We bury the bones in a meadow of yellow flowers. The jet bird hops impatiently beside the boulder, enshadowing the flowers with her flutters. We don't have a shovel. The queen uses a knife from the sack of vegetables, hilt stained with red juices from days ago.

I use my fingers. To pretend like I am doing something. Like plucking sharp rocks out of the way. Really, the bones do most of the work. Scooping with curved hand bones. Kicking with calcaneus bones. The queen pauses often to stare stonily at the mosses we're digging up. I am slowed by the constant reminder that Aqtilik's bones are not Skeleton Cook; she is shorter, less lanky, more eager to plow forward without dancing.

"I've got to leave," the queen abruptly stands, setting the knife atop the boulder. She dusts her hands on a blood-stained parka, walks away. I look to Aqtilik for some kind of answer, except she keeps digging her own grave. So I dig too, fingernails grimy. I pretend like this grave is for another skeleton too, since I think he would have liked that.

The bones lie down in the shallow pit and the queen has still not returned. I hesitate, crouched over the soil. The jet bird flutters to the top of the boulder, tipping the knife into the pit. It bites into the ground beside the skull. I glare at the bird and yank the knife free, she glares back.

The queen returns. I hide the knife behind my sleeve.

"Is there a way you usually do this?" I ask.

"Do what?"

"Burial ceremony," I say.

She shrugs and folds her arms. "She's not technically royal. I've never been part of a ceremony that wasn't for a royal."

"Oh," I say. The pit is shallow enough the ribs don't quite fit. We can't go deeper, there's too many rocks and the soil's nearly frozen.

"Even if it were for a royal, there's no procession. We can't take her to the palace tunnel. There's no coffin."

"Oh," I say. Lean my cheek on my lifted knees.

Silence.

"I don't think we have enough soil to cover the bones," I say.

"I don't think so either," she rocks side to side, still hugging herself.

"Would you like a moment alone?" I suggest. I don't suggest shoving the boulder over to cover the bones. More like crush the bones.

"No," she walks past me, to the heap of sacks and waterskins and a tent. "We should move on."

I stand. The jet bird tilts her head at me, points at the ground with her beak. "Of course you could have," I say. "But then we'd have a round crater and a plume of dust." Attracting an army.

"Let them come," the queen says.

I turn around.

"If they see it, let them come," the queen repeats, slinging the tent bag over her shoulder. "If the royal avian can give her that, let them come."

I hesitate. We just spent a quarter of the morning digging a shallow pit. "Okay," I say, and lift the jet bird by stormy blood. She launches to the sky, and I guide her clear of the boulder, and the flowers, and the bones. "If you say so."

The skeleton stands, out of one grave, waiting patiently for another.

***

Dear dead, we followed a swath of burned land--not that there was much to burn beside mosses and grass--after following a column of black smoke, after sleeping restlessly in a tent of three, Tatter-cloak, you, me.

You, queen, didn't understand why Tatter-cloak ran away in the first place. Why didn't he fight? You said you didn't understand. But you did.

Why didn't you fight harder for your palace? Why didn't you see the guard who took Aqtilik? Why did you go for the birds in the first place? Why did you wait? Why did you wait? Why did you wait?

You tossed and turned in a tent of three, shoulders aching with burdens you carried under daylight; hip bones aching with the stones in the ground; feet sore with days of walking; eyes sore with the few hours of darkness, and the tears, but mostly the blinking the tears back. A queen is strong for her people. A queen is only as much of a queen as the justice she delivers to those people. As much of the mercy she keeps in her heart.

A killer had taken that queendom from you. A ruthless empress slaughtered the people who lived there.

A queen is strong for her people.

***

I am in the crowds the day it happens--the jet bird shoved in a blanket tied around my waist, my hood kept up to conceal my face.

I can't move when the guards shove you up on that stage. I can't feel, just a hollow blankness caverning my interior. The narrow flag over the tent whips in a wind, it is a white tent, they kept you in a white tent, which is where they must have shaved your head, split your lip three different times, tore your parka to shreds and left you in rags.

When the guards tie you to the post your eyes meet mine. They hold mountains, still. I look away first, away from the glinting sparks of steel beneath your feet.

Which is better: your honorary death, or a savior from the flames named a terrible death mage?

You came up with this plan, queen--you tell me.

Regal. You lift your chin. Filthy rags whip in a wind. Your arms, bound behind your back, hold you to a post on a heap of wood. A quiet falls, the first licking flames eat up the wood pile. I have never seen much firewood in my life. Not even from Bone-builder's bonfires.

I meet your gaze again. Mountains, trembling; the fire licks the oil-soaked rags of your ankles. You nod once. I nod back. Speak a word, collapsing on itself, stopping your heart. Simple as that. The flames erupt skyward and you are already a color, a shift in the smoke, a silver shape pantomiming how you died. The flames erupt skyward and you are already working your way backwards, alive, breathing, dancing for an audience of one witness, me.

***

five years later

***

Simple as that. I shutter the caverning swoon around my heart as I do the window. The scent of smoke still trickles in.

Simple as that, this town has become a wasteland. Never much liked it, never mind that, this town is a wasteland. "We're going to have to leave," I say.

The body under the other covers rolls over. Black eyes blink at me, above a black beak.

"There's a fire," I say.

The black eyes blink, so I shrug and pace towards the bathroom. Plumbing, it's called. Plumbing, in a town by the bright sea, chattering vendors shouting to buy from me this, buy from me that, I guess they haven't smelled the smoke at all yet.

Plumbing, but no mirrors. A tub holding water, but no towel. A strange box you sit on for body waste. Whoever thought of sitting on a box for that?

Never mind that.

Crazy thoughts for a crazy woman who hasn't talked to anything but a bird in weeks.

I return to the bed. I sniff at the shutters, wrinkling my nose. The smoke has gotten worse. I think I was starting to be okay with this town, this place, the raucous seabirds taking over the shoreline and my ears.

I drag my bag out from under the bed. One of those fancy ones that hangs from your shoulders and straps around your hips. One Tatter-cloak gave me.

I pack the water bottle from the table, the leftover seaweed bread, the canned meat. The beginnings of bone knives from fish ribs, I collect in the front pouch. I fold up the clean cloak hanging off the three-legged chair and stuff it on the side. I go back for the soap by the bathroom sink and steal that--never know when you might need soap--and drain the water filled tub.

The jet bird likes water filled tubs, splashing, bobbing, thrashing with her stick-like claws to pretend that she is swimming. The way her beak splits, and she pants for air, nearly turns her to a grinning thing.

But we are leaving. I unhook my spare clothes from the back of the door. Fold them awkwardly, lumpily. I pull the comb from the brown cloak's corner pocket and halfway brush out my hair, dyed black with old leaves. Then I shove the comb back in with the cloak, hurry over to the bed and the backpack and the bird.

A call rises up outside, rattling the window shutters. "Fire! Fire!" I tug her wing by drowsy sky blood and nearly gag on acrid smoke, snaking through the window. I nearly shiver at bright flashbacks on my eyes.

"We are leaving," I say to the bird. She waddles out from under the white quilt. I pluck a loose feather from the sheets, shove it into the backpack. "Right now."

She waddles into my hand, and I shoulder the backpack, which bounces against my spine all the way through the door and the empty hall and the creaky stairs.

***

We head for the docks, the jet bird and I. Until I catch textures of the clamoring crowds and discretely angle away, thoughts whirling.

Passage on a boat is the quickest way out of here. Safest. Walking the roads, less so. You never know which road the Burners come from, with their oil and striking sticks and wagons of eager tinder.

I squeeze through the streets, shoulders curled against the tide of people. Children cry over left-behind dolls; stone-faced mothers shush them; curling smoke hazes gray, watering my eyes. I don't tell the tide of people that the docks are already overflowing, the beach about to wash out with the boats. They'll figure it out.

Which road, then, to avoid the Burners? The beaten path up the coast, the two cobbled roads going inland? I curl my shoulders against the tide, the bird on my head drawing stares, the backpack digging into my hips.

***

Dear dead, the Burners came to burn the taint of magic. Empress lands, Empress laws, any whiff of the extraordinary was worthy of being purged from existence by incineration.

Dead, I wish to speak for all the magic that has lived and been scrubbed free of this world, as if I could speak for our entire people, for textures pumping in thread-thick arteries, for inheritors of enchanted forests and constructed cities. Me, a death mage, awander in a city I don't really like--who am I to speak for this people?

I live and die every day.

So I speak for an entire memory. You, yesterday, a cut-copy version of I, me, us, an inked stamp bleeding with color. I, more faded through layers of rice paper.

I hold the stories of our dead.

I killed the king, that rot-gotten hollow of slimy hunger. I say I, it is easy for me to take credit for our mistakes.

He showed up at the coronation. Pyre. Throne room in the whipping wind where you danced for me. He showed up.

I must have missed the hunger, between the rags and the shock and the shushing of a crying bird. I missed that awful, slimy hunger in the tents beside us, because.

I had just watched you die.

The slimy hunger walked onto the stage, grand feather cape black against the gray smoke.

He smiled, teeth white.

I had just killed you so you wouldn't die by fire.

I would say I'm sorry, but the dancing figure of you in the flame sparked bright red at his teeth.

I found a depth of hurt, I unbottled it, like fired clay cracking in a fist, the hurt ran like blood up my throat and I screamed at him.

He crumpled like a child's doll. His cape kept billowing in time with the red flag over the tent. The crowd hushed. Not because of shock. I stood an island in a still sea of collapsed bodies, this is why Tatter-cloak wasn't invited. The fire crescendoed.

"Mage!" a voice screeched, on the continents outside the sea of collapsed bodies. I carefully rebottled the hurt. "Mage!"

I ran, senses a knife cutting through water of ragged voices.

***

The Burners didn't come from any road. They made their own. I take the road going up the coast, squinting at the charred wagon tracks cutting through the harvested fields. "Whyever did they do that?" I ask the bird perched atop my head. The jet bird doesn't reply. I glance back at the town, could the Burners burn a whole town for the magic of bone knives?

A stone building in the town's outskirts crumbles. The Burners laugh, cackling like mindless birds. A shivering creep clings sideways of my spine at my exposed silhouette, on the beaten path away from the town, my swaying arms bare. Mage that I am. I cross my arms, braiding the cords of the backpack in my fingers; could the Burners burn a whole town for the magic of bone knives?