At that moment, Gwen realized she had visited the Never Tree before. The aura of familiarity this place carried made so much sense. Months and months ago, she had followed Peter through the night to this place. Fairies had collected in the dark marsh, and the mud had even glowed beneath her feet. She remembered, with melancholy clarity, the night after the bombing that killed Bramble, when the fairies had gathered at the willow tree for his funeral and sent his pyre drifting across the marsh. She and Peter had danced together that night, floating on the air beside the Never Tree by the glow of fairy light. As sad as the night had been, the memory itself carried a pleasant sense of comfort.
They stepped into the swampy openness that surrounded the tree and listened as the vines fell shut behind them, like a beaded curtain secluding them in this epicenter of Neverland's magic. An intuitive feeling told Gwen that her ability to fly had returned to her, but she felt too in awe of the Never Tree to employ it.
The Never Tree did not look quite as she remembered it from that night with the fairies. The magnificent tree stood straight and beautiful, its branches cascading like a willow's, but among its thin leaves brilliant fruit flourished. Like pomegranates or apples, the fruit seemed an imaginary cross between the two. The mud around it seemed drier, and the bark was rougher and gnarled, too. As she approached, Gwen saw the bark looked almost like barnacles, or beaks.
She had wandered here so many times before.
The mud was not as red as it had been yesterday, but she picked up a handful and molded it in her palm. The redskins had been shaped from this slightly transformed clay. What's more, it was her little sister's raven tree, too. She remembered preparing for her mission to find Piper, Rosemary drawing her to this place and twisting it into her vision of an utterly magical tree—a vision born of Gwen's own stories.
No wonder the Never Tree could hide so well—it changed its nature like the sky changed its weather. It shifted and regrew to meet the needs of whatever native inhabitant desired its magic, whether that was the redskins, the fairies, Peter himself, or…
Rosemary? An inkling of confusion morphed into several questions for Gwen. How had Rosemary known how to find the Never Tree on her own? How had she managed to compel it into such a strange form as the clucking raven tree?
Gwen had no time to spare on these questions as she and Peter approached the sacred source of Neverland's magic. Little vines of waxy ivy wrapped around the trunk, its leaves like polished emeralds. Its roots digging deep into the moist ground, it towered in the marsh with a majesty usually reserved for royalty.
She felt breathless standing before it, reveling in the extent of its power. “It's so beautiful.”
“If only grown-ups could let beautiful things be,” Peter sighed. Turning to Hollyhock, he instructed make sure no lost children were left in the perimeter before she went and found Rosemary. Gwen wasn't paying attention, she was captivated by the tree.
She leaned down and touched one of the sprawling roots. The fibrous pattern on the root looked like letters or runes from some ancient alphabet, just like on the root specimen they'd given Piper. The poor Never Tree, wounded by that amputation at such a critical moment in Neverland's history.
“I can't help but feel there's a story in this old tree…” she remarked.
“Oh, there is,” Peter answered. “The oldest story.”
“Which one is that?” Gwen asked.
“Don't you know? What kind of cut-rate storyteller are you?” he asked, his playful contempt no longer something Gwen took offense at.
“I don't know,” she told him.
She noticed Peter counting his paces. Not wanting to interrupt him, she waited until he stopped and dropped to the ground. He started digging through the goopy earth until he found, buried in the shallow marsh mud, a metal pail. Half-emptying it of mud, he explained, “The story of how grown-ups' lost the Never Tree. A couple of them found it once, a long time ago, but they boggled it up so bad the Never Tree had to go somewhere they'd never reach it.” Peter picked up the bucket and carried it by its wire handle. His eyes went to the branches of the Never Tree. “One of these fruits is different than the rest,” he told her. “We need to find the branch that has the odd fruit.”
With such vague instructions, Gwen doubted her ability to assist. Still, she turned her eyes to the task and scanned the hundreds of fruits shining on the branches above. For as lush and ripe as the fruit was, none had yet fallen or rotted on the ground. “How did they boggle it up?” Gwen asked.
As she and Peter lifted into the air and circled the tree, searching for the stray fruit, he told her the story of the Never Tree. “The same way these brainless grown-ups aim to: they tried to use it. They tried to take what it had for themselves instead of appreciating it for what it was. It wasn't enough for them to have it. They wanted to understand it, know it, and control it. Of course, it wasn't all their fault. This was before mermaids slithered off to the depths of the ocean, back when the first mermaid had only just been born of a falling star.”
Gwen tested the fruit in her hands. They all had the same tomato-like squishiness, but none of it fell off in her hand. “There was a time before mermaids lived in the ocean?”
“There was a time before there were oceans for them to swim in,” Peter told her. “You have to remember, when everything is made-up, there's always the moment before anyone made it up.”
“But not everything is made-up,” Gwen replied.
“Then where did it come from?” Peter asked.
Gwen didn't know if she was stumped, or just not following Peter's fanciful excuse for logic. The matter fell out of her mind when she sighted a tiny red fruit, no larger than a marble and ten times as glassy. The skin of the fruit shone, iridescent and glossy. “Peter, I think I've found it!”
He zipped over and followed to where Gwen pointed. “Good golly, Gwenny, you have! Good eyes! This is just the branch we need.”
Peter grabbed the slender branch in his hand and broke it where it forked off a larger branch. The leaves shook and shuddered, but neither they nor the solitary fruit fell from it. “Anyway,” he continued, planting the branch in his bucket of mud, “mermaids were just as dangerous back then as they are now, only nobody knew it yet. If it weren't for the mermaid, those grown-ups might have left well enough alone and not gotten it in their heads that messing with the Never Tree was a good idea. The truth is,” he confessed, “grown-ups aren't so bad, except for when they're trying to do good.” He and Gwen drifted back down to the ground, and Peter clutched his bucket with the cutting. “Mermaids, on the other hand, you always have to watch out for.”
A voice came from behind them.
“I don't think I care for the way you tell that story, Peter.”
Gwen and Peter turned to face the sloshy sound of footsteps as Lasiandra approached from the forest's edge. Still in the black diving suit the Anomalous Activity Department had outfitted her with, she looked just as unnatural to Gwen as she had when she arrived on the shore. Her usually silky hair had dried, leaving her blond locks as frizzy and starchy as straw.
Gazing up at the tree, Lasiandra's eyes brimmed with satisfaction and grim delight. “What marvelous land fruit. I've never seen any like it. How come you never brought us fruit from this tree, Peter?”
He gave her an unhappy glare. “You've done a horrible thing, Lasiandra,” he told her. “You shouldn't have led the grown-ups here.”
“By that logic you shouldn't have led me here,” she announced, too pleased with herself. “But here we all are. I knew I was close, but I was just starting to think I'd never find this place when I found two sets of silly bare footprints heading right here.”
Footprints. If only the lawyers had not stripped them of their flight, they could have flown to the Never Tree without a trace and arrived with the same secrecy that the flying lost children had guarded it with. With grim horror, Gwen realized the lawyers would no doubt catch on to their route as well.
“How could you betray Neverland?” Gwen asked her.
“How could you consider Neverland an ideal?” Lasiandra asked her. “How could you think that this is somehow better than life? You have no idea what it is to live as a myth. You might have runaway and donned imaginary vestiges, but you have a life waiting for you, Gwen. You promised Jay you would go back. You had plans to abandon this place, you had plans to abandon me, and you have the gall to tell everyone through your teeth that Neverland is superior? If I've become a liar, I gleaned the art of it from you.”
Too wounded to muster any other question, Gwen simply asked, “Why would you say that?” She had made no secret of her confused heart to Lasiandra. That somehow made her a liar?
“Because you would have flown home to grow and live. You would have gone home to learn, and make a family, and create a life around you. You would have done all this, and left me to turn into sea foam on the shore. You would have forgotten about me and left me to die without a trace, while you lived out all the potential that is the birthright of every human.”
“No, Lasiandra, I—”
The girl strode forward, cutting her off as she replied, “It doesn't matter, Gwen. I don't hold it against you, and you won't hold this against me either. I'm going to bring the officers here, we're going to cut down this silly tree and end this war, and then we are all going on to fantastic things, the sort of things that can only be contained by a place that has a future. If this is paradise, then paradise is madness. We deserve so much more. All of us do.”
“We won't let them take the Never Tree,” Peter swore. “You've made a terrible mistake, Lasiandra. You've made a deal you can't fulfill.”
She smiled at the challenge embedded in his declaration. “Do you want to bet? I know the way now, and these legs may be new, but they're fast.” Lasiandra took off running, sprinting back into the woods to find her nefarious allies and bring them to harvest the Never Tree. “You've no options left,” Lasiandra cried, “I'll tell them where the tree is and this war will be over, once and for all!”
Peter did not pursue her, but as Gwen started to run after her he called, “Gwen, no, don't.”
She stopped, and watched as Lasiandra's legs carried her off into the thick of the jungle. “Why not!” Gwen demanded.
“We don't need to stop her,” Peter answered, setting down the bucket with the Never Tree cutting. “Let her go.” She watched as he rooted around the mud and kicked around, attempting to unearth something.
“But she's going to tell them where the tree is! They're going to win!”
“No, they're not going to win, and they're not going to find the tree,” Peter answered, bending down and pulling a long handled tool out of the swamp and wiped it off. The sharp stone blade lashed to its wooden handle, the hatchet looked like a weapon crafted by redskins. “If she wants to be a liar, we'll make her a liar,” he announced.
With all his strength, he swung the blade into the Never Tree.