‘It was all a terrible mistake, my love. They were after me.’ Jelka shook her head, but a huge lump sat in her throat at the thought of what had happened. She had spent the last ten days in bed, suffering from shock, the after-reaction fierce, frightening. It had felt like she was going mad. Her father had sat with her through the nights, holding her hands, comforting her, robbing himself of sleep to be with her and help her through the worst of it. Now she felt better, but still it seemed that everything had changed. Suddenly, hideously, the world had become a mask – a paper-thin veil behind which lay another nightmare world. The walls were no longer quite as solid as they’d seemed. Each white-suited attendant seemed to conceal an assassin dressed in black. It made it no better for her that they had been after her father. No, that simply made things worse. For she’d had vivid dreams – dreams in which he was dead and she had gone to see him in the T’ang’s Great Hall, laid out in state, clothed from head to foot in the white cloth of death.
