The Villainess They Made

The Shell-Band Goes Dark

"What's wrong, my love?"

"Liam — my wrist — there is something — "

"Take your time, sweetheart."

He is smiling. We are at the edge of the f*******n Zone. The black veil of it shimmers at his back, twenty feet away, the cursed trench no royal has approached in a thousand years. He is letting me read. He has stopped swimming. He has, in fact, taken my hand — gently, the way a groom takes the hand of his bride — and he is holding my hand still in the cold water while my shell-band shows me everything he has been writing to my cousin for three years.

He wants me to read it. He wants me to know.

He has wanted, for three years, the moment in which I would read it.

*Liam: She held an open audience again today. The widow from the eastern reefs. I watched her cry over a commoner's shell-message like a girl reading her first letter. Rose, my love, are you sure I have to marry her? Tell me the wedding night part again. It is the only part that keeps me through the courtships.*

*Rose: The wedding night part is exactly what we said. You stay with her one minute longer than is necessary. You make a face the priest will remember. You leave at dawn. By the time the morning court opens, the chambermaids will have found her. Liam. I know it is hard. Two more weeks.*

*Liam: Two more weeks. My love. I am counting.*

I read three years of these. I read them in the order in which the band has filed them, which is chronological, which means the first message is one Liam sent to Rose nine months *before* he proposed to me. They have been planning this since before I was promised to him. They have been planning this since before my father got sick. The poisoning of my father, which I had thought was a single act of opportunism by my uncle, is on the same timeline as the courtship — the same calendar, the same months, the same plan. It was always one project. It was always going to end at the eastern reefs.

I look up at Liam.

He is smiling. The careful smile he has used on me for three years. The one I am only now seeing for what it is: a held expression. A muscle held in a shape, the way a flag is held in a shape by a wind that has nothing to do with the cloth.

"Why are you letting me read this?"

"Because I want you to know, sweetheart."

"Why now."

"Because the place you are about to fall into," he says, in the same warm patient voice he used to put me to sleep with on long nights, "is going to drink a lot of you. I want it to drink the part of you that loved me first. I want you to understand who you were dying for. I want, when the Hollow takes your color and your voice and your soft little reign, that the part it takes first is the part that wanted to marry me."

He has thought about this. He has thought about this for years.

"Liam. You did not love me."

"No, my love. I did not."

"Did you ever?"

"No."

I did not expect the sound that came out of me to be a laugh. It was not a real laugh. It was the small, broken cough of a thing that has run out of room for any other reaction. He smiled gently at it. He thought it was the beginning of a plea. It was not. It was the noise a closing door makes when it cannot quite reach its frame.

"Liam."

"Yes, sweetheart."

"My mother knew."

Something in his face — for the first time in three years — does a thing I have not seen it do before. A flicker. He recovers it almost instantly. But for one full half-second, my consort's face is the face of a man who has just been told a thing his coordinator did not tell him, a thing his architect did not warn him about, a thing his ancient cousin in her blue veil has been keeping from him because she did not trust him with it.

"Sweetheart. Your mother is in Paria."

"My mother gave me a list, Liam. There are nine names on it. Yours is not the worst of them."

He recovers his smile. But the recovery is half a beat too slow, and we both know I saw the flicker, and we both know that whatever I am about to say next is the last sentence I will be allowed to speak in his presence. He does not let me finish it. He turns me — gently, the way you turn a lover — and the dagger comes out of his side-sash so quickly I do not even register the motion until it is already between my ribs.

"You were never going to be the queen this kingdom needed, Irene."

"Rose is everything you are not."

He pushes me. I have already shown you this part. I am not going to show it to you again. The Hollow takes me.

But this is the part I have not shown you.

As I begin to fall, in the last instant before the trench swallows me, my shell-band shows me one more thing. One more file. One more message. The most recent message in the archive. The message Liam received this morning, an hour before he met me at the outer archway, from a sender whose seal is silver — silver, a metal no mer-kingdom uses — and the content of the message is two sentences in a hand I have never seen.

*Beloved nephew. Push her cleanly. The pearl is hungry today, and so am I.*

*— Calisto.*

The shell-band goes dark.

It is the last thing it will ever show me. The Hollow has finally drunk enough of me to silence the band entirely. The kelp-display fades. The archive closes. My mother's list, in my other hand, dims and folds itself into the case as if it has decided I have read enough for one death.

I am falling. I am alone. The water around me is the color of a closing eye.

And below me — very far below me, but no longer impossibly far — there is a single point of light.

It is black. Black as starless water. Lit from within. Pulsing in a rhythm that is not mine and is not the Hollow's and is, somehow, both.

It is not waiting for me anymore.

It is reaching for me.