The Villainess They Made

The Third Host

"Don't open it, eighth."

"Who — "

"Don't. Open. The case."

She is smaller than Morrigwen. That is the first thing I notice. The other ghost in this trench was a woman built for thrones — six feet of mad queen with stars in her eyes and a bone-crown set sideways on her head. This one is a commoner. Plain grey scales. A face that knew kitchens. The coarse coral-weave robe of a province I do not recognize, the kind that has not been worn in any kingdom for at least four hundred years.

She is sad. The whole of her is sad. The sadness is not new; it is settled, the way a stain is settled in old cloth.

"My name is Vessa."

"The third host."

"You read fast for a young one. Yes."

She moves toward me — not by swimming, by appearing closer the way memories appear closer — and she sits, cross-tailed, in the silt at the edge of the seventh cairn. Her hands rest in her lap. The pearl in my chest is uneasy with her in a way it was not uneasy with Morrigwen, and after a second I understand why. The pearl is afraid of Vessa specifically. Vessa survived. Vessa is the only host the pearl has not finished, and she is sitting at the foot of an empty cairn, and the pearl in my chest does not like being looked at by a woman who escaped it.

"Why are you sad, Vessa."

"Because you are about to do what I did. And I cannot stop you. I am only allowed to warn."

"Tell me what you did."

She tells me. Without flourish, without the long pauses of Morrigwen, without any of the stagecraft I have come to expect from the dead. She had been refusing food for nine days. The Salt Throne had laid a tax on her village that ate the harvest before the harvest could be eaten by anyone, and Vessa had been sitting in the village square refusing the small meals her sisters tried to bring her, because she had decided that if the Salt Throne would not feed her, she would refuse to feed it back.

"I was twenty-six. I was not soft. I was not strong, either. I was bone-tired in a way you only get when your body has been told *no* by a kingdom for seven years. I sat in the square. The pearl found me on the ninth night."

"It chose you because you were already empty."

"Yes. Quick child. Yes. I asked for nothing. I refused everything. The pearl said: *will you live.* I said yes. I said yes the way you say yes when there is nothing else left to say."

She lifts her head. Her eyes are not angry. They are not soft, either. They are the eyes of a woman who has spent four hundred years in a Pacific trench learning not to be either.

"After the bonding, I drained the tax-collector. Then his lieutenant. Then the lieutenant's wife, who had been kind to me. Then a noble. Then his son, who was eleven. Then a town. Then a province. Then I was famine, eighth. I do not remember the rest. I remember waking up four years later in a Pacific trench with my body in a sleep I have been in ever since, and I remember the sea-grandmothers explaining to me what I had become."

"How did you survive."

"I refused at the right time. The pearl asks one question, eighth. Once. Late. When you are tired. When you have already given everything else. The question is not the bonding question. The question is the second question. *Will you stay.* You will know the moment when it asks. You will know because everything in you will want to say yes. *Say no.* That is the only craft I have to teach you. Refuse the second question. Refuse it even if your kingdom is on fire. Refuse it even if the man you love is dying. Refuse it especially then. The pearl will go quiet. It will not leave you. But it will go quiet, and you will sleep for a long time, and you will wake up half-mad in a trench, and you will be the second host the pearl could not finish."

"And the case on the cairn."

Vessa's face becomes the face of a woman who has been wanting to say a thing for four hundred years.

"That is not from a host, eighth. That is from her. The blue lady. She made the case look like one of ours. She wrote your name on it three years ago, when she chose you. She placed it at the seventh cairn last year, after the seventh died. None of us left anything for you. None of us were allowed. The case is hers, and whatever is in it is hers, and if you open it she will be inside you a year before you understand she is."

I am already reaching for it.

Curiosity is older than caution. I learned this with my consort. I learned this with my cousin. I am, apparently, the kind of woman who does not learn it once.

Vessa does not stop me. She cannot. She is only allowed to warn. She watches me lift the kelp-wax case from the cairn-lip and break the thumb-seal on it, and I watch her watch me, and her sad face does the smallest possible flinch.

Inside the case is not a list.

Inside the case is a small token, the size of a thumbnail, made of the same black obsidian as the sliver Calisto sat in. Embedded in the obsidian is a silver crescent the width of a hair. The token has no weight. I lift it into my palm and it does not register as a thing my new body has to carry. It is cool. It is calm. It is humming with the same frequency I felt three minutes ago.

The pearl in my chest stops pulsing.

Not slows. *Stops.* The second heartbeat that has been in me since the bonding goes flat — and in the silence where it used to be, I hear, distinctly, a heartbeat that is not mine and is not the pearl's, coming from the token in my palm.

Vessa, fading: "Oh, eighth. Oh, I am sorry. You have just let her in."