The Villainess They Made

The Older Voice

There is no one there.

I turn my head on the obsidian, slowly, using the last of what I have, and I see only the ledge and the glow at its centre and the black water around me. Nothing with a face. Nothing with a shape.

"Where are you," I say. Sound comes out. Thinner than my voice should be, warped by the pressure of the Zone, but sound. The voice has given me back my voice, or the Zone has, or my own body is remembering itself in the act of not dying fast enough.

Closer than you think, little one.

The voice answers from nowhere. From the obsidian beneath my spine. From the glow at the ledge's centre. From a place inside my own chest that I did not know was hollow enough to hold a voice. It is female. It is old. It has the quality of a very old relative speaking across a long distance on a night when no one else is listening.

"Am I dead?"

Dying. Not yet dead. The distinction matters in this water. You have perhaps two hours. Dying in the Hollow is a slow business. Lie still.

I lie still. I do not have the strength for anything else. The obsidian is cold through the few scales I have left, and my ribs have stopped aching, which means either the wound has closed or my body has stopped recognizing the wound as a thing that belongs to me. I do not know which. I am afraid to test.

"Who are you?"

A question you are not ready to ask. You will ask it again in a little while, and then I will answer.

"What do you want?"

Also a question for later. First we have work to do.

The voice does not hurry. That is the first thing I notice about it, after the fact that it is here at all. It is not in a hurry. Whoever is speaking has the time of someone who has already died. Whoever is speaking does not need anything from me that I cannot give slowly.

"What kind of work."

You have been betrayed, little one. You are going to die of it unless you choose otherwise. But before you choose, you must understand what has been done to you. All of it. Not only the parts your cousin could see from the outside. Not only the version of it that let you keep loving him until this morning. The whole of it. Every choice that was made for you while you thought you were making your own. Every stranger at the edge of your court who was never a stranger. I will show you. I cannot make you look. That is the rule.

The voice knows my cousin's name without having said it. It knows Liam. It knows this morning. It knows the specific shape of my love, and the word morning in its mouth has the texture of the particular dawn I swam out on.

I should be afraid.

I am not.

In the slow water of the Zone, fear is one of the things the Zone is taking from me. I can feel it going. I can feel the edges of my panic softening. I can feel the sweetness the voice mentioned before it said the word, a warm, easy drifting, the feeling of a child being carried back into a bed she has almost fallen out of, and I understand that if I let it, it will carry me.

Do not take the sweetness, the voice says, reading me. Not yet.

"Why should I listen to you."

Because your father is here. And he is asking me to ask you.

My father.

I have not allowed myself to say the word father since he died. Not even in my own head. Other women have fathers. I have the late king, and my father's reign, and the one they called Thalor. I have the distance of a queen who inherited a throne eighteen months before she was ready to carry it. I have a pearl-comb he gave me that is now tumbling somewhere in the dark below.

I have never said, in any clean voice, father.

The Zone is very quiet around me.

He is here, little one. He has been waiting for you too. You were the only person he got to give a real warning to, and he thinks you missed it. He wants two more hours. He wants to show you things. He wants you to see them with his eyes as well as your own, because your eyes were still loving the man who killed you, and you would not have believed him without him.

I begin to cry.

I did not expect this. I have not cried since the night my father died. Not at the funeral. Not in the first three weeks of my regency when the Consolidation nobles circled me like fish at a wound. Not on the morning Liam first knelt in my receiving-room and asked for my hand. I thought the crying part of me had been drained along with everything else. Apparently not. Apparently it had been saving itself for the bottom of the Hollow, in the dark, in front of a voice I cannot see.

I know, child. Cry. It is the right moment. Cry while I prepare you.

"Prepare me for what."

To remember. To see. And then to choose.