WEARING SHOES, THE LITTLE ROSE stood at eye level with my chin. To kiss me, she had to stand on her toes and propel herself forward and upward. I was not at all prepared for this sort of attack, which pulled me away from my center of balance and onto my heels, but I did manage to catch her before she overbalanced us or caused us to fall through the screen and into the well. Her nose pressed against mine, and she stepped on my foot. When she moved finally away again, it was a long moment before I realized that I held her by her waist, preventing her from moving any farther. I dropped my hands immediately.
“That was terrible,” she said, looking at the space over my shoulder. “I have to go and murder Saoud.”
“What?” I said. It was, perhaps, not the most helpful of questions, but it seemed to encompass everything I wanted to know.
“He said I would have to tell you.” She was still looking over my shoulder.
“You didn’t tell me anything,” I pointed out.
“I have been trying to tell you for days, Yashaa. I thought…I don’t know what I thought.”
“Princess,” I said, and her eyes flashed with anger. She managed to look straight at me, and I saw fire there.
“My name is Zahrah,” she snapped. “The others use it, even Saoud. Why can’t you?”
I didn’t know. She was the Little Rose. She was my Little Rose, and she was my princess. Her name wasn’t mine to say. At least, I had thought it wasn’t.
“You were Tariq’s friend, back when we lived in your father’s castle,” I said. “And Arwa has worshipped you since before you met her. I thought I was different. I was older, and I remembered too much of how life used to be. I thought—I thought that I was meant to live without you. Then we met again, and I thought I was meant to live behind you. To have a place in your house, if you would have me, and to do my work there.”
“Your work,” she said, and the fire in her voice was gone. She laughed, a sad echo of her usual joy. “You meant every word you ever said to me. You meant exactly what you said.”
“Of course I did,” I told her. “What did you think I meant?”
“In the stories, the bold rescuer is always gallant,” she said. “He swoops in and sets it all to right.”
“I am not your rescuer, princess.” I said the word without meaning to, but she didn’t flare up at me again. “If anything, you are going to rescue us.”
“I know that, Yashaa,” she said. “It’s only that for so long, all I had were my dreams.”
“All I had were my memories,” I told her. “So perhaps I can understand. Tell me whatever it was Saoud told you to say.”
She blushed, and straightened her veil.
“He said that you were hopeless.” She was looking at the space next to my ear again, words grating out of her like they were being pulled behind a square-wheeled cart. “He said that his father told him how it was with men and women, but he didn’t think that anyone ever told you. He said that I would have to tell you what I felt. But the problem is that I’m not certain what I’m feeling either, so when I saw you—when I heard you telling the piskeys about the well cover—it was like I forgot how words worked.”
“And so the kiss,” I said.
“And so the kiss,” she said. “It turns out that remembering stories doesn’t make you good at that.”
I laughed and realized that there were bees everywhere around us. They flew close but did not touch us.
“I thought you were flattering me,” the Little Rose said. “When you told me that you never fancied another girl. I thought you said it to make me feel better. But you really never have.”
“I haven’t,” I said. “Did you ever dream of the Maker King’s son and hope that he was different from the stories you’d been told?”
“No,” she said. Her face closed up, and she was solemn again. It was almost more than I could bear.
“Tell me about your dream, Zahrah,” I said. I took her hand and led her to a place where there was soft heather and no bees, and we sat. “It can’t possibly be more foolish than what we’re doing now.”
“I must marry,” she began. “I know that much. And I suppose because I have always been trothplighted to the Maker King’s son, I imagined having the freedom to choose on my own.”
“That doesn’t seem unreasonable,” I said.
“Yashaa, it is the most unreasonable,” she said gently. “I lived in a tower. I barely knew the maids who brought my meals to me, though I could sometimes overhear their gossip. I could see the guards or riders coming over the hills, but I knew nothing of them.”
“When I came through your window, what did you think of me?” I asked, though the possible answers made me fearful.
“I thought you had come to murder me, of course,” she said. “That’s why they had to put me in the tower in the first place. To keep me safe from others, and safe from myself. Except you hadn’t,” she said. I noticed that she was sitting in such a way that there was no possibility I might accidentally touch her. “You wanted information. You wanted to know the story, too, and I thought that if I played the pretty princess for you, you would take me with you.”
“I knew you manipulated me,” I told her. “I didn’t care.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better about it,” she said. “That might actually make me feel worse. Every time you said anything, I thought we were growing closer.”
“We were,” I said. Because we had been. “I’m sorry.”