WHEN THE LITTLE ROSE was born, my mother was given the care of her wardrobe. My mother’s hands spun the yarn that made her receiving blanket, and the thread that stitched together her tiny robes and nightclothes, but when the princess was old enough to require actual clothing, it was my mother’s hands that oversaw their design and make.
“Spinning is the start, my Yashaa,” she said to me. “That is why a spinner will oversee the princess’s clothes. Later, when she is older, she will have a proper wardrobe mistress. But the Little Rose is ours now, and you must always remember that.”
It was heady news, even for a three-year-old boy who was more concerned with the frogs around the castle well than he was with the child his mother took such care over. I was not jealous of the Little Rose for taking up my mother’s time. Her days had always belonged to the queen, as mine would too someday. Rasima was hardly a harsh taskmistress, and I often accompanied my mother while she went about her work, if there was no one else free to mind me. So it was my hands on which the yarn for the Little Rose was spooled up, and my face she laughed at when I made faces to distract her while my mother measured her or changed her wraps or took a moment’s peace from the pair of us. I had no sibling, after all, and had the story gone differently, I might have looked to the Little Rose as sister and princess both.
If there were hard feelings between myself and the princess in those days, it was from the knowledge that someday she would be old enough to know that she was loved by her mother and her father, while I had only my mother. It was her birth, the way the king and queen looked at her when she cooed or giggled, or even puked, that brought to my attention something I had never noted before. The Little Rose had two parents. I had only the one.
“Where is my father?” I asked my mother one night while she spun undyed wool for no particular reason, other than that she liked the work. “Has he died?”
My mother set the spindle down, carefully as always so that her work would not undo itself, and took me in her arms.
“Your father is not here, my Yashaa,” she answered me. “I loved him, and he loved me, but he had his own duty to mind, as I do here. He could not stay, and I would not go with him.”
“Will I ever meet him?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “When you are older, and can walk all day and into the night if you must, we will ask the king if he will outfit you for a journey to find him.”
“Leave here?” I said. “Leave you and Tariq? And the Little Rose?”
“If you wish to,” she said. “You can always return, remember. Your place here is as assured as mine is, and will always be.”
“Even if I can’t spin as well as you can?” For this was the deepest fear of my childhood, that I would hold a spindle and spin the thread, and it would not be good enough for the Little Rose or her parents.
“You can always muck out stalls,” my mother told me, but she was laughing as she said it, and I knew that she would do everything she could to make sure my thread was the match of hers. It was, after all, as much her pride as it was mine.
And so I practiced. My chubby fingers made lumpy yarn, almost too thick for the horse blankets it ended up in, though my mother was always sure to point my work out to me as the horse and rider went past. Then I made better yarn, as could be used in new rugs for the cold stone castle floors. By that time the Little Rose had a proper nurse, not a spinner, and it was Tariq who spent the most time with her. When they came to visit us in the spinning room, I was always given charge of them. I was entrusted to make sure they didn’t end up falling into the hearth, or into the uncarded wool we kept in bins along the wall; or, at least in the case of the latter, to make sure that if they did so, they did so on purpose.
I thought the world was Kharuf, and Kharuf was the world, and I did not learn otherwise until the Little Rose turned four, and the Maker King brought his son to wish her well on the day of her birth. I stood proudly beside my mother when they rode into the courtyard, horse after horse. Even the prince had his own mount, though he was barely older than I. Each of the horses was tall and brown, and draped in fine gold cloth. I knew they must have stopped just beyond the rise to gird the horses thus, for they bore none of the dust that long travel would have given them. Still, it was an excellent show.