The Villainess They Made

The Warning at the Gate

"Don't go, cousin."

"I'll be home by dark, Mabelle."

"Don't go. Don't go. Don't go."

Three of her words against three of mine, and in the end mine carried more weight because I was the queen and she was a Bayou cousin and nobody had ever taught either of us that the queen was the one who needed to be stopped.

I am falling, and I can see her face. More clearly than I can see anything. My cousin at the eastern gate of Coralspire in the dawn current — her hair coming loose from a braid she had clearly not finished, because there had not been time, because she had been waiting at the gate since the small hours, because she had been waiting for me. Her moss-green scales dulled the way a wet leaf is dull. Her eyes open in that particular Bayou way that does not blink while it waits for an answer.

She had her hands out.

She did not raise her voice.

She said *don't go* the way you say a prayer over something you have already lost. The first time was almost a question. The second time was a fact. The third time was a binding in itself — a small voice-knot tied in the air between us, the kind a Bayou grandmother ties around the neck of a feverish child, the kind that doesn't work unless the child wants to live.

I wanted to live. I just thought I already was.

"Cousin, I have ten minutes before Liam expects me at the outer archway. Step aside."

"Look at the binding on your wrist."

I looked. The small green knot Mabelle had tied there at midnight was already loose — half its threads softened, the way a dye runs in the wrong water. I had not noticed. I had been getting ready to meet a man who was going to put a dagger in me, and my hands had been busy with my hair.

"It's loose because I slept on it. It's fine."

"Cousin. It is not loose because you slept on it. Something in your palace is eating it. I told you last night. I am telling you now. Let me re-tie it."

She reached. I lifted her hands off my wrist gently — the way you lift the hands of a grandmother who has been gripping your sleeve too long — and I said the sentence I have replayed since I started falling. The sentence I would give back, if I could give back any single sentence in my whole short reign.

"Mabelle. I love you. I will see you at dinner."

Her face did a thing faces are not supposed to do. It crumpled, then set. She is Bayou. Bayou does not cry in public until the body is in the ground. She did not cry. She did, however, do something I had not seen her do before. She knelt — there in the gate-pool, in front of my own guards, in front of the household servants who had stopped to watch — and she put her hand to my tail and started a knot.

Not on my wrist. On my tail.

She was binding me.

I felt it the moment her fingers moved — a small green prayer beginning to weave itself around my caudal fin, the same prayer her grandmother had taught her at fourteen, the prayer Bayou mers tie around a sick child to keep their soul attached to their body during a fever. She was tying my soul to my body. She was doing it in front of strangers, in a public gate-pool, breaking three different protocols of her own court at once, because she was that frightened.

I twisted my tail and broke the knot before she finished it.

I did not mean to. I am not a Bayou mer. I do not know what kind of half-formed prayer I broke when I broke it. But Mabelle's shoulders went rigid, and she sat back on her heels, and she looked up at me with an expression I have not let myself remember until this moment of falling. Pity. Bayou pity. The pity of a woman who has been raised to recognize the moment after which a person cannot be saved.

Nerida came out of the clinic-wing gate ten seconds later.

Her old hands were full of blue herbs. The herbs she keeps for miscarriages and for stab wounds — the herbs she only pulls when she has been woken at the wrong hour by something she cannot name. Her face was already white. She did not call my name. She did not try to follow me. She reached Mabelle in the gate-pool, and the two of them — the old midwife with her blue herbs and the Bayou cousin with her broken knot — stood there together and watched me swim out toward the eastern reefs.

Orin was not at the gate.

I noticed that as I swam. I noticed that my captain — who is always at the gate when I leave the palace, always, the way a dog is always at the door — was not there. A message had come for him before dawn. A dispute at the northern outpost, a matter only the captain could settle. He had swum north with two senior guardsmen at first light. He had left me a note on kelp-paper at my chamber door. *Your Majesty. I will return by nightfall. Orin.* I had read it too quickly. I had filed it the way I filed most of his notes, beside the small stack of unread reports I told myself I would get to over the weekend.

He will return by nightfall. He will return by nightfall and find his queen dead, his palace in mourning, his cousin from the Bayou re-arrested for treason, and his own absence written into the timeline of a coup like a missing comma in a forged confession.

Rick sent Orin north. Rick knew Nerida would wake from a dream at midnight tide and come to the gate with blue herbs. Rick knew Mabelle would come with knots. Rick — sitting down to a boiled quail-egg in the breakfast hall right now — Rick arranged. Every loyal piece on the board cleared from the board before dawn, quietly, expertly, by a man who has been planning this morning for three years.

I did not know that, this morning. I thought I was going on a ride with my lover.

Liam met me at the outer archway. He kissed the inside of my wrist — the wrist with the binding on it, though he did not notice because the binding was already dulling, the way Mabelle had told me the night before that something in the palace was eating it. He told me I looked like a sunrise. He led me east.

I did not look back.

Mabelle's last words to me carried across the gate-pool only because the dawn current was still and her voice was strong. They reached me a full ten seconds after I cleared the outer archway. They were the words I had been afraid she would say.

"Cousin. If you come back tonight — I will be here. I will be here."

I did not answer. I am falling. The last thread on my wrist breaks now, mid-fall, finally — the thread that was tied to a thread on Mabelle's wrist at the other end of the same prayer, the thread that was the only piece of my cousin still attached to my body. I feel it break. Through my whole grey self.

Three hundred feet up, in a dungeon cell my uncle has put her in within ten minutes of my clearing the gate, Mabelle feels it break too. I feel her feel it. The Bayou prayer cuts both ways. She lifts her head from the stone bench. She does not waste breath on the guards. She does not try the bars. She opens her mouth and she begins to scream — a scream that is not a sound but a binding, a final binding she is throwing into the dark with the last of her wrist-thread because she does not know whether I am still alive to receive it.

I receive it.

And as it reaches me — as my cousin's scream cuts through the cold black water of the f*******n Zone like a thrown rope — something else cuts with it.

A face. Above me. Between me and the dwindling glow of Alastor's spires. A face I have not seen in seven months and have spent every night since trying not to dream of. He is shaking his head. He is mouthing one word over and over, and the word does not reach me until the seventh time he shapes it.

*Wine. Wine. Wine.*

My father has come back.