The Villainess Has Excellent Taste in Shoes

It is, in fact, exactly what she says next, because I have just said it, and I am the only person in this room with a mouth that the author does not control. I have tested a hypothesis and the hypothesis held. The narrator can describe me. The narrator cannot drive me. There is a difference, and that difference is the entire reason I am going to keep my head attached to my neck past chapter twelve.

Probably. Provisionally. Subject to revision, like all my opinions.

I rate my current situation, on the five-star scale I use for everything because old habits do not die just because the body holding them did: two stars. Compelling premise. Hostile execution. The narrator is a known unreliable source and is, I suspect, armed.

"My lady," Briony whispers, "you are frightening me."

"Good instinct," I say. "Hold onto that. But not of me. I promise you, of everything in this castle, I am the least of your problems."

She does not believe me. Why would she. In the book, Seraphine slaps Briony twice and threatens her once, all before the maid's pointless death, and the body I am wearing remembers how to do that, the muscles are pre-loaded with cruelty the way a piano remembers a tune. I can feel the slap living in my right hand like a reflex. I keep the hand still. That is going to be the whole job, I think. Keeping the cruelty the author installed from firing on its own.

"Dress me," I say, gentler. "And while you do, tell me everything. Pretend I have hit my head and forgotten the last month. Because, honestly, that is close enough to true that I am going to start saying it out loud."

---

The wardrobe is a war crime and I love it.

I would like to be above this. I am a serious critic. I have used the phrase "fast fashion of the soul." But I have been dead for an indeterminate period and reincarnated into the body of a margrave's daughter, and the woman has gowns, oxblood and midnight and a green so dark it is basically a threat, all of it embroidered with the thorn-and-rose motif that the author cannot stop describing and that I, traitorously, find gorgeous in person. The shoes alone are worth a paragraph. I give the wardrobe four stars and dock one only because there is nothing in here with pockets, which is the patriarchy.

Briony talks while she laces me into the oxblood. Her hands are quick and frightened and she keeps glancing at my face to see if it is about to turn back into the one she knows.

She tells me, in the careful too-bright voice of someone who has learned to narrate a dangerous woman's own life back to her without setting her off, that the betrothal season is three days begun. That the Crown Prince Lucian must choose a bride before midsummer to satisfy the King and the Bloom-treaty with the southern duchies. That candidates have gathered at Ravensgilt. That the favourite is a girl named Aurelia Wynn, a nobody from the western farms, who arrived with a prophecy stitched to her name and an unfair quantity of luck.

(In the book, this is the prologue and chapter one in summary. Briony is functioning, right now, as the clumsy info-dump the author front-loaded onto page three. I want to tell her that her exposition is unnatural and she should weave it into action. I do not, because she would not know what I meant, and also because she is currently the only friend I have in a world that wants to behead me, and you do not give your only friend notes.)

"And me?" I ask. "What does the court say about me?"

Briony's hands go still on the laces.

"They say," she says, very carefully, "that the Lady Seraphine will have the prince, or she will have the realm burn trying."

There it is. The villainess thesis statement. The author put it in the mouth of a gossiping countess on page twenty-two and clearly thought it was a great line. I thought it was the laziest possible characterisation, a woman reduced to ambition and spite, no wound underneath, no reason, just cold and useless as a knife in a glass case.

And here is the thing I did not expect, standing in her body, in her gown, in her terrible perfumed room: I can feel the wound.

It is faint, a pressure behind the borrowed ribs, but it is there, in the muscle-memory the way the cruelty was. A father who looks at this beautiful daughter and sees a piece to be played. A childhood of being a prize and never a person. The specific exhausting loneliness of a girl raised to win a man's hand who has never once been asked what she actually wants. The author never wrote any of it. The author wrote malice that was her nature and moved on. But the body remembers what the book left blank, and the blank is full of a real woman's pain, and that, more than the thorn ceiling or the smug narrator, is the thing that makes my throat tight.

She was a person. The hack who made her did not notice. And then I came along and one-starred her for not having an inner life she was never given.

I do not love that. I rate my own past behaviour, privately, two stars. Cruel. Funny. Punching down at a fictional woman who could not punch back. Author's note: do better.

"Briony," I say. "When this is over, whatever happens to me, you are not going to die in this castle. I am going to see to it personally. I need you to believe that even though you have no reason to."

She stares at me. And then, because the body I am wearing has been feared since she was small and promised nothing, ever, Briony's eyes fill, and she says, "Yes, my lady," in a voice that means she does not believe me but desperately wants to, and I feel something happen in the room.

It is small. It is like a draught from a door you did not know was open. The air goes, for half a breath, the colour of a coin held to a lamp, gold and thin, and then it is gone, and Briony does not notice it but I do, because I have just spent my life learning to notice exactly the moment a story does something it was not supposed to.

A kindness, the narrator murmurs, and it sounds genuinely interested now, the fond grandmother gone, a colder professional curiosity underneath. How novel. The villainess has never once been kind. The page does not know how to hold it.

"Get used to it," I tell the ceiling.

Briony follows my gaze up to the thorns and the gold and sees nothing and looks back at me with fresh alarm.

---

Here is what I work out, in the next hour, sitting at the vanity while Briony does something architectural to my hair.

The narration is real, and it is the author's voice from the book, the omniscient telling-not-showing presence I mocked, except now it is loose in the world like a draught, and only I can hear it. It wants me to be the villainess as written. It narrates me doing things I am not doing. When I do something off the page, something Seraphine would never do, it notices, and the air goes gold, and the voice gets interested, which I do not think is a good thing to be to a narrator who has my execution scheduled.

So there is a cost. I felt it. A kindness to Briony bought me something, the air going gold, call it slack in the story, a place where the rails bend. But a thing that interesting to a hostile narrator is a thing that is going to push back. I do not know how yet. I am a critic. I know how stories work, which means I know that when the protagonist gets away with something easy in chapter one, the story is just deciding what to charge her for it in chapter four.

I count my deviations so far. One: I did not slap Briony. Two: I promised to save her. Two off-script choices. Two pulls on a thread I do not fully understand, in a book that beheads its villainess in eleven chapters, narrated by an entity that has just learned my name is on the wrong character.

I square the shoulders. I look at the beautiful, cold, miscredited face in the mirror.

"All right, Vossberg," I tell her, because I have decided that is what I am going to call the body, the role, the part I have been miscast in: by the author's own surname, which she gave the villainess, which I clocked the second I read that half-sealed letter and have been quietly furious about ever since. (Who names the disposable villainess after themselves? Who does that? I wrote in my review. That is not foreshadowing, that is a typo with delusions of theme. I am going to be wrong about that. I do not know it yet.)

"All right," I tell her again. "You were a cardboard cutout fed through a woodchipper of clichés. I should know. I wrote that sentence. I am going to spend the next eleven chapters making it the wrongest thing I ever said."

Three days go by before the book makes its next move, and I want that on the record, because it taught me something the review never could. In the text, the rose-court scene sits on page thirty-one, practically the next morning, and I braced for it accordingly. Instead the world dealt me three long unnarrated days of nothing at all, and I learned the first true thing about this place: pages and days are not the same length here. The book is a map, not a calendar. I spend the time being uneventful on purpose. I learn the corridors. I learn which courtiers matter and which only think they do. I am boringly, suspiciously civil to Briony, who stops flinching by the second afternoon and starts, cautiously, talking to me like a person. Every night the narrator reads over my shoulder and narrates small villainies I am not committing (the Lady Seraphine brooded upon her rival, it says; I am eating candied violets and reading Seraphine's staggeringly dull correspondence, but sure), and every night I lie in a dead woman's bed and count. Chapter twelve. Eleven of road. However many days the world decides a chapter is worth.

On the fourth morning, Briony laces me back into the oxblood, because I have decided it is armour.

There is a knock at the door.

Briony goes to it, opens it a hand's width, murmurs, comes back with her face arranged into the careful blankness of a servant delivering news she knows will land badly.

"My lady," she says. "You are summoned. To the rose court. By the Crown Prince himself."

And in the book, I know, this is page thirty-one. This is the scene where Seraphine corners the prince and is icy and ambitious and he is icy and bored and the chemistry is between them like two refrigerators, and it goes nowhere because the author has already decided he belongs to Aurelia and Seraphine is just an obstacle in nice shoes.

In the book, this is a throwaway scene. Half a page. Two refrigerators being cold at each other, then a scene break.

So the smart move, the survival move, the move a person who wanted to keep her head would make, is to walk in there and be exactly the cardboard the author wrote. Say the cutting line. Be the obstacle in nice shoes. Give the narrator its throwaway scene and bank the rest of my deviations for somewhere they might actually save my life. I know this. I am, allegedly, the cleverest reader in the room.

I look at my own miscredited face in the mirror and I already know I am not going to do the smart thing, and I hate that I know it, because it is the exact flaw that has run my whole life: I cannot leave a badly written character alone. Never could. I see the blank where a person should be and I cannot stop myself reaching into it.

The Lady Seraphine went to meet the prince with poison in her heart, the narrator says, comfortable again, settling in for a scene it has read a hundred times.

I stand. The oxblood gown falls into place like a verdict.

"We'll see," I tell it, and I go to find out how much one conversation can cost.