by Lisa Jensen
“Then you may let yourself go entirely,” I point out. “You may sprout cloven hoofs and a tail, for all the difference it’ll make to me.”
Stella laughs, and the vision of ourselves ancient and doddering pops and vanishes. In its place stands Queen BellaAeola, or, rather, she hovers there, hands fisted on hips like an Amazon, feet slightly apart shod in delicate, moss-like boots whose toes and high serrated cuffs rise and loop round and round like wanton tendrils of wisteria. Yards of twinkling gossamer drape from her shoulders and gird round her middle, all of it billowing around her like agitated flames, although we feel no breeze. Her skin is undyed, so light-washed I don’t perceive it as any color, only note again the arcane royal markings etched in the most luxurious shade of purple that trail down from her bare shoulder to curl provocatively round her breast. Her exquisite, silvery hair clouds behind her as well, and her moonlit eyes, circled in purple and shadowed in green, gaze at us both with impassive aplomb.
“So, Captain, have you come to conclude our transaction?” she purrs at me.
I fight down the memory of bitter desolation from our last encounter, raise my chin, and return her gaze, struggling to calm my rattling heartbeats. “I have come to ask your guidance, Majesty.”
“Why have you never asked for my help before?” she chides.
“I never thought you would give it,” I reply, but it sounds so petulant, I quickly add, “I didn’t deserve it.”
The air shivers like tiny carriage bells heard on a breeze from far away. The imp queen is laughing. “Are you more deserving now?”
From the lively intensity of her eyes, I feel I’m being invited to dance, or game, or duel to the death, or perhaps all three. Every word must count; Eagle Heart once warned me to be wise.
“I’ve grown up,” I tell her simply.
“Ahhh,” she muses, her eerie, caressing speech a-hum in my head. “And now the Red Moon is risen again, you would complete your journey, at long last. And if I refuse?”
I order my mutinous wits not to desert me. “I might attempt to cozen you with flattery,” I begin cautiously. “Or I might threaten to make war on every fairy in the Neverland if I don’t get my way. But those are the boys’ tactics.” I draw a breath. “And I am boy no more. Instead, I ask your pardon for my many, many mistakes.”
“What will you give me for it?” BellaAeola fences. “Have you found something in the Neverland you value at last?” My heart stutters as she turns her provocative gaze on Stella. “Your woman?”
Stella faces her out with the appearance of boldness, although I feel her tense beside me. “She is not mine to give you, Majesty,” I tell the queen. “She is mistress of herself.”
BellaAeola’s magnetic gaze holds Stella still. “And you, Woman. What will you give me?”
“Nothing,” Stella replies. Intensity quickens in the air as if the queen had lunged forward, although she does not appear to move. Nor does Stella back away. “My absence,” Stella explains. “A Neverland with no part of myself in it. Surely that will be a great relief to all who live here. Better than any other gift I might offer.”
“This is well.” BellaAeola murmurs. But something quickens in her demeanor as she turns her weird, shining eyes again to me, and this time she does sidle closer; it’s like the weight of the ocean pressing on a drowning man. “She kindles a passion in you, Captain, that was not there before,” murmurs the queen. “It is very exciting. Perhaps I will keep you for myself after all.” She looms closer. “I can show you delights far beyond mortal imagining. I can conceal you from the boy.”
I cannot lie and say I’m not tempted, not even to myself. My traitorous blood beats merrily in all my private places. My phantom fingers ache to caress her glorious body, so visible beneath the drape of moondust she wears. My blood, my body, might easily give way; she might fold her lustery wings round me like a bird of prey and smother me with pleasure, was it their decision alone. Yet my wits tick on with a fierce will I never knew before Stella came.
“You may beguile me, Majesty.” I labor like Sisyphus to roll words off my dry tongue. “You may use me as you please, bend me to your will, and I will not protest. We both know it. But you can never, ever harvest from me what I feel for Stella unless you are prepared to love me as she does.”
“Love, love, love,” BellaAeola trills derisively. “A handful of rain and a heart full of ash, that is mortal love.” But she has halted her advance. “Fairies do not love. It’s a foolish business and a waste of our considerable talents.” Eyeing me appraisingly, she adds, “You may yet regret the day that you refused me, dark and sinister man.”
The boy’s old epithet chills me, reminding me how closely allied are all magical forces in the Neverland. “It’s not in my feeble mortal power to refuse you, Majesty,” I answer her. “I only tell you the truth.”
“The truth is, Captain, it has never been done before, what you ask,” says the queen, with an ominous trembling of her wings. “How do you propose to leave this place? You have no dreampath to follow.”
“But I do,” Stella speaks up. “We will go together.”
The imp queen shifts her hungry gaze again to Stella. “And you, Woman. Your mortal power has intensified since last we met.”
“I’ve lost my innocence,” Stella tells her. Turning to me, Stella adds softly, “When I fell in love with you.”
By God’s life, she even bled; I remember now.
“Yes,” hisses the queen, nodding with intrigue. “You forfeit the protection of your innocence when you choose to love this man, knowing full well how upsetting the consequences can be for all who live here. Yet, my ladies—” and I hear an eager rustling and tittering like so many finches in the garlanded shadows around us, “—might make rather merry sport with such powers as you now possess.”
Stella neither falters nor turns away from her dazzling inquisitor. “But not in the Neverland,” she reasons gently. “It disturbs the boy.”
BellaAeola flutters back a pace or two in a great swirl of sparkling dust and fairy majesty to regard us both again. But neither anger nor yet scorn clouds her expression, only lively curiosity, as if we are a game she enjoys. “Alas, yes,” she agrees “Such feelings as you now arouse in the captain are as dangerous as a weapon to the boys’ innocence. There is more at stake here than my pleasure,” she adds, with a pretty sigh. “Or that of my ladies.”
I tremble to imagine any force in the universe stern enough to turn BellaAeola from her pursuit of pleasure. To what sort of perverse deity might the fairies submit? Surely more terrible than the angry god of mortals, of whose blood and body Stella and I make such free speech, who sacrificed his own son so men would know to fear him. That god would have smote me centuries ago for my crimes, might yet, should I dare to venture beyond this enchanted place. But the glistening cascade of BellaAeola’s laughter scatters my thoughts like seafoam.
“Your angry god has no power here,” she scoffs, as if she heard my thoughts. “But he might find you, Captain, your thunderous god, out in the world. Are you not afraid?”
Stella’s fingers twine through mine again. “No, Majesty.” My words slide out with ease this time, without hesitation. “Because I have loved.” Whatever else might be said against me, and there are volumes, at least, at last, I have loved.
“The Neverland doesn’t want us,” Stella appeals to the imp queen. “We ask for your blessing to leave this place.”
“My guidance, my pardon, my blessing,” BellaAeola chants impudently. “Those are three favors you ask of me, yet you have nothing to give me.”
“Majesty, what can you possibly desire that is not already yours to command?” I temporize.
“Flatterer!” she snaps back, but with more sauce than rebuke. She even preens a little, tossing her silvery hair with a dazzling tremor of her wings. “You are so fond of the truth, Captain, perhaps you will confess there is something else you hold dear in the Neverland. A prize you would seek to keep from me.”
“Never,” I protest, my poor wits racing to keep apace of hers.
“Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes,” she chants merrily. “Deny me if you dare.”
A broad swag of flowers behind the queen drops away to reveal the shimmering surface of one of her perverse mirrors, as high as a palace wall, if indeed her domain has walls. Its misty image resolves into a shape that does indeed clutch my heart with longing and parch my throat for want of it. The clean, strong lines of my sloop, Le Reve, appears before me, her sails set, her black paint smart with its green trim. The queen is not yet done pleasuring herself at my expense.
“But … this is a ghost,” I stammer.
“Your pretty ship is as real as you are, Captain,” she taunts me, her eyes keen with her sport. “Do you suppose I would leave it about for the boys to wreck with their games? So many years of your life,” she croons on. “So much labor. So much love.” She sneers the word. “For so entirely futile a project. How deeply you must care for it.”
“Yes.” I can scarcely speak at all.
“But I desire pretty things,” she chirps. “Will you give it to me?”
My insides twist with longing almost beyond bearing. My ship, my Reve, safe and whole, my solace, my sanity for so long. All that was ever good in me, the only thing of any worth I ever achieved in this place before Stella came, indeed, ever in my life; it tortures me to imagine her moldering in the queen’s sepulcher for all eternity. But I force down my anguish. Le Reve was ever my dream of redemption, but it was only a dream. Life awaits me, a genuine life, safe in Stella’s heart, do I only dare to claim it.
“She is yours, Majesty,” I tell the queen, peeling my gaze away from that beloved image for the last time. “Please accept her with my compliments.”
The vision of Le Reve dissolves in a giddy piping of fairy laughter. “What use have I for transport made of mortal hands?” BellaAeola cries gaily, and flutters her incandescent wings, the span of a top royal at her present size. “You had better have it for your journey.”
She says it with such indifference, I scarce believe I heard it.
“Yes, Captain, I will grant the thing you most desire,” BellaAeola murmurs; her glance is keen, despite her drowsy voice. “What you have always desired.”
“Thank you, Majesty,” Stella whispers beside me.
“You owe me more than your thanks, Mortals,” BellaAeola replies placidly.
My wits give up at last; I dare not look at Stella.
“A small matter, a trifle,” the queen assures us with a wave of her delicate hand. “The fee required of all who leave the Neverland. You must forfeit your memories.”
Stella frowns at her. “All of them?”
“Only your memories of the Neverland,” says BellaAeola lightly. “And all that has happened here.”
A tremor of jubilation races through me. To forget the Neverland and all the misery I’ve known here! How marvelous to return to the world a normal man, to pick up the thread of my life exactly where I left it off over two centuries ago. And my fatuous joy turns to ice and vinegar inside me. What a cruel, raging tyrant I was two hundred years ago, at war with all the world, unfit to live. Unfit to love. Before the Neverland taught me the hard lessons of patience and wisdom. Before the healing solace of Le Reve. Before Stella. I stare into Stella’s stricken face and read my same despairing thoughts in her beautiful eyes. I won’t know Stella. I’ll no longer be the man she loves. I will forget her. She will forget me.
“By Christ’s blood, no,” I stammer.
“It’s too much to ask, Majesty,” Stella pleads.
“I do not ask it,” BellaAeola shrugs with a rustling of her haughty wings. “That is the price. It has ever been the price. Tales of the Neverland must not be allowed to spread abroad in your world.”
“But the world already knows of this place!” Stella protests.
“But they don’t believe it,” the imp queen replies. “Only children believe, and they are always welcome here because children forget. And so must you.”
We are speechless. The fairy queen backs away with a shimmer of majestic impatience. “That is the price of what you seek,” she declares. “You have earned the right to go, and but a few mortal hours remain in which you may do so. Do not bore me any longer with your mortal humors. Your fairy will show you the way.”
She sweeps her fantastical wings round her and vanishes as if through a hole in the air. And upon the instant, the enormous garlanded hall with all its dazzling surfaces, dripping with perfumed flowers and heady with the nectar of luxury and indolence, all of it dissolves before our eyes. Stella and I stand again in a green clearing at the edge of the Fairy Dell, an ordinary little grassy burrow just visible in the distance, surrounded by a chiggering of busy insects.
Stella stares at me as if the uncanny alteration in the scenery has not occurred. “I was bitterly unhappy when I came here,” she whispers. “I don’t want to be that person again. I can’t lose you, James.”
“I was less than human,” I mutter, wrapping my arms round her, struggling to regain my shattered wits. How could Stella ever love the man I was?
“Then we must stay here!” Stella urges me. “Why can’t we stay here forever?”
“It will astonish you how short a time that is.”
“I don’t care!” she insists.
Oh, but I do. By God’s poisonous blood, how desperately I want to keep Stella safe. But her safety carries an enormous price tag. How much longer before we are made to pay it?
Even now, a tiny firefly light comes shivering toward us out of the green mist. Has the charm already begun? How many more heartbeats before I see the loathing creep into Stella’s eyes, before I know she’s forgotten James and sees only Hook in all his deformities?
3
We’ve regained our usual proportions, for the imp is scarcely more than a speck of lavender-blue against the vale of green, trailing a scent of smoky allspice. Piper.
“We need more time,” I beg her. “We’re not ready.”
The little thing shivers with laughter, shaking the preposterous coils and loops of her black hair into a Maenad dance. “More time? I thought you’d had enough of time, Captain! But I am your escort, nothing more. You won’t forget the Neverland until you leave it.”
“And when must that be?” Stella asks sadly.
The imp regards us quizzically. “Whenever you wish, of course.” She peers at us with more concern. “It cannot be that you fear it? It causes no pain. You will be delivered into the world as if reborn. Beyond the borders of this place, you will have no more memory of it than an infant has of the womb it leaves behind.”
We must not look convinced, because the little creature sighs and entreats us further. “You now both desire something more than childhood can provide. You must go where your dreaming takes you. As soon as they begin to long for something far beyond their lives here, Lost Boys, girls, all of them, when their longing is too volatile, they must go. As you must go, and soon.”
Stella’s fingers lace through mine. “May we have a minute to discuss it?” she asks the fairy.
“Talk, talk, talk,” Piper chants, sounding chillingly like the imp queen. “Do not talk away the time you have left,” she warns us. The spell has been broken, Captain; you have regained your mortality, which means you are now vulnerable to Peter as you have never been before. As you are,” the imp adds, nodding to Stella. “Peter dislikes change. He fears any dream, any desire more powerful than he is. He will do anything he can to crush it.”
She fades into the mists while Stella and I ponder the enormity of the decision we must make. How long before the boys come to hunt us down like the outlaws we are? We must pay for our memories with our lives unless we forfeit our memories to live.
“We’re in an awful damned fix here, Maestro,” Stella sighs.
“It must be obvious even to you that we can’t think of staying here,” I counter. “Don’t condemn me to watch you die, ma rose.”
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nbsp; That silences her. She folds her arms round herself, stalks off a few steps, staring into the distance, absently chewing her lower lip in that gesture I will miss so much. How I will miss all her gestures. How can I ever look upon her, even as a stranger, and not be as moved by all her little quirks and habits as I am now?
“We don’t know for a fact that we will never love each other again,” I fence cautiously. “Out in the world.”
Her face turns slowly back toward me. “No,” she murmurs.
“We may not know each other,” I go on, ignoring the pain that claws at my vitals at the very thought, “but we might be drawn to each other again. It happened before.”
“I came from another world to find you,” Stella agrees.
“Perhaps, whatever it is between us now will pull us together again,” I hazard. “The Scotch boy retained something of this place, some buried memory, however fragmented, even if only in dreams.” What did Proserpina say of her ancestor, Zwonde? The spirit does not forget love.
“If we are … destined,” Stella chimes in, more eagerly, “what should it matter where we are? Or … who?”
It’s a very feeble thread of possibility, but the alternative … there is no alternative. We both know it.
Stella marches back to me, still hugging herself, the quaver in her voice at odds with the determination in her eyes. “Then we better have Piper back before we change our minds.”
But Stella scarcely calls to the imp when I turn to see the merest shiver in an evergreen at the edge of the clearing. A figure steps out from behind the tree, a young brave, slender and fleet, stripped down to buckskins with daubs of red and black paint streaked across his cheeks.
I move toward him, raise my hand in salute. He does the same.
“Chief Eagle Heart sends a message to Captain Hook,” he says. “Little Chief Pan is on the warpath. He calls for a war party of braves to join him and his boys to attack the ship in the bay.”
“The Rouge?” I gawp at him. “Why?”