“Some advice, Yashaa,” she said, all the dignity she could muster in her voice, and a desperate need to be taken seriously behind it. “Never ask a girl who cannot make things what she might need so badly she would have to ask a child—sorry, Arwa—to make for her.”
“I don’t mind being helpful or being a child,” Arwa said. “I am happy to make them and not need them yet. It seems a troublesome annoyance. No one’s ever explained it before, that’s all. My mother never got the chance.”
I could tell that the Little Rose was uncomfortable, so I let it drop, and didn’t remark on how quickly Arwa tucked her work away when Saoud returned to the cave.
“We’ll have to hunt tomorrow,” Saoud said. “And probably the day after that, too, unless we are very fortunate.”
“And then what?” asked the Little Rose.
“Then they’ll leave us here for a time,” I said. I did my best to use the voice Saoud’s father used when he barked commands at us on the training field. “We need things we cannot get here, and there is no other way.”
The Little Rose did not protest, and Arwa and Tariq swallowed any remarks they might have made. Saoud nodded his thanks and began to inspect his knives. Arwa, with a touch of defiance, took out her sewing again as though daring us to comment on it, but no one did.
The Little Rose only stared at the fire, her idle hands clasped tightly in her lap, and said nothing.
When you make a thing and keep it, you control it utterly. If no hands but yours have touched it, then it is yours. If you make a thing and give it, you relinquish that control, but earn in its place a sort of trust between you and the person to whom you have made your gift. If a thing is made and stolen, then it can be twisted; and this has always been my way.
The thrice-damned Storyteller Witch had tried to change that. She had given so freely that she had nearly died of it, and the creatures she gave to the world kept it safe for her after her power had waned, and even after she died. They took up her watch in our mountain prison, and the poison that plagued us here had no effect upon them. They set themselves in the little valleys and on the slopes, even on the topmost spires of the highest peaks, and hounded us from every side.
Oh, if only the Storyteller Witch’s power had been ours. She was the greatest maker-of-things her kind had ever known, even if she did not understand until the end how her magic worked. If she had been stolen and twisted, as her husband was for a time, my kin might have ground the human vermin so far into the sand that they would not crawl out of it until the skies fell. Instead, we could only watch as she raised these mountains from nothing and decorated them with everything our jailors loved.
There were wide glades on sheltered mountainsides where fields of flowers grew. The piskeys and sprites danced upon the wind with floating blossoms underneath their wings. There were deep pools and caves cut from the iron-laced stone where the dragons could lay their eggs, and hatch new fire-breathing menaces, without fear of us finding them in their only vulnerable state. There were grassy fields in hidden valleys where the unicorns could graze by day and sharpen their horns on the stones by night. There were mountaintops where the phoenix could roost. And there was good dark earth, hidden from the wind and scouring rain, where the gnomes could grow whatever they liked, and garden themselves to insensibility.
All of these things the Storyteller Witch gave, and gave with her heart full of love for the creatures she’d made, and the world she set them in. I wanted each of them to burn in fires so hot that their flesh melted from their bones; to scorch the ground so badly that nothing would ever grow there again.
We settled for petty destruction where we could. We fouled the rivers that fed the pools where the dragon eggs were laid. We struck the heads off every flower we could find. We set fire to the grass, and trod upon the gnomic gardens whenever we found them. We gloried in the days when the mountaintops were obscured by clouds too thick for even phoenix fire to pierce. It gave little satisfaction, as the years turned to decades and then to centuries, but at least it was better than nothing.
The creatures did not fight back. They did not have to. With their powers combined, they were more than a match for us, so they had only to stand firm. I took my lessons from the wind and rain: two forces that seemingly affected the mountains little, but in truth accumulated their damage over the span of years. I could match that span. I did not foul rivers, I diverted them. I did not pick the flowers, I found insects to devour them. Little by little, I wore away at the very earth the gnomes could turn to their use, until their gardens were few and far between.