So...I do get another page? Now? At the most pivotal moment of the story? Alright, fine, but you do realize the readers, as we're calling them, will probably skip over whatever I have to say, to find out what happened with you. Especially if I tell them too. Seriously. I forgot all my good ideas that I was going to write about on the last paper. I don't remember any of them.

Well then. Readers, people, listeners, if you are paying attention to this section, Kaliq wanted me to mention what I was doing while she was literally fighting for the palace.

I, in fact, was sleeping in the middle of nowhere. By middle of nowhere, I literally mean, the middle of nowhere. I could look left, and there was tundra. I could look forward, and there was tundra. I couldn't actually look right because my neck was pulsing with bruises, but I'm sure there was just plain tundra that direction too.

So yeah. That's what I was doing. Sleeping, mushing up bread with my tongue because my jaw was also terribly bruised, staring at tundra out of pain-teary eyes until I grew crazy enough I thought I could see the grass crawling.

Fish bones, I don't remember any of those great ideas I had. You really shouldn't be here for this section, readers.

The queen lost a whole lot of people. I suppose I did too, but not in the same way. I came to the palace as an orphan, found by the palace guides on one of their excursions. They did that a lot. Dead parents, absent parents, those are pretty common with summer diseases that kill, winter chills that kill, better work across the sea. I never really missed my parents though; the palace guides were nice when they found me, and on our journey to the capital. And the adults in charge of the glimmer insect children were very loving and supportive.

The real loss, obviously, was the king. Not the madman, but Panuk. I liked him. I didn't know him super personally, I remained pretty distant compared to others in the king's entourage, since I was just the guy in charge of supplies and navigation, not prepping meals or advising the king on diplomatic decisions. Plus, my then-boyfriend (the king's cook) did most of the map reading and real navigation, which meant he did most of the explaining where we were going, how long it would take, how hard the climbing would be. Et cetera. I just took care of the equipment and helped set up tents.

I am now realizing I didn't spend much time with anyone of the king's entourage, other than the equipment. And my then-boyfriend.

But yes, I was there when the madman's servant stabbed the king, Panuk. He took my knife to do it. I stood there gaping in shock (before, during, and after he took my knife), my scant knowledge on how-to-guard-the-king dying cold and alone somewhere in my subconscious. And since the merchant crews were right there, far enough away to make out just enough details; such as, king-falling-over-dead, the madman's servant pointed and shouted and blamed me for assassinating the king. To the mob of merchant crews, that was enough to send me and the rest of Panuk's entourage fleeing for our lives.

Let me just pause to rid my fingers of the furious shake inside them.

Okay, now we can continue, readers, listeners, people.

If I had really killed the king, why would I have done it in front of a crowd of witnesses?

Imagine, the sheer conspiracy of me, killing the king, running away and spending months scrounging for a living, my then-boyfriend dumping me (his name does not deserve to be mentioned in this book. Take that as petty revenge), then me ending up in the middle of nowhere after getting beat up by an army, only to have the queen herself die and appoint me monarch in her stead. Imagine the sheer conspiracy of me planning all that so precisely for it to come true. All that for me to become the monarch--of some place completely overrun by a foreign Empress, no less. Why in any deity's name would I do that?

Needless to say, I never wanted to be a ruler. I didn't kill Panuk, I liked leading his expeditions. I would've been just fine without all that scrounging and getting beat up and people dying.

I hope, if we're scrounging for some good in all this, that all that stuff makes me a better monarch. The death mage is reminding me there's some beauty in all this mess. Such as, I think I like the sound of monarch. Better than ruler or royal, anyway.

***

As my mother, I found freedom in the wind. Aqtilik and I sped through the corridors to the aviary unhindered, which I suppose should have warned us. Given the day of tense silence, fingers of time waiting to shatter stone, we should have watched more carefully.

As soon as we entered the aviary, moving toward the seed bins to lure the birds to the window, there came footsteps outside. They must have been waiting in a musty room opposite the hall for us to come. We should have checked.

The madman had a better plan than we were prepared for. And how he knew we would go for the birds...well, he knew that from the beginning, didn't he?

How he knew to strike at us then...well, we threw caution to the wind by trusting the people in the burial tunnel that night. We spoke treasonous things, to the king. How we would arrest him after his surrender to the army. It is easy to reason that not everyone there deserved our trust. It is easy to reason that the madman thought to strike at us before he surrendered to the army.

Fools that we were. To trust so blindly, trust as if we had nothing more to lose when we certainly did.

Footsteps outside the aviary. Aqtilik and I darted to block the door at the sound, but the guards flooded through, cracking the door in a war cry, calm birds erupting in raucous alarm. Knives, swords, what I remember of this battle flashes like glinting metal, echoes like sharp grunts, crashes, blood slicked my blades stabbing solid flesh, Aqtilik's warmth pressed to my back. We communicated in a language so silent and deadly our movements may well have been one.

Until they weren't. Until Aqtilik wasn't there anymore.

The crumple of skin to stone told me all I needed to know. How she made no cry. How a blade had pierced past my arm. How light flashed in my eyes--too late--where it had swung. That was all I needed to know.

Lose Aqtilik, lose the birds, lose the queendom; that avalanche, the careful snowflakes--the balance of my fury shivered. I would not, couldn't, lose them all.

I picked one.

I hurled a knife at the guard standing in the doorway, I ran headlong through the rest of them with my arms covering my face, a blade bit the thick cloth on my stomach and a slash to my arm set my blood afire but I bit down a whimper without looking back.

I was lucky that we'd already cut guards to the floor, that wounded guards hung away from the fighting; I sprinted over the dead guard in the doorway with footsteps pounding after me, and I was lucky.

I have no clue what they did to Aqtilik's body.

I left the birds, we couldn't even open the window, I left the birds with the stink of dead bodies, I was lucky, I'm so sorry.

***

I'm not sure how the king surrendered. Did he shine a light through his window? Did he send a messenger through the streets? Were the people fleeing the palace surrender enough?

I read nowhere in the terms of his surrender anything about wrecking the outskirts of the city, yet as I fled, the palace rocked with violent booms. Dust vibrated from the ceilings. I ran, and did not think. I found fighting on the lower levels--messy, bloody fighting, for there was no way to tell whose side was whose. I found a death mage, who'd followed the army back, and her magic quelled the fighting so we both escaped. All that mess, all that blood, paused with magic beyond my comprehension.

But none of the fighting really mattered, did it? The guards I stabbed and cut down with my remaining knife made no impact to a war. The shaking booms, the tang of metallic blood on my lips from spraying knife cuts, the fire in my lungs--those didn't arrest a king in his plan. They didn't save any of our people's lives. I was lucky to survive. I was lucky to escape. Many of the palace people weren't. What fools we were, walking to her death.

I'm sorry.

***

There are three authors of this book, readers. I--the queen--then Uyagaq, then the death mage. This page is for the death mage:

Tatter-cloak says we separate the good parts of when we were younger from the bad parts.

Playing in the vivid waves,

A boy drowning in violent water.

Pause. Let it sink in.

Laughter is chronologically followed by tears when the grand joke is over, but in my head the laughter jumps to giggles months later jumps to grinning at the wind the next summer.

The storms all blur together in the haze of the ache of this heart.

Tatter-cloak says we separate the good from the bad, like ripping apart bread slices and sorting out the seeds. Flat seeds, or pointed, or dark-red seeds, dull-gray; the sorting table gathers a mess of crumbs a breath can blow away.

People are too complicated for that. Too mashed up and messy.

What do I make of the man who fed me from my childhood, left me out in the cold, taught me what he knew of our magic, senselessly ripped apart the dead body of the boy I loved?

Yes, Kolariq still haunts me. I cannot figure how to sweep his magenta crumbs from the table of my memories; yes, Kolariq still haunts me.

He lives on in the curses I silently speak. He lives on in the memories of a boy who dreams in a bed under stone ceilings. He lives on as the color magenta in my eyesight in every candle. He lives on in words like "kitchen" "glacier" "skirt" "salt taffy" "tent." He lives on inside me, as much as I try to remove him. His ghost laughs at me, in my sobs for the child whose fingers turn to claws in dark dreams. In my sorrow he looms, costumed a volcano, red and silent. In the rasp of bone on bone he whispers of not wasting any taffy.

Yes, Kolariq still haunts me. In the night a hooting bird reminds me of his instructions and I flinch. In the streets the rustle of expensive cloth makes me wonder what outfit he would wear out of it.

What water is there to drown the violence of a whole person, what waves are there to leave only a vivid smile reflecting back at me? What bread-sliced memories can you pick at and pick at until you have sorted all the seeds--pointy is bad, dull-gray is good--then clean them a bellowing breath, heaving away the pointless crumbs?

I hardly knew Aqtilik. I only temporarily knew a queen. But their actions lie half-sorted across the table--bad, good, dignified, vengeful. We can jumble them up with a whispering breath, two queens of the Nunait. They will haunt these lands forever.

***

The death mage gave me two gifts: one, the freedom of my birds. Two, a resting place for Aqtilik.

She did this by animating Aqtilik's bones into a walking skeleton, opening the window for the birds then walking her free of the city.

While I was grateful, I could not hide the discomfort--disconcert--it brought me. As much as I tried, every glance still formed a question: between which of the ribs had the blade slid to kill her? Right side, third from the bottom, or second?

There were no lips to hide the chip on her lower tooth from when we both knocked into a building when we were teens. The day we found a bird's nest atop a building and the parent attacked her, and I more or less caught her, but she still chipped her tooth on the corner of a wall with her momentum.

The way she walked, if her bones plodded in my periphery I could imagine a pale parka and trick myself into believing Aqtilik truly strode beside me. Until the bones kicked a rock. Clacking was something Aqtilik never did.

The way the bones sort of relaxed into themselves when the death mage fell asleep, ribs going saggy, toes curling, that kept my eyes bloodshot to the stars, to a summer horizon tinged with gray.

Whenever those bones moved like true elbows and shoulders should, my mind replayed the knife that took her--Aqtilik at my back, twin daggers swinging. I could have lifted my dagger and deflected the blade. I could have slashed the guard who stabbed for her. My mind replayed the blade that took her and my eyes ached.

I dug up gaunt ghosts of Aqtilik's expressions in the skull. Sure, the teeth always smiled and Aqtilik would never grin like that, but a quirked eyebrow over the eye socket like she judged me for some lame joke...oh...her pursed lips highlighting low cheekbones like she always did when thinking deeply...I couldn't stand those gaunt ghosts, I dug them up anyway.

While I was grateful for the aid of a skeleton carrying supplies, I was more grateful when we buried her. I couldn't bear to do it, chiseling at the packed ground to lay her to rest. But I suppose we had a royal avian for that, clearing away a chunk of the ground. In laying her to rest, the ghosts became feather blankets because I knew nobody could hurt her anymore.

The birds from the aviary...I hope they find warm homes before winter. I hope that they fly across the sea to their homelands, wherever those are. Maybe some stray soul will adopt a bird, never knowing who the previous owner was. Or the palace window is always open, and they can break open the seed bins if they ever figure out how.

In return, these are my two gifts to the death mage: a story, and a home.