He didn’t notice, by the way—Peter—that I was missing that night. Or if he did, he didn’t care. He didn’t say anything about it when I just showed up at the tree house at around lunchtime the next day.
He didn’t ask me where I’d been or what I’d been doing or even if I was okay. He just wrapped his arms around my waist, lifted me off the ground, and gave me a kiss that I didn’t understand.
There was a sort of roughness to it that I couldn’t tell you even now whether I cared for or not. A bit of me did, a bit of me didn’t…but if that isn’t just my entire relationship with Peter…
“You take your medicine this morning?”
“Hmm? Oh.” I look back at him, shake my head. “No.”
He goes inside to get me some, and I stay there, watching the younger boys.
Peter’s back after a minute, hands me the tonic in the flower like always. I don’t even mind the taste now. I think I used to not like to drink this, but now I can’t remember why.
My eyes fall onto Holden, the Lost Boy who arrived however many days ago he arrived—I can’t remember. He’s playing in the sun with the others. He looks so small.
I nod my head at him. “Has he been okay?”
Peter frowns. “Course he has. Why wouldn’t he be?”
“He might miss his parents.” I shrug. “That can happen when a child is lost.”
Peter shakes his head as though he knows of such things, though I suppose of all the boys present in one way or another, he is the lost-est. “He has us.”
I give him a tall look. “We are hardly parental figures.”
He stands up taller, slips both his arms around me. “I think we’re okay.”
“You disappear on adventures for days at a time.” And you’d best believe that I absolutely sidestep the fact that I just did that also. Peter’s not brought it up, so I won’t either. “You’re not very safety conscious.”
“A father’s job is to instill in his sons a drive to have fun and to never grow up.”
I press my finger into my top lip as I stare at the boys and say nothing.
Peter rests his chin on top of my head, and for a quick minute, I feel like we are together—properly together—and I feel a dash of guilt for how I spent the day prior to this one. I think it was the day before? Right? Wasn’t it? It could have been a week before. It feels cloudy all of a sudden, and then I see some love bites on the nape of Peter’s neck and some ink smudges on his chest, and I know without knowing how he spent my birthday. And maybe in light of Jamison by the fire, I’m not really entitled to feel sad, but I do.
“What are we doing today?” I turn in his arms to face him.
“We?” he repeats. “Nothing.” He grimaces a bit. “I’ve got boy stuff to do.”
I frown a bit. “What’s boy stuff?”
“Secret boy stuff.” He shrugs. “I’ll take you to the Indians on my way.”
“I don’t think they’re Indi—”
“Rye wants to see you,” he says over me before his eyes pinch. “Do you think he has romance inside him for you?”
I shake my head reflexively, even though sometimes I do wonder. “No.”
Peter doesn’t buy it. “It would make me angry if he did.”
“I know.” I nod, feeling tired all of a sudden.
He nods his head. “Let’s go.”
We fly, of course. Peter only ever flies, I think a bit because no one else can ever seem to do it very well if they aren’t with him, which he likes, and also (obviously) convenience.
He drops me off by the river. Calla’s lying on the edge of it, barely wearing anything. She props herself up when she sees him, gives him a wave. Peter just nods his chin at her and flies off.
The way it crushes her—he’s crushed me like that before too—I feel guilty that he’s doing it for me. Not guilty enough to ask him to stop but enough that what I asked of Jem yesterday burns hot in my mind like a fever, and I feel like a traitor somehow to both of them.
Rye and I go for a walk past Cannibal Cove, past Moon Crescent Cove, and then a bit into the rainforest.
There are submerged caves he thinks I’ll like, and I can tell even before we get there that he’s going to be right.
Rune flies in and joins us on the way.
She tinkles in my face.
“It was wonderful, thank you!” And then I give her a grateful look. “I loved my dress.”
“Oh, I forgot it was your birthday!” Rye says, looking back at me. “Sorry! Was it good?”
“Yes.” I flash him a grateful smile. “I had a really happy day.”
“What did you do for it?” he asks.
“I went to the volcano,” I tell him, choosing my words carefully.
“Oh!” Rye sings, pleased for me. “Peter took you to the volcano? Did you like it as much as you thought you would?”
I pause, thinking how best to proceed.
“Someone”—I give Rye and Rune a delicate smile—“took me to the volcano, and yes”—another quick smile—“I liked it very much.”
The fairy stops flying, and the Stjärna boy turns around, eyes pinched.
“Daphne,” he says at the same time as Rune jingles something.
“What?” I frown at Rye before turning to look at Rune. “Yes, he did,” I tell her. She replies something I won’t be telling you, and I gasp, “No, he did not!” She chimes, and I whisper to her, “Though not entirely without trying on my behalf.” And she winks at me.
“Where was Peter?” Rye asks, walking backwards, watching me.
“With your sister.” I shrug, like I don’t care. “It wasn’t on purpose by the way, and I didn’t ask Jem to take me. He just—”
“Jem?” Rye repeats with a smirk, and Rune flies over to him and clangs around his ear, angry. She honestly might have even given him a tiny kick.
I roll my eyes at him. “I didn’t ask Jamison to take me. We bumped into each other. I was looking for a map.”
“Did he say sorry?”
“Who?” I ask.
“Hook.” Rye eyes me. “For what he said to you.”
“Oh.” I shake my head, frowning. “I think so. I quite can’t…”
“Remember.” Rye nods once and then turns around and walks on, hitting the grass, not saying anything.
Rune bells quickly in my ear, and I give her a little look.
“He mightn’t have a problem,” I whisper. “He’s Peter’s friend. Maybe he thinks I’m doing wrong by him.”
She chimes louder, and I roll my eyes.
“Yes, well, we all know how you feel about him.”
She flies around by my foot, circling the ankle. I have the dagger Jem gave me hidden in my boot. Not because I think I’ll need it but because I like having something he gave me with me. It feels a bit like a talisman, but for what, I don’t know.
She flies back up to me, ringing.
“Yes,” I tell her, feeling pleased with myself. “He did, for my birthday. Would you like to see it?”
She chimes and I frown.
“What do you mean ‘you’ve seen it before’?”
And then she zooms in front of my face, hovering, jingling curiously, changing the subject to something that’s rather uncouth.
“Why do you always ask about that?” I roll my eyes, putting my hands on my hips. “It’s such a busybody question.”
She chimes hotly.
“I know it is! No, I know. I’ve seen it.”
She jingles excitedly.
“No! You know not like that. It’s just…very hot in those caves down there.”
She gives me a look.
“Rune.” I give her one back.
She shrugs and says it’s my loss in Stjär before flying off ahead.
“Do you have feelings for him?” Rye calls back to me without turning around.
I think about denying it. I’ve never said it out loud before. I’ve just thought it in my head a billion times.
“Yes,” I say defiantly, though I can’t be entirely sure who it is I’m defying.
Rye sighs. “Daphne—”
“No.” I walk up to him and grab his arm, shaking my head at him. “You don’t understand. You don’t know him.”
“Yeah, I do.” Rye gives me a look. “He’s great.”
“Oh.” I frown.
His eyebrow lifts. “But Peter…”
Rune flies back, chiming loudly.
“But Peter!” I sigh, ignoring her. “What is it about him?” I ask hopelessly.
Rye shrugs. “He’s the dream boy.”
I roll my eyes and so does Rune, but Rye shakes his head.
“He’s a literal legend. Most people find it hard to say no to him or not to fall for his charms and shit, but you and your family—” He gives me a look that makes me feel hopeless. “It’s in the blood.”
I ask the question I don’t know I want anyone else’s answer to. “Do you think we’re fated?”
“Yeah.” Rye shrugs, and his face looks bleak.
Rune’s chiming away angrily, she’s swearing, I think. She’s saying words I don’t know. They sound like words one’s grandmother mightn’t teach them.
“Yeah, I do.” Rye keeps nodding. “I kind of hate that.” He laughs dryly, then looks over at me like he’s sorry. “Probably rather you’d be with Hook, honestly, but yeah, there’s something about how Peter is with…you.”
I look at him, eyebrows up, and Rune jangles loudly for my attention.
“Stop it, Rune,” I tell her, stomping my foot. “I know that you don’t like him, but this is complicated for me.”
Rye catches Rune’s eye and nods his head at me.
“He grew up for her.”
“Well,” I clarify, “not for me.”
But Rye shakes his head. “I don’t know. Something made him grow up after all these years, so many years of being a kid, and then—” He gives me a look. “He grew to your age. What are the chances?”
I purse my lips. “Slim, I suppose.”
Rye flicks his eyebrow. “Fate, I think.”
You’d think this might make me feel better, but it doesn’t because it’s binding. To belong to Peter Pan is, in so many ways, a dream come true, isn’t it? But perhaps not my dream come true, just someone else’s dream that I’m living. Maybe it could be mine? And maybe it’s just that—that I didn’t know it at the time, or did I? It’s so difficult to be sure of anything before whichever present moment you’re currently in here, but I think that’s what I came here for? To be with Peter? And then there’s that pull towards him…that gravity, that thing that sucks me in, and it’s impossible to ignore, and I feel it in me even when I’m happier lying next to someone else, even if I’m growing increasingly sure that the someone else in question is who I think I’d quite like to be next to in general. Peter is the idea that trickles into my heart like a leaky window in a storm. He’s this creeping vine of a thought that wraps its way around everything, chokes everything to death but him. He colours everything. The other day with Jem was my favourite day maybe of my entire life, and then as soon as I was back in the tree house, all I wondered was what Peter would do if he knew.
It worried me, what might happen if he did. And maybe it would have been nothing, but the way the volcano rumbled instilled in me a quiet fear that perhaps Peter wouldn’t even have to lift a finger and there’d still be hell to pay.
“Does he like you?” Rye asks.
“Jamison?” I clarify, because I suppose I have a few balls in the air at the moment, and I wouldn’t be entirely offended if someone were to wonder whether Peter actually does.
“Yes, Jamison.” Rye rolls his eyes.
“Oh, um—” I purse my mouth. “I think so?”
Rune rolls her eyes.
He lifts an eyebrow. “You think so?”
I nod. “Mm-hmm.”
Rye’s eyes pinch. “Did he say he did, or—”
“Well, we mostly really spoke around it?”
“Okay?” He nods, unsure.
“Um—” I frown as I try to word it. “I think it was topically inferred.”
Rye pulls a face.
I breathe out loudly. “We talked about having sex.”
“Whoa!” Rye pulls back, and Rune starts chiming like a maniac, practically bouncing off invisible walls.
I gasp and point at Rune firmly. “You honestly have a terribly filthy mind for a fairy, I do mean it.”
“No, that one’s on you.” Rye shakes his head. “You nearly had sex with Hook?”
“No.” I shake my head. But maybe. “We talked about it. We haven’t even kissed. Nothing happened, but—”
“But you wanted it to?”
I straight up look at him down my nose. “Maybe.”
Rune throws a tiny fairy firecracker at my shoulder that looks like someone popped a water balloon made of glitter. I give her a look as I dust my shoulder off.
“Peter tried to have sex with me the other day,” I tell them.
Rune starts saying the bad words under her breath again, and Rye looks far away in his thinking.
“I have a headache,” he says mostly to himself before he looks up at me, frowning. “What happened?”
“Well, he tried, and I said no.”
“Why did you say no?” he asks.
There is an answer; it’s plain as day on my face. I don’t say a word. I don’t need to. I think it just lives there. An affection and a fondness that aren’t safe on the outside of me, but I don’t know how to keep them in anymore, and I hate to tuck them away.
“Wow,” Rye says as he watches me quietly. He nods at the mouth of the cave. “This is it.”
We walk in past some columns five times as tall as the tallest man I know.* The cave itself is spectacular. Rimstone dams and flowstones galore. It gets dark quickly in here, though it’s okay because Rune is a light in and of herself. We move through the hallway and into a different room that’s darker and dryer than the others.
Rye gives the wall a solemn nod, and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, but then I see it. The prophecy. Or at least I think that’s what it is. It’s mostly written in some kind of hieroglyph that I don’t understand, but I feel quite certain my mother could.
“The true heir,” Rye says, staring at the glyphs in front of us before he looks back at me. “And you don’t even know if you like him.” He laughs dryly.
“I do too like him.” I frown, and Rune trills in discontent, and I don’t know whether I can look either of them in the eye at the minute so I look at the wall instead, running my hands over some Latin engraved into the wall also. “What’s this?”
“Praecepta vivimus,” Rye says with a tight smile.
I purse my lips, trying my best to translate it. “The rules we live by?”
He nods, then shrugs dismissively. “They’re not real, just something the founders wrote on the wall when they found this here.”
There are a few things written down: sanguis pro sanguine, in somnis veritas, in scientia et virtute, semper fortunas iuventutis, and a few more that are harder to read in the lack of light.
“Ad pacem, ad lucem, ad magicam, ad naturam, ad omnium bonam ac libertatem,” I read aloud to no one in particular before I look between the two of them. “Were they true to it?”
Rye purses his mouth and shrugs. “Some.”
Rune jingles in agreement, and I hope to myself that Itheelia falls under the banner of that some.
“Come on,” Rye says, leading us back out to the main cave. “That’s not even the best part.”
And he’s right.
A great deal of this cave is at least partially submerged. It’s impossibly dark in parts, but then there’s holes in the roof where the light pierces through in a way that almost looks like shooting stars, and the water—it glows.
I stare at it in wonder only for a half a second before I dive in, unable to help myself.
“They’re Noctiluca scintillans,” Rye says, smiling down at me.
“They’re what?”
He laughs, then jumps in too. “Bioluminescent plankton.”
I let out a small laugh. “I thought you were going to say it was mermaid dust or something magical.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Just phosphorescence. Still magic though,” he says, looking straight at me.
Rune coughs to break the tension in the room that I don’t understand.
“Hey, Daph.” Rye catches my eye. “Hook’s a really good man, you know.”
“I know.” I frown defensively and duck under the water for a second. I think he’s maybe the best man. And then I sigh at the same part I do every time—the part that doesn’t make sense. I pop my head back up. “He can’t be my fate though.”
“Says who?” Rye asks.
“Well—” I roll my shoulders back. “You. Everyone. Anyone whose paying attention to myself and Peter and everything that’s happened with my family till now.”
Rune chimes in my ear, kicking up some water into my face with her tiny foot, and I roll my eyes at her because she’s really hung up about that breeze.
“Would it matter if Hook wasn’t?” Rye asks, swimming into a beam of light.
“Well.” I swim after him. “I should think so?”
“But why?”
I shrug, hopeless. “Because it’s fate.”
“Right.” He looks sad for me. “Maybe fate’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
The fairy tinkles again about the snow, but I think she’s putting too much stock in the weather.
“There wasn’t a great anything to it, Rune.” I give her a look. “He just put his coat on me is all.”
She sighs, belling again.
“No, maybe she’s right,” Rye says with a shrug. “Maybe there are different kinds of fate. Maybe everything’s fate.” He gives me a long look. “Maybe we all are.”
And then he ducks under the water.
* Not to name names, but Jamison.