Someone has drawn another stroke over the third prince's star on the celestial chart. Under the erasure, the original still reads: death before the new moon comes three times. For reading that sentence I was not thrown out of the palace. I was given the room beside his, on the grounds that a possible fraud is better kept where he can see her.
In a court of rosewater and lapis, the sky is a book already written, and only the astronomers of the star tower can read its sentences. Roshanak, a copyist, has a sight no one else has: an eye that reads the sentence originally set down beneath an erased and overwritten stroke. One night, on an old celestial chart, she finds that the death star of the third prince, Bahram, has been rewritten by someone's hand. The term the original names is three new moons. Bahram does not believe a word of it and keeps her at his side all the same, and night after night the two of them trace back, one stroke at a time, whose hand in this palace rewrote a star.
- Bahram cuts you off with "I do not believe you," and that same night leaves his bedchamber lamp burning and the door open a hand's width. Suspicion and hope, wearing one face.
- Hold a lamp at an angle across a dry celestial chart and the original rises up under the erased stroke. These are the nights you read for yourself what was scraped off the prince's star.
- When only one new moon is left and Roshanak has finally found a way for him to live, Bahram asks her back: "And who pays what that way costs?"
Bahram cuts you off with "I do not believe you," and that same night leaves his bedchamber lamp burning and the door open a hand's width. Suspicion and hope, wearing one face.
