‘It would be a brave man to deny Alethea her wine,’ observed Lilla.

‘Or a cruel one.’

On occasion Lilla had joined them, wanting to escape the scented hallways and echoing staircases of the palace and see for herself the squalid alleys and dismal courts of the poorer quarters.

The worst of them were truly wretched – dark, fetid places, a welter of disease and misery. The people were not yet starving but the cold made them suffer all the same. Domnicus, a lean, long-shanked man with a sparse sandy beard and eyes bright as blue flames, sought out the poor like a dwarf digging for gold. The elderly, the sick, the maimed, the hungry. The cold drew them forth into the narrow, lightless lanes like a flame driving lice from a seam. There was no shortage of work for him.

She and Gerutha would bring baskets of scraps gathered from the palace kitchens, or else blankets and copper coins. And of course wine.

Alethea was a beggar for whom they had both developed a fondness, although she was a truly repellent creature. She had no legs. She wedged her stumps into a small box on ill-cut wheels and pushed herself about with wooden blocks – even though she only ever sat on the same corner of the same filthy passageway next to the same little wine shop. She was wrapped head to toe in rags and some infection had eaten away half her nostril, leaving behind a purple crater. A difficult face to look at, certainly, except that she was always smiling.

But today Lilla made ready for more elevated company. The emperor had summoned her. And she intended to make the most of her chance.

However, when they came for her, his attendants led her not to the golden throne hall, but down to the main courtyard spread before the Triklinos of the Excubitors – the sentinels’ barracks – where an imperial litter awaited her. She gathered up the folds of her silk robes and climbed inside, unsure what to expect.

The litter bumped along in time with the bearers’ steps. It was an uncomfortable mode of transport, she decided – unbearable had she not been wedged inside with half a dozen cushions. She braced herself with a hand on either window, preferring to travel with the curtains open so she could distract herself with the passing city.

Once clear of the palace precinct the litter-bearers turned west up the Mese. Those few hardy merchants still plying their trade – who grew fewer by the week – moved aside for a litter blazoned with the imperial eagle. Meanwhile she gazed out. The coming of the snows had given her a pang for her homeland. There, first snow was not exactly a thing to celebrate – but it brought with it a certain beauty, a familiarity, a kind of cosiness, which only the tall, frosted pines and the powdered shingle hall-roofs could recreate. Here, it was different. A city under snow was an ugly thing – the flurries of ice-dust, the roof tiles rattling in the wind, the endless shifting slush. She felt dislocated, cut off, her heart sick for a home that she feared no longer existed – at least not as she knew it.