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tombstone. Their apparel brought them closer to the afterlife, to the otherside.
White for death
, she thought,
and brown for the tombstone
. The Dervishes were harbingers of death. Nur Banu would soon be wrapped in a white shroud and buried in the crypt with a stone at her head.
    Feyra’s legs grew stiff, and her arms ached where they rested on the stone balustrade. What would become of her? Would she be pursued and imprisoned because she had been too late to taste the deadly fruit before the Valide Sultan ate it? Because she could then not cure her mistress of her malady? Should she run, like Kelebek? And what of her father? Could he intercede for her with the Sultan? Or should they run together? Would he sail her across that sea she had wondered about, only this morning?
    Feyra was suddenly visited by a vivid memory, as bright and over-coloured as the fruit and her mistress had been. She saw, as clear as day, herself as a six-year-old-child, outside her father’s door, playing in the dust with her friends. One of the boys had a top, and he spun it for what seemed like infinity. Feyra had seen magic in it, as it hung there, barely moving, held by some invisible celestial force. Then, at last, the stillness broke into a tremor, then a wobble, before the white top fell into the dust to skitter away between the children’s feet. Feyra captured it and spun it once, twice, until she had the trick of it; and while it spun round its still centre it held her gaze; she and the top unmoving, fascinated that something could move so much that it became still. The other children melted away in search of another game, bored, but Feyra stayed, watching; waiting with excitement and something akin to dread.
    Now, fourteen years later, she understood that seed of dread. She had been waiting for the top to fall, wanting it but dreading it too, hoping with some small fibre of willthat the top would spin for ever; knowing that it would not. Now she watched the Dervishes, waiting for one of them to fall, until she heard the rasp of the curtain being drawn behind her. She turned to see one of the Odalisques, and knew what she would say before the girl spoke. ‘
Come and see
.’
    As she rose, stiff in every sinew, Feyra turned back once, to the Dervishes.
    They were still spinning. It was Nur Banu who had fallen.

Chapter 3
    ‘ I am Cecilia Baffo.’
    Feyra was seated on Nur Banu’s bed. The Valide Sultan looked weak, and her pale skin was darker than ever, the veins mottling. The poison was gaining on her. Feyra might have thought her mistress was raving, but she was still alert and lucid. Feyra shook her head in confusion.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    The Valide Sultan tried to raise herself up a little on her pillows. ‘What do you know of me?’
    Feyra parroted what she had heard from Kelebek. ‘You were captured by corsairs and brought here to the Sultan Selim, may he rest in the light of Paradise.’ Feyra knew that Turkish horsemen were feared the world over; supreme in battle, descending from the hillsides upon their enemy ululating like banshees.
    ‘Captured by corsairs.’ Nur Banu gave a small smile. ‘Yes, that is my legend.
Captured by corsairs
; but this is not the half, the quarter, no, not the slightest piece of my history.’
    ‘I thought I knew everything,’ said Feyra, bewildered, for they had shared so many secrets over the years.
    ‘Speak to me in our tongue.’
    Feyra knew her mistress meant Phoenician. If they were to speak in that tongue, she was about to hear a great secret.Greater than the time when Nur Banu had concealed her husband Selim’s death from the world for three days until their son and heir, the current Sultan, could be recalled from the provinces. Greater than the times when Feyra had helped her mistress divert money from the treasury, and take caskets of money to put in the hands of the architect Mimar Sinan who was building a mosque in Nur Banu’s name. Greater than all the times when Feyra had