Spindle

by E. K. Johnston

  THE NEXT DAY, I woke early and took a stick from the woodpile. It was the length of my forearm, narrower at one end than the other. It had been meant for kindling, but I would put it to another use. I went down to the pool and scooped up a bit of mud off the bottom. It was mealy stuff, and would make no vessels fit for even the lowest of tables, but it would do for my purpose now. I rolled the mud between my fingers, squeezing out most of the water, and then fastened it to the wider end of the stick. It wasn’t a lot of weight, but it would do.

  I had kept up the practice of checking the Little Rose’s blanket for loose threads. I even checked her dresses and veils when she wasn’t wearing them, and had by now accumulated a collection of scraps. This morning, I would spin them all together. I sat cross-legged by the pool and missed my mother as I set the whorl spinning experimentally. The wet mud held, barely, and I set out the scraps on my knee so that they were in easy reach.

  Sitting on the ground to spin is not the easiest way to do it, but there was no other seat, and I had no distaff to hold the pieces if I stood. After only a few minutes, my shoulders ached from holding the spindle up so high, but I had a short length of ugly thread. I was almost ashamed of it, except I knew that it was all that I could give, and I hoped that the recipient would see its worth.

  “Good morning,” said the Little Rose, sitting in the wet grass beside me.

  “Good morning, princess,” I said. “I haven’t started breakfast yet. I wanted to do this first.”

  “You don’t need to hide spinning from me, Yashaa,” she said. “I can’t do it, but I still like to watch good work done.”

  “This is hardly good work,” I said, examining the thread as I wound it around the spindle.

  It was varicolored, but not in an attractive way, and though it did not have lumps in it, there were definitely places where it looked stretched. I picked off the mud-whorl, and did my best to remove any flecks of dirt from the thread itself, but it was still far from the sort of thing that would make my mother proud of me.

  “It’s not very good,” I told her. “But I hope it will suit.”

  “Is it for the gnome?” she asked. Her bare feet moved back and forth through the grass. Even after all the days she had spent out of the tower, the ground was yet a wonder to her.

  “It is,” I said. “Though I am nearly ashamed of it, the thread will be stronger than the reeds we used yesterday. This will make the fence stronger. Or,” I amended, “at least parts of the fence. There isn’t enough for the whole thing.”

  “It’s a wonderful gift, Yashaa,” she said. “Shall we go and give it?”

  “Breakfast first?” I asked, even though she was already standing and looking at the slope in a measuring sort of way.

  “Here,” she said, and tossed me half of a pomegranate.

  I caught it, and we began to climb. Now that we knew where we were going, it took us far less time to reach the glade. The Little Rose didn’t bring her shoes at all, and soon we were close enough to smell the flowers. I went first to check the snares, which were empty. Upon short reflection, I removed them entirely. I no longer had a wish to kill anything that happened into this glade. That done, I went back toward the gnome’s garden, where the Little Rose was waiting.

  “Look,” she said, awe writ on her face.

  There was a basket, small enough that I could lift it with one hand. It must have been made by someone far smaller than I, though, because it had two handles. It was carefully woven and just as carefully filled. There were grains and fruit, the nicer sorts we had been too fearful to take the day before. There was no vetch at all. It could not have been a clearer expression of thanks had the gnome itself appeared to speak to us. I stuck the shaft of my makeshift spindle into the ground, the thread side pointing up so that the gnome would be able to see it, and picked up the basket.

  “Do you feel better about magic this morning, Yashaa?” the Little Rose asked. She set down her own offering, flowers that didn’t grow in the glade, and looked at me.

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  She waited. Even her silence had power.

  “I’m a spinner, princess,” I told her. “I spun thread for your mother. I spin thread for you because you can’t do it for yourself. And so the gnome gets thread, and I get misgivings about the whole process, but it is my duty, and so I do the work.”

  “I don’t understand you sometimes, Yashaa,” she said.

  “If it is a comfort,” I told her, “I never understand you at all.”

  She laughed, and I watched her dance through the flowers. There was no reason or direction to her steps, no trace of the court dances she ought to have known. Instead, she spun seemingly at random, as much carried on the wind as the blossoms that surrounded her in the air. Her skirts and veil flared around her, and for just a moment, I wondered what she would look like with her hair grown out, its summer-wheat color spread against the blue of the sky and the green of the grasses.

  “Do you dance, Yashaa?” she asked, having caught me staring.

  “No,” I told her. “Well—just the staff dances that Saoud’s father teaches us. That’s what I was going to teach you, if you like.”

  “There’s never been a pretty girl in a traveling caravan that caught your eye?” she pressed. I was not entirely sure what answer she was after, so I settled on the truth.

  “No, princess,” I said. “There has never been.”

  She flopped into the grass. Had I thought her less dignified, I might have said she was pouting.

  “You are a terrible disappointment, Yashaa,” she said to me. Her voice was quite serious, but her eyes still danced.

  “Oh?” I said, sitting beside her.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have always known that my wedding would not be for love. At best, it is hoped I will love my children. No one ever has anything good to say about the Maker King’s son. So I have spent my life listening to stories of shepherdesses and spinners, of traveling dancers and merchants, of all the sorts of people who get to marry for love. It helps me remember why I must get married at all.”

  “I will confess I have not thought very much about marriage,” I said. “Though, I suppose one of us will marry Arwa. Probably Saoud, because then her children will be of Qamih, and they won’t starve. She might even be able to join the guild.”

  The Little Rose looked at me, and I knew that I had spoiled her game. She wanted me to tell her of some dream I chased, but I couldn’t do it. The only dream I had ever chased was her, and they had not been particularly good dreams.

  “I suppose only the very lucky marry for love,” the Little Rose said.

  “My mother used to say that the king and queen were lucky,” I told her. “They had only met twice before their wedding, and yet they did their duty to the kingdom, and wed. And then they grew to be fond of one another.”

  “It’s true,” the Little Rose said. “I am terribly jealous.”

  “Is the Maker King’s son really as bad as I remember?” I asked. “I mean, we hear little of him at the crossroad camp, and there is much about my childhood that I have remembered incorrectly.”

  “He is, and worse,” she said. “I am sure of it, though mercifully I haven’t seen him since we were very small. There’s always talk, you see. The servants in the castle love me, in their way, and they gossip about how terrible it is that I must wed him. I understand that some of it must be exaggerated, but there is so much of it, Yashaa, and it’s quite consistent. I fear that it must be close to the truth indeed.”

  “My mother doesn’t share your fear,” I said. “When she sent us out, she wanted us to go to the Maker King’s court and swear to serve the prince after he had married you.”

  “I’m very glad you didn’t,” she said. “I should have hated to see you for the first time at my wedding, only to learn that you were sworn to my husband, and not to me.”

  “I think it was the only way my mother could think of to get us into your service at all,” I sa
id. “She never imagined, I think, that we would simply walk to your tower. I’m not sure if she will be furious with me for risking Tariq and Arwa like that, or proud.”

  “You risked yourself, too,” the Little Rose pointed out. “You still risk yourself.”

  “I don’t mean the risk of your father’s guards or army,” I said. “When Tariq crossed in Kharuf, the first thing he did was nearly cough up his lungs on the riverbank. It’s the curse, you see. It doesn’t affect us in Qamih, but Tariq has done the most spinning of all of us, and so when we came back, he felt it the worst.”

  “But you felt it too?” She spoke so quietly I could hardly hear her.

  “It was a pressure on my lungs,” I told her. “And, worse, I have never wanted to spin so badly as I did when I could not. It was difficult to think straight or focus on anything. Saoud had to mind us, like we were sheep.”

  “How did you manage to climb into the tower?” she asked, but I could see in her face that she already knew the answer. “Yashaa, tell me you didn’t.”

  “I did,” I told her. “It was the only way. It’s the only way that Saoud was able to take Arwa and Tariq with him to get supplies, though they won’t have to move quickly, which will make it easier to breathe. Saoud will make sure they don’t spin, and will keep them focused when they become distracted by their desire to work thread. We do what we have to, princess, even when it is hard. We always have.”

  She beheaded a bright orange flower whose name I didn’t know, rather viciously I thought. I picked up the fallen blossom and tucked it into the corner of her veil, by her ear, where she would be able to smell the scent of it.

  “I hate the curse,” she said, her voice quiet again. “I hate that I have caused so much misery, and I hate that I can’t even end it by ending myself.”

  “We are going to find that piskey,” I said. “Or one who can help us. And we’ll find a way to break the curse. I swear, I will see it done.”

  It was difficult to imagine dark and cruel magic in the glade, with the sunlight shining on us and the scent of flowers in the air. But when I listened, I could hear the deeper thrum of the mountains underneath me, and then it was easy to remember that the very ground we sat on had been built to be a prison and a paradise both.

  “Come, princess,” I said. “We should go. The gnome will have work to do, and it might not want us to see it yet.”

  I pulled her to her feet, and we went back down the slope.

  I LEFT THE LITTLE ROSE standing by the pool, and crossed the ledge behind the waterfall to put away the basket. I sorted out the food and took inventory. It was not a great amount, but it was rationed such that we would get two or three meals out of it. We would not have to eat plain vetch until our very bodies started sprouting it. I wondered briefly if I ought to keep some of it for when the others returned, but I had no way of knowing when that would be, and I didn’t want anything to spoil. Besides, with luck they would be bringing food as well. I secured everything and then went back through the falls and along the ledge. I was not at all prepared for the sight that met my eyes.

  The Little Rose had left her veil and overdress on the bank and gone into the pool to swim. Or at least float. I wasn’t sure if she was able to swim, or if she had ever had the chance to learn. In any case, she had no fear of the water. I noticed that her hair was several inches long now. It must grow very quickly. Of course, Arwa never cut hers at all, and the rest of us simply hacked off the ends whenever our hair grew past our shoulder blades. Perhaps short hair grew faster. It was still uneven and pale against her scalp, but it wasn’t as awful-looking as when I’d first seen her in the tower.

  I meant to turn and go back into the cave so that she could have her privacy, but she saw me and waved.

  “Do you swim, Yashaa?” she called.

  Our ancestors had come from the desert, where even a bath was a great luxury. There was more water here, in Kharuf and in Qamih—there was even an ocean if you went far enough to the west—but I had not done a lot of swimming, even though I knew how.

  “Only to bathe,” I replied. “And I did that this morning.”

  “You know, I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong with you, Yashaa,” she said. It was that voice again, the voice that teased in such a way that I knew she was very serious. I sighed. Arwa was never this much trouble.

  “And what is that, princess?” I asked. I sat down on the bank so she would know that there was no chance of convincing me to get in the water. I took out my knife and began to sharpen it on a whetstone.

  “You never have any fun,” she said. She held up both hands in defense. “And before you pout at me, let me remind you that while I know your life has been very hard, I’ve spent the better part of seven years locked in a room with barely a window, much less a functioning door, and I had absolutely nothing to do with my time.”

  “I like the staff dances,” I told her. “They are useful and enjoyable. Does that pass royal muster?”

  “Barely,” she allowed. “In the future I will, as your liege-lord, endeavor to find activities that will suit your incredibly narrow definition of the term.”

  “You have my gratitude, princess,” I said. In this imaginary court of hers, I would be happy to serve in whatever position she allowed, as long as the others had their places too, and I could be of use. “What besides swimming do you do for fun?”

  “Needle you, of course,” she said. She kicked water at me and didn’t seem to mind at all that it fell well short of its target. “You are delightful.”

  I made a mockery of a bow to her, as well as I could from my seated position, and she laughed again.

  “I also liked talking with Arwa,” she said. “Saoud and Tariq are as formal as you, but Arwa was good at making me feel comfortable.”

  “We all want you to be comfortable, princess,” I said.

  “I know that,” she said. “And I am glad. But Arwa talked to me like I was just a person. When the rest of you talk, it is impossible for me to forget that I am a princess, and cursed.”

  “I can never forget that,” I told her. “Please do not ask me to try.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “Not now that I know you better. Not even to needle you.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said. “Your lips are turning purple, and we’re about to lose the sun. You should come out.”

  “All right,” she said. “Turn around.”

  I did of course, and stared at the rock wall of the valley while she changed. I could hear the sound that her soaked underdress made when it hit the grass, and the soft whisper of the overdress as she pulled it back on.

  “You can look, Yashaa,” she said, and I turned.

  She hadn’t put her veil back on yet, and her hair dripped trails across her forehead faster than she could wipe them away. She was looking at the knife, and all of the ease that she had carried in the pool dripped off her, like the water.

  “Yashaa,” she said, “would you cut my hair?”

  I stared at her. There was barely any hair to cut. Even with my knife at its sharpest, I could not possibly do a good job of it. Worse, I might cut her.

  “I can’t,” I told her when I could speak.

  “Please, Yashaa,” she said. I heard the effort it took for her not to make the words a plea, and I hated myself for having denied her.

  “Why?” I said. “I mean, why must it be cut? It’s still short, isn’t it? And if you keep your veil on, no one will recognize you by it.”

  “It’s not the veil, Yashaa,” she said. “It’s the hair. If it gets long enough for me to braid, I will braid it. I do want to make things, but I want to do it on purpose. I want to be able to control it.”

  And then I understood. Even her own body betrayed her to the foul demon’s curse.

  “Come and sit, then,” I said, and she sat down in front of me.

  I put the whetstone aside, and tested the edge of my knife against my finger. It was as sharp as I could get it, and it was the best blad
e I carried. If Saoud were here, his throwing knives might have done a better job; but he was not. I sucked the blood from my thumb while she settled herself, and then I put a hand on her shoulder to steady her.

  “You must tell me if you’re going to move,” I said. “This knife is a far cry from the razor they must have had at the castle.”

  “I will,” she said, and stilled.

  Her hair was finer than mine, I learned, as I ran my fingers through it. It slid away from me when I tried to grasp it, finer than the finest thread I could have spun. I did not know if even my mother could have worked with it, and she was the greatest spinner I had ever known. I leaned forward and used both hands: one to hold the knife, and the other to try gathering up her hair.

  It would have to be done in small parts, I realized immediately. This was not going to be a quick job. I set my teeth and cut away from her skull to spare her from any accidental slips of the blade. I cut my own fingers twice before I got the hang of it. It was slow work, and she did not move while I did it. I crossed the even dome of her skull, taking more care around her ears, and finally traced the back of her head, where the muscles in her neck were quivering from the effort to stay motionless.

  At last I was done, and I brushed the knife blade in the grass.

  “Thank you, Yashaa,” she said. She wrapped the veil around her head so quickly, I thought she might get her hands caught in it.

  “You’re welcome, princess,” I said. Her shoulders slumped, just a little bit, but then straightened again as she got to her feet.

  “I’ll go and make sure we have enough water for dinner, then,” she said, and fairly fled across the ledge before I could even get to my feet.

  She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the evening. I knew I had not offended her, but I wondered if perhaps she might be upset at how she was forced to air all of her weaknesses before me. That could not be an easy way to live. Even if she knew I would never press an advantage on her, she must find it difficult to trust that it was so, trust it all the way to her bones. Worse, if the Maker King’s son was as awful as she thought, then letting her guard down at all—even around trusted companions—would only lead to future danger.