Uyagaq didn't speak to me for two days after I informed him he was the next ruler. Partially because he refused to believe it would be so soon.

Uyagaq: Why does the plan have to involve you dying?

I, the queen: all the scenarios I've thought of are to stop the war. I'm willing to pay that price.

Uyagaq: I'm not willing to let you!

I: are you going to pay it, then?

Absolutely not. No one is.

This is war. We don't walk away without casualties.

Says who? Why is war the equivalent of people dying?

Because it is war. One side wins, one side loses. I'm willing to pay this price. I won't have someone else pay it for me.

I don't want you dying. I'm not fit to be king!

I don't want to die either. But this is my war, my fight, my enemy. I can't stand by and do nothing.

But that's exactly what you are asking me to do!

Then two days of silence.

One part is the plan, one part is the events as they actually happened. One part I, the queen, write, one part the death mage writes.

The plan: thought up, written, poked holes through, re-thought up.

First, I will approach the camp as a servant wearing my own emblem. A crest of feathers encircling an island. I will be taken prisoner, or surrounded by guards and questioned, which is the same thing really. I will be meek, say I represent the queen herself, may I speak with the empress to establish a location of surrender?

Of course I will not admit I am the queen. If the queen dies, the next ruler is the madman. And since the madman is there in the camp, I will have chopped short my hair, I will behave as a servant, and he never noticed me for my face anyway.

So, after being allowed into the camp, I will drop notes in the army's kitchen tents, leave the talk to the winds of servants' mealtime rumors--the queen's successor is Uyagaq, who wears a torn cloak. Uyagaq has the story of the queen.

And Uyagaq, with the death mage, will scatter whispers through the nearest towns, tell them a queen's will lives on. A queen has chosen her successor, and it is not a madman. I will leave Uyagaq and the death mage as my witnesses.

I will bring no weapon into the camp. Such things will betray my "surrender" as little more than an opportunity to get close. Which it is, of course. But they must not know that. The only things I will bring into the camp are folded notes stuffed under my clothes and a heat rock hidden and well insulated, slipped above the sole of my shoe.

Throughout the day, I will leave hints that I am not truly loyal to the queen, but after I gave the fleeing queen shelter and food she threatened my daughter's life if I did not do as she commanded. That is why I came, doing as she commanded.

To get the empress alone, I will stay through the night. The little night there is, in the summer. I will take whatever sleeping space they give me, pretend to slumber until the camp grows quiet. Then I will shed the parka with my emblem and approach her tent. I will approach her guards, sobbing about the queen coming here, tonight, seeking revenge on the king. The true reason she'd sent me ahead of her was to distract the empress and the camp--I was supposed to start a fire so the queen could sneak in unnoticed. I will beg that I must not be known to the queen, if she found out I had warned them, my family would not be safe. She had another servant, perhaps three, who would still do her bidding against my daughter if she did not return.

Warning delivered, I will pretend to return to whatever sleeping place they gave me. In reality I will start the fire (without telling anyone), somewhere removed from the empress's tent, using the small heat rock insulated in my shoe, because (if anyone asks, which they shouldn't) not starting a fire would give the illusory queen cause to hurt my illusory family. Then, guards doubly distracted, I will hide near the empress's tent until I can slip inside.

I will kill the Jani empress in her sleep. I will bring no weapons, a tent is rife with weapons already. Cords and bedrolls to choke. Corner stakes to stab. Tent posts to bludgeon.

I do not know if I will be caught.

Perhaps she will scream. Perhaps I will have to struggle and fight. Perhaps, I will fail. I don't even know what the Jani empress looks like, what if she refuses to meet me in the daylight, what if I do not find her tent in the sprawling camp? What if they search me and find the rock in my shoe, or the guards do not believe my stories?

No, I will not fail. Because I cannot. Because if I fail, I may as well have died alongside Aqtilik in the palace. I will not fail.

Perhaps after the empress is dead I can run from the tent. The fire I set may cause enough confusion for me to slip away in the madness. Idealized, that is how this story would go--no martyrdom necessary.

I know, death was the plan, death the absolution for vengeance. But here at the end...I do not truly wish to go. In for a day, out in a night, we could disappear into the tundra and spread whispers of the queen fighting against the empress. Idealized, there'd come no retaliation on the towns for her death, no vengeance sought on the queen who killed her.

It seems too much to hope for.

If I do survive, this book has no purpose. Why speak to you, readers, as if I am gone when I am not? I may as well speak the words to you myself. My love. My queendom. My enemies and my people.

My final written words are to hoping I can. Speak the words to you myself, that is. I want to do my best to escape in the confusion. I want to do my best to ghost away in the twilight of a night and live on in a war for my queendom.

Here, at the end, I should no longer question my path. But a part of my heart rises with doubts: will my death serve you better, or my life?

***

Part two:

We could just leave those words there. "Part two." That's the last thing the queen wrote in her own book.

This is the death mage, by the way. Harbinger of bad news, as I only write a second-hand story the queen couldn't tell on account of her untimely death. And by that I mean, I see dead figures shouting inside of fires.

I have little practice writing things by hand. They offered to write for me, as I spoke what I wanted to say. But I will speak it to myself, scratch the words slow, they don't have to know what things I have seen in a pillaring pyre. Yet.

Part two, queen: I see you battling two figures in a fire, hands gripping what must be tent stake and discarded hammer, I see you with shimmering blue in your heart, battling the Jani empress and her wife.

Perhaps we should start with that. All the planning could not have prepared you for the fact there were two Jani empresses.

In the flame, one strikes colors yellow-near-green, the other scumbled magenta, and I know from the fire's shouting that the green one is the strategist, the warlord, commander of armies in blood.

She is the one you always planned to kill.

But stories of how people died in a fire are wholly inaccurate. Sometimes. Screaming, clawing, bodies flail as if drowning in water when in life they tripped and fell. So.

That warlord Jani empress, yellow-near-green, has a wooden leg in the fire, perhaps metal, it doesn't look like she can walk at all with the other one limp and useless as dim sparks.

The magenta empress sleeps with knives under her pillow, your whispery footsteps enter and she springs up from her bedroll.

Of course, you enter through a slashed hole in the back, not the front, and catch the magenta empress off guard enough to floor her with your hammer. She hisses, scoring slashes on your wrist, blood dripping as bright red to the wood of the fire. She hits the rocky ground and rolls, you knock her unconscious with a booted kick. (Do you even know this is the second empress, or do you think she is just a bodyguard?)

The warlord empress scrambles for her bow, drawing an arrow, aimed at you, but this is a tent not a battlefield, and the flickering fire walls hardly offer any way to angle the bow cleanly.

So you duck and whirl, and the warlord empress releases a wild arrow through the side of the tent, fizzing sparks erupt from the fire with the tearing of canvas. She catches your swinging hammer with the curve of the bow and it cracks like wood snapping under heat.

She shouts for the guards, yells and can't bring the shattered bow around to block your arm swinging the tent stake at her temple.

The yellow-green flames collapse, sputtering.

Fire people always die so violently.

The guards rip through the tent before you can step toward the magenta empress, bodying you to the ground. They don't kill you then, because they still think the real queen is coming to kill the king. So they drag you to the king's tent as a ransom against the queen. A queen who is not coming.

Then, the fire goes out.

Is that the true way it happened? Possibly. There's always a chance.

The queen branded this as part two: the events as they actually happened. I suppose a duel in a tent actually happening is more dramatic than, say, the queen sneaking in, doing the deed dead, and having the magenta empress wake to incapacitate the faceless assassin for questioning.

We can pretend like that. A queen going down with a fight, her queendom furiously alight with her blood and fists and weapons swinging. That is the more dramatic way, more dramatic than a blow inside the tent that the queen didn't see coming. More dramatic than the quiet dread of a Jani empress dead, fleeing in the night only to stumble into guards who knew by the bloodstains on her mittens the things that she had done.

We can pretend like that.

The fire goes out. The Jani empress is still dead, the queen was still caught, and I was the one who killed the queen to make her a martyr, spared from the pain of a violent death in flames.

***

Part three: the queen danced in a fire for me the day she died, danced and replayed the past evening divergent from her written plans. Scars scored across her body, cloth bound her lips shut, they didn't want her to speak they just wanted her to hurt.

That night, no replacement for her ransom came, no questions for an assassin were asked, it must not have taken long to realize who she truly was.

I killed her with a silent word, a shadow. In her death she spoke volumes for an audience of one witness.

Dance for me. Jittery hands hidden in mittens, speaking to sword-bearing soldiers about visiting the empress to discuss surrender.

Swordplay your words, face impassive at the veil-covered palanquin of a legless empress, is this the warlord, the destroyer of nations you came to murder in her sleep?

Sing for me. That morning, they gave you a tent to yourself, you could stand inside it stooped over. You could sit in the mud. Quietly, you muttered under your breath the part you'd rehearsed for yourself in this play of succession.

Play for succession, stab an empress, nobody will ever know the last things she dreamed.

Readers, war with me. The death count on both sides numbers greater than ten, yet the tally total lies strictly uneven, join a monarch in striking dead bodies against the other side.

Contain yourself, queen, from raging at the ropes binding your wrists together, the tent they gave you as a prisoner, twice the size they gave you as a messenger of surrender. The ground stunk just as muddy, and they tied both your ankles to the tent post in the corner so you couldn't stand up to test the height of the ceiling.

The madman king came to question you, him and someone else flickering purple in the flames, the someone else recognized you for who you were and you screamed across the whole camp that this madman was not your successor. Your successor would have the book of the queen.

They tied your mouth shut after that. Shaved your already chopped hair to grind your scalp in the flickering fire mud.

Burn for me, queen. The camp of the empress stayed put for two days, the bright tents steadily sinking in the bog, they sent messengers to the town and announced the official execution of the last queen, the glorious dawning of the Jani empire.

Burn for me. Dance in the fire colors, this is how a queendom goes out, sword-cutting the sun in smoke. Sing with the awed hush of a whole crowd watching your body crumple orange and black as ash. Play at war, a Jani empire dawned but you deemed the day dark and unfit to last. Contain yourself in silence audible only as screams to me of how you died, you died, die and fly free of the ruins of your bones, shoulders and shins charred with embers erupting in firespeak.

Burn. For me.