“Not as safe as this,” she said and kissed me again, her hands making fists in the cloth of my tunic as if she never intended to let me go.
When she pulled away, still holding on to me, she was crying. I wiped her cheeks with my thumbs, which was not particularly effective, and she did her best to smile.
“I’m scared,” she said. “And I’m sorry. If I had stayed in the tower, none of this would have happened.”
“I spent most of the day trying to apologize to Arwa and Tariq for the same thing,” I told her. “But there is nothing to apologize for. We made our choices, and we agreed on them when we did. We had to try, Zahrah, and we don’t regret it.”
“I know,” she said. “But I still feel sorry for it. And angry that there is nothing I can do.”
“I was angry for a long time,” I told her. “And then I found something better.”
“Flatterer,” she said, but she laughed a little bit when she said it, and I knew that for however brief a time, I had made her feel better.
“Can you sleep?” I asked. My own mind whirled, a map of Kharuf spread across it with all the obstacles between us and Zahrah’s castle starkly visible on it.
“I think so,” she said. “And you are going to at least try.”
I let her pull me down beside her, and she turned so that she was still in my arms. She was, I noticed, very careful not to put weight on my injured hand, though otherwise she was as close to me as she could be without physically crawling into my very skin. Her breathing became measured and even, but sleep eluded me. I looked across her to where the others were sleeping, or pretending to, and felt something sharp and hard in my stomach.
Saoud’s father, and the demon he carried, had taught us the staff patterns and how to throw knives. He had taught us to survive in the forest. He had taught us how to find water. My mother had taught us the craft of our ancestors, and the stories they had carried with them from the desert. Those things had carried us this far. Tomorrow, none of that was going to do us any good. All we could do now was wait. And then, when the time came, we were going to run.
THE DAY STRETCHED OUT, long and interminable, and we waited. They did not come for Zahrah, which was a blessing—we had not planned what to do if we were separated when the signal came—and a curse: idleness was worse than the wait. Arwa gathered loose threads from Zahrah’s dress, and from her own clothing, and stored them in her bag. I couldn’t even begin to imagine why, though I didn’t say anything to her. She kept herself occupied, and it was a mercy. Zahrah’s dress was ill-suited for travel, but the soldiers had taken our spares, and so we would have to make do. It was, I concluded, likely to be the least of our worries, and since there was nothing we could do about it, I didn’t let myself linger in my thoughts for too long.
Instead, I thought of spinning, from the carding, which had been my earliest task in the spinning room, to the careful storage of the undyed wool as it waited on the distaff for use. I thought of my mother’s fingers, cleverly pulling just the right amount of wool and feeding it into the dropping spindle, and then I saw my own hands learning the task. What began as lumpy and uneven became smooth with practice, until I had set the work aside to take up the staff and my knives.
But that was spinning too, or at least it was still a pattern. In the movements of the training circle, I had found the same peace my mother found in spinning. It was the peace she had hoped I would find in spinning someday. I had peace now, of a sort. Either we would succeed or we would die. I was reasonably sure that this was not what my mother had had in mind.
We stretched as best we could, to make sure that three days of sitting wouldn’t slow us down too much, and we memorized the way each of us looked, in case there were fewer of us to remember it in the coming days.
When the sun turned to orange and began to light the desert in dark purples and blood-reds, we stilled and listened hard. The soldiers were cooking supper, from the smell, roasting a goat without herbs or any particular finesse to their technique, and those not on duty were seeing to the horses or waiting in their tents for the meal to be ready. There was only one guard outside our tent flap, the man who had carried Arwa, and he looked uncomfortable as he leaned on his staff. He had left the tent open after his shift began, which we appreciated for the air, except it made it difficult to act like we were meek captives.
“How are we going to deal with the guard, if he’s still there when the noise starts?” I breathed in Saoud’s ear. He looked at Arwa, or rather, at her bag.
“I will take care of it,” he said, as quietly as I had. “You get Zahrah away.”