It was early in the year for pinecones, the best kindling, but with Arwa in our company it wasn’t too much of a concern. She could climb the trees more easily than the cones might fall, and seemed to take delight in pelting us with them as Tariq and I assembled camp every night. She was taking her eviction from the crossroads harder than we were, so we didn’t berate her for it too much. Coming as it had so soon after the death of her mother, Arwa felt the loss of her makeshift family, particularly the company of Saoud, most keenly.
I missed him too. When we walked, I made Tariq lead us, with Arwa in the middle and me behind her to cover their backs. There were large animals, with teeth and claws to match, in the mountain forests, and there was not a lot even the most powerful king could do to keep the roadways safe. If Saoud had been with us, he could have covered the rear, and left me free to lead. Tariq was not wood-blind by any means, and the road was clear enough, but he tended to get distracted.
Accordingly, when I woke up the next morning and found Saoud patiently feeding the last of Arwa’s pinecones to the dwindling fire, I only laughed and pointed out that he could have started the porridge if he was going to be awake anyway. He walked to the food pack, shooing away two bees that were hovering over top of it.
“You’re not going to send me back?” he said.
“You say that as though I could.”
“Your mother said it was spinner’s business.” He would not meet my eye, pretending to measure out the grain for breakfast, when I knew he had done it so many times he could tell by weight alone.
“My mother says that about everything when she wants to cut you and your father out,” I said. It hurt me when she spoke like that. I could imagine how Saoud felt. “Are you coming with us for our sakes, or because you want to see your father again?”
“Can’t it be both?”
“Of course,” I told him. “Only, we might miss him in the capital. Or on the road. Or maybe my mother lied, and he has other business altogether.”
“Then I will go with you, wherever you end up.” He meant it to have the solemnity of an oath, but the effect was somewhat marred when Arwa emerged from her tent halfway through his declaration, crowed with joy, and threw herself into his arms.
“Took you long enough,” she said, once she had rescued our breakfast from an untimely fate and hung the pot above the fire so that we might eat sometime before noon.
“Yashaa’s mother is difficult to escape once she gets her mind set on something,” Saoud informed her. We all knew it for the truth. Even ill, her determination had been enough to get the three of us evicted from the only company that Tariq and Arwa could remember. I imagined she had set Saoud to any number of mundane tasks to prevent him from running off. For a moment, there was a pain in my chest—my heart, not my lungs—as I remembered how my mother and I had parted, but I ignored it. Saoud was here. Everything was much improved now.
Tariq crawled out of the tent we shared, blinked twice, and then accepted our new circumstances without comment before heading off to the river to wash. By the time he came back, the porridge was ready, and the tents were struck and rolled. Saoud carried no tent of his own, because he would have had to steal it, and that was something he would not do. We would have to sort it out once we stopped for the night, but not now, because it did not take us very long to break our fast and be on our way. I ate quickly, and the others followed my lead. I was eager to be moving, even if I wasn’t overfond of our destination. Arwa and Tariq were both intimidated by the fact that today we would leave the forest. They had both left before, of course, but they did not remember it as I did, and they didn’t know what they might find there.
“Look!” said Arwa, who had taken the pot to the river to rinse it. “It was on a rock, right by the river’s edge. I must have just missed it.”
There was a soft glow coming from her cupped hands. The pot hung from the crook of her elbow, bowls stacked neatly inside. Tariq peered over her shoulder to look, and his eyes widened at what he saw.
“Yashaa, have you ever?” he asked, breathless, as I reached them and looked down into Arwa’s hands myself.
There wasn’t a lot of it, but it was unmistakable: fine golden powder, with a soft glow and the slightest smell of honey. I had only seen it once before, when I snuck into the Great Hall at the castle in Kharuf after the Little Rose’s fateful birthday party. The maids, most of them weeping, were cleaning the floor, but I had still been upset over having missed everything, and wanted to see even the remnants for myself. One of the girls had called me over, perhaps understanding that I did not yet know how much the world had changed, and showed me what she had collected in her dustpan.
“It’s from the piskey,” she had said to me, her voice kind, and her face streaked with tear tracks. “It’s for luck.”
“It’s for luck,” I echoed, as Arwa poured the dust into my hands. “It means they watched us, heard us, and approve of what we’re doing.”