CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT-1
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT Two years passed. The spring of 1529 blossomed. The Valide Sultana tapped her fingers, deep in thought, before lifting the quill to continue her writings. Her suite, curtains drawn, was in darkness except for a candle that flickered in the waning afternoon breeze. The ink scrolled and serifed across the parchment, its flow only interrupted when Hafsa had to reach over and plunge the tip of the feather into the ink well. Her mind raced as she wrote—the quill scratching swiftly in her grip to keep up with the formulation of thoughts and realizations from what she had personally observed, or her emissaries had whispered to her in the solitude of her court: Great battles have been waged between the Scarlet Mantle and the Hapsburgs along the Austro-Hungarian frontier
- Writer
