Tiger Lily

by Jodi Lynn Anderson

  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 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 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.

  SIX

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

  SEVEN

  Tiger Lily was trying to work on a water pouch for 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.

  “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.

  “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.

  EIGHT

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

  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 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.

  NINE

  In the chaos, I didn’t see him tie her. I bit him, but he, quick as a blink, grasped me between his fingers and flicked me away. Then forgot me as he turned back to Tiger Lily.

  Tiger Lily tried to stand and dizziness brought her down again. She tried to move her hands but they were tied behind her back. He reached for her neck, took her pearl between his fingers, then, with a flash of his dagger, sliced the chain from where it had rested against her collarbone and tied it around his own. I flew back at him and bit him, right at the shoulder. He flicked me off again, barely noticing. I landed in a grapevine, tangled and winded.

  He knelt in front of her, slowly and quietly, and from above, I couldn’t tell whether it was to slit her throat. He held her chin and looked at her face.

  “Are you a boy or a girl?”

  She blinked at him. His face was mud covered, making his eyes glitter in the gritty mask of dirt he wore. His hair was matted to his skull. Suddenly his teeth showed through his lips in a smile.

  She didn’t reply. The rain was abating, and dripped loudly on the giant leaves above. She butted her head into his teeth. He let out a deep, guttural moan.

  I expected him to kill her then, but he only stared at her and rubbed his lip in surprise. Blood flowed down his chin, but it was the surprise that held him there, staring at her. And then he laughed.

  “Boy, I guess.

  “You’re sad about that man,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “I’ve seen you, watching over him. I thought you were a girl at first. But you’re too strong. I thought about stopping it sooner. It’s too close to our woods,” he said. “It’s good they took care of him.”

  Tiger Lily sucked in her breath. Her chin sank against her chest.

  Pan paused, studying her stricken face. He seemed to be thinking over his words, though I couldn’t tell for sure. I’d never tried to listen to someone whose thoughts were so muddled.

  Suddenly, he darted off. Tiger Lily tried to stand, and failed. In a moment he was back with a handful of spotted yellow orchids, sloppy and pulled up at the roots, which he laid in a pile. Underneath the mud, around the circles of his eyes, his skin was pale. Soft as velvet to look at. His eyes were blue.

  He knelt before the flowers, so suddenly solemn that it appeared he was making a joke. Tiger Lily stared at him, bewildered. He still had the delicateness we had seen at the lagoon, but he must have been deceptively strong, because when he pulled her beside him, she went easily, like a doll. He made her kneel. “We should have a funeral,” he said.

  Pan held his hands clasped in a tent on his lap, and he bowed his head.

  He seemed to be trying to recall something, and it was a long time before he finally said, “Our Father. Our Father. Our Father. Amen.”

  Then he leaned back, and his face was blank again. He smiled, all white teeth. “There.”

  A piercing cry rose from somewhere in the woods behind him. Tiger Lily pushed herself back harder against her tree.

  “Just the mermaids,” he said. “The moon’s rising.”

  He did something curious then. He wiped something off his knife that might have been blood. And then he carved a few words into the tree just behind the flowers. It took several minutes, but he was meticulous about each letter. IN MEMRY OF THE STRANJER, it said. HE LIVD AND DID. He turned and smiled at her.

  Tiger Lily shimmied her wrists. It was the twitching that gave her away.

  Peter’s face grew grim and perplexed. He reached for her wrists. It was the wrong thing to do.

  For all the time I had watched over Tiger Lily, I still underestimated her. She must have been free for some time, because as he leaned in, she flung all her rage against him with her weight, held him against a tree, her fingers around his neck. Panting, her heart racing, she squeezed until he choked for breath and sank slowly down the tree, half conscious.

  She left him dazed and lying in the dirt, and ran.

  It wasn’t until the next day that Tiger Lily realized she’d left her necklace behind, hanging around his neck.

  TEN

  Peter didn’t love Tiger Lily the first time he saw her, or even the second or the third. But Reginald Smee did.

  How did I know? Because I didn’t follow Tiger Lily home that night. I followed the pirates instead.

  I made the night journey across the island, trailing the clipped leaves and muddy prints that announced the way the pirates had gone. The forest at night is different from the forest in the day. As a faerie, you can’t slip through it unnoticed, because you give off a faint glow that is like a beacon in the dark, deep Neverland nights. But we are equipped with defenses too. Great speed. Excellent eyesight. Sly, secretive natures that lend themselves to seeking the best hiding places. And the pirates, while deadly, were careless enough not to notice me.

  They camped about halfway to the cove and ate dinner by a warm fire. I watched them from the cold, gritty shelter of a crevice in a rock nearby. And I learned about Smee, the man Tiger Lily had spared because of his tears.

  The other pirates and their captain, I had seen before; they had inhabited the island on and off for years. But Smee was something new. I listened to the cobwebs of his memory. A human might think memories are fainter than present thoughts, but that is not the case. Often, they are easy paths to follow for a f
aerie, and sometimes they are so loud they drown out everything else in the brain.

  Smee had killed his first man at the age of twelve. The product of a privileged and sheltered life, he found the difficulty of murder had appealed to him: he loved doing something so frightening. It wasn’t that Reginald was heartless. Quite the opposite. He sympathized with his victims, wondered about who they would leave behind. He felt deeply the despair of the man’s or woman’s final moments. He never killed without having to wipe a tear or two from his eyes, and that was how Tiger Lily had found him crying, after they’d pushed the pleading, terrified Englishman off the cliffs. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. I listened on, and shivered down to my little faerie bones. Reginald didn’t kill because he had no heart. He killed because he did. He killed to make himself cry, and he only killed the people he admired.

  By the time he was sixteen, the trail of violence he’d left was being called a “rash of murders.” In the papers, he was named “the South Bank Strangler.” Reginald walked through the streets during those days, waiting for someone to point the finger. But no one looked at him, except to say “excuse me, sir” if they bumped into him.