All Chapters of The Villainess They Made : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

 "Mama. The lady at the gate is crying.""Hush, child. Don't point. The lady is allowed to cry. Today is a hard day.""But Mama, I know her face.""You don't, sweet.""Mama. Mama. The dead queen is in the market."The mother turns, finally — distracted, embarrassed, a small tired commoner woman in the middle of a hundred other small tired commoners — and she sees the grey-scaled stranger her child is pointing at. She apologizes. *I am so sorry, ma'am. The little one. Today has been long. She has been seeing her grandmother in every face. We lost her grandmother in the spring. Please.* She bows. She pulls the child toward her. The child looks back at me over her mother's shoulder, certain, undeterred. The child is four, maybe five. The child has my mother's eyes — not in a way I can explain, but in a way her own mother would not catch — and she has just looked at her queen and recognized her queen, and her queen

   "Don't move. Either of you. Captain. Your hand off your sword.""Sergeant. I do not know what you think you are seeing.""I know what I am seeing. Step away from the woman."Orin does not step away. He angles himself, very slightly, between me and the second guard — the one with the crescent pin, the one whose eyes are still working over my face the way you work over a name on the tip of your tongue. The first guard has his hand on his shell-blade. The second has his hand on his alarm-shell. The pearl in my chest pulses once, urgent, *let me. Let me. He has seen you. Drain him.*I do not. I step around Orin instead. I let the glamour soften, very slightly, around my face — not enough to break it, not enough that the first guard sees what the second is seeing, but enough that the second guard's certainty cracks for a half-second. Long enough for me to do the thing the pearl has been teaching me without

 "Read it, Majesty. She wants you to. She would not have sent it otherwise.""Nerida — ""Read it. We will burn it after. The Bayou rootworker tonight will help me bind the ash. Read it. She is going to write to you. You may as well learn what her voice sounds like in a room you are safe in."I take the shell. The seal is silver. The crescent embossed on the seal is the same crescent embedded in the obsidian token in my pocket. I press my thumb to it. The seal recognizes my blood — *my blood, somehow, already* — and softens.Calisto's voice plays for me in Nerida's clinic-kitchen. Old. Calm. Almost affectionate. The voice has the small fond pleasure of a woman who has just located a small lost thing.*"Little sister. I am so glad you have reached your old midwife. She is a good woman. I have been to her clinic three times. She refused to sell me the cauls of two of the children she midwived in the warm-current season.

  "Mistress, the kelp-flake — and a man at the spice market gave me this shell — he said I was Yara, he knew my name — should I have taken it?""Yara. Hand the shell to me. Slowly.""Mistress, was I — was I wrong to take it?""You weren't wrong, sweet. You did the right thing by bringing it home. Hand it to me."Yara hands the shell to Nerida. The shell is small. The seal is not silver. The seal is brown coral — common Alastor coral, the kind a fisherman uses for a casual message — and the wax that has been pressed into the seal is the warm yellow of common kelp-wax. There is no crescent. There is only a name. *Yara.*Yara is fifteen. Yara has small grey scales and large hands she has not grown into yet. Yara is looking at me — really looking, properly, in good lamp-light, for the first time since she walked through the front door — and Yara's face does the small slow thing o

  "Cousin.""Mabelle.""Cousin, you took your time.""I had to die first.""I am aware."She is on a stone bench. She is thinner than she was at the gate yesterday morning. Her moss-green has dulled to olive. The rootwork-burns at her wrists are angry red — the scars of a kingdom's inspectors who learned their bindings from a book and tried to strip a Bayou cousin's prayers from her wrists with the same impatience a man uses to peel a kelp-cake. The burns are already half-healed. Her grandmother's rootwork moves under the skin in slow patient waves. She will be scarred. The scars will not impair her.She rises from the stone bench. She moves slowly — the way a body moves after fourteen days of sitting on cold stone — and she crosses the cell to the bars.Orin opens the cell.She does not embrace me, at first. She steps through the cell-door. She lifts her hand. She studies my face &md