She Stole My Curse novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: The Second Choosing

I took the white pearl off his palm.

I didn't say yes.

I bent down, in my mother's crown, and kissed the scar across his knuckles, the way I had at the Choosing.

The hall exploded.

The castoffs at the back were shouting.

Corwen was standing on a bench.

Brannoch was pounding the shoulder of the captain beside him so hard the man nearly sank.

Somewhere in the middle of it, a court lady started clapping.

Then they all were.

"That's a yes," Aurek said, very low, under all of it.

"That's a yes."

We married at midwinter, in the Choosing Hall.

I chose the day.

The court had always held royal weddings at midsummer, in the warm water, with the reef in bloom.

I didn't care.

I wanted it on the longest night of the year, so it would be the longest one we ever had.

The old nurse made my gown.

She took his mother's silver-blue silk, the one I'd worn to Isveth's feast.

She sewed every pearl I'd lost on the gallery floor back onto it, and a hundred more besides.

"Don't you spill anything on it," she said.

"I didn't last time."

"Last time you spilled it on your sister. That counts."

The Wreck Deep came as honored guests.

They swam in at the front of the procession, in front of the lords, in front of the merchants.

The net-scarred brothers wore new shirts.

The blind man carried a new lute that Brannoch had sent him, strung with vent-silver.

The girl with the torn fin had flowers in her hair.

The maid, in a blue gown of her own, with her forty pearls sewn on the hem.

The old nurse rode in at the very front in her basket, towed by both brothers, and glared at every lord she passed.

The court gave them the best places in the hall.

The front rows, by the dais.

The places where Isveth's ladies used to sit.

My mother sat at the side of the hall, in plain blue, with no crown. She'd asked to come.

I'd said yes, on one condition. She sat with the old nurse.

The old nurse made her hold the basket.

Aurek waited on the dais.

He was wearing his gold pauldron again, polished until it shone.

The old nurse had braided his white-gold hair back the way his mother used to.

His dull gray scales showed at his ribs, where his shirt was open.

He hadn't hidden them.

Brannoch stood beside him as his witness, in red armor, grinning.

The herald blew the horn.

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