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Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Villainess They Made : Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

10 Kabanata

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. Alm

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 drug 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 i

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 st

The Cousin from the Swamps

Mabelle of the Bayou told me, three weeks ago, in four sentences I refused to hear.I am still falling. The Forbidden Zone has my sunset-gold now, and half my teal, and the pink is almost gone — only a flush at the edges of my fins, dulling fast, the way a flower loses its color between being picked and being placed on a grave. My tail hangs useless beneath me. I am not swimming. I am sinking the way a dropped coin sinks, except a coin cannot remember.And what I remember, now, while the Hollow drinks me, is my cousin arriving at the palace gates in the first week of the warm-current season.She was two weeks ahead of schedule. Nobody had told us she was coming. Her retinue was four Bayou apprentices and two freshwater guards, and Mabelle herself at the front of them in a travel-cloak of woven river-grass, her moss-green scales flecked with copper catching the coral-lanterns above the palace gate. A rootwork-binding on her left wrist — fresh, still damp from the swamp-water she had ti

The Warning at the Gate

"Don't go, cousin.""I'll be home by dark, Mabelle.""Don't go. Don't go. Don't go."Three of her words against three of mine, and in the end mine carried more weight because I was the queen and she was a Bayou cousin and nobody had ever taught either of us that the queen was the one who needed to be stopped.I am falling, and I can see her face. More clearly than I can see anything. My cousin at the eastern gate of Coralspire in the dawn current — her hair coming loose from a braid she had clearly not finished, because there had not been time, because she had been waiting at the gate since the small hours, because she had been waiting for me. Her moss-green scales dulled the way a wet leaf is dull. Her eyes open in that particular Bayou way that does not blink while it waits for an answer.She had her hands out.She did not raise her voice.She said *don't go* the way you say a prayer over something you have already lost. The first time was almost a question. The second time was a fa

The Man Who Was My Father

"Sweet-scale. Look at me.""Father — ""Look at me, Irene. I have less time than I did last time. Look."I look. I cannot do anything else. The water around me has stopped being water — it is a held breath, a pause carved out of my falling, a small bright pocket the dead are only allowed to make once. My father is in front of me. He is himself. Not the diminished thing that died in my arms on a bright morning seven months ago, but the king from before. Broad-shouldered. Full-scaled. The deep blue tail of House Thalor catching a light that has no source. His eyes are full of water. He is in pain. He is in pain and he is here anyway."Father, you came back two weeks ago. You spoke to me in a dream. Father, I — I did not understand —""I know.""You said *not the wine* and I thought you meant —""I know what you thought. Sweet-scale. Listen. I am going to say the four sentences again and this time I will not break in the middle. I have been preparing the breath for two weeks. I will not

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

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 Forbidden 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

The Pearl

"Do you want to live?""...Yes.""Then come."The voice is not a voice. The voice is pressure. The voice is what it would feel like if a closed mouth could speak by changing the temperature of the water. The voice is the inside of a held breath. It does not enter my ears. It enters my chest, the way a tide enters a tide-pool, the way a hand enters a glove that has been waiting for it.I have hit the floor.I think I have hit the floor. There is no sense of impact — only a softness, and then a stopping, the way a body stops moving when there is nothing left to push against. I am lying on something. The something is silt and bone. I am surrounded by skeletons, and not all of the skeletons are mermaids. Some are larger. Some are stranger. Some carry weapons in shapes my kingdom forgot a thousand years ago. They are arranged around me in a ring. The ring has eight spaces. The eighth space is the center. The eighth space is where I have landed.They have been waiting for me.Forty feet ahe

The Bonding

"You are the eighth.""Who — who are you — ""You will refuse me. They all do. And then, eventually, you will not."She is in front of me in the dark. A woman who is also a flame. Her crown is on sideways. Her scales are the same blood-red and gold and teal as the ones I do not yet know are spreading across my body. Her eyes are full of stars in a way that is not metaphorical — there are actual stars in them, pinpricks of cold light that have no business being inside the eyes of a creature that lives at the bottom of an ocean trench.Black veins climb her throat to her jaw. The veins are mine, in nine years, if I am not careful."My name is Morrigwen, host. I was the first. The Salt Throne was mine. I burned it down. I burned my own children. The pearl made me hungry and I ate everyone I had ever loved and then I ate the kingdom and then I ate the continent and then there was nothing left but the trench it sent me back to. I have been here for eighteen thousand years. I have been wait

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