The Dagger Between My Ribs

The blade goes in before I understand that my consort is the one holding it.

That is the first sentence of my new life. I do not know yet that I am beginning a new one. What I know is this: the cold steel has entered the soft place between my third and fourth ribs, and my mouth has filled with a scream that will not come out, and the water around me has gone suddenly warm with something that is not current.

My name is Irene. I am twenty-two years old. I have been Queen Regent of Alastor for seven months and three days, and I was going to be married in three weeks. My wedding dress was finished by the royal weavers yesterday afternoon. I tried it on. Rose was there. She cried, and I thought she was crying because she was happy for me.

His name is Liam.

His free hand, the one that has traced the iridescent patterns of my scales on a hundred quiet nights in our private garden, the one that has cradled the back of my neck when he told me he loved me, is tangled now in my hair. Gently. Almost tenderly. The way a lover holds another lover in place for one last kiss.

We are beyond the eastern reefs. The outer markers of my kingdom are two currents behind us. He led me out here at dawn, smiling, telling me he had a surprise. A private place. A promise he wanted to make. The moonstone caverns his grandfather once took his grandmother on the morning of their engagement.

I wore my father's pearl-comb in my hair for him. I left the palace without my retinue because he asked me to. I broke Mabelle's rootwork-knot at the gate because Liam was waiting on the other side, and I did not want him to see me listening to her.

I am going to die because of every one of those small decisions.

"Irene," he says. His voice in my ear is the voice I fell in love with. Warm. Patient. The soft rasp of a man who knows he is being indulged. "You were never going to be the queen this kingdom needed."

The dagger twists. I feel the tip of it scrape something inside me that should not be scraped. My vision whites for three heartbeats. When it comes back, I am looking past his shoulder at the thing behind him, the thing we have been swimming toward since dawn without my realising, and my mind, which has been refusing to understand any of this, finally understands.

The Forbidden Zone.

It shimmers in the water twenty feet behind his tail. The cursed trench. The place no royal of Alastor has approached in a thousand years. It is the colour of ink poured into ink, and it has a faint hum that I can feel in my teeth. Nerida taught me. My father taught me. The oldest song of our kingdom teaches us. Nothing that falls into the Zone comes back.

This is not the moonstone caverns. This was never the moonstone caverns.

"Rose," Liam says, close to my ear, so close his words are warm against my gill-slits, "is everything you are not."

My name for my cousin, when we were children, was my other hand. Rose and I were born nine weeks apart. She braided my hair at my father's funeral. She wept into my shoulder when her first engagement broke last spring, wept because she wanted Liam and Liam was already mine, and I understood it too late. She sat at my right for every feast of my reign. She is the sixth name on my mother's sealed list. I have known what to do with that list for a week. I have been too afraid.

I try to say her name. I cannot. I try to say his. I cannot. I try to sing, just one note, the smallest warmth I know, the warmth I use on the commoners' babies in Songsquare. But the water has flooded the place my voice used to live, and what comes out of me is a cracked whisper that does not carry two feet.

Blood clouds the space between us. Delicate crimson threads. Mine. The current catches the threads and draws them up in a slow spiral toward the surface that is three hundred feet too far above, toward the bioluminescent spires of Coralspire Palace where my uncle Rick is sitting down to his dinner this very moment with the knowledge of exactly what his nephew-in-law is doing beyond the eastern reefs.

My father's pearl-comb slips from my hair.

I watch it fall past Liam's shoulder, tumbling end over end, the small pearl at its centre catching the last of the twilight. It was his. The only jewelry my father wore in private. He gave it to me on my twelfth nameday and told me it had been in our family since before Alastor had a throne. He told me a queen could keep one true thing, and one true thing only. A queen could keep her own name.

The comb disappears into the dark below, toward the shimmering veil of the Forbidden Zone.

I realise, with a calm that does not belong to a dying woman, that I will follow it.

Liam tilts my face up to his. He does this gently, with one hand, the way you tilt a lover's face to kiss her. His blue-and-purple scales are flecked now with my blood. His silver-tipped fins catch the last of the twilight the way the comb did. He is beautiful. He has always been beautiful. I hate him with a depth I did not know I had, because I am, or I have been, a queen who kneels in the market to sing babies to sleep and who has been told all seven months of her reign that she is too soft for this throne.

"Rose will know what to do with this kingdom," he says. His eyes search my face with what looks, I swear, like real affection. "You never did, my love."

I want to tell him that Rose will not rule anything. That Rick will not permit it. That whatever Liam thinks he has been negotiating for three years, he is going to find out, the moment my body stops floating, that he was never the prize either. I want to tell him what is on my mother's list. I want to tell him that my father's ghost visited me in a dream two weeks ago and pointed at a cup of wine. I want to tell him there are nine names on that list and that his is not even the worst of them.

I cannot say any of it.

I cannot say anything.

My gills have begun to fail. Not from the wound. The dagger has not reached my lungs. Something else. Something at the edge of my awareness. Something the Zone is already reaching up to take from me even though I have not yet crossed its veil. My hands have gone slack at my sides. Mabelle's rootwork-knot at my wrist, the small green binding she tied this morning at dawn, the one I broke pulling away from her, is coming undone in the current. A bright green thread drifts down into the black.

Somewhere, in a dungeon I do not yet know she is sitting in, my cousin Mabelle will feel the last of that knot break, and she will begin, wordlessly, to scream.

Liam turns me.

He does it carefully, the way a man turns a woman he loves in order to kiss the back of her neck. He removes his dagger from my ribs with a surgeon's patience. He rehearsed this, I understand in a rush. He has been rehearsing this in his own chambers for three years. He wipes the blade on my shoulder-scales before he tucks it away. He does not want to lose a good blade in the Zone. He intends to swim home.

He puts both hands on my shoulders. From behind me. Steadying me. Holding me upright against the current. His mouth is at the back of my neck. His breath is warm there. He kisses me once, one small, final, unbearable kiss at the base of my skull, and he whispers, in the voice I fell in love with, the voice I chose to trust over my mother's voice and my cousin's voice and my own dead father's voice, four words I will hear for the rest of whatever life I am about to have.

"Give Morrigwen my regards."

I do not know the name Morrigwen. Not yet.

He pushes me.

My tail is already limp. My arms will not rise. The current catches me and turns me the way it turned my father's pearl-comb three minutes ago, and I tumble, slow, undignified, scaled belly rolling up toward the surface, over the edge of the Forbidden Zone and into the black.

The last thing I see of the world above is my consort's silhouette swimming calmly back toward the glowing coral spires of Alastor. He does not look down. He does not need to. He already knows how this ends. His purple tail sweeps a small competent arc against the current and carries him home.

Below me, the Forbidden Zone opens.

And as I fall, tail limp, blood spiraling upward in threads that will be gone before anyone at the surface can notice them, every bright hue in my scales beginning, very slowly, to drain, the Hollow begins to drink me.

The pink goes first.

And then, somewhere very far below me in the black, something much ol

der than pink begins, patiently, to wait.