Uyagaq wasn't born in the palace, like so many of the children weren't. I suppose I probably saw him as I grew up, or perhaps not--he was one of the glimmer insect children, and the glimmer insect children were always busy, working in the tunnels too small for any of the adults, or in the secret chambers to lure insects into jars, or toting those jars into the city beneath the light-catching walls of the main level.

The glimmer insect children lived lives far removed from a young queen and her tutoring.

As he grew older, Uyagaq began training as a palace guide. Came to not like that so much, and took responsibility for the mess of the equipment room, which, in their own words, was like a moldy loaf of bread someone had buried in the permafrost, dug up years later with rocks and soil to dump into a box, then shaken up with a helping of dust balls and insect legs and wafted around to sniff at. Before Uyagaq, no one set foot inside the equipment room for longer than they could hold their breath, grab random maps and snowshoes and backpacks, and dart off into the tundra.

Palace guides. The most disorganized of the palace workers. Until Uyagaq came along.

I won't write most of Uyagaq's story here. That is for them to tell. I will only say that Panuk saw something in them and made them Expedition Leader of his personal entourage, every spring equinox, every trek to the coastal towns.

And when Panuk died, Uyagaq was the only witness who ever came back.

You'll be in good hands, reader. The Nunait may not--yet--be as bad as a moldy bread loaf shaken up with dust and dead insects, but even if it were, I would still trust Uyagaq to build you back into shape. You will be in good hands, reader.

***

(Queen, or Kaliq, I'm really not sure how I should address you in your own book, but...this is not how it happened. Sure, right up until the part about the equipment room sounds great. And yes, thinking about the awful mess of that storage closet still makes my skin crawl. But really? Palace guides weren't that disorganized.

Okay, I guess if you're comparing them to the kitchen workers, then fine. And everyone knows the guards were militaristic and regimented beyond belief. That's why I didn't join them. So fine, the palace guides were the most disorganized of the palace groups, but only when compared to the most perfectly organized teams in the whole continent. Honestly.

I respect that you respect my secrets, but I'd rather have you write it than me try and figure out what to say. That'd be a whole easier, you know that, right? My hands are shaking right now. What am I supposed to say? My story?

The death mage figures I should mention I won't be called a king or a queen. A royal? I haven't figured out what sounds best. A keen? Oh goodness no.

The death mage is unhelpfully shrugging right now. Should I mention how I was born a female? Okay, I wrote that down, so I could fully consider it.

Shoot Kaliq you only gave me one page!? What is this? Why?

Well, whatever. For most of my time there, I was one of two girls working in the glimmer insect tunnels. The tunnels were really quite neat. Cool in the summers, glowing with dancing blue specks. Positively freezing in the winters, but what wasn't? They were always very clean, and living in the palace requires a certain level of comfort with the dark anyway so that hardly bothered me.

I never knew Aqtilik tried the glimmer insect tunnels. Huh.

Anyway. I moved on from the glimmer insect tunnels when I was twelve, when I was finally big enough. That frustrated me to no end. It seemed everyone else was big enough to move out by age ten. And the girl near my age (she was a little younger) moved out more than a year before I did.

So I moved on, and chose to join the palace guides. The woman who mentored me there was named Nailuh. Naeeluh? I was terrible at understanding accents, and she was from a far-off island, harsh in her ways, so it was a mentorship doomed from the start. She was a great palace guide. A total expert at navigating sea ice. I was just convinced she hated me.

Which I suppose is why I retreated into cleaning out the equipment room. I spent a long time alone, pinching my nose, analyzing that mess of a room, at the same time I analyzed myself and who I was.

Let's put it this way--I wasn't comfortable with the way I fit in my body. I wasn't comfortable with the way other palace people perceived me. I don't know how to explain it. There's...just something about the way people treat you as a teenage girl, and the way people treat you as a teenage boy, and the way people try to figure out if the some-of-both teenager is supposed to be a boy or a girl. I've been in each one of those outfits. I know the shape they take against my skin. Or, whatever is beneath my skin, I suppose. Some nameless part of me, like the piece of my thoughts that is capable of examining my own thoughts.

So I changed. I was born female, altered my hair and clothes, imitated different people. Which was both liberating and terrifying at the same time. With my body physically changing

(oh, the squirmies)

And myself more aware that I didn't want that...it was terrifying. I don't think this is the place to discuss the ways I coped. Suffice to say that while I cleaned out the equipment room, spending over a year digging into the furthest crevices, dumping out the literal decayed remains of old winter cloaks, I dug into my own furthest crevices and examined the ways I felt, how I could change and create organization where stressful chaos had reigned.

Like taming the tangles in a wild head of hair. It's quite liberating to drag out all the itchy parts, while slightly nerving because you've had it mostly in braids for a whole season and don't know what it will look like in the end. Like...never mind, I will stop now. But seriously Kaliq, you only gave me one page. That's not enough!

***

One autumn equinox, I was away from the city on a queen's retreat. Panuk and Aqtilik both agreed I was stretching myself too far, but there was a drought after a winter with little snowfall, the fish hadn't migrated close enough for many who depended on the seafood, a bad strain of some disease brought by traders ravaged the north, and a whole host of the palace guards were retiring and we didn't have enough people to fill those positions.

It was a forced queen's retreat, might I add.

The festival for the autumn equinox often leaves me bittersweet. The fading of daylight, the coming of cold and darkness. The green of the tundra dying into yellows and browns, eventually to be covered in white.

This was two years after both our children. A season after two assassination attempts. I spent the equinox alone, in a tent to myself, despite the pair of palace guides pretending to be invisible in a beige tent mere steps behind me. I laid inside the tent with the flap strung wide open, rustling in the wind, chin resting on my knuckles pointed to the setting sun. My palace guides and I had trekked far enough towards the coast for a foggy line of the sea to shroud the horizon, so the dwindling red sun lit up the water a fiery red-orange.

The equinox marked a midpoint. The summer solstice came months prior, with days of endless sunlight. The winter solstice would come in the months following, with days of endless night. The equinox marked a sky coming into balance, half sun and half dark, tinged with twilight.

That autumn equinox, I stayed until the sun sank into blacks and grays, then I crawled into my tent and knotted shut the door flap to keep out the insects. I found my sleeping roll, fingers double-checking the boots at my side and the lumpy pack by my head. I laid there, breezes rustling the grasses outside. Months of build-up, just for a single cycle of the sun in perfect balance.

What worth was there in that? Sunset had faded, the night had come, and in the morning; balance, gone. Surrendered. The sky would now slowly sink into winter.

And I missed the party.

Each autumn equinox, everyone in the palace would work for a whole week sweeping out the streets, cleaning out the buildings where visitors would stay, catching glimmer insects in jars to light up the dim buildings. We would prepare festival foods and set out rows of tables; create elaborate dresses in reds, yellows and browns for the parade dancers; mend warped drum frames and cracked flutes. The children picked flowers from the slopes around the city, played with costume scraps, and made their own music from rocks and grass reeds. I always loved stringing dried flowers into garlands to decorate the palace doors, dancing along with children who didn't judge me for my lack of rhythm.

The morning of the equinox, the palace would grow still. The visitors would slowly trickle in beneath the sun, whole towns sometimes, feasting on prepared sugar breads and pressed juices and wild seafish. When the day melted into evening, Panuk and I would march from the palace doors in matching red costumes, symmetrical as the sun's rays. We would lead the parade, arcing through the widest streets, never with any predetermined route, always clapping along with the dancers and drums, eating until our stomachs bloated, laughing out bread crumbs. Aqtilik rarely took my place for the parade, she preferred joining the musicians. She learned how to play the flute when we were both teens, but my fingers like awkward blocks never learned the simple trills so I quickly gave it up.

When the buildings cast their deepest shadows over the multi-colored streets, Panuk and I would circle the parade to its close. Beneath the gray reaches of the palace, we would throw garlands of dried flowers into the air. The nature-ribbons would scatter on the breeze, signaling the music to fade, the parade line to disperse. Like one perfect moment of balance the drums fell still, the swishing costumes fell still, the laughter fell silent, Panuk and I would find each other's arms in the stillness before it broke, and break it did, in chattering conversations, the expected scream of a cranky child, an outburst of cackling giggles, the crackling of stepped-on garlands.

We would smile, that split moment of balance before it fell apart.

***

As my mother, I found freedom in the wind. I, of course, was never eager to go climbing. But there was a dusty old corner room on the fifth level of the palace, unused since the last royal avian, and when I was twelve I convinced my father to let me choose those birds as part of my history lessons. Near-giddy, I dug out of that room the records and diagrams of all the past royal avians. While my father taught Aqtilik about the past thirty-something names of the city, I pored over charts on the magical birds. The last one, having disappeared decades before I was born, was recorded to loom as tall as the city buildings. The drawings of the unassuming egg held pale claw-mark patterns that I memorized with my fingers.

The avian before that was small, but able to carry three full-grown people in their talons. The unnamed writer of the record claimed the bird had an easy time carrying three full-grown people, but they never attempted to carry more.

I did not have a royal avian. So I searched out the next best thing: regular birds. I hunted through the city for hidden nests, found cracked eggshells on an obsidian street and convinced Aqtilik to climb atop the building and search for the nest. When she'd barely scaled the lip of the roof, the mother nearly tangled herself in Aqtilik's hair, screeching; Aqtilik screamed and swatted at the bird, tumbling off the roof into my arms.

So my first actual bird came as a gift during the summer solstice. A pretty thing, as small as my hand, pale gray with yellow tufts around his tail. Aqtilik, my father, and I repaired the grand window in the avian room on the fifth level, organized the royal avian records and stored them in my room. We learned how to care for this little gray bird by accident; he pecked at the stone floor so we gave him seeds to peck at. He flew out into the hall and we lured him back with slices of fruit, but he vomited those up and the smell lingered for weeks, so we threw out the rest of the fruit.

He lived for many years, that bird, and taught us much about bird keeping. I cried so hard when he died, but the whole family of descendants, gray and yellow chicks hopping on stone ledges, happy to see me, softened my tears.

We rescued a family of red-feathered birds after an autumn equinox. One of the festival goers must have left them behind. As we cleaned out the city buildings, someone found the red-feathered birds trapped inside, squawking up a storm, clawing at the door.

The four birds seemed perfectly tame. But I was hesitant to let them live with the gray birds, at first, not knowing what could happen, until under mine and Aqtilik's supervision we introduced them to each other and they cared for each other about as much as they might care for a dull rock in the corner.

After that, news began spreading through the palace, and we had birds brought to us by palace guides. Exotic, colorful things, accustomed to humans, and we trained them to fly onto our arms at a piercing whistle.

We let the trained ones fly over the city sometimes. In orange sunrises, those birds dotted the sky green and black and gold.

As my mother, I found freedom in the wind. Flapping feathers made my heart flutter every time I entered the aviary. The reeking scent of waste, less so. The earthy rush of air from an opened seed container swept me up in comfort like home. The light playing through the window, the chuffing caws of hungry birds--I wanted to carry that pocket of sky inside me forever.