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Defiant as a rooster crowing at sunset, the boy bellowed back, “Yes! Yes! I am a whelp! I am a ith teeth like pirates’ swords and I’ll tear you into as many pieces as there are jewels in the Sultan’s vaults! She is not a deht now” He crossed his ar in him like the Star’s blood

But Dinarzad blazed Her eyes grew dark asslowly

“No, little brother You are not going anywhere”

The boy woke in a dark, foul-s prison

Dinarzad held a child in each ar their identical hearts out He was trapped with her in the royal nursery, amid the tortured cries of dozens of infants, es

Dinarzad, alrown and ready to befor the Palace children, and she ruled theer than any iron soddess and her as absolute Tonight she was tending the youngest, and for his trespass the boy was tied to her skirts and this wretched rooeon in a King’s castle, and there was no hope of escape as long as his sister’s eyes were fastened on him like scorpion’s pincers

But the gods are not always unkind to small boys, and fate was to intervene in the pink flesh of a colicky princeling Not yet understanding its royal duty, the poor thing simply insisted on his mother’s ar child to the appropriate bedroom

“If you so stone to the next,” she warned, “I will lock you away until you rot One brother will not be missed amid the dozens”

And with that, she swept out the door, rose-colored silks trailing behind her

Of course, the boy had disappeared out the north ithin three heartbeats

The bower looked as though a battle had been fought there, pitch tossed fro all underfoot The white blossos on snapped boughs Their supper had been strewn everywhere, and he saw that he had dented his water flask against a gnarled root when Dinarzad had snatched him away The ruin of the flowers touched him most, the oleander torn petal from petal, scattered onto the dirt The place where he had heard tales that still burned like lamp oil inside him was destroyed, ransacked like a fine house

And the girl was nowhere in sight

He searched over all the hiding places he knew in the vast Garden, through the hedges and rose trees, the lily ponds with their ululating bullfrogs, the olive groves and the borders of the fruit orchards She was gone, disappeared, and all the stories with her

The boy sat down heavily on the riently into the night He put his golden head in his hands, reproaching hiht, foundHe was an impossible thief and even ht to hiht, so perhaps he could be forgiven

He looked up in his despair, and the reat paper lantern And as the clouds passed over it, a single wild goose arced over its vast face, tracing a graceful path in the night He heard it call, lonely and foreign, like a jade flute, and sighed deeply