The Emerald Embrace by Briskin Jacqueline;

Author:Briskin, Jacqueline;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media Romance

Seventeen

Divorce in the East isn’t considered a sin. The Islamic husband, needing no grounds, isn’t compelled to brand his wife an adulteress. In the presence of the woman and two witnesses, he simply repeats three times: I divorce thee.

Despite the ease of the rite, however, for the Pasha to rid himself of the princess involved grave risk. There was no way for him to be certain whether discarding the Sultan’s niece would set off the fiercest of all battles, a war of faith. Since he mentioned neither the divorce nor marriage again, I assumed our talk that night had been another of his inexplicable games.

Then, in late August, he informed me that the princess was crating her dowry goods. “She’s taking my barge to Alexandria Harbor. A Byzantine galleon is waiting. Soon she will only be plotting her way around the Grand Seraglio.”

The princess, it turned out, was my one enemy in the harem. The Syrian kadines, when I told them about my pregnancy—though they already knew—responded with interest, giving me advice on it and childbirth. The concubines promptly bought lovely thread to embroider little quilts. The Pasha’s young daughters were always clustering around me to touch my stomach and “feel the baby.” Lullah Zuleika beamed like a proud grandmother.

The harem’s excitement alternately bewildered and delighted me. I’ll never get used to women amicably sharing one man, I thought. Still, it’s wonderful to have friends.

One day Lullah Zuleika invited me to a party. She’d hired an antar, one of that rare breed of storytellers who can properly recite The Thousand and One Nights.

The princess had not yet left, and I was living in the Pasha’s suite until she did. That day there was a chill to the wind and as I opened the unobtrusive door between the Pasha’s residence and the harem, I wrapped my violet wool cloak tighter about myself.

The princess was walking with four of her servants in the fountained courtyards. Obviously she had been waiting for me. As I emerged, she started toward me, her ermine-lined crimson pelisse swirling in a great blood-red curve, her servants following after her.

There was an inevitability to the advancing group. Among her retinue was the huge Turkish woman who looked like a female wrestler. My knees went weak. Nothing, I told myself, can happen in broad, cold sunlight with a score of gardeners around trimming wind-driven shrubbery. I’m safe. Yet instinctively I moved a hand to my gently rounded stomach.

The princess and I walked slowly toward one another. We were both tall and young, but there the resemblance ended. I, my loose blond hair windblown about my rosy cheeks, was of the first generation reared in our new democracy. The princess, her black braids glinting with rubies, her ivory face barred by those straight black brows, was the proud daughter of six hundred years of the Ottoman sultanate.

She halted a few steps from me. She didn’t waste words on greetings. “You’re to be the new Little Kadine,” she said.

Though he’d talked about divorce, the Pasha hadn’t mentioned marriage again.

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