‘I lived here with her. I looked after her. When her hands twisted so that she couldn’t use them anymore, I bathed her and dressed her and fed her…’ My hidden anger pushed the words stiffly out.

Tetlia waved my words away contemptuously. ‘And we all warned you that you’d get nothing for it. She burned through her own family fortune when she was a girl, Cerise. Everyone knows that if my grandfather had not married her, she’d have starved in the streets. And my father has been good enough to let her live out her life in a house that should have come to him when his father died. Now she’s gone, and the house and land revert to my father. That’s life.’ She tossed the plundered casket onto my grandmother’s stripped bed and left the room.

‘I loved her,’ I said quietly into the stillness. Rage burned bright in me for an instant. It was an old family dispute. Her father was the son of Grandfather’s first wife, and the rightful heir to all, as they so constantly reminded me. It counted for nothing with them that my grandmother had raised their father as if he were her own child. It scalded me that Tetlia would claim my grandmother as kin for the sake of being entitled to her jewellery, but deny that I had any right to share the family wealth. For a second I clutched that anger to me. Then, as if I could feel my grandmother’s gentle hand on my shoulder, I let the strength of my just wrath leak away from me. ‘Useless to argue,’ I told myself. In my grandmother’s looking-glass I saw the same defeated resignation I had so often seen in her eyes. ‘It’s not worth fighting for,’ she had told me so often. ‘Scandal and strife serve no purpose. Let it go, Cerise. Let it go.’ I looked at the gaping ring in my hand, and then slipped it onto my finger. It fit as if made for me. Somehow, it seemed an appropriate inheritance.

I left the room and went to my own chamber to pack. It did not take long. I had one set of clothes besides my own, and her old Trader’s robe of soft saffron.