Free The Storyteller's Daughter by Cameron Dokey Page A

through Dinarzad. He glanced up to find her dark eyes regarding him solemnly. He smiled, and she smiled back. Then Shahrayar gave all his attention to the trunk.
    Deep inside he thrust his hands, reaching down, down, down—a very long way it seemed to him— until his fingers touched the very bottom. Then up and down and back and forth Shahrayar swept his hands until he was certain he had covered every inch of the trunk’s interior.
    Nothing. There was nothing.

    Ah God, I cannot bear this’,
he thought.

    What if his true destiny was this: Always to be unable to obtain what others seemed to come by without thought.
    What had Dinarzad said? That Shahrazad had told her a tale each night since she had first grown strong enough to lift up the lid of the trunk. How many times had she reached in and pulled forth the thing she longed for, each time successful though she was just a child?
    But for the king, it appeared, there would be nothing. No tale, just as there had been no trust.
    No love.

    No! Not this time!
thought Shahrayar.
This time will be different. This, I vow.

    And as if his vow contained the power of a wish, his hands found the thing they had been searching for.
    Shahrayar seized the piece of cloth in his hands as he drew it forth as if he were afraid it might escape him now that he had found it. Then almost at once, he relaxed his hold. Passing the cloth from hand to hand as if trying to learn its texture. To figure out how Shahrazad would be able to perceive and decipher what he could not.
    Though the finding of it brought him wonder, to Shahrayar it still seemed but a simple piece of cloth. It was thick and heavy, its texture rough in some places and smooth in others. It seemed to cling to his hands, then slip away all in the same moment. Even its color seemed changeable, so that he could not truly say just what color it was.
    “This is all that I could find,” he said at last. He sat back upon his heels and raised the cloth to Shahrazad.
    “That is as it should be,” Shahrazad answered as she stretched out her arms. Shahrayar laid the cloth across them. “For it means this story is yours. Will you hear it?”
    “I will,” said Shahrayar.
    At these words, Dinarzad sighed once more. Shahrayar closed the lid of the trunk, lifted it, and set it aside. Dinarzad then curled up at her sister’s feet. Shahrayar retired to a nest of cushions nearby.
    For many moments Shahrazad did nothing but sit silently, her head bent, as if listening to the story within the cloth. Then she began to move her fingers from side to side across it—on one end only, Shahrayar noted. Not from end to end, as if to learn the tale in its entirety, but only the place where it would start. Though how she knew which end was which Shahrayar could not even begin to guess.
    “This tale is subde. It has many twists and turns,” Shahrazad said at last. Then to Shahrayar’s secret delight, she smiled.”As befits the mind of a king, perhaps.”
    “Perhaps,” agreed Shahrayar.
    “It is long, as the life of a king should be,” Shahrazad went on. “Are you sure you have the will and the patience to hear it through to the end?”
    “I do,” Shahrayar vowed.
    Though he expected her to begin at once, Shahrazad sat perfectly still for the count of a dozen heartbeats.
    “Then I will give you its name and begin,” she said at last. “The story you have chosen is called …”

Chapter 9
THE TALE OF THE KING WHO THOUGHT HE COULD OUTSHINE THE STARS

    “Once, in a country so far away that you and I will never visit it, there lived a king who desired one thing above all others: to have a son. He had a wife of many years whom he loved dearly, but, because she had given him only daughters, he divorced her and set her aside. He then chose a new, young wife who was beautiful and virtuous, as his first wife had been in her youth, a thing the king had conveniently forgotten.

    Surely,
he thought,
a wife such as this will give me the son I
have