She had wandered here so many times before.
The mud was not as red as it had been yesterday, but she picked up a handful and molded it in her palm. The redskins had been shaped from this slightly transformed clay. What's more, it was her little sister's raven tree, too. She remembered preparing for her mission to find Piper, Rosemary drawing her to this place and twisting it into her vision of an utterly magical tree—a vision born of Gwen's own stories.
No wonder the Never Tree could hide so well—it changed its nature like the sky changed its weather. It shifted and regrew to meet the needs of whatever native inhabitant desired its magic, whether that was the redskins, the fairies, Peter himself, or…
Rosemary? An inkling of confusion morphed into several questions for Gwen. How had Rosemary known how to find the Never Tree on her own? How had she managed to compel it into such a strange form as the clucking raven tree?
Gwen had no time to spare on these questions as she and Peter approached the sacred source of Neverland's magic. Little vines of waxy ivy wrapped around the trunk, its leaves like polished emeralds. Its roots digging deep into the moist ground, it towered in the marsh with a majesty usually reserved for royalty.
She felt breathless standing before it, reveling in the extent of its power. “It's so beautiful.”
“If only grown-ups could let beautiful things be,” Peter sighed. Turning to Hollyhock, he instructed make sure no lost children were left in the perimeter before she went and found Rosemary. Gwen wasn't paying attention, she was captivated by the tree.
She leaned down and touched one of the sprawling roots. The fibrous pattern on the root looked like letters or runes from some ancient alphabet, just like on the root specimen they'd given Piper. The poor Never Tree, wounded by that amputation at such a critical moment in Neverland's history.
“I can't help but feel there's a story in this old tree…” she remarked.
“Oh, there is,” Peter answered. “The oldest story.”
“Which one is that?” Gwen asked.
“Don't you know? What kind of cut-rate storyteller are you?” he asked, his playful contempt no longer something Gwen took offense at.
“I don't know,” she told him.
She noticed Peter counting his paces. Not wanting to interrupt him, she waited until he stopped and dropped to the ground. He started digging through the goopy earth until he found, buried in the shallow marsh mud, a metal pail. Half-emptying it of mud, he explained, “The story of how grown-ups' lost the Never Tree. A couple of them found it once, a long time ago, but they boggled it up so bad the Never Tree had to go somewhere they'd never reach it.” Peter picked up the bucket and carried it by its wire handle. His eyes went to the branches of the Never Tree. “One of these fruits is different than the rest,” he told her. “We need to find the branch that has the odd fruit.”
With such vague instructions, Gwen doubted her ability to assist. Still, she turned her eyes to the task and scanned the hundreds of fruits shining on the branches above. For as lush and ripe as the fruit was, none had yet fallen or rotted on the ground. “How did they boggle it up?” Gwen asked.
As she and Peter lifted into the air and circled the tree, searching for the stray fruit, he told her the story of the Never Tree. “The same way these brainless grown-ups aim to: they tried to use it. They tried to take what it had for themselves instead of appreciating it for what it was. It wasn't enough for them to have it. They wanted to understand it, know it, and control it. Of course, it wasn't all their fault. This was before mermaids slithered off to the depths of the ocean, back when the first mermaid had only just been born of a falling star.”
Gwen tested the fruit in her hands. They all had the same tomato-like squishiness, but none of it fell off in her hand. “There was a time before mermaids lived in the ocean?”
“There was a time before there were oceans for them to swim in,” Peter told her. “You have to remember, when everything is made-up, there's always the moment before anyone made it up.”
“But not everything is made-up,” Gwen replied.
“Then where did it come from?” Peter asked.
Gwen didn't know if she was stumped, or just not following Peter's fanciful excuse for logic. The matter fell out of her mind when she sighted a tiny red fruit, no larger than a marble and ten times as glassy. The skin of the fruit shone, iridescent and glossy. “Peter, I think I've found it!”
He zipped over and followed to where Gwen pointed. “Good golly, Gwenny, you have! Good eyes! This is just the branch we need.”
Peter grabbed the slender branch in his hand and broke it where it forked off a larger branch. The leaves shook and shuddered, but neither they nor the solitary fruit fell from it. “Anyway,” he continued, planting the branch in his bucket of mud, “mermaids were just as dangerous back then as they are now, only nobody knew it yet. If it weren't for the mermaid, those grown-ups might have left well enough alone and not gotten it in their heads that messing with the Never Tree was a good idea. The truth is,” he confessed, “grown-ups aren't so bad, except for when they're trying to do good.” He and Gwen drifted back down to the ground, and Peter clutched his bucket with the cutting. “Mermaids, on the
