“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.