“You said you never learned dancing?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “My father took no chances. You make patterns when you dance, after all.”
“It will still be a pattern,” I told her, “but Arwa left her staff, and I will teach you how to use it. If we start with that, and if you feel it is all right, then we can move on to something else.”
“Why staff fighting?” she asked.
“Because that is where you start,” I told her. “And because you don’t need to wear shoes.”
That contented her, and she passed me the empty bowls from where they had been drying. I was focused on the cooking pot, on not spilling any of the food we had gathered, but not so focused that I didn’t see when she pressed a hand to her temple. She rubbed her head the way my mother did, when the summer storms came to the clay flats in Qamih and brought a sort of aching pressure with them. I was not subject to the same aches, even with the head wound the demon bear had given me; but I knew what a headache looked like, and I couldn’t think why the Little Rose should have one.
And then, of course, I could. The phoenix’s gift made it possible for her to walk all night when she hadn’t walked so much as a mile before, but it could not take away the pain of it, and it could not take away the pain now. We had only done a gentle climb today, and the sun had not been overly hot. She had drunk enough water, and she could not have been overexerted by her work gathering the vetch.
But she had made a fence. She had used that part of her mind she had so long resisted using, and now it ached, like muscles set to an unfamiliar task. I remembered the ache of my arms and legs when I had first begun training to fight with a staff, and again when Saoud and I had learned to fight with knives. Perhaps the same thing was going on inside her head, as her mind expanded and then turned to rest. If the demon sought to build a fortress inside her, the weight of the stones was certain to hurt her, until she became accustomed to carrying them. It was yet more physical proof of the magic that wove its tangled way through our lives.
She caught my eye, and lowered her hand.
“It’s nothing, Yashaa,” she said, determined as ever. “Only more than I am used to.”
Her words had a power of their own, I had come to realize. She would say a thing, and I would do it. It worked with the others as well, but I had spent the most time with her. I had wondered if it might be magic of some kind, that I would do what she said, but I knew better now, or at least I knew that her words put no spell on me but that which I chose to take. Her power was not in magic, because she had said that it was nothing, and I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she lied.
THE NEXT DAY, I woke early and took a stick from the woodpile. It was the length of my forearm, narrower at one end than the other. It had been meant for kindling, but I would put it to another use. I went down to the pool and scooped up a bit of mud off the bottom. It was mealy stuff, and would make no vessels fit for even the lowest of tables, but it would do for my purpose now. I rolled the mud between my fingers, squeezing out most of the water, and then fastened it to the wider end of the stick. It wasn’t a lot of weight, but it would do.
I had kept up the practice of checking the Little Rose’s blanket for loose threads. I even checked her dresses and veils when she wasn’t wearing them, and had by now accumulated a collection of scraps. This morning, I would spin them all together. I sat cross-legged by the pool and missed my mother as I set the whorl spinning experimentally. The wet mud held, barely, and I set out the scraps on my knee so that they were in easy reach.
Sitting on the ground to spin is not the easiest way to do it, but there was no other seat, and I had no distaff to hold the pieces if I stood. After only a few minutes, my shoulders ached from holding the spindle up so high, but I had a short length of ugly thread. I was almost ashamed of it, except I knew that it was all that I could give, and I hoped that the recipient would see its worth.
“Good morning,” said the Little Rose, sitting in the wet grass beside me.
“Good morning, princess,” I said. “I haven’t started breakfast yet. I wanted to do this first.”
“You don’t need to hide spinning from me, Yashaa,” she said. “I can’t do it, but I still like to watch good work done.”
“This is hardly good work,” I said, examining the thread as I wound it around the spindle.
It was varicolored, but not in an attractive way, and though it did not have lumps in it, there were definitely places where it looked stretched. I picked off the mud-whorl, and did my best to remove any flecks of dirt from the thread itself, but it was still far from the sort of thing that would make my mother proud of me.
“It’s not very good,” I told her. “But I hope it will suit.”