As for Yogi, the king asked him: “Was any of it true? The mother’s star? The potter’s son?”

That night, Yogi brought the princess to the observatory tower. He pointed to a narrow slit in the dome. “Look there, Princess. Tell me what you see.”

The princess returned to the palace and slept soundly for the first time in years. The next morning, she asked to visit the potter’s quarter. She did not marry the potter’s son—she became a potter herself, and her bowls and vases carried etched constellations on their rims.

“I cannot,” said Yogi. “Only she can read it.”

One evening, Yogi was charting the princess’s horoscope for the twelfth time. Her moon was in Rohini—nurturing, creative, deeply emotional—but Saturn’s aspect was hard, and the nodes of the moon lay across her fifth house of joy.

“She is not sad,” Yogi murmured to himself. “She is waiting.”

King Vajra had a problem. His only daughter, Princess Chandrika, had not smiled in seven years. Not at festivals, not at the birth of a white elephant, not even when the royal jester tripped into the fountain. The king had offered half his treasury to any physician, magician, or sage who could cure her. None succeeded.