Chapter Thirty

SUITE: FOLIE À DEUX

1

“But … Eagle Heart said he didn’t capture you.” My heart is so full, I can scarcely speak, my joy at finding Stella safe tempered by anxiety that she has not yet escaped.

“He didn’t,” Stella replies. My eyes are adjusting to the gloom now. I see her rise to her feet and brush off her gown. She is not bound, as I am. “They were right there in the wood when I got out of the boys’ lair. He and his men hid me from them.”

And why should they not? Stella broke no oaths.

“Some of his braves brought me here in a canoe,” she adds, stepping across the pit toward me.

I glance all round the circular interior. Curved sapling ribs create a dome arching just over our heads, beneath their covering of hides. “What is this place?”

“I’m not sure, but we’re surrounded by water, so it must be very powerful.” And she hurries over to start unknotting the lines that bind me. “I’ve been so worried,” she murmurs to the ropes. “Eagle Heart told me how you came to him unarmed and asked for his help to get me out of there.”

“I’m to be judged by morning for breaking my oath.”

She walks around me unfurling the rope, coiling it round her hand. “I told him what happened, and why,” she says. “If anything happened to you because of me—”

“It would have served me right, after all I said to you,” I say bitterly. “It’s my fault you are even here at all.”

She stops before me, peering at me.

“I had a dream last night,” I begin.

“A stranger in a garden,” Stella says immediately. “I saw it too.”

“And a young girl, wearing a silver bracelet,” I go on. “I have seen that bracelet before. In your coat pocket on board my ship.”

Stella nods, draws a breath. “I could never bear to get rid of it, even after I outgrew it. Even after it broke. There was just something about it that made me so … happy.”

“It was all true, then,” I murmur. “My dream. Your story.”

“Not dreams. They were memories.” She’s coiling up the last of her rope.

“They have haunted me for years.”

“Me too,” she whispers. “Oh, James, it was you. You’re the one who called me here. It was you all the time.”

The Dreaming Place, the Indians call it, where dreams are made real if they are strong enough. If one only dares to believe.

“I’m afraid so,” I sigh.

And she turns away to cross the cold fire pit and drop the rope in the far shadows. I follow her into the gloom, rubbing sluggish blood back into my arms. When she kneels again at the edge of the pit and takes up her two sticks and a bundle of dried grasses, I realize how infernally dark it’s become.

“And look where it’s got you,” I mutter, “locked up in an Indian stockade.”

“It might be a place for ceremonies,” Stella suggests, sawing uselessly away at her twigs.

Peering about in the shadows, I spy a pile of the clothing I left behind with the braves, my black coat, hat and boots, along with my hook in its harness, and crawl over to them. I set to peeling off my savage vest and untie the fringed band from around my arm. How much longer before the braves pass their sentence, I wonder. An hour? Perhaps less? They could be on their way back here even now.

“There are baskets of herbs all around, and some furs and blankets—”

“Can you ever, possibly forgive me, Stella?” I blurt out, at last, unpacking the thing that has weighed down my heart for so long. “I didn’t mean any of it, not one word I said to you that day. I was so afraid of losing you.”

She pauses, still gazing into the cold circular pit. “I didn’t mean any of it either,” she says in a small voice.

Fishing a flint out of my coat pocket, I slide two fingers under my hook, and return to drop it into the shallow pit. Stella shifts to let me kneel beside her, clears away the straps, and braces my hook with her hands. She watches pensively as I work my flint against iron.

“I was so mad, I just wanted to hurt you,” Stella murmurs. “I know exactly what kind of man you are.”

My flint scrapes harshly on my hook, causing a fleeting spark that glimmers out in an instant. “Aye, the sort who repays love with cruelty,” I mutter, “who’ll seize the first opportunity to betray your trust.”

She shakes her head. “Not the first opportunity.”

I dart her a puzzled glance, and strike another tiny spark. This one catches in the little bundle of grass.

“You might have let the boys kill me at their trial.”

I’m so startled, the flint fumbles out of my grasp.

“The merwives told me what happens if innocent blood is shed here,” she goes on. “You’d have had everything you ever wanted. The destruction of the Neverland, and all your enemies. The release you’ve always craved.”

My fingers are trembling as I slip them under the smoldering little nest of grass.

“You could have let the boys have their way.” Stella’s voice is as soft as the wisp of smoke beginning to curl up out of the grass. “Didn’t you ever stop to wonder why you interfered?”

I lift the little bundle and blow into it gently, gently, until it glows, breathing the fragile flame into life. It never, ever occurred to me to let Stella die to set myself free.

“Because I’m a fool?” I whisper.

Stella rustles closer, presses her shoulder to mine in a gesture that is affection, forgiveness, homecoming all in one. “That makes two of us, Maestro.”

“Folie à deux,” I sigh.

“Absobloodylutely,” she agrees. “So save your horror stories about what a monster you are for the more gullible Wendys. I know better.” She shifts closer still. “I’ve always known.”

I slide the warm little bundle back into the pit as tiny threads of grass begin to blacken and burn, and we gaze into the fledgling flame. We might smother it through carelessness, we might blow it out in a rage, or maybe, just maybe, we might nurture this tiny, stubborn, luminous thing that is so much stronger than both of us.

When I glance again at Stella, she is looking at me, her expression unbearably tender in the warm light. I slide my ruined arm round her waist and she lays her head on my shoulder.

“It meant so much to me, that someone was kind to me when I was most alone,” she says. “No wonder I always felt something good was waiting for me here.”

“You deserved to go home, and it gave me such enormous pleasure to see that you did. I don’t know why. But for an instant it was as if the whole of the Neverland were holding its breath for something…” I shake off this inarticulate thought. “But … it’s fantastic, Stella,” I begin again, still shaking my head. “You said yourself no Wendy would ever come back.”

“For Peter, I said,” Stella corrects me. “I came back for you.”

At this moment, a man with red blood in his veins might sweep her up with passionate declarations, followed by passionate lovemaking. But the cold light of reason has stolen in upon us with our newborn flame; our situation is as perilous as ever.

Stella reaches out to lay another stick over our tiny blaze. “It was crazy for you to come after me, James. You’re the one Peter was after.” She glances again at me. “When I was under that spell, it was like being a little tight, I didn’t really know what was going on. But now and then I could hear them, understand them. ‘He will come for her,’ someone said. Peter’s fairy, I suppose. ‘And you will have your greatest victory,’ she said.”

I recall the urgency in the imp’s plea, Kill him now, and Pan’s refusal. “But he might have murdered me again at any time, if that was all he wanted. His imp kept begging him to do it.”

“And that would hardly be his greatest victory,” Stella agrees. “He’s, well, killed you dozens of times. Unless the fairy thought it was possible to … really kill you. Forever. But maybe it wasn’t possible. Yet.”

“Not until the curse is broken,” I suggest. “Until the third sign is seen.” Even could we solve the riddle of escape, assuming Eagle Heart doesn’t order me drawn and fricasseed first, Proserpina’s curse continues to bind me here.

 

 

It must have been a sizeable beast, but no less than a grizzly would do for the boy. It stinks of game and smoke and rancid grease, but the toast-colored fur is thick and soft. I’ve spread the hide over a woven mat next to the fire pit for Stella; she’s been nodding against my shoulder for a quarter of an hour, having had no natural sleep since she left the merwives. I’ve urged her to rest while I keep watch, should the braves come back for me.

The loreleis’ serene contrappunto harmonies are wafting down the river. Cold blue moonlight leaks in through a hole between the hides at the top of the dome, at the place where the sapling poles are roped together. When Stella drifts off, I go pluck a silvery log from the woodpile and add it to our little blaze. I find a basket of Dream Flowers giving off a sweet, earthy scent, and I toss one of those on the fire as well. A plume of smoke dances up for the opening in the skins, and out into the night. The Neverland stars are just beginning to rise above the fluttering jungle shadows, glittering like Pan’s eyes.

I sit again, draw up my knees, still clad in buckskin, cross my bare arms over them, gaze into the fire. It may be true, what Stella once told me about praying to the wrong gods. A more pervasive power than the boy rules in this place, a power to which I might yet appeal, should I muster the courage to play wisely and well.

2

Stinging smoke forces my eyes closed. I lower my head on my arms, give myself up to regret, that most useless of all emotions.

My scarred thigh has given me not so much as a tremor of rheumatics in the centuries since Proserpina nursed me. How poorly I repaid her. That insulting song I played to prove to my men I was still fit for war and murder, my cruel words flung at her in anger, centuries of resentment in this place before I had the wit to see what she’d done for me, how bitterly I’ve wronged her. The clamor of these memories prod me bolt upright where I sit. White smoke moves sinuously in the air, and something else seems to laze and stretch in the shadows beyond the fire pit.

I know her by her stillness, the purposeful way she holds herself – alert, yet relaxed. She wears the same vibrantly-colored headscarf, muslin chemise, blue apron over a ruffled skirt, the same strings of turquoise and coral and ebony beads round her neck that I remember so well. Proserpina the witch, unchanged in two hundred and twenty-six years.

Her chocolate eyes gleam at me, her expression cool. “Why do you call me?”

I almost smile; as if I had the power to conjure a flea. “I’ve never offered you a word of thanks for the care you took of me once upon a time,” I say quietly. “Were such a thing possible, I would tell you how grateful I was.” She nods but says nothing. “I repaid you with scorn and abuse,” I go on. “I am bitterly sorry for it. Can you ever forgive me?”

She regards me for a long time through the shimmering smoke. “At last you ask the right question, Capitaine,” she murmurs.

“I wronged another woman,” I continue. “Caroline. I was too eager to believe a lie that might have cost her a lifetime of happiness. I would beg her pardon if I could.”

“She could not have satisfied you then, Capitaine,” Proserpina observes calmly. “No more could I.”

“You sent me here to save the Neverland,” I hazard, and she nods again. Stella’s theory was correct. “To save myself.”

“When I was alive, I loved you,” she tells me. “You were a man in my arms. But you craved childish things, murder, revenge, a warrior’s fame. You were ruled by the fire of your rage. The loas warned me of a brutal, terrible end, your spirit doomed to eternal misery, if you did not change. I thought if you saw what endless childhood is like, you would not want it so much.”

How right she was.

“I cast a spell to suspend your life. I could not let it end before you paid for the wrongs you had done.” She sighs and shakes her head. “I did not now how long it would take you, longer than my own mortal life. I did not know what cruel game he would play to keep you here.”

“How did you know of this place?” I ask her.

“My ancestor told me. She lived long ago. She loved somebody once, a boy she met in a dream, and then forgot. But her spirit remembers. From the time beyond, she knew this boy and this place of dreams were in danger. ‘Send your man there,’ she told me, ‘until he tires of childish games. Let him wash the blood off his hands.’”

And it comes to me again, the hypnotic fragrance of jasmine, Pan’s favorite, permeating my dreams, ghostly voices in the dark. “Zwonde,” I whisper.

“My ancestor,” Proserpina agrees. “The first girl ever carried off to this place of dreams to care for him. We, the daughters of her tribe, have been healers ever since.”

“The first Wendy,” I marvel.

“Her spirit does not forget. That is what it means to love.”

I gaze at Stella, prone on her fur skin in the shadows beside me. Sorrow like molten lead pumps through my veins at what I must do. “I know now why I’m here,” I say to Proserpina. “But Stella has wronged no one.”

“Why say this to me?” Proserpina demands.

“You sent me here. Is there not some voudon, some bargain we might strike, you and I, to send her safely home? I know your spirits require some balance to be struck between their world and the living.” I draw a breath. “I will stay here forever if you let her go.”

Her laughter is like low, rolling ripples in a very deep pond. It stings like grapeshot to have my offer ridiculed, for I do not make it lightly. It will deaden me beyond any despair even I have ever known to lose Stella again, but if a trade, a barter is required, I will forfeit my one chance at escape in exchange for Stella’s freedom. What else of any value have I to offer? Yet the witch chuckles on, tilting her head to one side, gazing briefly over at Stella, then back to me.

“La, Capitaine, she is free to go at any time,” Proserpina says, with a careless wave of her hand.

I gape at her. “Then why is she still here?”

“That is her choice,” breathes the witch, with a rustling of her skirts. “You give me more credit than I deserve, eh? Poor, foolish man. I have no power over your life. Only you have that power.”

I frown into the fire. “That has not been true in a long time.”

She lifts her shoulders, round and glossy above the low décolleté of her chemise. “It has always been true. When you left me, I make a spell. I bury it in the earth,” and her hand dips low to the dirt floor. “I cast it into the sea,” and she mimes this action as well. “I breathe it into the wind,” and she spreads wide the fingers of one hand before her mouth. “Do not break, I say to my spell, until he open his hand in kindness, open his heart to love, open his eye with the wisdom that comes of the other two.”

“That’s all?” I whisper. “That’s all you wanted?”

“That is everything,” she rebukes me gently, dark eyes glittery in the firelight. “Kindness freely offered that asks for no reward, love that values another above yourself, the wisdom to live without fear. This is the best of life.”

“You give my wits more credit than they deserve,” I say dryly.

“But not your power to love, Capitaine,” she murmurs, with another glance at Stella. “You prove it beyond all doubt. I hoped it would be me,” she goes on, with a hint of her old saucy smile in her black eyes. “Alone in this place of childish things, I hoped you might come to think more fondly of what you left behind. That you would tire of this game, break my spell, and I would call on the power of my ancestor, Mama Zwonde, to bring you back. But he changed the game, trapped you here in fear, kept you here far, far beyond my own mortal life.”

“So—your voudon brought Stella here?”

But she shakes her head. “I am dead. I have no more power in the living time. Only my spell remains. The earth, the sea, the sky keep watch over my spell.” She eyes me with an insouciant tilt of her head. “They say your chance has come.”

Shock rattles through me. I scarcely dare to breathe.

“You play well,” she smiles at me. “I knew you would, one day.”

“Thank you, Pina,” I whisper.

“I am glad you end this game,” she says, with an airy sweep of her hand. “The loas ask a price, it is true; I find I cannot take root in the time beyond until you free yourself. All this confusion, back and forth,” she sighs again. “I would leave the living time to the living. So take back your life, Capitaine. Spend your love. Use it well.”

I scarcely stammer any response before she waves me off and fades into the shadows, as if she has no more substance than a wisp of woodsmoke. Scrambling to my knees, I peer up and out of the hole, thinking to see her whirling away into the sky like a most formidable fairy, but she is simply gone.

I sit back with a thud against the earthen floor, jittery with an excitement I dare not define, panting as if I’ve run a race. I feel muscles stretching under my skin, nerves humming though my body, blood pumping, hair growing, lungs shuddering in, out. Water wells in my eyes from the stinging smoke; my blink is like a clashing of armies. Every blink, every breath, every glance is cataclysmic, reverberating like an earthquake, a riotous concerto grosso of all my physical parts led by my thundering heart.

Life! Genuine life crackling inside me, tender, fragile, finite, explosive life. I am walking dead no more. The endless chasm of eternity no longer yawns before me. Joy nearly bursts out of me like an aria—only to crash like tideburst on a rock to see Stella sitting up on her bearskin, watching me, her face full of reproach.

“I’m not going without you, not this time,” she exclaims. I might have known she would see my hallucination in her dreams. “Why do you think I came back?”

“You did find the way out,” I breathe, rising to my knees.

She nods. “Grandmother Owl spoke to me in a dream. She told me all about it. The dreampath, that lovely bit of poesy? It’s a real thing, James, a tunnel, a conduit through the enchantment that binds this place. Every dreamer who comes to the Neverland, Wendys, boys, your men, each one forges a dreampath between the two worlds to get here, if their dreaming is strong enough. When Peter comes for the dreamer, fairy magic opens the dreampath, so the dreamer can get in. That’s the only way out again. When a dreamer is ready to leave, a fairy leads them back through it.”

“But you didn’t go.”

She shakes her head. “You never dreamed yourself here, James. You don’t have a dreampath of your own.”

And I realize my foolish delight at breaking the spell is all for naught. Proserpina is long dead; her voudon can no longer transport me away from this place.

“But I do,” Stella goes on quietly. “The dreampath remembers its dreamer, that’s what Grandmother Owl said. Each path seals itself up again to protect the magic surrounding this place. It will only open again for the original dreamer. If I don’t take you back through mine, you’ll never be able to get out.”

So that’s what sent her rushing away from the protection of the merwives. “And you came back for me?” I gape. “After all I said to you?”

She stares at me as if I am the world’s chiefest imbecile. “God damn it, Maestro, we’re on this journey together, remember?” Her sidelong glance darts across the pit to where Proserpina appeared. “At least, I thought we were…”

“You can’t seriously believe I wanted to lose you again!”

She is on her knees now, too. “Death is all you ever really wanted. And now that it’s possible—”

“And I thought I was the fool,” I groan, and I reach for her before she can berate me any further. She resists for an instant for form’s sake, then comes at me on the flood, and I fold her to me with all my strength, this vibrant, prickly woman with no better sense than to love me, press my face into her smoky cinnamon hair. “Now that I have something to live for at last, you think I want to throw it all away?”

She lifts her face to mine; I grasp her hand and place her fingertips on my chest. This is how it all began, the cycle of healing that brought me here, Stella’s touch. The wanton percussion of newborn life begins to stir inside me once more. I flatten Stella’s palm gently over the rioting of my heart. She feels it, looks at me, her green-tinted dark eyes fierce with understanding. Life-giver. Redeemer. Lover. Friend.

“You’ve given me life, Parrish. I mean to deserve it. If you’ll still have me.”

“Oh, James, I’ve been such a wreck without you!” And Stella’s arms close round me again, more powerful than any fairy spell.

I shut my eyes over the clamor kindling inside me, hold Stella closer still. “I did come back that day,” I murmur. “But by then you were already gone. I went to the merwives to try to find you.”

“And meanwhile, I walked straight into the boy’s trap, like an idiot,” she frets, raising her face again to mine. “And now you’re in trouble too. If—”

“Do not think to rebuke yourself for the single bravest act anyone alive or dead has ever committed on my behalf,” I tell her. “If it all ends tomorrow, tonight even, were the fire pits of Hell to yawn open and swallow us up before sunrise, this moment with you is worth whatever comes, Stella. This moment might be all we ever have.”

And her mouth opens under mine, and her body unfolds like a flower in my arms. Our next kiss is more tender, the next as urgent as the pull of the tide. And I give way to this crescendo inside me, as furious as bloodrage, as spellbinding as fairy magic. Tempestuous life thunders through my blood, swelling my heart, pulsing under my skin, drumming in my fingertips, as we tumble across the bearskin in a frenzy of sensation— deep, soft fur against skin, pungent smoke in our nostrils, a tiny, distant popping of tinder, the fervor of her touch, the sweet fire of her mouth, our mutual keening, our reckless momentum.

For so long, my life was like a spinning compass, without points or direction. Stella is my guiding star. Her body is my altar, my refuge. Her love is my life, and by God I will deserve her, coaxing the most wondrous music out of her that I have ever played, until we lose ourselves at last in the riotous swell of this love we make together.

 

 

I stretch out on my back with Stella drowsing alongside me. Silver smoke winds up through the hole above the skins to escape into the night, disappearing into the pattern of Neverland stars.

“Stella,” I whisper, “look,”

She tilts up her head in time to see a tiny glimmer of light tumble across a circlet of stars. The Medicine Wheel, I believe it’s called. It may be a trick of the smoke, or a wavering pulse of heat from the fire, but for a moment the entire circle appears to quiver in place, as if animated. Stella’s body sighs against mine.

“A shooting star,” she murmurs. “How lovely.”

We are ripe for Morpheus at last.

There is naught but a little glowing pile of embers to see by when I am suddenly awake. Most of the stars have sunk out of sight in the hole of black above us; it’s the eerie dark before dawn. I hear only a fading cacophony of night insects and the sirens’ muted song, yet something compels me out of our warm nest. Untangling myself from Stella, who sleeps blissfully on, I creep off the bearskin, open the tent flap and peep out, but my eyes discern only blackness and a distant bruise of moonglow behind clouds. I gather my courage and step outside to see what the matter is.

I don’t see him at first, might have never done but for a sudden incandescence of white moonlight spilling from between ragged clouds. He stands immobile, not the length of a tops’l yard away from me, his bow drawn, the arrow nocked and pointing at my heart, a larger target now than once it was, and far more vulnerable.

3

I say nothing, do nothing, only gaze into the flinty eyes of the young chief above the eagle feather drawn back against his cheek. I wear neither clothing nor hook, having come directly from Stella’s arms. And with the absurd vanity of our species, I am glad for a fleeting instant that I’ve never grown a paunch, despite the other deformities of my body, for Eagle Heart is scarcely any more clothed than I, stripped down to a breechclout, as chiseled as a Greek, painted not for war but for stealth.

Such are the lofty ruminations of my last moments of life. But the young chief does not shoot.

“Captain,” he says quietly.

“Chief,” I respond.

We regard each other for another long, silent moment. Stella murmurs in her sleep behind me; the mat rustles beneath her. For a blink, Eagle Heart’s gaze shifts to the open flap, then back to me, standing before him, naked in the pre-dawn chill, reeking of Stella.

“We meant no disrespect to this place,” I offer.

“Our women will perform the cleansing ceremony after you are gone.” Slowly, without the slightest thrum of string or creak of wood, he lessens the tension in his weapon and lowers bow and arrow. “This is a sacred place,” he goes on. “Our young ones come here to begin the journey out of childhood. The maidens bleed. The youths have their first dream vision, to honor the ancestor whose dream brought us to the Dreaming Place.”

He pauses as sweet-acrid smoke wafts out of the structure.

“We didn’t mean to steal,” I apologize.

“The fruits of the earth are free to all,” Eagle Heart replies. “A gift from the Great Spirit.”

Stella’s voice comes softly from behind me, addressing the chief, and his black eyes shift toward her. She’s wrapped herself in my coat before venturing out to crouch beneath the tent flap.

The young chief’s expression is as impassive as ever, but his eyes move back to me. “Our elders have rendered their judgment.”

I’m shaking. Stella rises to stand beside me, steadying me.

“You offend me and dishonor yourself when you break your oath,” he tells me gravely. “But the consequence of your action was this life,” and he nods at Stella. “Honor your oath and we will have no further quarrel with you. In our judgment it is now your destiny to leave the Dreaming Place.”

Stella’s fingers close round the stump of my phantom hand, and my good hand crosses over to cover hers. “But—”

“Our shaman watches the stars,” says the young chief. “Destiny is like the wind. He tells us yours now blows another way.”

“Your shaman,” Stella murmurs to the chief. “How does he say we are to leave this place?”

“You must ask the Spirit Queen.”

“Is there no other way?” I ask petulantly.

Eagle Heart reproves me with his stony gaze. “The Little Chief will come,” he tells me. “He will hunt you and your woman. Our shaman says you must leave by the next moonrise, or the Great Spirits who cradle the Dreaming Place in their hands will no longer let you pass. Twice before have the spirit elements stood ready for your journey, but never before were you ready to go. This is your last chance, Captain.”

I nod. “What must I do?”

“You must go the Spirit Place. Give the queen what she asks for and she will guide you.”

What will Queen BellaAeola ask of me? My heart? My soul? My sanity? What price will she set on my freedom? Mine and Stella’s together, what might she not demand?

“How are we to find her?” I ask.

“Follow the stream to the wood, and ask your spirit guide.” Eagle Heart gestures toward the sound of lapping water out beyond the trees. “Your boat is waiting. Our warriors will not stop you.”

Stella thanks him, and the chief evaporates back into the jungle as silently as the smoke slithered out the hole in our refuge of hides. As his form is swallowed in shadows, the full moon emerges from the clouds once more, as red as blood in the pre-dawn blackness. Stella sees it too, regrips my arm, and we exchange a long, silent look. Her expression is as pregnant as the shimmering crimson moon. It’s time to face our destiny, whichever way it now blows.