A madman: let's get this out of the way, he is mad in his ambition. In his intensity. Crazy with his own goals. Not mad by way of foolishness or an incomprehensible mind.

What I left out of my story was the story of a madman, rightfully so. But I did not spend months in a palace without learning pieces of his history.

So, let us speak of the pieces I do know. A madman cut in pieces, as it were. Let us build him out of his pieces.

When we...met, at the spring equinox, he was nearly into his thirtieth year. Not much older than I. He was born in the Nunait, in a small family, on one of the more remote islands. I doubt I could find it on a map, if it were even sketched in.

His mother and grandmother told stories of the greatness of their family, their grand history, how they would one day build that remote island into a splendor worthy of their heritage. From his grandmother, from his mother, his family name was Aquvuit.

Out of curiosity, or perhaps a dim recollection from the lessons of my father, I dug into the history records and searched the names of the city. My father's name, my mother's, my mother's mother. I researched the king's name who bestowed the kingdom on her, crowned her in his old age after all his children perished in a fire that broke out during the spring equinox.

The history records say that one of the five torchbearers of the equinox--carriers of the promise of coming warmth and melting ice--fainted in the middle of the parade. The torch set a whole cluster of people's costumes on fire, and with the winds that year the flames spread to the decorations, the tables, the rest of the overpacked parade. Most people escaped with minor burns or less. But the king's children, closest to the incident, did not.

This king overthrew the previous ruler in a...poorly documented incident. Which usually indicates falsehoods in the record, a web of lies surrounding the story, covering up the truth from history's eyes.

My father, who taught me the history, suspected this king murdered the former queen and cast out her whole household. Lovers quarrel, maybe the queen refused to let him marry her son, or the son refused to marry him.

Grown older, however, I question those stories, since this king married someone entirely different, and the record speaks of years of love letters between them long before the former queen's death (though only fragments of those letters remain). I doubt he was interested in the queen's son.

So who knows why he murdered the former queen. Maybe he thought she was power hungry. Maybe he was power hungry.

During his reign, this king and his lover took in five children. Peace marked his rule, marred only by the tragic death of his children. In his old age, this king gave the palace to my grandmother.

And yet, the city was called Aquvuit before him. For three generations.

Perhaps at the outcasting of their whole household, the family of Aquvuit took refuge on a distant island, unmarked on the maps. Perhaps they swore vengeance on a king who killed their mother, burned their pain into legends to sear through the generations. A madman's grandmother. A madman's mother. A history of what should have been theirs.

Now. Do I believe the madman came to Iqavu to restore his family to their "proper glory," and take his place at the throne that should have been his?

No. No I do not.

He is a madman in his ambition and greed. I do not think he cares anything for his grandmother, mother, cousins and aunts and sisters. He did not bring a single relative to the palace with him, that I know of.

To speak so boldly, the tales his mother told him of their family's greatness and grand history were merely the seeds. His mind was always fertile soil for stories of grandeur, I saw the way he strutted through the palace like all eyes belonged to him. Watered with the years, this plant of arrogant belief rooted deep inside him.

At the age of twelve, he left his island and earned passage as part of a merchant crew. From the rumors, he became assistant to the captain at a young age, perhaps fourteen or fifteen or sixteen. I reckon he soft-talked his way onto that crew, whispered things the captain liked to hear, stoking fuzzy embers until he could cook whatever he wanted in that captain's heart. That sounds like the madman I know, leading a whole entourage with his promises.

Rumors say he tried a different land first. Assistant captain of a merchant crew wasn't important enough, so he went after a kingdom. Empire. I don't know what land it was but the coup went poorly. Rumors whisper of votes for a ruler and he was not the ruler voted for so he led his followers in a rebellion. There, his soft-talked rebellion fell apart.

I don't know how long ago that was. But the mathematician in me wonders, there are fifteen years between the merchant crew and Iqavu. After the failed plot at a foreign kingdom, there is the fact that he came to Iqavu as a full merchant fleet captain, how his attempt at Iqavu was executed knowing full well the traditions of our equinox, how he came flanked with a loyal entourage. I think this far away land is years ago, for him. The brazen attempt of a child who thought himself clever.

What horrifies me is he was almost successful, all those years ago.

What horrifies me is this madman invited a Jani empress to his doorstep believing he could ally with her. Ally. With the conqueror of whole continents, island kingdoms, she who defeated armies of mages riding enchanted birds. Ally.

I would peg it on his arrogance, his ambition blinding him. Yet.

What could a madman--deemed king of a poor, weak land--have to offer a conqueror of while continents? What could he have, that he would invite her to his city? And, what could he possibly offer that would actually make her come? That is no simple arrogance. What could he have offered to make her leave the city unscathed, himself still alive, the Jani empress actually allying with him?

That horrifies me.

Yet, I am not here to kill a so-called king. I have no evidence, an unclear scene, I can build a madman from pieces of his history but I do not truly know him.

I am not here to kill a so-called king, even though I could pronounce justice on him for usurping my authority. Or I could blame him for the fighting of the palace, or for colluding with the enemy. Why not seek him out as I seek out the empress?

Reader, to admit a so-called king is truly king, is to admit I am no longer queen. And the only way to strip that from me is by my death. Secondly, I do blame him for Aqtilik's death, but I have no real proof he sparked the fighting that night. And three, punishment for crimes of colluding with the enemy come after punishment for crimes of being the enemy.

So. I will kill the Jani empress. And then someone else can kill a king for trying to usurp my queendom.

***

I lose track of the days as I write. How long has it been, since the fighting in the palace? How many days did we walk with Aqtilik's skeleton before we buried her? How many weeks did we walk after?

The avalanche of rage inside me that night, into the next day, dissipated weakly into stretched-thin exhaustion. One step, one footprint in the bog, then another. And another.

I kept my worn-thin self from snapping apart only with a reminder: this war is not over. This war will not be over, until we win.

We found Uyagaq. I knew him little, he knew me little. We talked. We kept walking. I didn't know where, Uyagaq and the death mage led us seemingly in circles. The same moss, the same bog, the same bags of supplies swaying from our arms.

One day I realized faint mountains were eating up the horizon like teeth, far off to our left. We walked, and they barely moved, from one foot, to another, then another.

One day I realized that we set up our tent in full light, not even twilight, and I was barely falling asleep save the scant time of darkness sometime in the middle. I don't recall what thoughts raced through my head most times lying in the light under a thick canvas, my eyes boring holes in the corners. But I do recall my thoughts in the moments I was closest to snapping, exhaustion fraying into giving up, letting go: this war is not over.

This war is not over, until I, tossing and curling and sitting up and rubbing my eyes and lying back down and sprawling on the sleeping pad--this war will not be over until we win.

One night, not that different from any of the other nights, I couldn't tell the lie to myself anymore. I held the water from leaking out my eyes until darkness--hardly even dark, more like a shadowy gray--descended.

We had already lost. They'd taken the capital city. We had no army. Their army had burned whole towns to ruins, and I could do nothing to protect the rest. The war was already over, and we did not win.

Under the glaring light of a noon day sun, we plodded parallel to the teeth cutting into the sky. The death mage told how she was born beyond those mountains, had few memories other than a small town and brief sensations. Uyagaq had few memories of their birthplace either, someplace drafty and cold. I didn't say anything. My birthplace was a palace a madman currently ruled in.

Yet, as they spoke of not remembering their parents, like they hadn't existed, had never truly lived, my night thoughts proved themselves wrong. The war was not over, wars could only end when the rulers of both sides agreed on victors and losers, who surrendered and who took the spoils. Or, when one side no longer lived to surrender.

And I was the queen until I died. I did not agree on surrender. So I kept walking, one foot, then another.

I spent the day--generally speaking--before the solstice counting parchment papers out of the supplies Aqtilik and I had scattered throughout the city, gathered by Aqtilik's skeleton when we left. I counted out four charcoal sticks, eighty seven pages of thick parchment.

I spent the solstice mapping out in the mud with my fingers how many pages I could afford to throw away, what I wanted to say of my whole life on only eighty seven pages. There is a lot I left out.

In the tent on the so-called night of the solstice, sprawling on my sleeping pad, my heart ached for the roaring party of the city. A soft breeze rustling tent canvas hardly substituted for squealing strings, shouted songs. The warmth of a sleeping roll hardly substituted for Panuk at my side under the sun. His endless energy to the near-unstoppable drum beats whirled the both of us through the whole night, the whole streets. He would drag me into a dazzling dance amongst the green and glittering costumes, his bare feet blurs against obsidian stone, his hands as rapid as birds, pulling my jittering arms in staccato rhythms. I hardly recall the festival food, the words I used to welcome visitors through the bonfire-lined road up the steep hill, but I do remember Panuk, the music, my lungs out of breath from so much dancing.

And all I had left of him was the tremble of my elbow at the memory of his movement, and sunspots on my eyes like flashes of his feet floating over the streets. He hardly seems to touch the ground, in my recollection. All I had left of him was the silence of a summer solstice, two figures in a tent seeming to sleep soundlessly, the fragrance of warm summer bog slipping through clean canvas cloth.

So I wrote him, here, like charcoal scratched words could give Panuk's memory solid flesh, pumping blood, could bring him back from months after a knife wound to his heart--

***

Panuk's name means "island" in the Uqik tongue. Especially ordinary, that. Many parents name their children by sections of the body--feet for running, kidney for purity--but nature--the grass, the ocean--comes in a close second.

An island? Half the Nunait are islands. Of course, the islands are frozen over every winter by the ocean, and then there are no islands, just ice and snow.

Panuk was never a shapeshifter like that. Island of rock, to be buried by a frozen ocean, indistinguishable from the water. Panuk was always Panuk. Better with the crowds than I, worse of an actor. He didn't have a lying bone in his body. He was skilled at diplomacy only because he spoke so comfortably to strangers, his fluttering hands and easy grin like bridges across foreign waters.

His father wanted him to be a fisher. His mother encouraged him to follow his dreams, that inheritance of father's father's father's fishing boat could sail with a different child. One who wanted it, one who didn't babble on to the fish about the weather, or the nice lady up the street and her stinky shoes, or the dreadfully early dawn, or the grossness of cutting off their scales.

Panuk's dream was to build a grand hotel in a coast town, bake desserts for his visitors and talk about their stories late into the night. He left his parents and many siblings at sixteen, traveled to a coast town further north, used his good graces and easy grin to start baking for a home that occasionally took in visitors. "Occasionally," because the family had enough wealth to work little to sustain themselves, and the occasional visitor paying rent kept their finances afloat. Mostly, the family spent their days on the beaches, writing letters to distant relatives or friends or perhaps no one, since Panuk never saw anybody take the letters from the house. They moved here, they told Panuk, because houses were more expensive where they came from.

Yet, it must not have taken them long to decide the cheap house prices mattered less than the cold. After Panuk's first autumn with them, the family moved away, granting him the house. I suppose they didn't want to see it left empty while they went and lived somewhere warmer, with prettier beaches.

With the whole place to himself, Panuk took in more visitors, baked desserts made with money from selling the previous family's left-behind clothes. But he found most visitors weren't eager to talk, they glared at his questions and accused him of prying. So he quit baking them desserts, used the money to buy his own food, and a fancier bed for himself, and red and blue tapestries to hang in the bedrooms to hopefully please the glaring visitors. And, because they paid well, he offered rooms to the palace guides coming and going seemingly at random.

But in addition to paying well, the palace guides talked. They complimented his meals, then his desserts, and asked what he thought about his house being an outpost for their expeditions.

So instead of a grand hotel, Panuk ended up with a palace guide outpost--by age eighteen. Nineteen, he discovered maybe his dream wasn't what it seemed, he still wanted more, and when the earthquake rattled the town months later, he took the palace guides up on their offer of refuge.

Coming to the city birthed in him a new dream: working in the palace. He thought he could live there forever, if they'd accept what sort of baking he could do. I met him, on a walk down the corridor from the kitchens where a palace guide was giving him a tour. We talked, we talked again, then again, and I liked him for more than his grin and way of speaking. I fell in love with the way he dreamed, so grand but practical at the same time. The way he opened his heart to total strangers, the kitchen chefs and palace guides. The way he set himself out in the center of the room, unafraid of the eyes watching him or his heart. I fell in love with that.

Then I informed him I was the queen. Then his dream of joining the palace chefs wobbled and shook worse than an earthquake.

He didn't ever dream of becoming king, until then. I do believe whole days passed before the shock wore off and his shot-up eyebrows lowered themselves back to sea level.

Panuk's name meant "island." But I hardly thought of him alone like that, a cluster of rock in the ocean. If anything, I saw how he saw himself as part of a whole, a single pebble on a continent, unified against the sea.