She Stole My Curse novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: Market Day

"I'll be standing right there," I said. "Holding his hand."

Isveth laughed and swam on.

Aurek didn't say a word the whole way out of the hall.

The maid swam between us with her arms wrapped around herself.

Brannoch's captains carried him south. He raised one gray hand to me as they went.

"Watch your hair," I called after him.

He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough.

We were halfway home over the black drop before Aurek spoke.

"She's right," he said.

I stopped swimming.

"Who is?"

"Your sister. About the spears." He looked straight ahead. "If I'm not a man by moonset, I'm not anything. I'm teeth. Better a spear than the abyss."

"You don't mean that."

"I've been thinking about the abyss since I was fourteen. The spears are quicker."

"There's a way. You know there's a way."

"The way where you scream for an hour." He turned on me. "No."

"It's my choice."

"It's my curse!"

The maid had stopped a few lengths off, pretending to look at a sponge.

"You don't get to decide to die," I said. "Not in front of me. Not again."

"I didn't decide it last time. I wasn't there last time. You keep forgetting I don't remember any of it."

"I don't forget," I said. "I can't."

He flinched.

Then he swam on ahead, fast, and I let him go.

That night he didn't come to my door.

The old nurse told me in the morning that he'd slept in the chain room, on the floor outside the bars.

"Like a dog," she said. "Like a stubborn, stupid dog."

"He's not stupid."

"He's both. So are you." She shoved a basket of bread at me. "Now go and set up your market."

The market had been my idea, a week before the wedding feast.

In my first life the Wreck Deep hadn't traded with anyone for fifty years.

Nobody would swim this far west to buy from castoffs.

But now we had kelp from the Shallows, more than we could eat.

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