* * *
When the girl woke, Argento was already gone, his blankets twirled in a nest, not even warm. The tent flap was open. She saw clammy sunlight on the deserted fire-ring. A yellow streamer tumbled across the field. A dog barked, a lone sheep in a bridle stalked past on shorn and twiggy limbs. Then, high above, almost like a breeze, came the roars of men in the distance. She raised herself on her elbows and listened. Metal ringing against metal. Fighting. She pulled the blanket back over her head and underneath it was moist, coppery, the smell of testicles. She could not sleep and she shivered, and soon she heard thumping hooves outside, then the chain-clank of wagons being dragged past by teams of horses. The men were hiding everything magical: all the gypsum and the glass and the mirrors, the hanging charms. Still Argento didn’t come for her and she felt like a fawn in the weeds—like her mother used to say—hide and wait for me, hide and wait. But when her brother finally stuck his head through the flaps, her heart popped, and she realized she’d been hoping he was dead.
“It’s some other carnival.” He had blood on his cheeks, his lips, a foolish grin. “They want this field, but we’ve had this field ten years now. I helped take it, and sure as shit I ain’t about to let it go.”
“The carnivals don’t start for a month,” she whispered. “Why do they want it now?”
He shrugged. The blood on his hands was gritty and black; he snatched her wrists and pulled her into the morning. He shook her. “This is dangerous. I got to put you in with the Heads—Storch is pulling all the wagons into a ring to make them defensible.” He looked at her, her nightshirt, colorless fabric, and her knobby body beneath it. She felt him looking as though she were looking at herself. He wanted to protect her, not because he cared for her but because he wouldn’t abide anyone taking anything from him. He rubbed the thin fabric between his fingers. “Don’t let me catch you out once I put you away. Doesn’t matter what happens. If I catch you out—”
A man staggered past, half his face hidden under red-purple pulp; clubbed. His destroyed head was a flower. She didn’t want to look, didn’t, but she did. Storch. He was bent double but glaring up at them as though they had hurt him, like he deserved more than this death, and she thought of Cosmas the Uncrusher, and wondered why anyone would execute a man who could heal. Storch’s blood made her feel nothing. That seaweedy smell of gore, though, reminded her of when her mother practiced surgeries on dogs. She was thankful when Argento flung her aside to steady his friend. “Fuck!” Argento said. “Storch! What happened?”
A shattered skull. There was nothing to stop the bleeding. Storch wept, his eyes peculiar bright blue orbs. It would not be long before the blood was gone. He glowed the way dying people do. She dimly recalled that Storch was her brother’s business partner, that they shared the same wagon and two bony yellow horses, but somehow, at that moment, the thought made no sense. She stared at the two of them tangled together, at Argento cradling Storch’s head and cursing. He motioned her away and screamed, “Get to the wagon. Now!”
She couldn’t move. Finally he kicked her.
As she stumbled across the camp, among the pikes and ribbons and dead hair blowing in the wind, she passed a pierced horse, men scrambling for more weapons, an old woman staring into her tent as though trying to decide what to save. She passed empty booths, devoid now of their wares. Above her, a flock of birds. Storch had already circled the wagons at the bottom of a slight hill, on the other side of the field, this field that lay upon the earth like an unfurled scroll. She could not have imagined this place before she saw it, the highness of the land, or maybe it was nearness of the sky; she felt she saw it now for the first time, even though she’d been here before. She heard the fighting better now, could even see bodies beyond a copse of trees, past the border-fires. People rushed by but no one looked at anyone.
Halfway to the wagons, she passed a tent, and beside the tent stood a man. He was not quite tall, perhaps her brother’s age, with a slick knot of black hair and a long curved knife. Clean, the knife, and him. A vest buttoned halfway up and leather boots with brass buttons. He was strange looking, not like anyone she’d ever seen before, so her stomach lurched and she stopped involuntarily. But he was just standing, staring across the field, at the shapes shrieking and colliding beyond the trees. Like he’d stopped mid-stride to bask. He wasn’t smiling but she got the terrifying impression he could smile at this fight. The girl turned to run but he’d already seen her and grabbed her and stuck the knife at her throat.
He didn’t speak for the longest moment, but held her eyes, held them, and exhaled a word, nonsense, or maybe something in a magician’s language. Then he laughed. Why was he laughing? His fingers around her arm hurt. She drew back as far as she could but he tilted his head and regarded her gently, with eyes like an illustration in a book—he was from far away, she realized, except when he spoke his accent was familiar. Her innards pitched at the sound—home, Florida. “What’s your hurry?” he said. “I don’t often see
