Spindle Page 4

  “That is why we must break the curse,” I said.

  There was stunned silence. I could almost hear Tariq’s mind as he considered all aspects of what I had said, and selected which bit to take apart first.

  “Is that your plan?” Saoud said. “Or are you just speaking whatever words come into your battered head?”

  “It’s not the injury talking,” I told him. “It’s the only solution that works for us long enough to be truly useful.”

  There were several more moments of silence while Tariq thought. The longer he was quiet, the more a desperate sort of hope began to rise in Arwa’s eyes. I had to look away from her.

  “We don’t know how it will work at all,” Tariq finally pointed out. “We don’t know what it will do to the Little Rose, to break her curse.”

  “I don’t really care what happens to the Little Rose,” I said, more harshly than I had intended.

  “Yashaa.” Arwa sounded upset, but I pushed forward. This would not be easy, and it was best to air all of the problems as soon as we could.

  “Is it fair that so many suffer for the sake of one girl, princess or not?” I said to her. “Is it fair that she lives in a castle while you live on the side of the road, and your mother paid for her craft with her life?”

  “Of course not,” said Saoud, speaking carefully. “But I didn’t like killing the bear, and it was possessed by a demon that wanted our blood.”

  “I don’t want to kill her,” I said, realizing belatedly that my words had been vague enough to suggest it. “But we have to do something. Do you think Kharuf would be better under the Maker Kings?”

  “Why do you care about Kharuf at all?” Saoud asked. Usually he and his father kept clear of our debates about spinning and our homeland, but committed as he was to us, I couldn’t fault him for joining in now.

  “I don’t,” I told him. We both knew I spoke too quickly, but I pushed onward, gesturing to where Tariq and Arwa sat. “I care about them. I want them to have the life they were meant to—to be respected for their craft, and honored for the history of their work.”

  “Then why don’t we just keep going after we cross the mountains?” he pressed. “Why don’t we take the Silk Road and cross the desert? Let the Little Rose grow old and die and take her curse with her to her tomb. You’ve been made unwelcome in two kingdoms, Yashaa, but you know there is a third that will have you, and have you gladly. You have only to get there.”

  We were strong enough to make the desert crossing now; I did not doubt that. And perhaps one of the spinners who had gone there would recognize me, or at least my mother’s name, and make us welcome. But it was all too uncertain.

  I felt like my brain was on fire. Demon bears and piskey dust, spindle whorls and desert roads—it was too much. I wanted my mother to be healthy and to stop looking at me like I had betrayed her by preferring the staff to the spindle. I wanted Tariq to be left alone with enough carded wool to spin himself back to the happy child I remembered. I wanted Arwa to have charge of a room full of weavers, as her mother had done in the castle of Kharuf-that-was. I wanted the Little Rose to pay for what she had brought down upon the people that I loved. I wanted to unleash twelve years of hunger and uncertainty on her, and make sure that she felt, in her marrow, the pain that she and her parents had caused.

  Overcome, I pitched sideways and Saoud caught me back from the fire. I fought him off, weakly and with no real effect, except that he let me go when I regained some measure of steadiness.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t make any decisions until you feel better,” Arwa suggested, her voice as delicate as her footsteps when she walked the fence rail.

  “I am fine,” I told her. My head was pounding again, and I looked away from the fire.

  “Promise me you will at least consider taking the desert way,” Saoud said.

  “Would you come with us?” Arwa asked. “We might not be able to get word to your father.”

  “I will go with you, whatever path you take,” Saoud said. “My father will find us, or he will not; but when he left, he told me that I had learned well from him, and that he trusted me to find my own way.”

  We were quiet for a long moment. I had never asked Tariq or Arwa what the last thing their parents had said to them was. Their illness had left them disoriented at the end, and it was possible that whatever words they’d managed to speak on their deathbeds were not useful. If I had spoken with my mother for the last time, I was not proud of how we had parted. For all my bravado, I didn’t have Saoud’s certainty. His father had blessed him. My mother had coughed, and I had abandoned her.

  “We will return to this conversation when we can better see the paths that lie before us,” I declared. “The Silk Road is a good idea, but there are many things we must consider before we take it.”

  “Even if we are only passing through Kharuf, we need to focus on the curse. It will affect us, though we don’t know exactly how much,” Tariq said. “The stories we do know are messy, and contradict one another all the time.”

  “My mother has told me the truth, I know it,” I protested, even though I knew that the stories she had told me had changed over the years, and she must have left things out, thinking I was too young to hear them.

  “Your mother told you the truth as she saw it,” Tariq said, precise as the pointed end of the spindle he loved so much.

  “He’s right,” said Arwa. She passed me a cup of water, and I took a small sip.

  “I know that too,” I said. “I just…”

  Tariq took my hand and squeezed it. I knew he understood.

  “Magic is complicated, and we must know all of the details before we can act,” he said.

  “How do you suggest we do that?” Saoud asked, but I knew there were only two answers.

  “The impossible way,” I said, marshaling my thoughts, “would be to find the piskey or the demon who was in the Great Hall when it happened.”

  We all shuddered at the idea of facing another demon. The bear had been enough. As for the piskey, they were the tiniest of the creatures that guarded the mountains, and could remain concealed forever, if they wished to. Certainly, they had made no move to help Kharuf thus far.

  “What’s the possible way?” Saoud asked. I met his gaze.

  “The possible way,” I said, heart racing against the bones and muscle in my chest, “is to go to Kharuf, to the castle, and ask the Little Rose.”

  My kind do not spend their days at craft or art. Our deepest desire is not for the making of a thing, nor for the thing itself. Rather, we thrive on the skills of those who make. We steal that time and that power, and we turn it to our own souls, and that is how we grow. Once, I had struck deals with shepherds and merchants, and knew only paucity of spirit in return. But I could wait for them to die and then strike new deals with their children, and their children’s children, and, thus, I gained some measure of true power.

  I went down from the mountains, not to conquer, but to trade. I found a king who had two sons and feared that, when he was dead, they would turn on each other with his kingdom as their prize. It was a quiet fear, for the boys loved one another very much, but I nurtured it, whispering tales where I could about kingdoms that had fallen thus, and before long, the old king could barely sleep without nightmares of blood and fire.

  And then I told him what to make.

  He set my mountains as the border and crafted two kingdoms, one for each of his sons. To the elder would go the clay flats and forests and fields and the harbor in the west, and to the younger would go the heathered slopes and deep dells of the east. It was not an even split, but it put his needless fears to rest, and turning him into the King Maker gave me more power than I had hoped for. Power enough to deal with his house for generations. I gave the Maker Kings of Qamih their name, and for seven generations, they made roads, and safe harbors for ships; city walls and a great army; and their subjects gave them names to match their work. All of it fed into me without their realization. I used
that power to control my own kin, to keep them from taking foolish risks in the lowlands, and to shore up their strength against the bitter iron that wounded us so deeply.

  Kharuf, where they herded sheep and little else, was nothing to me, except that I needed it to be, and I needed it to wither toward inevitable doom. And slowly, slowly, it did, presenting an ever more tempting target for the latest of the Maker Kings, who had no title of his own yet, and who hungered for conquest.

  Finally, I saw my chance. A girl was born to Kharuf three years after a boy was born in Qamih; ideal for an arranged marriage, if their parents could be convinced. The timing was perfection, beyond what I might have engineered. Kharuf already hovered on the brink of desolation—one or two hard winters, or a summer with too much rain, would be enough to send it over into desperation—but I would leave nothing to the mercy of possibility. When the proposal was made, it would be accepted.

  There had been one like me before amongst our kind. He had taken a king and ruled that king’s lands, but in the end he had been undone, and his undoing had ruined our kind for time nearly beyond measure. I would take no king, not directly. Instead, I would have the girl, the Little Rose. I knew she would be raised from infancy to rule: given the best education, taught to do everything from spinning thread to planning battle strategy. Her mind would be a fortress, each stone of it laid with the will to lead, and once I took it, I would make it impregnable. She would be queen, but once married, she would not be the focus of power—at least, not until I decided it was time for her to be.

  I waited five more years, almost nothing compared to my wait thus far, and then I went to the castle in Kharuf where the Little Rose spent her days. It was her birthday, and the Great Hall was full to bursting with her subjects. This suited me, as I fed as much on fear as I did on craft. I spent the afternoon in the kitchens, unseen, and watched as the cooks prepared a feast that almost didn’t require my help to be stunning. As I lurked, I felt the approach of the beings who might undo my plan before I could begin it.

  It was tradition to leave offerings for the creatures that kept my kind hemmed into our mountain prison. It was not tradition for them to actually attend. Perhaps they sensed me. Perhaps they were, at last, aware of my actions over the previous decades. Perhaps it was poor luck on my part. In any case, I had not come this far to be thwarted now. I cast aside my dignity, and waited, crouching in the kitchen embers, while the feast went on above. I waited while each of my hated jailors gave a gift to the Little Rose, and as they gave their power to her, I held back a flood of laughter. They gave her gifts to make her a better queen. Without meaning to, they would only strengthen my designs.

  At last, I could stand to stay in hiding no longer. I left the kitchens and went to the Great Hall in a storm of darkness and flame. I looked upon the Little Rose and I gave her a gift of my own: a promise that, someday, we would achieve great things together, and her own people would suffer greatly if she tried to work against me. In the face of my fury, only the piskey spoke, adding the wisp-thin thread of her magic to the strong-spun cord that was my own. Her gift to the princess was so laughable that I let her bestow it, as though sleep could protect her kingdom from my designs.

  I left them there, in panic and devastation, to reason out the depth of the doom I had presented to them. The effects would not be felt in full right away, but time would show them how far their fall was destined to be. The Little Rose would live; I had seen to it. She would grow up as blessed and talented as my jailors had decided to let her be. And then—then, she would be mine for the taking.

  That would give me Kharuf, but I did not wish only for that sheep-infested mire. I wanted Qamih as well, and I had plans for that, too. Each year of my enforced exile in those hated mountains, each moment spent pandering to one Maker King after another, all of it would come to fruition in the endless meadows of Kharuf. My kind make no art, it is true; but if we did, then the curse I gave to the Little Rose, to her parents and her kingdom and her people, would be our greatest work.

  THE WAY THROUGH the Road Maker’s Pass was easy, thanks to years of long trade between Qamih and Kharuf, but we did not take that road. Even after our encounter with the demon bear, Saoud and I deemed it unwise to travel in view of others. Bears, we had learned, we could handle. We were less sure of ourselves if confronted with a group of armed men. Banditry had not always been a problem on the trade route that linked the two kingdoms, but as the ruination in Kharuf increased, so too did the number of desperate souls upon the road. It was, Saoud’s father told us, the simplest of mathematics.

  “Why doesn’t the Maker King fix it, like he did in Qamih?” Tariq had asked, prying his knives out of the target while Saoud’s father lectured. My mother liked our weapons training little enough, and cared even less for when Saoud’s father taught us politics, but that had not stopped us from learning either. “We could all call him the Peace Maker after he does it.”

  “The Maker King will have peace, I think,” said Saoud’s father. “But he will do it in another way.”

  We never asked what that way might be, not even Tariq, and questions came to him the way that breathing did to the rest of us. Saoud’s father would freely tell us many ugly things, so we did not press him when he did not wish to be pressed.

  Now, I realized our path would have been easier if we had. Tariq was right about the version of the story that I knew from my mother: it was in many pieces, and we had put them together differently over the years. My mother told me about the creatures and their gifts to our princess as I lay sick in bed, and if there was an oddness to her face as she said the words, I thought it was because she was sad I had missed the event. Six-year-olds can be selfish, and I never thought that maybe, maybe, there was more to the tale she was telling.

  I had not realized the extent of the darkness until weeks later, when my sheep pox had healed, and I had gone back to the spinning room to sit at my mother’s feet. It should have been the same as any other day in the spinning room—wool came in, carded and bundled for us, and thread went out, each skein destined to be a part of a better work—but something was different. My mother wouldn’t let me spin.

  They whispered, the spinners, where once they had chatted freely. Spinning was a craft of the eyes and hands, and left the mind free for talk. At my mother’s knee, I learned as much about how Kharuf ran as I learned about her craft. But that day they were quiet, as though they did not wish for me to hear. I heard them anyway, of course, because it was a small room, but the words I remembered were strung together along an uneven yarn, such that I might have spun in my first months of working.

  “The Silk Road is the only way,” I heard, and “Mariam is already sick. It has only been two weeks!” and “They cannot expect us to stay here. They cannot expect us to live like this.”

  My mother said nothing, just spun on and on, as though the evenness of her thread and the steadiness of her work would be enough. She spun as the room around her emptied, of spinners and of that which they would spin. The wealth and wool of the kingdom went to Qamih, and returned in the form of cloth we should have been able to make ourselves. The food we ate became plainer fare. Other artisans followed the spinners out of the castle, back home to their own meager villages to scrounge for work, or across the sand in search of something better in the land their ancestors had called home. Arwa’s mother coughed, and pressed a hand against her belly; but she would not leave my mother, and my mother would not leave Kharuf.

  In the end, it took a royal decree. It was nearly a full year after the fateful party, when most of the spinners had gone, and those who stayed spent more time idle than they did at their craft. King Qasim stood on the dais in his threadbare purple robe, his face gaunt, and without his crown upon his head. Queen Rasima stood behind him, the Little Rose in her arms, even though she was six now, and too big to be carried. We stood in the Great Hall and listened as the decree was read out by the king himself, so important that he would not leave it to a herald.


  “By order of King Qasim and Queen Rasima, rulers of Kharuf,” the declaration began, “the craft of spinning, whether by wheel or by spindle or by means held secret to the crafters themselves, is forbidden. Wool may be shorn from the sheep and bleached and baled. It may be carded and coiled, but it may not be spun into thread within the borders of this kingdom.”

  There were so few spinners left in the court, a shadow of the former glory we had once held here, and all of them had stayed for love of their king and queen. Around me, I saw drooped shoulders as crafters saw the ending of their work. Arwa, not quite a year old now, made cooing noises, but the rest of us were silent as we considered our future. Even Tariq knew to be still. Some of the adults would find another trade, perhaps, or limit themselves to the care of the sheep and the trading of raw wool. Most would leave, my mother among them, rather than give up the craft they had set their lives to the mastery of. In the Great Hall that day, hers was the only back unbent, the only face that was not overcome with despair. I remember her standing there, so determined in the face of the king’s decree, and I felt my own body straighten to match hers.

  On the dais, the Little Rose turned her face into her mother’s shoulder. She was only six, but she was still a princess, and I hated her then, because she couldn’t even look at us one last time.

  And so we had left and wandered for two years, and then we settled for being poor spinners at the crossroads, when once we had made cloth for a queen. All that time, my mother told me, Tariq, and, eventually, Arwa, about the way the Little Rose had smiled at the phoenix above her chair at the birthday, and how the piskey had delighted her with aerial acrobatics. Her stories always ended well before the demon, and the curse, and maybe that was why Tariq and Arwa loved them so much, but I heard enough from others to understand it. The king and queen had been made to choose between their kingdom and their daughter, and they had chosen their daughter, to the ruin of all else. At the time, I had thought it was anger that gave my mother her determination, because that’s where I always looked to find mine. Now that I was older, I was not so sure.