Josef’s joy became my joy, and I learned from him to immerse myself in extravagant pleasures. I learned to love spice-filled sauces, fine wines, and elaborate desserts full of fruit and cream and nuts. I learned to love damask and silk, the feel of diamonds and emeralds and rubies weighing down my ears and wrists. I learned about art, and music, and poetry. I had dresses made by the palace seamstresses, and began bedecking myself in the most overstated, ridiculous manner. Beauty, at court, was paramount, with Josef as king. The Troubadour King, they called him, for his love of poetry, art, the kingdom’s glorious past, and, above everything else, beauty. And no one was more beautiful than I. Every day I asked my mirror the same question—who’s the fairest of them all?—and every day I took comfort in the answer, as if my luck and happiness, my whole future, were bound up in it. Every day, my ladies worked to enhance that beauty. Even when I indulged too much in sweetmeats, they were able to lace me into corsets that shrank my waist to a startling diameter, and apply paint to my cheeks, eyelids, and lips that worked more intensely than any spell Mathena had taught me.
