“What happens when you make things, child?” the piskey said.
“I haven’t made very many,” the Little Rose admitted, and she was Zahrah again: unsure and vulnerable, but no less determined. “It hurts to hold back. I want to learn and make and do, but I have not let myself, and others have helped by not letting me either.”
“But you have slipped up,” said the piskey shrewdly. “You have fallen through the cracks of your own prison.”
“Yes,” said Zahrah. “I helped fix a fence.”
She looked at me, and then back at the piskeys.
“It hurt even more,” she said. “My head ached for hours, so much that I could barely think straight.”
This was not the time for it, but later I was going to have words with her about this. I had known she was in some pain, but not that much. I never would have let her risk the staff patterns.
“But there was an exultation afterwards,” she said, and I saw the mirror of it in her face. “It felt like a part of me was finally completed. But it didn’t bring me closer to breaking the curse. We need you to tell us how.”
The piskeys looked at one another, and then their leader sighed.
“The thread tangled as soon as my gift to you was spun into it,” it said. We all straightened. This was the very piskey we sought. “I saw it, and I did not know how to set it right. We have spent these years trying to untangle the knot ourselves, but all we have for you are guesses and suggestions, not answers.”
“We will accept those,” Zahrah said. “And I, at least, will accept them gladly.”
“I will too,” Tariq said. “I am not afraid to do some of the thinking for myself and to try to put the pieces together for my princess.”
The smallest piskey fluttered around his head, showering his dark hair with gold dust.
“The demon is coming, child,” the leader of the piskeys said to Zahrah, and it was as though our fate was sealed with its words. “But there is hope. You must be completed or you will never have the chance to know peace. Never rule. Never see your kingdom safe.”
“How can I?” she asked.
“You must learn,” it said. “You must make, and you must do. I’m not sure which of them will plague you more, and I am sorry, for you will suffer the cost of it. It is the faerie’s curse. But remember my gift, too. You may find the right time to use it, once your own mind has begun to open up.”
There was pain in the piskey’s face. Regret and longing to make something right, where it could offer no help. It had already tried, as it had told us, the day the Little Rose turned five, and the knot had only tied itself all the tighter.
The Little Rose bowed to the piskey, and then the four creatures took wing, leaving a golden trail of dust on Arwa’s veil.
WE DIDN’T SPEAK VERY MUCH that day. I could have said it was because we were making up for our late start, but we all knew the truth. The piskey had all but said that the only way to break the curse was to play right into the demon’s hands. Yet we still marched away from our pursuers, away from the castle where Zahrah, at least, would have been home with her parents while the horrors swooped down on her. I supposed that couldn’t be much in the way of comfort.
When we finally stopped, it was two hours before dark. We set up the tents and lit a small fire, once Tariq had dug a pit for it. I noticed that the heather here was scrubbier, and flowers were few and far between. We must have been getting closer to the desert, though I could hardly see the point of reaching it now.
“I will go back,” said Zahrah, as though she had read my thoughts. “They will put me back in the tower, and I will go insane there, but I will do it.”
She looked straight at me for the last part, and I knew that while she would miss the others, she would miss me the most. It wasn’t a particularly happy realization.
“You still have to marry the Maker King’s son,” Saoud said. “That hasn’t changed either.”
She considered her options—home, with its myriad prisons, or the dangerous freedom that was life with us—and then something hardened in her.
“If the demon is going to have me,” Zahrah said, “I want to be me first, all of me. As I was meant to.”
She looked at all of us, the children who had grown up on stories of her, and who had come to love her when the stories were made into a real person who could stand before us. Even Arwa was fearless, or perhaps she was the most fearless of us all, for I couldn’t deny that I felt cold doubt in my bones, though I wouldn’t give in to it.
“Help me,” she said.
It wasn’t the princess who ordered. It wasn’t the Little Rose who manipulated. It was Zahrah, and she was asking. Anything I might have said stuck in my throat.
“The first thing you made wasn’t a fence, Zahrah,” Tariq said, coming to our rescue. “It was your ties to us. It was our friendship and our loyalty. Of course we will help you.”