Okay, so, new story! Halleluiah! Excitement! This is something new for me, an experiment, so:

PRELIMINARY AUTHOR NOTES:
1 Updates may switch to fortnightly. The week during which I don't update this will be filled by updating a second story however. So in effect you will still get weekly updates from me just not for a single story~

2 Yugi is a woman in this. I wrote 140 pages of this with Yugi as a boy. All I've done is change pronouns. This is an experiment. This is the only fic where I will have a female Yugi but I felt it fit the story better. I don't like fem!Yugi fics as a rule so if you don't either maybe give it a chance?

3 This is a kind of Historical Romance. It is an AU not tied to any specific period of history or a specific set of Earth countries. I know I can't do a story entirely 100% historically accurate so I won't pain you by trying. So think of this as…realistic fantasy style?

Chapter 1: Homecoming

He sighed through his clenched teeth as he strode into the private presence of his great father. Atemu had so hoped that when he returned to the East valiant, victorious, and almost married that he wouldn't return after three seasons to find that the little white witch was still in his ancestral home.

Yet there, like a bleeding orifice, sat the little pale devil on his father's footrest bare toes peeking out along the tiles as the woman sewed. A tiny white shirt, pale as her own fingers, sat spread being slowly stitched up in the foundling's lap and Atemu's first, gut twisting, thought was that the foreign plague was pregnant with a Sultan's bastard.

"Atemu," his father had sagged, and even now his booming voice strained gently as he extended his hands.

His fingers looked thinner under the fat gold rings and though the Ethiopian in him kept his skin bitterly dark like tree roots his face had developed and odd assortment of nooks and crannies. Atemu's uneasy realization came then, while glancing to his own gallant and taunt forearms, that his father was getting very old.

"Majesty," Atemu inclined his chin.

"Ah," he sighed contented for the moment, slouching back to a comfortable slackness supported by the tension of the seat. "Well then how did those sickly Brits keep you?"

"The people of Britton are quite charming I've found," Atemu attempted diplomatically, reeling back his tongue. "Once you decipher the mannerism and enter into their loving trust they prove to be exceptionally wise companions."

"Your predecessors told me they'll eat nothing as the gods intended it," his father grunted. "Are they still so backwards?"

"They certainly insist on thorough preparations of their food," Atemu tightened, insulted via proxy. He felt vaguely flipped that his father, who ruled such a savage country, could be so uneducated as to pester upon a smarter one. "They believe, on good medicine, that cooking is the only way to unlock the nutritional value of-"

His father laughed. Atemu tried not to sneer in his quest to regain his voice but the little white witch had looped her sewing and pulling the needle to her teeth bit the thread free. It was distracting. Every sinewy, exposed, motion of the supposedly invisible creature made Atemu's stomach curdle. A mission across the wide seas had done nothing to lessen the discomfort and disgust the creature inspired. The Brits had told him stories of the gypsies, from which his father's employee descended, as queer, ungodly, folk.

"-Of," Atemu repeated stubbornly, "their food stuffs."

"Then theirs must be weak crops," his father snorted.

"Not at all." Atemu insisted but was dismissed as, ignoring him, his father twittered over the armrest of his seat.

"Now, now, are we done?" He chuckled down to the witch who flexing, startled, gazed up to him in the dim ivory light of the afternoon. Atemu's father extended one dark hand. "Show me?"

The witch smiled, passed the tiny bundle and exposing it under his thick, weakening, fingers Atemu's father outlined the craftsmanship of the delicate shirt. A certain degree of apparent tenderness crept into the face of his father's advising whore.

"Such lovely skill," he sighed, "if I weren't half blind I could appreciate it better. Do you know, Atemu, your sister's to have her first child?"

The Sultan came back to his son but Atemu only noticed him a second later too transfixed by watching the witch reclaim the morsel and continue pulling another into her lap. He gripped the hilt of his sword tighter and fingers almost quaking he stood stiffer as he spoke next.

"I didn't," he confessed, his eyes couldn't quite connect.

There were embers bubbling, burning, inside him from years before. The witch making swaddling for his clan, the witch so close to the beating heart of the nation, the pale death that could sicken and curse a whole new generation…

"Aye, she is," the old Sultan tapped his lips with one gold painted fingernail. "Good strong husband she has now; a wealthy kinsman. Reminds me, you know, that your younger brother Zarzak tells me you've bought a white mistress from the Brits."

Atemu's stomach yanked gaze realigned steeply from the witch at his father's feet to the gruff, guttural, quality of the voice escaping the Sultan's chapped lips.

Damn it all.

"She's no mistress Majesty," Atemu's fingers flexed on his blade for comfort. "She's the daughter of a fine nobleman who has courteously agreed to give me her hand."

"You're my son," he grunted hoarsely, fingers flexing in the same gesture on the arms of his seat. "You don't order your own marriages boy."

"I am a grow man." Atemu specified carefully. "I am perfectly capable-"

"I don't give a piss in the wind if you're a pig in a sty." The Sultan spat. "It's not your business. It's business for your father and your kin and your gods. Not the white ones of Europe or their sickly, converted, women. Unless you dragged your own sorry arse into this world you ought to show me better fealty."

This was not how Atemu had hoped this would unfold.

"Send her back."

"If you would just meet with her Majesty even you will find-"

"You will not parade some harlot through my doors." He smacked the bare centre of his palm against the wood and his witch flinched. "I don't care how fine her tits are. I won't stand for some strumpet prancing beside your brothers' wives. I certainly won't stand for any bitch who could be Sultana to come from savages."

"She is a fine woman," Atemu retaliated sharply, "and I fail to see how it would make any difference to slander the state of the house with foreigners when you already do."

The witch stood delicate bare toes disappearing under the trail of the saris traditional to their homeland. As she twisted round the plush footstool to slink away with her eyes averted the Sultan grasped her tiny, narrow, elbow in his hand. The witch tried to pass him like an embarrassed courtesan leaving the creature's jewellery glittering and clinking across her frame but still Atemu's father insisted.

"Stay," the old man rasped his fingers flexing, and chin down the white witch made no motion to glance over the yoke of her shoulder. "If he wants to insult his ancestors he can leave."

Atemu's stomach sizzled over, bile hitting heat and almost drew his blade as his father's milky eyes settled upon him pointedly.

"Out."

Shooed, like a dog at his master's feet.

Atemu could've screamed.

Anzu, with that soft doe-eyed peaches and cream complexion of hers twittered up to her feet upon his entrance to the tavern where he had left her with his steward. She wrung her fingers, forced a smile, and Atemu suspected she'd been wringing them all morning. A marriage to a prince, a second born, was a very good union for the daughter of an earl.

"Did you find any peace this afternoon Sweetheart?" he attempted to greet her jovially, taking both her hands into his to kiss the backs of her palms. "I trust everyone's been kind?"

"Exceptionally," she promised half giving at the knees as she squeezed his hands, "and his Majesty?"

Atemu sighed, held it in a little.

"His Majesty…" he dithered, kissing Anzu's hands once more for the diversion as her creeks tried not to fall in the trained way of a European woman. "He will need some convincing. He's a very stubborn old traditionalist. He's simply never met a fine woman like yourself."

"So I…" She faltered a little but doing her best to appear otherwise unafraid laughed weakly to his fingers. "I don't suppose I am coming with you to court then?"

"Not for the night," he withered, "but I will leave you very comfortably established here, as befits a woman of your status, and in time I shall soothe father to more modern ways of thinking. At worst my brother, the future king, is sure to understand and support us."

He added a gallant certainty to his voice but quite frankly nothing in the slippery world of intermarriages and backward glancing cultures was ever certain. Kings married and abdicated, or annulled, or were tossed to the wolves in civil wars and no man or scholar could count the many good members of the gentler sex who'd been wronged by suitors who'd led them astray.

"I'm glad," Anzu promised sweetly.

"I promise you," Atemu assured her, "we will be married. We just have to be patient."

"I know," she nodded, "I know. I'm sorry; I'm too sensitive. I just worry that someone else will sweep you off your feet and I shant be able to compete…Men can win ladies back with swords and so but all I have are coy glances and patience." A sad smile escaped.

"No one shall ever infect my heart," he chuckled, then scoffed. "Certainly not here. My homeland hasn't changed since my absence unfortunately. It is still a land of heathen savages marrying many women and stuffing their harems."

"That's very sad," Anzu sympathized in the careful way of her type, never too boisterous or opinionated. In Europe a man only had one wife to discipline, adore or loathe after all. They had to be cleverer creatures. "You've told me your father is a very kind man. I'm surprised the finer points of God and the great work of Christ haven't reached him."

"No," Atemu was closeted in shame really, a converted Moor. "We'll find no good Christian fellows here. Not while my father nests with a witch."

"A witch?" Anzu paled, almost drew back. It was a word the gentler sex repelled and feared in good measure. Witches prayed on the ordered, on the good, on healthy sons and happy marriages and the contentment of others of their same sex and condition in the world. To be called one or to fall victim to one was a nightmarish, very real, concern in almost any continent.

"I suspect," Atemu grunted distastefully, "given how she's enchanted the Sultan. I can only hope my brother knows better than to fall into the company of sinners."

"Your poor father…"

"If I'd had my way the devil would've been tossed out bloody and dirty five seasons ago."

Qazzadara was an exceptionally noble kind of man. Yugi knew from the portraits that her soft bellied Sultan had once been an exceptionally handsome and fearsome war lord claiming at least four princedoms under him from Jursa to Hurzef. Given the option, given the craft, Yugi still would've chosen to meet him withering in his eighties than in the prime of his youth wherein the man could've swept Yugi off with very impure intentions. He was a gentler soul now, an aging father and a tender grandfather, in such a way that no young bull could really appreciate.

Yugi wished, every morning and especially every night, when she was kissed on the brow and sent to bed that the poor thing would live another month, another half a year, another rotation…

Her eyes must've glassed, dimmed off into dreamlessness, because chuckling the old sympathetic fellow squeezed Yugi's hand and drew her back into the warm scented swirl of the court. Yugi's eyes flittered from the domed ceilings, the mandalas, to his thick pitch hand and smiled as the Sultan patted her fingers.

"Which spirit are you off with now?" He joked.

"Seb and Njet," Yugi replied dryly in nonsense syllables which never failed to draw a hoarse pelt of laughter for her trouble. "You, Majesty?"

"Ruing my age," he murmured coyly. "If I was thirty years younger, seven hells, if I was ten-"

"You'd be off warring and fucking Ennochians," Yugi slapped the back of his hand, to divert the real sincerity of the promise. "I know you."

"You do," he chuckled, taking one of Yugi's fingers to kiss. "You're a sweet child."

"And you're a sweet man," she sympathised.

"A corpse almost," he scoffed, "with a bastard-"

"No, please," Yugi pushed releasing the withered crone's hand to stroke irritably at her temples. "Don't bring him into tonight. There's no point. We should be talking about Zarzak, Seth, Mahado, Mana'jet…" she flicked her wrist, bringing up a smile from the fathoming cold bottom of her belly. "Did you know Mana felt the babe kick today? She's absolutely aglow."

"I know too," Qazzadara leant towards her from the throne, clinking aside the scrappily glittering dinner plates as he gestured over the swirl of dancers towards one draped wall. "That Kisara and Sesset and the rest of that whole herd are looking for you."

"Oh dear," Yugi grinned cheekily. "Should we make them wait?"

"No, no, not tonight," Qazzadara patted her elbow. "Go tend my children, the great hopeless flock."

"What's good for gander is good for goose, eh?" Yugi laughed tutting her tongue, pushing back to her feet in such a way that her legs hardly tensed till her wooden heels clacked the tiles.

"Yes and I don't want you here, near the cutlery, when Atemu rears his stubborn arse this evening." The Sultan snorted sourly. "If he brings the whore, I swear to you-"

"You'll send him away and won't throw anything," Yugi half pleaded half ordered. The Sultan seemed gruffly sceptical. "It's bad for your health." She added with a coy little smirk. "Beat your son when you're well."

Kisara was the primary wife of Qazzarada's third son, Sesset the primary wife of the fifth prince, while Mana'jet was stationed at court as Qazzadara's eldest daughter by the now dead Sultana. They were all quite competent adult women skin flourishing in beautiful blooms from cinnamon ripple to Ethiopian pitch. Attending them was always a cluster of other such noble wives and ladies. They were a clattering collective of rich highborn women who organized the business of households, children, stables, dowries and inheritances while the men turned themselves to politics, trade and war.

Traditionally the powerful women of the court were referred to as the Great Lesser Council and without the lesser, sweeter, sex it was no great religious or cultural secret that the entire Eastern princedom would fail to function under the fingers of the menfolk.

Kisara was quite the wiry woman, noble tonight in silver thread and bitter navy. Flashing a long stretch of fine clavicle she handed Yugi her precious eldest son, still in swaddling clothes, for the gypsy to coddle into her chest. Yugi twisted the babe in her arms, clucked her tongue, and rocking kissed the dark nose against her slender arm.

The chatter sort of rushed and folded over one's self in a hive like this. Yugi had spent so many months with her head down, listening, absorbing… till her council became steadily more relevant and her position warily respected. Now she was clan. Now she was a notable lady with alliances and influence. Now the uncomfortable starkness of her foreign complexion was forgotten under five years of grand intermingling histories.

Mana'jet, Mana when they were lazy, held her steady hand to her heavy belly as it sunk between her knees and stroking it seemed so completely at peace Yugi felt soothed. Wives here were so easy going, so natural, as they supped their milk and honey ignoring the poisons of harder liquors. Women like Mana were even easy going pregnant.

"So what do you suppose it is?" Sesset slunk down to lounge like the grand European lords from Yugi's offshore adolescents.

"A boy I think," Mana hefted languidly, thick tawny hair slackly looped over one lovely lustrous shoulder. "Kicks hard. Yugi? Predictions?"

"Either way," Yugi bounced Kisara's son on her knee, "you've got strong hips, you take to it well, you'll have many strong."

"Aye," Kisara raised her glass, "we'll have a shipment of little princes."

Mana chortled lightly, like a lark, and clinking the tips of their glasses good humouredly took another sip as she cradled her belly. Yugi smiled, at ease with the intrusively blunt nature of all their conversations. Adjusting the slip of her sari off her shoulder she turned Kisara's son round again in her arms. She lifted up the back of the child's swaddling, remarked along the little one's spine, and in her natural way checked for faults.

"Good one that boy," Sesset remarked over the babe to Kisara. "You did marvellously."

"How's my stock look today though?" Kisara leant into her knees, clucking to Yugi with a cock of her elegant chin.

"Well fed, fat and lazy." Yugi held the boy aloft a little over her head, adoring. "He'll be hopping soon enough. Good long legs."

Sesset chuckled and extending her arms, without any search for permission from the mother, reached to take the babe from Yugi who likewise handed it over freely without Kisara's notice or care. They were kin and unlike lesser courts Yugi found no assumption running awry that all members of the feminine kind were out to do each other harm or mischief for individual gain.

"So, Gem Faher," Mana leaned into Yugi, calling with that older than sand endearment that had sprouted for Yugi from the ruling house in place of an official title. "Wahjet."

The women, the wives, nodded with knowing little mumbles. An important marriage was on the cards. Wahjet was the son of duke, at the right age to have his first wife and far too silly to be allowed to pick her himself. So they were down to business already.

Yugi snapped her fingers and a lower member of the court handed her her playing cards so across the table, along the gilded windows, she could stack the numbers. Playing cards were trifle, token, things they used to keep track of expenses while they plotted these new connections. Each card was part of a tally they constructed to plot out a man's pros and cons; birth, fortune, position…from which they construed an appropriate wife for him. It was a map.

"He's a firstborn," a lesser wife added up first without any fear of implementing her voice.

Yugi lay down the king of hearts in one corner. It was quite a point in any man's favour.

"For fifteen he has his medals," Kisara approved, as Yugi lay down another card under the king. "Overdue for a good primary; out on the cataracts the bride ought to be hardy, someone we can trust not to lose themselves in a storm. Heavy finances and good food sit out there near the Babylonians."

Yugi casually stacked the cards, in tight easy piles, as the mumbling began.

"Lurek," another lady puffed at the brittle beach wood pipe between her pouting lips, "has a lovely daughter about the age. Good blood, no intermingling relatives. She'd make a fine wife."

"Hmm," Yugi nodded.

Interbreeding was a delicate but rather important religious concern in a society where a man would have several wives and a son several possible mothers. Hence several possible extended families. More than one marriage had been misplaced or cancelled abruptly after a mistaking of which wife had borne which son.

A bearer brought them another round of drinks, swept up the plates and refilled them with fresh finery. Every studded, pierced, slave boy in the ranks could tell when the women had closed in to plot in the same way any beast on the savannah could smell blood in the stagnant air weaving through the reeds by the river. Like Prussian matchmakers they detailed, they weighed, counting, reducing whole families to stock. The only man who could intervene upon the organization of a union was a religious high elder or the Sultan; whose hand in international affairs raised the rank of his son's status and concern to a broader spectrum.

Yugi considered the spread layout, humming as her fingers traced;

"Miss Yusil?" She recommended her vote.

Mana bowed towards her to speak but cocking her chin up paused.

Yugi watched, kept her eyes on the level but felt the whole temperate composition of the air change and pushing as her hair reclined into the coldness of the window pane.

Atemu was here.

Yugi could downright smell it. Tension, whispering, the wives perked with a new cunning purpose.

Did Atemu know yet that…? Doubtful. If Qazzadara had no chance to tell Atemu the entire turn of events this afternoon then it was likely he hadn't sent anyone else with the message since. The Sultan would announce it to the second born himself or else leave it to Mahado his first born perhaps?

The wives, princesses and highest born of the women had already considered trajectories by now in the lavish forays of the grand central court. They turned a little, some of them, towards Atemu. Puffed up their children to go greet him and shuffling the cards left in her fingers Yugi asserted her eyes upon Mana's beautifully arched shoulder. It wasn't her place, wasn't her fortune, to make eye contact with the angry sprite of a princeling. Qazzadara and Mahado may have favoured Yugi these past years, kept her safe, but the river was switching courses soon.

The incense wafting up thick and pale from the centre of the room to the lush gold emblazoned mandalas of the glorious rainbow ceiling obscured Yugi's view as the prince, much too European in his dress, skirted the first layers of grand silk curtains into the more intimate fold of the high court.

There were layers, notes and mannerisms in every part of the palace. Yugi knew by now every ceremonial inch of the high arched window she leant herself into.

Silver and gold embroidery glinted on saris and sailor cut trousers that rustled towards new prey in thick, splendid, colours. Jewellery, clinking masses of fine wrought antiques spread on whole bodies, sung in harmonic notes of pure percussion. They were ready and waiting, all of them, with golden glinted eyes in the perfectly erotic low light of the East.

Atemu must've been swaying between bodies, greeting. The rumble of the sitars had picked up again. The Sultan would've waved his hand for it and the pan flutes to resume. Obviously Atemu had not brought his European mistress from the bay or there would've been an uproar.

Yugi caught his voice drawing closer and shuffling her eyes flickering to Sesset was handed the babe once more to coddle in Yugi's lap as she crossed one knee daintily over the other. It was a wordless covering of Yugi's presence. Mana took the cards from her to shuffle and lowering her voice Yasil, Sesset and another made a game of pretending to be scheming. The real talk would happen between the harems in the high point of the sun, tomorrow no doubt, when they'd eat cold slices of lunch. For now, with a prince to bait and spy, they'd play at talking about anything.

"Mana'jet," a handsome voice greeted kindly.

Yugi turned her face more towards the babe, stroked the cheek and pinched the nose of the shielding pup. Trying to pretend she didn't exist.

"Brother," Mana waddled up warmly, opening her arms.

"Nay, sit, sit," Atemu hushed skimming gently between the women to come to her side and enfold her in an embrace. "You look well dear one?"

"Fit as a horse," she swore grinning, grasping at his hand and pressing it to her navel. "I'd guess you have another nephew too."

"May the stars be kind I should hope," Atemu kissed the height of her cheek bone, patting the belly. "Your husband is a good fit?"

"Charming," she chuckled wiry, "I picked him myself."

Atemu took the joke with grace but it lacked the real sound of pleasure as if something about the suggestion bothered him.

"Kisara," he inclined his head as was customary, "sister-second mine."

"My prince," she extended her hand across the piled sweetmeats, abandoned bracelets and scattered cards. Atemu kissed it.

"Yugi," he grunted cordially, sighing; "as lovely as always."

Yugi rather inclined her eyes to the man's honey cheeked face and replied with the very same courtier's smile her glance never really striking the face entirely.

"Majesty," she answered kindly enough, endearing enough as she squeezed the babe. They would just pretend Atemu hadn't called her a foreign whore in so many words this afternoon.

"A nephew of mine?" Atemu supposed gesturing over the child. There was something subtle in his voice that suggested he rather disliked Yugi holding the son.

"Indeed," Sesset clapped her hands, reaching to tug at Atemu's wrist, "but what's this you're wearing? Aren't you absolutely sordid in that dear Prince?"

"Not at all," he laughed weakly, "it's all the fashion in Europe."

"Unsightly men they must have to cover them up so much!" Kisara joked.

Atemu smiled, pursed his lips, but couldn't make a witty reply. He'd come back all the more sour and sensitive had he? He'd been quite displeased with the state of court when he left. Qazzadara had hoped ambassadorial duties in the Brittons would put him off his piss and vinegar but if anything…

There was something distinctly European in him now; judging, indoctrinated. Those were the sighs of a converted man before savage non-believers in a setting where polite formality wouldn't allow him the mercy of complaining or correcting. Yugi nestled with the babe. She'd never liked the old one lord religions of Europe. The polytheism of the East seemed sweeter, more reasonable, to her than the cold word of Fren and Prussian orthodox churches. Apparently Atemu had received the opposite impression.

"Brother!"

A saving voice called across the tiles and the high lavish ladies round Yugi, including Yugi actually, all sat higher. Mahado, the crown prince, turned his younger sibling with that jovial, glorious, smile of his and generously swept Atemu up into a tight embrace. Atemu for the first instance laughed honestly and charitably squeezed his brother in the slapping embrace of two real warriors.

"My Majesty!" He chuckled taking Mahado's hand tight in his. "You look so lean!"

"Our dear Majesty has been fasting," Kuli praised, "he has even shaved."

"Why yes," Atemu nicked his brother's chin, "so I can see!"

"And you," Mahado slapped his shoulder, "you have transformed yourself! You're neigh unrecognizable in that!"

Atemu shrugged, dismissed it.

"All the same, all the same," Mahado chuckled. "Mana has become more beautiful don't you think?"

"Aye," Atemu smiled, generously affectionate. "She's a lady now."

"Not a mud scrapper," Mahado teased as cawing his sister leant across the table to slap their knees. "Yugi too, somehow, is even lovelier than yesterday."

"Ha!" Yugi snorted good humouredly and knew well enough that, to Mahado, she could smile widely, sweetly, and crossing lines meet the crown prince's eye in a way perfectly filial if not intimate.

"Don't you think?" Mahado offered Atemu the chance to lighten his reputation.

"I was just saying actually," Atemu forced a grin tartly, teeth instinctively tightening and Yugi refused to turn away now Mahado was so locked upon her.

With her eyes Yugi hoped somehow to mouth, to communicate, that the crown prince ought never leave court, ought never change so as not to abandoned them in the clutches of… She sighed, eyes deepening to dreamless worries and caught in that tide she was back to nestling the babe for shelter in the storm. She could barely think of what would happen when Qazzadara died and Mahado…

"So, dear little brother," Mahado joked, "has his Majesty told you the good news yet?"

"No your Majesty," Atemu joked upon the hierarchy of titles. "Though I have some for you."

"Well, well, as the oldest I," Mahado gestured between them, "get to go first."

Oh no, Yugi's eyes flittered up, not here. Mahado you great gentle giant not here before the whole court where Yugi hardly trusted Atemu to school his expressions well enough.

"I suppose you won that," Atemu snorted. "What is it then? Finally married I hope?"

"No the kinder sex has lost me entirely," Mahado grinned throwing up his goblet, "within the month I'm to the sanctuary of Juras."

"A pilgrimage?" Atemu suggested coyly but the concern was apparent in how his posture stiffened.

"No, no," he denied easily. "Off to the cloth; to serve the gods rather than the house of my father."

"A shaman?" The younger prince sickened with his feigned aloofness, supposed interest. "Lost a bet have ye?"

"Won one," Mahado offered his drink and forcing a chuckle Atemu took the glass to drown it. "Shall I tell you everything? Someone ought to escort you to his Majesty?"

"Yes," Atemu grinned palely, "by all means."

Yugi caught, before turning away, the flicker of a glance Atemu shot her; suspicion, anger, all of it violent. Yugi passed the babe back to Sesset and taking up the cards found it hard suddenly to swallow. The day Qazzadara died Yugi would have two options: flee or safely marry and unless she could convince a younger sibling of the prince she rather doubted a marriage would endear her enough to Atemu for safety's sake.

1 You'll find a lot of good old fashioned racism in here!
2 More of Yugi next time~
3 For quick reference;
- Atem's Father = Sultan Qazzadara
-Eldest brother= crown prince Mahado
-Second prince = Atem
-Third prince married to Kisara
-Eldest Princess Mana'jet or Mana
-Fifth Prince married to Sesset
3 Next week will see us posting chapter 2 of this. The week after might see it moving to a fortnightly update schedule as a new fic beings simultaneously. We'll see what happens!

Next Time: Atemu is forced into an unexpected position, Yugi frets amongst the princes, and along the river Anzu has an opportunity to impress the Sultan.