The sisters opened their mouths to explain themselves, and instead a stranger spoke first shaving his head, calling himself a Kalandar, begging for shelter with half a face and half a story.

He was a prince once, he tells them, the son of a king, sailing an innocent voyage when the winds betrayed him to an island with a dome of copper and a pavilion of sandalwood, and a smoke-crested mansion with no master but forty staircases and no servants but supernatural birds. His companions warned him: open every door but the fortieth. Of course he opened the fortieth.

What he found there was beautiful, and smell of ambergris, and a girl who warned him one hundred times of a creature behind the gate but pride is patient, and princes never believe the wild until it has them. He fled through smoke into a wandering brotherhood, and when he reached it he found his companions were not his equals: two were innocent. And the price of that mistake would be paid in his flesh.

Shahrazad does not stop to comfort him she is already introducing the Second Kalandar, whose story begins with treachery and a princess riding a horse no one believed was magic.

Continue the story that began at the dinner table. The King is leaning in. The dawn is coming. Are you?

"She smiled at the shaven-headed man, and bid him begin again from the part where his eyes were whole."