All Chapters of The Villainess They Made : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

"Hello, little sister.""Who — who are you.""Your older sister. The other half of what you have just become. I have been waiting two hundred years for this conversation and I would like, if you don't mind, to enjoy it for a moment before you start being clever."She is in the obsidian.Not behind it, the way a face is behind a window. Inside it. Suspended in the black stone the way a small fish is suspended in a piece of amber. Silver-haired. Pale-scaled at the edges where she has scales at all. Beautiful in the way a coiled thing is beautiful, and young-faced in a way that makes my new body cold, because no woman who has lived two hundred years should still have the face of a woman who has lived twenty.I have backed away from the sliver. Three body-lengths. Four. The sliver follows me. It does not move through the water. The water moves around it, and the sliver stays where it has chosen to stay, which is wherever I am looking."Do not back away, eighth. You'll only tire yourself.

  "What — what is — ""A predator, little host. Your first kill. Are you hungry?"The pearl is back. Whatever silence the obsidian token caused has passed. The pearl in my chest has come back online with a hunger that is not mine and a clarity that is, and the clarity is showing me — through the cold black water of the upper Hollow — a shape moving at me from the deep current with a mouth wider than my new tail is long.It is bone and teeth and a single flat eye that has been adapted to no light at all. The body is twenty feet at least. The body is older than my kingdom. It has been hunting in this trench for so long that most of its skin has fallen off. What is left is muscle, gristle, and a kind of patient hunger that recognizes me as the first prey in eighty years to ring its proper bell.The pearl pulled it. I understand, in the half-second before it reaches me, that the pearl has been calling predator

  "Hello, eighth.""You — you are alive.""I am a finger-bone. The rest of me is the floor."Her voice is sand and old breath. Each word costs her a little of whatever she is using for breath, and she is conserving carefully. Her eyes are the only living part of her — wet, focused, a clear blue I have never seen on a mer.I cross the threshold. The water stops at my own caudal fin and refuses to follow me — the chamber will not be flooded, not by my body, not by the trench-current behind me. I move through the air the way I used to move on legs the one time I tried legs, when I was eleven and my mother let me try a glamour above the waterline of Paria. My new tail compresses into something that walks. I had not known it could.I kneel beside the stone shelf."Tell me what you are.""I am what is left of a Tide Mother. The smallest piece of the smallest of us. We were seven. We tore ourselves

 "Child. The first one is always an accident. The second one is who you are.""Grandmother — ""Don't *grandmother* me, Irene Thalor. I have been dead forty years. I have not earned the affection. Sit up. Listen."I am asleep at the foot of the seventh cairn. I do not remember falling asleep. The Hollow does not let me know how much time has passed since the chamber sealed itself behind me. My new body has decided to sleep on its own — the way a cat decides to sleep, without consulting its owner — and somewhere in that sleep my father's mother has come through.Matriarch Ilenne of House Thalor.I have only ever seen her in a single mosaic in the inner palace. She is taller in the dream than the mosaic suggested. Her tail is the deep blue of House Thalor before House Thalor diluted itself with two centuries of marriages. Her face is my father's face, with all of his patience burned out of it. She does not look like a w

 "Did you see something?""In the deep current. Below us. Something moved.""Below this depth, nothing moves. You're tired."Voices from the upper currents, in a language I do not speak as a child speaks her mother's — Thalassos formal, the high register of their warrior-priest scouts. I learned it as part of a princess's diplomatic curriculum and I have not used it in three years. It is coming back to me with the speed of every other muscle the new body is finding it has not lost.I am ascending. Forty feet beneath the upper-thermocline. Through the curve of the trench-mouth where the Forbidden Zone's waters meet Alastor's normal cold currents. And forty feet above the thermocline, in a layer my own kingdom's patrol-craft are not supposed to be flying foreign colors in, three sleek hulls are passing.Thalassos.The hulls are sleek and northern in build, painted the steel-grey-and-white of the warrior-priest courts, and th