Yet another charred disaster. Dear dead, you named it so even before you fell asleep.

Your damp clothes and water-logged boots kept you awake, all through the smoke suffocating the fire, right until dawn. That late in the summer and dawn wasn't quick in coming through the night, you hardly slept there beneath whispering grasses, hardly dreamed, a yowling sea cat haunted the rug of the house everytime you shut your eyes and shuddered them back open.

In the morning light--you survived until morning light--you trekked along the riverbank, arrowing to a slick path of wide stones in a shallow riverbend. You stepped carefully across them, legs weary, eyes heavy, nothing but necessity propping you on your feet.

Yet another charred disaster, this time atop a hill that you climbed with sea cat bones slung over your shoulder.

There you found graying ends of tent cloth caught between rocks. Half a cloak survived; whether it had been the jet bird's nest or the sea cat's you weren't sure. Your bedroll had disappeared in the fire remains, same with snowshoes, gloves and seed. Your fingers dreaded digging through the ash so you didn't make them.

Maybe, the ash would grow something pretty out of their burned fruit seed.

What had partially survived were your supplies. Mushrooms, thick vegetables, surrounded by clay bottles in an incidental ring of protection. Of course, you had nothing to carry them with anymore. Except the sea cat's sack.

You made barren breakfast of mushroom caps and thick-skinned vegetables. Squatting on a sharp rock, you first pretended that eating was a replacement for sleep, the motion of teeth and throat and stomach a replica of stillness and dreams and oblivion. Second, you pretended the gray dust was a fine seasoning, a spice, that the bland powder stuck to your tongue was a healthy flavor, like raw grains, or tuber skins.

Then you counted the sack, the supplies. One cloak, too many contents for it all. The supplies you needed for the mountains. You predicted days of hiking in barren terrain, despite the thin road cutting up the windy mountainside.

The sea cat, well. You couldn't leave her. Certainly not there, amidst the gray ash and the strewn mage-hunter bodies, a few half-bloated by limbs hanging in the river. A few so peaceful they could be sleeping, faces tilted to the sun, the shadow of a circling jet bird blurring over their eyelids. She wasn't hungry, you told yourself.

So you became the scavenger bird, fingers as hooked talons digging at the dead's wealth. You kicked scabbards and spears down the hill, some of them splashed in the river and others hit other things but your aim wasn't that perfect.

Your scavenging hands ignored boots and sleeves on bodies, prim things of dark cloth to blend into the night. Your scavenging hands ripped apart black cloaks, so frail your fingernails could slice them. In the end you were the scavenger bird, back bent, hands like scrounging beaks to your sleepless eyes.

One mage-hunter held a sack. A sack with spark rocks and dry tinder and a clay bottle that you opened to discover held golden oil. You smashed that on the ground. Thick liquid oozed over the dirt, clung thickly to grass stems and you wished it were blood to shove deep underground.

You emptied the sack. Stomped and kicked the spark rocks and the pale tinder until their bruised bodies scattered through the rocky hillside. For good measure you took the sack, a pale gray thing with a shoulder strap, and wrung it in the river. As if a cold, slow current could erase the touch of a mage-hunter who tried to kill you.

Then you left it on the rocks to dry, and crawled back up the hillside and slept beside the gray ashes of your tent, clothes wet enough to take on mud stains, a sun warming the sea cat hugged in your arms.

***

The woman lets us sleep in a corner of her cabin, in the morning I wake to find her gone. A child is awake too when I sit up, his eyes boring into the ceiling.

"How are you?" I say.

He blinks and doesn't say. How he is, how he's been.

I give him a water bottle and he tilts it so fast a waterfall fountains down his chin, douses his shirt. I eat succulent, grainy fruits left on a round table by the door, its surface glittering green and white, a mineral smoothed as if by water. I pretend the fruits were left there just for us.

I construct a story like this: when the burner trapped us in fire, the child ran after his auntie. Or ran away from the flames holding his auntie. When the fire faded, the child--lost--walked beside the ocean until he came to the town of log cabins. He remembered the old man by the mornings we spent mixing mortar together, and wandered streets until finding him beside the pots of mortar while brick layers took their mid-day break. (I pretend it took from dawn until mid-day for the child to walk.)

But the old man remembered the child by his magic. By a night, a battle, the deaths of his clan. The old man couldn't kill him, he said so himself, so instead he thought to lure me here. Made it obvious with a stone box blocking the road. The old man must have believed he could kill me, when I returned. Must have believed that because I am not a child, silent and wandering, innocent and young, he could kill me.

The story goes like this: an old man believed I could find the child again. Perhaps he waited through the nights, plots of revenge and stony deaths a mimicry of sleep. Perhaps he doubted what he was doing, considered freeing the child but found resolve somewhere to simply not.

In the end, something in the ghost fires broke him and the texture of him hasn't moved from his bed ever since the town folk carried him there. A sickness, I heard the whispers, paralyzing the limbs. But I never cursed him. No, if anyone did, it was his dead wife for not killing my child.

I cried on the pedestal of stone for a whole morning, when I sat up, a crowd waited for me. Where a stone mage had been carried off from, the people anxiously milled, pretending not to stare. My cheeks burned. I hid behind the backpack. How many of them recognized me from the mortar mixing?

I thanked a woman, niece-less, who beat back the crowds with shouts clearing the way, and who gave me a corner of her cabin.

I spent a whole day holed up inside, rocking an unconscious child in my arms, dribbling water into his mouth and making him swallow with fragile curses to twitch the correct muscles. I spent a whole day curled against the wooden timbers, privy to the whispers of a crowd ever-so slow to disperse. They had gathered to ponder the woman crying on a stone pedestal, where the day before a stone box had stood. Or, once the danger of strange rumbles and fires had faded and fearful children had crawled back to bed, they had gathered to ponder me.

They would never know, I remind myself. Never know.

***

Dear dead, patrols of mage-hunters swept the tundra, the towns, hanging up descriptions of you for whoever could read them, entirely inaccurate charcoal sketches of the wicked death mage--her hair limp and knotted, her face skeletal, missing teeth--for whoever could see.

Of course, you knew none of this until winter set in and you came back from the mountains with a convoy of wagons, different from the wagons you joined at a coast town after trekking from the site of a battle.

Let's start over. The hillside littered with mage-hunters.

You transferred the bones of the sea cat to a gray sack with a shoulder strap, still damp, and collected clanking clay bottles and ash dusted vegetables in a wet, knotted cloak. Walked through a field of dead mage-hunters, separate burdens in both arms, following the river for two days to its mouth. There you found a town of tupiit, smoke streaming from pointed rooftops, and traded empty clay bottles for bandages at a seller's beige doorway embanked halfway in mud. In a silent alcove of animal skins, an alleyway of tent backs, you plastered thick bandages over your beginning-to-bleed face. Days later, after camping on a beach, you signed for space in a convoy of wagons, merchants traveling to the mountain folk to do business with metal miners. You paid for space in coins, you made coins by selling fish skeletons as bone needles, selling wreaths of dried flowers you picked from the tundra.

In the ocean, the eve before the convoy left, you laid to rest the sea cat. The broken bones you snugged tight with taffy, as tight as you could. Hips to a spine to a shoulder blade to half a leg bone crawled pathetically down a beach to the hungry waves. But you couldn't watch that, couldn't just turn your back so you shuffled onto the sand and scooped them all up again. The hips, spine, shoulder blade and leg. Tears pricked your eyes at the shallow trail going only a quarter way down the beach, extending from the limp pile of shattered bones in the edge of the grass so you scuffed out the trail and gathered those bones too.

Those pesky bones. Why couldn't you just do away with them in a lousy puddle and move on with your life? No one would know any wiser, the sea cat had no senses of her own to smell the dead fish remains in a puddle, she didn't need a nice burial place.

That's what you told yourself. No broken bones, no baggage, if only you could walk free. Walk away and leave no ribbons tying you to the past, to any history so shaken up with pain and skeletons left behind and your own mind shrinking from the very inkling of goodbye.

You stopped knee deep in sea water, from a trail of footprints and scuffed sea cat crawling. An armful of broken bones, neat ribs scratching your elbows, teeth once-sharp in a jaw, empty spaces to imagine ears and a nose. An armful of smashed up paws, a long-missing tail, two cracked femurs and split vertebrae heavy on your wrists.

All the power within you to always remember, never die--it all amounted to salt drips adding less to the ocean than a cloud. An inconsequential wind. Always remember, the bones of forever, shattered and shaken and worn down by the years, jangling because they were never as complete as your dreams.

You dropped the sea cat in the water. Every last bone, every last tooth, splashing quietly in the black dusk. Soft, sliding weights tapped your underwater boots and drifted off into the sand, in the eddies. "And now you are home," you said, through the thick bandages. You turned and took two steps and collapsed to your knees because the ocean inside you demanded release, there in the salt water, you buried your face in the sea so nobody ashore would hear your screaming, screaming, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Cut to the water rippling with your sobs.