Chapter 56
The castle is cold as I wander through it to the hall of tapestries.
Nox, Blaise, and I found the last one years ago. It’s hanging on the end of the hall where my dreaming body used to sleep, empty. Sometimes I take it down from the wall and lay it out across the dais, willing something—anything to appear.
Five years, and nothing.
I don’t know what I wish to see appear upon it. The Nomad—Farin, as my brother calls him—living out a peaceful life? Chasing down a different version of myself? A high I can only experience from a distance? It would likely hurt more than it would heal.
The wound of losing the man who chased me across worlds healed long ago. Well, it scabbed over, at the very least.
Blaise used to ask me every so often what I would do if I found him.
She stopped asking three years in.
It’s not that I don’t have a good life here. Nox and Blaise were eager to take me in. My brother spent too much of their money renovating the attic so I would have a comfortable place to stay. I’ve made good friends with my niece, who, peculiar as she is, I find refreshing.
Even if I am convinced that the imaginary friend in her head isn’t quite so imaginary.
And Blaise and I have become close.
Then there’s my parents.
That’s been strange. They’re not the parents I remember. Not the ones I lost when I ran away from home, hoping to protect them from the Nomad. But every once in a while, I get a memory of them, from back when I was Zora and not Tink, and a piece falls into place.
I’ve grown to love them, but I think I would have anyway, even without those memories buried somewhere deep underneath the surface.
At least once a week, they have us all over to their house, and we eat and play games, and it all feels right.
Except for the empty seat next to me. But I try not to think about that.
Besides, that seat was never meant to be filled anyway.
I love my life here, I do.
Well, I love the people in my life here.
The life itself—it’s… Well, it’s quiet, which isn’t so bad. Except for when I hear a joke in my head that fills the silence and I wonder whether I made it up and gave it the Nomad’s voice, or if somewhere out there, in another world, he actually said it.
I still dream of him every night, but instead of violence and murder, it’s the quiet moments we had. The stolen kisses. The love confessions. The lives we lived together.
Our daughters, Adele and Madeline.
They shouldn’t be, but they’re the same every time. Some strange Fated magic, I assume.
I miss them with a hole in my chest that will never be filled. Even if I find a husband here. Even if we settle down and have children, I don’t know that I’ll ever get over losing the girls I never got to meet, the girls I can now only speak to, hold, in memories and dreams.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to sleep.
That I could climb back on this dais and go under, though to where, I am not sure.
There’s no world that currently exists where I could have my husband and my children.
Not without writing me back into a reality I’ve already lived, which Nox and Blaise have discouraged countless times as dangerous.
So sometimes I come in this room, when it all gets too overwhelming, and I grab a tapestry, lie on top of the dais, press my back to the marble, and close my eyes. I run my hands across this empty tapestry and will something, anything, to appear.
So far, it has never proved effective.
When my back starts to ache from lying on the marble, I take that as my cue and fold up the tapestry, hugging it to my chest one last time before I leave it on the dais and turn toward the door.
“If you could be written back in, is that the fate you would choose?” says a deep, feminine voice I don’t recognize.
I halt, my hand on the door, the voice calling me back. I turn to face her and my stomach bottoms out.
The figure before me is formed of shadows. They dance around her, making up her skirts. I can’t make out the features of her face, and although I don’t recognize her voice, something about the shape of her face is familiar, something about the way she carries herself, and I can’t quite place it.
Although, I suppose it’s possible I’ve come face-to-face with a Fate in another life. It’s not as if I would remember it if I had.
“Which one are you?” I ask, which seems the most important question at the moment, given each of the three Sisters’ personalities and vices.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she says.
“It would depend,” I say.
“On what?”
“On who else was in that other fate.”
The Fate cocks her head at me. Her hands are folded in front of her. She’s holding something, a chain dangling from her fingers, but I can’t make out what it is.
“You have a family here. You would leave them?”
I turn and look out the window. I can’t see Nox’s house from here, but I can see the path. Just another curve down the road is my parents’ house.
My mother and I talked just a few nights ago, and her voice rings in my head. It was the first time I’d told her about the twins. She’d cried with me, held my hand in hers, and told me the pain she’d experienced at losing me when I was a child. How she would have done anything to get me back.
How now that she’s seen my face again, she would do anything to get me my daughters back.
“I have two families,” I explain. “To be with one is to abandon the other.”
“Mmm,” says the Fate, thoughtful. Pondering. “So which would you choose?”
“Do I get a choice,” I ask, spinning around to face her, “or is this just one of your cruel games?”
“I do not consider myself cruel.”
“Then why the intrusive questions?”
“Because I am going to offer you a choice, and I want you to be certain about your decision.”
“Why does it matter to you whether I’m certain?
You’re one of the ones who let the Nomad chase me down all these years, putting obstacles in our way.
Obstacles to our happiness. You could have made sure we were together, that I didn’t have to kill him over and over and over.
That he didn’t have to—” I stop, not wanting to cry in front of this creature.
The Fate pauses. Traces her hands down the folded tapestry on the dais.
“I’ll admit that I was there when the Nomad, as you call him, died for the second time.
When the shadow of his spirt pleaded with my Sisters and me for another chance to find you.
My Eldest Sister was easily persuaded. She thought it romantic.
My Middle Sister craved the drama that would unfold, the violence, even. ”
“And you?”
“Farin, wicked as he was, did not begin that way. I remembered him as a child. His insatiable curiosity. The way his innocent laughter was met with blows. Even after all he’d done, I still hoped for something better for him.”
“And me? What did you wish for me?”
“You already loved him by the time he came to us. I didn’t think you would find us granting his request cruel.”
“Even when our story always ended in tragedy?” I practically spit.
The Fate pauses. “I regret that I was…indisposed…for quite a long while. Unable to corral my Sisters’ insatiable love for dramatics.”
I fight the urge to roll my eyes, but the Fate continues.
“You see, time works differently in the different realms. The realm in which you first met the Nomad was long, long ago compared to this realm. And the realm you remember hailing from, the world from which Neverland was splintered off and created—I myself lived several lives in that particular world.”
“Is that so? Perhaps we crossed paths.” I say it with a huff, and sardonically, but the Fate goes quiet.
“Yes, in fact, we did. Or, to put it more accurately, you crossed paths with a version of myself.”
I go still, and though my arms are still crossed, I turn around to face the Fate. To examine her shadowy features, the face hidden beneath the shade. “Who are you?”
“Someone who should have befriended you long before I did. Someone who owes a great debt to you.”
Her hands open, and in her palm I glimpse what looks to be a pocket watch made of adamant. It’s ajar, the contents swirling inside, feeding her shadows.
“Wendy?” I gasp.
“In a manner of speaking.”
I go stiff. “All this time, you were a Fate? Then why…” I don’t know where to start asking questions. Why allow Peter to abuse her? Why allow John…
Anger rears up within me, proof that the Fates care nothing for the lives of mortals standing before me, but this strange, shadowed version of Wendy hangs her head.
“I did not know who I was. It was a trick of my Sisters, I’m afraid.
In fact, I never wanted to be this. I simply wanted to be Wendy.
At least, after someone reminded me why I should come back.
Why being Wendy wasn’t such a terrible thing.
So I came back, and spent several years as her.
And when I close this pocket watch, I’ll be her again.
I don’t often open it. Don’t often become… this.” She motions to herself.
“So why now?” I ask.
She cocks her head at me. “It was the strangest thing. There was a knock on my door one day. I was playing with the children, and who was there except for the Queen of Irethden and the Prince Consort. I wasn’t expecting royal visitors, of course, but there they were, adorned so beautifully.
They told me they had a message. The Prince Consort—he had not grown up in a royal class, and on his journey to climb the social ladder so he could ask for the princess’s hand, he had met the Nomad.
I knew the Nomad, of course, but he had disappeared years before.
I hadn’t heard from him, or from my friend since… Well, you remember.”
I remember bumping into her the night of the carnival, my heart going out to her.
“The husband regretted to inform me that the Nomad had died, strangely enough, at the hands of a faerie on their team. He had been shocked by the events, especially after the faerie was swept away in a gust of light. When the man had returned home, sure he’d lost any chance of being with the princess, he’d found in his home enough coin to pay for his medallion.
It seems it had been left there since before the man had ever left on his trip with the crew.
He entered the competition for her hand in marriage and won—by a landslide, apparently.
The previous queen immediately abdicated the throne to her daughter, and the happy couple married and began their reign.
The man remembered that with his money, there was a note, a request that, should anything happen to him, this man find me and tell me all that had transpired.
It took them a few years to track me down with matters of the throne often taking precedence, but eventually, they traced the rumors all the way to our front door. ”
My heart warms at the idea of Acel and the princess finding each other after all.
The Fate—Wendy—looks beyond me, out the window.
“I’m not sure when the Nomad realized who I was.
When he recognized me. I’ve been mulling it over in my mind, that, and why he didn’t tell me, but I suppose none of that matters.
The princess and her husband left, regretting to inform me of the death of my friend at the hand of another.
But I knew there had to be a reason the Nomad wanted me specifically to know if something happened, if something went wrong. ”
She looks down at the open pocket watch, pondering.
“So I dug this up from the grave in which it’s usually buried in my garden, and for the first time in years, opened it.
And now, here I am. I must say, it’s not as terrifying as it once was.
Before, I didn’t want to be Wendy again.
I feared that in opening it, I would abandon my family.
Abandon Nolan and the children.” But as it is, I find every second I’m away, I ache even more to get back to them. ”
She looks up at me, a question in her silence.
My heart throbs with mingled pain and relief. Wendy got her happy ending. My friend got her happy ending. Somehow, Captain Astor escaped from the Middle Sister’s clutches, and… “You have children?” I whisper.
She nods. “Yes. They opened up a part of my heart I didn’t know existed.”
“I have them too,” I whisper, my voice cracking with my heart.
“I know.”
“Could I…” I’m afraid to ask, and I don’t know whether it’s because I’m afraid the answer will be no, or whether I’m afraid of the action I’ll take if the answer is yes.
“Yes. If that is what you want.”
I let out a sob.
“And the Nomad?”
To this one, Wendy seems a bit saddened. “I can weave him back in. Into a world my Sisters won’t be able to reach. Into a world where you and he can live peacefully the rest of your lives. It would be the last of them. The last of your lives, but you could be together.”
My heart shudders, and I hold my breath, waiting for something to come crashing down on me.
“I can’t promise he’ll remember you.”
“I understand.”
“And Tink…creating a world like this. It would need a powerful tether to hold it together.”
My hand finds my throat. I close my eyes, touching it longingly. “Can I have tonight with my family?” I ask. “To tell them where I’m going and why?”
“Of course,” says Wendy.