“All right,” I said.
I wanted to hug her again, or touch her hair, or just stand close and breathe her in. I didn’t do any of those things. I didn’t know how. I was only a boy, for all that I was beginning to look like a man.
And there was no time.
Sally and Charlie went south, to cut through the forest and then the dunes and down to the beach. I went toward the tree, which was where I thought Nod would go if he couldn’t find us. That was what we always did. We always went back to the tree.
I ran, because I wanted to find Nod before Peter did, because I wanted to get back to Sally and Charlie before Peter did. I ran because everything I loved had been taken from me again and again and I was tired of Peter taking more.
I didn’t know what day it was anymore, or how long the sun had been up. It seemed I’d been running since Peter took Charlie away, but I wasn’t tired. Fear and anger drove me on, made my legs stretch longer, made my feet barely touch the ground. Somewhere I’d lost my moccasins, though I couldn’t remember when that might have been. Perhaps my feet had grown out of them and I hadn’t noticed.
My red coat caught and snagged on branches and I tore it off and threw it away in the woods. It didn’t matter anymore. Peter had always wanted the coat. He could have it now.
I ran, bare-chested and barefooted, wearing only my deerskin trousers and my knife. I looked, finally, like the wild boy that Peter always wanted me to be, but I would never be so much of a boy again.
Peter wanted me to stay a boy, but it was Peter, finally, who made me a man.
Then I was at the tree, and there was Nod, sitting on the ground with his back against the trunk, holding his left hand over the bleeding wrist of his right.
Nod gave me a weary smile as I ran to him. It was a very grown-up smile, not the smile of the boy he’d once been at all. “I was a little harder to kill than Peter thought I’d be.”
“You’d think he’d know that, having watched you at Battle all these years.”
I inspected the wound. Peter had done a bad job of it. He’d cut into the inside of Nod’s wrist but not come close to taking the whole hand off. There were a few other nicks and cuts on his chest and arms but the wrist was the worst thing.
I went for the bandages and water, and wrapped Nod’s wrist up tight so that the bleeding would stop.
“Where are Sally and Charlie?” he asked; then he looked at me closely. “Jamie, you have a beard.”
“So do you,” I said, scraping my hand down the side of his cheek.
He seemed surprised by this, and touched his face. It was only a few stringy hairs, but they hadn’t been there before.
Nod laughed, and I was struck by how different that laugh was, how much older it sounded.
“We’re growing up, Jamie,” he said. “I wonder why, after all this time.”
“It’s because we don’t love Peter anymore,” I said. I’d only just figured this out when I saw Nod’s face. “Because we don’t want to be boys and do boy things for always. The island will keep you young if you want it, and Peter never wants to be a man. But we don’t want it anymore.”
“No,” Nod said. “I had enough of being a boy when Fog died.”
I finished patching Nod up and then ran to collect all that I thought we would need on the boat—water, food, rope, weapons. I made certain to pack one of the pirate swords as well as an axe and several small daggers.
There was a great deal to carry, but there was no sense in pushing a rowboat into the sea without supplies. All we would be doing was trading Peter’s death for the slow death of starvation.
I let Nod rest until I was ready. He wanted to carry some of the supplies, but I wouldn’t let him. He’d lost too much blood and I was worried he wouldn’t be able to make it to Skull Rock as it was.
Somehow night had fallen again. How did the days pass so quickly then? I felt as though I’d just left to find Charlie, to save him from the Many-Eyed. I felt like I’d been on the island forever, running in circles, trying to escape Peter’s trap.
Once, a long time before, I’d found a wolf’s paw inside one of our rope traps. Just the paw, not the rest of the wolf. It was mangled and torn and horrible-looking, for the wolf had chewed off its own foot rather than be caught.
I should have chewed off my foot long ago, but I didn’t know that I was in a trap. Peter smiled and made me think there was only joy. Even when there was blood he made me think it was only play, until there was so much of it even Peter couldn’t pretend anymore.
Fireflies lit the night in the forest. I used to love to watch them light up, sparkling like stars close enough to touch, but I swatted any that came near me. I wasn’t certain anymore that they were fireflies. They might be fairies in disguise, spying for Peter and telling tales back to him.
And if they were fairies, they would have no love for me, for I’d burned all the plains where they’d lived.
Would I have still burned the plains if it meant getting rid of the Many-Eyed and saving Charlie? Yes. I would have. But I would have warned the fairies, if I’d known they were there. This was another fault to lay at Peter’s door.
If he hadn’t kept the fairies secret, then they might have been saved. Peter had wanted them all to himself, to keep their magic just for him.
Peter wanted to fly, but he wanted the rest of us bound to earth.
I tried to hurry Nod along, but he was tired and bloodless and not driven by the same fear that I was. He cared about Sally and Charlie, but it wasn’t the same.
Or so I thought.
We’d hardly spoken since leaving the tree. I could think only of Sally and Charlie and Peter and what might happen while I was gone.
Sally wanted me to trust her, to believe that she could look after herself because she had done so for years before she met me. But Sally didn’t know Peter, not really. Peter wasn’t like the boys that Sally fought for food on the streets of the city.
We’d crossed into the dunes, and the sky opened up above us. So many stars wheeled overhead it was hard to imagine them all. They were brighter that night than they’d ever been and they seemed to cry out to me, “Hurry, hurry, hurry.”
“I know she loves you,” Nod said.
He startled me. I wasn’t thinking about love. I was thinking about getting Sally and Charlie off the island and away from Peter. “What?”
“Sally,” Nod said.
I thought he might be blushing.
“So?” I said. I wasn’t certain why we were talking about this now.
“I was hoping it would be me, but it’s you. And I just wanted you to know that’s all right.”
It felt strangely like he was giving us a blessing, and it made me feel awkward in a way that I’d never been with Nod before.
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
“You’ve always been the best of us, Jamie,” Nod said, and his voice cracked. “Me and Fog, we always looked up to you. We always wanted to be just like you, only we never were.”
If he was crying I didn’t want to see. I only wanted to get to the beach. The night was spinning on and Peter could have found them by now.
“I wasn’t as good as you think,” I said.
“You kept us alive. You looked after us. We all knew it, even if we didn’t say so. We knew it made Peter jealous.”
“Peter’s not jealous of me,” I said. “Only of anyone that takes me away from him.”
“He is,” Nod insisted. “He knows no one will ever love him the way we all loved you.”
My throat felt clogged suddenly. I cleared it noisily, but found I couldn’t say anything. What could I possibly say?