The Villainess They Made

The Grandmother

"Child. The first one is always an accident. The second one is who you are."

"Grandmother — "

"Don't *grandmother* me, Irene Thalor. I have been dead forty years. I have not earned the affection. Sit up. Listen."

I am asleep at the foot of the seventh cairn. I do not remember falling asleep. The Hollow does not let me know how much time has passed since the chamber sealed itself behind me. My new body has decided to sleep on its own — the way a cat decides to sleep, without consulting its owner — and somewhere in that sleep my father's mother has come through.

Matriarch Ilenne of House Thalor.

I have only ever seen her in a single mosaic in the inner palace. She is taller in the dream than the mosaic suggested. Her tail is the deep blue of House Thalor before House Thalor diluted itself with two centuries of marriages. Her face is my father's face, with all of his patience burned out of it. She does not look like a woman who has been dead forty years. She looks like a woman who has been dead forty years and resented every minute.

She is sitting on the rim of the seventh cairn. She is not pleased to be here.

"Tell me about the pearl, grandmother. Tell me what your line knew."

"I will tell you. But not because I want to. Because your father wept in the afterlife when you bonded, and I have never known what to do with my son's tears, and so I am here. The pearl has weaknesses. Write these down — write them in your blood if you must, you have plenty to spare — because the pearl will let you forget them otherwise. *Love.* *Mercy.* *The small untranslatable joys.* Wonder. Quiet grief. Laughing at nothing in your private library when nobody is watching. The pearl cannot metabolize these. Every time you do one of them, the black veins recede by the width of a scale. You will need a margin of scales by the end."

"The end."

"The end of what is coming, child. Don't be slow."

"Tell me about Calisto."

She spits. The spit lands in the silt of the cairn-ring and the silt steams. My grandmother's spit, in dream-water, has not lost its temperature.

"That woman drove my mother into a sleep, Irene. Your great-grandmother. Drove her into a sleep your great-grandmother never woke from. She wrote a letter to my mother on a silver shell when my mother was twenty-six. The letter said one sentence. *Do you remember what we agreed?* My mother could not remember any agreement. The letter terrified her. She fell into a fever within a week and slept for twenty-three years, and when she woke up, she was an old woman who could no longer tell a kingdom from a kitchen. Calisto did not need to kill her. Calisto only needed to make her forget the agreement she had made before she was born."

"Before she was born."

"Yes. The Thalor line has been promised to Calisto for four generations, child. *Promised.* Some grandmother, six generations back, bargained a daughter to her in exchange for a kingdom. Calisto has been collecting on that debt ever since. I tried to pay it. I gave her my mother. My mother gave her *her* mother. Your father — " She stops. Her face does something a face is not supposed to do at her age. Softens. " — your father gave her two of his daughters. The ones before you. He chose them, child. He did not tell you that, because he wanted you to live. But he chose them. He sat with your mother through both miscarriages knowing it was the price."

"Father — would not — "

"Yes he would. Every Thalor king has. Listen to me, Irene. *Listen.* Your father loved you. Your father loved you in a way none of us loved each other in that line. He chose your sisters because he was buying you. He bought you with twenty-three years of your mother's grief and a bargain my mother made before any of us were born. And then Calisto took him too, because the debt had compounded, and now you are at the bottom of a trench with a pearl in your chest, and the only thing your father bought you with that bargain was the chance to refuse the second question. *Refuse it.* That is your inheritance. That is the only inheritance the Thalor line has left you. Refuse the second question, and the debt dies with you."

I cannot speak.

"Find Vessa, child. Saragossa knows where she sleeps. She refused at the right time. She is the only one of you the pearl has not finished, and she has been waiting four hundred years for an eighth she could teach. Go to the Saragossa Archive. Tell them House Thalor sent you. They will remember the name even if the kingdom no longer respects it."

"And the third pearl."

"That, I do not know. Even I do not know. The Tide Mothers hid it from the dead as well as the living. The sage in your palace crypt knows. Volusia. My mother exiled her before she could be made to tell. Find her. She has been waiting for you for forty years."

She begins to fade. The dead are tired. They have spent enough of themselves on this conversation. Before she goes, she lifts her chin one last time, and her eyes find mine the way only my father's eyes used to.

"Irene. The first one is always an accident. The second one is who you are. *Be careful what you make of the second one.*"

I wake.

I wake at the foot of the seventh cairn, and my new body is rested for the first time since the bonding, and my hand is curled around the bone-ring the Tide Mother gave me, and the obsidian token is in my left palm, and the pearl in my chest is quiet, and the trench around me is — for one held second — completely still.

Then I see the footprints.

Mer-prints. Fresh. In the silt three feet from where I slept. They lead away from the cairn-ring. They lead deeper into the trench, toward the chamber where the Tide Mother died.

Someone has been with me in the Hollow while I slept.