"So I'm thinking of leaving soon," I tell the woman one evening. Late evening, both of us are technically supposed to be getting ready for bed, but the bed sits empty and my corner of the cabin only holds a staring child. I pace in front of the door.

"Leaving where?" she asks, bent behind the bed. Boxes scrape against the dirty floor.

I shrug. "Away from here. I'm not sure I should be here." Here, taking up space in your cabin, I don't add. Eating food offerings off your table.

"Oh? Why did you come here, anyway?"

My flighty fingers pick a miniature loaf of bread from the smooth table, roll it in my palms. "It was the next place up the coast, I suppose."

"My sister," the woman pushes herself to her feet against the bedframe, grass-green nightgown swishing. "She was a mage."

"Your niece's...?"

"No. Dauntless is my brother's child. Older. My sister and I were near the same age. Different mother, same father. He raised all three of us.

"My sister had narrow magic, she could pull a thread of water from the ocean and do marvelous things with it. Run it like a ribbon across my hands so rapidly I could swear it was a living, darting fish. I could see better back then. I remember the water sparkled," she chuckles, "but I can't see what that word means anymore.

"Back then we didn't know of things like empires or burners. They didn't arrive until we were fifteen. I remember, the day the news arrived, a trader from up the coast came and announced to the whole town that the parliament had been overthrown," the woman pauses, hands smoothing out the sides of her nightgown. "My father laughed about that," she sits on the corner of her bed, face tilted to the floor.

"Two days later the burners came. My sister was rounded up with the two other mages from our town, a pair of plant growers. All they ever did was grow luscious vegetables in their garden and win every contest at the harvest festival--mind you, we used to have a harvest festival," she rubs the dirty floor with callused heels, side to side and back and forth, over and over. "It didn't used to be like it is, one wrong work of magic and a whole town burned to ashes. Nay, sometimes I doubt there is any sort of magic that puts a whole city down.

"But back then. The burners captured just the mages and our fighting back did nothing, and they burned them in front of everyone. They had a law from the new Empress saying the town had to watch, and any who didn't could be hunted out and burned too.

"I couldn't see much. I grabbed my dad's wrist and couldn't even squint through the crowds. But I heard it. My sister's screams still ring in my ears at night," she slowly exhales.

I sink to the ground. Press the back of my skull into the wooden door frame. A breeze whistles through the crack by my ear.

"Death mage," she says shakily, "I mean to tell you, thank you. I know my sister is at peace now. I heard her, when you came for that child."

"Ghost flames," I whisper.

"She was okay. I don't hear her screaming anymore."

"Not many of those people," I whisper, the ceiling going blurry. "Most are very eager to scream from the fire."

"Yes. Well. I wouldn't know about that. Dauntless and I, as a thank you, we've been cleaning out her parents' old mattress. It survived the burners that recently took down this place, but it's been sitting in her cabin useless for months now. So we thought..." she shrugs. "It's stuffed with old animal down, which means it's been crawling with critters, it was a mess," she shivers.

"What'd I do for her?" my eyes sting.

The woman frowns. "What do you mean, what did you do for her? She saw her parents. She heard their voice again. What would you do to hear your parents speak to you one more time?"

I don't answer that. "Thank you," I say instead. "That's terribly generous of you."

"Not to mention you killed off all the burners. As evidenced by your magic not calling the rains of fire down on this town. Again."

"That wasn't..." my intention.

"So if it's not too much bother, at least you can stay and try out the mattress Yua and I nearly have cleaned up."

"Right," I glance over at the child, still staring numbly at the wall. "I suppose that would be good."

"Alright then," she kneels beside her bed, fumbling about beneath it. "I'm off for the walk I didn't get around to this morning. Feel free to make yourself comfortable. Get that child some food, I haven't heard him eat today."

"I'm aware," I mutter, the loaf of bread in my palms cracking in my grip. "And thank you."

She doesn't hear me, with my scooting away from the hinges and the door creaking open and her walking stick clattering the gravel road. She walks away, my gaze follows the texture of her blood, fingers ripping the bread into chunks to give to the child.

***

If the convoy of merchants thought it strange, dear dead, that you paid for space in their wagons, yet never did any trading of your own, yet never departed the wagon convoy to stay a few nights in any of the towns, and walked the whole way beside them--none of them mentioned it to you.

But, far between any towns, you overheard the merchants around the cooking fires speaking of staying in the mountains the whole winter to get away from an Empress's laws. Voices muttered solemn and gloomy, land trading had high taxes and what were those ridiculous laws about the "danger" of their wagon beasts?

Crouched as you were against the backside of a wagon, you didn't want to stay the whole winter in the mountains. But how to leave? Just get up and walk away? Staring at the blank spaces in the horizon where peak teeth bit the pinprick stars, you ate cold mushrooms, drank bland water--you had no desire to just get up and walk away. The road flowed before you and to break away meant peeling from the guiding current.

But, you could not stay in the mountains for a whole winter. Why stay? Those mountains had no town rekindling your memory, no solitary peak slicing through clouds, no grave for a girl named Jadiya you'd killed as a child. Not yet, anyway. But the further you walked the less you wanted to look.

However, you didn't quite trust yourself, to merely leave the wagons and walk all the way back to the Nunait. If mage-hunters came here (surely there were more mage-hunters), you wanted a whole string of wagons to stand in their way. If the road forked, you wanted someone who'd traveled these mountains many times to pick the right way. If the going was steep, you didn't want to carry all your belongings and your food on your back and somehow find a tent to sleep in to shield you from the galing winds.

Yet, just get up and walk away you did, the jet bird silent in your bag. You convinced yourself to do it by naming it step one of joining a wagon convoy going back the other direction, not embarking out on your own against the current of the road. You snuck from the merchants laughing around a dancing cooking fire. You slept in a rare stand of trees in the windswept valley, waiting for the textures of blood coming closer, waiting out the hours and the days beneath the blinding sun by weaving grass garlands and stringing them from crooked branches, stringing them up again when a jet bird tore them down with her talons.

When the first red wagon came close enough to make out the ricketing rhythm over the road, you packed your sack and knotted up your cloak and planted yourself in the dusty path. Asked the frowning wagon leader, reining the wagon animal to a halt, if you could join this convoy, and where was it going?

The dark-furred creature hitched to the wagon hissed at you, the beating heartbeat in your sack, with narrowed golden eyes. The wagon leader studied you up and down, her eyebrows furrowed, her dark lips pursed--you shifted between your feet, skin prickling.

"Run away from home?" she asked.

You parted your lips, confused--you thought yourself too old to be running away from home.

"Don't need details, sweetness. Seen your type before. We headed down to new-empress controlled lands. A seaport. Load your stuff," she jabbed a thumb behind her, "one cart back."

You shut your mouth, nodded, and lugged your supplies back one cart, heart skipping. At the second wagon, an animal handler helped heft your knotted cloak into the back of the open wagon bed. Thanking her, you tried not to frown at her smile, this strange politeness of strangers. You blinked in bafflement when she offered to help you into the wagon too, let you ride for free. You stepped up with her aid, you sniffled back tears at a total stranger who kept on smiling like she knew exactly everything you'd ever been through.

Which she didn't, of course. How could she? But you still rode from the mountains on the back of a wagon bed for free.

If you were truly guilty of what they believed, you might not have cried tears at their misplaced kindness. If their kindness was truly what the tears were for, you might not have dug into the pain in your side with every bump in the road, a punishment for whatever guilt you owed. If punishment was truly what you owed, maybe that's why you never found a town like home up there in the mountains.

***

Kneeling atop rumpled blankets, I sing for a child, quietly, lest the cracks in the cabin catch my exhales and carry them to a whole town.

The words I sang to him through a stone box have vanished from my mind. But the melody of a different time, a town by the sea where a pock-marked woman sang sadly for a funeral you and Aukai snuck into, floats through my heart. A syllable, lift, trilling up and down. I sing soft, of fleeting happiness, a sunbeam's warmth, a wave stretching forth. The lonely parts of the song that I remember scream like a sea screeching with ice, but I merely whisper the loudest sections, the lack warping of wrongness so irking to my skin, like my calves on scratchy blankets.

The song builds, faster. My lungs swoon as storm winds, for a moment, until I am empty of air and the melody goes on too complicated for me. But I remember. My heart yearns like a tide at a cliff side--stretch me further, obliterate this barrier to my soul. So I open my lips and start again, notes roll up and down my throat and I'm not very good at speaking like myself so they come out off-kilter.

I sing for a child. Not that he heeds, he stiffly bites bread and sips water and stares into a wall. My song stutters out. He pays no mind. Crumbs flutter from his lips to his brand new leggings, all black.

"What am I to do for you?" I whisper--in the Uqik tongue, not the language of this muggy coastline. "I saved you once, maybe twice, and I'm trying to hear you but I don't know how to. I don't know what you need. Could you please speak, but please don't shout, or try to murder more things. Child, why do I care for you like I do, why did I come back for you?"

He, for many reasons, doesn't answer. He swallows the last lump of crust and sips water and liquid stains his pale shirt and the shallow cup empties itself there. He stares at the wall, fingers pressed white against the clay cup. I love him for his small knuckles; I detest him for the water dribbling off his chin.

"I think it is because," I speak softly, "I inherited the viciousness of people who raised me. People came close to touching the ocean of me but withdrew at the ice. I inherited the kindness of strangers, people in a town who handed me tissues to my tears. I inherited many burned up homes and lost bones, child. And I see the way you ache. How you break, into pieces, into silence and anger. Child, this succession," I tap above my heart, between my collarbones, "I'm still finding how to heal from it too. We're not regal. But we're as powerful as continents and oceans, and whole words will never stop us, never scour us from screaming our memories."

The cup thunks to the quilts covering the dusty boards, and the child's eyes leak, two rivers to one dribbled chin to three gutters staining the floor.

"Whole worlds will never stop us."