The Villainess They Made

The Man Who Was My Father

"Sweet-scale. Look at me."

"Father — "

"Look at me, Irene. I have less time than I did last time. Look."

I look. I cannot do anything else. The water around me has stopped being water — it is a held breath, a pause carved out of my falling, a small bright pocket the dead are only allowed to make once. My father is in front of me. He is himself. Not the diminished thing that died in my arms on a bright morning seven months ago, but the king from before. Broad-shouldered. Full-scaled. The deep blue tail of House Thalor catching a light that has no source. His eyes are full of water. He is in pain. He is in pain and he is here anyway.

"Father, you came back two weeks ago. You spoke to me in a dream. Father, I — I did not understand —"

"I know."

"You said *not the wine* and I thought you meant —"

"I know what you thought. Sweet-scale. Listen. I am going to say the four sentences again and this time I will not break in the middle. I have been preparing the breath for two weeks. I will not have it again. Listen."

He does not look away from me this time. His eyes hold mine the way a father's eyes hold a child's when he is about to say a hard thing he refuses to soften. And he speaks — clearly, slowly, the dead-king register I have not heard since my coronation, when he stood beside me on the dais with his crown already turning grey on his head.

"The cup came from my own brother's house. Your uncle Rick poured the poison into the bottle on the third night of the warm-current season. He chose a vintage I drank only on private suppers because he wanted my death to look like grief had finally caught me."

"The boy you love is his tool. Liam has been lying with his shoulders since before he asked for your hand. He was never the architect of this, daughter. He was the instrument. He is the dagger your uncle has been sharpening for three years and you are the wedding it was forged for."

"The girl is yours. Your cousin Rose has been his lover for as long as he has been your suitor. She does not love him. She loves being chosen. He never quite chose her. She is still in your palace as we speak. She is the second blade."

He pauses. His mouth works. The fourth sentence costs him more than the other three. He spends a long second looking past me, at something I cannot see, gathering whatever a dead king gathers when he is trying to push a single sentence across a current he is not allowed to cross again.

"And there is a ninth name on your mother's list. The one she could not say to you in Paria. Your uncle is its servant. Your consort is its servant. Even your cousin Rose is being moved by it, and she does not know. The name is older than House Thalor. Older than House Varlo. Older than the kingdom itself. Sweet-scale — your mother has been guarding that name for six months because she is too small to fight what owns it. She was not strong enough to come home. I am not strong enough to come back. We have failed you, Irene, both of us, in our small ways. The list is in your hand."

I look down. He is right.

I have been clutching something. I did not know I was clutching it. I open my fist for the first time since the dagger went in and I see, pressed into the grey skin of my palm, the small sealed kelp-wax case my mother put there two weeks ago in Paria. It is in my hand. It has been in my hand the whole time. The dagger did not knock it loose. The fall did not knock it loose. My fingers, while my mind was failing, kept holding it. Some part of me knew.

"Father — Father, I am — "

"You will not die, sweet-scale. I would not be allowed to come if you were going to die. You will arrive at the bottom of the Hollow and a thing will offer you something. Take it. I do not have the breath to tell you what it costs. I do not have the breath to warn you. Take it anyway. The kingdom needs what it makes of you."

"Father, *what* will I become?"

"Sweet-scale. Listen. The list. Open it. Read every name. The ninth name is the one that matters. Watch the obsidian. Trust the Bayou girl. Trust your old midwife. Trust your captain. Do not trust your shell-band. Do not trust mirrors. Do not — do not — "

He is going. The current that brought him is closing. He is fading from the bottom of his tail upward, the way a candle goes when the wax has run, and his hands are reaching for me one last time.

"Father, *please* — "

"Sweet-scale. I am sorry. I died too soon. I should have warned you. I should have lived. I — "

He cannot hold it anymore. The dead can spend a single visit at the cost of seven months of preparation, and he has spent two now, and the second has emptied him. His eyes find mine in the last second. They are full of an apology I will carry for the rest of whatever life I am about to have.

*"Read the list."*

And then he is gone, and the water is water again, and I am still falling, and the small kelp-wax case in my palm is the only thing in this trench warmer than my own dying body.

I lift it. I am not sure I have the strength. The case has a thumb-seal — my mother's. I press my thumb against it. The kelp-wax recognizes my blood and softens.

The case opens.

Inside, on a small fold of writing-kelp, in my mother's handwriting, is a list of nine names.

I read the second name. *Rick Varlo.* I read the fourth name. *Peter, family steward.* I read the seventh. *Liam.* My eyes keep going down the list. The ninth name is underlined. The ninth name is the only one underlined. The ninth name is one I have never heard in any court, any record, any song.

*Calisto.*

Just the one word. No house. No family designation. No location. As if my mother had wanted to write more and could not — as if writing the name in full was, for her, the same impossible breath my father had spent his last morning trying to push past his throat.

And as I stare at it, falling — the small folded kelp curling at its edges from the cold black water — the writing on the page begins, very slowly, to glow.

Not the other names. Just the ninth. Just *Calisto.*

And at my wrist, where my shell-band has been silent since I broke the eastern reef's upper-current, three hundred feet ago — at my wrist, where Mabelle's thread is gone — at my wrist, the band lights up.