She Stole My Curse novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: The Annulment

"Then she won't get the chance," Aurek said.

I turned around.

He was in the kitchen doorway with an empty grain sack in his hand. He'd heard every word.

"If I never give it," he said, "she has nothing to catch."

"If you never give it, the Blood Tide keeps you," I said. "And then the spears."

"Then that's what happens."

The maid looked between us and slowly picked up her knife again.

We didn't fight this time.

We'd said it all.

We just stood there in the kitchen with the market noise coming down the ladder.

Each of us knew the other wouldn't move.

Eight days later my mother came to the Wreck Deep.

No queen of Pearlmere had swum this far west in a hundred years.

She came with twenty guards in silver armor and the herald blowing his shell horn the whole way, so everyone would know.

Isveth swam at her side in violet, with Brannoch nowhere in sight.

"He's resting," Isveth told me sweetly at the gate. "He sleeps all day now."

I didn't answer her.

The old nurse took one look at the guards and said they could all wait outside, because her hall wasn't built for that many tails.

The captain of the guards opened his mouth.

My mother lifted a hand, and the guards stayed at the gate.

She came into the great hull with only Isveth and the herald.

The hall was full.

Every soul in the Wreck Deep had come in from the nets and the kelp sheds to see the queen.

They stood along the walls, under the curved ribs of the ship, in their patched clothes.

My mother looked at the long table and the benches and the lamps, and her nose wrinkled.

She didn't sit.

"I've come for my daughter," she said.

"I'm right here," I said.

"I've come to take her home." She turned to the herald. "Read it."

The herald unrolled a sealskin.

"By order of the queen. The binding between the Princess Nerys and the dragon line is declared void. The princess was not in her right mind at the Choosing. It is the Court's finding that she was bewitched."

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