The Villainess They Made

The Glyph-wall

"Read me, host."

"What — "

"Read me. You are bleeding into the floor. The floor wants to know what you are. Read me, host. The walls have been waiting eighteen thousand years to tell you the rest."

I am not sure who is speaking. The voice is not the pearl. The voice is not Calisto. The voice is not Vessa or Morrigwen or my father or my grandmother. The voice is the trench itself. The Hollow has been listening to me for hours, and the Hollow has decided, finally, that I have bled enough into its floor to be worth answering.

I press my palm against the nearest stretch of glyph-wall.

The glyphs are a script Alastor does not teach. They are a script Alastor never taught. They are older than the alphabet on my coronation-tablet by a margin I cannot measure. When my hand touches the wall, the glyphs do not light. They flow — *into* my skin, through my palm, up my arm, into my chest where the pearl waits with sudden interest.

The first impression is a battle.

Not a battle I can name. A battle older than naming. Seven women — taller than any mer I have seen, scaled in colors I do not have names for, bone-crowned in a way Morrigwen was a small echo of — fighting something that did not have a shape. The fight took an age. The seven women lost most of what they were. They won by becoming the prison.

The second impression is the splitting.

A thing the size of a continent broken into three parts. Each part crystallized into a pearl. The pearls hidden — buried, not lost; deliberately placed, not scattered — in three trenches on three continents. The Black Pearl in the Hollow under Alastor. The Silver Pearl in a trench under what would later be the Saragossa Archive. The Red Pearl in a third trench whose location the glyph refuses to give me, even now, even pressed into my skin by force; the glyph closes itself around the location the way a clam closes around a pearl. Some knowledge has been f*******n even to the floor.

The third impression is a face.

Silver-haired. Beautiful. Two hundred years younger than the woman in the obsidian. *Calisto, before Calisto.* Her bonding. Not pushed. Not betrayed. *Chosen.* She walked into a Saragossa trench at twenty-three carrying the rituals her mother had taught her. She lay down beside the Silver Pearl in a kelp-circle she had drawn herself, and she said yes to its question with a clarity none of us have had since. She wanted it. She had been wanting it her whole life. She had been *promised* to it, the way some daughters are promised to convents in human kingdoms.

I watch her bond. I watch her ask the pearl what it wants from her. I watch her offer it, in the kelp-circle, the body of her own newborn nephew — the first kill the Silver Pearl ever took through her, willingly given, in a private bonding ritual that her family had been preparing for three generations.

The pearl in my chest pulses with respect.

The respect makes me want to vomit.

"That is what she is, eighth. That is what she has always been. Do not pity her. Do not — "

Vessa's voice, somewhere behind me. I do not turn. I am still pressed to the wall.

The fourth impression is the worst.

It is a list. Not a list of names — a list of *kingdoms.* Calisto's kingdoms. The ones she has hollowed. The ones she has steered into the Silver Pearl's mouth across two hundred years. I count seventeen before I lose track. Most of them I have never heard of. Three of them are kingdoms I learned about as a child in my father's library — the kingdoms of the deep-pacific war, the kingdoms whose collapse Alastor blamed on plague and on famine and on internal mismanagement. They were not those things. They were Calisto. The history my father taught me was a history my older sister wrote.

I lift my hand from the wall.

The wall keeps reading. The glyphs continue to flow into me — slower now, the way a final wave finishes a beach — and the last impression is not a picture or a name. The last impression is a sentence. The sentence is in a language I do not speak, and yet I understand it the way you understand the last words of a dream.

*The eighth is the first who has been pushed.*

*The eighth is the first whose hand was not on the door.*

*The pearl can be refused. The pearl has never been refused by a host who did not choose it. The pearl has never met a host who did not want it.*

I stand in front of the wall for a long time.

Then I push off it. I push hard. I push with the whole new strength of my new body, and the section of wall I touched cracks where my palm-print burned itself into the stone. The c***k runs upward, branches, opens. A piece of the wall the size of a door falls away into the silt.

Behind it is a small chamber.

The chamber is dry. There is no chamber that should be dry, three hundred feet under the surface of an ocean. This one is. The water stops at the threshold. The air inside the chamber smells of dust and of something that is almost, but not quite, lavender.

And lying on a stone shelf in the center of the chamber is a body.

A mermaid, in clothes from a kingdom that has not existed for nine thousand years. Her scales the color of new snow. Her hair the silver of Calisto's, but plaited the way the Saragossa archivists plait theirs.

The body is not old.

The body is fresh.

The body cannot be fresh.

The body opens its eyes.