“Usually we start with spinning,” I said. “But we can’t do that.”
“I spun as a child,” Zahrah reminded us. “And I sewed once, too. I made the cloth bags my mother used to wrap the gifts she gave to the creatures who came to my birthday.”
“I remember,” I said. “I was appalled that such messy stitches made it past my mother’s watchful gaze. I was never allowed to do such work.”
She stuck her tongue out at me. She was much more fun now that she was a girl and not a rose.
“Here,” said Arwa, passing over her sewing kit. “There’s got to be something that needs hemming.”
In the end, we settled for hemming the last of Saoud’s spare tunics for Tariq, who had grown again.
“We had to replace his shoes, too,” Saoud said, while we watched Arwa show Zahrah how to set the pins, and Tariq stood there as a clotheshorse. “I did it when we got Zahrah’s. Do you remember growing that much so quickly?”
“We must have,” I said. “I only remember that it hurt.”
“I trip a lot,” Tariq said. “And sometimes when I’m sewing, my fingers forget what they’re doing. But eventually I’ll be back to normal.”
The girls finished the hem, and Tariq changed back into his old shirt. Later, I was sure, he would take it apart to use for something else. It was fraying a little bit, but there was a lot of usable fabric.
“Your turn, Yashaa,” Arwa said.
I went to sit with them and began the task of helping Zahrah remember how to work the awl and needle. Tariq was the best at it, but he moved so quickly it was sometimes difficult to follow his movements, and he wasn’t very good at slowing down. He watched us for a moment before turning his attention to Saoud.
“Rabbits?” he asked.
“If we’re lucky,” Saoud replied. “Come on, before they pin you to the ground.”
I missed hunting, to be honest. I didn’t have Saoud’s gift for it, but I was competent enough, and I could make better snares than he could. We had been a good team. This was the part of my spirit that had never taken to spinning and craft, despite my mother’s hopes. The part of me that liked to move more than just my hands, and was not content to sit in a room with thread and wool and the easy rhythm of work to fill my time.
If I wasn’t a spinner for Zahrah, I didn’t know how I would spend my time. There would be others to hunt and guard, and she would have better people to give her lessons. She needed to learn things I didn’t know how to do, for a start. Plus, there was the ruling of her kingdom to think of. I couldn’t help her with that.
Or perhaps I could. Saoud said that I listened, even to people like Arwa who often went unheeded. Perhaps that would be my task. I could work, and I could listen, and I could help the Little Rose, if I was married to her.
I stuck the needle into my thumb and cried out.
“Yashaa!” said Arwa.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and turned away because I didn’t want to bleed on the tunic. I scrambled for an excuse. “It’s been a while since I did this.”
Married! To Zahrah! The thought was both laughable and desperately appealing. Of course that was how the story ended. We break the curse and both of us are heroes, and then we wed. The thought was so ridiculous I could barely think it, and it was so necessary that I wanted it with all my heart. I looked at her as furtively as I could. She was sewing slowly, with Arwa guiding her. Her brow must have been furrowed in concentration, because her veil was slipping forward.
She had thought of this before I had, I knew it. She had thought of it from the start. Once she had seen a grand and gallant tale, but now she saw a quiet, oddly feasible future. It was still a dream, but it was closer than it had been when we were in the mountain valley, and closer than it had been when I crawled through the window of her tower. If we did this, if we were successful, we would marry. We wouldn’t have the abandoned love of my mother and father. We wouldn’t have the arrangement-made-good of her own parents. We would have ourselves, and we would make something of that, too.
“Yashaa, has it stopped?” Arwa said.
I made a show of examining my hand and wiping my thumb in the grass.
“More or less,” I told her. “I’m safe to return to work.”
“Is the work safe for you?” Zahrah asked.
“I can only hope,” I told her. “Because otherwise it’s going to take so long to hem this tunic that Tariq will have outgrown it before he even tries it on again.”
It was like a great weight had been lifted from me, knowing the full end of my own dream. It would be different work than I had learned, and different than what my mother had planned, but it would still be good. And if we didn’t break the curse, well, then we were all going to need new dreams anyway.
I looked at the stitches that Zahrah had done. They were even, at least, though they were larger than anything we might have done. I watched her sew two handspans’ worth of stitches, and then I called a halt.