She Stole My Curse novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Wreck Deep

In the starving drowned city the castoffs think she's a spy until she feeds a cake to a crab in front of them and it turns black; that night Aurek catches her at a door nobody has opened in a hundred years.

I closed the box.

"Nobody eat these," I said.

The crowd at the gate went quiet.

A thin young woman with a torn fin was already reaching for the ribbon. She pulled her hand back.

"Royal cakes," she said. "Sugar tops. We haven't seen sugar in two years."

"I know," I said. "Don't touch them."

The one-armed man swam closer, looking from me to Aurek.

He had brown curls, a crooked grin, and a sleeve pinned up where his right arm should be.

"Corwen Drift," he said. "Quartermaster, cook's helper, and the best-looking man in the Wreck Deep."

"He's the only man in the Wreck Deep who says so," Aurek said.

"Because I'm honest." Corwen looked me over. "So this is the one who kissed your hand. The courier told us. Then he laughed so hard he swallowed water."

"This is Nerys," Aurek said. "Princess of Pearlmere."

"Not anymore," I said.

Nobody smiled.

They looked at my pearls and my gray court gown and my soft hands. They looked at the box from the palace.

I knew those looks.

I'd worn the same one myself, the first time, when I arrived here crying with my gown torn from the guards.

Back then they'd been kind to me anyway.

Now I was a stranger who'd swum in with a gift from the queen's favorite.

"Come inside," Aurek said. "You can sleep. We'll talk when it's light."

The great hull of the flagship was dry inside, sealed and warm with whale-oil lamps.

The moment my tail touched the dry deck it split, and I stood up on bare legs in the lamplight.

The old banquet hall was a long room under the curve of the ship's ribs.

There was one long table, and nothing on it.

People came in behind us and sat along the benches. Forty of them, maybe fifty. The old. The scarred. A pair of net-scarred brothers. A blind man with a lute on his back.

The castoffs of the Pearl Court.

An old woman came out of the kitchen, small and bent, with a wooden ladle in her fist.

She'd been Aurek's nurse when he was a boy.

In my first life she'd taught me to gut fish and then held my hand through the laying of ten eggs.

She stopped and stared at me.

"So it's true," she said. "She came."

"She came," Corwen said. "With cakes."

The old nurse looked at the box in my hands.

"The Court's never sent us a crumb in twelve years," she said. "Why would they start now?"

"They wouldn't," I said.

I set the box on the long table and opened it.

Every eye in the room went to the cakes.

Somebody's stomach growled. Somebody laughed at it, a thin, embarrassed laugh.

"Corwen," I said. "Can you get me a crab? A live one."

He frowned.

"What for?"

"Please."

He went. He was back in a minute with a spider crab clacking in his one hand.

I broke a corner off one cake and held it out.

The crab grabbed it with one claw and stuffed it in its mouth.

We waited.

The crab's legs twitched once.

Then its shell went black, starting at the mouth and spreading out in a stain.

It curled up and didn't move again.

The blind man asked, "What happened? Somebody tell me."

"The crab's dead," the old nurse said quietly. "Turned black as a coal."

"Black-urchin venom," I said. "From the sea witch's grotto. One bite of those cakes and every one of you would be dead by morning."

The silence went on a long time.

The young woman with the torn fin had both hands over her mouth.

Aurek was looking at me, not at the crab.

"Your sister sent that," he said.

"My sister sent that."

"To you."

"To all of us."

Corwen let out a low whistle.

"Well," he said. "Families."

I picked up the box and closed the lid.

"Where's the pit?"

The old nurse pointed with her ladle down the hall, toward the cargo hatch.

I carried the box to the hatch and opened it.

Below the hull the seabed dropped away into a black crack in the rock, so deep the light didn't reach the bottom.

I tipped the box over the edge.

Ten pearl cakes fell into the dark one by one.

I watched every one of them go.

When I came back to the table, the old nurse had set a bowl down at an empty place.

It was the only bowl on the table with a painted rim.

Inside was a ladle of thin fish broth with three pieces of fish in it.

"That's the good bowl," Corwen said, in my ear. "She doesn't give out the good bowl."

"Eat," the old nurse said.

I sat down and ate.

It was the best thing I had ever tasted.

They gave me a room in the stern with a lock on my side, just like Aurek promised.

I didn't sleep.

When the lamps were down and the hull was quiet, I went out barefoot along the dry corridor, down two ladders, past the cargo hatch, to the deepest part of the ship.

The lower door was where I remembered it.

It was round, made of black stone, taller than a man, with a dragon carved across it in a coil.

Nobody in the Wreck Deep had opened it in a hundred years.

Everyone thought the old kings had taken the secret of it to the bottom with them.

I knew better.

I put my palm flat on the carved dragon's head.

"Who told you about this door?"

I spun around.

Aurek stood at the foot of the ladder with a lamp in one hand, the light shining up on the silver scales across his ribs.

He wasn't angry.

He was worse than angry.

He was afraid.

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