Winter's first snows, dear dead, swept the winding road into oblivion behind you. The wagon leader blessed the skies you'd made it down the mountains before the snows struck; of course, the foothills and plains were nearly as treacherous. Wheels sunk and slipped and creaked and rattled, but through sheer force of the animals never quite got stuck in the growing snowbanks.

You hardly had clothes for the winter. Just your cloak, two pairs of boots, an extra pair of leggings you didn't have time to pull on so you wrapped your knees with them. Shivered at the biting blizzard.

The previous week, traveling from the mountains back down to the Nunait, hadn't been so cold, merely faintly crisp, nights leaking into dawns crusted with thin frost quick to melt away. This winter storm struck fast, hard, brought ice winds where before cool breezes held sway.

You, shivering in the back of a wagon bed, lost all sound of the growling wagon beasts, the animal handler's calls, the creaks of wagon wheels other than the ones below you. Your whole world muffled with erasing white, snowflakes upon snowflakes falling through the light.

You would have hopped out of the wagon bed to walk, since walking would have kept you warmer than shivering in a wagon might--or, you would have done it, if you had snowshoes. If you hadn't already wrapped a spare pair of leggings around your knees with no desire to untie them.

The road wound through the foothills, descending into tundra, occasionally the snow and hills gave way to the sight of a slow, wide river. Late snowflakes sunk into the water, sticking like slush, then fading into liquid reflection of the shrouded sky.

The storms waned and built again, through the first days your fingers iced to clumsy blocks, holding your cloak around you. Same for your lips, your nose; your muscles thickened to thick, fuzzy senses of how to move them. The jet bird hugged the back of your knees where they curled against the wood, she fluffed up all her feathers and her blood roused strange summer storms, hot winds and lightning.

"We're just not used to it," you whispered to her. "Give it a few days."

A few days later, all spent sleeping in snowbanks and riding the back of a wagon, you grew more accustomed to the cold than the wagon leaders and mammals. But that wasn't a surprise to you. The wagon leaders complained of the winds, burrowed themselves beneath thick gloves and fluffy coats. You tried to pretend like you were cold too, hiding under tarps in the wagon bed, hugging your cloaks and spare leggings around you. But your fingers no longer moved thick as ice floes in a stream. Your lips no longer froze between syllables. And was that magic, you wondered, or years of these icy winters?

Either way, you didn't want to dispel the illusion of a girl fleeing her home in the mountains. You didn't want to feel guilty for the free passage, the solid wagon bed under your back instead of all the walking through the snow. You were native to the mountains, your lips and hair matched most of the wagon leaders, and that tenuous connection to your childhood seemed too precious to throw away by acknowledging the ice hardly bothered you.

One afternoon, all suddenly, the blizzard vanished. The sky glowed pale orange. Glittering, bright snow smoothed out the tundra. As if jealous of the smothering snow, the wagons cut a trundling path behind you, two rows, many animal paws, wide as snowshoes. You dared sit up in the rocking bed to squint at the red wagons behind you, smiled at the lumbering beast only paces away. The golden-eyed creature glared at you and hissed. You waved back, easily ignoring the puzzled frown of the animal handler, since she seemed more cotton ball than human.

You would have hopped out the back if you had snowshoes. You would have laughed at the vivid tundra and plowed through snowbanks up to your knees if there weren't an audience to stare at you. The horizon stretched out forever, glittering and white, never devoured by vengeful teeth chomping at the clouds and night. How you missed feeling whole. How you'd left, for weeks, a part of you here.

"Nunait, I've missed you," you whispered. Though technically, you never crossed into the legal Nunait, over the river. But the snows didn't care about Empress lands or borders, so your heart didn't either. "Nunait, it's been awhile." A jet bird cawed in agreement, launching past your shoulder into the sky.

***

I spend a whole morning on the beach, with the child on his rock, the one with the aquamarine bloodstains. The jet bird keeps diving into the water and resurfacing with smooth, silvery pebbles glittering in her beak. She paddles with thin talons back to shore, sometimes I help prod her forward with fish bones drawn up to the surface. "Look at us," I say, perhaps to the child, perhaps to the bird. "Both of us fishing, but neither for real fish."

The jet bird squawks back an indecipherable reply.

A large ribcage with two fat fins claws through the wet sand underwater. Pale yellow vertebrae slowly poke above the surface, lapped by waves, crawling higher until they flop over, imbalanced, in the shallows. The jet bird waddles up after them, fluffs out her black feathers and hops past me to the beginning of a silver pebble nest.

From my rocky seat, I stoop over and grab the closest yellow rib bone, a thing smoothed like a pearl. I scoop up the whole skeleton, held together by its taffy. "What should we do with this?" I ask the child, scuffing the sand between us with the swaying ribs.

The child sits numbly on his rock, eyes half-closed, peering at hands curled in his lap. Curly hair sways over his forehead.

"Do you want to make a necklace?" I ask. "Or we could make a fun sculpture, maybe." As if I know how to make a fun sculpture.

He says nothing.

"A necklace, then."

I brought thread, of course. I have blood to make a needle. But these ribs are as long as my forearm, what sort of necklace would that make?

"A necklace for a giant," I mutter. I release the salt taffy stringing together the bones, they clatter, I lift one rib in my fist.

To the cuts on my back, I reach under my shirt and scratch the nearest one open. Stubby fingernails break apart the dried scab, barely, a droplet of blood condenses on my finger. The aquamarine blob follows my beaked fingers, needling into the wider end of the rib. Pursing my lips, I chip away at the bone, blow free the yellow-white dust and it drifts to the sand and lies there, disguised.

I poke and prod until a hole of light opens through the rib. I trade it for the thread coiled on the rock beside me. The thread bunches in my palm, springs up and down with the curling of my fingers. "Do you remember this?" I ask the child, offering the thread. He stares at his hands on his knees. "Here," I prompt him, pour the bundled thread to his fists.

It half falls to the sand. With one hand I try guiding him to hold the thread tightly between two fingers. After four attempts, his arm keeps the shape without dropping the thread. Quickly, I take the rib and guide the thread through the chipped away hole, then place the leading end of the thread in his other hand, and slide his fists closer so the bone can't tumble to the ground.

Then I work on bone number two. My blood needle picks a hole through the side of the bone, near the base, I blow dust to the beach. Help the child string this bone into place beside the first. They clatter together. The curved bones stretch longer than his torso, aimed outward like odd tusks. "A necklace for giants indeed," I say. Yet I pluck bone number three from the sand and pick at it with my aquamarine needle.

By bone number six, approximately half of the length of the thread, the child has begun to mutter something. Nonsense syllables that cut out into silence, so I dive to that ocean of curses in my mind to stop his tongue from working. But the motion of the muttered words gives me pause; the curse is building toward the bones. I study him, frowning, blood needle floating before my beaked fingers.

The curse rips past his lips and the yellow bones on the thread squeal something awful. I wince and would cover my ears, but one hand guides a blood needle and the other holds a bone.

When the squealing ends, the child sits still again. His face flickers in the briefest smile and he shakes the bone necklace. The bones don't rattle. I lean forward, glancing between the child, the necklace, the child, and the necklace with six rib bones shoved into one another like rocks jammed into each other's faces--as opposed to notched slats of wood, evenly fitted. They mangle into a solid shaft burying the thread, rib points jutting out like a six-fingered hand, no thumbs.

But the child quits shaking it and his hands drop to his lap. He goes still, expression slack, eyes unmoving.

My gaze flicks between the bones and his face. "We can work with that."

He doesn't seem to register what I say, the child and his six-fingered bone hand, so I hesitantly touch his knee with my own. He doesn't register that either. But he looks beautiful, in my imagination, in my plans.

***

Dear dead. One last elegy, for the person you used to be, the person you grew into and grew out of inside this skin. Dear dead:

The red wagon caravan came to a coast town cloaked in snow. The ocean waves lapped sluggishly, the sky dwindled red in drawn out twilights, sinking into stretched out nights. You thanked the wagon leader for helping you arrive here, you thought you could make a home here, away from the mountains. Every word true. She thanked you, it was her and her team's pleasure to help those in dire need.

Then you parted ways, but you left some of the clay bottles, albeit empty, in the wagon where you rode, in case selling clay bottles brought in some kind of profit for letting you ride the whole way.

The town loomed silent and gloomy, your footsteps sloshed through street slush. The place had gone to sleep, the sky glowed red twilight at the end of the day, and hearts pulsed thick and steady with sleep behind shuttered windows.

The first sign of you--the mage-hunters' posted signs of you--you discovered on a brick wall outside the empty market. The brick wall formed one side of a supplies building, where ship crews could pay to store goods while their boats floated empty in the docks, in need of cleaning.

The wall itself needed cleaning. Scouring. The sign on the bricks detailed a description of you, which you read with darting eyes, growing wary of your pale hair, the bird that followed you, the gray cloak you were in fact still wearing. Yet no textures of blood wandered down the street, no pairs of eyes stared pinpricks at your sides, and you hadn't crossed paths with anyone in the drowsy town. So you ripped the poster down. Tore the damp parchment into shreds so the inked letters scattered to the slush.

That wasn't the only sign, though. Descriptions dotted the buildings, poor illustrations fluttered outside doorways. You shrunk deeper in your cloak; the wagon leaders all knew exactly what you looked like. They knew all about the bird that slept curled behind your knees. Kindness of strangers, how far did that go?

Yet it was hardly the prospect of wagon leaders suddenly coming to hunt you with hissing mammals that hunched you inside your cloak. More like what they believed about you. The pity for a woman fleeing her home in the mountains settled--entirely misplaced--on your shoulders. You, a death mage, wanted for the murder of sixteen peacekeepers, according to the signs.

One last elegy, for the person you used to be. In the red dusk, you walked away from a sleepy town. Down the coast, by yourself, except for a gray sack and a knotted cloak and a jet bird circling high above.

One last elegy, for the person you used to be. Winter blizzards struck the coast hard, you scraped out a hole in the snowbanks but had to keep kicking at the exit lest you get buried alive. You ate frozen mushrooms out of cold fingers, but less cold than if you were out in the howling winds and flurrying ice.

When the blizzards stopped, you slid from your chrysalis jumpy with energy, quickly sapped by the trek through knee-deep, never-changing snow. The jet bird cometed in craters around you, making patterns of round dots on the tundra. Maybe, from high above, the dots formed a whole shape, a word in a jet bird's language asking why you had to go, again.

When you reached the town by the sea, near where the frost orchards used to be, you spent a whole day camping on a rocky hillside, dreading going back. Your limbs shivered, your heart resisted, your stomach twisted something awful. In the twilight, after what you deemed a whole day of denial, you tucked all your hair under your cloak, the brown one, and darted for the closest hotel. The jet bird kept far from you, only by you nudging her blood away from the town. You paid for rooms and food to a towering woman in a hotel lobby while ducking your head. Even though this town had fewer signs, for more hunted figures than just you, you didn't dare show yourself fully.

In the hotel room--slunk to through a dim hallway, cold as ice--the walls creaked with every mild breeze from the icing-over ocean. You let the jet bird in through the rattling window. Not that there was much for her there, or you--just a bed, a restroom, rugs woven with thread designs of leaping animals and giant red birds.

And you waited for Tatter-cloak. Restlessly awake on the pillowing mattress, peering out the window in gray light at the sluggish movements of cloaked people waddling the streets.

Tatter-cloak came, visited you on a bench by the docks, a winter a year and a half out by the dear dead.

You had visited the mountains because you knew you couldn't stay, but missing the tundra like that and you didn't want to leave again.

But you both agreed to logic: they found you camping beside a river. The mage-hunters. They could find you in the middle of the tundra again.

So maybe you'd be safer somewhere else, like on a ship to cross the sea.

But it's winter, you said. The ocean is freezing over. There's no ship to take.

So you hide for the months you have to. And hope they don't find you. And I'll see you before you leave.

So you hid in a hotel, then a different hotel, then the first one again. And you didn't like it, but you agreed to it.

Here's the real reason you took the ship at the first winds of spring: you realized you had nothing left for you in the Nunait. Besides Tatter-cloak. But you only met in the winters and the summers, for a day. So that last spring he brought you a backpack, all indelible straps and compartments, like a proper goodbye gift. Multi-layered, purposeful, to keep close until it broke down.

You had little left for you in the Nunait. Your home between two white hills had been scrubbed out by fire. Aukai's bones you promised not to touch again, not even to free them from a collapsed glacier cave. That was a better resting spot than you'd given almost anyone else.

You had nothing left for you in the Nunait, bar the snowstorms and the oceans and the wide open tundra you'd missed up in the mountains.

Maybe you'd sail clear to the other edge of the world, you told them. You parted ways--you walking to the docks, them walking back to the palace.

A breeze rippled your hair, ice crunched under your boots, on the streets, on the ship's boarding plank with no one else aboard. Maybe you'd sail clear to the other edge of the world; Aukai always talked about that, chasing the sun as it sank, until it rose and drowned behind you. You hadn't believed him at sixteen, surely the oceans weren't big enough.

You had no reasons to stay. That's what it'd come to. If mage hunters chased you, you would hide on the other divide of the ocean. If an Empress wanted you dead you would disappear. If you missed the snows and the tundra and the beaches beside the oceans you would promise to come back just for them.

Dear dead, we held forever. Or at least it seems so in my dreams. I think back on what you didn't know two years before, one blizzarding winter to another, the way you'd later reach for the jet bird's texture by habit to ask how she was doing. One blizzarding winter to another and you were furiously alive, etching the stars with your fingertips and desolating them with your tongue. You never would have burned so bright two years before.

You never would have shrunk so much from a fire two years before.

How you've grown, how you've wilted, you built a home out of a dead man's palace and wrote it full of wishes. How she rushes, a girl two years before.

I hold power in my fingertips. But not enough to keep the loop of time from stopping. Like a frost orchard mage I imagined I could live forever, not actually; but in the house's etchings and the writings seems a promise to a future death mage who held everything you did and more. No accounting for what the future may lose.

The ship across the ocean stunk of salt and fish. Spices loaded in crates formed your bed beneath a cloak and a backpack. You weren't supposed to be on the ship, that's why you snuck aboard when no one else was, but the crewmembers found you night number one. When the waves rocked you off the crates and you thumped to the floor.

Or, they found the sound you made, a smashed crate, but assumed it was the stray bird and caught no sight of you. She got to fly wildly overseas after that, favored by the captain, while you sat in the dark. You ate shriveled tubers in the fish stink while she ate the ship's pests and the salt spray.

And so you came to a different continent, a coast you snuck onto when no one was aboard. And so you missed the snows and the cold amidst a muggy heat, and promised to return again, just for them, one day.