cheeks, and led him to his accustomed chair. Palomides found himself blinking back tears. His own father the caliph wouldn’t have embraced him the way this British king had. In Baghdad he was a fourth son, an inconvenient extra, the laughingstock of the paper-sellers’ quarter. But these men had seen him at his absolute worst, humiliated, rejected, wallowing in sin, and here they were waiting for him. They didn’t care what was written on him. They saw the parchment beneath the letters. After that Palomides left off both his hunting and his wooing for a while. For the first time he began to take
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