I set the child down--he clings weakly to my knees--and knock. The blood behind the door stirs faintly and I shuffle back, hugging my arms around myself. To protect from the oppressive clicking of many insects. The cold of distant burners.

The door slides open. A man squints at me.

"The burners are coming here," I whisper. "And he lost a lot of blood," I touch the child's hands gripping my knees.

He rubs his eyes. He leans heavily against the doorframe. "I have several questions."

"Can you help this child first?" I ask.

"I can give him food. Beyond that..." he shrugs.

I pick the shivering, gasping child up and carry him into the cabin. "That's enough."

The man stumbles off, past the single bed, and fades into the shadow. Stones tap on stone and I gently lower the child to the bare floor.

The man returns, dark vegetables and a cup of water in his wrinkled hands. "First question," his voice rumbles. He hands me the cup of water, and I carefully hold it to the child's mouth. He drinks greedily. "How close? Why is the town not awake if the burners are coming?"

"They're far away," I say. Water dribbles down the child's chin.

"Second question," he sets the vegetables on the floor, "how did your child lose so much blood?"

"He cut his palms open and called the burners here. Then he jumped off the roof and injured himself, so I carried him here. Do you know anything of healing..." I whisper out, "magic?"

"Third question, if the burners are far away how do you know?"

"Where do you find the rocks for the mortar every morning?" I ask back. "I only see one bed; where is your wife? Why is your blood the texture of deep mountain caves, so worn and smooth as if you had been there? How do you reverse a mind curse a child spoke that you have never heard before?"

"Fourth question," he continues, "was going to be 'how exactly did he call the burners here?' but never mind." He rises and returns to the corner of the cabin, fading into the shadows behind the bed.

"And that comes as a surprise to you?" I whisper.

Clacking insects answer me.

The dribbling water down the child's chin stops. He pants through his nose. I lower the half-filled cup to the floor, reach for one of the vegetables and find a spongy skin. My nails cut to the juicy center and I rip it open.

The man emerges from the shadows with some kind of pale cloth stretched between his hands. "Fifth question, was it your child who called the burners here, or you? I have never seen him lift a finger of his own volition."

I twist up toward him and glare. "We were asleep. I woke to him missing, found him on top of the roof. His magic caught the burners' attention."

The man slowly kneels, and tries wrapping the cloth around the child's hands. The child flinches from the touch, fingers flighty, elbows poking the man away. The man pulls the cloth away, and my shoulders prickle like he's staring at me with beady eyes. I rip off chunks of the spongy vegetable skin. I throw them out the open doorway.

The child's panting slows, but the rapid pattering of his heart does not. I hand him a chunk of juicy, dripping fruit. The flighty fingers take it, disappear it into his mouth. Teeth squish up and down, up.

"Are you going to answer my questions?" I say.

"You're a death mage," he says.

"So, no you're not going to."

"How many people have you killed?"

My hands, giving the child fruit chunks, go still. "Clearly, I shouldn't have come to you," I hand the child the fruit, half peeled, and scoop him up. "Or warned you."

"I know stone magic," he whispers at my back.

"That much was obvious," I step to the doorway, treading into the night. The dry chill of burners pulses closer, incrementally so, but still I shiver.

"And the burners came because of what I did last time," his voice rumbles after me. "My wife died months ago, and I gave her body a proper ceremony down at the base of those hills," his footsteps swish over the gravel roadway in my wake--swish, not crunch, "beside our clanmates. I didn't care that it might attract the burners. I was prepared. I kept her ashes with me, so I did carry her free of the burner's flames. I didn't lie.

"Then the next day, I watched the town burn. I told the surviving town folk that I was away mourning my wife after her customs--a day's long vigil to send her spirit off."

I stop walking. I turn. "So you did lie about her, lied to the townspeople."

He raises a shaky finger, a black silhouette. "No. I am better than that." Silence. "What is it to you, death mage?"

"What is my being a death mage got to do with lying?"

"My wife and I never had children, for fear of your twisted kind."

I snort. "And you lied about that too."

"No. We did not have seven human children, we had seven birds, more colorful than a field of flowers. We trained them to speak, we called them our kids. But you...you lied about your child. You killed his aunt, didn't you? You stole her death mage child."

"Nope," I twist and crunch through the gravel.

"That's what death mages do," he hisses. "Murder people. They murdered my and my wife's master. Murdered our clan."

"That is what death mages do," I whisper-breathe to the air, heart rattling. "You think I don't know that? That I don't live that? I don't need your reminder, stone mage."

"Then what are you doing here," he yells, "calling burners to a town I am helping rebuild as penance?"

I turn, motioning with the child in my arms to the cabins all around us. The drafty holes between wooden logs, the sleeping strangers. "I am running for my life," I say, jittery. "Because I have no one, and no place, and no thing somebody else hasn't taken from me, except my existence," I exhale, wreathed in silence. The insects fall quiet. "You want to talk about losing your family? My master ripped apart the dead body of the boy I loved. You want to talk about losing family? I said goodbye five years ago to the only family greater than one soul I have ever known, one of them is dead and buried and the other is a half-ruler under the control of an empress. I left them to escape mage hunters, to protect what they were trying to build.

"I have been on this continent, in the horrendous muggy heat and chattering insects, for years. And the only one who has needed my help is this child, who tried to kill me before going mute. Every town I enter I doom to attract the burners, because I am a death mage, and that's what we do. Get people killed. You think I don't know that, with every inhale? I don't need you blaming--"

"You chose to come here," the man paces closer. The gravel street ripples out of his path, leaving soft dirt. "To my home. My wife and I built this town from nothing thirty years ago. Absolutely nothing. Every building we made as a memorial to our dead clan of mages. We named the streets after them! Right here was Hollow, intersecting Granite, Pebbles is one lane over. The street called Seam winds towards the beach, we named the main road to the judge's hall Shatterclast. Our master raised us well. Fed us, gave us caverns warmed by the heat of a volcano, took each of us in when our birth families cast us out for our magic.

"And you," he jabs a shaking finger toward me, "and your kind murdered her. My wife and I found her body at the entrance to the caverns. Her body was pierced on stalagmites, like some monster's teeth. You know what killed her?"

I cross my standing legs, to calm the vibrating of my knees. The child's palpitating heart skips counter to my racing one. We rush like two clashing sea currents thrown upon a boulder.

"You know what killed her?"

"A death mage," I say.

"Her ribs were ripped from her body!" he screams, and the ground shakes. Heaves like liquid thunder, bottled up and roaring to escape the glass. The child and I stumble to the ground.

"And we found our clanmates littering the valley floor, left for scavenger birds!" The ground shreds in half. "How dare you come to this town, act for my sympathy and these good people's food, only to call the burners back? How dare you?" Soil shakes, a fountain of gravel and rock clouds out the cabins full of dreaming people.

I exhale. I suppose this is part of the child's curse. None of the sleeping people wake to the ground thundering.

I inhale. Behind an avalanche of soil the man disappears. "I came to warn you," I whisper, pushing to my feet, "because I thought we had something in common."

I speak a curse. Deadly, knife sharp, raging against the gravel erupting in the air. Yet against the rushing roar and spinning soil, the curse unravels itself, sound stifled. A cloud of rock speeds toward me, I shudder and step backwards. The child weighs down my arms, he isn't aware enough to cling to me when I spin and run, jostling over the uneven ground.

"How dare you?" The floating rocks shiver, prickling at my spine.

"Run," the child hums, like one of the youngest boys from the caves wilting the first time Kolariq ever screamed at them. He bounces in my arms, "run for a living, run, run..."

I know not how he remembers that. Run for a living, flight for five years.

I inhale.

My boots quit slapping over uneven gravel roads. I reach out for drowsy, humid skies, call her to me. She wakes. She senses this child's heart, my pounding blood, and erupts into the sky.

I exhale.

I whirl and face a suffocating cloud of soil, tiny specks glittering in the starlight. The gravel rocks chisel themselves into sharpened knives.

My lungs heave. "You're only calling the burners here faster," I say loudly, and the chiseled knives pause. The ground roils, and I shift the child's weight onto my shoulder. "What about your wife's ashes?"

His blood, like smooth walls of mountain caves, sprouts jagged spikes. "My wife's name was Strata," he shouts, muffled by the soil cloud. "I buried her bones far beneath the surface. If I don't save her ashes, the rest of her will be fine. She wants me to avenge her and our clanmates, more than she cares for her remains. Death mage, you couldn't understand."

No, perhaps I can't. I did keep Aukai's bones far longer than I cared after Kolariq's.

The swirling soil strikes at me, tries to cling to me like hanging creepers, kicks at my hair and cloak.

I twist my wrist, flick the man's blood sideways but he doesn't move. Something solid and large stops him. I shove his blood down towards his feet and he screams, muted with the floating stones, needles form of the rocks and sling towards me. I hurl his blood away but he hardly slides, a solid barrier keeping him from flying. The needle rocks glint, shrieking, abrading my fingers.

Cometing, the jet bird crashes through the shower of glinting gravel blades, dispelling dust. The child and I stand free at the edge of the looming soil cloud, a plume of weak dirt floats from the bird's landing. But the ground vibrates again, I twist my boot into the ash and crouch low, to keep my balance, like a queen holding daggers might.

But of course, that queen is not here. But of course, a staring child weighs my wrists down, not lightly gripped blades.

Beneath the crater of the jet bird, I find skeletons of the long burned, I slick them up with tugs of taffy. They lurch awkwardly to the surface, clawing themselves free of unelected graves.

Gravel knives loft into the air, deadly flocks, I curl around the child protectively and stone needles pith into the path, cut my cloak, but the jet bird shoots past, cutting the air. More knives launch at us and I awkwardly scurry away with the bumpy ground and the child against my shoulder. The jet bird sweeps overhead, her squawks bellowing the air clean, a sonic barrier to his magic.

Skeletons punch through the streets. Shattered skulls, missing teeth; these are jangling creatures accustomed only to silence. Their agitation only salts the taste of taffy stringing them tighter, and they fling themselves at the soil cloud mercilessly; white bones fade to gray silhouettes, fade to opaque blurs. The whipping soil tears at them, gouges out their skulls through their eye sockets, whittles delicate finger bones to gaps in space.

"I will leave you for dead, as your kind left my master!" the man's blood shouts. "She didn't deserve that!"

"What was your name?" I say loudly. "Dirt?"

"I was Sandstone!" the soil shrieks. A wave of gravel-knives launches toward me but the jet bird is faster, louder.

"I'd rather not kill you!"

"You should have left before I ever knew what you were!"

"I came to warn you."

A skeleton reaches through the ground and grips the man's ankle. Sediment whirls, scouring apart the skeleton, but another--poorly hinged toes and vertebrae--clamps down on his other foot.

The gravel knives, sharpened and thrown at me and halted by a jet bird's body or her squalls--they peter out. I loosen my grip on the child. I dredge up deeper bones, buried inside broken building frames and heaps of ash. They grind against gravity, against the weight of ash-packed streets to claw up to the man's shins and knees.

A towering rock shoots out of the depth of the spinning cloud, blackening and resolving to eat up the stars. I startle, turn my back, the jet bird comets overhead and the boulder cracks down the middle. Like we are a parter of rivers, two clean-cut sides of a stone soar past me and the clinging child.

The gravel beneath my boots vibrates, so I step to the soft ground already used up of its rocks. Ash, black and white, feathers into the air. The jet bird alights atop my wild hair and screeches at the rising gravel, cobbling into something large and solid. It collapses to pieces.

From the vessels in my nose I ribbon blood. My toes I curl with the motion of shooting the ribbon into the soil cloud, toward the sense of the man's veins. He's raised a pedestal of solid rock to stand on, and my skeletons climb from the ground around it, bent ulnas lifting clawed fingers to grip the sides of the pedestal. The soil cloud erodes them before they reach him.

The jet bird atop my head caws thunder at the ballooning wall of spinning soil and it caves before her. It surges, she screams, I plant my feet into the ash against the push and pull raging before me. I shut my eyes and hone in my senses.

My blood launches like a solid arrow, ripped at, sucked at with the particles of screaming soil. The man has no clue it's coming until my weapon cuts him in the arm, he wears no armor like a bird perched atop his head, when the blood cuts him his concentration wavers.

A conglomerate skeleton--an eroded femur lofting curled ribs and thumb bones--yanks him by the shin and he stumbles. The outer rings of the soil storm collapses, the drumming whush of soil quiets. I yank out the man's blood from the cut on his arm and slash both wrists, his palms. The storm surges with his fury, envelopes us, I cough on dry dust but the jet bird pummels her wings and shrieks and stone magic statics dead in a bubble. I string his blood up and choke him, the gravel street launches into the air like a tidal wave ready to crash down on us and only a jet bird's constant screaming in my ears saves me and the child from scathing knives slashing us to threads.

I choke the stone mage, I suffocate his windpipe with liquid cords, the ground roars and rattles and I fall to my tailbone but I never let my chokehold go. I never let the child shaking in my arms go.