Spindle

by E. K. Johnston

  “How do you know I’ll take you with me?” I asked.

  “You know who I am, it seems,” she said, “but you have forgotten about the gifts. Most people do, you know, so you mustn’t feel bad about it. Most people are rather focused on the curse, and I think that is understandable, so I will let it slide. But if we are to travel together, you must remember the gifts as well.”

  “Discernment of truth,” I said. “Knowledge of worth.” They were the gifts from the unicorn and dragon. She’d had my measure as soon as she laid eyes upon me.

  “The very same,” she said. The pillow casing was full now, and she was standing close enough that I could have reached out and touched her.

  “Well, boy?” she said. I blinked at her. “The rope.”

  “My name is Yashaa,” I said, not wishing to answer to “boy” for the rest of the evening. “There are three others in my party that wait for me in the hills. We have no real plan for our own escape, let alone yours.”

  “Why did you come here, then?” she asked. “If you had no real plan.”

  “We—” I paused, and then decided that this escapade was likely to get stranger before it was over, and she might as well know everything. “We wanted to know the truth of the curse. To see if there was anything we could do.”

  “You’re in luck, Yashaa,” she said. “I was there, after all. And though I do not remember the details with much clarity, I have had them explained to me many, many times. Take me with you, and I will tell you everything you want to know.”

  “You will have to leave your slippers,” I said. “They will not grip the stone, and they will be of no use on the ground.”

  She toed them off obediently, and set them neatly next to her bed.

  “The rope may hurt your hands,” I told her. “I can carry you, or I can carry your bag.”

  She looked at her meager belongings. Then she looked at the other pillow casing. She got it quickly, and wrapped it around her hands. There was a lot of extra fabric, and her hands were now attached to each other, but the idea was sound.

  “All right,” I said, tying the rope around the leg of the table. “There’s no way to untie the knot from the bottom, so they’ll know how you escaped as soon as they see it.”

  “They’ll know anyway,” she pointed out. “The window is the only way in or out, until they break the wall down for my wedding day.”

  “Right,” I said, flinching from her terrible pragmatism. I tested the knot. “Let me go first. And hand me the bag.”

  She did, and I tucked it up the back of my tunic. I looked ridiculous, but there was nothing for it. At least the bag was light. I pulled one more time on the knot, and then climbed over the window ledge. The moonlight was close to this side of the tower, now. We would have to go quickly.

  I let myself down slowly, despite my rapidly beating heart, but it was only a matter of moments before my feet touched the ground. I looked up, and saw the Little Rose sitting on the ledge. She had kilted up her skirt so it would not billow in the breeze or get caught on a protuberance of stone. It was not as practical as Arwa’s wide trousers, but it would have to do.

  Her descent was much slower than mine had been. I barely breathed as I watched the line of moonlight get closer and closer to where she climbed. Then she dropped and was standing beside me, unwrapping her hands. She smiled, a true smile this time, not the bitter thing I had seen in the tower.

  “It’s nice outside,” she said, like she had never been outside the walls before. I knew that she and Tariq had been taken out together, for riding lessons and the like, but I shuddered to think of how long it been since the last time she had been free of stone walls and narrow windows. “Shall we go?”

  “Follow me,” I told her.

  She did. Down the ditch, through the dirt, and up the other side. We didn’t speak as we walked, keeping low and quiet, as I had done on my way in. My mind continued to unfreeze, and I realized that, for all my bravado, I had kidnapped the Little Rose. That she had come willingly—in fact, she had all but insisted—would not serve as an adequate defense if we were caught. And I couldn’t just send her on her way. She had no shoes. Saoud was going to kill me.

  Before we got to the others, I pulled her into a little hollow, and put my face next to hers.

  “The others,” I said, my voice low. “They are my friends. I take care of them.”

  “You don’t want me to put them in danger,” she said. “I’m sorry, Yashaa. If I could get away without you, I would. But I need you.”

  “I know,” I said. Her cold practicality was no different than my mother’s when she had sent us away and separated me from Saoud. “We will manage somehow. That is Arwa—she’s nearing twelve, and is the youngest of us. Tariq is fifteen, and Saoud is of an age with me.”

  “They will know me?” she asked.

  “They will,” I said. Even if her hair did not betray her, they would know her. “Princess, we were your friends once. Tariq and I were, at any rate. Arwa wasn’t born until after you were cursed. We lived here, and then we left.”

  “You’re spinners,” she said. It was a surprise. The unicorn’s gift hadn’t told her that. She didn’t sound frightened, though, merely determined.

  “We are,” I said. “Saoud is not, but he is my friend and my brother, and he will stay with us.”

  “All right,” she said. “I will try my best, Yashaa. And I am sorry.”

  She could have been apologizing for any number of things, but I chose to believe she meant the kidnapping.

  “Come on,” I said, and pulled her to her feet.

  We kept going through the dark. The way was easy enough, but there were thistles on the ground. I could only barely see them in time to step around them. The Little Rose didn’t know what she was looking for. She must have stepped on at least three of them but made no outcry and voiced no complaint. If she kept this up, I thought, we might actually make it back to the mountains. She would need shoes, though. There was no getting around that.

  At last we drew close to the place where Saoud, Tariq, and Arwa were hidden.

  “Yashaa,” whispered the Little Rose. I stopped. “There is one thing I have to tell you.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “No matter how I ask, not if I beg and not if I order you, you must never, ever give me a spindle,” she said. Her eyes shone in the light of the moon.

  I nodded, thinking that the sky was bright enough that she would see, and understand.

  “Yashaa, promise me,” she said. “Promise me that you will never let me spin.”

  “I promise,” I said. Her voice was almost regal, where it wasn’t edged with frenetic worry, and I responded automatically; a spinner to the request of a princess. She would explain it when she was ready. Despite her gift-given trust of me, there was something she feared.

  “All right,” she said, her voice calm again. “I am ready to meet the others now.”

  We took the last hundred steps, up the low hill and down into the little dale where the others were hidden. They were sitting right where I had left them, ready to run at a moment’s notice. My shoes were in Arwa’s lap. She heard us first and looked up. I saw the light of her eyes as they widened in the dark, though she made no noise, and then Tariq turned, and then Saoud.

  “Yashaa,” said Saoud. “Yashaa, what have you done?”

  WHEN THE LITTLE ROSE was born, my mother was given the care of her wardrobe. My mother’s hands spun the yarn that made her receiving blanket, and the thread that stitched together her tiny robes and nightclothes, but when the princess was old enough to require actual clothing, it was my mother’s hands that oversaw their design and make.

  “Spinning is the start, my Yashaa,” she said to me. “That is why a spinner will oversee the princess’s clothes. Later, when she is older, she will have a proper wardrobe mistress. But the Little Rose is ours now, and you must always remember that.”

  It was heady news, even for a three-year-old boy who was mor
e concerned with the frogs around the castle well than he was with the child his mother took such care over. I was not jealous of the Little Rose for taking up my mother’s time. Her days had always belonged to the queen, as mine would too someday. Rasima was hardly a harsh taskmistress, and I often accompanied my mother while she went about her work, if there was no one else free to mind me. So it was my hands on which the yarn for the Little Rose was spooled up, and my face she laughed at when I made faces to distract her while my mother measured her or changed her wraps or took a moment’s peace from the pair of us. I had no sibling, after all, and had the story gone differently, I might have looked to the Little Rose as sister and princess both.

  If there were hard feelings between myself and the princess in those days, it was from the knowledge that someday she would be old enough to know that she was loved by her mother and her father, while I had only my mother. It was her birth, the way the king and queen looked at her when she cooed or giggled, or even puked, that brought to my attention something I had never noted before. The Little Rose had two parents. I had only the one.

  “Where is my father?” I asked my mother one night while she spun undyed wool for no particular reason, other than that she liked the work. “Has he died?”

  My mother set the spindle down, carefully as always so that her work would not undo itself, and took me in her arms.

  “Your father is not here, my Yashaa,” she answered me. “I loved him, and he loved me, but he had his own duty to mind, as I do here. He could not stay, and I would not go with him.”

  “Will I ever meet him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “When you are older, and can walk all day and into the night if you must, we will ask the king if he will outfit you for a journey to find him.”

  “Leave here?” I said. “Leave you and Tariq? And the Little Rose?”

  “If you wish to,” she said. “You can always return, remember. Your place here is as assured as mine is, and will always be.”

  “Even if I can’t spin as well as you can?” For this was the deepest fear of my childhood, that I would hold a spindle and spin the thread, and it would not be good enough for the Little Rose or her parents.

  “You can always muck out stalls,” my mother told me, but she was laughing as she said it, and I knew that she would do everything she could to make sure my thread was the match of hers. It was, after all, as much her pride as it was mine.

  And so I practiced. My chubby fingers made lumpy yarn, almost too thick for the horse blankets it ended up in, though my mother was always sure to point my work out to me as the horse and rider went past. Then I made better yarn, as could be used in new rugs for the cold stone castle floors. By that time the Little Rose had a proper nurse, not a spinner, and it was Tariq who spent the most time with her. When they came to visit us in the spinning room, I was always given charge of them. I was entrusted to make sure they didn’t end up falling into the hearth, or into the uncarded wool we kept in bins along the wall; or, at least in the case of the latter, to make sure that if they did so, they did so on purpose.

  I thought the world was Kharuf, and Kharuf was the world, and I did not learn otherwise until the Little Rose turned four, and the Maker King brought his son to wish her well on the day of her birth. I stood proudly beside my mother when they rode into the courtyard, horse after horse. Even the prince had his own mount, though he was barely older than I. Each of the horses was tall and brown, and draped in fine gold cloth. I knew they must have stopped just beyond the rise to gird the horses thus, for they bore none of the dust that long travel would have given them. Still, it was an excellent show.

  The Maker King dismounted and walked up the stairs to where Qasim and Rasima waited for him. The Little Rose stood behind them, but on her own two feet rather than in the arms of her nurse. The prince followed his father and made a pretty bow to the Little Rose when they were introduced. My mother stood one step down from the queen, in the place of honor her work accorded to her. I watched the Maker King look right through her, as though she wasn’t even there, which I did not understand. Surely, after all, the Maker King understood cloth and thread, and the making of it. He wore enough of it.

  I looked then to the prince, thinking that we were of an age and would perhaps be sat together, as the Little Rose had sat with Tariq since they were old enough to take spoons at the table. He had dark hair and skin, and cheeks as round as mine, but his expression was already cold in the face of our welcome, as his father’s was. He was a child as I was, and yet at the same time he was not. I suddenly hoped we would not have very much to do with one another while he stayed, for he did not look like he would be good company.

  As the kings and queen were distracted by the necessary courtesies of formal welcome, and everyone else was distracted watching them, the Little Rose grew bored, and wandered over to where I stood behind my mother’s place. I knew from experience that a bored Little Rose was a mischievous one, so when she held out her arms to me, I took her hands without protest, hoping to forestall a scene. She was, after all, old enough to understand dignity; we both knew it was my duty, if not my prescribed task, to help her if she wavered.

  The Maker Prince watched us, disdain on his face. Usually, the Little Rose’s parents smiled indulgently when she reached for me; but now they didn’t look at her at all, and her nurse hurried over to take her away from me. I knew then that I had done something wrong, but I didn’t know what. I couldn’t see my mother’s face, but I could see the face of the Maker King if I dared to look at it, and when I dared, I saw that he was as indignant as his son. I looked back at the flagstones in the courtyard, humiliated and aware, for the first time, that the Little Rose was a princess—the princess. That someday, she would be the queen. And though I might inherit my mother’s place, if I earned it, I would only ever be a spinner in her court.

  I do not remember the rest of the Maker King’s visit, except that the tables in the Great Hall were moved, and that Tariq and the Little Rose could not sit together. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen, nursing my hurt feelings with whatever food the cooks would let me sample. It was there, and not from my mother, that I learned the true purpose of the Maker King’s visit.

  “He has come to offer a marriage contract for the Little Rose,” the bread mistress said, as she counted the barley stores with the head brewer. “For the little prince, of course. That wedding will get him his name.”

  The prince had not endeared himself to anyone in the castle during his stay, so her tone when she spoke of him was not kind.

  “Will the king and queen accept it?” the brewer asked. He sounded unhappy at the idea of the match. I knew little of marriage, except that when it transpired the bride invariably went to live with the groom. I did not wish to lose the Little Rose.

  “They have asked for time to consider,” the bread mistress said. “They will give their answer tonight.”

  I had skipped most of the formal meals since the Maker King’s arrival, and my mother had let me because she understood my discomfort. The prince still stared, though he never spoke to me. I was accustomed to receiving some measure of respect in the hall, for all I was so young, and to giving respect in return. My mother had guessed, rightly enough, that if the prince was disrespectful to my face I would be disrespectful back, and then the Maker King would insist on some kind of punishment, which Qasim would be forced to agree to. During their stay, I took most of my meals in the kitchen.

  No force on earth could have kept me from the Great Hall that night, though. If we were to lose the Little Rose to marriage across the mountains, I would hear it from the king’s own mouth, not from the kitchen gossip. So I went to wash and dress and joined my mother for the meal.

  It was a farewell feast and should have been a sight to behold, except that the head cook cared little for the way the Maker King had sniffed when he’d toured her kitchens, so instead it was merely politely ostentatious. The lower tables were subdued as we ate, a
nd we wondered what the king’s answer would be. The Maker King had made the marriage proposal in public, and thus a public answer was necessary. I began to fear the worst.

  When the plates were cleared away and the sugared confections were brought out, Qasim and Rasima took to their feet. They faced the Maker King and his son. The Little Rose did not stand with them. Her nurse had, I noticed, rather a strong grip on her.

  “My lord,” Qasim said, inclining his head to the Maker King. The Maker King did not return the gesture. “You have come on a long journey and honored us with your presence, and with the presence of your son, at the celebration of our daughter’s birth. We are grateful for your company, and hope to someday return the favor of a royal visit to your own capital.”

  The Maker King’s face was frozen and blank, but Qasim looked determined.

  “You have also offered a marriage alliance between our kingdom and yours, to be fulfilled by our children,” Qasim continued. “Forgive an indulgent father, but we had not yet even begun to think of such arrangements for our daughter, and thus are grateful for the time you have accorded us to consider.”

  Every breath in the hall was held. It was as quiet as I had ever heard anything be. I could feel my heart race in my chest, and my mother’s hand gripped my shoulder.

  “Our ancestor the King Maker made us separate our kingdoms, as you will recall,” Qasim said. “We have consulted our advisors and agree with them. A marriage between our daughter and your son would reunite the kingdoms, and so for the good of Kharuf, we cannot agree to it.”

  A gasp is a quiet sound when made by one person. When made by dozens in a hall of stone, the echo is rather remarkable. Still, the Maker King remained cold, though his eyes tightened briefly before relaxing.

  “Your majesty is as wise as I have been told,” he said to my king. “Perhaps if we have younger children someday, we might revisit negotiations?”

  Qasim nodded regally, and they all took their seats again. There was a moment of pause, and then the servers who bore the dessert remembered that they were meant to be serving it. With their movement, the hall relaxed. Soon, everything would be back to normal.