“The pirates won’t stop,” I said. “We’ve killed a bunch of their lot again.”
Crow let Sally go, and she leaned all her weight on me. There wasn’t much to her, really—none of the boys were anything but skinny and strong from all their adventuring—but it felt different, somehow, when she was pressed up against me. Was it because I knew she was a girl, or because I could feel the tiny curves at her chest that I wasn’t aware of before?
For her part, I think Sal only wanted to rest. The short hike across the arena seemed to have drained her.
Crow gathered up the weapons and put them in the bag Nip had carried, then slung it over his shoulder. He took up his place on Sal’s other side and we continued our slow, deliberate way.
Behind us, Peter was still screaming.
Nod had found a place for Fog in the meadow. I think Charlie wanted to stay there with him, see it through until the end, but I told him to come along with us. Nod needed to be alone with his twin, this one last time.
It took us a long while to get back to the tree. I carried Sal on my back down all the parts where climbing was necessary, and Crow took Charlie. Nod caught up with us fairly soon (he had Fog’s knife slung at his waist, the one they’d fought over) so he and Crow took it in turns to carry the smaller boy.
Peter did not return with us.
It was night when we staggered into the clearing, numb and exhausted. Nod and Crow and Charlie collapsed in a heap together just inside the tree, all three clinging to one another. Sal muttered incoherently, and I was afraid she might be building a fever.
I got her settled in a pile of skins and then lifted her shirt to check the wound. The blood had soaked through the bandage, and it was still fresh and red.
This might have been because the wound was so much worse than it looked, or it might have been because Sally hadn’t been able to rest since she’d been injured. I took off her shirt and waistcoat entirely, carefully ignoring the wraps around her chest, and cut off the strips of Charlie’s shirt that I’d tied around the wound. Some scabbing came away when I lifted the cloth and Sal cried out.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said.
I ran outside to get some water from the skins that collected rainwater. These were hung all about the tree on the branches. The water was warm but it would do.
I poured some water in Sally’s mouth, holding her head up so she wouldn’t choke. She coughed and spluttered anyway and half of the water ended up on my face. I released her head back and she closed her eyes, drifting into sleep.
My own eyes were gritty from sleepiness and worry, but I washed out the wound as best I could and then put some spicy-smelling green leaves on it that I knew would make it stop bleeding. That boy Rob had also showed me this when he’d lived on the island.
How long ago was that? Fifteen seasons? More? It didn’t matter. I wrapped the wound again and hoped it would stop bleeding in the night. It was one thing to experiment with sewing up myself. I didn’t think I could do it to Sal.
Sally. Her name was Sally, not Sal.
I covered her up with one of the best skins, a nice soft fox-fur one. Then I lay beside her on my side, and watched her breath rise and fall until I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep for the first time since I’d lived on the island.
PART III SALLY
chapter 12
Peter didn’t return the next day, or the next, or the next after that. In fact, he was gone for more than a week. He’d never done this before, and I might have worried about it, except that Sal did catch a fever.
The next morning when I woke up her skin was like fire. The wound had ceased bleeding, but she moaned and tossed and turned and it was hard to get her to swallow any water or broth. She soaked through any skins we put on her but if we took them off, she would cry out piteously that she was cold.
Nod and Crow were, surprisingly, a good help to me. They took it in turns to watch her and to bully her into swallowing soup, and even washed all the dirty clothes and skins so she’d have something clean to sleep in. Charlie ran back and forth collecting water and bathing Sal’s head with a cloth.
If the pirates knew where the tree was, they could have crept up on us and killed us all, for none of us was aware of anything except Sally.
On the fourth day, her fever broke.
We all cheered, and I think I never loved those boys more than at that moment. We had saved her. We’d all done it together.
Together wasn’t something that Peter understood, not really. He liked all the boys to be in one group, but he didn’t like sharing and he certainly didn’t like it when the boys banded together to do anything without him. He liked to sow discontent, to cause fights, and this, I realized, was why he never played at Battle. It was much more fun for him to watch us run to and fro and hurt each other. If we hurt one another, even in fun, then we could never like one another best—only him.
On the sixth day, Sally sat up and scowled at me when I changed the poultice.
“Must you put that foul-smelling stuff on there?” she said.
“If you enjoy living, then yes,” I said. “That foul stuff probably saved your life.”
“I thought Crow said it was your magic broth that saved me,” Sally said, her eyes twinkling. It was nice to see that twinkle again, to know that Sal was almost back to normal.
Nod, who was good at sewing, had made her a fresh pair of deerskin pants that stopped at the knee, and a matching shirt with silver wolf fur trimmed all around the edges. It was one of the finest things he had ever made, and he’d presented it to her with a blushing face that morning.
Sal had thanked him very prettily, her own cheeks pink, and then asked for some privacy so she could change into Nod’s gift.
She’d washed and changed while the four of us stood outside the tree, looking up at the sky and trying not to be curious about what was going on inside.
When she called out that it was all right to come back in, she was wearing her new clothes and sitting up against the cave wall. There was something different about her, something I noticed after a few minutes. She’d stopped binding her chest, and now it was desperately obvious that she was, in fact, a girl.
Crow and Charlie didn’t seem to notice, but Nod looked everywhere except directly at Sal, and I tried to keep my eyes right on her face.
“Something saved you, the broth or the leaves or just plain luck,” I said, feeling the blood rise in my face as I glanced at her chest.
I had to stop being so foolish. It was only Sal, my friend Sal, and truthfully the curves were so small that she barely looked different from a boy.
But they were there. She was most definitely not a boy.
Nod and Crow and Charlie were outside, and I heard them laughing as they played some game. It was good to hear Nod laugh, though it never quite reached his eyes—the ghost of Fog lingered there.
“Jamie, do you remember your mother?” Sal asked.
I gave her a startled glance. “My mother? No.”
“Sometimes you sing a little song to yourself when you’re at some task, like you were doing just now,” Sal said. “I thought you might have learned it from your mother.”
I hadn’t even known I was singing, and wondered if this happened often and the other boys just never thought to mention it to me.
“I told you I came here a long time ago, Sal,” I said, feeling unaccountably angry. “I don’t remember my life before the island.”