The pole chair swayed as the bearers paced through the hallways of his palace. He counted his friends and his enemies and knew that some he counted belonged on both lists. His dear, loyal chancellor was one. And his loving, viperous vixen of a daughter was another. Thrice he had married Chassim off, hoping to be rid of her. Her first husband had left her a widow at fourteen. Barely three weeks after the sumptuous wedding, the man had slipped coming out of his bath and broken his neck. Or so all surmised at the time. There had been no witnesses to the accident. And his young widow, sallow-faced and hollow-eyed, had seemed appropriately mournful when his family had returned her to her father’s home.

Her next husband had been a much younger man, scarcely thirty years older than his bride. He had lasted six months, succumbing to a stomach ailment that gave him debilitating cramps and bloody bowels. Again, the girl had been returned to the palace, and he had seen her silent and seething at her fate.

Her most recent spouse had died three years ago. The worthy old man had publicly slapped her over some lapse of manners. He had died before the day was out, subsiding in a frothy fit at the feast table among his warriors. Again, Chassim had been returned to him. This time, he had asked her directly. “Daughter, do you mourn your husband?”

To which she had replied, “I mourn how suddenly and swiftly death found him.”

The Duke had made space for her among his own women, and she had made her own choice never to emerge from those chambers and their secluded gardens and baths. He knew of her life mostly from his concubines. She tended the herb gardens assiduously, read avariciously, mostly history and healing lore, wrote poetry, and practiced for an hour every day with her bow. She had expressed an ardent desire to never wed again.

Her wish had been granted, not by her father’s inclination, but by the reluctance of any noble male to make an offer for her. As the eldest of his legitimate daughters, she commanded a high bride-price despite her widowhood and advancing years. But he doubted the cost was what made suitors quail. Any woman thrice widowed might be suspected of witchery, even if no one dared broach such an accusation.

The Duke kept his own counsel on the matter. But he would not suffer her to come near him when he visited the women’s quarters, not that she had ever seemed so inclined. Nor did he eat anything that might have passed through her hands. There was no sense in taking chances. But now, as his chair swayed to the measured pacing of his bearers, he forced himself to consider her as an option.