I am a small thing in a world of giants.
I know them well, the giants whose house I hide in; I even know their names, though I mustn’t say them. To say a thing’s name is to summon it, and if I drew their attention they might find out I’m here, and then what would happen? I don’t know and don’t want to find out.
So they are the Mother-Giant and the Father-Giant, and the Son-Giant and the Daughter-Giant, and the Littlest Giant who was only born this very summer. The Mother-Giant is still and quiet and graceful and keeps her eyes low. The Father-Giant is large and loud and merry and never sits still at all, except when the Mother-Giant gets in one of her moods and flinches at every sound or movement; he can be as still as she is, then, and hold her very gently, for he hates to frighten her.
The Son-Giant stands as tall as his father’s chest and loves to scamper around and hit things with sticks, particularly the Daughter-Giant if he can catch her, though he usually can’t. The Daughter-Giant was the smallest of them until this summer when Littlest arrived to compete for the title; she stands as tall as her mother’s waist, now, though I remember when she had trouble peeking over the edge of the dinner table.
The Daughter-Giant saw me once, when I was slow to hide. She told her mother there were fairies in the garden and her mother told her very seriously that fairies are wise and proud and ancient and you mustn’t draw their attention by speaking of them lightly, even if you think you have seen one. I am not at all ancient; I think I must be younger than the Daughter-Giant, because I don’t remember her being born the way I do with Littlest, and Littlest’s birth was very memorable and if the Daughter’s was at all like it I don’t believe I could have forgotten if I’d tried. I do not think I am particularly proud, either, and if I have any wisdom I’ve never noticed it.
Apart from that, the only Giant who has seen me is Littlest, who is very sensibly afraid of the dark. If the Parent-Giants put him to bed too late, he’ll keep them up crying, unless I hide in the rafters above his crib and sing to him very quietly. I weave the softest possible light around him, half illusion so only he can see it, but real enough to guard him against the terrors of the night-time. I can nearly always get him to sleep, that way, although sometimes I get tired before he nods off, and then the Parent-Giants wonder why he started crying again just when they thought they were safe. I think it is still better that I try, though.
I’m worried that this will be one of those evenings, because the sun is slipping out of sight of the window and the Father-Giant isn’t home yet. The Mother-Giant sits in the chair by the fireplace with the best view of the front door and twists her hands together in her lap, and then picks up her knitting needles and stitches a few rows, and then puts them down again, and then picks them up. She’s afraid for him, and so am I.
But the door opens just as the last sliver of sunlight is wavering on the wall. The Father-Giant hurries inside, muddy and disheveled and carrying a lit lantern. He looks hunted and haunted and not at all like himself. The door swings firmly shut behind him; he bars it, and hangs his lantern carefully from its hook, and wrestles out of his muddy coat and boots and leaves them on the floor and rushes to the Mother-Giant to sit at her feet and lay his head in her lap like the Daughter-Giant after a bad dream.
“Bad?” murmurs the Mother-Giant. The Father nods, shivering. She pets his hair, the way he does with her when she’s frightened. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him frightened before. I don’t think I have, not like this.
He clears his throat, and then does it again, and then sits still for a long moment while the Mother-Giant strokes his hair and makes soothing sounds; and then he says, “He’s gone. They both are.”
The Mother-Giant stiffens. I huddle on my rafter and hug my knees to my chest. I don’t see much of the Neighbour-Giants, who are two Brothers I can hardly tell apart, but Father goes out hunting with them most days. Went out with them, I guess. I guess he won’t be doing it anymore.
“I saw the dark take them,” he whispers, and the Mother-Giant hugs him and murmurs his name over and over.
The Son-Giant rattles down the stairs, and stops abruptly when he sees them. “Father…?” he says uncertainly.
The Father-Giant takes a deep breath and heaves himself to his feet. I huddle even smaller, pulling my cloak uncomfortably tight over my wings to hide their shine. I listen to him explain to his son that the neighbours—he calls them by name—aren’t there anymore. “We didn’t see anyone else all day,” he says, to both of them. “It was just us. I think—I think we might be the last.”
“There was going to be a caravan…” the Mother says softly.
“I know. It’s a week late, now. I don’t know if it’s coming. I don’t know if there’s anyone left to send it.”
“We should’ve gone with the last one,” says the Mother-Giant, hugging herself tightly, hunching over and rocking back and forth. “Should have gone with the one before that. Should have gone with the Chandlers when they left at the end of summer and took half the town with them, only there was the baby—”
“I know,” the Father-Giant repeats, gently. “I know. I’m sorry. I know.”
“Missus Gardner could’ve ridden in the back of a wagon and the Stoddards got no use out of all that gold and, and we should’ve gone, we should’ve gone we should’ve gone we should’ve gone. We should’ve gone years ago.”
“It was barely a rumour then,” he says. “I hadn’t met anyone who’d seen it with their own eyes.”
“Well now it’s eaten half the town—how close is it—”
“We should go tomorrow at first light to get all the lamp-oil out of the cache on Holly Lane,” he says. “You can see the edges from there, now.”
The Mother-Giant shivers. “Fetch your sister,” she tells her son. “We should—we should do the reading now.”
The last of the sunlight disappears as she says it.
The Father-Giant sets the lantern in the middle of the dinner table and the Mother-Giant gets out the book and opens it and marks down two new names at the end. They put Littlest up on the tall chair so he can see over the table, and the other four hold hands and bow their heads, and the Father-Giant reads out the names one by one. They’re dead, now, and as far as I know the dead don’t come when called, but I still don’t like to say their names. It feels—not mine. It’s a Giant thing, calling out for those who cannot hear you. I take too much from the Giants already; what right have I to their dead?
His voice shakes, when he gets to the end, and just this once I huddle in my handkerchief cloak and whisper the names along with him. He seems like he needs the support.
The family turns in for the night, and I creep into the bedroom once the night-lantern has been set on its hook and the four of them have settled into their assorted beds to wait out Littlest’s frightened cries. I climb across the ceiling to sit right above the crib, and I wrap my cloak around myself so that only my eyes are uncovered, peeking down over the edge to see my work. I sing, as softly as possible, of the gentle moon wrapping frightened children in silver blankets. The moon is a waning sliver tonight, too faint to calm the baby with its light, but I sing moonbeams until Littlest relaxes in their soothing glow. Then I climb back out of the room and up into my nest in the east wall, where a tiny crack will alert me to sunrise.
In the morning, the Father-Giant takes the Son-Giant out to retrieve the lamp-oil he spoke of. They’re gone until early afternoon. The Son-Giant is shaken, when they get back, and doesn’t once try to hit his sister with a stick. I’ve seen him go out with the Father-Giant before, when the day’s expedition was supposed to be very safe, but I don’t think he’s seen the edge of the dark before and he clearly wishes he could have avoided it longer. I wonder what it’s like. I think I would rather not find out.
A week later, I see it from the garden.
There’s a tree in the back corner, spreading its leafy branches triumphantly over the flowers it killed with its shade. I don’t like to go near it, but it’s a steady place to perch and some of the tallest bits stand higher than the roof and I want to look for the Father-Giant, who said he was scouting east to see if he could find a house that hadn’t been picked over yet. I fly up up up, wings sparkling in the early morning light, and stand at the top of the tree and look east, and I don’t see the Father-Giant but I do see the edge of the dark.
I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t know how to make the thought of it fit in my head. It’s dark, yes, but that’s not all it is. I’ve peeked out the windows at night, even climbed up on the roof under the moon, and the thing about the dark of night is that there are still things in it. Stars, on a clear enough night, and the silhouettes of rooftops. Trees and grass and cobblestones, even if they’re mostly smudges.
In the dark, in the true dark, there is none of that. Its edges lap at the sunlit streets, and I know I probably can’t see them creeping closer inch by inch, not at this distance, but it feels like I can. And I can’t see past it; for all I know, there’s nothing past it but more dark. It can’t be that it eats things right up the moment they touch it, because when a wave of it rolls closer and then retreats again, the stone it uncovers is only a little dimmer than before. But for all I can see with my own eyes, that whole end of town might be gone. The market square and the clock tower and the one house with a bright red roof amid all the grey and brown, that I saw once the last time I flew this high. All of it, taken by the dark.
I flutter back inside and find a good hiding spot where I can see the Mother-Giant clearly. She’s knitting again. Something for Littlest, I think; I can see the beginnings of a baby-giant-sized sleeve. She keeps stopping and staring across the room for long minutes and then starting again.
The Father-Giant comes back that night with a sack full of food, and the whole family gathers around the dinner table to open a jar of fruit preserves and put all of it on bread and eat it right there. I’ve seen the Mother-Giant counting and recounting the contents of the pantry, making soups and stews to stretch each vegetable out to twice its natural lifespan, fretting in her quiet way when the Father-Giant couldn’t find anything more to eat for a few days; I don’t understand why they’re doing this.
But then I see the smile on the Mother-Giant’s tired face, and the way the Father-Giant leans back in his chair to rest, and the Son-Giant drumming his hands on the table like he hasn’t done for a week, and I think perhaps they needed something good for now. I think… I think perhaps they aren’t trying so hard anymore to save things for later.
The Daughter-Giant is the last of us to set foot in the garden. She’s gone there every day for as long as I can remember, but when the dark gets close enough to lap at the hedges and swallow the farthest branches of the tree, her mother tells her that it’s not safe to go outside anymore. She cries for hours, and the Mother-Giant holds her and rocks her and agrees with her that the world is a terribly unfair place, in a thin tired voice that sounds like she’s not far from bursting into tears herself.
The family gathers around the table that night, and reads out the book of names, and eats the last of the fruit preserves on the not-far-from-last of the bread, and I see the look in the Daughter-Giant’s eyes as her father carries her up to bed, and I’m not surprised, after the rest of them have gone to sleep, to hear the Daughter-Giant tiptoeing down the stairs. I slip out of my nest and hide in the rafters to watch. Sure enough, she goes to the back door, peeks out the window beside it, then turns the handle as quietly as she can and takes a step outside.
The dark is closer than it looked. One step out the door, and she’s gone, swallowed by the crushing absence of light.
For a moment I’m frozen, and then, in desperation, I call out her name.
“Lily!”
It’s too much. I am only a very small thing, and there is so much in this name, in this daughter of giants, and there simply isn’t enough of me to contain it all. I can taste her bright bitter fear, and the despair waiting underneath it, ready to claim her along with the dark. I can feel the warmth of the love in her heart, that drove her to open the door for one last look at the place where her flower once grew, one last chance to say goodbye to the garden she loved. I see her whole life in one single jumbled moment, a baby smaller than Littlest is now, a toddler clutching her mother’s skirts for balance, a child running from her brother, being swooped up in her father’s arms—and the garden, the garden she loves—the garden the dark has taken from her—
I gather all the courage in my tiny heart, and I open my mouth and sing, as loud and bright as I can. I sing Lily’s name, the whole of it, though it feels like I might burst from trying to hold the vastness of her in my small body. I drop my cloak and stretch out my wings, and I sing every ray of sunlight I’ve ever felt warming them, until I shine brighter than I ever have. My light pushes back the dark, until I can see the edge of her skirt—until she can see me, shining through the veil of darkness—and in a rush of sudden hope, she turns back, following that beacon, and struggles through the dark back into the house. Even just at the very edge of it, I can feel how it holds her back, clings to her, weighs her down until she can barely take a step.
I hear footsteps clattering down the stairs into the room, and the Mother-Giant, moving faster than I’ve ever seen her, darts forward to grab her daughter’s hand and pull. The Father-Giant is only a heartbeat behind, and hauls them both back from the door, trailing gluey strings of darkness.
Exhausted, I flop over onto my cloak, letting my light fade to its usual glimmer. I feel like I just tried to fly to the sun. I’ve never been tireder in my life.
And below me, Lily… flickers. Like a guttering candle. The darkness that still clings to her reaches out with misty tendrils, coiling them around her mother’s hands, her father’s neck.
No. Absolutely not.
I sit straight up and call her name again, let it fill me with the vibrant colours of her soul. I sing the green of her favourite dress which is also the colour of the leaves on the tree that killed her flowers. I sing the flowers she loved, and her mourning for them. I sing this house, her home, all four and a half rooms of it, the table in the corner that she recently grew too tall to hide under, the jar of fruit preserves she shared with her family not so very long ago. I hardly feel myself falling out of the rafters, because there’s too much song in me, too much Lily, and not enough left to pay attention to my body with. I hardly feel the wondering hands that catch me.
Lily has curly black hair that glows a little red in the sunlight, when there’s sunlight. She has dirt under her fingernails and a scrape on her knee from tripping over a rock. She has eyes, two of them, and only one can see at the moment, but I know the right shape of her and I sing it until the darkness clears. She’s staring at me and I see myself through her, a tiny girl curled up in her father’s hands, wearing a dress sewn from tattered rags, ringing like a bell and with wings made of sunlight. I feel her think to herself that she did so see a fairy in the garden. I feel her shiver and cling to her mother, and the numbness where the dark still has her, and I sing and sing and sing until she can feel every single one of her toes, and I see through her eyes how the darkness is reaching for her parents, and I feel how scared she is for them, and how she struggles with the hope that maybe this little sun-fairy can somehow shine bright enough to save them, and I can’t help myself; I sing them too.
If I thought Lily’s life was too much for me—!
Henry Brook is thirty-two years old and has been with his wife for twelve of them, and he loves her more than he’s ever loved anything in all thirty-two years of his life, except for his children who he somehow manages to love even more. My voice cracks, breaking from the strain of trying to carry all that history. Thirty-two summers and winters and springs and autumns, thirty-two birthdays, and I cough and squeak and gasp and sing them all, every last one of them. I sing the moment last month when he saw his friends die, and I sing the moment he met them, a decade ago—I sing the decades, three of them, each impossibly long to me on its own—and the darkness recedes, and I daren’t take a moment to rest.
Annette, a pure bright note ringing through me, one year younger than her husband. I see the terrors of her childhood, and the echoes she carried with her into the person she is today. I see her looking at me, and thinking to herself that she never really believed in fairies, and I feel the tears stinging her eyes as she remembers how this little impossibility sang her daughter back out of the dark.
My whole body hurts and I feel utterly desperate to breathe and I’m not sure I remember how, and the dark is closing in, I feel it pressing against the edges of my light, creeping through the walls—my voice falters, and my glow with it, and I am such a small thing, such a tiny thing, neither ancient nor wise, there can’t possibly be enough light in me to stand against the weight of all this dark, but if I don’t, what will?
I sing the light again. Sun and moon and stars, flickering candles and blazing hearths, the cold grey glow of a winter sky, the red of sunset and the pink of dawn. I sing Lily and Henry and Annette, and Henry hands me to his wife so he can pick up his daughter and carry her upstairs, and we all huddle together in the bedroom, the five Giants and me, as the dark eats away at the walls. It comes up through the floor and I push it back with the memory of a summer morning when the sun was so bright I could hardly look at the sky. The Son-Giant’s name is Peter and there’s a coil of darkness reaching for him and I sing it away, sing him back to us, sing the restless energy that drives him to chase his sister around with sticks and the slow recent realization that maybe there are reasons to stop that besides being told so by his mother, sing his terror when he first saw the dark and his deeper, more despairing fear when his parents ran down the stairs after his sister and he thought he might never see them again. I sing Charles, the Littlest, a scrap of life so small and new that it almost doesn’t hurt to carry him in my voice.
I sing and sing and sing, naming the Giants one after the other, seeing through their eyes how I tremble with exhaustion and still keep singing. The floor gets worse and worse until they all pile together into the Parents’ bed to get away from it, and even in my sunny glow no one can see the floorboards, and they huddle closer, and closer still, and still I sing. We lose the walls, and the windows, and the headboard. I sing life and light back into numb feet and dark-touched elbows. I’m spinning through names so fast I start to lose track of where one ends and the next begins, because I couldn’t stand to lose any of them, my Giants, and the dark is waiting to claim them if I leave one alone for a moment. Lily and Henry and Annette and Peter and Charles, and there’s nothing in the world but the five of them, and me, and a fading circle of blanket. Lily and Henry and Annette and Peter and Charles and it hurts to keep singing this long, it started out hurting and it’s only hurt more since, and I don’t know how long I can keep going like this, and I can’t let myself rest for a moment because if I do I don’t know that I can start again. Lily and Henry and Annette and Peter and Charles and they’re all hungry and thirsty and tired and crying and I too would like to eat and drink and sleep and cry and I wrap my voice around them all and remind their bodies how to be well-fed and watered and wakeful and healthy and strong, though I hardly remember the feeling myself.
We hear the caravan before we see it, my Giants and I.
The sound of a bell, an ordinary brass bell, carries through the dark to us; and the part of us that is Henry bellows back, as loud as he can, calling for help. They come with lanterns and crowbars, tearing through the melting ruin of the house until they find us, and the part of us that is Annette sees the part of us that is me shiver and go limp, my endless song faltering, the light going out of my wings. I feel her wonder if I’m even breathing, and hold me up to her face to check, and through her eyes I see her tears dripping down onto my still and silent form; and I think perhaps I feel them landing, and then I don’t feel anything at all.