The Villainess They Made

The Decision to Rise

"You are the eighth."

"I know."

"Stay."

The voice is mine. The reflection in the obsidian sliver — which has reformed itself, repaired in the way only Calisto-stone can repair, and floated back to me at some point in the night — is mine. Not Calisto. Not Morrigwen. Me. The new me. Blood-red and gold and teal and obsidian, with eyes that have spent a night sleeping at the foot of a cairn and have woken up changed.

She is talking to me. The pearl has learned a new trick. The pearl can speak through my own face.

"Stay, eighth. The trench is safe. The trench is ours. Above is your consort, your cousin, your uncle, the Thalassos patrol, the woman in the blue veil. Above is fourteen kinds of dying. Below is one. Stay."

"You want me to stay because if I rise I will refuse the second question."

"I want you to stay because I love you."

She says it the way a parent says it to a child who has just announced she is leaving for university. Patient. Fond. Wounded. The pearl has decided, in the night, that the fastest route to my staying is sentiment. The pearl has been in eighteen thousand years of practice. The pearl knows what works.

I do not answer her. I look around the cairn-ring instead. I count the things I am leaving behind. The seven cairns. The seventh, which has been emptied of the case Calisto left for me. The chamber where the Tide Mother died, its threshold now gently flooding, the dry air gone. The glyph-walls, which I have read enough of. The footprints in the silt.

The footprints worry me. Whoever was here is not here now. The pearl in my chest has not given me an answer about who. I have decided not to ask. Some questions you are better off carrying upward.

The obsidian token in my left palm pulses once, lightly, the way a small dog presses its nose into the hand of someone who has stopped paying attention. *Stay.* The pearl in my chest pulses, with less subtlety, twice. *Stay.*

Mabelle's rootwork-knot — the binding that broke yesterday, that should be entirely gone — has somehow re-tied itself a small fraction overnight. Not the whole knot. Just one thread. A green hair-fine thread laid against the silver of my new wrist-scales. My cousin's prayer is, against every rule of Bayou rootwork, finding its way back. *Rise,* the thread says. It does not say it in words. It says it in the way it has chosen to exist.

I am about to rise. I have decided. My new body has decided. The pearl is going to lose this argument, and the pearl knows it.

And then I hear the child.

The crying carries down through three hundred feet of trench-water in a way that crying should not carry. It is faint. It is real. It is a child of about six years old. Crying. Far above. In a tower. In the northern reefs of my own kingdom — somehow I know exactly where the cry is coming from, the way a cat knows a closed door. Some part of my new body is reading the kingdom now in a way I am not yet trained to read.

The child is crying because she has been left alone for too long. The child is crying because the woman who feeds her did not come this morning. The child is crying because she does not understand why the woman did not come, and she has been told not to leave the round room at the top of her tower, and she has obeyed, and she is hungry, and nobody is coming.

I do not know who this child is.

I know, in a way that has nothing to do with thought, that the pearl in my chest has decided to taste her. The pearl has tracked the cry. The pearl is interested. The pearl says, in the warm patient register of a parent suggesting a snack, *little one, that is a soft one, that is a small soft tender one, the first kill is always an accident, the second one is who you are —*

I shut the pearl off the way you slap a hand off a stove.

"No."

I say it out loud. The cairn-ring hears it. The Hollow hears it. The thing under the Hollow's floor pulses once, considered, and the consideration is not anger but interest. Even it has not been refused before by a host on the first morning.

*"No,"* I say again, to the pearl directly. *"You will not have her. Whoever she is. You will not have any child. You will not have soft kills. The first one was a sea-beast and that will be the smallest you ever eat through me. *No.*"

The pearl goes quiet. Sullen. The way a child goes quiet when she has been corrected in front of company.

I push off the trench-floor.

I push hard. I push with the whole new strength of the body that is going to surface into a kingdom that has been mourning me for two weeks. The pearl does not fight the ascent. The pearl has decided, instead, to wait — to bide, the way an older sibling bides, the way Calisto has been biding for two hundred years.

As I push off, I hear the seventh cairn c***k behind me.

Not the case. The cairn itself. I turn in the rising current to look. The black coral of the cairn has split lengthwise. Inside it, where I had assumed there were bones — there are not. There has never been a body in the seventh cairn. There has only ever been a single sealed letter, addressed to me, in a hand I have learned to hate.

The letter is dated.

Three years ago.

Calisto wrote me a letter and placed it in a cairn at the bottom of the f*******n Zone three years before I was pushed.