Carmania Persia 1910

Lillie remained perfectly still; her fourteen-year-old life depended on it. To cause any doubt at this critical juncture would prove fatal. Although it was only mid-morning, she was sweating profusely in her burial gown. The glasshouse effect in the rear of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost was now stifling, and the dead King sitting at her side was beginning to smell.

Six religious clerics led the funeral cortege, with the King's ministers following behind the Rolls. They were each dressed in ceremonial black thawbs. Their cloaks flapped around their sandaled feet in disapproval. Their bowed heads belied the power they wielded without mercy. Later, they would rejoice within the privacy of their cloistered walls, knowing they'd shucked off the infidel and the undeserving.

Tightening her grip on her sanity for the last few feet without gagging or displaying anything other than total commitment to the process, Lillie looped the memory of her last attempt to escape to anchor her conviction. As it flickered across her mind's eye, she clinically analysed the mistake she’d made, which had predictably resulted in yet another violent assault. The beating she'd received had been severe and brutal. The branding of the Royal house between her shoulder blades, pitiless. Despite her tender years, there'd been no intervention to save her from the vicious onslaught. When those times had come, she sheltered in a distinct memory of someone methodically counting her fingers. A woman's hand clasped lovingly around hers, with pale skin like hers and a gold band on her finger. But she could never see the woman's face, just her own chubby fingers and how small her hands were compared to the woman’s. She'd shed many tears of regret over the years that she hadn't looked up; if she had, she might have the memory of someone looking at her with love. Her captors had assumed because she'd been taken so young, she'd have no recollection of her previous life, but she did. The lack of anything approaching sympathy, kindness, or understanding from her abductors left a constant ache in her heart, reminding her she didn't belong and compelling her to risk everything to escape. Each time, after being returned to her luxurious prison, she'd play back the reason for her failure, berate herself and wait impatiently to heal from the punishment. Now, with the King dead and his so-called protection gone, if caught, death would be the best she could hope for. The alternative, to be sold to the highest bidder in the whore’s market, was no idle threat.

The sudden rumble of rough stone under the tyres brought her back to the present. Her last chance to escape was imminent. The stone arch leading to the burial chamber cast the car into shade as they passed under it, continuing through several cavernous rooms, each slightly smaller than the last, until there was nowhere left to go. The Rolls crept silently, barely disturbing the sand floor until finally coming to a stop. The engine was cut, and the chauffeur left quietly. Nothing was ahead except six-foot-thick blocks of stone and oil lamps smoking against the late King's brief pictorial history. She seemed imperious to those looking on. She'd not only adopted their ways, she'd purposefully created a religion out of them. Her commitment to their sovereignty and, crucially, to the aspiring Caliph meant she was now deemed unquestionable by most. She knew their laws better than they did themselves; she'd cleverly and deliberately instigated this particular one, that a king deserved no less than to enter the spiritual world with his Favourite. She wasn’t, nor had been for years, his favourite anything. Maybe at one time, early on, his favourite trinket. Now, it was the duty of the Favourite to stay at his side in death, as she had in life. But she had a plan.