Tier hopefully checks the fridge, but there’s nothing.
“Gnomes hate underground,” Rig says, and laughs a little. “And they wouldn’t leave food.”
“Maybe it was tightropers.”
“No ropes,” Tier says. “Maybe nymphs.”
“Tigerladies,” Beckan says. “Or backpackers. They carry their babies in their backs, have to cut themselves open to get them out, it kills most of them. Scrap’s mother was a backpacker. He has a mark on his back. That’s how he looks like her.”
“What about Josha?” Tier says, gently.
“Nymph. He likes water and he’s tall, fingers are longer. . . . I have
a gnome nose. But I’m no good at digging.”
“You don’t know that,” Rig says, and Beckan realizes that, no, she does not know that.
“What about Cricket?” Tier says.
She can’t remember.
Did she ever know?
She does not know what else Cricket was.
But then she thinks about his long, thin feet, his eyebrows always smiling even when the rest of his face was not, the way he wrapped himself around Josha like he was born to twist himself into Josha’s every nook, the time he balanced on the top of the headboard and walked all the way from one end to the other. . . .
“I think he was half tightroper,” Beckan says.
They give her small smiles.
She goes to the living room and finds a half-gnawed piece of taffy, a hair bow that a child would wear, a used but empty glass.
And then the sun shifts from behind a cloud and the entire cottage drowns in sunlight, and they all start to laugh, first with wonder and then with everything in them, because every surface of every room is covered with glitter. Glitter of fairies who were here, together, recently. Glitter of fairies who were alone and who sparkled and who were not ashamed.
Beckan drops to the carpet and rolls around in it, and she is stunned by how little time it takes before the other two join her, and they roll back and forth until Tier starts to sneeze, like Scrap, and suddenly she is crying so hard she can’t breathe.
Beckan is surprised to find out how little Tier and Rig knew about Scrap and what he had to do.
“It didn’t sound like there was a chance he was going to take the job,” Tier says. “He was . . . resigned to being eaten.”
Beckan shakes her head. “He told us he was going to take it.”
“He did?”
Now she can’t remember. “I told him to.”
“Oh.”
She hears Scrap’s voice now, saying No. She shakes her head hard. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
He had to take it.
He had to.
“Did you see what happened to Josha?” Tier says.
She is dizzy. “No. No, no.”
Because the whole city was dust and smoke and blood, and the last thing she can imagine surviving in all of that is a fairy. Especially when one is unruly and one is a little scrap.
“He’s . . . he’s got to be dead,” Beckan says. “They’ve got to both be dead.”
The gnomes don’t say anything.
She had heard someone call him King Scrap.
She does not know whether or not to cling to that.
Beckan looks around at the furniture, at the piles of glitter in the corners she’d thought were dust. “Maybe I’m the only one left,” she says.
“Then you’re a gnome now,” Rig says.
“I love you guys,” she says. “But I don’t know what I am.”
She tucks her chin on top of her knees and squeezes her eyes shut for a minute. She wraps her arms around herself and holds herself still and together. Hours ago, just hours ago, she was in her cottage. She hadn’t made her bed yet. There were dishes in the sink. And now it could all be gone, it could all be dust and rubble and just the tiniest bits of glitter and maybe she’ll just never know. Maybe she’ll make like a fairy and never go back, and it scares her that, for the first time, she really understands why someone might. She understands why those fairies at that meeting, so long ago, laughed at her and her pack because it was their first war.
How do you go again?
Beckan sleeps alone in one room and hears, through the walls, the sound of Rig and Tier doing the same in the other.
She scoots herself against the shared wall and presses her cheek against it. She hears one of them roll over in bed and nothing else.
“Do it,” she whispers. “Clothes off. Do it. Come on.”
After a while she can no longer stand it. She gets out of bed and wraps the sheet around herself because suddenly she is cold. She tries not to care that she is getting glitter all over it.
She pads through the house in bare feet and opens all the cupboards as if she is looking for something. But it isn’t until she cracks open a low one in the living room before she realizes that she has been, and here they are, three shabby books. She chooses the shabbiest.
It is too dark to read in her room, and she’s afraid that if she lights a candle the gnomes will smell the match and worry about her. So she sits on the bed and pretends she can read the words with her fingers, but these were printed like real books so she can’t feel anything. Not like Scrap’s notebook, with his bumpy left-handed writing that bleeds from page to page. Not like those stories that she already knows.
She has known them all. Even the ones that aren’t real. She has known them for a very long time.
She has known Scrap’s love story.
The next morning, hunger hits them at full force, and they whine their way around the house, checking all the cupboards Beckan opened last night for anything digestible. Beckan briefly considers eating her book.
They need more water, so they decide—or the gnomes decide, and Beckan exhaustedly agrees—to take a wide path back to their stream to see if they can track down anything alive. This phrasing worries Beckan.
Tier leads the charge through the fields, while Rig wanders off every so often in search of a flower to match one she has just found or because she thinks she’s seen something in the distance. Beckan stays with her, but then feels like she should be making conversation, and the truth is she still isn’t fully comfortable with Rig.
“I don’t think they’re dead,” Rig says, suddenly.
“What?”
“Any of them. Scrap almost certainly. With all the gnomes up on the ground like that, fighting again, he’d be an idiot not to pick a side. That side.”
“There was all that glitter. . . .”
“What?”
“You didn’t see it?”
Rig shakes her head. “But I was underground, so maybe . . .”
“I think they tore someone apart,” Beckan says. “I think . . . I think the glitter was someone being torn apart.”
Rig doesn’t say anything for a minute, then: “Scrap is fine. And Josha, almost as likely. Scrap would keep him safe.”
“And Piccolo?”
“Well . . . chances are the worst for him, because he’s a tightroper, and I heard all those teeth. . . .”
“Tightropers were getting eaten.”
“I think so. And he’s the son of a general . . . but maybe the tightropers are surviving okay. Or maybe they ran away. He could be safe.”
“Maybe.”
“And if he’s in the city, Scrap would look out for him too.” “Scrap hates him.”
“There’s a big difference between hating someone in peace and hating someone during war.”
That is the truest thing Beckan can ever remember hearing.
It’s the same reason Josha and Scrap’s fighting has nothing to do with whether they will keep each other safe. Josha held Scrap when he cried over the dishes. They are in the same pack.
“Still,” Beckan says. “Even if they did all survive initially, there’s no guarantee. There could be bombs going off, one of them could be crushed, shot, torn up. . . .”
“I don’t hear anything, do you?”
> She doesn’t. She isn’t sure if that means anything—how could she be, when she has only the vaguest idea of how far they are from Ferrum?—but she lets it comfort her just the same. The truth is, now that the immediate shock of yesterday has sunk back below the surface, something in her feels that her pack is alive.
It is stupid and she can’t explain it, but she feels as though she would know if they weren’t.
She would feel as though she has lost an arm.
Beckan says, “Why aren’t you sleeping with Tier?”
Rig looks almost as surprised at the question as Beckan is.
“Oh,” she says.
“I’m sorry.” Beckan shakes her head. “It’s really not my business.”
But Rig sits down and looks at her, and Beckan can tell that she’s meant to sit too. She feels, very suddenly and deeply, like a prostitute, for the first time in months. Like Rig has hired her to sit down.
It’s so, so sad.
The feeling is gone as soon as Rig offers her hand. Beckan sits next to her, and Rig does not wipe the glitter off her hand, and Beckan notices immediately. Of course she does.
She realizes, really, that she did not like being a prostitute.
“It was just a sudden question,” Rig says. “We can talk about it.”
“I said I’d help you and I guess I haven’t really.”
“You have, though.” She rubs her feet in the dirt. “You’re so lovable, Beckan, and seeing you with Scrap . . . I want what you guys have.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “No. You don’t.”
“I do.”
“We don’t have anything. I don’t know what we have.”
“You are wrapped around each other,” Rig says. “When one of you moves, the other does too.”
“We strangle each other.”
“You keep each other warm. That’s what I mean. I want it to be ugly and complicated. I want to . . . not see Tier, and know that I have to spend the rest of my life with him, that this is my partner forever, that everything is . . . set.”
“Break up with him.”
“No, no! I want to spend the rest of my life with him. But it’s scary, too . . . I don’t know. I don’t know how to be okay with being a person who just wants what she’s supposed to want. It’s hard to be in love with the boy I was betrothed to and not feel like it’s just because someone told me I should be. Doesn’t that make me . . . boring?”
Beckan laughs a little. “Love should be more boring.”
Rig smiles at her. “I love him. I really do.”
Beckan smiles back.
“But I’m afraid I won’t be good enough to keep this future that I want. That I’ll mess it up, and I’m not good enough. It’s . . . hard, looking at you, Beckan. Imagining you sleeping with him.”
“It was a job.”
“But you’re cute and loud and funny and . . . and you kept him going through the war, and now I have to take your place, and I have to do that forever if I’m going to stay with him.”
“You don’t have to take my place. You have to be you.”
Rig doesn’t say anything.
“Rig,” Beckan says. “Don’t ever let a whore make you feel like you’re not good enough.”
Tier comes running back to them with a lamb, no more than a few weeks old, cradled in his arms. “Look!” he says. Beckan wonders if she has ever really seen him smile.
He says, “Look who’s lost too!”
To Beckan’s relief, they decide not to eat the lamb.
“She’s too small,” Tier says. “She wouldn’t last us a meal. Maybe for Beckan.”
“Please, no,” Beckan says.
“She’s not enough to be worth it. Animal meat doesn’t do much to sustain us,” Tier says. “Not as much as . . . you know. Other things.” He clears his throat, but this isn’t anything Beckan didn’t already know. Tier used to grumble, whenever she pissed him off, that he could eat one of her fingers and live longer than he could if he went rogue and devoured ten of his own kind. It was a comforting kind of teasing. If he was ever going to do it, after all, it wouldn’t be because they’d calmly discussed it.
“So we’ll raise her and milk her,” Tier says. “Find her a mate.”
“That will take weeks,” Rig says. “At least.”
And so they develop a routine. Tier goes out during the cooler parts of the day, looking for more animals. Rig tends to the lamb. Beckan digs up things from the ground that she thinks she can cook and makes them all soup that none of them can tolerate beyond a few spoonfuls. She hates herself for occasionally visually butchering the lamb.
They save energy where they can, which, for Tier and Rig, means that they still do not sleep together, and for Beckan means that she spends a lot of time on the porch, in the rotting rocking chair, reading through the old books.
She reads a poem that says nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands, and she thinks that she probably knows someone with hands even smaller, and she drifts off and remembers finally that the day she realized how small Scrap’s hands are was the same day Cricket died.
She’d teased him for it. He’d smiled back, not embarrassed, not amused, only full of expectation, because they both knew what was going to happen and it was inevitable enough to be unbearable, and his hair was wet from the shower and she had only half her makeup on so there was something entirely perfect about them, half finished and half naked, but they had to go to work so it would have to wait, and Cricket was already out the door, yelling for them, but he could already taste I mean she could already taste his skin and how his lips would feel and how hard it was going to be to wait just a few hours but they had to, and it would only be a few hours. That was the day.
She is tired and hungry and hot, and she should want desperately to go home, but what she wishes now is not that she was with him but that he was with her, and that they could stay here forever, and also that he would bring food with him, and she laughs.
14
Soon, though, reality creeps in on them. After a few more days, Tier is too weak to go out searching, their lamb is no bigger, and Beckan has dug so many holes around their cottage that they trip whenever they step outside, but there are no more vegetables or weeds that look as though they may be persuaded into becoming vegetables.
They are dizzy. They lie on the floor in heaps, alternately drawn together for comfort and pushed away in frustration.
“We have to eat something,” Tier says.
Beckan feels their eyes on her.
“We have to eat something,” Rig repeats.
Beckan sits up. “I’m going for a walk,” she says.
Tier says, “It’s after dark.”
“I’ll be fine.” She totters on her feet when she stands up. “I’ll take it slow.”
But she doesn’t. She runs.
With every bit of energy left in her, she runs.
She was so stupid. She was happy to be here. She thought she was living in some kind of dream. She thought they would find food and it would be fine.
Tier and Rig would rather not eat her, but this is what they were made to do. The two of them can survive on her body for a long time. She could never eat one of them. She wouldn’t. She would die first.
Will Scrap have to eat fairies now that he is king?
What is she thinking? There are no fairies.
She can’t run far before she has to stop and pant. She’s just so hungry.
She never thought she would die like this. Deep down, she assumed she would someday be eaten; that’s how most of them go, eventually. But she’d pictured it in a struggle. She would die fighting for her life. The bits of her left over would kick, bite, hurt however they could. She would not give up, not down to her last speck of glitter.
Bits of her would stay conscious forever, and why did that ever sound like a blessing?
She will someday be lost.
She watches the pieces of glitter on the ground behind her. If she concentrates so
, so hard, she can make them move.
She’s left pieces of herself everywhere already.
She never thought she would die like this.
She straightens up and looks out into the distance. It is hill after hill after hill, but the stars—
The stars never looked like this at home.
Away from the lights of the city, away even from the dim lights of the cottage, there is nothing glowing but Beckan’s glitter and the stars. She feels small and safe in the mouth of the universe.
Her body is hers, and it is hers to give away. And giving a bit of herself to someone she loves will be the exact opposite of being a prostitute.
“A little,” she tells Tier and Rig, panting from the run back. “You can have a little.”
“I wish we had alcohol or something to give you,” Rig says. She is in charge of holding Beckan still, but right now she is only sitting at the table, stroking her hair. Beckan is on her back on the table, her eyes already closed and her shoe already off.
“Do it fast?” Beckan says.
Tier nods. He is concentrating on Beckan’s foot.
“Are you sure a knife wouldn’t be better?” Beckan says. Weakly.
“Our teeth are much stronger than that.”
She tries not to think about how strong their teeth are. About how easily Cricket was devoured. About how quickly the two of them could crush her down to glitter and powdered bone.
She holds Rig’s hand.
“It’ll just take a second,” Rig says.
“But then it will keep hurting.” Beckan does not want to cry, but she thinks she probably already is. “It’s not going to stop hurting as soon as the toe’s off. It’ll keep burning for so long.”
“Scrap managed,” Tier says.
And Beckan stops crying. “Okay.”
Rig leans over her and holds her tight, and Tier’s teeth come down quickly and precisely, and he bites off her biggest toe.
She screams. She feels it shoot all the way up her leg and into her hip bone, she feels fire as if Tier has cauterized her, she feels her throat sore from crying when she has hardly started.