The Villainess They Made

The Cousin from the Swamps

Mabelle of the Bayou told me, three weeks ago, in four sentences I refused to hear.

I am still falling. The f*******n Zone has my sunset-gold now, and half my teal, and the pink is almost gone — only a flush at the edges of my fins, dulling fast, the way a flower loses its color between being picked and being placed on a grave. My tail hangs useless beneath me. I am not swimming. I am sinking the way a dropped coin sinks, except a coin cannot remember.

And what I remember, now, while the Hollow drinks me, is my cousin arriving at the palace gates in the first week of the warm-current season.

She was two weeks ahead of schedule. Nobody had told us she was coming. Her retinue was four Bayou apprentices and two freshwater guards, and Mabelle herself at the front of them in a travel-cloak of woven river-grass, her moss-green scales flecked with copper catching the coral-lanterns above the palace gate. A rootwork-binding on her left wrist — fresh, still damp from the swamp-water she had tied it in. I knew the moment I saw the binding that something was wrong, because Mabelle's grandmother had told me once, in the long boat-summer we spent together when we were twelve and fourteen, that a Bayou mer does not wear a fresh binding to a courtesy visit. A fresh binding is for funerals and for warnings.

I chose not to ask about it.

That is the shape of my life, I am understanding as I fall. Choosing not to ask. Choosing not to look. Choosing to believe the mouth of the boy I loved over the wrist of the cousin who had swum three weeks of open ocean to sit with me.

At breakfast I seated her at my right hand. This was a small scandal. Eleanor-of-Reefs — Consolidation to her bones, my uncle's oldest ally, the woman who greeted me on my coronation day with a courtesy so cold I felt the chill through my crown — Eleanor's mouth thinned when I lifted my palm toward the chair at my right and said, pleasantly, "Ambassador." Rose, at Mabelle's far side, did not hide her surprise fast enough. Her rose-gold scales picked up the dawn light through the eastern windows and I watched a small calculation happen behind her face, a small rapid shuffling of whatever protocol she had prepared against whatever protocol I had just made. Liam, at my left, smiled the smile he used when he was charmed. It was one of his best smiles. He had three of them in regular rotation and I had catalogued all three without realizing I was cataloguing.

Mabelle ate a fish-cake in silence. She did not speak during the meal. She watched Liam with the steady attention of a woman reading the weather. She watched my uncle Rick with the steady attention of a woman reading the weather a day before it breaks. And when breakfast was done, and the hall was emptying, she caught my sleeve lightly in two fingers and said, quietly enough that only I could hear: *Cousin. Library. Now. Close the door.*

I went. I brought kelp-tea. The library smelled of its own dust and of the lemon-oil the old archivist rubbed into the shelves. Mabelle closed the kelp-wax door behind me herself, without waiting for the archivist to return from whatever errand he had invented to give us the room. She leaned against the door.

And then she gave me the four sentences. I have been holding them in the back of my throat for three weeks. I hold them there now, as I fall, and I can taste every word.

*Your purple boy lies with his shoulders, cousin.*

*Your rose cousin lies with him.*

*Your uncle lies with the Thalassos silver.*

*And your dead father is still trying to warn you.*

She said them the way a Bayou grandmother says a prayer — flat, even, each one a complete weight. She was not guessing. She was not hoping. She had been in my palace for five hours and she had read the court the way she might have read the surface of a slow river, and she was telling me what the current showed her.

I defended Liam first. That is the detail I cannot forgive.

I said his shoulders did not lie. I said he had been tender with me for three years. I said Rose's distance from us both in the last months was because of her broken engagement, which I was certain Mabelle could not possibly have heard about from three weeks away on a Bayou skiff. I said my uncle had never done anything but support the treasury through my father's illness. I said my father's death was a slow poisoning, yes, by someone, but the investigation was ongoing, and we did not have evidence, and — my voice was careful here, because I had rehearsed this argument against my own quieter suspicions — we could not throw accusations at sitting nobles without cause.

Every sentence I spoke was a reason I did not want her four to be true. I understand that now. I did not understand it three weeks ago.

Mabelle watched me construct the explanations. She did not interrupt. When I finally ran out, she let the silence sit between us long enough that I felt the heat rise in my throat. Then she said, without cruelty, without triumph:

*I see what I see, cousin. You will see it too. I pray you see it in time.*

She did not leave the library. She walked past me to the window, pressed her palm against the kelp-glass, and looked out at Coralspire's spires for a long quiet moment. And she added, not turning:

*I came two weeks early because the river-bones warned me. My grandmother wept when I left. I did not tell you that. Grand-Maman does not weep for Alastor. She wept for you.*

I am falling. The last of my pink is gone. I am grey from tail to fin-tip now, the grey of reef-bone, the grey of a bride's lost ribbon in the current. My gills burn. My voice is still trapped somewhere in the Hollow's throat and has not come back yet. The memory is crystal-clear because there is nothing else left to me — the Hollow is drinking my body, but it has not yet figured out how to drink what I have already remembered.

And what I have already remembered, finally, is that my cousin walked into my palace three weeks ago already grieving me.

She stayed. She sat at my right hand at every dinner after that. Every meal, Eleanor's mouth thinned a little further. Every meal, Rose laughed a little less spontaneously at Liam's jokes, because Mabelle was watching, and Mabelle was Bayou, and Bayou was something none of them had a frame for. They thought she was peasant-mystic. They did not understand that a Bayou mer raised by a grandmother who speaks to river-bones sees courts the way other people see dinner parties. Shallow. Patterned. Predictable.

I watch Mabelle now, in the memory — her watching. I watch her wrists. Every morning for three weeks her binding was a little fresher. She was re-tying it every night. I did not ask her why. She told me yesterday, in the small hours after the council meeting, while she braided my hair for the next day's wedding preparations: *Cousin. I am re-tying the binding every night because every morning it is thinner. Something in this palace is eating it.*

I laughed. I told her it was the salt. I told her Bayou rootwork was not meant for Alastor water. I told her she was imagining things. I had become very good, by then, at telling her she was imagining things.

She did not argue with me. She finished my braid. She kissed the top of my head the way a Bayou grandmother kisses a small girl and said: *Cousin. I am going to tie a binding on your wrist tomorrow before you leave the palace. I do not want you to tell me whether you are wearing it. I only want you to wear it. Will you do that for me?*

I said yes. I said it easily, the way you say yes to a child's small request. I said yes because I was not taking her seriously, and because I wanted her to stop worrying, and because my wedding was in three weeks and I did not have time for her Bayou superstitions, and because I was twenty-two and in love and stupid, and because I thought — *thought*, past tense, a past tense I am only now learning to use about myself — that my cousin's worry was a problem I could solve by wearing a green thread on my wrist for the day.

This morning, before I left the palace, she tied the binding. Her hands were shaking.

I did not look at her face. I was already thinking about moonstone caverns.

The Hollow takes more of me. I have been falling for fourteen heartbeats, by the way my dying body is counting, and I have been remembering Mabelle's gift on my wrist for only part of those.

I lift my grey hand, slowly, through the cold water. I turn it. There is the knot — the small tight green binding, threaded with a strand of Mabelle's own hair, woven with her grandmother's three particular prayers — and it is unraveling. Not breaking. Unraveling, thread by thread, the way a Bayou grandmother told a small girl once that a binding will unravel when the woman wearing it is dying.

Mabelle is in the palace. I do not know where in the palace, but she is in the palace, and every thread of this knot is tied to every thread of another knot she keeps at her own wrist. When the last thread here breaks, the last thread there will also break. And whatever cell or corridor or dungeon my cousin from the Bayou is sitting in right now —

She is going to know. The moment the last thread breaks, my cousin in this palace is going to know what has happened to me. And Mabelle, who came two weeks early because the river-bones warned her, who has watched this court for three weeks with the steady attention of a woman reading the weather, who wept in her grandmother's boat-house before she left —

Mabelle is going to scream