Tiger Lily

by Jodi Lynn Anderson

  “I wish I were brave like you,” Moon Eye said suddenly.

  “Why do you say that?”

  Moon Eye shrugged. If Tiger Lily hadn’t been distracted, she might have noticed the seriousness in her tone. As it was, she just shrugged it off. Moon Eye was often incomprehensible to her. It was no wonder Pine Sap had grown such a fondness for her; they were so much alike. And Tiger Lily felt a moment of comparison in which her bullish ways came up short against Moon Eye’s thoughtful, gentle ones. At the moment, she didn’t feel very brave. She was trying to think of a way she could possibly bear giving up Peter.

  In the water, catching their fish, the villagers looked so happy. Aunt Sticky Feet put her arm around Red Leaf and gave her a squeeze. Pine Sap was kneeling in the current, helping some of the children position their baskets under the water. He rarely came back from these fishing forays with a catch because he spent most of the time like this, helping the little ones. With them, he seemed at his most confident and lively, and the children of the village—who were always so scared to come close to Tiger Lily—flocked to him like bees to a flower.

  Tiger Lily thought about what Tik Tok had said, about promises, and who she was if she didn’t live up to her duties. She didn’t notice Pine Sap jogging up the hill until he was standing in front of them, dripping, a large salmon dangling from his right hand.

  “For my mother,” he said, holding it up. “I’ll smoke it, so it keeps for a while.” He ignored the look that crossed Tiger Lily’s face. She was disappointed in his weakness, his eagerness to appease his mother, and it embarrassed him. “Hey,” he went on, falsely bright, “will you help me practice spearing tomorrow morning, before everyone’s up? I have to go on the hunt, day after. It’d be nice if I made it through the day without being a laughingstock.” He smiled abashedly, his brows knit together.

  Tiger Lily nodded. “Yes, I promise,” she said.

  “Great. I owe you.” Pine Sap beamed. He winked at Moon Eye, then hurried off with his fish, his wet feet slapping on the path. Moon Eye watched him go, but Tiger Lily didn’t. She stared down at the bird on the skirt. She wondered if there was any way she could fly away too.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I woke in the night to a figure by Tiger Lily’s bed. It was Peter kneeling beside her in the dark, watching her. She woke with a prickling feeling.

  “I’m so sorry I didn’t meet you at the bridge, Tiger Lily. I’m sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said, fear running like lightning down her legs.

  “Come with me.”

  Tiger Lily wanted to say no. But she got up and followed him. The village was sound asleep, and the only light was a faint orange glow from the dying coals of the main fire. They didn’t make a sound, though I could hear Peter’s breathing, and they didn’t speak until they’d crossed the threshold of the forest into the trees. And then, he only said, “The boys are waiting up ahead.”

  The boys stood in a gaggle by a creek a safe distance from the village, and huddled around a tiny fire they’d built. In the firelight I realized Peter had painted his face. They all had.

  “Why are we—”

  “It’s an adventure.” Peter gave her a big, hardened smile and started walking. It chilled her. They all followed behind him.

  After a few minutes, Nibs fell in step with Tiger Lily. “We’re going to the pirates,” he whispered, giving her a meaningful look and swallowing nervously. “They’ve gotten too close. We saw more tracks, just on the edge of the territory, but we lost him. We’re sending a warning.” Startled, Tiger Lily looked to Peter for confirmation. He didn’t meet her eyes. He wore an unrecognizable expression: his pupils were huge, and his face was cold, like a mask of himself. The others looked scared, and Tootles seemed like he was going to be sick. One twin kept glancing at his pale, green-hued face. The other twin, Nibs explained, had stayed home to take care of Baby.

  Tiger Lily didn’t tell Peter that she couldn’t go, that she’d never get home before morning and that a Sky Eater breaking the truce and provoking the pirates was dangerous for her whole tribe. If he was going somewhere dangerous, she wanted to be there with him. He smiled his strange, cold smile at her, from far away. She’d never seen him look so frightening.

  They slowly entered the part of the island that was lower lying than the rest, and more empty and rocky. The boys’ fear became tangible as we saw the first landmarks of the cove—a few torches stuck in the ground, unlit, with skulls on top. I hate to say that just below them, like a kind of trim, were several hundred faerie skulls. I wondered if they belonged to anyone I knew or had known, and shuddered. The sight of the skulls slowed the boys’ feet, too, and Tootles began to shake. Peter pushed forward at the same pace, seeming to forget we were behind him. Tiger Lily hurried to stay beside him. Unconsciously, she kept a hand on her hatchet.

  As we came to the outskirts of the cove, Peter finally slowed, became stealthier and even more silent, and grinned at the boys, looking more in his element than maybe I had ever seen him. I could tell we’d come within range because it smelled like rotting meat, and within a few minutes we arrived at the place where the pirates threw their animal carcasses. They’d clearly been lazy about their butchering, and left some valuable parts of the animals to rot, as if the killing—of something as “lowly” as an animal—made no difference. Tiger Lily found this shameful, and her heart hardened a little more as she walked.

  We came to a long narrow walk between tangled mangrove trees. Peter walked ahead. Tiger Lily followed just behind him, keeping her eyes trained on the thick foliage. I could hear Peter’s familiar breath.

  And then he came to a stop. Tiger Lily saw a split second after he did.

  The man was curled up on the ground, his dirty white shirt just visible through the trees. He lay behind an intricate construction of bamboo and spiked spears, cocked and ready to release at whoever was walking down the path.

  A bottle was curled into his elbow. He was asleep.

  It was all so quick that Tiger Lily didn’t have time to stop it.

  Peter pulled back a branch, whether to see better or to move closer, it was hard to say. The man woke. It took him a second to make sense of what was before him, but the moment was too long. Before he was upright, Peter had a thin rope around his neck. The man jerked, reached for his neck, struggled, kicked, and made a gurgling, tortured noise. It lasted for what seemed like forever, though it could have only been seconds. And then, almost just as quickly as waking, he quieted, and his life ebbed out of him.

  When Peter stood to face the others, he was panting and triumphant and shaking with fear. Tiger Lily stood staring at him, in shock.

  They walked toward home in silence, and the Peter who had killed a man began to fade, so that the Peter we knew emerged. He became quieter, slower, more thoughtful in his movements, noticing the dark, angry presence beside him.

  “You’re unhappy with me,” he said flatly.

  Tiger Lily lifted her chin. Her anger was so palpable, even the boys took a few steps away from her. Her heart was as cold as ice.

  “He was ready to kill us.” Peter smiled hopefully, but it bounced off the steel of her face and dropped.

  They didn’t speak for the rest of the walk. The other boys were uncomfortable with their discord and walked on ahead in silence. Nibs kept glancing back at them. Slightly and Curly argued in a hushed whisper over who was going to eat a coconut Curly had pulled from his sack, their appetites undeterred by recent events.

  Tiger Lily walked with Peter to the burrow but, once there, changed her mind about being there, and walked into the darkness. Peter let her go, but then came after her a few moments later, startling her as she reached the top of a small rise.

  “Please, Tiger Lily.” He pushed his hand into hers and she let the fingers stay loose. “You think I’m a monster.”

  “No.” She shook her head, keeping her own thoughts.

  “But you believe in killing. If your tribe was attacked
.”

  She turned her eyes on him. They were so full of disappointment that Peter flinched. “There are rules to killing,” she said. The Sky Eaters, when they went to war with someone, sent a series of warnings. To sneak, to ambush, was so foreign to someone like Tiger Lily, she couldn’t fathom it.

  Peter looked desperate. He held tighter to her hand. “Tiger Lily, the pirates take young boys. They’re usually orphans. They snatch them up and put them to work on their ships. They’re slaves. They beat them and worse. Slightly was nine when he was taken. He still remembers....”

  Peter’s voice trailed off, and he swallowed. She listened in silence.

  “When I met him, he’d escaped. I saw him in the woods, and he was so skinny and lost. But I took care of him. We rescued the others, over the years. And now … I have to scare the pirates. To protect the burrow.”

  I felt Tiger Lily thaw, but only slightly.

  “Peter, how did you get here?” she asked.

  Peter looked down at his hands. “I don’t remember. I have a bad memory. You know how people remember a few things that happened to them when they were small? Slightly does, even Nibs and the others do. I don’t remember those things at all. I just remember being here.”

  “But to sneak up on someone and attack them is cowardly.”

  “To not do what you can to protect someone, that’s cowardly. You wouldn’t understand. You don’t have to be afraid of anything.” He kicked a root protruding from the ground, then sighed and gave her a softening look. “I need you to think I’m okay,” he said.

  Tiger Lily was silent beside him. She took hold of his hand. She wasn’t sure what love was, but maybe she was supposed to bend. “I think you’re okay,” she whispered. From the burrow behind them, they heard a burp echo out and reverberate in the trees. They couldn’t help but smile.

  “I think that’s the biggest compliment you’ve ever given me,” Peter said ruefully. It gave Tiger Lily a twinge of guilt. She regretted that she wasn’t better at telling people how much she cared about them. But Peter looked as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

  Tiger Lily sighed. She was wrapped in Peter now, and she didn’t know how to extract him from herself.

  Peter went back to the burrow to see to the boys, and she departed alone. The sun was just coming up. And there, like last time, was Maeryn, just her eyes above the water, staring at her.

  She lifted her mouth above the water. “You’re being watched,” she said.

  I realize now that she must have meant Smee. But that wasn’t who Tiger Lily thought of. She remembered suddenly that she had broken a promise.

  “You’ve lost your feathers,” Maeryn said behind her. But rushing away, Tiger Lily didn’t hear it.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Tiger Lily hurried along the river, looking for Pine Sap. She didn’t often walk this far upstream, as it became tangled and impassable. But now she heard a hammering, camouflaged by the sound of the water. Following the sound, she came up to a small structure, crafted even more carefully than Tik Tok’s house.

  Pine Sap was on his knees, twining a piece of sinew around two poles. His attention was so wrapped in his work that he didn’t hear her approach until she was almost above him. He startled. Then smiled up at her in his crooked, slow way and stood, brushing the dirt from his knees.

  “What do you think?” he asked. He gestured to all of the poles and pieces of wood, the carefully scraped bark, the scrollwork, four walls.

  “This is what you’ve been doing in the woods?” she asked.

  He nodded, clearly excited for her to see. “It took a while, I’m slow at these things.” But he was being modest. The work was astoundingly intricate. It was a proper house—with four walls intact, curved inward, and sitting on stilts. “I was going to wait a little longer to show you.”

  It was almost finished, except for the roof. It overlooked a quiet bend in the river, where the water slowed and collected in a small, calm pool, deep enough to swim in.

  “It’s beautiful, Pine Sap.”

  “You like it?”

  She thought of the hours it must have taken him—while she’d been running wild, playing games with the boys, making the journey to the cove—and tried to understand how all that time, Pine Sap had been here in this same patch of forest, working on the same thing, day after day. “You have so much patience,” she finally said, her voice falling tellingly.

  “You say that as if it were a bad thing.”

  “No,” she said, but the lie was detectable. “It’s just … don’t you get restless?”

  Pine Sap looked nervous, and swallowed deeply. “Yes, but … it’s worth it. To have something to show in the end.”

  “Yes.” Tiger Lily nodded as if unconvinced.

  He seemed to sense her disapproval, because he turned back to his work, his smile having sunk away.

  Tiger Lily looked around. Up on the roof, a pair of crows were perched, curiously watching Pine Sap work.

  “Are those your friends?” she asked.

  He smiled softly, then let out a tiny, eerily perfect caw and reached into his pocket, laying a handful of dark-purple berries on the ground beside him. “They love these,” he said. The crows were there in a heartbeat, there by his side, gobbling down the berries. They had no fear of Pine Sap at all. But when Tiger Lily moved to kneel beside them, they flew off to a nearby branch.

  She stood and laid a hand on one of the walls, tracing the designs of it with her fingers. “Why have you kept this a secret?”

  Pine Sap sat back on his knees. “I don’t want people to give me their opinions on it. It’s where I want to live, when I’m married. I want it to be close to home, but far enough away from the gossip and everyone’s eyes. Just a place to be ourselves.”

  She crouched beside him. “It’s beautiful, Pine Sap. Really.” She put her hand on his shoulder. She thought of Moon Eye in the house. How peaceful she would think it was.

  He looked up at her a long while. “You think I wasted my time?”

  “No, no. It’s just, you and I are so different.” She was thinking how bored she would have been, working on the same monotonous task.

  “I hear you,” Pine Sap said. He had heard more than she wanted him to hear.

  She changed the subject abruptly, to what she had come to say. “I’m sorry I didn’t come this morning.”

  Pine Sap nodded. “You’re still going off at night,” he said.

  “I can’t sleep. I go for walks.” She let him infer the rest. She didn’t lie all the way.

  “Be careful,” he said. He didn’t believe her. But he didn’t believe she would lie to him about anything important. “You could always run into something you can’t handle. A jaguar or the lost boys or something.”

  Tiger Lily looked at her hands; the depth of her guilt seemed bottomless. “I will.”

  I talked myself into flying back toward the cove a few days later. I wanted to see the pirates’ reaction to their lookout’s death, and see if there was anything they planned to do about it.

  I was surprised though, just beyond the forbidden territory, near the berry patch the boys often liked to visit, to run into Smee—far from the grotto and barely recognizable. He was tattered, swaying on his feet, tromping along loudly. I followed him until he sank down onto a rock, and I listened to his thoughts.

  He had barely escaped the cove with his life. Hook had been drunk since the morning they’d found Spotty strangled on the forest floor. Of course, they all knew who’d done it. And Hook had proceeded to get drunk immediately, murmuring that at any minute Pan would materialize from the trees to murder him. He hadn’t even picked up a weapon; he’d just gone into a bleak depression.

  Finally, two days into his binge, he’d become convinced Smee was betraying him in some way. “I don’t know what you’re lying about,” he’d said, “but I know you’re lying.” He had been too drunk to kill Smee. He hadn’t been able to find his knife. So he’d cast him out instead.
>
  Now Smee, huddled on the boulder below me, was alone. His frantic thoughts flitted from his inability to hunt to the fact that there was no one who would possibly take him in. He had come here because it was where he’d last seen Tiger Lily. It was the only thing he could think to do.

  He was still lost in this thought when I heard loud footsteps crookedly winding their way among the berry bushes a few yards away. Smee ducked into the greenery. I lifted up into the air a few feet to see Tootles, trawling for berries. For every berry he dropped into his leather pouch to bring home, he shoved two into his mouth, staining his lips red. He was humming Slightly’s French song.

  He wasn’t looking around him like the other boys would have. I flew over to land on his shoulder, to try to warn him. He recognized me, but flicked me away, shoving more berries between his lips. I tugged on his earlobe. He swatted at me.

  Finally, he swiveled back in the direction of home. He walked, and Smee followed. My heart began to race. When Tootles didn’t turn around, I flew to him, yanked on his hair, but he kept brushing me off and nearly pulverized me against a tree. And behind him I heard Smee’s thoughts: that the boys were the way back into Hook’s good graces, and his way to Tiger Lily, and that this was all too good to be true. When we reached the burrow, poor, dumb, hapless Tootles pulled up the tree stump so he could enter underground, without even a glance in any other direction. He happily climbed down into the hole, still humming.

  I turned to look, but Smee was gone.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Mirabella showed up one morning to convince me to come home. I was drinking water from a rose petal when she appeared at the edge of my nook above Tiger Lily’s bed.

  Back home, she had the worst nook in the worst log, where we’d once lived together. The holes in the bark looked out on a swampy piece of land full of mosquitoes. Together, before I’d left for good, we’d conspired to make our home more homey, hunting out sparkly rocks and flower dyes. But then I’d left and failed to come back.