Freize waited for moments, listening to the silence, knowing that the two of them, the young woman and the dark lord, could move as quietly as ghosts. What the hooded lord was doing, speaking to Ishraq whom he had declared a complete stranger to himself, and then creeping out to the dark quay, he could not begin to imagine. What Ishraq was doing, silently closing the door behind him, acting as his porteress, he could not think. He lay still, turning over treacheries and uncertainties in his mind and then he sat up in his pallet bed, pulled on his boots in case of an emergency, and spent the rest of the night dozing in the chair by the fireside, on guard – but against what, he did not know. At some time, just before dawn, he thought he was on guard against fear itself, and that he could hear it, quietly breathing at the keyhole.

The inn was stirring at dawn, the lad who slept in the stable yard bringing in wood for the kitchen fire, the innkeeper’s wife coming down yawning to bake the bread which had been rising in a pungent yeasty mound all night long, and the innkeeper running up and down stairs with jugs of hot water for the guests to wash before they walked up the hill to attend Prime at the church. The church bell was starting to toll when Freize started at the sound of a shout from the top of the stairs.

He was out of the kitchen and racing up the stairs, two at a time, to the door of the lord as Luca came tumbling downstairs from the attic room. The door stood open and the lord was there, his hand held out, shaking slightly. As Luca and Freize came towards him he turned his face away from them, pulled the hood over his head to hide his face, and then showed them what he had in his hand.

‘Radu Bey,’ Luca said at once recognizing the standard in the lord’s hand. It was a perfectly circular beautiful piece of fabric, richly embroidered in gold and turquoise, green and indigo to look like the eye of a peacock’s feather, the symbol of nobility in the Ottoman empire, the colour of the standard that Radu Bey had laughingly unfurled from his galley while Luca’s lord had shouted impotently for his arrest.

‘How?’ Luca stammered. ‘What does it mean? Where did it come from?’

‘I found it this morning, pinned on my heart. On my heart! It was fastened to my robe with a gold pin. He sent a killer to pin this on me, as I slept. He pinned it over my heart. This is his warning. This is a message from Radu Bey telling me that he has put his mark on me; he could have put his dagger through my heart just as easily.’