The Villainess They Made

The Bonding

"You are the eighth."

"Who — who are you — "

"You will refuse me. They all do. And then, eventually, you will not."

She is in front of me in the dark. A woman who is also a flame. Her crown is on sideways. Her scales are the same blood-red and gold and teal as the ones I do not yet know are spreading across my body. Her eyes are full of stars in a way that is not metaphorical — there are actual stars in them, pinpricks of cold light that have no business being inside the eyes of a creature that lives at the bottom of an ocean trench.

Black veins climb her throat to her jaw. The veins are mine, in nine years, if I am not careful.

"My name is Morrigwen, host. I was the first. The Salt Throne was mine. I burned it down. I burned my own children. The pearl made me hungry and I ate everyone I had ever loved and then I ate the kingdom and then I ate the continent and then there was nothing left but the trench it sent me back to. I have been here for eighteen thousand years. I have been waiting to tell someone."

"I will not — I will not be like you — "

"That is what we all said, little eighth. I said it to my predecessor. She said it to hers. The third said it to the second. We all refuse. The pearl is patient. The pearl has nothing to do but be patient. It will wait. You will refuse it for a year. You will refuse it for five. You will refuse it for nine. And then, on a morning when you do not expect it, you will not refuse it anymore. And that morning, little eighth, will not feel like the end of anything. That is the cruelty of it. The end will feel like a choice."

I scream. I am screaming because my body is becoming something else. My grey scales are blackening, then igniting — blood-red blooming outward from my sternum, gold threading through the red, teal piercing through the gold, obsidian edging every fin like the blade of an artist who has decided to finish her work in one cut. My tail lengthens and sharpens and grows razor-keen at its fan. My gills stabilize with a new rhythm that is not mine. My stab-wound closes from the inside out. My voice returns — lower, older, laced with a register that can shatter coral when I choose. I scream in the new voice. The water answers. The Hollow itself answers. A harmonic shudder ripples up through the trench, through the deep currents of Alastor, through the coral foundations of Coralspire Palace.

Six hundred feet up, at his late breakfast, my uncle Rick's wineglass cracks in his hand. He sets it down slowly. He does not speak. The boiled quail-egg on his plate goes uneaten.

And in a sealed dungeon cell my cousin does not yet know she is sitting in, Mabelle lifts her head — eyes red from screaming, throat raw — and feels the shudder through her rootwork bones, and smiles for the first time in two weeks.

Morrigwen watches me bond.

She does not flinch. She has watched seven women do this — bond and refuse and slowly, year by year, fail. She watches with the steady attention of a teacher whose lesson is patience. When my screaming finally stops, when my new tail has settled, when the new voice in my chest has finished writing itself over the old one, she nods once. The crown on her head shifts a fraction toward straight. It does not get there.

"Eighth. Listen now. I have one warning the pearl will not let me give you twice. The Silver is awake. The Silver has been awake for two centuries. The Silver wears a body. The body is in your kingdom. She has been writing letters to your line for four generations and your grandmother burned them and your father burned them and your mother could not. She wrote your courtship. She wrote your fall. She wrote me into your dreams tonight to soften you for what she will say to you next. *I am not your enemy.* That is what I am supposed to tell you. I am telling you the opposite. The Silver is your enemy. The Silver wants the Black. The Black wants the Silver. The hosts are the place they meet. Do not trust her. Do not trust her sweetness. Do not trust the way she will call you sister. She has called seven women sister. She has buried six. The seventh sleeps in a Pacific trench, half-mad, and dreams of being eaten. Do not be the eighth she sleeps."

"Morrigwen — what is — what is the third pearl — "

"Ah."

Her smile is the first warm thing I have seen in this trench.

"Eighth. The third pearl is the only piece of good news this prison has. It is hidden. The Silver does not know where. The Black does not know where. *I* do not know where. The Tide Mothers buried it so well that not even the prisoners can find it. As long as it stays hidden, the entity beneath us cannot wake. Find it. Hide it better. Do not let her near it. That is your work, eighth. Not vengeance. Not your purple boy. Not your rose cousin. The third pearl. Everything else is — "

She fades. Like my father, two days back, she has spent her allotted breath. She fades from the bottom up — tail first, then waist, then shoulders. Her stars burn last. Her last whispered words are quiet in the new black silence of the Hollow.

*"Eighth. I am sorry. I went mad. I do not want you to. Find the third. Be the first who does not."*

And then she is gone, and the trench is quiet, and I am floating in the eighth space at the center of the cairn-ring, and my new tail is moving without my asking it to, and my new gills are processing water without thought, and I am — for the first time since the dagger went in — alive.

I do not know what I look like.

I float — slowly, carefully, the new body still negotiating with itself — toward the seventh cairn. The empty one. The one that was waiting for me. There is a sliver of obsidian leaning against its lip — not placed there, just fallen from the trench wall in some old collapse, sharp and dark and reflective. I drift in front of it.

I look.

She has my eyes.

She has my mouth.

Everything else belongs to the Hollow. Blood-red shot through with molten gold and piercing teal, edged in obsidian that swallows the light around it. Her fins are sharp enough to cut coral. Her tail is longer than the one I was born with by an arm's length. Her scales are the color of a reef on fire.

And behind her — *behind* the woman who is supposed to be me, in the dark of the obsidian where the reflection has nothing else to reflect — another face is there.

Smaller. Fainter. The way a face is in a window when the light inside the room is wrong.

A woman. Silver-haired. Pale-scaled at the edges where she has scales at all. Beautiful in the way a coiled thing is beautiful. Older than anyone who should still have a face. She is looking at me through the obsidian the way an older sister looks at a younger one she has been waiting to meet for a very long time.

She lifts a small, pale hand. She gives me a small fond wave. Her smile is the kind of smile a fond elder gives a child she has helped bring into a world.

Her mouth shapes the words slowly. So I do not miss them.

"Hello, little sister."

"You took longer than I hoped."

"I have been waiting two hundred years."