This was true. More than once over the years, we had concocted some sort of plan to eavesdrop on the merchants who visited our parents when we had been forbidden to listen to their talk. The plans had always failed, but it had taken Arwa only moments to sit next to someone’s wife, stir a pot over a cookfire, and ask the questions we wanted to have answered. She was small, and so they often thought she was younger than her true years. Even if they did not speak to her directly, they spoke around her without heed to her presence, and her memory for such overheard conversations was excellent.
“Very well,” said Saoud. “But Tariq must go with you, even if he hides himself. I don’t think any of us, even Yashaa or I, should be alone once we come down from the mountains.”
“Or in the mountains,” Tariq said, tearing a strip of bear meat with his teeth with particular ferocity.
“Yashaa, how is your head?” Arwa asked me.
I grimaced, for I had hoped that they had all forgotten.
“It’s fine,” I told them, which was not quite the truth. Saoud frowned. “It’s better, in any case. The headaches are almost gone, and I can look at the fire without fainting. We have walked for days, and I haven’t faltered. Sometimes I feel a bit light-headed, but my sight has cleared and my mind no longer feels fuzzy, like it did in the first few days.”
“You will tell us if something changes?” Arwa pressed. “I know you are well enough, but, Yashaa, we are all we have.”
“I will,” I told her, “and I know.”
And silently I promised her that someday, I would make sure that she had more.
WE WEREN’T SURE IF the border between Kharuf and Qamih was at the highest point of the mountain pass, or somewhere else along the way. The mountains were not inhabited, for the most part, so it mattered little which kingdom laid claim to them. Anyone might climb partway up and trap for meat or furs, and anyone might scratch the surface of the mountain rock to look for iron ore, though most of what had been easily exposed was long since depleted. We knew that Qamih lay behind us, but we weren’t certain where Kharuf would begin. At least, we weren’t until we crossed into it.
There was a little creek, one we had followed down the mountainside because it was clear, and if we kept to it, then we didn’t have to carry our own water as we walked. It turned sharply south where we needed to continue east, and so we crossed. As soon as our feet touched the dry dirt on the other side, we knew that we were home.
Tariq, who spun the most of us, coughed so hard that his paroxysms took him to his knees, and there was blood on Arwa’s handkerchief when he handed it back to her. For her part, Arwa caught her breath easily enough and kept her feet, though she swayed enough that Saoud put his arm around her shoulders to hold her up. My head, which had ceased to ache as the air thickened on our way down the mountain, pounded anew, though I too was able to stand.
“Give me your spindles,” Saoud said. “Now.”
Tariq didn’t try to talk, but rummaged in his pack as his strength returned to him. Arwa retrieved both of hers—one from her mother, and one from the father she had never met—and I got mine.
“Are you going to break them?” Arwa asked, and she handed Saoud the tools of her craft. She didn’t sound sad or scared, just resigned to whatever would be decided.
“No,” Saoud said. “I will keep them for you.”
He had sat around the fire in the evenings with us all these days in the mountains, and all the years before. He had seen how unconscious it was; how, as soon as we were settled, a spindle appeared in our hands and wool for us to spin. Even I did it, and my feelings about spinning were complicated. He knew that, though we might not mean to, our hands tended to find craft to work, and he knew that if he left us our spindles, we would spin whether we meant to or not.
“The king’s decree was for our own protection, as much as it was for the Little Rose,” said Tariq, as his spindle disappeared into Saoud’s pack.
“Maybe,” I said. “But he still drove our parents away to save one girl. I am not ready to forgive that so easily. Are you?”
“No,” said Tariq, but his heart was not in it. He was still looking at Saoud’s pack. “The magic must have grown stronger in the years since the curse was laid. Our parents weren’t affected so quickly, even right after the birthday party.”
“Can you walk?” Saoud asked, hoisting the pack onto his back again. “Are you ready to go on?”
In truth, my body was, but my mind had seen clearly for the first time the illness that was killing my mother. She had always kept it from us, even when Tariq’s father and then Arwa’s mother were dying in the spare tent. She never let us see the full power of her illness, never let us feel the fear of it in our lungs. I felt it now, though, in my own breathing, and when I looked at how Tariq’s shoulders still heaved.
“I am,” I said.
“So am I,” said Tariq, pale and determined, and beside him, Arwa nodded.