Captain James Hook and the Siege of Neverland by Jeremiah Kleckner, Jeremy Marshall

silence for a few moments, then took in a breath of stale air and steeled myself from head to heart.  
    “Let’s go.”

Chapter Eleven

    I hurried up the staircase.   Behind me, chains rattled.   There was a crash of steel against stone, then two dull thuds.   I continued looking forward.  
    The light of the main hall stung my eyes.   I looked to the floor until my sight adjusted, then over to Bertilak as he dragged the boy up the staircase.   The knight and his captive stepped into the light and I saw the boy’s fresh bruises.  
    “He will need to be able walk to show us where Peter Pan is,” I said.  
    “He walks fine,” Bertilak said.   The knight held the chain for the boy’s collar up so high that the boy was nearly on his toes.   The boy’s face flushed red, then purple, before Bertilak released him to stand on his own.   The boy slumped forward, but caught himself before falling.  
    The three of us walked in silence out of the main hall.   Not one pirate, servant, or maiden stirred as we passed through the doors of the keep and the inner wall.   Bertilak stopped just past the outer gate and jerked the boy closer.  
    “Now, where are we going?”
    The boy didn’t talk.   Instead, he pointed into the Crescent Wood.  
    Bertilak gripped the boy’s arm and shook him.   The boy clutched at the knight’s thick fingers and tried to pry them off of him.  
    “You have until the next sunset to get me there,” Bertilak told him.   As he said this, the sun raced across the clouds in staggered leaps.   The boy could have had hours or minutes until dusk.
    The boy bowed his head and led us into the forest.  
    We traveled a road west of the castle, along the river made by the mountain’s waterfall.   It was south of where I traveled with my crew before the storm and worlds different.   The smallest trees here were taller than the Jolly Roger and had trunks four men thick.   Their wide, outstretched branches shaded us and our intentions.  
    The path shook a thought loose from deep in my mind.   When I was six, I fell while running in the woods after William and Emily.   The two of them jumped across a shallow stream by leaping from rock to rock.   I followed, but my blood condition made me light-headed and I slipped.   Something hard hit my side.   William ran for help and Emily sat by me until my father arrived.   When he did, there was no scolding or panic.   He calmly lifted me out of the water and carried me on his shoulders the whole way home.   All of this I remembered with vivid clarity until a voice broke me away.
    “What is it, Captain?” Bertilak asked.
    “Nothing,” I said.   I relayed the details to myself word for word, but when I tried seeing the image again, it became fuzzy and remote as though I were trying to picture a story told to me by someone else.  
    Barely five hundred yards from the castle, the boy stopped in a grassy field no more than six yards in diameter.   He stretched his arm forward and pointed to a twisted, double-wide trunk at the far end that I suspected was actually two trees intertwined into one.   Several large holes cut into the trunk like doorways above stoops made of broad branches.  
    “In this tree?” Bertilak asked.   “I have passed here a thousand times.”
    “We know,” the boy said.  
    The knight snorted and shoved the boy aside.   “Peter Pan!”  
    Tense moments passed in silence.  
    Again Bertilak yelled for the flying boy.
    Again nothing.  
    “This is not the place.”   Bertilak reached behind his back and drew his single-bladed axe in one fluid movement.   He turned to the boy and raised his weapon in the air.  
    “Stop,” I yelled.   I darted between them and pointed Bertilak’s attention to a hole above a high branch.   “Look.”
    The knight craned his head up to the hole, where a small face retreated too slowly into the darkness.   Bertilak smiled and walked to the tree.  
    “Chopping the tree