“What, going to the capital to beg?” Saoud said, suddenly bitter. His knuckles were white on the staff he carried. “I know what your mother would have you do. I heard the merchant master tell her that not even pity for children would sway a Maker King, no matter who was negotiating the treaty. We could send Arwa before them in rags, and they wouldn’t feel the slightest bit of concern for her.”
Arwa blanched at the idea, fingers unconsciously twisting in the frayed hem of her headscarf. The cloth was good, but she had worn it for a long time, and it showed. When she ran or climbed, Saoud’s father had said the broken wisps of her veil trailed behind her like piskey dust, but now that we saw both veil and dust together, we knew that he had spoken the words only as a kindness to her.
“You will never have to do that,” I promised her.
“What will we do, then?” she asked. I watched as she made her fingers relax their hold. There was still dust on them, gold against the brown of her skin. It was beautiful.
I looked at Saoud, at Tariq. What could we do? We could walk for days and days, only to throw ourselves at the questionable mercy of the Maker King. My mother, hoping against hope and unable to travel herself, thought that I could secure a future for us. But it would be a future that she wanted. A future for me to spin out the rest of my days in Qamih, and hope for whatever meager prosperity I could wrench from people who were not my own. Always I would be the poor relation, the hanger-on who had no other place to go. I would do that, and gladly, for my mother, if it caused her breathing to ease, but I knew that it would not. Despite the sourness of our parting, I loved her. She was my family too, even if I didn’t agree with her dreams for me and for my future. I would survive, as she had done until her strange illness took hold of her. But I looked at Tariq, at Arwa with her gold-dusted hands and threadbare veil, and I knew that I could not be satisfied with that little for them.
“Whatever we do,” I said, “we will do it together, do you understand? If you don’t like my mother’s plan, if you have another suggestion or an idea, you must tell me what it is.”
They nodded. There was a fire I hadn’t seen before in Saoud’s eyes. I felt as though the bones along my spine were tempered iron, making me strong. The gold dust glowed against my skin, and reminded me of something that I had missed for too long. There were no answers here. But there might be some to be found, if we looked in another place for them.
“We will not go to the capital,” I said. “We will not beg for scraps at the table of the Maker King of Qamih. It’s time for us to go home.”
It felt very strange to say the word.
Tariq stilled. More than any of us, he wanted to see the heathered fields that were his birthplace once again. His was the longing of a memory half real, half constructed. My memories were firmer, and Arwa had none at all, save an idealized version of the Little Rose that I could never bring myself to tarnish. Tariq believed in Kharuf the way he believed in everything else: he had heard the story many times, and when he reasoned his way through its inconsistencies, he found surety, not doubt.
“We will go back through the woods, and cross the mountains,” I said. “We will go back to Kharuf, to our birthright there.”
“What about the curse?” Tariq said.
I let the gold dust fall to the ground, where it mixed with the dirt and disappeared, save for the occasional glint when it caught the sunlight. I brushed my hands on my kafiyyah. It was my turn for white knuckles on the staff I carried, the staff I would use to fight and support my steps on mountain paths. I held on with all I could, the way I held on to the stories my mother had told me about her life before her ruination. The way I held on to the truth.
“If we go to Kharuf, we will fall victim to the curse ourselves, as our parents did,” Tariq said. He didn’t sound afraid, and Arwa didn’t look it. “It will come into our lungs and choke us. The Little Rose does not spin, and so neither can we.”
I had never believed it to be that simple. I don’t think Tariq did, either; he only spoke plainly to bring an end to the conversation. I thought about the golden dust again, and let myself consider the full scope of the world. It was hard for me to do. I liked the straightforwardness of staff fighting, the ease of movements my hands had done a hundred times before. Whether I liked it or not, that also meant spinning, and spinning meant the curse. I knew in my heart that Tariq was right. The magic spun around the Little Rose all those years ago must have grown in potency, the threads of it twisted more tightly by the pull of each season’s turn. We could not just blunder into its webbing.
“We haven’t spun in Kharuf as they did,” I said. “And we haven’t spun here as much as they did. Maybe we won’t be as sick. There must be a way.”
Tariq considered it, but I knew it would take him a while to decide. He would sift through all that he knew.