“How could he give her that?” Gwen asked.
“He couldn't. The magic to fulfill such wishes rests with the stars, in a language so strange and backward even mermaids—who are hatched from the falling stars that strike water—cannot read it unaided.”
Strange and backward, she thought. If that were literally true, then the only means to decipher the stars would rest in something that reflected them.
“So Piper procured a mirror—which were almost impossibly rare at the time. The Weser's mermaid kept her end of the bargain, and made the stars give him everything he desired in the realm of his music.
“But star magic is a finicky and exacting magic… what it gives to one, it pulls from another. Mermaids became revered creatures and depicted in a more favorable light than the sirens of early Europe, but Piper suffered for it.
“His home shunned him. No one wanted to hear his music, no one wanted to have anything to do with him no matter where he went. His talent sat dormant for want of an audience. Only rats would gather to listen, but when he turned this one advantage to use in Hamelin, he was cheated out of his due. After that, I suppose he went mad and lost what little remained of his benevolent nature.
“But you see, mermaids are born of fallen stars and they tend to do their accounting in a similar manner, even without secret star magic. Any deal you make with a mermaid will come back to bite you. They are always honest, but you will always get more than you barter for dealing with them.”
This depressed Gwen, but she refused to believe it. “Don't you think there could be some good mermaids out there?”
“Oh, I'm sure there are,” Starkey agreed, “in the same way that there must be some good scorpions, or morally superior specimens of snake.” He shifted forward. “So tell me, how did Gwendolyn Hoffman get herself tangled up with mermaids?”
She couldn't obscure the vested interest she had in their conversation. Starkey saw the obvious: she had a more personal and pressing stake in the matter. Still, she felt like an idiot for having the story forced out of her. “One of the mermaids… after I met her with Peter, she gave me one of her scales so I could always reach her. We went swimming together, we talked all the time. There isn't anyone else to talk to around here. I mean, if I want someone anything like me.”
“No one knows about this, do they?” he asked.
“No.”
“You should know better, Gwen,” Starkey told her. “If you feel like you have to keep something a secret, it's because you shouldn't be doing it.”
“Lasiandra has been a perfect friend to me,” Gwen insisted.
“Because centuries ago, Vanda made the deal that painted sirens as perfect creatures in all the myths that ever followed.”
“I gave her a mirror,” Gwen confessed, cringing at her own words.
Starkey's eyes widened and he leaned even further forward. “What deal did you make? What did you give her?”
“I didn't make a deal. I mean, that was the deal. I gave her a mirror in exchange for a friend's safety… someone who got all tangled up in this because of me.”
“Only the mirror?” Starkey mused. “Then perhaps all is not lost for you—though only time will tell how much more you sacrificed for that. I hope, for both your sakes, that your friend is not as trusting as you.”
Gwen wrung her hands in her lap where Starkey could not see the uneasy gesture. The last thing she had told Jay was how much she trusted Lasiandra, how much he could trust her.
“I can't imagine you making a deal with mermaids,” Starkey remarked, drawing her out of her thoughts. “You don't seem like the type.”
“What do you mean? What type?” Gwen couldn't tell if she was meant to process his remark as a compliment or insult.
“Greedy. Ambitious. Risk-taking. Desire-driven,” he elaborated. “To be honest, I still don't entirely understand what brought you to Neverland in the first place. I've never met a anyone who came to Neverland without an intense passion for magic, but you seem to have been blown here by little more than a strong wind.”
“I like it here. It's beautiful. It's surprising. It's relaxing,” Gwen defended, unable to form more complex thoughts out of her mismatched feelings for Neverland.
“And what about Peter?” Starkey asked.
“What about him?”
Starkey shrugged, but kept his smile in his eyes. “He's quite the attraction for most the girls who wind up here. And he seems to value your opinion more than any that I've seen.”
Gwen almost gagged on a laugh. If Peter took her seriously, she hated to think how he treated other girls.
“You're too old for all this nonsense, or at least, too old to pull any meaningful satisfaction from it. You're not here to fight redskins and talk to fairies. You want more out of life than that. Everyone does and, sooner or later, everyone flies home for it. Yet everyone is always amazed poor Peter stays behind, as if that isn't what he's always done…”
Gwen cast her glance elsewhere, not wanting to meet Starkey's eyes. However, she brought them back when he pierced the calm of the cabin with pointed melancholy. “He's a terrible heart-breaker, that boy.”
“He is who he is, and he's Peter Pan,” Gwen announced. “I'm old enough to understand that.”
“But are you wise enough to believe it?” Starkey questioned. “Wisdom is not inherent in age. Growth is earned, not given, and your current residence is in the one place that allows the least of it. So on a scale of alcohol to mermaids, how
