Tigerheart by Peter David Read Free Book Online

upon a time, Gwenny and her brothers would sleep peacefully in their nursery and dream of the Anyplace, playing upon its colorful shores and hobnobbing with its varied and sundry residents. They would see lions and wolves, savages and gnomes and a strange old lady with a hooked nose, and princes with six brothers, and just about everything that they could imagine and you could imagine. The Anyplace was about all these marvels and more besides. And every night their mother would sort through their minds, as mothers always do, so as to make them all nice and orderly for the morning’s activities, and she would find bits and pieces of the Anyplace strewn about. It was in this manner that she first learned about The Boy, setting into motion an entire sequence of events that no one could have foreseen.
    Gwenny and her brothers made their initial flight to the Anyplace when they were of a certain youthful age. There they had many great adventures, including notable and epic confrontations with Captain Hack, who eventually went to his end in the jaws of a beastly serpent. They then returned home, Vagabonds in tow (“Vagabonds” being the group name for The Boy’s followers—parentless young boys gathered by The Boy to return to the Anyplace and accompany him in an endless reverie of unending childhood). The Vagabonds were adopted by Gwenny’s parents and put on the path to the inevitable destruction that is called maturity.
    A year later, The Boy returned and brought Gwenny and her brothers back to the Anyplace for spring cleaning, just as he had promised…although it should be emphasized that time moves very differently in the Anyplace than it does in our own world, and The Boy easily crammed a lifetime’s worth of adventures into the same period that Gwenny was cramming fractions, history, and astronomy.
    The positive aspect of this was that The Boy’s existence was one of constant challenge. The negative aspect was that, since Gwenny and her brothers were far less ambitious in their experiences, they were able to retain the knowledge of the things they learned; whereas events unfolded so quickly upon The Boy, and in such number, that they pushed one another out of his head. Gwenny was dumbfounded to learn, for instance—upon her eventual return to the Anyplace—that The Boy had no recollection of Captain Hack. The Boy didn’t consider this remotely unusual, explaining that he tended to forget people after he killed them.
    Even more shocking was that he had no recollection of Fiddlefix, the glowing pixie sprite who had been his constant companion. When Gwenny did all she could to stir his memory on the subject, he opined that she was probably dead, since pixies tended not to live for all that long.
    It was odd that this should have left Gwenny unhappy. Fiddle (as she was called) had done nothing to hide her disdain and dislike for Gwenny, and had even tried to engineer her demise on more than one occasion. To Gwenny, though, pixies were amazing creatures, and Fiddlefix was no less amazing than others of her sort. It had been almost touching how much she had wanted Fiddle to like her; and the fact that she would never be able to accomplish that aim weighed sadly upon her.
    That first spring cleaning visit was gloriously active otherwise; and, although The Boy’s forgetting about Hack and Fiddlefix distressed Gwenny, the Anyplace is such that sad memories tend not to linger. So Gwenny and her brothers were able to enjoy their share of experiences without too much concern about those missing from said experiences, both friend and foe.
    After that occasion and their return home, The Boy did not come back for her for several years, and when he did, he was unaware that he had missed all that intervening time. Gwenny’s brothers were absent, off on a school holiday, when The Boy came for Gwenny; but that did not daunt him, since he didn’t recall her brothers either. Indeed, it was miraculous and a measure of the depth of