The Villainess They Made

The Older Voice (2)

The glow at the centre of the ledge, the one I cannot look at directly without my eyes wanting to slide off, pulses once. The pulse travels through the obsidian and enters my spine, and when it enters me it carries, folded inside it, something that is not meant for this moment.

It is a scent.

Ambergris and old paper and the slightly smoky sweetness of the oil my father used to brush into his beard on the mornings of state audiences.

It is the scent of his study.

I am in his study.

"Wait," I say, and the voice hushes me, the way a nurse hushes a child who has woken too early from a nap.

Do not fight it, little one. The remembering does not hurt. Only the understanding will hurt, and I will be with you for that part. Look. He is there. You were twelve years old on this afternoon. Do you see him?

I see him.

My father. Alive. Sitting at his carved coral desk with the big kelp-glass window behind him filled with the blue-green light of the afternoon current. His hands on a pearl-comb. His eyes on me.

I am twelve.

I am standing at the door of his study in a formal hair-dress that Nerida has laced through with small pink shell-beads for my nameday. I am proud of the hair-dress. I am proud of the fact that he has summoned me alone. I am proud of the way he smiles when I come in, as if he has been waiting for exactly me and for no one else in the world.

I am twelve.

Adult-me stands in the corner of the study, unseen by either of them, watching.

And adult-me sees, for the first time, with the eyes of a queen who has now been stabbed by her own consort and pushed into the Zone by his hand, something I did not see when I was twelve.

My father was dying.

The pallor in his lips that I took, at twelve, for the beginning of a cold. The slight tremor in the hand that holds the pearl-comb. The way his eyes sit just a little too deep in their sockets. The way he has arranged the desk between himself and me so that I cannot come too close. The way he breathes, in small shallow sips.

He knew.

He was summoning his only child, alone, on her nameday, to give her the one object in his possession that was older than the throne. And he knew he would not have another nameday to give her one.

"Come here, Irene," my father says in the memory, to my younger self. His voice is softer than I remember it being. Softer because he was tired.

I watch twelve-year-old me float across the study to his desk. I watch him lift the pearl-comb and hold it up in the light of the kelp-glass window. I watch his fingers tremble around the pearl at its centre. I watch him hide the tremble by turning the comb in his hand, a small practiced movement, as if he has been practicing how to hide tremble for months.

"This," he says to twelve-year-old me, "was in our family before Alastor had a throne. Before our name had anything attached to it. Before there were any of us to hold it."

Twelve-year-old me listens. She does not interrupt. She is a well-taught child. She has been trained to listen to kings.

"Irene, you are going to be a queen. Not soon. But someday. And a queen, my love, is given many things that are not hers. A throne. A kingdom. A husband. A council that wants what she can give it. A cousin who will hate her quietly for not being the cousin. An uncle who will love her until the moment he can no longer afford to. She will have to give all of those things back, one by one, if she is asked. Do you understand me?"

Twelve-year-old me nods. She does not understand. She is twelve.

Adult-me in the corner, who is now twenty-two and has been stabbed and pushed, begins to understand.

"But a queen," my father says, "can keep one true thing. One. And only one. Do you know what yours will be?"

Twelve-year-old me shakes her head.

My father smiles, and in that smile I see, for the first time, the grief of a man who knows he is about to leave his daughter alone in a kingdom he was supposed to protect her in. He extends the pearl-comb toward her.

"Your own name," he says. "Keep your name. And keep this, as a reminder that you have one. When they take everything else, Irene. When they take everything else. Keep this."

Twelve-year-old me reaches out and takes the pearl-comb.

And behind her, at the half-open study door, a figure appears that neither of them sees but adult-me sees very clearly. A figure that was not in this memory the first time I lived it. Or was here and I did not notice.

My uncle Rick.

Standing in the corridor.

Watching the comb pass from my father's hand to mine.

Smiling.

And my father, from the desk, without turning his head, without breaking his eyes from twelve-year-old me, says softly, in a voice that was not in the original memory, a voice he is saying now, across twenty-two years of my life and an unknown measure of the Hollow's depth, directly to the grown woman in the corner of his own study:

He killed me on a Thursday, Irene. In

the wine. I want you to know that. I want you to remember it was him.