Arwa screamed, and reached out for the space where Tariq had been. Saoud grabbed her hands and pulled her close to his chest, muffling the terrible sound. I could only stare at the spot, frozen. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t. He was alive, somehow. He must be.
“Stop!” screamed my Little Rose, loud enough for the demon to hear her. “Stop and I will go with you.”
“You have been mine since the day I first saw you, princess,” the demon said. Its voice was even worse now. “I will have you, and I will do whatever I wish. But if you want, I will stop, so that it is you who murders your friends. They will see you do it, and I will make you watch.”
Arwa’s eyes were streaming tears now, and Saoud was shocked beyond horror, though his grip on her hadn’t lessened. If the demon took one of them as it had taken Tariq, it would have to take them both, but there was nothing I could do. I was stuck in place, fixed by fear and by my grief.
“Choose, little rose,” the demon said. “Choose the manner of their deaths.”
The demon was so fixated on its prize and our pain, so overcome with joy at its perceived victory, that it did not see the piskeys until they were upon it, lifting it up into the sky above us, to battle on a plane we couldn’t reach. The lights of them, warm and cold, strained against each other as we watched, and for a moment, we were locked in the awe of it. Then I shook myself free and fell to my knees, scrabbling at the ground with my bare hands over the place where Tariq had been standing when he disappeared. Surely he was not beyond retrieval. Surely, with magic, he might be brought back. My injured hand sent a wave of pain through me, and I screamed. Then hands locked on my shoulders and pulled me away.
“No,” I said. Everything inside me focused on that single hope, that vain and foolish hope. “No.”
“He’s gone, Yashaa,” Zahrah shouted at me, her voice full of tears and rage. “He’s gone and we need you.”
I howled, uncaring of everything in the whole world except that Tariq was dead and I couldn’t save him. Zahrah shook me again, and I saw that the battle of lights still raged on, though the silver light had dimmed.
“They won’t kill it, Yashaa,” Zahrah said. “They can’t. When the Storyteller Queen made them, she made them as jailors. They will only imprison it again. Yashaa, the curse will still be in place. Tariq will have died for nothing.”
It was cruel, but it worked. I stopped up my grief, though I felt that it was boundless, and looked at her.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked, my voice cracking with the effort of speaking at all.
“I watched the demon while I was crafting, Yashaa,” she said. Her voice was quiet—only for me—though Saoud and Arwa could hear her, and both of them were weeping enough to break my heart again. “It wants me so badly it is like a physical need. I’m nearly ready for it. If I tempt it, I don’t think it will be able to resist.”
“No,” I said, at the same time Saoud looked up and said, “How?”
“I must spin,” said my Little Rose. “Yashaa, you must show me how to spin.”
“I can’t,” I said. “We have no spindles.”
“Yes we do,” said Arwa through her tears, and upended her bag.
Out fell the rags she and Zahrah had sewn in the mountains, the ones she had jokingly told us not to ask questions about, and that had been so distasteful to the guards that they hadn’t confiscated them. Out of the dark of the bag, I could see that the rags were wrapped around four long objects that were heavier at one end then they were at the other. Arwa unwrapped them, her hands hovering over her own spindle, and then mine, and then finally closing around the spindle that Tariq had carried since he was old enough to do the work.
“Spin,” said Arwa, and pressed the spindle into my hands.
My fingers ached, but I closed my grip on the spindle out of habit.
“Spin for him,” Saoud said, and passed me the threads that Arwa had gathered so carefully from the fraying hem of my Little Rose’s dress.
I laid the scraps out, already trying to tell which would make the best leader to guide the rest of them into a single thread. I attached the one I chose to the hooked end and reached for the next piece.
“Spin, Yashaa,” said my Little Rose. “Please.”
I knelt and dropped the whorl. It spun evenly in the light of the rising sun, and the thread grew beneath my hands.
“Take me home, Yashaa,” said my Little Rose. “Find your mother. Tell her what we have done.”