Spindle

by E. K. Johnston

  “All right,” I said. She kissed my cheek, and we stood. And froze.

  We saw campfires, more than ten, spaced out like sentinels in the night. This was not a caravan, with its large central fire. This was not a lone shepherd keeping warm against the dark of night. This was the Maker King’s son, and the others who rode with him, and we were finally caught.

  WE COULDN’T RUN. EVEN IF we knew the way to another source of water, we were traveling on foot. They would surely have horses, and a better idea of the land. We would only be able to go as far as our water skins could take us.

  “This is not the cave I might have chosen for hiding,” Saoud said. “It’s not deep enough, and if we seal up the entrance, it will be obvious that the stones didn’t fall there naturally.”

  “What if we made it look like a tomb?” Tariq suggested.

  “It’s too risky,” I said. “It will be clear that the construction is new. And the Maker King’s son probably doesn’t care about the desert gods or the desert dead. He might take a look inside, just because he can.”

  “So what do we do?” Arwa asked.

  “I could go to him,” Zahrah suggested. I could tell her head was pounding, but she hadn’t vomited again, and her voice was steady.

  “No!” That came from all of us at once, and was louder than we intended it. We all hushed ourselves immediately.

  “No, Zahrah,” said Saoud. “We have not come this far to let you go alone now.”

  “We’ll get as much water as we can,” I said, “and go to the back of the cave. We’ll be as quiet as possible and hope for the best.”

  “That is a terrible plan,” Saoud said. He smiled in spite of the seriousness of the moment. “But your terrible plans have done well by us this far.”

  “This is the worst of them, I think,” I said. “We will be at the mercy of whoever searches this part of the wadi.”

  “Do you think they are really searching, or merely tracking?” Tariq asked.

  “They are camped in such a way that I think they are truly searching,” I said. “They must have a general idea of where we are.”

  “We haven’t been able to make good time,” Saoud said, though he did Zahrah the courtesy of not looking at her when he said it. “We haven’t laid false trails, or done much to obscure the real one.”

  “That’s true.” I said. “And now we must make the best of it. Tariq, get everything that can hold water and put it near the front of the cave. Save a pot with a good lid.”

  “I don’t think I’ll throw up,” said Zahrah. She sounded almost sure of it, rather than merely determined to hold it together.

  “It’s not for that, Zahrah,” I said. “We won’t be able to leave the cave tomorrow for anything, and we might have to stay under cover for more than a day.”

  “Oh,” she said, and understanding dawned. It was going to be an uncomfortable time.

  Tariq got the vessels and selected the one to use as a privy. Arwa took it to the back of the cave and did her best to set it up so that it would be both useful and discreet. The rest of us fetched water, using the night to cover our walks back and forth to the pool. The wadi bed was rocky, not sandy, which was a mercy: we would not leave tracks. On the third trip, Saoud found a shallower cave, closer to the pool. He dug a fire pit there, though he did not light a fire, and then buried it again. Without ashes, it would not bear up under close scrutiny, but he also took the time to strew the ground with footprints, and impressions where five people might have sat around the fire. Finally, he left his whetstone and two of Tariq’s empty thread spools.

  “You can come back for it,” I told him. “They probably won’t take it.”

  The whetstone had been a gift from his father.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “After all, you all left your spindles behind.”

  At last, we had collected all the water we could, and we withdrew to the cave to wait for sunrise. The others slept, but Saoud and I were watchful, even though there was nothing to watch but the mouth of our hiding spot, and jumped at every noise. As the sky grew lighter, we heard the wadi toads begin to croak, and we knew that the prince’s men would soon be striking their own camp and taking up their hunt again. Zahrah stirred beside me but did not wake, and I put my arm around her shoulder. It was colder now, and I didn’t want her to wake up because she was chilled. Sleep was the only real defense against the terrible wait that would be our day.

  She sighed but didn’t wake, and I rested my chin on the top of her head.

  “Sleep if you can, Yashaa,” Saoud said, so quietly I could scarcely hear him over the chorus of toads outside. “I will watch for a bit.”

  I thought I would be unable to drift off, but found instead that I was almost unspeakably weary. Zahrah was a comforting weight beside me, and I fell asleep between one worry and the next.

  It was fully daylight when I woke, though I could not have said how much time had passed. Arwa and Tariq were both awake, and when I moved I knew that Zahrah was awake too, and had only been staying still to spare my rest. Saoud was nodding off, Tariq having taken over the watch, and once he saw that I was conscious, he let himself go.

  My neck was stiff, but I couldn’t stretch it properly. I knew that my legs would probably cramp up soon enough. It didn’t really matter. If we were caught, it wasn’t as though we could run. I rolled my shoulders as best as I could, feeling every knot and every place where the cave wall dug into my back. Arwa was leaning over to whisper something to Zahrah, but the words were so quiet I couldn’t hear them. Whatever Arwa said, Zahrah nodded and turned a little more toward the younger girl. I pulled my arm back from where it had rested on her shoulder and ignored the creak my elbow made when I bent it after so many hours in the same position.

  Arwa removed her veil and shook out her hair. She hadn’t been able to wash her hair in days, but it was protected from the dust of the road, so it was probably cleaner than mine. I had forgotten how long it was, because she had always been so careful to tie it up. It fell nearly to her waist, and I thought she might have been able to sit on it, had she tilted her head back a little bit. She unbraided it slowly, showing Zahrah how it went, even though the movements were reversed, and then slowly braided a smaller portion of it, so that Zahrah could see.

  I remembered what Zahrah had said the day I cut her hair—that if it grew too long, she would braid it. Braiding was making. You could turn braided cloth into a rug with a bit of sewing, and braided threads could be stitched onto a hem for decoration. Zahrah couldn’t braid her own hair, and wouldn’t be able to for some time thanks to the latest trim, but she could braid Arwa’s.

  Her first attempt was clumsy, the plaits wide and gaping, and one of her strands was much shorter than the other two, which resulted in a larger tail than was generally considered fashionable. I laughed quietly as she began again, this time taking care to separate the strands so that they were all of even length. The second attempt was more tightly woven, and I tapped her on the shoulder to let her know that I thought she had done well.

  “You’re not helping, Yashaa,” she breathed, so quietly that I had to lean forward to hear her.

  “You’re doing fine,” I whispered back, close to her ear. Her own veil was still anchored on her head, so I couldn’t see her face. I wished I could. I had learned that I liked to watch her work.

  She made six more small braids in Arwa’s hair before she stopped. Each one was neater than the one that had come before it. When she was done the sixth, she carefully unwove all of them. Arwa’s hair, used to braiding, held its shape even without a tie, so all but the loosest of Zahrah’s attempts had stayed in.

  Arwa quickly rebraided her hair into a single plait and wrapped her veil around her head again. We had not spent much time on the exercise, but I could feel Zahrah relax against me, and I knew that she was feeling momentarily better for having done something, even if it was only busywork. Arwa was more settled too, and Tariq, who had been spooling and unspooling his own st
ore of thread, also looked calmer.

  Saoud slept on, and we waited…and waited. As wretched as the waiting was, I knew that any action would be worse. It would mean we had been found, and I would endure all the monotony in the world if we could avoid that.

  When Saoud woke, we decided it must be close enough to midday to eat something and drink a ration of the water we had hoarded. Though I wasn’t hungry before I started eating, I found that as soon as my portion was gone, I was famished. I took another drink of water instead. We had enough food for two days in the cave and water for three days after that, and it would do me no good to want more of it now.

  Zahrah was holding her head.

  “Do you need more water?” I whispered as quietly as I could. Saoud looked on with concern.

  “No,” she said. “This time it’s different. The headache from sewing was an ache that started in my back, and went to my neck and my teeth and the place behind my face. This is like a stabbing needle, right in both of my eyes. It’s sharper. Like something is trying to catch me by surprise and open me up.”

  She spoke the words as they came to her, describing what she felt, but in the instant after she said them aloud, we both understood them. For the first time, I saw true fear in her eyes, and I knew that I probably looked the same way.

  “Saoud,” I whispered. “I think the demon queen rides with the Maker King’s son.”

  We all carried iron knives and pins. The demon could not take them from us, but the prince’s men could. Even Zahrah would be unprotected if they found us now. I was still scouring my brain for an idea when I heard something and froze. The others froze, too. I’m not even sure any of us breathed.

  The croaking of the wadi toads had faded hours ago, and there had been little noise beside that ever since, but there was a sound now. It was the scrabbling step of feet on loose wadi stones, and it was coming closer.

  Zahrah groped for my hand but dropped it as soon as she had caught it. I knew why. If we were found, she could not show fondness for any of us. They would use it against her, or they would use her against us. Instead we sat, trembling and waiting and hoping.

  And then there was a shadow in front of the cave, and it swallowed up any hope we might have had left.

  The key to a good plan is patience. Any idiot can cobble together an idea, taking pieces of knowledge and power and foresight and laying them out so that the order of them finds itself, but more than that is required for true excellence. I have watched countless schemes fall apart within sight of their end because the one who had charge of them lost patience. Men were out of place, the weather did not cooperate, tools or weapons failed, and without them, all was scuttled.

  Even my own kind were not immune. I had seen my lesser kin go down from the mountains too early, before their power had rekindled. They tried to make bargains and manipulate humans, but they overextended themselves and could not pay the price that magic always requires. I had paid it in small sums, stretched over decades of waiting, and as a result, I was strong.

  I could tell that she was close. We followed the trail that the piskeys had made by accident, but before we went too far, I knew that she was before us. I could feel her—the part of her mind that I had ensured would always stay empty until I chose to fill it. It called to me, as I had known it would. The gaping space where I would make my beginning with her, before I reached out and took the rest of her by force. It was every bit the temptation I had feared it would be, but I was not afraid.

  This was what my kinsman had felt, all those years ago in the desert. He had taken the king and used that power to get more, but he had still been tempted by the Storyteller Witch, and by the magic she had brought to their marriage bed. He had not been strong enough to kill her, to take from her if she would not give, and to leave her body in the sand like he had left hundreds before her. So he reached too far. He failed. And he took the rest of us with him when he fell. I would not make his mistakes.

  The hunting parties rode out the morning we reached the first wadi bed, but the prince commanded that the camp be left standing. He knew that his prize was close, though he did not know what winning it would cost him. Magic is a tangled knot pulled tightly in each direction, and some of the threads are hidden by the others. The Maker King’s son could not see the complexity before him. That suited my purposes too.

  And so I waited one last time while the horses went out and men scoured the desert. I could have gone with them, could have found the Little Rose before they did, but they had earned this chase and catch. And I had earned the fear that the Little Rose would feel when she was finally caught. If I had raised her, she would have been perfect, but she would have been a pawn. Now she would be frightened and angry, and she would try to fight me. It would be all the better when I caught and crushed her, leaving her screaming in her own mind while I did horrors in her name, or sent her to her husband’s bed.

  The sun rose, and I took a form that men could see. I went to the prince’s tent and demanded entrance. His remaining guards let me in without mustering any defense, even though they were plainly surprised by my appearance. Their master thought it a lark, I supposed, for a demon to surprise his own men. I felt my distaste for the lot of them surge, and was glad that soon enough I would grind them all back into the sand from whence they had come.

  At last there were shouts from the wadi, and the prince was called to see what had been found. I could have gone then, to look at her, and see her face when she was trapped. But I had not come so far to waste this moment on a whim. She would see me for the second time in her life, and she would be on her knees before me. It would take time to arrange, time for the prince to secure her and bring her back to his camp, but it was time I did not fear to spend. I had waited this long, and I could wait a little bit more.

  THEY TOOK ZAHRAH OUT FIRST, lightly pulling her with one man at each of her elbows. I felt Saoud move to restrain me if he had to, but I offered no resistance, since Zahrah didn’t either. She could have made them drag her, but they seemed willing to treat her respectfully, and so she let them. That was the first thing I learned about our captors. The second thing I learned was that they were less certain what to do with the rest of us. They had clearly been expecting to rescue a kidnapped princess, and likely thought they would find her in the clutches of bandits or some such. To find us so young and vulnerable in a cave perplexed them, and so they hesitated.

  Several long minutes passed, and we stayed sitting on the floor of the cave. We didn’t move, and they did not come in to take away our things. I saw Arwa dig into her pack and shuffle something around. Without Zahrah between us, there was a space for her to move. I couldn’t see what she was doing, and she was too far away to stop without drawing the attention she was clearly trying to avoid. It took her only a moment, and then she was sitting still again, waiting.

  I turned back to the men at the cave mouth. They were soldiers in Qamih colors, and they carried short swords at their waists. They had the look of men who had traveled far—worn boots and the slight bowlegged stance that comes from sitting astride a horse for hours at a time—but they did not look overly weary. I knew their camp was close, but apparently they had not ridden hard to catch us. It was useless to lament the days we had wasted in Kharuf. We had stopped with purpose every time, and it was not as though going farther into the desert would have solved anything, but still I felt like we should have done more. We were all Zahrah had, and we had failed her.

  I thought how, only a short time ago, I had dreamed that someday soon we would break the curse and Zahrah would be a princess in truth, instead of a dark secret that everyone pretended would live without worry for the rest of her days. I had dreamed that I might marry her and take up a place in her court, as my mother had planned, though it would not be the place she had thought I would have. It was so foolish now, and I realized that it had always been foolish. Dreaming had done me no good, as it did us no good now. There was only the reality of capture, and the uncertainties
of what punishment we would endure at the hands of the Maker King’s son. I hoped for Zahrah’s sake, and for Arwa’s, that the rumors of his character weren’t true. And yet, he had chased us across the heathered slopes of Kharuf. We were probably not so fortunate.

  There was a stir at the cave mouth, and a man’s figure came into sight.

  “Get them out of there,” he said. “It’s too stuffy in that cave for me to go in. Bring the villains out to face me, as they ought.”

  My first impression of Prince Maram was that he had not earned his reputation as a fighter. He was broad-shouldered, of course, and well-muscled enough, but the sword he carried was too delicate for real combat, and his hands had no sign of any of the calluses that would have been formed by extended use of weapons. He dressed very well in silks that were far too expensive for the conditions he wore them in. They would be ruined, certainly, by the day’s end, but he seemed to have no care of that. It angered me, who had seen the suffering of those who starved to buy the most basic homespun wool, to see him have so little regard for his clothes.

  The prince made a disgusted sound when he saw us, waving his hand before his face as though the air of the cave offended him. I’ll admit that after several hours of sitting in close quarters there was a bit of an odor, but it was hardly as bad as he made it out to be. I wondered how he could bear the scent of his horse at all, or if he rode with some sort of scented handkerchief to protect his frail sensibilities.

  They took Saoud out first, hauling him ungracefully to his feet and forcing him to his knees as soon as he was clear of the overhang. Then it was my turn, and then Tariq’s. Arwa caused them some problems, because in the dim light of the cave they hadn’t seen her veil or realized that she was a girl until they picked her up. The guard who set her beside me looked at her almost apologetically. Too late, I wondered if we should have tried to pass Arwa off as Zahrah’s handmaiden, but as soon as I thought about it I realized that between her clothes and her bearing, Arwa was clearly one of us. We were all blinking as our eyes adjusted to the light.