Of course I didn't agree to the plan. I thought it was foolish, dumb--going off and getting yourself killed rarely does anyone any good.

For one, the queen said it herself. The madman can't become the true ruler here until she is dead. Why would she risk death, then? That's so dumb of her.

I mean, I know she had a plan to announce who her successor was--the whole "who's the next successor" thing does always happen with rulers in the capital city, I get that. But we're not in the capital city. We're in a war. And unless everybody on the whole continent heard it from her mouth, nobody's going to believe that I'm the queen's successor. Me. A palace guide, who could barely read a map. The guy who let his knife get stolen so the king ended up dead.

Just like the queen.

Listen, I don't understand why she had to send herself into the heart of danger. There were other options. We could have worked something out. We didn't have to go kill the Empress, she didn't have to make herself a martyr to stop a rampage of vengeance, she didn't have to give us a shred of hope she might survive then choose not to step away from the fire that killed her.

For two, the Empress is dead, yes, but there's another one. So we still have the same problem of war against a Jani empress.

For three, the queen died, I became her successor, and nobody knew that.

For four, the madman actually died, unexpectedly. The queen dead, the madman dead, and the queen's justice satisfied in the process. That should have been a good thing, except, apparently, the madman has a friend who is claiming to be the king now. A dead empress, a dead king, two instant replacements.

For five, I'm not sure if the madman dying was part of the queen's plan or not, but theoretically that should have cleared up the successorship.

It didn't. Nobody thought to wonder who the next ruler should have been. They just followed a madman's friend who claimed he was king now, and went after all the lies he told about the death mage having murdered the queen.

What convoluted mess have you got us into, Kaliq? You selfish woman. Your personal justice and need to prove something to the world only made my world harder.

But of course you don't know that, do you, because you're dead. You are dead. Why'd you have to go off and die on us, Kaliq, I don't know what I'm doing here I don't know the first thing about being king. Monarch. Whatever. Just call me Uyagaq because that's my name, I didn't ask for all this responsibility. I didn't ask for a war. I didn't ask to have to think of a better name than "king" for myself. I didn't ask for this.

I'm ripping this page out. You got to have one of those kinds of pages Kaliq, so I do too. Even if it is your book. About your life. And your death. And I'm only writing anything to sound charming so people will like their next ruler. Who, currently, nobody knows about. Which then makes it my responsibility to tell everyone that I'm the ruler. And I don't want to be a ruler. And nobody will even believe me.

You know what I want? I want my stupid boyfriend back. No, I want the version of him that's not a cheater back. I want you back, Kaliq, to be the one in charge here, so I don't have to. There. Ha. Take that.

I'm ripping this out.

***

Hello, townspeople! My name is Monarch Uyagaq. I am reading from this book, the book of the queen. The last queen. She wrote it, before she died. She gave it to me when she told me I was to be the next ruler of the Nunait.

Yes, I am the ruler of the Nunait.

Pause. Look around the gathered crowd (if there is a crowd). Meet the death mage's eyes, standing near the back, holding a sack with the queen's bones. Those might not be necessary, they might frighten the crowd more than anything, and they might not believe they're the queen's singed bones anyway.

Pause. Take a deep breath. Continue.

Dear townspeople, I know we find ourselves in a time of war, a time where fear clouds our hearts and smoke clouds the horizon. I know things may seem hopeless.

But even in despair and fear, our queen stood strong. Our queen, having lost her palace to an usurper who allied with the empress, planned for a way to free her people. To free you.

Our queen snuck into the camp of the enemy and with her own hands slayed the empress. She saved our lands from being overrun further by the enemy.

Except, our enemies were greater than she knew, and a new empress took the place of the old one. The queen was captured and killed. The day our enemies burned the queen atop a pyre, the usurper who took her palace was also killed. In this, the queen's plan was complete. And I was made the next ruler, by the queen's own words. By the queen's own writing. Here.

Pause. Hold up the book. Turn to the fluttering page at the front with the inked emblem of the queen, blue feathers encircling an island. Of course, when the queen made it, the emblem was a rough sketch of charcoal. It was the death mage and I who boiled and strained out the ink to paint it darker, for a gathered crowd to see.

Pause. Show the book to the gathered crowd. If there is a crowd. Take a deep breath. Continue.

The man who calls himself the king now is no more than a replacement to the usurper. He has no claim to rule. The authority to rule passes from one queen to another, by stated successorship. One ruler must announce before witnesses who the ruler to follow them will be. Under more ideal circumstances, the rulership passes from spouse to spouse, or parent to child, or royal to relative. This is what the usurper hoped for, by blackmailing the queen into a marriage.

But the queen did not die. Her servant, posing as the queen the day the usurper took the palace, was slain in battle. But the queen herself did not die. She lived on, to write this book, to announce me as the next ruler. She had another witness. The witness who carries the bones of the dead queen.

Pause. Motion to the death mage, standing near the back of the crowd. Wait for her to step forward, clutching a sack, and carefully tip the bones into the street.

Pause. Take a deep breath, at the charred cracks in the bones. (The death mage tried to teach me bone names, but I could barely stomach it. The one I remember is skull, plus teeth, but those were easy.) The queen's teeth scatter, stained with soot. Her skull has a deep crack running back over the round top. Take a deep breath, continue.

The queen burned atop a pyre. The heat of the flames cracked her bones, you can see the head was not broken by a heavy blow, like crushing an eggshell with a rock. No, it was cracked by heat, like a precious wood log delivered unto smoke.

The stains of black are from the ash, where she sat buried after the fire ended. This witness returned to the pyre, afterward, and dug up all of the queen's bones. She is a witness to all that the queen said--what's written in this book, who her true successor is.

Please, townspeople. If you care for your home, if you want to expel the armies of an empress from our lands, join me. Help me save the Nunait.

Pause. Thank them for their time. The death mage will have gathered the bones back into the sack, using no magic. Smile. Answer their questions. Then we can leave. If there is a gathered crowd, maybe volunteers will flock to us. If there is no crowd, maybe the birds perched on the rooftops will listen to our message.

Pause. Take a deep breath. One way or another, the inhabitants of the Nunait will hear us.

***

Monarch of the Nunait's message to the man who calls himself king (to be read before an audience of townspeople, nomads, traders, families, etc.): The death mage killed your rabid friend, not the queen. Get the story straight, liar.

No amount of question dodging and proclamations run by bird riders can challenge the truth--you have no claim to rule here. The people you command should hunt you for burning their true ruler.

Your demands go like this: you say the death mage killed the queen and her husband. You say the death mage needs to be brought to justice. You say you are the new appointed ruler, because the queen married the king, and he was closest to you in life.

The truth goes like this: the queen died after killing the Jani empress as an act of war. Before the queen could flee, she was no doubt captured by you and your like. You are responsible for the death of the Nunait's true ruler. You are responsible for her torture, her public shaming and burning at a pyre. The death mage was part of the public, she watched the whole thing happen, and when your king walked on stage to examine the remains of his so-called wife and claim justice had been meted out by her death, the death mage killed him.

I say your king needed to be brought to justice for allying with a Jani empress and inviting her to our continent, when the whole world knows she is a conqueror who spares no people. I say your king needed to be brought to justice for conspiring with the enemy to capture and burn the true ruler of the Nunait, his wife by law.

You are not the appointed ruler, because the queen was the ruler until her death. Before her death, she appointed me in her stead. Have you read the history books, man who calls himself king? Because I have. The queen has. We know the actual laws around here.

You have no claim to rule. You are adjacent, a footnote, a smudge of ink to the history of succession here. I am the ruler of the Nunait.

I actually saw you, who claims king, once. From a distance, the morning after the queen's death. You sat atop a palanquin, I thought you were an important servant, to have guards carry you atop their shoulders; I had no clue you were claiming to be king then but now it all makes sense.

I doubt you saw me, I was in the town the Empress set up her camp next to. So she could pronounce herself Empress to them, or something, but then the queen interrupted that. I doubt you saw me. I blended in with the crowd, I am a native here, you know.

You sat atop a palanquin, guards carrying you through trodden-grass labeled a camp street. And I recognized you. I knew you. I would know your face anywhere in the world. I would know your hands if I saw them only under dim starlight. Why? Because you are the source of my greatest mistake, my forever-haunting split instant of frozen indecision. I know you.

You are the man who stole my knife to kill the king, Panuk. The king your king killed to blackmail the queen into marrying him. Oh, I know who you are.

I was there. You tried to blame the incident on me, on Panuk's other servants. Just as you now try to blame the queen's death on a mage. But I ran. I survived. You killed the king and shouted how I was a murderer, my knife was bloody, but I survived. And my existence, my words, my monarchy will haunt you forever, hunt you to the ends of our continent until your skeleton lies a fool beside your madman friend in the frozen dirt. I don't have to swear it by anything. It's the basic truth.

You are a nobody, willing to backstab to satisfy your hunger for power, but in truth you are so starved of anything good that you carry less substance than a shadow. We will shine the light on your frightening threats and convoluted lies and they will wither to nothing. We are coming for you, substanceless shadow who thinks himself worthy of being king around here. We are coming for you.

***

This is the book of the queen. But I've never given a speech before, and there were all these empty pages so I figured I'd use them to map out what to say. Outline my presentation, as it were.

I wrote one speech. I practiced it in a small room talking to some animal's bones under a rug.

Yeah. Me, the monarch, practicing my own speeches to an audience of a skeleton and a rug. How pitiful is that?

Extra pathetically sad, that's how pitiful. So I planted myself on the squishy couch in here and scrawled a scathing letter to the current guy who calls himself king. Then I decided to keep it in here, with this explanation.

As I wrote it, I felt bold. Like nobody could touch me, like I could demolish with a breath the evil people who need to be taken down. Like my words were an arrow loosed, dead-set on their target. I have rarely felt so bold.

In the palace, they taught all the children letters and grammar, stringing words together on rough parchment with thin berry juice. My childhood projects of bad songs and "what did you do during the equinox festival?" turned into ripped nests for glimmer insects, the dark red juice faintly visible in blue-lit tunnels.

I was always embarrassed of my writing. The other children bragged to our tutor of how many pastries they ate in the space of a single equinox song, how they snuck out of the city and played king and queen in a mud palace they made themselves.

Whereas I silently handed my tutors my parchment, red juice leaking all over the page, and muttered how for my assignment I wrote about when I fell asleep in one of the buildings because the drums made me sleepy. I didn't mention how I hid in the building because I hated my flowery parka, hated the pastel threads dotting petals all down the front to make it pretty for the festival. Nor did I mention how I fell asleep because I put pillows over my eyes so I wouldn't have to look at it, and by accident I covered my ears too, and I couldn't even hear the drums.

I still hate that parka.

I always felt small in my writing, my fingers got sticky with juice and my hands rubbed red with the rough parchment.

But this...this is different. In my head, anyway, sitting on a squishy couch. I can be sharp and pointed where nobody can touch me. I can be bold to an audience of a rug hiding a skeleton.

But to an audience of townspeople? To a grandfather leading his grandchildren to a coast city to trade for supplies?

How can I denounce a man who calls himself king when I can't even deliver to an empty room my speech without forgetting the words? How can I denounce a man who calls himself king when I don't want to be ruler, but I'm the one who must replace him?

How do I denounce him when he has armies at his command and I have mere words? He would slaughter me and anyone who followed me.

And who would follow me? I'm just the replacement to a queen who endured mountains of opposition. I? I ran away when my king was murdered.

This is the book of the queen. Not the book of Uyagaq.

Who knows who will read this? Strange things become the cruxes of history. Like a lullaby rhyme one queen wrote for her twin children, about holding each other close in the fearful times. That lullaby lives preserved in the palace beside the illustrations from when one twin choked the other for the throne. Is this book one of those? Or will it die with the queen, die with me, when an usurper slaughters my bold speech with questions I can't answer?

Dear readers--as the queen would say--if I am held up in your hands to judgment, answer me this question first: how would you rule a land overrun by enemies? How would you rule a land left by a competent queen? How would you rule, trapped under a haze of lies you can only attempt to pierce?

I write words of truth I stumble too much over to speak; are written words the sword you would also use to take back your monarchy? Or do you judge me, claiming you have a better way? What is your better way?

Answer me that, readers. And truss me up in the dark with history's hands, having never lived those hollow questions for yourself.