so named because
of the time she’d walked through hot tar and gotten her foot
stuck to a chicken that had run in front of her a moment
later. A feather had burned itself into her foot permanently,
making her sole a living fossil. Aunt Agda was a kind woman,
younger looking than the other two but in actuality much
older. She was self-conscious by nature, but always willing
to help anyone with anything. Aunt Fire, still glancing at
Tiger Lily in the strange, satisfied way she had the night
before, was the ringleader, witty, full of information (it
didn’t matter if it was accurate or not—she always said it with
such confidence that it seemed true).
“Here.” Aunt Agda reached out timidly and put a basket of
thread at Tiger Lily’s side, making sure not to touch her.
“Our little death bird,” Aunt Fire said, pulling her thread
through her suede blanket and barely looking up. Her
wedding bracelets jangled against each other—a reminder
of her long-dead husband, killed by beasts. “I thought birds
were supposed to be beautiful,” she said with a wry smile at
the other women, then bit her thread to break it. Long ago,
Aunt Fire’s delicate features had gotten lost in the folds of
her skin, so that her face gave the appearance of having been
mashed against a hard surface and left that way. The other

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 women seemed to bristle at her icy comments, but kept their
thoughts to themselves. It simply caught, like yawning.
Some of the younger girls tittered. Tiger Lily turned her
face down to her work. She was making a belt. The strings
were all tangled up and her colors clashed. Her fingers
moved like hunks of meat. Across the circle, Moon Eye gave
her a lone sympathetic smile. In contrast to Tiger Lily’s,
Moon Eye’s work was intricate and beautiful, her dainty
hands moving like little grasshoppers, fleet and sure. She
was a wisp of a thing. Sitting there, so delicate and dreamy,
she looked as if someone had only given half a life to her.
It was whispered among the tribe she wouldn’t live long,
she was so tiny and thin, with feather-like fingers and a
crackling voice. Next to her, the other young girls wove with
deft hands, though their designs were much more formulaic
and less imaginative than Moon Eye’s.
The women weighed in with their own thoughts of what
should be done with Tiger Lily.
“Could have been worse,” Aunt Agda said, low and soft and
barely audible. “Could have been the lost boys.” This brought
ghastly smiles from the youngsters. Aunt Skip Pebble hissed
and spat in a gesture of superstition. Several of the women
snapped their fingers in excitement in the peculiar gesture
of the tribe. But they were also all a little breathless. The
lost boys figured in a favorite story for scaring the younger
children, and for scaring themselves. It was like they were
drawn to the idea of the monsters lurking in the woods, and

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 at the same time horrified by it. I, too, felt my heart beat a
little faster.
“What you did was very brave,” Aunt Sticky Feet said, her
words clipped but not unkind, “but men don’t want women
who are brave. They want women who make them feel like
men.”
“I don’t care about that,” Tiger Lily said quietly. The girls
laughed and the women all fell awkwardly silent for a while
as they worked, except for Aunt Fire, who was never self-
aware enough to feel awkward.
“Tik Tok was born to be two genders,” Aunt Fire said
tightly. “That’s the way he was made. But you’re a girl.
Someday you’ll want to be a prisoner to someone other than
yourself.”
Tiger Lily stared down at her work and chose not to reply.
They were just finishing up when Tik Tok emerged from
his house and walked over. His heart was so heavy that
everyone could feel the weight of it, and the hairs prickled on
the backs of their necks. The boys, finished and exhausted
from their games, came to hover.
Tik Tok looked like he hadn’t slept, and like he had
something to say. Everyone grew quiet.
“Tiger Lily, we’ve decided that since you’ve already been
exposed, you can return to visit the Englander, if he’s still
alive, and learn what you can for us.”
Tik Tok sank slightly here. He looked tired, worn down,
and defeated. “But people in the village have suggested

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 you’ve run wild too long.” Curiously, his eyelids began to
tremble, as if the tiny muscles had gone weak, and his eyes
became glassy with tears. Tiger Lily, who had never seen Tik
Tok so distraught, was struck with a sudden, burning fear.
“As shaman, I’ve decided you are to be married.” He looked
around the circle and his eyes rested on Aunt Fire, then
trailed back to Tiger Lily almost involuntarily. “You’ll be
married to Giant at the end of the hot season.”
Aunt Fire’s glance showed itself for what it was: triumph.
Of all the people sitting at the fire, she was the only one
unsurprised by the news.
Tiger Lily went as still as if she were prey and her life
depended on blending with her surroundings. But for the
widening of eyes, the opening and gasping of lips, everyone
was still. There was only one real movement. One figure
moved next to Tiger Lily, and one set of fingers slipped
themselves between her own.
No one seemed to notice that Pine Sap had taken his life
into his hands by holding hers.

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 four

moved into the village permanently that week. Up till

I then, I’d been shuttling my things from here to there,

never sleeping in the same place more than a few days in
a row. But now I felt the need to stay close to Tiger Lily. I don’t
know if I thought I could protect her or if I just needed to see
how it would end for her. But somehow it felt important to be
there. Faeries can be unfailingly loyal, even, apparently, to
someone who doesn’t seem to notice them. And I felt loyal to
the girl with the crow feather in her hair.
Aunt Fire wasted no time putting Tiger Lily to work, now
that she was going to be her mother-in-law. She forbade
Tiger Lily’s rambles in the woods, and her solitary hunts.
She made her take on chores for both herself and her son,
though Tiger Lily had never even been good at keeping her

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 own house and clothes in order. The one thing Aunt Fire
couldn’t forbid was Tiger Lily’s return to the Englander.
Tiger Lily caught sight of Giant on her way out of the village
the next morning, for the first time since their engagement.
When Giant had stopped aging, his growth in years
seemed to have been replaced with a spurt in outward
growth: he was enormous—every bit of him. It was easy
to mistake him for a boulder walking through the village;
sometimes that seemed more believable than that the shape
coming toward you was actually a man. He met her gaze now,
his eyes dull. The only acknowledgment he gave her was to
suck his teeth in her general direction. As she walked away
from him, the village’s pity trailed her, the same way their
fear always had.
She entered the woods in a daze. I heard wisps of her
bewilderment with each breath she took as she walked,
and even smelled it in the breeze after it ruffled her hair.
In Neverland, the year was divided into three seasons: the
dry, followed by the wet, and then the hot season, when
everything bloomed and grew in the humid heat. The end
of the hot season was nine full moons away. She hadn’t yet
come to fully grasp what it meant or how largely things had
changed, and how in nine moons she would be married.
Most of all, she couldn’t understand Tik Tok.
It was an hour’s walk to her destination. The house
where she had left the Englander was a remnant of visiting
missionaries who—unable to cope with the heat and the

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 beasts and the pirates—had died somewhere in the forest.
The roof still stood intact, along with three of the stone
walls, but the fourth had crumbled badly from years of the
harsh wind. From the house’s back window there was a view
of the ocean beyond Neverland, and below, hungry waves
lapped against a thin slip of coastline. Wind buffeted the
house constantly; in the rainy season it could be deadly. All
in all, the place was windswept and lonely.
The house smelled musty and the coolness stroked Tiger
Lily’s cheeks. Against one wall was a rough cot with a straw
mattress. There, in a lump, lay the Englander. His bald
head glinted in the dim light. He blinked at us from behind
a pair of crooked but intact spectacles, but didn’t move or
say a word. Tiger Lily unwrapped the food she’d brought
and sat at the edge of his bed, and tried to feed him, but he
wouldn’t eat. She checked his ankle, which she’d bandaged
to stabilize a broken bone. She’d bandaged his chest too, but
was unsure how many ribs he’d broken. She poured some
water into his mouth. Then she sat and watched him, and
waited. He slept, on and on.
Listless and eager for a task, she soon made the difficult
climb down to the beach to gather the many things that had
washed ashore, making the immense physical effort to pack
them up to the house while I hid among the branches that
overhung the cliffs, watching for the hawks who liked to
scan the edges of the ocean for prey. A canvas trunk. Some
clothes. The bodies had disappeared, eaten by sharks or

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 taken by mermaids to use the bones for their dwellings in
the deep.
When she returned, she sat in the darkness awhile longer,
waiting and listening. And then simply went to work. She
pounded a clay-and-hay mixture to stuff into the holes
in the walls to protect against the wind. She sweated and
cooked and dried food and belongings.
The Englander was awake the next time I looked, and he
watched her come and go. He had begun to eat. His round
cheeks puffed out and he stuttered one word, his lips
shaking: “Phillip.” He held a frail hand to his chest.
She laid her hand on her own chest and said, “Tiger Lily.”
“A ship will come looking for us,” he said, with effort.
He licked his lips a few times, then nodded, reassuring
himself. He reached out and patted Tiger Lily’s hand. She
didn’t flinch.
I wondered about the man’s ship. Neverland was so deeply
and snugly tucked into a remote corner of the Atlantic, so
far from anything else of interest and so surrounded by
violent and usually impassable tides and currents, that the
ships that did end up here usually only did so by accident.
To find the island on purpose, I’d heard pirates claim over
the years, was next to impossible. The pirates themselves
had stumbled upon the island long ago during an escape,
and now sheltered in a cove on the remote northwest side in
between raids on the far-off trade routes.
Tiger Lily opened a trunk, its contents surprisingly,

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 immaculately dry. She pulled out a few books, which, to her,
contained only nonsensical symbols.
Phillip made an eager gesture and muttered, “Take it.” He
made an attempt at an encouraging smile. “It’s a wonderful
book. You deserve it.” Tiger Lily stared at the cover, then at
him unsurely. “Do you know how to read?” he asked. She
shook her head. She didn’t, but Tik Tok did. He had tried to
teach her, years before, but she had had no patience for it.
As it grew dark, Tiger Lily built a fire. She tried to imagine
where the Englander had come from, but all the world out-
side the island seemed impossible, like a story. I hid behind
a log to stand close to the flames and watch them dance. I
played with the sparks, throwing them against pebbles.
Finally, she squatted by Phillip’s bed to say good-bye. “I’ll
come back,” she said. “I promise you, I’ll look after you,” He
nodded. Just as she was about to stand, he pushed something
into her hands. A tiny box that had come out of one of the
trunks. Inside was a thin gold necklace, with an ornate gold
pendant that held a small pearl dangling at its end. “You
should have it.” His brown eyes lit up for a moment, from
behind his spectacles. He licked his lips, swallowed. “It
was my wife’s. It’s precious to me.” Again, his cracked lips
widened in a frail smile.
Tiger Lily held the necklace, deeply curious. While old
shells washed in all the time, she’d never seen a pearl before.
The necklace was the most exquisite object she’d ever held.
Wincing, Phillip rested his hands on his stomach. He was a

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 portly man, but clearly malnourished now. “Don’t lose it,”
he said. And made a feeble attempt at a smile. Tiger Lily
hung the necklace around her neck.

Out in the open, it had cooled off a little, but the air still felt
wet and warm when we set off just before dusk.
She made her way down the hill to the edge of the woods,
holding the book, which she planned to give to Tik Tok. Her
thoughts turned back to the village.
The sky fell away as she entered the thick of the forest,
and I had flown up high to get a good look at the stars. She
was soon wrapped in a cocoon of night noises . . . insects
nibbling on plants or chirping, leaves rustling. The still,
thick heat wrapped us in a fine layer of sweat, and Tiger Lily
was tying her long black braids up to the back of her head
when a low voice caught her ears, close enough to startle her.
She hid instantly, holding her body close to a tree, its
rough life breathing beneath her hands. Then, gauging the
voice’s location, she moved on toward it, utterly silent, her
senses sharp. She didn’t notice she’d wandered into the
tangled lowlands of the forbidden territory until afterward,
when it was too late.
Almost immediately, she came to a deep, black lagoon.
She stopped short at the water’s edge.
She waited for several minutes, and was about to turn
around and continue home, when there was a movement
among the branches to her left.

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 In the dark, I could barely see him. He was covered in mud,
and blended in with the trees. He had an ungainly walk, like
something unconscious of itself. His hair was caked in dirt
and none of his features were visible, except his eyes glinted
in the glow of the moonlight, and I got a yellow-lit glimpse
of his features: a pale face, smooth and animate. He wasn’t
terribly large in frame. There was a delicateness to his
shoulders; they were like chicken wings. Below me, Tiger
Lily was frozen as well.
A baby was tucked beside him in the shadows. The baby
cooed.
Clearly, he hadn’t seen us yet. He was working on
something, and I could see as my eyes adjusted that it was
a spear.
I had never seen a creature like him. He was nothing
like the men of the villages—orderly and well-postured,
dignified and stiff. Nor was he like the men of tribes across
the island—the Cliff Dwellers or the Bog Dwellers. He
seemed very young, and also fragile.
And then there was a muddy, wet sound behind him. He
turned, and as he did, I studied the sweeping black lagoon
he now faced, still and mirrorlike under the moon. And
then a bubble from the surface, and a figure slithered out
of the dark water. Effortlessly, it beached itself on a rock
protruding not far from the shore. A patch of moonlight
coming through the clouds raked over it, revealing half of a
woman—a mermaid. Her long hair was wet and pasted to her
back. She waved at him in the dark, and he waved back. He
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 walked over to the water, and said something in a low voice,
and she laughed. He took another step toward the water’s
edge. And she said his name.
“Pan.”
Below me, Tiger Lily startled. The tree shook, almost
imperceptibly, in her arms. It was nothing. But enough for
him to sense she was there. He lifted his face up, his glittering
eyes. Tiger Lily ducked behind a tree and disappeared, and I
fluttered up into the branches.
He moved toward us.
I watched from above as he hunted her. I could hear him
breathing, listening for whatever it was that was hiding from
him. Tiger Lily set her sights on a tree a few feet away, and
came silently out, hiding behind the next. She chose another
tree, and again, ran toward it on silent feet. They waited
each other out. He disappeared into the trees beyond a small
clearing to her left. She took the opportunity to veer right,
behind a boulder. And in this way, they zigzagged toward the
edge of the forbidden territory, where the scrubby, tangled
lowlands gave way to high ground and taller trees. Her feet
found the bare spots between rocks and over branches. And
then she was beyond the line of low swampy growth and
rising into familiar territory.
She knew how to fade into this forest. Long afterward, I
heard him walking back and forth through the trees, but we
slipped along the shadows, and in this way made the slow
journey home, arriving long after nightfall.

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 five

ik Tok closed the book that Tiger Lily had brought.

T His hair was a revelation this morning, a glossy braid

he had started on at dawn, woven with tiny seashells.
He put the book on the shelf right next to his clock. He had
been reading it many hours at a time for days. “I love it,” he
said. “Thank you again.” He seemed to be bearing up the
weight of the air as he stood, slow and tired. “Are you ready?”
Tiger Lily nodded.
Since she had been a child, Tik Tok had often taken
her with him on his gathering expeditions, saying that he
needed one person to help. But secretly, it was their private
time to just be together in comfortable silence. Now, the
silence was thick and tense. Tiger Lily was confused and
hurt, but she preferred to stay that way rather than question
him.

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 She kept her mouth closed as they walked, so that none of
her anger would tumble out. Besides her clandestine swims
with Pine Sap, she had never kept anything from Tik Tok.
She avoided his eyes, and kept her gaze on his heels as he
took the lead.
Tik Tok shambled along in front of her as they entered the
forest. From behind, he was shaped like an eggplant, his
hips swaying under his deep-green tunic, the shells in his
hair bright in the morning sun.
After several minutes, they knelt in the dead leaves and
rooted around.
Today they were looking for taro root, which Tik Tok used
to treat insect bites.
“It’s for the best if the Englander dies,” he said. “Better
than him suffering longer.”
Tiger Lily swallowed. She had been to the house twice
since our first visit together, and Phillip didn’t seem to be
getting any better. Clearly, Tik Tok thought she was holding
out false hope. But hope wasn’t exactly what it was. She, too,
believed the man was doomed, and she couldn’t explain to
herself why she kept going back. She pulled at the taro root
fiercely, holding it up in clumps.
“If he dies, it was all for nothing,” she said. Tik Tok winced,
and she hurried to change the subject. “Do you really need
all of this?” she asked.
“You always want to be prepared,” he said. “You don’t want
someone to come to you needing help, and you can’t give it

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 because you didn’t gather that herb.”
I had watched Tik Tok minister his potions to almost every
person in the village: the old and young, the meddling, the
generous and the petty, equally. I alone had seen him sitting
up nights with those with fevers, sitting patiently next to
people covered in salves for burns or cuts or animal bites,
when Tiger Lily had tried to stay awake and fallen asleep,
strong willed, but still a child after all. Twice, I had seen him
nurse people back from the brink of death in secret, so the
rest of the tribe wouldn’t think the person was weak. And
once he had slaved over Giant himself for four nights, who
had never been nice to anyone, least of all Tik Tok. He would
sit there, his wrinkled face immovable, his eyes steady. I’d
often stayed awake in my nook as long as I could, until my
eyes drooped, and more than once, I’d fallen asleep behind
his clock, and I’d woken to find him still wide-awake beside
his patient. His collections—including the clock I slept
behind—and his hair were his only indulgences, the sole
things he did for himself.
Now I watched his face as he and Tiger Lily worked. It was a
fine, delicate, feminine face, with full lips and warm brown
eyes. His movements were unconscious but always minced,
small, womanly.
“It’s my fault,” he said suddenly, the words seeming to
bubble out of their silent work. “I wanted you. That was
my mistake. I knew I’d never have a child. I begged them
to let me keep you, though for a man to take in a little girl

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 is unheard of. To take any child who isn’t a Sky Eater is
unheard of. As eldest woman, it was Aunt Fire’s decision to
let me or not. So she made me give her a promise. When it
was time for you to marry, you should marry her son. It was
a secret. She wanted it to seem like I chose Giant. To marry
the daughter of the shaman would bring him great respect.”
Tik Tok leaned back on his heels and looked up, wiping a
stray hair from his forehead delicately. “I was always able
to put her off. The tribe wouldn’t get behind her. Until this.
The Englander and everything.” He sighed. “It’s not your
fault. It was my selfishness. I didn’t have the courage to leave
you in the woods. But I should have let someone else have
you . . . one of the other tribes,” he said. He leaned down
onto one palm as, with the other, he yanked a root from the
ground and brushed it off. “I could have told you. But I didn’t
want you to live under a shadow. I never held you back from
anything.”
Tiger Lily was silent for a while, her long, dark hair falling
across her face, obscuring her expression, and Tik Tok
stared at the root in his hands. Finally she reached for his
fingers. “I’m glad you took me. It’s just a husband. Maybe it
won’t be terrible.”
“It was my job to protect you,” he said. “And I didn’t.”
Tiger Lily shook her head. “You have. I’m okay. Really, Tik
Tok.” Secretly, Tiger Lily knew it was her job to protect him
too.
Tik Tok smiled, but his eyes became wet. His shoulders

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 sank, and he steadied himself where he knelt over a patch
of bitter gourd.
“I let you down, little one.”
She reached for his arm. “I’m not so little. I can take care
of myself.”
“Yes, I know.” He frowned. “But you shouldn’t have to. You
should have someone to love and take care of you. Not like
him.”
Tiger Lily didn’t want someone to take care of her. But I
heard the longing in Tik Tok’s heart too, and the loneliness
of being such a singular type of person, without another
like himself to hold at night. He didn’t want the same for his
daughter.
“You love me,” she said. “That’s enough. We love each
other.”
“Yes. Yes, that’s true.” He smiled. “We are a love story.”

That night from my perch, I heard something behind the

house, like footsteps, circling from behind the cover of the
woods. But when I looked out, there was nothing there.

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 six

’ve seen Tiger Lily move through the forest as a deadly

I predator, duck easily through briar patches and over

boulders, this fallen rock, that noisy leaf, under that
branch, so silently it seemed she was made of air. But I’d
never seen her so intent on something as she was on the
stone house.
She returned there whenever she could. The moment she
finished weaving leggings for Giant, or scraping the dead
skin off Aunt Fire’s toes, she would disappear into the trees,
without anyone really noticing she was gone. For a while I
was too busy to follow her, dealing with some faeries from
back home who came to try to convince me to return where
I belonged. When they finally left and I did have time to go
with her, I noticed that on the walk both ways, we peered into
the trees, always thinking of Pan, and wondering whether

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 he was somewhere there watching us.
But the trips were worth it, because Phillip was improving.
We had found him this last time sitting up in bed and peeling
a star apple from a bunch Tiger Lily had left for him. He’d
greeted us with a strong voice. “I’ll be out of bed soon,” he
promised sheepishly. “Then you won’t have to wait on me all
the time.” Tiger Lily had left with a smile.
That night, just approaching the fire in the main square,
she was startled when she saw that Aunt Fire was waiting
for her, her sagging body lit by the light of the flames, where
several of the villagers were gathered, digesting their food
and talking their way into sleepiness before they went off to
bed. They all looked up as Tiger Lily approached.
Aunt Fire stepped close to her, holding something behind
her back. In a flash, she pulled it out, and struck Tiger Lily
across the face with a bamboo cane.
Tiger Lily fell backward, and the people around the fire
went silent.
“You belong to me, and your duties will be to take care
of my son. Not straggling home late at night. I need you to
myself for the next few days. No house in the woods.”
She hobbled off to bed.

The last of the dry season passed. When the first rains
started arriving, the way to the house on the cliffs was
impassable. Every afternoon a fog fell on the whole island,
and threatened to swallow it up. We were unable to return to
the stone house for six days. It was too long.
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 seven

iger Lily was trying to work on a water pouch for

T Giant that Aunt Fire had demanded she make. She

kept on peering up at Pine Sap and Moon Eye over
her work, her eyebrows knitted darkly. Her work was a mere
shadow of Moon Eye’s, and for some reason, it embarrassed
her for Pine Sap to see it.
I was in the rafters dealing with troubles of my own. I was
carrying a raindrop to keep in a little hole in the wood, so I
could drink from it at my leisure. But each raindrop I lifted
kept falling apart. Water is so delicate.
Tiger Lily worked stoically on her pouch as if sewing was
the worst thing to have ever befallen anyone.
Then, outside, there was a shift in the sounds of the village.
The women all looked at each other, surprised and on alert.
Suddenly, Stone poked his wet face in through the window.

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 “Pirates,” he said breathlessly, the rain dripping down his
cheeks and eyelids, and hurried away.
They were all up in a moment and out of the hut into the
deluge. I flew out toward where a crowd of men and boys had
gathered near the front entrance of the village. The women
and girls were all retreating to the houses. Tik Tok directed
Tiger Lily to do the same. But as soon as he stopped looking,
she followed behind him.
Before the braves stood a ragtag crew of men, in torn,
scraggled clothes.
Tiger Lily slowly sidled up beside Tik Tok, silently, and he
made an unconscious, protective gesture to hold her back.
It was the only movement he made that evinced any fear or
discomfort. There was a truce between the pirates and the
Sky Eaters, based on the agreement that neither side wanted
trouble from the other. But there was little trust between
them.
“We don’t know about the boys,” Tik Tok was saying. “We
hear sounds sometimes. Nothing more.”
The pirates’ captain was not a large man. Yet the others
were clearly in thrall to him, their bodies turned toward
him nervously. His wavy black hair was just going gray;
he had high bony cheeks, and a piece of old, stained cloth
tied around his head to hold back his hair. The whole group
stank of sourness, old spirits, and filth.
“We would very much like to find them,” the captain said
politely.

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 “We cannot help you, friend.”
The captain smiled; it broke through his lips and stayed
there, masklike. “No, of course not. Yes, okay.”
They turned to go, and shuffled a few feet backward.
Suddenly the captain seemed to remember something, or
sense something, and he swiveled, only instead of facing
Tik Tok again, he trained his gaze on Tiger Lily. His eyes
were flat disks, bloodshot around the empty blue, and they
studied the braiding in her hair, grazed her neck, and settled
on her necklace. “That’s lovely; did someone give that to
you?” he asked. Tik Tok took a protective step toward Tiger
Lily. She stared at the pirate silently. “It looks English,” he
said, bemused. He smiled again, and I felt the smile in my
fingers and in the soles of my feet; it invaded me like a bad
spirit, and Tiger Lily shivered. As he turned, his flat eyes
scanned the ground, so subtly it was barely noticeable. But
only barely. Tiger Lily saw.
“Well, thank you for your time.” He seemed pleased.
It was later that day, sitting around the women’s circle in
the drying hut, that suddenly Tiger Lily jolted. And in that
one moment, I knew what she did.

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 eight

he leaves cut at her face. Her breath came in gasps.

T Even in her mad rush, she leaped the rocks without

missing a step. She was at the bottom of the rise
when she saw the smoke. I didn’t fly ahead of her. I stuck to
her shoulder, and in her state she never knew I was there.
The trunks were in the front yard, burning. The house
had been torn apart, even the walls knocked down. The
Englander was gone. Tiger Lily searched the ground for the
path they’d taken, and her eyes followed footprints to the
cliff’s edge, and a shudder ran through her.
She knew what lay below. Pirates.
Tiger Lily sank onto the rocky ledge. The ocean was at high
tide and crashed right against the rocks. It had washed away
whatever the pirates had thrown onto the shore.

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 She stood. She followed their tracks. A cooler head would
have remembered the truce.
Pirates were fierce adversaries, but they weren’t stealthy
ones. With little effort, and within half a mile, we were close
enough that I could hear them up ahead.
One man, balding and slow, straggled behind the others.
He was muttering to himself compulsively.
Tiger Lily had her arm around his neck before he knew
she was behind him, and had him against a tree. Her knife
was at his throat, and she moved to slice, but first she looked
in his eyes, to let him know of his death. And she paused. He
was crying. By the redness of his eyes and face, she could tell
he’d been crying for some time.
She watched the tears in wonder.
He didn’t say a word. No one turned to come back for him—
or even paused on their way, not noticing he was gone.
Hovering behind her, I could see where Tiger Lily’s pulse
throbbed. The tears ran over the knuckles of the hand that
held his neck.
And she couldn’t make her hand move to kill him. She let
go. He fell back against the tree, and down onto his hands
and knees, then recovered himself and looked up at her. He
turned and lunged into the woods, and she let him go.
She staggered the other way, back toward the stone house.
She wasn’t herself. She left such easy footprints in the mud.
She didn’t look behind her, keep her mind on her peripheral
vision like all Sky Eaters were taught to do. She stumbled

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 through the woods, and she didn’t hear him behind her
until he had his arm around her waist. She bucked. They
slammed against a tree. She kicked and kicked. But it was
too late.
Peter Pan dragged her into the bushes.

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