“I’m glad we’re on the same side,” Saoud said, as I pulled him to his feet. “When it counts, I mean.”
It always counted, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. He knew it as well as I did, and if I said the words it would only remind him that his father, once our teacher, had left him here with us and gone off to do who knows what. And that my mother had probably been the one to drive him away. Instead we bowed, and I passed my bow staff to Arwa, who used it to balance herself on the fence rail; first standing, then walking, and finally spinning on one bare foot, the staff whirling in the other direction above her head. Tariq gripped the rail harder, as though his balance was transferable to her.
“That makes me so uncomfortable,” Saoud said, and I smiled.
Arwa had come with us from Kharuf, strapped to her mother’s back. Almost a year old, she should have learned to walk while we journeyed, but because of the steep slopes we climbed and the wagons on the roads we traveled, her mother had been afraid to set her down very often. She was held by everyone in the convoy at one point or another during our two years of travel, and by the time her feet finally touched the ground, we were all a little worried that she wouldn’t ever take to walking as she should. Technically, I suppose she didn’t. Now, she had no fear of heights, and could climb almost anything. Her balance was so perfect that Saoud’s father used to joke that she must have been crafted by a sword-master. I looked forward to facing her at her best in the sparring circle someday, once she had mastered the basic forms. It would certainly be an interesting match.
Tariq was less gifted, less sure of his physical strength. He excelled at strategy, though. Saoud’s father would tell us that Tariq might only strike one blow, but it would be the only one he needed. Tariq could hold his own, at least for a while, but his chief talents lay in other areas.
“Yashaa!” came a voice from our circle of tents. “Your mother wants you.”
Saoud grimaced, but I knew he wished he still had a parent to yell at him. Arwa threw me my staff, and laughed as I nearly dropped it. Saoud looked away as she jumped down from the fence, but he needn’t have bothered. She didn’t show off.
“I’ll come with you,” she said. “Your mother has my spindle.”
I nodded my head, and we headed back toward the tents. Tariq watched, ever keen-eyed, even if it was something he had seen a hundred times, while Saoud began one of the solitary drills that his father had taught us. I had only known Saoud a few years. He and his father were from Qamih, and had no ties to Kharuf at all, except through us. We tried not to treat him as an outsider, Tariq and Arwa and I, mostly because we knew how much that hurt, but he didn’t understand the spinning, or why we still clung to it, though it had been some years since spinning had done us any good.
There were four main tents and two smaller ones in our encampment, plus an open-air kitchen. It was a far cry from the castle that my mother talked of when she was feeling nostalgic, but it served us well. We camped near a crossroads, and merchants knew where to find us. We did not have very much to offer, but we were cheap, and the work we did was good.
After the demon laid its curse upon the Little Rose, most of the spinners had gone on the Silk Road, into the desert. Across the burning sands was the kingdom from which our ancestors had come, and they could do their work there, which they could no longer do in Kharuf. We knew the desert kingdom still existed because their traders crossed the desert with camel caravans, but few people from Kharuf ever made the trek. My mother hadn’t gone because she loved Queen Rasima, and because she was afraid that I was too young to survive a desert crossing. She waited for two years, until I was eight, while everything in Kharuf fell apart around her. Then she took the last few spinners still at court and went, not through the desert after all, but across the mountain pass to Qamih.