The Villainess They Made

The Pearl

"Do you want to live?"

"...Yes."

"Then come."

The voice is not a voice. The voice is pressure. The voice is what it would feel like if a closed mouth could speak by changing the temperature of the water. The voice is the inside of a held breath. It does not enter my ears. It enters my chest, the way a tide enters a tide-pool, the way a hand enters a glove that has been waiting for it.

I have hit the floor.

I think I have hit the floor. There is no sense of impact — only a softness, and then a stopping, the way a body stops moving when there is nothing left to push against. I am lying on something. The something is silt and bone. I am surrounded by skeletons, and not all of the skeletons are mermaids. Some are larger. Some are stranger. Some carry weapons in shapes my kingdom forgot a thousand years ago. They are arranged around me in a ring. The ring has eight spaces. The eighth space is the center. The eighth space is where I have landed.

They have been waiting for me.

Forty feet ahead of me, against the far wall of the trench, a single point of light is pulsing. Black as starless water. Alive in a way nothing this deep should be alive. It is sitting at the bottom of a small natural hollow in the trench-wall, on a small altar of bone — though the bone is older than any bone in the ring around me, and I think the altar is older than the trench.

I cannot move my tail. I cannot move my arms. My gills are failing. I am dying, the way small things die in the shadows of reefs — quietly, alone, with no one watching except the sea itself.

"Then come, little host. I have been waiting."

"What — what are you — "

"I am not a what. I am a who. I am the seed of a heart that the Tide Mothers buried so that the world would not be eaten. I am hungry. I am one third of the hunger that ate the Salt Throne. The other two thirds are looking for me. We will find each other. You will help."

"I do not — I do not want to help — "

"You did not want to die either, host. The first one is always an accident."

I cough. Blood, not water. The dagger-wound is the only part of me that still hurts. The rest has gone numb. The pearl pulses. I can feel it in my chest the way I felt my father's last heartbeat in his palm. It is matching me. It is matching me badly, on purpose, slightly off-rhythm — the way you match a partner you intend to lead.

"Crawl, host. Three of your father's body-lengths. That is all I am asking. Three. I will give you the rest. Crawl."

I crawl.

I am going to spend the rest of whatever life this thing is about to give me carrying the memory of how I crawled. On my hands. On my one good elbow. With my tail dragging behind me, useless, a fin-fan that flapped the wrong way and never recovered. Past the cairn of the first host — Morrigwen, the queen who razed her own continent, her bone-crown still set on the small black coral plinth she had not been allowed to be buried with. Past the second cairn — a warrior whose ribs were the size of mine but whose skull was longer. Past the third — small, almost humble, a commoner's stack, and I felt a small twist of affection for it that the pearl noted with displeasure. The fourth cairn had no offerings. *That woman refused you,* I thought, and the pearl pulsed harder, irritated. The fifth was bitter and bejeweled. The sixth was a monk's, circled with prayer-knots still holding after centuries.

The seventh cairn — the most recent — was empty.

One thing rested on its black coral lip. A small kelp-wax case, identical to the one my mother had given me. The hand that wrote the name on it was not my mother's. The hand was older. The name on the case was mine.

I did not pause. I did not have the breath. I crawled past it.

"Closer, host."

"What — what is — what is the price — "

"Closer."

"Tell me — what is the price — "

The pearl laughed. It was the first time I heard it laugh. The laugh was not in the water. The laugh was in my own bones. The laugh said: *little host, the price is one of every untranslatable joy. The price is the small smile you used on your commoners' babies in Songsquare. The price is wonder. The price is laughing at nothing in your private library when nobody is watching. The price, in nine years, is your face in the cairn-mirror not being your own. The price is everything that makes you the kind of woman a man stabs in the ribs at the eastern reefs because she is too soft to deserve a kingdom. Take it. The kingdom did not deserve you anyway.*

I crawl one more body-length. My fingertips touch the pearl.

And in that exact instant — in the moment my skin meets the pearl's surface and the bonding has not yet happened but is about to — I hear another voice.

Not the pearl's. Not my father's. Not Mabelle's. Not Morrigwen's.

A woman's voice. Old. Calm. Almost affectionate. Coming from somewhere that is not the trench, somewhere that is not the kingdom, somewhere that is somehow inside the pearl and outside the pearl at the same time.

*"Almost, little sister. I have been waiting such a long time."*

*"Take it. Take it. Take it."*

I take it.