She Stole My Curse novel · Chapter 7 of 32
Chapter 7: The Shallows
We went to the Shallows three days later, every soul in the Wreck Deep who could swim.
Forty-one of us, with sickles and nets and the old nurse riding in a basket towed by the net-scarred brothers, because she said she'd be damned if she missed it.
The meadows lay on the eastern lip of the reef, where the water turned green and warm and the sunlight came down in ribbons.
The kelp stood taller than a ship's mast.
Nobody had cut it in twelve years.
The young woman with the torn fin swam into it and turned in a slow circle, her mouth open.
"It's all ours?"
"All of it," I said.
"Says who?"
"Says the queen," Corwen called. "In writing. In front of the whole court. I made the herald give me a copy. I'm going to have it framed."
"You can't read," the old nurse said from her basket.
"I'm going to have it framed upside down, then."
We worked from mid-morning on.
The brothers cut at the base. The rest of us gathered the long blades into bundles and tied them with twine.
The blind man sat on a rock in the middle of it all and played his lute, and everybody sang.
Corwen sang loudest.
He was terrible. He was so terrible that a school of silverfish turned around and swam the other way.
"Stop," the old nurse begged. "Corwen, you'll scare off the kelp."
"Kelp doesn't have ears."
"It's growing some to get away from you."
I laughed so hard I had to hang on to a stalk.
I looked up and found Aurek watching me from a few lengths away, a sickle in his hand and his hair drifting in the current.
He wasn't smiling.
But he wasn't looking away either.
I swam over with a bundle under my arm.
"You're doing it wrong," I said.
"I've been cutting kelp since I was six."
"You've been cutting it in the dark, in the cold, in the Wreck Deep, where it grows short and tough. This is different. Here."
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