The Kislar aga, the master of the girls, shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against his smooth cheeks. “They-they do not want to go, Yashim.”

“Abdulmecid is sultan now. Any moment he may arrive here, at Besiktas, and he will bring his women.” Yashim gestured to the staircase.

The Kislar aga took a deep breath and started up the stairs. “You must come with me. We must get the women away.”

Yashim followed reluctantly as the Kislar aga bustled through the gallery, clapping his hands. “The carriages are come, ladies! To the carriages!”

Not one of the women paid him the slightest attention. They had spent years learning how to behave, how to speak, how to be beautiful, devoting their lives to the service of the sultan. Now the sultan was dead and carriages were to take them away.

They wanted to wail and scream, and to mourn.

To mourn the sultan, their youth, their hopes.

And grab what they could, while there was still time.

2

Above the gardens of the palace, in the smaller quarters reserved for the crown prince, Elif leaned at a window and watched the pigeons through the lattice. Each crump of the guns shook the heavy air and sent clouds of birds fluttering from the domes of Istanbul. From the leads of the Suleymaniye they rose high above the Golden Horn; clapping their wings from the low rotunda of Ayasofya, where the Horn bled into the waters of the Bosphorus; billowing from the domes of the Grand Bazaar, and from the single hemisphere of the Grand Mosque on Uskudar. Again and again the pigeons clattered into the sky, and then fell back.

“It will not be long, Elif.” Melda lay on the divan, twisting a lock of black hair between her hennaed fingers. “The aga will call for us very soon.”