“It’s a glorious day,” I said. “Don’t be so lazy.”

“Lazy? No, my dear. Never lazy.” He sprang up, swooped me off my feet, and dropped me back on the bed. “Stroke of genius, actually, letting in the light. I much prefer being able to see you.”

I smiled. Breakfast would be more than late.

Within moments of arriving at the palace—the huge outer courtyard of which contained the Imperial Mint, the newly completed Archaeological Museum, and a bakery from whose windows wafted the most delicious yeasty smell of fresh bread—I decided that should I ever be discarded, I would be quite content to find this the site of my banishment, although I did momentarily reconsider this position as a guard led me past the Executioner’s Fountain. I paused in front of it, imagining the men who, over hundreds of years, had washed in it their bloody hands and swords after public beheadings.

We reached the end of the courtyard’s path and Topkapı Sarayı ’s Gate of Salutations—a tall structure with two pointed towers the likes of which I would have expected to find on a medieval European castle. My guide led me along a diagonal path, lined on both sides by tall, carefully shaped trees, through a second courtyard to the entrance of the harem, where he remanded me to the care of a tall, dark-skinned eunuch, the only sort of man other than the sultan who would ever be admitted to the harem.

“If you would follow me.” He bobbed his head in what might be construed as a bow of sorts but did not meet my eyes. The rich voice with which he spoke was not at all what I’d expected, nothing like the stories I’d heard of the castrati, whose angelic sopranos had charmed all of Italy during the Baroque age. Although he sounded like an ordinary man, there was no trace of whiskers on his perfectly smooth face. “Her Highness has been waiting for you.”

“It took me longer to get here than I expected,” I said, moving more quickly to match his pace, my heels catching in the spaces between the smooth black and white pebbles formed as a mosaic to look like directional arrows down the center of an otherwise cobbled pavement.