“Tell me about Qamih,” she said. “I know very little about it, and nothing at all that doesn’t in some way relate to the Maker King. Tell me about the people there, and how they have treated you since you left Kharuf.”
Now it was my turn to chew. I was a fair hand at camp rations, but not even Tariq could do very much with bitter vetch. I forced it down, and marshaled my thoughts.
“I have only the faintest memories of Kharuf, before we came back to you,” I said to her. “I remember the smell of the heather more than anything else—anything outside the castle, in any case. It always seemed to be a gentler land to me than Qamih, though that might be because it was my home, and because my mother always speaks of it with such fond longing.”
“I will remind you,” said the Little Rose, with a smile. “Only, tell me first of Qamih.”
“It’s wider, somehow,” I said to her. “I have walked it from one end to the other when I was a child, and though I know its borders, it feels like it goes on forever. It is bounded by the sea, as you know, and there are great flats where clay is harvested like a sharecrop. There are forests, too, and broad fields where wheat and barley are farmed.”
“It doesn’t sound so bad,” she said.
“We were not welcome for very long in any of the towns,” I said. “They have guild laws in Qamih, and their own spinners and weavers, and they did not want anyone from Kharuf encroaching on their territory. It was nearly impossible to gain admittance to a guild, save through marriage, and few of the guild members would marry an outsider. My mother did not seek a suitor, in any case, and neither did Arwa’s mother, though she was younger and had not given her heart to Arwa’s father, as my mother gave hers to mine.”
“Did your father die?” she asked, concern writ in the lines around her eyes.
“No,” I said. “Or at least if he did, my mother never heard of it. He went back over the Silk Road into the desert before I was born, because he has his tasks there, as my mother had hers in Kharuf.”
“I have always known that my marriage would not be for love,” the Little Rose said. “I had hoped that others would not feel so constrained by their duties. But I suppose it is the way of the world.”
“My mother told me that she loved Queen Rasima and her position in your parents’ court too much to leave it, and that my father felt similarly about his own path,” I told her. “They chose between two loves, not for lack of it.”
“I’m not sure that’s any better,” she mused, and I nodded my acknowledgement of the truth in her words.
“In any case,” I said, “my mother did not marry, and so there was no position for her in the guild. We wandered until Arwa was well into her walking years, and then we set up a permanent camp at the first crossroads beyond the mountain pass, coming from the Kharuf side, of course. We met Saoud’s father there, and he agreed to teach us staff fighting and knife work.”
“And your mother could talk to the wool traders, and hear news of Kharuf,” the Little Rose guessed.
“Yes,” I said. “Though she rarely passed any such information to me. She was determined that I would grow up and become a guild member in Qamih, so that when you wed, you would have at least one ally on the west side of the mountains.”
“I am flattered by your mother’s foresight,” said the Little Rose. “Did you resent me?”
“Of course I did, princess,” I told her. “You had cost me my home, and your curse was killing my mother. I watched Tariq’s father breathe himself to death.”
I had not meant to speak so harshly. In the days since the others left, I had let no moment go by without reminding myself of who she was, even though my own feelings for her were complicated by long misunderstanding. I had tried to be polite, even though whatever court training I had ever had was long since faded from my memory. And then to say that!
“It’s all right, Yashaa,” she said. “That is how curses work. They poison everything.”
“The demon was not content with just hurting you,” I said. “It hurt others in your name, and because I did not know it, or how to hurt it back, I turned on you instead. I thought it was your selfishness, or perhaps the selfishness of your parents, that kept the curse intact. I know better now, and I am sorry.”
“There has been too much suffering in my name,” the Little Rose said. “I hate it too, and if I could end it, I would; but now I am as much trapped by the piskey’s gift as by the demon’s curse.”
Her words hung there, like the pot we hung over the fire to cook in, and then I looked straight into her eyes for the first time since I had first beheld her in the tower.
“There must be a way,” I said.
“What?” she said.