No longer a young boy – Safiya’s ‘little prince’ – but a grown man, Yuel plots to win Safiya over once more. Yet she, too, abandons him, when Yuel grows old enough to no longer need a nursemaid to tend to him.īereft and embittered, Yuel has nothing to look forward to, until – after a prolonged illness – his father eventually dies, and Yuel inherits the throne and the crown in his stead. Safiya is Yuel’s only ally in the palace: his father cold and distant the servants deferential, brow-beaten, and kept silent through fear. In private, however, Yuel turns to his nursemaid, the kindly Safiya, for succour. Kings are not, after all, supposed to cry even future kings such as him. Outwardly, Yuel must swallow his sorrow, for fear of earning his father’s ire. They are, in Khalil’s words, wicked and deceitful, and becoming too attached can end in nothing save disaster. For other women, such a folly mightn’t have been so lethal, but for Yuel’s ill-fated mother – the wife and queen of Indra’s tyrannical king, Khalil – it spelt her doom.Īs he witnesses his mother’s corpse decomposing beneath the intense sunlight, Yuel’s father offers him some sage words of wisdom: namely, not to trust women.
Yuel was only six years old when he witnessed his mother being put to death, for the heinous crime of daring to have an affair. Don’t let your guard down, or they will ruin you.” “Women are snakes and liars, all of them: the more beautiful, the more conniving.
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