The Villainess They Made

The Mother in the Shallows

"Mother. Look at me."

"Eat your fish, Irene."

"Mother."

"Eat your fish."

She had not looked at me since I had arrived in Paria. The shell-band on my wrist is showing me this memory now, mid-fall, in a way the Hollow is letting it show me — Calisto's name pulsing on my mother's list, the band warming against my pulse, every conversation in the last two weeks I had wanted to forget rising into the light because the band has finally been given permission to play them.

Two weeks ago, in Paria. The shallow-court of my mother's exile. A small dining-pool with kelp-glass walls that let the surface light in unfiltered. Queen Mirela of Paria, my mother, sitting at the head of a table built for four with the chair beside her empty for a husband she would not even pretend to seat. She was smaller than I remembered. Sharper. The lines around her eyes were new. She had not eaten her own fish in twenty minutes.

She had not looked at my face once.

"Mother. Why won't you look at me?"

"Because I have not earned it, Irene."

"Mother — "

"I left you. I left you in Coralspire when your father died. I have been here in this small pool for six months and you have been ruling a kingdom that is poisoning you, and I knew it was poisoning you, and I let it. I have not earned the right to look at you. Eat your fish."

I did not eat my fish. I waited. I have learned to wait. My father was a man who answered questions when you asked them; my mother is a woman who answers questions when she has finished her own argument with whether to answer them. I waited. I watched her not eat. I watched the kelp-glass walls of her dining-pool catch the late afternoon light and throw it across her face in pale moving stripes that made her look — for a moment, for the first time in years — like the woman in the wedding-mosaics of the inner palace, the queen who had carried me twenty-three years ago. Smaller. Sharper. But the same woman.

Finally, without raising her voice, without lifting her eyes, she said the sentence she had brought me three weeks of silence to come hear.

"Your father's killer is at your table, Irene. I have known for six months. I could not come home and live in the same kingdom as the knife."

I set down my fork. I set it down very carefully because if I had set it down quickly I would have broken the coral plate beneath it. I said the only word I had.

"Name him."

"I cannot."

"*Mother.*"

"Irene, listen to me. Listen. There is a binding on the name. It was placed on me — on us, on the line — before either of us was born. I cannot say it. My mouth will not shape it. I have tried, in this pool, for six months. I cannot. What I can tell you is the house. The house is your uncle's. Rick poured the cup. Rick is the second name on the list I am about to give you. Rick is — " She stopped. She took a small, careful breath. "Rick is the smallest name on the list."

"The smallest."

"Yes."

"How many names are on the list, Mother?"

"Nine."

She rose from the table. She crossed to a small kelp-wax cabinet on the far wall — moving with the careful slowness of a woman who has been measuring her own steps for six months. She returned with a sealed kelp-wax case. She set it beside my untouched fish. She still did not look at me.

"Open it only when you know what you will do with it. There is a binding on it. The case will not open for any thumb but yours and mine. The list will not glow for any name until you understand what the name has done."

"Mother. Tell me the ninth name. Mother. The one that is underlined. The one you cannot say."

She looked at me, then. For the first time in three days. The first time since my father had died. Her eyes were the eyes of a woman who has been carrying a stone in her mouth for six months and who has just been asked to spit it out and cannot.

"Irene. There are some names that are written by hands that have already taken your sister."

"I do not have a sister."

"You did. Twice. Both before you were born. Your father and I do not speak of them. Your father will not speak of them now even if you ask him in a dream — even if he could come back, even if he had the breath, he could not. The ninth name is the name of the woman who took them. She has been waiting for me to fail her with a third daughter for twenty-three years. She is patient, Irene. She is patient like an ocean is patient. And whatever I have to say to you about her — I cannot. The binding has my throat."

I sat for a long time. The light through the kelp-glass moved across her face. She did not eat her fish. I did not eat mine. We sat like two women who had finally, after a lifetime of formal courtesies, told each other a single true sentence and were waiting for the room to recover.

When I left her residence the next morning, she walked me to the outer pool herself. She held my wrist. Her grip was harder than I expected. She said, very quietly, the last words she would say to me until she returns to Alastor for my funeral — which will not happen now, because I am about to refuse to die, but she does not know that.

"Daughter. When you read it, watch your wrist. The shell-band knows things you do not. It has been reading them to someone for the last year. Do not trust what it has been telling you. The name on the list is the name in your wrist. The same hand wrote both."

I am falling. The shell-band on my wrist is glowing now in a way it has not glowed since my coronation. *Calisto* is pulsing on my mother's list and *Calisto* is pulsing in my band — the same letters, the same hand, in two places. They are responding to each other. They have been responding to each other, my mother is saying, for an entire year.

And the band — finally, mercifully, late — opens its archive to me.

Three years of my consort's shell-traffic. Cascading across my wrist in time-stamped order, sorted by recipient.

Liam. Rose. *Liam. Rose. Liam. Rose.* Hundreds of messages. Mocking. Planning. Flirting. A wedding-night arrangement that did not include my survival. A photograph from a beach in Paria, six weeks after my coronation, dated and timed.

I read.

I am still falling. I am still alive enough to read.

And above me, far above — too far to reach, too far to stop — Liam's voice carries down through the water in the memory of an hour ago, in the warm patient register he used when he had finally noticed I was reading something.

*"What is it, my love? What's wrong?"*