He looked directly at me, his eyes bright.
“Yashaa, your mother was completely devoted to her princess and to her king and queen. It was like they were a focus, some bit of magic that no one even knew about. Not a spell or anything, just…a connection.” He turned to look at the Little Rose. “It’s you. That’s why we’re better this time. It won’t save us, not forever, but you’ll help us get through.”
The Little Rose’s eyes were bright, too.
“Come on,” Saoud said, his gentle voice drawing us forward again. “We should take every advantage we can.”
On the third day, we came to what had at one time been a village. The wooden walls of the huts and houses had collapsed, but the foundations were still there. Heather grew everywhere, topping the low and rotting walls, and crowding over the paths that had once been the village roadways.
“Find the well,” Saoud said to Arwa. “And see if it has been fouled.”
She nodded and went off. It was a small enough village that even if she strayed beyond our sight, we would still be able to hear her. We busied ourselves checking the other houses, in case anything of value remained in them. The settlement had not been quickly abandoned. This was one of Kharuf’s forgotten places. With spinning forbidden, the people who lived here had nothing to support themselves with. They had gone south, to where the land was marginally better for farming. If they were lucky, they got there early enough that land was still available. Most were not so fortunate. The few people who had remained in the north were shepherds, and only needed help during the annual shearing.
The Little Rose stood in the middle of what I guessed had once been the town square. The remains of a raised platform rotted there, and the houses that faced it had stone foundations and dugout cellars, like the ones shops needed for storage.
“This is my fault,” she said. “Everything is always my fault.”
“And now you are working to fix it, princess,” I reminded her. “And we are here to help you do it.”
“It’s been years, Yashaa,” she said. “So many have suffered and died.”
“They won’t blame you,” I said.
“You did.” The accusation was quiet, and it stung because it was the truth. If she had been Arwa, I would have put an arm around her shoulders. But she was the Little Rose.
“I was sick during your birthday party, did you know that?” I said. “I had the sheep pox, so I had to stay away from you and Tariq, because you hadn’t caught it yet.”
“Most of what children remember is told to them,” she said. “No one ever wanted to talk to me about that night, but I made them. I don’t want to make you, but if you would do it anyway, I would listen.”
“It was beautiful,” I said. “The most beautiful night I have never seen. I didn’t even get to see the hall when it was empty, before the guests arrived. But when it was full of light and song? Before the demon came…princess, I imagined that night for years.”
“Is it a happy memory?” she asked.
Behind me, I was aware that Saoud and Tariq had come into the square. I expected them to join us, but instead Saoud took Tariq by the shoulder and led him into another abandoned house. I wondered briefly what he had spotted there.
“No,” I told her. “It is an angry one. It has been angry since I made it, lying in my bed all those years ago and barely able to hear the music. It was torturous, princess, to be so close to it and miss it entirely. Your mother sent me a plate she had made up herself, and I barely ate it, I was so furious with my own circumstances.”
“Children can be vicious,” she said. She looked away from the platform and smiled at me. “What made you change your mind?”
“You did,” I said. “I carried that anger with me for so long. Every time my mother tried to tell me what she had seen that night in the Great Hall, I twisted her words to match my rage, and I focused all of it on you. I thought you were selfish and spoiled. I thought my mother’s love of you had ruined her, and I thought your parents were terrible rulers for letting your safekeeping outweigh the safety of their subjects.
“But then I climbed a tower,” I said. “And I saw you at the top of it. And I understood.”
“What did you understand?” She took a step closer to me and looked like she was about to take another.
“That you aren’t just the Little Rose,” I said. “You aren’t a far-off person that I can ignore, and you never will be. I understood that you are my princess, and even if your court cannot have spinners, I would still be in it.”
She froze, her weight half pushing toward the step she was about to take, and seemed to shut in on herself.
“I would never keep you in a place you could not spin,” she said, so quietly I had to lean in to hear her speak.
“I think that’s why I would stay,” I told her.