~~Do I want to be like the birds? So I could just fly away and go somewhere else? Shirazad was musing in her room. Or do I want to be like the rain falling through clouds – to be able to go through the mists of people's minds and read them? However I am not sure I want to know what's on their mind. Except for the king... I'd like to know what happened between father and him.~~
After the last conversation between Shirazad and Shahryar and the thing she told him, you would suppose that he wouldn't come to see her again as he was furious, but he obviously didn't plan to give her a chance to relax from story-telling, and he simply appeared the next night as if nothing had happened before. In fact, ever since he returned from his journey, he was no longer so completely silent as before, but he was often drunk.
Shirazad was writing something at the desk when he arrived. She stood up as he entered the room and greeted him,
"Your Majesty..." But then, it seems she was a bit confused at his appearance after the previous evening, so she looked at her sheet of paper, then at him, and at the sheet of paper again. He allowed her to sit down and return to her work. She was writing something. He sat on the bed and kept observing her. Quite some time passed in silence. Should she continue the story she was telling him earlier?
"Would you cry for me?" he said then. Her eyes moved away from the sheet of paper to look at him. She wasn't sure if she'd heard wrong. Cry for him? She calmly assessed the situation.
"...Would you cry for me?" she replied.
"Yes. Yes, I would..."
She was surprised; she couldn't tell him she would cry, she couldn't tell him she wouldn't.
"...If I want to bed you, will you object?"
"No. You are my king." She was as calm as usual.
"Yes. I am your king. Have you wanted to marry me before?"
"No. You were married." Her voice remained calm. As she felt uncomfortable answering these questions, she looked at the sheet of paper on the desk.
"What if I wasn't?"
"Our father didn't bring us to court. I didn't know you."
Still, his questions continued,
"So you've never been interested in me?"
"How could I be interested in a married man?"
"Yes," he said thoughtfully. "And you had many suitors to keep your mind busy. But you weren't interested in any of them."
She turned to look at him for a longer while, perhaps wondering what these questions aimed at. He was probably trying to get on her nerves, but she couldn't understand why.
"This doesn't mean that I was interested in you," she replied. She could have chosen a more polite way to say this, but then she was afraid he might "misunderstand" her words on purpose.
He laughed, "Then who were you interested in?"
She looked at him with a complacent expression, "Myself."
He suddenly came closer to her desk and stared her right in the face, "You think they wanted your beauty and your wealth?"
He didn't need an answer.
Then he sprawled on the bed – her bed, in her room, – and to Shirazad's dismay, fell asleep, or pretended to. As a result, she had to stay at the desk whole night and she hardly got a wink of sleep. In the morning, when she woke up, still at her desk, he was gone. But she wasn't alone for long because a maid came to deliver important news,
"Your Highness, His Majesty ordered that you prepare yourself because you will accompany him to the kingdom of Samarkhand." Another maid brought some formal clothes the queen had to wear.
Shirazad blinked twice. Yesterday evening, had he come to her room in order to keep her awake on purpose, because he knew that the next day they would be travelling to another kingdom?
Leaving? Where were they going? Why hadn't he mentioned anything? Was he sending her in exile or something? She asked for more information.
"I am not sure, but I think it's just a political visit to the kingdom of Samarkhand," one of the maids replied.
Why would Shahryar take her with him to visit a neighboring kingdom? And was this the way to announce such news? Just random maids barging into the room...
She quickly got prepared. She just put on the clothes chosen for her. She was thinking about her sister, thinking that because of the journey she would be unable to communicate with her at all, or it would be too difficult. She didn't even know how long she'd be away. She hoped Dunyazad would be okay.
In fact, her sister Dunyazad used to have a very good suitor. He was very kind and responsible, and unlike many other men he never intruded on them. But it turned out that after Shirazad's marriage to the king, he got scared and under the influence of another woman who was trying to get his attention and perhaps his family as well, he drifted away from Dunyazad. That surprised Shirazad too because she also liked him and had a good opinion of him. How strange it was, a person who made such a good first impression, who you would think to be so good would suddenly turn out to be so disgustingly meek.