Todos los capítulos de The Villainess They Made : Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 9

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

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

"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

"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