The Villainess They Made

The Long Falling

The falling lasts longer than dying should.

That is the thought I hold on to as the Zone takes me. That this is taking too long. That I should be gone by now. That whatever d**g or venom was on Liam's blade should have ended me before the push. But my heart is still beating. My lungs are still drawing ragged half-breaths through gills that refuse to fully close. My mind is still mine.

The pink goes first, and then the orange.

I watch it happen from the outside of myself, the way the dying are said to. The sunset-orange scales along my flanks, the ones my father used to call my evening-tail because he said they reminded him of the hour just after vespers, dim to the colour of wet stone. Then the coral-red across my chest. Then the pale gold at my wrists. My scales are dying and I am still inside them.

Below me, the water is the colour of closed eyes.

I cannot see the bottom. I cannot see my own hands. I can only feel. And what I feel is cold, and a slow tugging beneath my sternum, as if someone below has hooked a line into my heart and is patiently reeling me down.

I try to pray.

I am not a religious queen. My mother was, my father was not, and I was raised in the quiet neutral space between them. But in the dark of the f*******n Zone, with my scales draining and my blood threading upward like smoke, I try. I try to remember the prayer Nerida taught me when I was four. I get the first line. Tide that lifts, tide that takes. I cannot remember the second.

I try my father's name instead. It comes out of me as a single bubble that rises past my face and breaks and does nothing.

Something answers.

Not in words. In pressure. In a shift of the current around me, a small, almost polite adjustment, as if something below has noticed my arrival and is making room. I feel it in my skin before I feel it in my mind. Something is aware of me. Something is waiting for me.

I should be afraid. I am not. That is the strangest thing of all. There is a calm at the centre of me that should not be there, the calm of a woman who has already accepted that she is meat falling into deeper meat, and inside that calm I find enough clarity to count.

I count the lights.

There are lights in the Hollow. Small. Green. Pulsing in no rhythm that makes sense. At first I think they are fish. They are not fish. They move in straight lines, and fish do not move in straight lines. They move past me, one and then another and then three in a slow procession, going up while I am going down, as if they are the exhalations of something breathing slowly at the bottom.

Bioluminescent, I think, in the scholar's voice my old tutor used to use when she was testing me. The deep coral varieties of the Hollow emit photopigment only in the presence of, and the thought is gone. Because one of the green lights has paused in front of my face and looked at me.

It has eyes.

Not fish eyes. Eyes shaped like mine. Eyes the size of my thumbnail, set into a shape I cannot see. They regard me for a long unhurried moment. They blink once. Then they move on, up toward the surface, carrying whatever they are carrying away from the pit.

I understand then, with a certainty I have not earned, that I have been seen.

Whatever is down below knows I am coming.

The teal goes next. The teal has always been my favourite colour. The scales along my tail in the shade of the shallow bays south of Paria. My mother's sea. My summer-place. The water I learned to swim in when I was three. I watch the teal drain down toward my fluke. I watch the fluke itself begin to lose colour. The gold accents along my fins. The pale pearl-sheen across my belly. All of it going.

I am going to be grey.

I am going to be the colour of a thing that has stopped.

There is a feeling in my ribs, not in the wound but beneath it, that is new. A warmth. No, not a warmth. A warm absence. A space inside me that is not mine, that is beginning to fill with something else, the way a bowl fills with water when it is left out in rain. I do not know what is filling it. I only know that it is filling.

I hear my father's voice.

Not in memory. Here, in the Zone, in my ear, as clear as if he were swimming beside me.

Irene. Open your eyes.

My eyes are open. Has he forgotten what open means?

Open your eyes, my daughter. Look down.

I look down.

I see, far below me, a single glow. It is not green. It is not any colour I can easily name. It is something deeper than black, a darkness with a light inside it, or a light inside a darkness, or both at once, and it is growing as I fall toward it.

That is not the end of your life, my father's voice says in my ear. That is the beginning. Do not be afraid of her. She was a queen once. She has been waiting for you.

"Her?" I try to say. No sound comes out.

Listen to what she tells you. Do not agree to anything the first time. Refuse twice. On the third time, name your price. That is the oldest rule of this water. Do you understand me, Irene?

I cannot answer. The voice is fading. The warmth in my ribs is growing.

My daughter. My Irene. I loved you. I love you still. I did not poison myself. Remember it was him.

Then my father is gone. And I know, the way you know the shape of your own hand in the dark, that he was really there. That was not a memory. That was the Hollow letting my father speak to me one last time, across whatever distance separates the living from the drowned.

Below me, the glow grows. I can begin to make out shapes around it. A ledge. An obsidian ledge. Long. Flat. Old. And at the centre of the ledge, a single point of deep, patient light, pulsing slowly, in time with my own heart.

The grey is almost complete.

My tail gives one last twitch that is more memory than motion. My hands float out from my body at the level of my face, pale as a drowned girl's. I can see my engagement ring on my fourth finger. The setting has loosened. The stone is still there. I note it with the dispassionate attention of someone cataloguing someone else's property.

I fall the last fifty feet in silence.

I land on the obsidian ledge on my back. There is no pain. That is the first surprise. The second is that I can breathe. There is water moving through my gills, slow and cold and thick, and I am not dying of it. The third surprise is that I can still see. The obsidian is almost black but not black enough, and the single light at the ledge's centre illuminates it just enough for me to know where I am.

I am lying on a ledge wide enough for four queens, in a pit older than my kingdom, in what I think must be the last minutes of my life.

Somewhere above me, three hundred feet above me or three thousand or more, I have lost the ability to measure distance in any direction, my consort is swimming peacefully toward Coralspire. My cousin is weeping in a dungeon without knowing yet why she is weeping. My uncle is ordering his second course.

And very close to my ear, in a voice I have never heard in my twenty-two years, a voice that is warm and female and amused and as old as the ocean itself, someone speaks.

"Oh," the voice says, the way a relative greets a niece she has not seen in a long time. "Oh, little sister. Welcome home."

I turn my head on the obsidian to look.