I dragged my unconscious escort back to the building I'd been cleaning. I stashed vegetables in a sack of "cleaning supplies" in an adjacent building, then returned to dust the rest of a long table. When the guard woke, I was slowly sweeping dust out the doorway past him. I quietly asked if he remembered who punched him. He grimaced, glared out into the street, by which I took as a recollection of where it happened. Of course, I admitted, I had swept out his legs. I blamed that on instinct, people didn't normally grab me.

I told him she worked for the Jani empress. I told him she threw the punch. I asked, what does the king hold over you, to keep you here as a dull guard for a confined queen? You know the Jani empress is coming here, don't you?

He didn't answer me. Instead, he used the wall to heave himself to his feet, rubbing his forehead. The rest of the day he stayed my silent shadow; when I returned to the palace, when I crept quietly back to my rooms.

***

The mage who built the city arranged pipes up and down the walls of the palace, to funnel clean water up from the ground and siphon down the dirty. With magic from an ancient mage involved, it was natural that none of our engineers could figure out how the pipes worked or where the clean water came from.

Another reason the Nunait deserve no Jani empress--maybe one day, free of her, we could figure out how to replicate those pipes and share the engineering in our towns.

Of course, the pipes tend to freeze for over half the year. Perhaps the all-powerful ancient mage hadn't considered that.

The night after the messenger and her bird, Aqtilik and I pooled all our notes in the bathroom. We didn't talk, for guards waited outside the bedroom doors and we were supposed to be sleeping. We scribbled to each other in coded words, how she had found more letters hidden in the king's private chambers, detailing a timeline. We had a week before an army came to our city.

I told her of the woman I met in the streets, a messenger from the Jani Empress. I told her of the letter, which I stuffed back under the bird's saddle, whose contents told of arrivals of forces on the Nunait shores, how the army coming to the city would discern the signs of the king's surrender.

We ripped our charcoal scribbled papers to shreds and stuffed them down the marble basin drain. No records, no echoes, just shreds to clog the water pipes. We hugged quietly on the cold floor, scented vaguely like sweaty feet and sharp herbs. We had hoped the Jani Empress would pass over our lands. Deem them insignificant in her conquests. What did we, a people locked in ice and permafrosted tundras, have to offer a ruthless warlord?

But of course, our magic. Our city built by an ancient mage more interested in water pipes than power.

The Jani Empress, readers, burns magic-tainted lands to nothing. Burns magic wielders at the stake. No city, no forest has escaped her wrath, ash and coal a scathing black swath in her wake. What hope did we have to escape it too?

Aqtilik and I hugged in the bathroom, crawled over cold stones and old rugs back to our beds, because crawling creaked less than walking. Was this what was to become of our queendom? A smoking ghost to a warlord's name?