I messed up. Messed up big. Made a rash decision while I was so broken up over Panuk's death that half the spring equinox passed in a fuzzy haze. I recall the merchants showing up, Aqtilik and I waiting in front of the palace, that man in the black and blue costume striking the stance of a stranger. I imagine I asked where he was. I imagine Aqtilik beside me held me up. I imagine the stranger had an elaborate story, but I hardly heard it, knives and servant betrayals and he wanted to break the awful news as gently as possible.

I do remember the next day clearly though. Some ignorant fool (or part of the stranger's entourage) let him into the palace and pointed the way to my rooms, a knocking on my door woke me in the early dawn, I was so confused to see this stranger with his smiling white teeth standing outside my door.

He asked me to marry him. Out of nowhere. I don't know where he came from. He asked me to marry him, and when I said no, obviously not, I don't even know your name, my husband just died, he said he would murder my servant he could see sleeping in the corner. He would murder the famous Iqavu birds. He would send his servants out through the city and kill the festival goers.

I believed one of those threats. Possibly two. Aqtilik was not asleep, she watched the whole thing. He couldn't know where I kept the birds in the maze of the palace, except that he ended up outside my room just fine, so possibly. But the festival goers? They came for the party. They still slept in the city buildings, since it was so early in the morning. The buildings had a single door, no hiding places, what utter shock to wake up and find a murderer in your bedroom.

I don't know where this madman came from. But I said yes.

I messed up big. I should've ducked and let Aqtilik throw a knife at him. I should've brought a knife with me to the door instead of yawning out of bed, irritated by the person disturbing me in my grief.

But would a knife have protected the festival goers? This man had allies, a crowd, he showed up to the equinox with a trail of supporters.

Still. I messed up big. I'm sorry.

***

This madman had a better plan than Aqtilik and I were prepared for. Aqtilik and I were hardly prepared at all, caught off guard completely. How were we supposed to prepare? He came as part of a whole entourage, servants he used to quickly replace ours, each one of our confidants retired, trusted guides sent off on wild hunts across the continent.

Aqtilik and I found ourselves isolated and alone, and I just wanted to cry about my dead husband.

At least the madman and I both agreed to pretend like a blackmail marriage meant nothing at all between us. Except that it was his excuse to call the city after his own name--as though he could take that from me any way but killing me.

I cared about justice. I grew so determined to dig up proof about what happened to Panuk, like proof would fix my grief and anger. But nothing really happened, the madman didn't really kill anyone, if that was my only evidence it'd be my word against his. Aqtilik's word against his whole entourage.

I was so determined to find proof that the madman stuck the knife in Panuk--we buried his body, I tried not to think about that, our children just across a dark tunnel--that I ignored what Aqtilik was telling me. We need a weapon, she said. We need a plan. We can't just sit here and hide supplies in the buildings, unless we are truly running away, but we aren't running away.

But it happened so quickly.

I didn't have time to mourn my dead husband. I don't remember the marriage to a madman other than it happened outside the palace with a whole lot of people watching. I honed in so blindly on proving Panuk's death that I blocked out the minor disasters happening every day.

Quick note, readers, that hindsight is tricky. The sunlight we have to look at the past is often colored by guilt. Maybe, I merely lie and say it was because of Panuk that I lost my edge; that in my grief that's all I cared about. Surely that's a rational thing to care about, right? And isn't blaming my grief much simpler than not being sharp enough to begin with? Isn't that simpler than acknowledging that I should have done better? How, Kaliq, how did you let a madman with an entourage have a better plan than your entire queendom? Ignorant fool, that girl you were. You thought you were a queen.

The minor disasters everyday--there was the confinement to our rooms. The queen could visit the birds, but only with an escort "to keep the birds from flying away." The queen could visit the burial chamber, to pay respects to the dead. At night the door to our rooms was guarded, and Aqtilik and I learned to speak a hidden language, deflect what we meant with what we said. We traded places every other day so we didn't go mad with confinement, the servant had more freedom than the queen, we traded places like a scheduled change of costumes in a storybook.

I found my father's old children's tales in a box behind the wardrobe in my room, dusty and forgotten. I re-learned simple stories of friendship, honesty, short-cuts and mended mistakes. Cried over those last ones; this was one mistake so massive the two of us could never undo it ourselves.

The madman removed every confidant, every remaining ally by mistrust; in the ruptured peace of our shared bedroom, Aqtilik whispered to me rumors of what he said to the other servants:

"That queen, she's terribly aloof. Why, she probably takes all this work we do in the kitchens for granted. Of course, you'll never see her around here to ask." "Did you hear how the queen bribed the king's own servants to kill him? The queen and her personal servant are awfully close, I think she did it so she could be with her real lover. You want evidence? The queen and king were together for how long, yet they don't have any children." "I hear those birds she keeps, she's trained them to carry messages. That's how she communicated with and paid the king's servants to do the deed. I bet she's conspiring with our enemies the same way."

That stung.

Panuk's death stung.

This madman squeezing away every droplet of our queendom stung the worst, got me furious. A cold, every-snowflake-I-place-will-topple-into-an-avalanche-one-day, furious.

I cared about justice, but that can so easily trickle into vengeance. Concentrated in a solution, what difference is there really?

We found a weapon, Aqtilik and I. More than one. The first one we called sneaking and stealing. In our own home.

***

The king was doing half our work for us. Determining which servants were the most loyal to him, that is. It set my heart alight to sneak into the madman's rooms and copy down his near-paranoid notes about who amongst the servants was most and least likely to betray him.

She and I, we compared our notes in our guarded rooms. His more paranoid ramblings we folded up with the box of children's stories. In the letters from the servants to the king--requests for less work, more pay--we combed through those in his entourage that weren't woefully loyal to his awful cause, those just there for the perks. Like, the novelty of living in the capital city, the money, or the fame by extension of knowing the king.

Technically speaking, I suppose they were all there for the perks, even the madman. Power and glory and power and such. But the madman had never read from the history records, about the king who sold an island to a neighbor in exchange for riches, only to have his neighbor launch an attack from said island and steal the riches back. The madman had never read from the history records.

So Aqtilik and I found the servants for whom the novelty was wearing off--the madman gave them an island for their riches of loyalty, so we would strike back at him with the servants meant to cage us. We sifted for the servants who found that fame in an empty royal city, was really just palace work. We planted seeds. Snowflakes on a mountainside. We couldn't promise them more power, but we could offer them freedom. The king came with strings attached. We could cut those free.

Our second weapon was the arrival of a death mage. Not especially the death mage herself, just her arrival, and the arrival of the royal avian. The prospect that we had allies outside the city. The belief that magic or chance or fate was conspiring with us. For the first time in months, Aqtilik and I smiled in our guarded rooms. For the first time in months, the flutter of bird wings in the aviary rhythmed an alofting of hope.

Our third weapon was solid evidence against the king. After a fashion. After the death mage, we could finally let go of Panuk, set him to rest, I knew in my heart what had happened even if I had nothing tangible to say so. That was enough.

Then, the evidence we found had nothing to do with Panuk. If I hadn't let my hunt for proof on Panuk's murder go, I might not have recognized it for what it was: evidence of a not-so distant war having already arrived.

It went like this. My day as the servant, I found letters between the king and the Jani Empress, styling herself "the liberator." They hadn't even bothered to write in code. I took the box full of letters off a polished table from his public meeting room while he was gone for lunch and returned them during dinner. The afternoon I stole them, I crouched in the dancing hall with a jar of glimmer insects and a sheaf of parchment, writing the entire contents of the letters in my own code, blurbs of words and dashed lines like messy charcoal scribbles. That night I showed them to Aqtilik while she chattered about her day, what seed types she fed the birds--code for locations of buildings she hid supplies in--and how the burial chamber was glowing really quite brightly after recent dimmings.

The next day, we switched, Aqtilik searched the king's quarters more thoroughly while I sat confined to my bedroom. Late morning, I smiled at the solemn-faced guard outside my room and strolled to the aviary. Nearly noon, I smiled at the solemn-faced guard on my way out, green feathers clung to my parka, I really needed to work on cleaning up the city buildings, very dusty they were, soft chuckle. The guard didn't smile.

Some of the guards let me in the city by myself, as the queen. Some didn't even make it past the aviary part of the queen's routine before they dozed off against the wall. This guard wasn't one of those.

So I spent the morning sweeping. Quiet stone buildings, shadows sharp, my broom swishing out crumbs and dust. I puttered around with the furniture; long couches, low tables, sleeping rolls frayed at the corners. I stacked sitting cushions in the corners so I could sweep. I dusted off the interiors of doors by the light of flitting insects. The solemn-faced, broad-shouldered guard stuck like an unwanted shadow, unwilling even to help me slide stone-heavy couches out of the broom's path. Some queen I felt, that day.

Through our open doorway, the clopping pattern of boots made me pause. Who is that, I asked the solemn-faced guard, crouched on my knees, dusting off a table. When he didn't reply I set the dusting cloth down and peeked out into the street. I'm the queen, and I have jurisdiction over the visitors who come here, I told the guard.

She led a strange bird, this visitor. This visitor wore a blue jacket emblazoned with the insignia of the king, a ship breaking over waves, which marked her as a palace servant I did not recognize. She had unfamiliar pale hair, a sharp nose I'd never seen before.

But...that bird. It walked on two featherless legs, the palace servant led them by a long harness leading to a saddle on a pale yellow, feathered backside. I asked the guard if he knew her name, how long she'd been working in the palace. He didn't reply, but when I slipped out the doorway to intercept the woman and her bird, he grabbed my shoulder.

The next part was instinct, I suppose. Training. An inkling that I didn't recognize the woman servant for a reason. With a swing of my boot, I knocked the guard's legs out from under him and ran across the coral-pink street, jar of glimmer insects in hand, and hugged the woman so tightly she froze up and gasped.

I rifled through her backpack while blubbering that the man had grabbed me, thank goodness she'd come along, oh, I didn't notice your...your animal there, I was so frantic, what is that creature?

I stepped away like I was startled, crumpling an envelope from her bag in my mitten. My guard ran up, huffing and glaring, and I was not the one who punched him in the temple. I gasped and frowned and apologized, the king probably wouldn't like hearing how one of the queen's own servants had to flee from one of the palace guards assigned to help her clean up the city.

Her sympathetic smile almost made me feel guilty for fishing around her bag. Almost.

Then I huffed and told her I should finish my work before returning to the palace, but I thanked her and wished her well. Said I didn't think I'd seen her around before, questioningly glanced at the massive creature serenely still beside her.

She shuffled sideways in thick, black boots and agreed, it'd been some time, in fact, would I be willing to hold her bird while she took an important report into the palace? (Bird, I gasped, can it fly? She merely chuckled.) She told me if the palace guard woke up while she was gone, the bird would certainly protect me. I was quick to assure her I had experience handling large animals, certainly not large birds, but I thought I could manage.

When she disappeared around the buildings I set my glimmer insects down and opened her crumpled envelope. Found what I'd quietly suspected; another letter from the Empress. I scanned it, tried not to panic about the terms of alliance and public surrender it contained, then hid it under the bird's saddle. I picked up my glimmer insects and led the large creature in slow circles, inspecting the toe pads, puzzling at the lack of feathers on the long legs and thick neck. I doubted this bird was native to the Nunait. I doubted the supposed servant was either.

When the servant returned, marching down the street with her bag in her arms, red-faced, I asked her if something was wrong. She shrugged, glanced at my full hands (harness, glimmer insects), and dug through the pockets of her saddle. She muttered incomprehensibly until I asked again if something was wrong.

She smiled. Checked the state of my full arms again. Puzzled, I asked if I had done something incorrectly with her bird. She shook her head, dug through the saddle pockets, sighed how she must have misplaced something important. Something very important, I surmised, if she'd come all the way back out here to look for it. Yes, she agreed, very important.

So I helped her look. Set my insects aside, took off my mittens and rolled up my summer-parka sleeves. I untied worn saddle pouches, wrinkled my nose at the poignant spice roots in the first of the pockets. Smoothed out maps from another. Never looked where the letter truly was, planted under the saddle. And I worked slowly enough to stay away from the side of the saddle the letter sat under.

The servant found the letter when the bird explosively crowed and slapped her wings, sending me stumbling backwards, feather fluttering to the stone and the saddle shifting sideways. I hit the street and grimaced, for real, but the servant was too preoccupied with wriggling something free of the bird's feathered backside.

The last thing I told the woman was sorry for startling her bird. I wasn't sure what I did to get it crowing and flapping (yes I did, I yanked a feather out from the bird's breast). In her haste back to the palace, the servant woman did little but nod at me, red-cold hands clutching a saddle-squished envelope. After she faded around a corner, I hesitantly reached for the bird's harness again. They didn't squawk at me. Maybe they didn't know I yanked the feather out, but I didn't want to take a chance that they were just waiting to strike back. So I cautiously led the bird to a building--wary of those oversized black eyes that might fill with vengeance--and shut the door to trap the harness in place.

I waited nearby until the servant woman's silhouette appeared at the end of the street. Then I slid the door wide enough I could tug the harness free, as if I'd been holding it the whole time.

And I let her go. Gave her the harness back, smiled about it, and she punched the unconscious palace guard for good measure so he wouldn't wake while I still had work. I assured her I could drag him to the doors myself, it wasn't that far, and I'd hardly want to slow her down anymore than I already had with my rambling.

I'm still not sure why I let her go. Maybe I felt bad. Maybe she wasn't so bad.

But she works for the enemy, I reminded myself, the woman and her bird clopping away down the street. She's helping to take down your queendom.

I still couldn't do it. I couldn't run after her and punch her in the temple, like she'd punched the palace guard. Maybe I had to tell Aqtilik first, about the evidence. That's what I told myself, the woman mounting her bird and striding off the hill. I shouldn't kidnap someone without first telling Aqtilik.