I would say we walk to greet the burners, but. My arms are too shaky to carry a child, and the goal is to keep the old man alive--dragging him by his blood 'til dawn is a poor way to keep him that way.

The child I carry on my back. I loosen the shoulder straps to fit them around his arms and mine together, I tie the hip straps beneath his legs so they stick out like mad feather tufts in front of my waist. With each step his head bounces on my shoulder but there are worse fates than shoulder bruises.

The man...well, I leave him in his cabin, in bed beside a perfectly round pot that must hold ashes. We take handfuls of his fruits, strips of dried meat. I say we, but. My hands and senses do all the dragging and collecting and touching of salted meat. I stuff those in a sack and give it to the jet bird's talons, I rub my hands against my sides like that'll keep the taste from clinging against my skin.

The jet bird flies to greet the burners. She and I both agreed, wordlessly, to leave little evidence in the town of cabins. At the beach she comets into her silver-pebble nest, and when she hops from the crater of cracked stones her blood drifts a bittersweet winter wind. But leave little trail, we do. Her trail in the sky bobs as erratic as an insect's, weighed down with a sack of food.

I walk to greet the burners, devouring dripping sweet fruits and tossing spongy skins as a spotty map, marking an echo of the jet bird's skittering flight path. If a stone mage wakes and deems none of it a dream, maybe he will come find me. Come find the place where I greet the burners by a trail of spongy fruit skins.

I walk to the burners, the shake in my elbows diminishes with the distance. A night in a town of cabins loses its stranglehold over me--one pleasant past of niceness fading to a present of fruit juices and erratic flight, black wings against a near-black sky.

So judge me, you ghosts in the air and flickers of flame. For believing the niceness wasn't better, the past of niceness was a lie, judge me for the simplicity of believing we are better than belief now, more so than a mere day ago.

I walk to greet the burners; one burn to another.

Judge me, I will ruin the burners. Leave them to set no more cabins afire, leave no more children vengeful, do it like a decent savior would do.

We could pretend like that, like I do it for them. But I only want their fires and their frost-sharp texture to leave me to sleep at peace at night, so the next time a child perches on a rooftop and curses somebody, or attacks an underwater fish, I don't have to run. No more running, child.

In the graying twilight, I crest a hill. My arms and clothes resolve into dull color, brown under the red light. I slump to the ground, crushing long grass stems. I untie the backpack holding the child up and he wakes, I carefully lower them both behind me, turning to face them. He blinks, expression blank, the dirty gray backpack like his pillow in the yellow grass.

"Do you remember what happened?" I cross my legs.

He blinks and stares. The jet bird comets gently behind us. I imagine most of the food squishes still.

"Last night?" I ask.

He stares.

"We left the town," I say. "There's burners coming. So we went out to meet them."

He rubs his eyes and stares blankly at the sky. I turn away, shut my eyes and reach out with those senses to the frost-sharp, bitten cold of the burners. No more running.

***

Dear dead, when Tatter-cloak returned to the house, you were wide awake. By your bed, sitting against the smooth wall, waiting for dawnlight. None of the commanding guards ever went upstairs, those were the private chambers of the monarch and their bodyguard, but you still hid the sea cat in the closet and bled in the bathroom and waited against the wall instead of at the top of the wooden steps in sight of the bottom floor.

Tatter-cloak didn't come up to you. They had a celebration, around the dining table with too many chairs, with the commanding guards. Something with bad jokes and dramatic stories of injuries and decimating the enemies.

You hugged a jet bird too tightly, she could fly away through the starlit window above the bed if she wanted, but as it was she wriggled uncomfortably in your grip because you were squishing her. Yet at your squeezing hold, her blood didn't strike sharp storms, so you kept clinging on to her.

Yet what was the big deal with wanting Tatter-cloak to come upstairs and talk? They were a monarch. They were busy. You were a death mage. You'd only known each other for part of a summer anyway.

The conversation downstairs turned to the death mage hiding in the army's midst. You strained to hear, ear to the pale painted wall, echoed fragments of "terrifying" "here all along" "it makes me so mad" "never would've" falling on your cold skin.

"Why do you think she's...bodyguard at all?"

You shut your eyes. Reminded yourself: people are not all good, all bad. Tatter-cloak trusted you. Then to your ears, they didn't lie to these commanding guards that they knew a death mage was their bodyguard, that's why she's the bodyguard. Who's going to assassinate me with a death mage bodyguard?

People are not all good, all bad, Tatter-cloak could both trust you and not come upstairs to talk. Talk about what? All you shared was part of a summer anyway, that and a replacement queen bent on vengeance. How paltry that seemed against their laughter at the bad jokes, stories of a so-called king never waking up to the blade thrust under his ribs.

You let the jet bird go so you could wipe your face, quietly, so the sound didn't travel through the painted walls and wood floor to the hearty celebration down below. The jet bird squatted on your lap and didn't move, what popped in your mind was the number of boulders this feather-ball in your lap had shattered, split smoother than a mirror. You were crying to a splitter of boulders, crater-er of snowdrifts. What did she know of softness and aches?

Shouting down below. You wiped your nose, pressed your ear to the paint and rubbed the shifting bird. "I won't stand for this! A death mage tried to assassinate the last queen, you know that? You can't trust them. They hear voices of dead people. They possess people. You know th--"

"I've been with this death mage for months!" Tatter-cloak interrupted. "We're friends. I trust her with my life, you hear me?"

"Then where is the death mage right now? How do we know she isn't waving her hands over that city making an army of dead bodies to come murder us?"

"I don't know! We got separated! You expect me to keep track of someone when I'm being mobbed by a screaming crowd? I can't think clearly when my skull is vibrating, much less tell who's arms and legs and shouts are whose."

A snort. "Some bodyguard."

"Hey."

"I'm only saying..."

"This is not up for discussion." Squealing chairs. "I'm going to bed."

You scrambled away from the wall and slipped into your bed. Boots beside the mattress, cloak slung to the corner, the jet bird fit in the curve of your arm and you curled under the hot covers. You tried to breathe evenly with the stair creaks, the muttering downstairs; your insides twisted up and your thoughts warred at each other. People are good, not all bad, it'd be much easier to wholly despise or wholly love the residents of your house if that weren't true.

You breathed evenly at Tatter-cloak's sigh, the bootsteps over the wood. The jet bird lay frozen under your touch, even when the other bed creaked, even when Tatter-cloak muttered about how the guards better leave soon and you shed silent tears into her feathers.

***

Gray dawn, to red horizon, to outlined shapes of burners pulling wagons across the plains. On the yellow-grass hill, I stand. Squint against the light of the rising sun. I reach for frost-sharp blood, measure the distance by how many shivers the hollow cold makes in my shoulders; twelve.

I can count individual burner masks, dozens, things of gaudy, chalky colors and bubbly headdresses. People in trailing cloaks pull the coverless wagons, heavy footsteps a rhythm to the unified heart pulse.

I mouth a curse, lips forming silent sounds, my throat burns with the weight of it. Before I finish speaking, the thrum of cold narrows and focuses on me.

I can't decide if that's a good thing.

I wish we had a canoe.

I utter a curse at the turning of wagons.

It is a beautiful thing, soft syllables and round vowels, tumbling over each other, fraying with the distance but arrowed fast enough.

The curse hits the first row of gaudy mask-wearers, and they stop walking. That's it. They stop walking. No bodies go limp, no breaths flee pairs of lungs. They only stop walking.

I speak another curse, this one sharper and faster, arrowing towards only a single colored silhouette. The body crumples, draped over the wagon's handlebar. The wagon tips ever so slightly, a dot skewing out of the straight line of wooden wagons. The one remaining wagon puller shouts something at me. Loud, but not loud enough to make out the words. I speak another curse and arrow it towards the shouter. They crumple too.

I build another curse on my tongue, arrow it forward. A third burner crumples, a second wagon skews sideways.

Licks of fire erupt behind the row of wagons. My eyes widen, stomach knotting, behind the front line of wagons they started the fires, hidden from my view.

I launch another curse anyway, crumpling a fourth. The fire sprouts golden.

The front row of burners--minus the ones I've cursed--parts like a pair of hands, revealing a narrow catapult.

In the catapult's bowl rests a fireball as bright as the sun.

I reach down for the child and the backpack, limbs half as fast as my thundering heart, panicking at our unpreparedness, fingers too shaky to slip quickly through the backpack strap and around the child's shirt.

What did I expect, to stand on this hill and curse all the burners dead?

I suppose I did.

Burners, burning in a fire. No more running, this dawn I came to welcome them to every fire that haunts me.

But I didn't prepare for my curses to do nothing.

Bodies of burners pile on the front of the catapult and a shout echoes out. Rope snaps, the catapult weighed down with bodies rocks, and heaves the fireball into the air.

I messily hoist the child and the backpack out of the crushed grass and run, freefalling down the hillside, hoping the dirt will shield us. I glance backward; the force of flight has eaten away most of the flames, leaving a charred ball, flickering with sparks.

A jet bird caws, she still stands on the hill with our sack of food. I have time to trip and roll precisely twice before the boom of flaming boulder smashes atop the hill, spraying grass stems and dirt and rocks and sparks. I and the child and the backpack quit rolling, a thorny bush embracing us. A jet bird screams. Her voice vibrates the very air, her blood twists violent as an impending winter blizzard flinging shards of ice.

Another fireball looms, shadowing the sun. I cover my face, boom, the thrum of burner hearts leaps at the roar of annihilation. Grass stems catch fire.

"Run," I yank the child to his feet halfway by his blood, scramble to my own, fumble the twisted backpack straps up my shoulder. I drag the child after me, sprinting away from the hill, tongues of orange seem to chase us through the whipping grass stems, the dead brush. The jet bird screams again, from the sky. The texture of her storm hammers through solid mass and this boom drums different. Shattering. Sonic air. My ears count the pattering thunks of charred boulder chunks falling to the ground. One, two, four, five, baby craters split the ground, the racing fire leaps ahead of us with the morning breeze and I freeze.

The child stumbles, he is sobbing, my hand grips red welts into his wrist, the shoulder strap digs into my skin. Frantically I spin, the fire leaps and dances around us and that's when I comprehend this is no ordinary fire.

The jet bird screams, the burner hearts slow, again in unison, that doesn't seem natural. I shut my eyes and reach for the burners again, pushing against my instincts screaming to recoil from the frostbite cold. What is at the heart of that ice, so chilling it squeals dry and splintering?

"Auntieeeeeeeee!" the child yells, jerking my eyes awake.

Magenta. I hold the child back from running headlong into the flames, his wailing cries drown out the crackle of the fire burning the coastline. I've lost trace of the jet bird, her screams. I reach out for her, her storm, attempting to anchor myself in the spinning walls of magenta and the frantic yanks of the child. I do not find her.

The fire holds no heat. No salty sweat prickles my forehead, no red swells rise from my arms. But still I see magenta, eating up the grass in a perfect ring, ever shrinking.

Kolariq's footsteps curl the grass black, his arms swallow up the sky. My eyes singe with tears and I wipe the water away. His burning mouth opens and he cackles, the child's wails mix with his.

"Quit haunting me!" I shout. Kolariq's face, eyes pits of light, chin jagged with magenta fire tongues, warps in and out of costume--colored cloak, painted mask, floppy hat.

"You can't escape me," he chokes out, like the pale smoke suffocates him. "You are too weak to escape."

"You don't know me!" my throat burns. The child yanks against my hand and tears away, running headlong into the flames. I whirl, and run after him.

"I can see you," Kolariq hisses, bones adorning his face like a halo. "You aren't what you think you are."

I shield my arms before my face and breach the wall of magenta, no heat wave devours me but I can't see with the light. I sprint, boots whipping grass, senses flailing wildly for a child, a bird.

"You thought you could escape me?"

Boom. The ground erupts, flinging me down, pebbles and dirt pelt me. I cough, throat burning, from real smoke or maybe shouting or maybe just dirt.

"You cannot escape," the magenta whispers, "cannot cannot cannot boy you cannot boy. Cannot escape..."