Amid inaccessible clefts of rock, where hardly a passage might be secured to allow two soldiers to march side by side, the procession of mournful victors began their descent toward the capital. The same route they had taken some time ago now seemed impassable, lined with narrow brooks that carried black cholera, intestinal worms, and lasting fevers caused by the many corpses.

When the melancholy look in Gold Dust’s eyes turned to resignation, the Shah lifted her from the stretcher and carried her on his lap upon the horse. When night fell and the sky grew diaphanous, the king furled the awning, so she could count the stars and follow the transformation of the moon.

She gazed overhead. “I feel such despair. The tears I prayed for won’t stop now.”

He ran a lock of her hair between his fingers and tugged at it softly. “We will invite the best hakims. They will find a cure.”

She sighed. “What’s the cure for bones that once sheltered emotions?”

The Shah snapped his visor shut and made a disjointed sound of grief, his metallic sobs reverberating inside the helmet. “There must be a cure for a sultana at whose feet the Shah prostrates himself.”

But Gold Dust knew that this time the powerful king and all the wealth in his coffers could not heal her. The fall could not have been the only cause for her broken bones. For years, she had listened to the grievance in her marrow as she longed for the love of a humble acrobat, as her mother plunged deeper into her own obsession, as a daughter with no color and with strange passions was born to her, and as she watched her man drown himself in his own daughter, her Raven. Now her bones had, at last, surrendered, like grief-stricken hearts. She averted her eyes from the Shah’s. Too late, his tears had lost their healing power.

The army neared the base of the mountains. The narrow passes gave way to goat tracks. On his black stallion, the Shah loomed restless against the gray dusk, or the blush of dawn, as he spurred his soldiers on. Behind him, mountain ranges caught the faint light of the moon or the gold of a rising sun absent of resurrecting power.

During the day, they stopped to replenish their goatskins with water from ghanats, or to shoot mountain goats for food. The few hours they rested, watch fires scared wild animals away.

At night the Shah was a dark silhouette pacing the campsite, the breeze shuffling his hair. Occasionally, the tinkling of camel bells punctuated the stillness of the night. The gruff calls of muleteers and the despondent caravan song of men of the desert left behind faint echoes and the grief of an impatient Shah, awaiting daybreak to resume the march, while the ponderous silence and the never-ending tears of the favorite pressed on everyone’s heart.