The Piper's Price Read online

  From what she could gather, the gentleman was giving the girls bad news, and was not even particularly sorry about it. She caught only a few words: Peter, danger, children, grown-ups, drones…

  She decided to wait until the conversation was over to ask about Rosemary. Soon enough, Hawkbit prompted a fitful outburst from Hollyhock, and he flew off… away from the swarm of unhappy words she cast at him. In a huff, Hollyhock departed in the other direction and went to seek solace with her beloved Peter. Only Foxglove remained, and she floated over to hug Gwen’s finger as if in apology, but muttered fairy curses as she did.

  “What was all that about?” she asked Blink.

  The girl shook her head, her black hair slipping like silk across her shoulders. “The fairies are worried that the bombs and drones have found Neverland again… some of them are scared they’ll never stop coming as long as there are kids here.”

  Gwen held her arm, remembering the scar the newsprint bombing had left her with. The burn had healed completely, but the careful eye could still see a few grey words on her arm. “Don’t they realize that it’s Neverland’s magic they’re after, not the kids? Even if we weren’t here, they’d still come for it. At least now we can help destroy the drones and make spider-silk havens for them.”

  “Hawkbit thinks it would be harder for the grown-ups to find if children weren’t keeping the pathways open. He thinks that the more kids that fly to Neverland, the easier adults can track it and send drones.”

  It seemed like a reasonable concern, but Gwen never knew what to believe about the nature of Neverland. She wondered if tracking and accounting pathways was part of her father’s job, or if the task fell on someone else in the strange agency he worked for.

  “Hawkbit might be right,” Blink continued. “I understand why he’s sad. He doesn’t want us all to leave, but he says there are some fairies who blame Peter for this… and Bramble’s death.”

  “Ah,” Gwen sighed, “that’s why Hollyhock flew off.” The impish fairy never could stand to hear Peter insulted and was still a tempest of grief whenever someone mentioned Bramble.

  She cupped her hands and let Foxglove sit in her palms. The fairy’s wood-shaving dress felt funny against Gwen’s skin. She looked up at the girl, her big eyes almost as dark as her short, crooked hair that jutted out in all directions.

  “But Foxglove is on our side. Lots of them want to help. They know we love Neverland and want to stop the adults as much as they do,” Blink informed her.

  Foxglove burst into a rant, denouncing the horrible adults who sent the bombs and drones. For all the vices for a fairy to have, wrath was sometimes the most inconspicuous. There was very little that could incite wrath in a fairy, but the newsprint bombing had boiled Foxglove’s hot blood and pushed her to the forefront of this unusual war.

  Gwen could imagine how an issue like this would polarize the fairies. It made sense—more fairies had been wandering into the grove and keeping company with lost children. They were showing allegiance. They wanted Peter’s help fighting this.

  “Have you seen Rosemary?” Gwen asked.

  Blink shook her head again and somersaulted in the sun, her red overalls collecting yet another round of grass-stains in the process. Foxglove became excited though, and tugged on Gwen’s finger.

  “You know where she is?”

  Rather than answer, she floated back out of the bramble, and Gwen scrambled to crawl out too. She followed the fairy back to the grove, and soon saw Foxglove was leading her into the underground home. They flew up to the top of the tall oak tree—the one flight Gwen had mastered—then descended through the darkness to the warm light of glow flowers and a fire in the hearth.

  “Rosemary?”

  No one seemed to be home.

  She looked at Foxglove, but the fairy shrugged her pea-sized shoulders, surprised by this as well.

  A boy’s voice came from afar. “Hello!”

  Gwen crossed the room and pulled aside a curtain tacked against the wall. A deep, dark tunnel greeted her. “Hello? Is Rosemary with you?” she called.

  A light appeared as Newt crawled toward her with his miner’s cap on. He looked blindingly happy under an almost uniform layer of dirt. “Who?” he asked.

  “Rosemary!” Sal answered from much farther down the tunnel.

  “Oh,” Newt responded.

  “Is she with you?” Gwen reiterated.

  “I can’t hear you,” he yelled back.

  Gwen padded toward Newt on her hands and knees, but only got a few feet before the tunnel gave out. She gave a startled scream as she tumbled a few feet down into a gaping hole.

  “Watch out,” Newt told her. “That’s our tunnel to China.”

  “It’s not finished yet,” Sal added.

  Gwen pulled herself up and decided Rosemary was neither with the boys nor any part of their plan to dig a complex series of tunnels under Neverland for emergency escape purposes. She wondered where all the dirt for this project was going.

  “If you’re looking for Rosemary,” Newt announced, finally helpful, “she’s probably with Peter.”

  “Where’s Peter?”

  “Same place as always.” Sal called, still a disembodied voice in the darkness. “In the house.”

  Foxglove was distracted by the bubbling soup Jam had started cooking in the grove, so Gwen wandered through the woods alone. She had not yet memorized the subtle natural reference points that led to the house, so finding it meant craning her gaze up until she was sore in the neck, looking for the house among the trees.

  She spotted it eventually: its walls made of branches glued together with reddish sap, except for where craggy windows were formed. Roses and brambles had taken root in the old weathered and greying thing. It had a tiny chimney—despite the fact that no fireplace existed in it—which only smoked when Peter was inside.

  Gwen began climbing the tree in which it was situated. There was a rule of etiquette against flying into the house; it had to be climbed into.

  The house was an odd landmark in Neverland. No one referred to it as a treehouse. Peter insisted it was merely a house that had blown into the trees during a savage windstorm. When he first began using it again, it was a novel discovery for all the lost children. It had sat dormant in the trees for years, if not decades. Peter claimed to have forgotten about it.

  Since their return from reality, weeks had passed Peter by unnoticed. The children were left to their own devices when he hermitted himself away inside. The wonders of Neverland kept them amused. In their own time, each child would wander off to spy on their reclusive leader, never comprehending what his quiet withdrawal meant.

  Gwen didn’t understand either, but not for lack of trying. She saw too many possibilities for why he might be shutting himself away for long hours, studying his notes and old journals. The house had little in it but old books full of chicken-scratch shorthand that documented all the important details of this war that his childish mind could not be bothered to remember.

  As she climbed up to the house, she heard Rosemary and him volleying a conversation back and forth.

  “But how will figuring out the riddles help us find the Piper?”

  “The riddles point to his payment,” Peter answered. “The price merely to meet with him. If we figure out what those objects are, we’ll be able to pay for his attention.”

  “But we’ll just have stuff.”

  “No, no, no… that’s why we need someone who has heard his song. Someone who has heard his song will know how to find him and deliver these tokens.”

  Gwen poked her head into the conversation and went effectively unnoticed. She climbed up to one of the platforms and joined the scenery for Rosemary and Peter’s discussion. The house’s floor was more holes than floor after being blown up and away from the ground. Branches poked through up into the house from all the holes and windows, and scavenged floorboards were nailed to those to create steps, tables, and seats. Below the house and outside its many windo
ws, other platforms littered the branches. Inside and outside were not helpful terms when describing things. Books, journals, and a ragged globe a hundred years out of date stayed on mismatched end tables safely under the moss roof, but Rosemary leaned against the tree trunk on one side of a window, while Peter perched on a branch nearer to the ceiling than the floor.

  “Won’t the Piper want money? Gold or something?”

  “Of course,” Peter scoffed, “but first… this is a test for anyone who would make a deal with him, to make sure it isn’t a trap. Only someone magical will be able to figure out and find the mark of the first debt, the melody of lamb and death, and a patch fit for a prince.”

  “Oh, I see.” Rosemary’s glee spread across her face as she crawled forward on her branch, back in through the window. Leaves and flowers had collected in her voluminous hair, over the course of hours or days Gwen couldn’t hazard to guess. In a dress she had all but decimated from thorn snags and mud splatters, Rosemary looked more comfortable than she had in anything Mrs. Hoffman had ever dressed her in. “I don’t think we can find the Piper. I think we have to make him want to find us.”

  Peter considered this, striking a thinking pose by dropping down off his branch until he was only hanging by his knees. Upside-down, he put a thoughtful hand to his chin. Casting his glance at their visitor, he asked, “What do you think, Gwen-dollie?”

  “I think Jam’s making an egg-flower soup and dinner will be ready soon.”

  “Flower soup?” Rosemary asked. “I should take her roses!” She twisted around, looking for roses at the window, before realizing the only one in reach was already in her hair. She plucked it out and scaled back out of the tree one-handed. Gwen didn’t have the heart to tell her egg-flower soup didn’t actually have flowers in it. With any luck, something lovelier would distract her little sister before she stumbled onto that reality.

  Peter was packing his notes and maps away. Gwen returned his spyglass to him, but he didn’t say anything as he took it back from her. She waited for him to say something, but he seemed to possess no desire to break the silence. Was he frustrated that she derailed his conversation with Rosemary? She couldn’t get a read on his emotions. He functioned so much like a child, but he had grown just enough to hold a mood quiet and hidden. “Will you join us for dinner tonight?”

  “Perhaps,” he nebulously answered. Peter was infamous—even before this obsession with finding the Piper—for skipping meals and imagining his hunger away. She didn’t know how he did it. Pure willpower and strength of imagination, she presumed. It seemed super-human.

  Gwen climbed over to a branch nearer Peter. He seemed lost in the wild labyrinths of his mind. She turned her back to him, but hung tight to the branch with her knees as she fell back. She looked at him, her hair trailing down from her head. They hung upside-down and shared a silent moment. The blood rushed from her heart to her head, but Gwen just stared at Peter within the tiny forest house.

  At last she spoke, broaching thoughts that had been simmering for too long in her own head. “Before I came to Neverland, I heard adults talk about the Invasion of '08… the Piper was part of that, wasn’t he?”

  Peter smiled at last. “Aye, he was the linchpin in it. He found a key for his song that not only didn’t affect grown-ups, but that they also couldn’t hear at all.”

  “I would have been eight when that happened.” She looked at him and floated an idea that had only recently surfaced in her own mind. “I think I remember it.”

  His smile dropped, replaced by shocked interest. Peter bolted upright, flying over to Gwen’s branch and grabbing her hand in his. He pulled her right side up, and it happened so fast that Gwen felt her blood-addled head spin with dizziness for a full minute afterward. It didn’t help that Peter began hurling a zealous line of questioning at her.

  “Really? You were there?”

  “Do you remember where it happened?” she asked. “Was it by my house?”

  “I don’t know exactly where. I was waiting out at Lake Agana for his signal.”

  This encouraged her. “That’s half an hour from my house. Did it happen in the evening? Just before sunset?” Although she had little memory from the night, what details she did have were clear in her mind. She had been outside, and music from a flute had started playing. Her mother made her leave her dolls outside, and she tried to open her window after being tucked into bed. The most potent aspect of the memory was her desire to find the source.

  “Yes, right at the end of the day,” Peter affirmed. “Then you heard Piper’s song! You can help us find him.”

  At last, he let go of the hand he had pulled her up by, and somersaulted back to the ancient globe. He pulled out a mathematical compass from the end table’s drawer and stretched it from Germany to the United States. Gwen could not discern the purpose of this gesture and could not imagine how any information was derived from it. She suspected he was only mimicking behavior he had witnessed from adults too long ago to recall.

  “There’s just one thing,” Gwen said, interrupting his joy. “I don’t remember the song.”

  The energy faded from his posture, and the compass dropped from his hand, clattering against the globe and then falling through a hole in the floor to the depths of the forest below. He had completely lost interest in it. “What do you mean, you don’t remember? How can you not remember the most magical thing that ever happened to you?”

  His accusatory tone flustered her. Peter had barely spoken to her the past few weeks, and now she had initiated a conversation for the sole purpose of raising his hopes and then dashing them. “I just don’t remember the song. I remember that I liked it. I thought it was fun and wanted to follow it, but then my mom took me inside and tucked me into bed. When I told her I heard music, she locked my window shut and turned on my music box.”

  Peter listened with a dissatisfied expression, but it lifted as soon as she finished. “Could you hear the music after she shut the window?”

  “No, my music box was playing over it.”

  “But before your mother woke up the music box. Could you hear it through the window?”

  “I… I guess so. She turned on the music box to drown it out, I think.”

  Peter paused, taking only one excited and apprehensive breath before asking, “Do you still have her?”

  “My mother?”

  “Your music box.” Peter’s intense expression and silly questions seemed to contradict each other.

  “Oh. Yes, I suppose so… what would an old music box matter?”

  Peter’s face gave way to a sly smile and victorious little joy. “Your music box,” he declared, “might have a much better memory.”

  Dinner was an egg and flower soup, not an egg-flower soup. The Never Bird’s egg was stewed in the pot with lilacs, orange blossoms, and roses. The broth was a beautiful and luminescent pink color. They pulled the egg out, its blue shell bleached white and the milk within ready to drink. Jam recruited Gwen to hold the heavy egg while she pricked a hole in it, and Bard laid out a collection of cups, mugs, glasses, and a brass goblet to pour the milk into.

  The first squirt of milk shot straight onto Jam, soaking her ruffled pink shirt. To her dismay, Spurt began trying to lick her clean. Bard fetched Newt and Sal from their tunnel. They surfaced looking like subterranean mole boys. As night fell, Blink wandered into the grove, right as dinner was served.

  “You can’t come to the table looking so dirty,” Rosemary objected when she saw the tunnel diggers.

  “What table?” Sal asked.

  “It’s a matter of principle,” Rosemary insisted. Gwen watched her little sister struggle with understanding her own precepts. Talk of principles seemed alien when espoused from a child as young as Rosemary… the little girl did not seem to remember that these were her mother’s words she was regurgitating. It concerned Gwen to see that thoughts and memories of their mother only arose for Rosemary in sputtering intervals, always devoid of context. She was forgetting. The
little girl remembered everything about their mother when prompted, but Gwen was worried by how cohesive thoughts of their mother never organically occurred to her sister.

  “Jam’s dirty too!” Newt objected. He followed Sal’s lead, taking off his shirt and wiping his grimy face and hands with it.

  “Yeah, she’s all covered in Spurt’s slobber.”

  “She can’t take her shirt off. She’s a lady.”

  “I’M NOT A LADY, I’M A PRINCESS,” Jam screeched, flinging her shirt off and almost into the fire.

  Gwen sat in the grass a ways off—far enough from the fire that she could just barely discern what flowers were floating in her soup. While the children slurped their soup from bowls and danced shirtless around the fire, she retreated to that cusp of darkness, feeling even more isolated than she was. Even Peter sat on the other side of the fire, staring at it as if unaware that Hollyhock and Foxglove were puckishly plucking the flowers from out of his soup for themselves.

  The evening felt as though it carried a chill no one else noticed. Neverland was never cold, even at night. The bare-chested children were evidence of this. The weather bent to one’s desires, which was why only Gwen felt cold. She pulled the oversized grey sweatshirt tighter around her. She played with the zipper and rolled back the cuffs each time they unrolled and swallowed her hands again.

  Her mind wandered back to Jay’s room with the wistful thought of her left-behind sweater. Did her cardigan still smell as much like her as Jay’s sweatshirt smelled like him? She hadn’t meant to leave her sweater behind—or steal Jay’s, for that matter—but now that she had, she wondered if he took as much joy in the accident as she did.