I know it isn’t me they’re after, not Penelope the Duck. It’s only what comes with me the royal connection, the pile of glittering junk. No man will ever kill himself for love of me.

And no man ever did. Not that I would have wanted to inspire those kinds of suicides. I was not a man eater, I was not a Siren, I was not like cousin Helen who loved to make conquests just to show she could.

As soon as the man was grovelling, and it never took long, she’d stroll away without a backwards glance, giving that careless laugh of hers, as if she’d just been watching the palace midget standing ridiculously on his head.

I was a kind girl—kinder than Helen, or so I thought. I knew I would have to have something to offer instead of beauty. I was clever, everyone said so in fact they said it so much that I found it discouraging—but cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he’ll take kindness any day of the week, if there’s nothing more alluring to be had.

The most obvious husband for me would have been a younger son of a king with large estates one of King Nestor’s boys, perhaps. That would have been a good connection for King Icarius.

Through my veil, I studied the young men milling around down below, trying to figure out who each one was and a thing of no practical consequence, since it wasn’t up to me to choose my husband which one I preferred.

A couple of the maids were with me they never left me unattended, I was a risk until I was safely married, because who knew what upstart fortune hunter might try to seduce me or seize me and run away with me? The maids were my sources of information.