Dear you, who are dead now, the future holds a lot for you. Death cycling into rebirth, and the like; a whole lot of selves live within this skin of ours.

I speak as if you were here, when you are dead now.

You accompanied Tatter-cloak on his journey. He wanted to announce in every town and to every traveler that he was the monarch of the Nunait. That he was fighting to reinstate the rightful ruler of the Nunait.

So he did.

Not every town, not every traveler, but a great many. His words spoke of their fears--a smoky horizon, flames setting their homes to ruin, a warlord taking all that they loved--and he spun their fears into hope. But when the volunteers flocked to him, Tatter-cloak gaped blankly at their pleading expressions and you were the one to suggest the frost orchards. If these people were to battle an empress--a second empress--they should be bold enough to sleep under enchanted trees.

Closer to the palace city, in the few towns left miraculously unscathed by the army, Tatter-cloak found palace guards and palace guides, kicked out by the king, disillusioned by the queen they were loyal to until she seemed to disappear from ruling altogether.

Some of them didn't believe the book. Vilified it as falsehoods written by a nobody vying for power in the chaos brought by the invaders. Some of them wept at its pages, and joined you.

And that was how you built an army, fed by magic fruit, trained by palace guards, a mere autumn before winter crawled up from the sea. In a mere autumn of glowing frost orchards Tatter-cloak had never seen before, they fretted that the army would never be ready, then thought the army was more than ready, then worried the army would never be ready no matter what, then settled with "as ready as reasonably expected."

The snows struck for real. The days shortened, the dark stretched, and you caught wind of a king's friend coming for the ragtag rebellion in a magic orchard.

So Tatter-cloak's army launched an attack first.

***

One night, indistinguishable from the others--same insects, same heat, same drafty cabin and soreness in my arms--the child is not there when I wake. At first I rub the canvas of my cloak and deem it fluidity of dreams that scrambles my senses--the child sleeps on the woven mat behind me, surely, crystalline blood, flexible bones.

Until jagged blood shoots into the sky from our rooftop and sleep flees my mind.

There screams a silent, pained curse from the blood, washing down the sides of our rooftop.

I can't do anything with the words already spoken. The jet bird could. The jet bird nests beside a beach.

The curse plummets like roils of thick fog, wandering over the ash, slipping through the drafts of the cabins around us. I crawl on dusty floorboards and clog my cloak under the door, a paltry curtain to stop silent words buzzing to those senses.

But the words were never aimed for me. The curse slips into sleeping minds, piercing, severing something important, I don't know what, I know nothing about cursing the mind I doubt Kolariq did either. I pull away my cloak.

Blood threads follow the curse, sneaking through the gaps in drafty cabins. I stumble out the door and stare at the rooftop; against the starlight, tentacles of blood rise from the child's swaying body, he hums something soft, my melody from the beach.

I wrench control of the blood threads, the ones stringing around necks of unconscious people, something severed in their minds. I take control of the crystalline texture easily, this child knows about mind curses and ribboning his own blood but he doesn't have years of experience, training inside those senses.

"What are you doing?" I hiss, lest I shatter some silence and the townspeople awake to find the outsider and her child dancing with blood ribbons.

The child hums. Sways. Hardly seems to notice how I've pulled his blood threads back and am siphoning them into the soil. He doesn't have much blood to ribbon out, thankfully these threads are thin, what is he doing threading his own blood out to dance for the sky?

"What are you doing?" I hiss, trekking around the cabin's corner to find how he climbed up. "Are you okay?"

As if I believe he will answer.

Long planks of wood protrude from the back corner of the cabin, forming easy handholds. I climb up, fingers discovering all the grime, gravelly ash dirtying my feet.

I poke my head over the roof. "Hello?" I whisper. The child continues to hum, soft and simple, pausing often for breaths. New, crystalline-sharp blood floats in the air above him, sprouting from extended palms, twirling like thin, leafless stalks. Groping for something to cling to.

I crawl toward him, over the bodies of dead insects littering the tilted roof. My tongue curls ready to cut his curses short, should he speak again. Kneeling by him, I wave away crystalline blood twirling toward me, I reach out and carefully touch my fingers to his bleeding palm. This night, the liquid as black as water, I try to picture the color under sunlight. Is it red, deep blue, almost silver?

My fingers trace their way along the bloody lines of his palm to his wrist, the pulse under his skin pumping weak, he keeps on humming slower than a heartbeat.

"We should go back to sleep," I say.

He hums, a sad tone, and the blood spins in tighter circles overhead.

"Come on," I say, carefully tugging his wrist.

The sudden thrum of distant heartbeats overtakes me and I gasp, shuddering at the sheer frostbitten cold within those veins. The drying frost screeches into my senses.

The child quits humming. Ribbons the blood loose. He curls his palms into fists and he scrambles, scrambles and leaps and falls off the edge of the roof.

The fall is not far. As in, I barely lunge across the roof, not even catching a glimpse of the ground, before he thumps to the gravel and I freeze. Holding my breath, I peer down at the ground. My shoulders slump. A mound of ash has softened his landing, faintly white in the night, his sprawled limbs  a dimmer gray. He has no bones broken. I can't say for sure about bruises. But either way, he isn't standing up to run away, run toward some army of burners it sure seems he called here.

Shaking, I scale down the cabinside, knees weak and cold with the distant heartbeats. The child lies, fingers twitching; he sucks in air facedown on the ash, I carefully roll him to his back and scoop him up. I don't say things, like "that was rash" or "why would you use so much blood, such a strange curse, and draw the burners here?" or "you are not the silent child from this evening. Nor are you a screaming, murderous one" or "what now, child who draws burners to us? Run?"

I walk back to the front of the cabin, feet ash stained, arms ash stained, the child gasping shallowly, cold and pale from blood loss. I set him in the doorway. He continues to gasp, his crystalline blood pumping thin.

I close my eyes. Not that it isn't already dark. I extend those senses through the town of cabins, no further than the town of cabins, I have never specifically traced an elderly man's texture but I find him, dry as stone powder, damp as the heart of mountain caves, worn and smooth as stream pebbles.

I fetch my boots, from inside the doorway, leaving footprints on the floorboards. Then I hug the child in my arms, he shivers, heaving for air next to my ear, breath hot and humid.

And I walk. The crunching gravel grinds at the silence; the distant burners--cold and frostbitten--aware of us as the stars. And I walk, to the only other mage I know of in this town.