The Older Voice

There is no one there.

I turn my head on the obsidian, slowly, using the last of what I have, and I see only the ledge and the glow at its centre and the black water around me. Nothing with a face. Nothing with a shape.

"Where are you," I say. Sound comes out. Thinner than my voice should be, warped by the pressure of the Zone, but sound. The voice has given me back my voice, or the Zone has, or my own body is remembering itself in the act of not dying fast enough.

Closer than you think, little one.

The voice answers from nowhere. From the obsidian beneath my spine. From the glow at the ledge's centre. From a place inside my own chest that I did not know was hollow enough to hold a voice. It is female. It is old. It has the quality of a very old relative speaking across a long distance on a night when no one else is listening.

"Am I dead?"

Dying. Not yet dead. The distinction matters in this water. You have perhaps two hours. Dying in the Hollow is a slow business. Lie still.

I lie still. I do not have the strength for anything else. The obsidian is cold through the few scales I have left, and my ribs have stopped aching, which means either the wound has closed or my body has stopped recognizing the wound as a thing that belongs to me. I do not know which. I am afraid to test.

"Who are you?"

A question you are not ready to ask. You will ask it again in a little while, and then I will answer.

"What do you want?"

Also a question for later. First we have work to do.

The voice does not hurry. That is the first thing I notice about it, after the fact that it is here at all. It is not in a hurry. Whoever is speaking has the time of someone who has already died. Whoever is speaking does not need anything from me that I cannot give slowly.

"What kind of work."

You have been betrayed, little one. You are going to die of it unless you choose otherwise. But before you choose, you must understand what has been done to you. All of it. Not only the parts your cousin could see from the outside. Not only the version of it that let you keep loving him until this morning. The whole of it. Every choice that was made for you while you thought you were making your own. Every stranger at the edge of your court who was never a stranger. I will show you. I cannot make you look. That is the rule.

The voice knows my cousin's name without having said it. It knows Liam. It knows this morning. It knows the specific shape of my love, and the word morning in its mouth has the texture of the particular dawn I swam out on.

I should be afraid.

I am not.

In the slow water of the Zone, fear is one of the things the Zone is taking from me. I can feel it going. I can feel the edges of my panic softening. I can feel the sweetness the voice mentioned before it said the word, a warm, easy drifting, the feeling of a child being carried back into a bed she has almost fallen out of, and I understand that if I let it, it will carry me.

Do not take the sweetness, the voice says, reading me. Not yet.

"Why should I listen to you."

Because your father is here. And he is asking me to ask you.

My father.

I have not allowed myself to say the word father since he died. Not even in my own head. Other women have fathers. I have the late king, and my father's reign, and the one they called Thalor. I have the distance of a queen who inherited a throne eighteen months before she was ready to carry it. I have a pearl-comb he gave me that is now tumbling somewhere in the dark below.

I have never said, in any clean voice, father.

The Zone is very quiet around me.

He is here, little one. He has been waiting for you too. You were the only person he got to give a real warning to, and he thinks you missed it. He wants two more hours. He wants to show you things. He wants you to see them with his eyes as well as your own, because your eyes were still loving the man who killed you, and you would not have believed him without him.

I begin to cry.

I did not expect this. I have not cried since the night my father died. Not at the funeral. Not in the first three weeks of my regency when the Consolidation nobles circled me like fish at a wound. Not on the morning Liam first knelt in my receiving-room and asked for my hand. I thought the crying part of me had been drained along with everything else. Apparently not. Apparently it had been saving itself for the bottom of the Hollow, in the dark, in front of a voice I cannot see.

I know, child. Cry. It is the right moment. Cry while I prepare you.

"Prepare me for what."

To remember. To see. And then to choose.

The glow at the centre of the ledge, the one I cannot look at directly without my eyes wanting to slide off, pulses once. The pulse travels through the obsidian and enters my spine, and when it enters me it carries, folded inside it, something that is not meant for this moment.

It is a scent.

Ambergris and old paper and the slightly smoky sweetness of the oil my father used to brush into his beard on the mornings of state audiences.

It is the scent of his study.

I am in his study.

"Wait," I say, and the voice hushes me, the way a nurse hushes a child who has woken too early from a nap.

Do not fight it, little one. The remembering does not hurt. Only the understanding will hurt, and I will be with you for that part. Look. He is there. You were twelve years old on this afternoon. Do you see him?

I see him.

My father. Alive. Sitting at his carved coral desk with the big kelp-glass window behind him filled with the blue-green light of the afternoon current. His hands on a pearl-comb. His eyes on me.

I am twelve.

I am standing at the door of his study in a formal hair-dress that Nerida has laced through with small pink shell-beads for my nameday. I am proud of the hair-dress. I am proud of the fact that he has summoned me alone. I am proud of the way he smiles when I come in, as if he has been waiting for exactly me and for no one else in the world.

I am twelve.

Adult-me stands in the corner of the study, unseen by either of them, watching.

And adult-me sees, for the first time, with the eyes of a queen who has now been stabbed by her own consort and pushed into the Zone by his hand, something I did not see when I was twelve.

My father was dying.

The pallor in his lips that I took, at twelve, for the beginning of a cold. The slight tremor in the hand that holds the pearl-comb. The way his eyes sit just a little too deep in their sockets. The way he has arranged the desk between himself and me so that I cannot come too close. The way he breathes, in small shallow sips.

He knew.

He was summoning his only child, alone, on her nameday, to give her the one object in his possession that was older than the throne. And he knew he would not have another nameday to give her one.

"Come here, Irene," my father says in the memory, to my younger self. His voice is softer than I remember it being. Softer because he was tired.

I watch twelve-year-old me float across the study to his desk. I watch him lift the pearl-comb and hold it up in the light of the kelp-glass window. I watch his fingers tremble around the pearl at its centre. I watch him hide the tremble by turning the comb in his hand, a small practiced movement, as if he has been practicing how to hide tremble for months.

"This," he says to twelve-year-old me, "was in our family before Alastor had a throne. Before our name had anything attached to it. Before there were any of us to hold it."

Twelve-year-old me listens. She does not interrupt. She is a well-taught child. She has been trained to listen to kings.

"Irene, you are going to be a queen. Not soon. But someday. And a queen, my love, is given many things that are not hers. A throne. A kingdom. A husband. A council that wants what she can give it. A cousin who will hate her quietly for not being the cousin. An uncle who will love her until the moment he can no longer afford to. She will have to give all of those things back, one by one, if she is asked. Do you understand me?"

Twelve-year-old me nods. She does not understand. She is twelve.

Adult-me in the corner, who is now twenty-two and has been stabbed and pushed, begins to understand.

"But a queen," my father says, "can keep one true thing. One. And only one. Do you know what yours will be?"

Twelve-year-old me shakes her head.

My father smiles, and in that smile I see, for the first time, the grief of a man who knows he is about to leave his daughter alone in a kingdom he was supposed to protect her in. He extends the pearl-comb toward her.

"Your own name," he says. "Keep your name. And keep this, as a reminder that you have one. When they take everything else, Irene. When they take everything else. Keep this."

Twelve-year-old me reaches out and takes the pearl-comb.

And behind her, at the half-open study door, a figure appears that neither of them sees but adult-me sees very clearly. A figure that was not in this memory the first time I lived it. Or was here and I did not notice.

My uncle Rick.

Standing in the corridor.

Watching the comb pass from my father's hand to mine.

Smiling.

And my father, from the desk, without turning his head, without breaking his eyes from twelve-year-old me, says softly, in a voice that was not in the original memory, a voice he is saying now, across twenty-two years of my life and an unknown measure of the Hollow's depth, directly to the grown woman in the corner of his own study:

He killed me on a Thursday, Irene. In

the wine. I want you to know that. I want you to remember it was him.