Waiting for her bath to be filled, she gazed out at the rain and the distant glow of the foundries and the mines where the dwarves laboured. Each team worked long shifts and the fires never went out. This was a hardy land and the dwarves were the hardiest of its peoples. She wondered sometimes if they were hardy simply from years spent breaking their backs at the rock face, but when she’d mentioned it to the king he’d grown angry. He’d said that the dwarves enjoyed their work. Hadn’t she heard them singing? Her words had stung him – he didn’t like to be seen as unkind, even by her.

She had kept her thoughts to herself after that, but she could remember men who sang from the land of her own birth. Those men had been captured in foreign lands and brought across the seas, their dark skin so different from the milky cream of her own, and they too had sung as they’d been forced to beat at the earth and dig fresh roads. Sometimes a song was all a people had.

In its way the king’s reaction, however, had amused her. What was this need to be seen as benevolent? If you were going to be cruel, then admit it. Embrace it. Anything else was just self-delusion and weakness.

The clatter of horse’s hooves sung out above the rain and she opened the window to peer out into the evening. The rain was cold on her face and she squinted against it. The slim, cloaked figure on the horse was holding a heavily laden basket, and a wisp of dark hair was blowing free in the wind.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ the queen said haughtily. ‘I’d like my dinner now.’

The cooks and scullery maids kept their heads down. She could see their skin flushing from the rarity of this visit. She was the queen. She did not venture to the kitchens.

‘All of it. I know the courses and I expect to see them all here.’ Her words were greeted with silence. Outside, thunder rumbled. She walked carefully along the kitchen table where the platters from the dining room had been laid out. ‘And yet they are not. Where is the pigeon? And the venison? There is always a haunch.’ Her words were as sharp as the diamonds that covered her, shards of ice filling the air. ‘Has one of you stolen it?’

‘No, your Majesty.’ Finally, the head cook, a fat ageing woman with warts on her chin and yet the softness of expression that told stories of a long and happy marriage and children at her ankles, spoke up. ‘You know we would not do that.’

Lilith heard the slight reproach in her voice. As if she were talking to a spoilt child, rather than her queen.

‘Then who did?’