The Villainess They Made

The Last Tide Mother

"Hello, eighth."

"You — you are alive."

"I am a finger-bone. The rest of me is the floor."

Her voice is sand and old breath. Each word costs her a little of whatever she is using for breath, and she is conserving carefully. Her eyes are the only living part of her — wet, focused, a clear blue I have never seen on a mer.

I cross the threshold. The water stops at my own caudal fin and refuses to follow me — the chamber will not be flooded, not by my body, not by the trench-current behind me. I move through the air the way I used to move on legs the one time I tried legs, when I was eleven and my mother let me try a glamour above the waterline of Paria. My new tail compresses into something that walks. I had not known it could.

I kneel beside the stone shelf.

"Tell me what you are."

"I am what is left of a Tide Mother. The smallest piece of the smallest of us. We were seven. We tore ourselves into shards to bind the thing the pearls hold. I am the finger-bone of the youngest of my sisters. I have been kept alive by the third pulse — the one beneath your floor. The pulse and I are old friends. It did not want to keep me. It does not have a choice."

"The third pulse is — "

"Yes. What you are afraid of. The thing the pearls imprison. It has been asleep for eighteen thousand years. The pearls keep it asleep. The pearls are awake. If two of the three rejoin in a single host, the thing wakes a little. If three rejoin, the thing wakes fully. If it wakes fully, eighth, every kingdom from the shallows to the abyss is eaten in sequence, and the eating does not stop when the kingdoms are gone. The eating eats the water itself."

"Calisto wants the rejoining."

"Calisto wants the rejoining. Calisto has been working toward the rejoining for two hundred years. Calisto does not want what comes after the rejoining — Calisto thinks she will be able to ride it the way she has ridden the Silver — and she is wrong. The thing under your floor will eat her first, eighth. She will be a small light in a long meal. But she will eat your kingdom on her way, and she will eat you, and that is a comfort I cannot offer you."

She lifts a hand. The hand is not flesh. The hand is a finger-bone wrapped in something that almost-but-not-quite resembles flesh, the way a chrysalis almost-but-not-quite resembles a leaf. In the palm of the hand is a small bone-ring. Carved. Old. Bayou markings on its inner surface — the kind of markings Mabelle's grandmother taught her at the boat-summer.

"Take this. Give it to your Bayou cousin when you see her again. Her grandmother will know what it means. The Bayou are the only living court that remembers the binding. They were there. They sang for us. We did not survive. They did. Tell the grandmother I said: *the finger-bone has met the eighth, and the eighth is willing.*"

I take the ring. It is warm. It is humming at a different frequency than the obsidian token in my left palm. The two hum against each other for a half-second and then settle into a quiet truce in my hands.

"Why are you helping me."

"Because you are the first host who was pushed. Every other host wanted the pearl. You did not. You went into the trench because your consort put a dagger between your ribs. The pearl in your chest knows this. The pearl is uncomfortable. It has not had a host like you in eighteen thousand years, and it is — I can tell you this only because I am about to die for the second time and have nothing left to lose — it is afraid of you. The pearl, eighth. Is afraid. Of you. *Use that.*"

Her eyes go a little less wet. Her breath thins. She is finishing.

"Eighth. There are three things you must do before Calisto reaches you. Find the third pearl before she does. Hide it where she cannot follow. And — listen carefully — when the pearl in your chest asks you the second question, the way it asked Vessa, *say no.* Say no even if your kingdom is on fire. Say no especially then. Tell your Bayou cousin I said her grandmother sang me to sleep at the binding. The grandmother will know. Tell her — "

She cannot finish. The breath is gone.

Her body does not crumble like Morrigwen's, like Vessa's, like the others I have met in this trench. Her body simply *empties.* The chamber's dry air leaves her, and her finger-bone is once again only a finger-bone, set on a stone shelf in a small dry chamber that will close around her again the moment I leave. She has been preserved here for eighteen thousand years for one conversation. The conversation has happened. She is allowed to rest.

I stand. I bow to her, formally, the way my father taught me to bow at the Memorial Drifts. I turn to leave the chamber.

And on the floor of the chamber, beneath where her body had been lying, I see a glyph carved into the stone. Three concentric circles. A black mark in the inner circle. A silver mark in the second.

And in the third — the outermost — a red mark.

The red mark is glowing. Faintly. Like an ember through ash.

The third pearl is awake. Somewhere. Somebody, or something, has touched it recently enough that the glyph in this chamber is still warm. I do not know where. I do not know who. But the third pearl is no longer hidden the way the Tide Mother thought it was.

And the chamber begins, slowly, to flood.