The Feather She Left

Years later Sam repents and comes up the mountain for the son he left, and the Shahnameh gives the bird the harder half of the scene. She does not refuse him. She tells Zal what he is and where he came from, gives him back, and sends him down with one of her own feathers: burn it, and she will come. The poem has her say he had a nurse whose heart is his, and it lets the leaving be a leaving. What she gives him is not a weapon or a blessing. It is a way of asking, kept for a lifetime and spent once.