Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher Read Free Book Online Page A

wailed. “You’ve always been too trusting!”
    â€œSit down, Dunya!” Shahrazad said firmly. “You, too, Marjan. We’ll sort this through. Both of you! Sit down!”
    Dunyazad set her mouth in a hard little frown, with dimples on either side. But she obeyed with a sudden meekness that surprised me. I sat down, too, carefully covering my bad foot with my gown. And then I had to tell them all about getting lost in the bazaar, about the blind storyteller, about how Auntie Chava had taken me away. I could see that Dunyazad still didn’t believe I hadn’t heard the rest of the tale. She sat unmoving, with her arms crossed, eyeing me hard.
    But Shahrazad believed me—I could tell. “If storytellers in the bazaar are telling of Julnar,” she mused, “her story must be widely known. And yet I’ve never heard of her. She’s not in any of my books—”
    â€œAre you certain?” Dunyazad asked. “You have thousands of tales in your books.”
    â€œI—like Marjan—would remember,” Shahrazad said. “I’ve read them all and, even though with some it was years ago, the Julnar tale doesn’t sound remotely familiar. Besides, sorting through all my books for one particular tale would be like sifting the desert to find a grain of sugar. And we need it
soon.”
    â€œWhere did the Sultan hear it?” Dunyazad asked. “Did he say?”
    â€œNo. It was when he was a boy. His nurse is long dead. And we couldn’t ask the Khatun—”
    â€œAllah forbid!” Dunyazad said.
    â€œNone of the eunuchs were here then. Our father—”
    â€œMaybe
he
knows it!”
    â€œMaybe. But I don’t know when he’ll be back. Since he’s traveling with the Sultans brother, they’ll probably be stopping along the way to visit with his ministers in different parts of the kingdom.”
    Their father, I knew, was the Sultan’s vizier. He was in charge of supplying new wives. Auntie Chava once told me that he didn’t like this—didn’t approve of it at all. But the Sultan had banished his previous vizier for refusing to give him new wives to kill. This vizier—the old one—had been the Sultan’s father’s vizier and had known the Sultan all his life. The Sultan had trusted him above all other men. So the lesson was clear.
    Even less had Shahrazad’s father liked the idea of giving his own daughter as a wife to the Sultan. But she had begged him to let her try to end the killings, and at last he had relented.
    â€œI can stretch out the part that Marjan told me for three more nights,” Shahrazad was saying now, “but after that. . .”
    Dunyazad sighed. “Well, if
she
won’t tell you”—she glanced at me—“you’ll just have to tell the Sultan you don’t know it. Surely he wont. . .” She swallowed. “Surely that will be all right. He’s grown fond of you, Sister, I can tell. Just distract him with another good tale. You can get one from Marjan. Unless she refuses to tell you
anything,
and then we’ll know for certain whose creature she is.”
    â€œI’d be happy to tell you . . .” I stammered. “I know many tales, and I was thinking . . . There are five or six unusual ones that you might not know, and I’d be glad . . .” I trailed off, looking at Shahrazad.
    She wasn’t listening. She was looking down, hugging her pillow, biting her lower lip.
    â€œWhat?” Dunyazad asked her.
    Shahrazad shook her head.
    â€œSister,
what?”
    â€œI ... I told him I knew it.”
    â€œYou
what?”
Dunyazad’s voice was a whisper.
    â€œNot in so many words. But he told me how he loved the tale about Julnar’s son, and he asked me if I would tell it, and he seemed so eager, so happy about it. Like a child he seemed. Like an innocent child.” She sighed, gave a sad little laugh,