She Stole My Curse novel · Chapter 6 of 32

Chapter 6: The Dowry

I pulled my hand back through the bars.

"I'll tell you," I said. "Not today."

"Why not today?"

"Because you just spent a night as a dragon, and you've got a cuff stuck in your hair."

He reached up and found it, a twisted half-ring of iron caught in the white-gold.

He pulled it out and stared at it.

Then he looked back at me, and he didn't push.

I unlocked the gate.

He swam out past me, close enough that his shoulder brushed mine.

Neither of us said anything about it.

At breakfast the whole hall knew.

The old nurse put an extra piece of fish in my bowl and didn't say why.

Corwen sat down beside me and said, very seriously, "Did he snore? He snores as a dragon. It's like a ship breaking up."

"He didn't snore."

"Then you have a gift."

I let them talk.

I was counting jars in my head.

The drowned stores would carry the Wreck Deep through one winter. Maybe two, if we were careful.

Then they'd be hungry again.

In my first life, the hunger here only ended when the Tide Crown came and the Court was too afraid of us to keep the blockade.

I didn't want to wait for a crown.

After breakfast I found Aurek on the hull roof, mending a net with Corwen.

"Who owns the Shallows?" I said.

They both looked up.

"The kelp meadows on the east edge of the reef," Corwen said. "Pearlmere does. The queen's guards shoot anything of ours that goes near them."

"Who owned them before?"

"Nobody remembers," Aurek said. "Why?"

"Because I do," I said. "I own them."

On the day I was born, my mother split the royal meadows between her two daughters, as every queen of Pearlmere has done for three hundred years.

Isveth got the Pearl Beds, which were rich.

I got the Shallows, which were far off and full of kelp, and which nobody wanted.

It was my dowry.

And under Pearlmere law, a princess's dowry follows her to her mate.

My mother knew that law very well.

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