Spindle

by E. K. Johnston

  There were four main tents and two smaller ones in our encampment, plus an open-air kitchen. It was a far cry from the castle that my mother talked of when she was feeling nostalgic, but it served us well. We camped near a crossroads, and merchants knew where to find us. We did not have very much to offer, but we were cheap, and the work we did was good.

  After the demon laid its curse upon the Little Rose, most of the spinners had gone on the Silk Road, into the desert. Across the burning sands was the kingdom from which our ancestors had come, and they could do their work there, which they could no longer do in Kharuf. We knew the desert kingdom still existed because their traders crossed the desert with camel caravans, but few people from Kharuf ever made the trek. My mother hadn’t gone because she loved Queen Rasima, and because she was afraid that I was too young to survive a desert crossing. She waited for two years, until I was eight, while everything in Kharuf fell apart around her. Then she took the last few spinners still at court and went, not through the desert after all, but across the mountain pass to Qamih.

  They had hoped that in this kingdom of tradesmen and merchants, they would find a place where they could do their work and be paid for it. But Qamih was different from the home they had left, and on this side of the Iron Mountains, a harsh guild system prevented unlicensed crafters from selling their wares in public markets. The guilds were also behind the trade agreements that Qasim had been forced to sign with the Maker King, which beggared Kharuf at every turn while the coffers in the Maker King’s capital overflowed. It was impossible for a spinner from Kharuf, even one as highly respected as my mother, to be given the credit she was due. New spinners, especially talented ones, were unwelcome competition.

  We couldn’t stay in the cities or towns, and so we wandered for two years, Arwa on her mother’s back and me carrying my mother’s loom, until Saoud’s father, who had found us on the road and hired on as a guardsman even though we could barely afford him, took us to the crossroads, to camp with the other non-guild traders there. He understood spinning even less than Saoud did, and wanted to train all of the children in combat. My mother disapproved but never directly forbade it, even when it became clear that I was more enthusiastic about fighting than I was about spinning. For Arwa and Tariq, spinning was a game that, once they had mastered it, became as important as breathing. For me, who could remember the castle and the king’s face and the way the Little Rose laughed from her place at the table, it was a hateful reminder of what we had lost.

  We could hear my mother coughing before we reached her tent. Arwa stopped in her tracks, and looked up at me.

  “Can you get my spindle?” she said. “Maybe bring it to dinner?”

  “I will,” I told her. “Go and see if they need help cooking.”

  Arwa’s mother had died of the sickness that plagued my mother. It wasn’t contagious—at least, not in the traditional sense, or we would have been driven out of the crossroad camp—but it was hard to watch, and harder still when you knew the outcome. Magic is not common in the world, but from what I have seen of it, it is mostly cruel; and, at least when it comes to the magic that hurts the ones I love, tied back to the Little Rose. Tariq’s father had died of it first, a drowning gurgle that grew more and more quiet, until all breath was gone; then Arwa’s mother; and now my mother was ill. I didn’t know what we would do if she died. The other merchants were reluctant enough to keep us as it was.

  I took a deep breath, and lifted the tent flap. There was light inside, because of the lamps, but the air was heavy with the herbs my mother burned in the brazier to help clear her lungs. I didn’t like the smell very much. Mother was sitting up, and spinning. I had asked her once why she could never keep her hands still. She hadn’t answered, but instead had smiled, and told me to coil the yarn so it didn’t knot on the floor. I was glad to see her spinning now. Some days, her hands did not have the strength for it.

  “Yashaa,” my mother said to me, “thank you for coming. Do you feel better now that you have hit Saoud for a while?”

  “Yes, Mother,” I said, my voice clipped. I had hoped, for a moment, that she was going to apologize for being so obtuse earlier. We had quarreled over Saoud’s father, again, and it had brought us no closer to understanding each other than it ever did. “It is not from hitting him, though. It is from moving with purpose.”

  “There is purpose to all movement,” she said to me. “Even in the simple coil and rhythm of spinning.”

  “What did you wish to tell me?” I hoped I was changing the subject. I didn’t want to fight with her again.

  “I have had word from Saoud’s father,” she said. “I wanted to tell you what he discovered.”

  “Is he coming back?” I asked, unashamedly eager. He had turned a little strange when Tariq’s father died, as though seeing our curse play out in front of him made him regret throwing in his lot, and Saoud’s, with us in the first place. He traveled much more after that, but he always came back—or he always had before.

  “No,” said my mother. “He is too busy to come back. But he has sent me important news, and you need to hear it.”

  “Then tell me,” I said, sitting at her feet as I might have done once to hear stories of the Little Rose.

  “Kharuf is dying,” she said. “The people are starving and there is no money. Even the king and queen struggle. The Little Rose cannot spin, and so no one can.”

  I wanted to say something about how Kharuf had been dying for years, and that Qasim and Rasima’s struggle meant nothing to me, but my mother raised a hand, and I held my peace.

  “There was a blight in the wool last season,” she continued. “They could not sell very much, which meant they had no money to buy cloth.”

  Once they had spun their own thread and woven their own cloth, I thought. But I knew better than to say it out loud. It would be wasted breath, and my mother had no breath to waste.

  “Qasim has made a deal with the Maker King,” my mother said. “The Little Rose is seventeen now. When she is eighteen, she will wed Prince Maram, and by that marriage, Qamih and Kharuf will be united again, and the Maker King will get whatever name his people choose to give him.”

  “What has this to do with me?” I asked. “We have left Kharuf, and we have never been welcome in Qamih.”

  “If the kingdoms are united, there will be a treaty for the spinners. There must be,” my mother said. “You shall go to the Maker King’s court, by the sea. You must find out who is negotiating the treaty, and make sure you are included in it. Take Tariq and Arwa with you.”

  “No,” I said.

  I couldn’t leave. We were barely surviving here with the work spread between all available hands. If we left, if I took Tariq and Arwa and we left, then there would be no one but strangers who barely tolerated us to watch over my mother. I shook my head.

  “What about Saoud?” I asked, my words slow as my thoughts raced.

  “He will stay at the crossroads,” my mother said. She had never loved Saoud, so I didn’t understand why she would keep him behind, especially since his father was gone. Maybe she wanted to be sure of his father’s loyalty, though neither he nor Saoud had ever given us cause to doubt them, as far as I could tell. “He will be old enough to hire on as a guard, soon.”

  “What about you?” I asked then. “I could stay too, and be a better guard than Saoud. We could all stay here.”

  “No, Yashaa.” She started to cough. I waited. It seemed now that when she coughed, she coughed for hours. Finally her throat cleared. “You will go. Take the others. If you do well, you will be able to make a real home.”

  “I have no home,” I told her, anger flooding into my voice. I didn’t look at her face when I said it, because I knew I would hurt her. “The Little Rose saw to that.”

  “Yashaa,” she said. “It is a terrible net, that magic. The Little Rose suffers as much as any.”

  I did not care about the suffering of the Little Rose, beyond an ugly gladness that she did. I only wan
ted the conversation to end.

  “Arwa needs to pack her spindle, if you are driving her out,” I said, my voice as cold as I could make it.

  “I will put it in the basket with the other spinning tools,” she said. Her breathing faltered.

  I made myself meet her gaze. Her eyes were full of tears, as though she was sad to see us go, as though she hadn’t so casually dismissed the boy I held in my heart like a brother. Anger filled my chest, crushing my lungs the way the Little Rose’s curse crushed my mother’s.

  I did not understand. I didn’t understand how a woman so weak could have such an iron will. I didn’t understand why she had so much power over Saoud’s father, over the crossroads camp. Over me. I did not understand my mother at all. But I loved her, and so I went to gather my things.

  WE WERE A STRANGE PARTY on the road, Tariq and Arwa and I. My mother had struggled to stay standing as we left her at the opening of her tent. It was the farthest she had walked in some time. I tried not to think about the chance that she might die before we made our way back. Saoud did not see us off, having been sent out hunting in the early hours while we were taking our leave of my mother. I was furious, and I could see that Tariq and Arwa were likewise upset. At least he had been with us while we packed, and while we strung together what little plans we could. I tried not to think about losing him, either.

  We didn’t take a wagon with us. Even if we had an ox to pull it, we didn’t have the means to feed the creature that would do the work. There was grazing aplenty on the plains of Qamih, but there were great forests there too, and clay flats that stretched as far as the eye could see. So we went on foot, carried what we could, and prayed for good weather on the road. Tariq did most of the praying. Arwa was happy enough to say the words, and earnest enough to believe that someone heard them, but my faith in such things had long since waned. Tariq, though, believed with the conviction of one who had seen the world, and chosen faith to spite it.

  In the foothills of the Iron Mountains, we had an easy time. The way was mostly downhill, and there was plenty of game for Tariq to catch in his quick-made snares. Saoud’s father had shown us all the trick of making them before he’d taught us staff fighting. “You must be able to feed yourselves before you can defend yourselves,” he’d said. At the time, I remember thinking it was ridiculous—what good was it to eat in the wild if you were prey to anyone who might stumble across your path?—but now I was glad that Tariq, at the least, remembered his lessons.

  It was early in the year for pinecones, the best kindling, but with Arwa in our company it wasn’t too much of a concern. She could climb the trees more easily than the cones might fall, and seemed to take delight in pelting us with them as Tariq and I assembled camp every night. She was taking her eviction from the crossroads harder than we were, so we didn’t berate her for it too much. Coming as it had so soon after the death of her mother, Arwa felt the loss of her makeshift family, particularly the company of Saoud, most keenly.

  I missed him too. When we walked, I made Tariq lead us, with Arwa in the middle and me behind her to cover their backs. There were large animals, with teeth and claws to match, in the mountain forests, and there was not a lot even the most powerful king could do to keep the roadways safe. If Saoud had been with us, he could have covered the rear, and left me free to lead. Tariq was not wood-blind by any means, and the road was clear enough, but he tended to get distracted.

  Accordingly, when I woke up the next morning and found Saoud patiently feeding the last of Arwa’s pinecones to the dwindling fire, I only laughed and pointed out that he could have started the porridge if he was going to be awake anyway. He walked to the food pack, shooing away two bees that were hovering over top of it.

  “You’re not going to send me back?” he said.

  “You say that as though I could.”

  “Your mother said it was spinner’s business.” He would not meet my eye, pretending to measure out the grain for breakfast, when I knew he had done it so many times he could tell by weight alone.

  “My mother says that about everything when she wants to cut you and your father out,” I said. It hurt me when she spoke like that. I could imagine how Saoud felt. “Are you coming with us for our sakes, or because you want to see your father again?”

  “Can’t it be both?”

  “Of course,” I told him. “Only, we might miss him in the capital. Or on the road. Or maybe my mother lied, and he has other business altogether.”

  “Then I will go with you, wherever you end up.” He meant it to have the solemnity of an oath, but the effect was somewhat marred when Arwa emerged from her tent halfway through his declaration, crowed with joy, and threw herself into his arms.

  “Took you long enough,” she said, once she had rescued our breakfast from an untimely fate and hung the pot above the fire so that we might eat sometime before noon.

  “Yashaa’s mother is difficult to escape once she gets her mind set on something,” Saoud informed her. We all knew it for the truth. Even ill, her determination had been enough to get the three of us evicted from the only company that Tariq and Arwa could remember. I imagined she had set Saoud to any number of mundane tasks to prevent him from running off. For a moment, there was a pain in my chest—my heart, not my lungs—as I remembered how my mother and I had parted, but I ignored it. Saoud was here. Everything was much improved now.

  Tariq crawled out of the tent we shared, blinked twice, and then accepted our new circumstances without comment before heading off to the river to wash. By the time he came back, the porridge was ready, and the tents were struck and rolled. Saoud carried no tent of his own, because he would have had to steal it, and that was something he would not do. We would have to sort it out once we stopped for the night, but not now, because it did not take us very long to break our fast and be on our way. I ate quickly, and the others followed my lead. I was eager to be moving, even if I wasn’t overfond of our destination. Arwa and Tariq were both intimidated by the fact that today we would leave the forest. They had both left before, of course, but they did not remember it as I did, and they didn’t know what they might find there.

  “Look!” said Arwa, who had taken the pot to the river to rinse it. “It was on a rock, right by the river’s edge. I must have just missed it.”

  There was a soft glow coming from her cupped hands. The pot hung from the crook of her elbow, bowls stacked neatly inside. Tariq peered over her shoulder to look, and his eyes widened at what he saw.

  “Yashaa, have you ever?” he asked, breathless, as I reached them and looked down into Arwa’s hands myself.

  There wasn’t a lot of it, but it was unmistakable: fine golden powder, with a soft glow and the slightest smell of honey. I had only seen it once before, when I snuck into the Great Hall at the castle in Kharuf after the Little Rose’s fateful birthday party. The maids, most of them weeping, were cleaning the floor, but I had still been upset over having missed everything, and wanted to see even the remnants for myself. One of the girls had called me over, perhaps understanding that I did not yet know how much the world had changed, and showed me what she had collected in her dustpan.

  “It’s from the piskey,” she had said to me, her voice kind, and her face streaked with tear tracks. “It’s for luck.”

  “It’s for luck,” I echoed, as Arwa poured the dust into my hands. “It means they watched us, heard us, and approve of what we’re doing.”

  “What, going to the capital to beg?” Saoud said, suddenly bitter. His knuckles were white on the staff he carried. “I know what your mother would have you do. I heard the merchant master tell her that not even pity for children would sway a Maker King, no matter who was negotiating the treaty. We could send Arwa before them in rags, and they wouldn’t feel the slightest bit of concern for her.”

  Arwa blanched at the idea, fingers unconsciously twisting in the frayed hem of her headscarf. The cloth was good, but she had worn it for a long time, and it showed. When she ran or climbe
d, Saoud’s father had said the broken wisps of her veil trailed behind her like piskey dust, but now that we saw both veil and dust together, we knew that he had spoken the words only as a kindness to her.

  “You will never have to do that,” I promised her.

  “What will we do, then?” she asked. I watched as she made her fingers relax their hold. There was still dust on them, gold against the brown of her skin. It was beautiful.

  I looked at Saoud, at Tariq. What could we do? We could walk for days and days, only to throw ourselves at the questionable mercy of the Maker King. My mother, hoping against hope and unable to travel herself, thought that I could secure a future for us. But it would be a future that she wanted. A future for me to spin out the rest of my days in Qamih, and hope for whatever meager prosperity I could wrench from people who were not my own. Always I would be the poor relation, the hanger-on who had no other place to go. I would do that, and gladly, for my mother, if it caused her breathing to ease, but I knew that it would not. Despite the sourness of our parting, I loved her. She was my family too, even if I didn’t agree with her dreams for me and for my future. I would survive, as she had done until her strange illness took hold of her. But I looked at Tariq, at Arwa with her gold-dusted hands and threadbare veil, and I knew that I could not be satisfied with that little for them.

  “Whatever we do,” I said, “we will do it together, do you understand? If you don’t like my mother’s plan, if you have another suggestion or an idea, you must tell me what it is.”

  They nodded. There was a fire I hadn’t seen before in Saoud’s eyes. I felt as though the bones along my spine were tempered iron, making me strong. The gold dust glowed against my skin, and reminded me of something that I had missed for too long. There were no answers here. But there might be some to be found, if we looked in another place for them.