Shadow (Wendy Darling #3)(47)
“Forgive me, friends. I have not thought of Lomasi in a long time. I’ll continue.” He coughed into his hand and raised his head. “It was one of those days where the sun rose over our beautiful Neverland Sea, and everything in the world felt possible. I began my morning circling around Shadow Mountain—as I’m known to do. When you fly around the mountain counterclockwise, you can watch the sun hit each rock just perfectly, watch the shadows crawl away from their crevices and make their way to the peak. After I watched the sunrise, I spent the morning down in Port Duette, trading with some of the Pilvi children, eating a ripe pineapple, and—I must be honest—teasing some of the drunk pirates who were pouring out of the tavern after their nightly debauchery.”
The crowd gave a chuckle at the idea of Peter pulling off the hats of drunken men and shoving them against each other, tweaking their noses and dropping items on their unsuspecting heads. Peter sighed, his red hair falling over his forehead.
“But that soon became boring, as it always does, and though I can’t say exactly why, my intuition pulled me over to the dark corner of the island, the place where wicked men go to sneak a peek at bathing mermaids—Miath, The Gray Shore. The Darlings aren’t familiar with Miath, so I’ll quickly explain.” Peter’s gaze narrowed, and a shadow fell across his face as he dipped his chin. “Neverland lore says that if a man lays eyes on a mermaid that he will have good fortune the rest of his days, which we know isn’t true. When a mere mortal sees a mermaid outside of the water, they lose their minds. Jealousy and lust overtake them, and half the time they will fight their companions to the death out of a perceived rivalry for a second look. But as we know here on Pan Island, the world of grown men is full of nothing but blithe idiots. Every year pirates flock to Miath from time to time to try and peek at the mermaids’ beauty.”
Peter shook his head with a barking laugh. “The fools. It doesn’t affect us, does it, boys?”
The boys laughed and clapped, thankful for the youth that saved them. Peter grinned.
“Ah, it’s good to be young! Back to the story—on that fateful day when Hook lost his hand, I decided that I would fly over Miath. When I arrived there, there wasn’t the usual group of drunken pirates, gawking over some of the rocks that lie up the mountain from the mermaids . . .” Peter’s eyes widened, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “No. There was only one man, his broken body lying on the great sea-glass rock that overlooks the Gray Shore. This is Sybella, the rock that the mermaids pulled from the bottom of the depths of the sea. As large as a table and filled with the skulls of their elders, the rock is pure evil.”
Peter got a faraway look in his eyes. “To this day, I will never understand how the man got there. He had been stabbed with a single, thin blade, up through his ribs, and was slowly bleeding to death, his blood turning Sybella a terrible shade of auburn. His body was slowly calcifying, and green sores cracked at his lips, a combination of the salty air and the mermaids’ poison that was slowly seeping up from the rock.”
Peter shook his head.
“I did what I could to save him, but it was too late. I offered to carry him home, but he confided to me that he had no home, that the pirates had been his home, and they had betrayed him. I told him not to speak, to save his energy, but he kept whispering to me . . . three little words.”
The entire room leaned forward as Peter bent over the moon throne, his eyes glittering with excitement. His mouth turned up in a serious smile, and he began whispering it again and again . . .
“‘The Sudden Night . . . The Sudden Night . . . The Sudden Night.’ I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I was sure that he was calling out for death to take him. Those words had no meaning for me, not yet. I stayed beside him as he whispered these words, his body convulsing with each breath. Finally, his eyes went dim, and I saw the life snuffed out of him upon that green glassy rock.” He closed his eyes. “Though he was heavy, I heaved his body off the sea-glass rock, where it would be a haven for Keel cats. It was only then that I saw the message that he had written in blood on the side of the rock. Scrawled in red were the numbers 42 and 73, and he had drawn some strange lines beside them. At first I wondered if these were the amounts of gold he had been promised, or the number of men he had left behind, but no. I remembered that many years ago, I had seen a nautical map, a tool of sailors, and had tossed it into the treasure room. The oceans of Neverland are vast, and pirates often end up circling in its tricky waters. I committed the numbers to memory and flew back to Pan Island. To say that I turned the treasure room upside down is a bit of an understatement.”
He chuckled and took a breath. Wendy shifted, and when she moved, all the little Lost Boys moved with her. Michael clutched possessively to her hand, and she watched as members of the crowd kept their eyes riveted on Peter.
“Finally, at the bottom of a chest, under a bag of dresses, I found this map.”
From his pocket, Peter pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and held it up to the lunar light. The crowd gasped at its beauty, but to Wendy, who had seen many maps, it seemed fairly plain.
“After a few minutes of figuring out how it worked, I learned that 42 and 73 were coordinates.”
He paused for effect.
“And so, like a fool, I decided to fly there by myself. When I reached the coordinates, I kept rechecking the map, thinking that I had done it wrong, because there was nothing there. It was only the Teeth, those sharp white cliffs that rise out of the ocean on Neverland’s east side—you know them well.”