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
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