Off the Plank: A Neverland Story

Chapter 31

My heart felt like it was wrestling with itself inside my chest, a painful feeling that plagued me well into the night as I tried to sleep in High Falcon's tent. He and Chief Taputu were fast asleep and occasionally snoring. Snapdragon was keeping watch just outside the door, her silhouette cut out by moonlight.

There had been more sightings of pirate spies in various parts of the island, which was curious considering Hailstone's crew, as I remembered, was not more than thirty men. If these truly were all his spies, who was left to man the ship? And why was Hailstone, and Shadie as well, so confident that his plan would succeed? How were we to defeat him, if we didn't fully know what we were up against? All these unanswered questions only contributed to my restlessness.

"Can't sleep either, eh?" came a small voice.

I sat up on my bedroll and looked over at the stool. Having slept all afternoon thanks to the medicine woman's soothing song, Kendan was now wide awake like me. He turned his head to look at me. I could tell by his heavy sigh that he already knew his fate. Which was for the better, as I didn't have it in me to tell him.

I reached for a leg of the stool and pulled it closer to my bed. When he spoke again, his voice was weary and slow.

"You know what the worst part is?" he said. "I was ready to tell Solarine how I truly feel. All of it, down the detail about the first moment I saw her. I was flitting around the lagoon looking for honeysuckle, and she was dining on the shore with half a sardine in her mouth, it's tail still wiggling. I thought 'By jove, did a piece of the sun break off and splash into the lagoon or is that just the most radiant fish woman I've ever laid eyes on?' She didn't see me, of course, because I'm roughly the size of the little fish that was in her mouth."

He chuckled at his own story and I felt my heart tearing to pieces.

"I plotted for days afterward how I was going to introduce myself to her in a way so dazzling, she'd forget her species. Of course, it didn't work. I almost got myself eaten by rather large toad until she finally saw me and shooed the beast away. Saved my life that day. And every day thereafter."

I wanted to tell him he wasn't going to die. But I didn't know how long fairies lived, and I didn't know the extent of the internal damage done to his delicate self. His face, normally so bright and glowy, looked drained and empty.

"You should still tell her," I insisted. "Get it off your chest, at least."

"So I can die humiliated? Ha. Not your greatest idea, you know. It's bad enough she's seen me like this. Broken as a twig. Even less a man than I was before. Ah, Silver. Not only was I going to confess my love, I was also going to..."

"Going to what?"

"Change. I was going to try to change for her."

"How do you mean?"

Kendan's voice had dropped to a whisper, and as a fairy voice is smaller than a human's, so also are their whispers. I sat frozen in my blankets, as any amount of rustling could have drowned him out.

"There are a few old fish-tales you hear now and then, about fairies that fell in love with humans, or humans that fell in love with mermaids..."

"Or mermaids that fell in love with fairies?"

"Precisely. And how that old adage that 'love conquers all' held true for these, how it was enough to transform them, in quite a literal sense."

My mind immediately turned to Nevaeh's flowing dark locks, her soft hand on my cheek, her minuscule feet walking across my shoulder.

"How did they do it?" I asked, trying not to sound eager.

"You know how tales go. They get taller and taller and with every creature that tells it, and the details twist a different way. But it's usually some grand act of devotion. A human swims halfway around the world to rescue his mermaid kidnapped by fisherman, and by the time he reaches her his legs have turned to fins. Or a fairy diving in front of an arrow to block it from the heart of his human lover. That story, of course, goes that the second he became human, and therefore big enough to block an arrow, the thing goes right into his heart. So those two didn't get much time."