Pillars of fire greeted your window, dear dead, over breakfast. You ate breakfast in bed, that is, staring at the fire because you couldn't believe your eyes.

You hadn't noticed anything outside when you'd woken up. Hence the trip downstairs to make breakfast of peeled snow witches and seal's fur herbs. Hence the humming while seated on the counter, eyes shut to imagine the steps of a Skeleton Cook not there to dance. Hence the eating at the table alone, too many chairs from who-knew-where an obstacle course to your feet.

Hence when Tatter-cloak shouted about a fire, you ran upstairs, plate in hand. Hence why you stared, then knelt on your bed and kept eating because that was vaguely calming, and certainly pretending.

Tatter-cloak sat across the room from you, shivering atop his bed, a blanket around his shoulders with ends tickling to the floor. You pretended this was a special occasion, breakfast in bed, that rarely happens, maybe you should have brought him a plate too.

That is, the frost orchards burned.

***

 Those first days in the house, dear dead, when it was only you, Tatter-cloak, and the silent pages of a third person, you tried teaching Tatter-cloak to carve drawings in a bone.

You had a few random bones, actually, kept on the shelves in the cave's stomach. Things stumbled upon while digging in the garden. Small animals frozen years and years ago, slowly brought to the surface by melting snow. The broken tibia--perhaps radius--you found with Rattle-bones, months before.

You taught Tatter-cloak etching with kitchen knives, dainty blades meant for peeling fruits--possibly--or maybe cutting meat from the bone. You had never used them.

You sat at the dining alcove, him in the only chair, you on the smooth wooden table. For a demonstration, you carved one end of a bone, carefully scratching with the knife's point. You carved out petals of a tundra flower, pointy things, yellow in the flower patches, pale white beneath your knife. "You want to go slow," you said, handing the bone to Tatter-cloak. "And start shallow, then gradually cut the lines deeper." You adjusted his fingers along the edges of the bone so he could work in the middle without any of his fingers turning to casualties.

Tatter-cloak nodded, eyes faintly wide, gripping the knife handle too tightly. But you didn't say anything, about that. Best to start with the basics.

In the afternoons you gardened, while Tatter-cloak sat in the sitting room with the queen's book. On the occasions you returned to the house for a knife, or a shovel, Tatter-cloak was often pacing, muttering, exclaiming whole phrases to scribe then shaking his head no, not good enough.

In the evenings Tatter-cloak taught you map language, using skins of peeled vegetables as poor paper. For ink you squeezed blood of red mosses you'd found beside the spice rows, for drawing you whittled thin bones to round points.

He explained squiggle markings represented water, like waves, the arrow in the top left indicated orientation with the rising of the sun at the equinoxes, the pointy angles represented mountains; and you did your best to listen, tried to picture mountainous landscapes sketched entirely from pointy red lines.

Then you slept, upstairs, with the jet bird, and Tatter-cloak slept on the couch; you laid awake in that house so empty (a skeleton, a false-but-true queen, a Rattle-bones), but at the same time so full (Tatter-cloak, a jet bird); you checked the glittering window above your pillow like the night would tell you if the garden you straightened up would last much past winter with the plans of a queen's book and an actual monarch sleeping in your downstairs.

As the days passed, Tatter-cloak's grip on the etching knife slowly relaxed, and his lines drew more clean and less hatch-marked. Less shaky. You learned to glance at the orange peel of a hemlock tuber and recognize a squiggly river descending from a peak of mountains, shadowed every morning.

One evening, standing across from each other at the counter island, Tatter-cloak asked if you had a whole skeleton. You blinked, asked why, it was map language time, not bone carving time.

"Oh, I just had a thought," they shrugged, ragged cloak hugged around their shoulders, foot tapping the base of the cabinets. "Something deep, probably flaky, about our bones holding our history."

You blinked again, red ink dripping from your drawing bone onto a cracked rock shell. The dot devastated a coastline.

"What if our ribs have a legend?" They pointed at the box in the corner of their vegetable skin map (which you were copying) on the cleared counter, with the indications of what each particular red squiggle meant. Calm river. Muddy terrain. Coastline.

"What if our ribs...have a legend?" you repeated, eyebrows furrowed.

"Yeah," they nodded. "The bone you gave me to carve, it has a lot of strange bumps in it. Some smooth creases, and this one pointy bit that I keep poking my thumb on," they held up said thumb for reference. A tiny red scab stared out from their evening-shadowed skin. "I just thought, 'what if that pointy bit represents a mountain'?"

You lowered your hand to the counter. "Okay. I don't have a whole skeleton to use for carving, though. Or, map reading."

"I mean," Tatter-cloak said, "maybe a mountain could represent a great achievement. Like when this imaginary person was four, and they ran to the top of a hill without falling down."

"That's a great achievement?"

"I bet for a four year old."

"...The great achievement of a four year old was important enough it stayed as a pointy bit in their rib bone throughout all the growth that skeleton went through?"

Tatter-cloak opened their mouth. Shut it again. And slumped forwards, elbows thumping the counter. "That does sound absurd, putting it like that."

You dipped your round bone into the pot of red moss ink between you both, then added a dot to the devastated coastline on the curved rock shell. "If it's a rib from a four year old's skeleton, that could be a great achievement," you said. "Maybe it would've faded as they grew older." Tatter-cloak quit moving. You glanced at them. "What?"

"That's so sad," they murmured. "A four year old's skeleton."

You poked your writing stick into the little pot again. "Four year old's do die too."

"I know that logically. But I don't want to think about it happening!"

You added more red dots.

"Why are you adding dots?"

"For the beach."

"Dots are for glaciers. Hatch marks are for the beach."

You blinked at the dots going all up the map's coastline, then at the legend in the corner of Tatter-cloak's map. "Oops."

"What if there was a mountain in a rib of a fifty year old?" Tatter-cloak tapped their lips. "Could that represent, maybe, overcoming the difficulty of a long winter ten years before?"

"Sure," you bit your lip at the map inside the curved rock shell, trying to figure how to save it.

"So you could learn a lot about a person's life that way."

"Sure," you said.

"I like that," they sighed. "Our whole lives recorded in our skeletons. Like we're a whole continent."

"Assuming it actually happens that way," you whispered, "I've never found a map legend to decipher the terrain of a skeleton." You rubbed your knuckles. You certainly didn't trace any mountains or glaciers or coastlines there, beneath your skin.

"Oh, let me believe," Tatter-cloak kicked the edge of the counter, gently. It still rattled your rock shell map, wet dots smearing. "I want to think all my memories will be recorded in my body, for some future historian to read."

You grimaced, carefully stretching glacier dots into hatch marks. "I think a future historian would frown at my skeleton."

"You don't know that."

"You don't not know that. I don't want a future historian to read my skeleton anyway."

Tatter-cloak's eyebrows slowly furrowed. "You'd be dead though, so you wouldn't know."

"Same for you."

"True, okay, yeah. But I still think it's fun to think about."

And what of Aqtilik's skeleton? What terrain did it possess, would it reveal that Kaliq never said her servant would be queen if the true queen died, was that line in the book entirely made up by the beneficiary?

That shouldn't matter; Aqtilik hid the truth so well as to erase herself, and yet...you wondered, does Tatter-cloak have any claim to the throne? Kaliq to Tatter-cloak makes a much cleaner line than Kaliq to Aqtilik-pretending-to-be-Kaliq to Tatter-cloak, sidelined by the madman who married Kaliq and his successor.

"I'm done with my map," you said.

"You're never done with a map," they flashed a dazzling smile. "That coastline, a glacier will eat it up in a year or two, then you'll have to re-do it."

You blinked and stared at your dots-turned-hatches, supposedly going to need redoing back into tiny dots in a year. "And you think skeletons can hold secrets that last decades?"

"You're the death mage."

"And you're the map person who wants to believe."

***

That is, the frost orchards burned. All through the morning, dear dead. Weeks after the death of the so-called king, weeks into asking how or if to get the palace city back. Weeks into spreading word of the so-called king's death, the correct ruler's reinstatement, according to the last queen's wishes.

The frost orchards burned, and all you could do was kneel in your bed, hold an empty plate in shaky hands, glance at Tatter-cloak's frozen expression halfway across the room, wonder if yours iced the same.

Out the window, the horizon leaked gray, into red, backdropping the towering orange and yellow flames, smoke obscuring the sky in a neat column. A neat column that stealthily spread wider with the winds.

You would be safe there, in the house. Heaping snowbanks covered the distance between you and the frost orchards. It was all so silent, through the window. Just colors dancing with each other, confined to the square pane of glass. If you leaned left or right the boundaries changed, a touch more sky, a layer more of snow, but still a square, nothing but a curtain-obscured picture on your wall. You could walk away, if you wanted to.

You whispered to ask if Tatter-cloak should help the army evacuate, if you should go help, but he shook his head. A monarch would only attract the attention of guards to whisk him away from the danger, when those guards could be doing more effective things. A death mage would only instill fright where there was already panicked chaos.

But there wasn't panicked chaos, you knew. You could trace the texture of all those hearts, all rather calm. You weren't quite sure, but the numbers seemed to have diminished since the last night. Slightly. You weren't sure, really. Surely, if the numbers were diminished, all those hearts wouldn't be so calmly waiting around.

Colors in the fire tried to form people for you, but you weren't close enough--that's what you assumed killed them off, anyway; the distance. A flash of magenta, consumed by clear orange. A boot stepping out of the yellow, to wither in curls of smoke. Flickering honey tongues morphing to clawed fingers, then disappearing in bright flatness.

"Do you think it was the Empress?" you whispered.

"Maybe it was an accident," he said.

You didn't think so. "Maybe," you said.

You held your shaky plate in two hands to stop them exploring outwards, for charred skeletons, for remnants of an Empress's army. You didn't need your hands for that, but you still clenched the ceramic plate with both of them, as if it would stop you.

"Do you think the frost orchards will survive?" you asked. "Or regrow, if they don't?"

"You're the mage, not me," he said, shivering in a blanket. It wasn't that cold, your skin hardly prickled with bumps. But maybe you could bring a rock up from the cave's stomach to warm the house. It'd been weeks since the last one.

"I'm a death mage. Not a frost orchard mage."

"What do they call the mage who made the frost orchards, anyway?" Tatter-cloak glanced at you, wrapping another thick blanket around their knees. "All I know is, the frost orchards helped civilization begin in this climate. But what kind of mage made them?"

"All I know is that they were made by someone who wanted to live forever," you leaned sideways to glimpse green flickers at the edge of the orange. The green faded before any recognizable shape emerged.

"Like a legacy?"

You shrugged. "Maybe. Or they actually thought their magic would keep them alive forever. Which clearly didn't happen."

"And the legacy is going up in flames right now too."

"I hope it grows back," you said.

"I never had time to fully appreciate the glowing lights," Tatter-cloak sighed. "I was too rushed this autumn with checking on the camps and the soldiers and trying not to be nervous about giving speeches."

You nodded to the pillow. "I always wanted to turn those fruits into a meal of some kind. Mix them with something sweet."

"That sounds nice."

"Maybe someday," you said.

"Maybe."

That is, the frost orchards burned.