Above me, high in the sky, the moon was rising. It was not quite full yet, but it was full enough. If it rose too high before I climbed back down, it would light the wall well enough for me to be spotted. That, more than anything, limited the amount of time I could spend in the castle looking for our answers.
At last, at long last, my fingers gripped the window ledge. This was the hardest part, not the least because I could feel the closeness of my goal and wanted it badly. The ledge was made of wood, so soft after all that stone, and I ignored the screaming protests of my arms as I pulled myself over it, so that I perched on the ledge, one leg in the tower room and one still outside.
It was not storage. It was not an office either, even an abandoned one. What it was, was very, very strange.
The room was wide, the size of the entire tower, with no divisions. I could not see a door, only two very high windows on the courtyard side, and an odd compartment where the door ought to have been. There was a cot with a straw tick mattress near the window. There were two pillows and a heavy quilt. There was a chamber pot and a low table with nothing on it. There was no hearth or brazier, and I wondered how the room was kept warm when the snows came.
The not-quite-full moon was shining through the courtyard windows, and I saw that the floor was thick with dust. Patterns were drawn into it. Lines a finger-width and wider, as the design called for. Flowers and men and horses, and swirls beyond counting.
And footprints.
I was so surprised I nearly fell out the window, but instead caught myself on the ledge and waited there. There was no door. No person could have fit out through the odd compartment I saw. Whoever had made those footprints was in the room with me. Slowly, I pulled my other leg through the window, and stood on my feet, as steadily as I could manage given the dark unknown I was peering into.
Over the hammering of my heart, I heard her. She laughed, when she realized I was afraid. Maybe no one had ever been afraid of her before. And then she stepped into the moonlight, and I saw her.
She was my age, or perhaps younger. It was hard to tell. I thought that maybe if she had lived in the tower for a long time, it would be like how we’d worried about Arwa when her mother had had to carry her on the road. If she never walked properly, if she never got to see the sun, then she would be small and frail.
Except Arwa had never been frail. And I didn’t think this girl was, either. If she had been plague-ridden, they would have taken her out of the castle, or she would have died. The candlemaker’s wife said that they had not come here in years, and yet this girl was still here. She could not be sick. She must be locked up in this tower for another reason.
She wore a simple dress and slippers. It was good cloth, for all it was a plain design, and the fit was very good. Her hair was mostly covered by a scarf, but a few tufts of it stuck out as though they yearned for freedom from their prison, and I knew that her head had been shorn. It was her hair that gave her away. The color of summer wheat, of rice cooked with saffron, carried across the desert by an ancestor old out of time.
“Hello, boy,” said the Little Rose. I had never heard a human being sound more resigned. “Have you come to rescue me?”
The petty humans do not remember the moment of their making. They cannot recall that first spark of life, nor the painful pathway to their first breath of air. They do not carry the memories of their first word or their first step or their first food. They do not remember the beginning, but if they were a spinner in Kharuf, I gave them the gift of every feeling of their end.
This was how it went: first a tickle in the back of the throat, and then a cough. These things were easily ignored, shrugged off as summer colds or the whisper of pollen on the back of the throat. They drank tea with honey and put fresh flowers in the spinning room to clear the air. They threw the windows wide open and sent the rugs out to be cleaned. There was dust in the courtyard, they said to one another; it was dust from the sheep brought in for counting.
It was not the dust.