Tiger Lily (4 page)

“What was the Englander like?” Pine Sap asked.

“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.

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 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 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 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 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.

I
moved into the village permanently that week. Up till 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 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 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 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.