CHAPTER ONE

Egmar was not yet king when he was married to the Princess Shansi of Kroya.
The match was arranged by Volkis and was perhaps the shrewdest thing this vain and rather dull-witted man ever managed.
Kroya, immediately to the south of Sair Jisenner, is a tiny kingdom but extremely rich thanks to the abundance in its hills of gold, silver, iron ores and lead.
It might be thought that Shansi would have benefited from the wealth this brought to the Royal House but her father, King Taigram II was a mean and surly man. Her move to Sair Jisenner was therefore an escape for which she thanked the gods; and she doubly thanked them on account of her prince.
She thought him the most beautiful man she had ever seen. His lips were sensuous and finely sculptured, his nose straight and his eyes blue. He wore an immaculately-trimmed black beard, and his tall, elegant figure was crowned with loosely curling black hair that fell shining to his shoulders.
He lived well, and surrounded himself with boisterous, pleasure-loving young men and women, and Shansi was bound to compare her new life in the royal compound in Felewith with what she had known at the court of her father.
Shansi had spent her childhood in austere royal castles, the chief of which was a massive pile overlooking the capital of Budenrath. In none of the king's castles was the sound of music or merry-making to be heard. Taigram was reclusive; he took no pleasure in company, preferring the solitary tasks of calculating the profits from his mines and smelting-works. When he did spend, he spent grudgingly, and he reacted with sour ill-will to Shansi's insistence, after her betrothal to Egmar, that she have a tutor to teach her the Sairish tongue. Was she not costing him enough already? he grumbled.
The chance to exchange the dour, joyless court of her father for its very antithesis in Felewith had seemed to Shansi to be proof that the gods looked upon her favourably. She was so enchanted by her new life that when Egmar became king, and she his queen, she saw no disadvantage in losing control over the appointment of her personal attendants* .
Those whom she had brought with her from Kroya were required to leave, and she was sad, but not dismayed. She had known it would happen, but could not have foreseen what a crucial handicap it would prove to be.
If she had not been so infatuated with Egmar, and so bewitched by the life he seemed to offer her, she might have noticed other signs which pointed to possible trouble.
Morvina, the Dowager Queen, had quarters in the royal compound, and Shansi might have noticed the barely-concealed contempt in which she held her step-son Egmar when they encountered one another. Perhaps it was because Egmar appeared not to notice it that Shansi was able to ignore it too.
She might have questioned why Morvina continued to live in the royal compound at all, in view of the accepted practice for a dowager queen to be granted an estate well away from the capital (and affairs of state) to which she might gracefully retire; she might have questioned why so many of her husband's counsellors, powerful nobles whose goodwill he needed because they controlled the kingdom's wealth - Egmar was as bored by matters of finance as he was by matters of state - visited Morvina as frequently as they did, and she might have realised that Morvina's correct but cold attitude towards her was indicative of more than the reaction of an older woman towards a younger, prettier one who had displaced her.
Shansi was blind to everything that did not fit into her picture of an ideal world, a world which was to crash around her when the calamitous news reached Felewith of her father's downfall: Taigram had been deposed, and had fled into exile.
Calamitous for Taigram and his family, the news was greeted with delight by Morvina. Furthermore, she had been expecting it.
Unknown to Shansi, her father's hold on the Kroyan throne was somewhat shaky; she discovered how shaky when Egmar told her of his flight.
Morvina, on the other hand, had known of it long before, and having once used powerful connections to dispose of a king, she now did it again.
Securing the throne for her husband had required the disposal of his elder brother, the childless and unpopular King Tayssad and in this project she had enlisted her brother, the Lord Borden. This time it was another brother, Shten, Lord of Karm, who was her chief accomplice.
Married into Kroya's royal family, Shten it was who engineered the invasion which drove Taigram into exile and replaced him on the Kroyan throne with one of his wife's relations.
Babra, the new king and a man of Sigmar's age, was thus indebted to Shten and allied to Morvina.
She heard directly from Shten how Babra had crossed into Kroya at the head a small army; how his support had rapidly grown as the people and nobility rallied to his banner; how Taigram, unable to trust anyone, had packed up his family and treasures and escaped by boat to the island kingdom of Theigia.
Morvina broke the news to Egmar, and Egmar told Shansi. He seemed to infer that it was her fault; as though she should have known that her father was vulnerable and so have spared him, Egmar, the humiliation of being associated with his disaster.
For her part, Shansi was too bewildered and distressed to do anything but weep, which only seemed to annoy him more.
"My mother and sister," she asked, attempting to control herself, "what news of them? Have you heard?"
"As far as I know they're all in Theigia. Your father packed them and himself off in a boat at the first sign of trouble. That's no way for a king to behave."
Shansi was sobbing quietly, but she said "they might all have been killed."
"Nonsense!" said Egmar. "A people don't kill their king. If Taigram hadn't shown himself to be a coward they would have come to their senses soon enough. Kingship is more than garnering wealth - and fleeing with it at the first sign of danger,"
Shansi said "yes," and afterwards hated herself for not having defended her father. In Egmar's eyes Taigram had shown himself to be worthless. And she was her father's daughter: what a disgrace!
It was a disgrace which the entire court seemed to know about in a matter of hours, but no-one came to commiserate with her. She had thought she had many friends, but now found herself friendless. It was as though failure were a miasma which surrounded her; she became a non-person. Only Morvina deigned to speak to her. "You poor thing!" she said. "How unlucky you must think yourself! But look on the bright side, my dear; if you had not been married you too would be in exile now. They tell me Theigia is the most frightful place; they've absolutely no idea of comfort, and live on fish. I suppose your father will be quite miserable, poor man."
The thought of Taigram being miserable had little effect upon Shansi; certainly not as much as Morvina might have hoped. It was the condition of her mother and sister which worried her. She assumed they were living wretchedly.
After these remarks by Morvina, Shansi could no longer hide from the fact that the Dowager Queen disliked her. She might previously have pretended not to notice the subtle contempt and cold malice in her looks, but now she had to confront the unpleasant truth: in Morvina she had - and always had had - an implacable enemy, but she could not know how dangerous.

*Note: An arrangement, peculiar to the Sairish court, which dated from the murder of a member of the king's council who had been obstructing certain schemes that were precious to the then-queen's family. A personal attendant of the queen whom she had brought with her poisoned him, and since then no queen of Sair Jisenner had been permitted to appoint her own retinue.