The queen's bones know no resting place save a woven sack, jangling like a sea cat when they move.

I hardly let them out of the sack, what would I do with them, pick the overgrown green of the garden back into rows? A crawling, broken skeleton would only carve furrows in the soil for her own loose bones.

So the queen's bones sit in a sack beside the hinging door, hardly decor, hardly helpful, just there.

What makes a queen is not the grandeur of her bones, I remind myself, walking back and forth from the garden, arms laden. What makes a queen is not the daintiness of clean vertebrae, complete collarbones rolling with a rhythm of footsteps.

If I were to let her out of the sack, I could taffy-pull the cracked collarbones snug. The skull would look charming, the crack in the top letting light shine through--really giving something extra to light behind her eyes. I could line up all the teeth in sticky taffy of magic. The ribs would rattle, since the sternum split down the middle and the two smooth pieces slip against each other.

Her spine is fine; well, it should have twenty-four vertebrae, but the skeleton that crawled from the fire only had twenty one so it's mostly fine. Her hips have cracked, the taffy pulls those close but chips are missing, all her fingers and toes are accounted for, but one of the patellas for her knee never rose from the ash.

The right shin bones...remnants of them remain, leaving a gap between knee and foot. A quarter of the tibia hinges beneath her knee. The end of the tibia's splintered, like badly chipped ice, and the fibula bone is completely absent. To the separated foot bones, a stub of the tibia sticks.

We left fragments of the queen behind, in the heap of the fire. I tugged for a whole skeleton to cross the stage, tugged it from under the weight of ash, but parts of the bones didn't pull through. Parts of her shattered too far to glue back together.

Taffy cannot stick together bones with whole gaps in them.

Hence the way she crawled across the tundra behind me, my arms occupied with bags of supplies. A broken queen crawled herself from her own demise, quite pathetically. Eyes fixed on the ground. Fingers muddy and stained green. She limped on fists and knees, one detached foot clutched in the other.

We don't want to remember a queen that way. So we keep her in a sack most days.

This page poses a promise: we need the bones to help prove his validity as monarch. My validity as a witness to the successorship. All official, that--witnesses and validity and successorship.

But when we need them no more, we will lay them to rest. Somewhere quieter. A cliff by the sea, maybe, since a mountain would be ideal but those lie too distant to the north. The tunnel of the palace, maybe, if such a thing lasts long enough to lay another queen there. Beside her husband. Beside her children. Near enough to her closest friend to count for something. This page poses a promise, someday, queen, you will be buried.

And yes, I speak of burials like a resting place. Write of it, in my slow, shaky letters. But what is rest to heaps of charred bones, rattled ribs, shattered shins? Does rest consist of concealing ever-grinning teeth in the ground so imaginary cheek muscles can fall slack, hidden from witnesses who the bones knew needed the smiling charade? Is "rest" covering the cracks in skulls so all that fills the eyes is a thick grayness?

If skeletons find rest in never moving again, what becomes of all that is writhing with motion inside a person?

Alive, we thrive on the dance. And those who die, we believe they seek stillness. A broken ground, a dim tunnel, a black ocean.

This page is a promise: I barely knew a queen, I knew nothing of the stories in this book until they and I read them together, in my house, alone in the far reaches of a continent, where a queen never knew about. She never knew much about me.

But the queen I knew for a summer, the queen I talked to the day of a solstice about how we both count numbers too often, is a fragment of my mind I know I will remember brighter. Missing fibula, quarter of a tibia, the her I didn't know makes a gap that my memory will seek to glue together with sweet taffy. But the gaps are too large, sometimes, for glue to fix up. Memories matter more than magic, sometimes.

We live for the dance of it. But in your death, queen, I can give your bones the stillness you seek. I see it in the fire, you, treading ever-forward, through growing bogs and thicker mud, murmuring of some place to sleep, just for a night, just for a little rest.

Queen who never has and never will read my words, I can give your bones the stillness you seek. This page is that promise. A promise you will never see. That's part of the dance, queen; we leave hollow pauses for the ones no longer writhing with us. Goodbye, queen. It's been nice knowing you. Speaking of the sack sitting by the hinging door. I check your jangling bones with a tap of my boot, my arms ache laden with vegetables from the garden, we will bury you someday.

***

I have a few more words to say.

I hid this page near the back, hoping you would fill the empty pages before discovering this one.

Uyagaq, did you discover this page after writing all the others? Or did you flip through the whole book first and find this?

Either way, what happens happens, you could write the rest already knowing how this ends. But life isn't like that, so I left it up to you.

Of only eighty seven pages, some left blank, this one is the one I was most careful about. The one I pondered the most, and came up with the fewest answers for. You could keep this one at the back, as a sort of post note. End note. A neat conclusion to tie this book full circle.

Full circle, I would end how I began, my father taught me letters before I knew how to walk.

But at the end, I knew how to walk, I knew my letters, my father was long dead and I was not a child.

Here is how I want to end:

What do you do when it all falls apart?

I held forever, pristine moments of balance at a decade of equinoxes. I held days that lasted through whole nights. The equinoxes faded, the day spun gray, my queendom crumbled around me and I fought on, for my palace, for Aqtilik, for Panuk, for the people of this continent. Then that fell apart too. An Empress came to my doorstep and I fled, plotting my war from the shadows.

Now, what remains of me will emerge from the shadows--into an end where I have no answers for you, readers. Forever fell apart. And I kept going, until I could go no more, until I risked all I have to stop a conqueror setting armies on my continent.

If you read this, readers, I suppose I failed in some measure, for I am not here to speak the words to you myself. But maybe I have succeeded in some measure too--we can always hope that.

Uyagaq, I hope you have a nice name for the palace city, next ruler of the Nunait. It is your palace now, your royaldom. I wish I could give you forever. I wish I could give you longer than the one we held that summer, longer than a single grand memory.

We can always wish, can't we?

***

I am Uyagaq, Monarch of the Nunait, the city called Tatter after my lack of a family name, and because I do not reign from there. It being the tattered memory of a time before an empress.

The end.

***

Rip this scrap of page out, too.

I am not who I told you I am.

Is this a truth I can tell you?

My charcoal sticks grow short, the night grows long, at some point I must decide, I must lay down and sleep and deem my works enough. Deem them good enough.

Will they ever be good enough? I want to hold it all close; friends, memories, dreams of mine: wake me, hold me, dance with me, show me--we could build palaces and fill them with stuffs of forever. We could pretend like that.

And I know, even as we dream, the stone walls around us will crumble, like the banishment of childhood to clinging minds, like our first joys fading to brand new memories. And I must let it go. I must. Or else ramble long as the night grows long and I fear the dawning of tomorrow.

What do you do when it all falls apart?

Her father taught her letters before she could walk, and she shared those stories with me in our darkest months. Her tales of children's fables gave me courage after her death, I could talk, I could write, I could flee through a city's streets named Iqavu and I didn't need those children's fables anymore to do what needed to be done.

I'm sorry, Kaliq, for pretending to be you these long months. Perhaps our bones will find each other in the frozen ground, this queendom we called our home.