After the first tickle, the cough became more persistent. They struggled to breathe, and slept propped up on pillows or sitting in chairs. The faintest amount of smoke, from the hearth or from a torch or even from a candle, was too much for them, and they wheezed for air. They took walks along the top of the castle wall. They went out into the meadows, and sat under the shade of the broad-leafed trees that grew there. They tried compresses to draw out infections; they tried teas to clear the lungs. They tried every remedy they could imagine, except the one they knew would do the trick.
The spinners took council with each other and argued long into the night. No agreement could be reached, and so they left each master of the craft to make their own decisions. Most took their tools, families, and apprentices and set out on the roads, leaving Kharuf to seek their fortunes in other lands. Some few stayed behind and tried their hands at other crafts, but were not made content by them. No matter how busy their hands were or how occupied their minds, their bodies yearned for the downward drop of the spindle, the weight of the whorl, and the steady pull of growing thread, until they could do nothing but reach for the spindle once more.
No fewer than a dozen stayed and kept to their craft’s traditions. They spun for the king and queen because they loved them, and they grew more and more ill as time progressed. When they finally died, it took days. They could not eat or take water, only breathe, slower and slower. The nurses who minded them measured every rise and fall of the chest, breaths spacing out so far that just when the caretakers were prepared to check the time and give the final blessing, the spinner would heave again. It drove the nurses nearly mad to hear it, rusty, slow breathing, echoing down the stone walls of the corridor where the spinners were brought to die.
The mind, by my design, was the last thing to go. When they drowned in their own lungs, they knew it, though there was no one for them to tell, even if they’d had the air and strength to do it. I gained nothing from this additional suffering, except that it entertained me to watch it unspool before me.
In the end, Qasim did the only thing he could think of. His last few spinners loved him so dearly that they would not forsake their craft for his sake, nor for his wife’s, nor for the sake of the Little Rose. So he made a new law, and forbade all manner of spinning in his kingdom. There was a great bonfire in the courtyard when he had the spindles and wheels burned. And the last remaining spinners were driven out from his house.
Kharuf was a country made for sheep and little else. The sheep were still caught and sheared, but the wool could no longer be turned into thread, even in secret, so it was sold to Qamih. At first, the Maker King only sold back thread and yarn at a higher price than he’d paid for the wool. But his greed grew ever more, and in time, he only sold cloth. At last, he ordered his merchants to sell only finished clothes to the people of Kharuf, and they were so dearly bought that the people could barely afford to eat.
Their only hope was for the day that their princess would marry the Maker King’s son, and the two kingdoms would be united once more. Then the Maker King would ensure they did not starve, and that wool and thread and yarn and cloth were fairly traded on either side of the mountain. It was a vain and small hope, but it was what they waited for on the heathered slopes of Kharuf.
It was not what I waited for. I waited for two kingdoms, one falling and one strong, to come together. I waited for a baby girl to grow to womanhood. I waited for an undeveloped mind to learn what a future queen is taught. I waited while her parents tried to protect her and their own desperate subjects from the tightly spun threads of magic that made up my curse. I waited, and I did not care how many spinners breathed themselves to death while I did.
And all the while, the Little Rose grew up in a dark room at the top of a stone tower, and the king and queen guarded the secret of her confinement more closely than they guarded the castle itself. For they knew what I knew—what I had declared to them on the day of her fifth birthday. The age I gave was a number pulled from the air to give weight to destiny. The truth was that I would have the girl whenever I wanted. I knew that her parents would do all manner of desperate things in an attempt to thwart me, and that in turn would serve my purpose. The spinners were cursed, the land of Kharuf was cursed, and the Little Rose could break it in a heartbeat—if only, if only they would let her have a spindle.
“MOST OF THE PEOPLE who come here come to kill me.” The Little Rose had a calm voice, a beautiful one, but I got the idea that she didn’t get to use it very often. “Though before, they always came through the gate and pretended to be friendly before they turned to murder. They would want to see me, I suppose, to see what they were after. They would speak to my parents, and then when they saw me, they would fly at me with a knife. Killing me won’t work, you know. I mean, it will work in that I will be dead. But it won’t break the curse.”