Excerpt of Game of Queens: a Novel of Vashti and Esther by India Edghill

Where does this tale truly begin? Does it start in the
jeweled garden of the harem of the King of Kings, master
of half the world? Shall I begin it there? Or shall I
begin it at an extravagant banquet on the night that a
woman defied the King of Kings before all the nobles of
the empire? Shall I begin when the Queen Mother and the
Grand Vizier plotted slaughter and treason – or with the
extraordinary contest arranged to choose a new queen for
a humiliated King?

Or perhaps I should first tell you of a battle fought
over five hundred years ago, when one king surrendered to
another, only to be beheaded by an outraged prophet – an
act that created a feud between the descendants of King
Agag and those of King Saul. Yes, that is a place I could
begin, with the eternal hatred of the Agagites for the
Jews.

But although that long-ago murder played its part in what
follows, even that is not the true beginning.

Oh, you know a part of it already, but you only know what
all the world knows. You have heard how Vashti, Queen of
Queens, the most beautiful woman in all the empire,
defied the king her husband and so lost her crown. You
have heard how Ahasuerus, King of Kings, commanded the
most beautiful maidens in his lands sent to him that he
might chose a new queen. You have heard how he set the
queen’s crown upon the head of the virtuous and beautiful
Jewess, Esther.

And you have heard how Queen Esther herself defied both
king and law to save her people from the fate the evil
Prince Haman had prepared for them. But beyond that, you
do not know what truly happened, for you were not there.
I was. I am Hegai, who once ruled the imperial harem. I
was there. Oh, yes, I was there when this great and
deadly game began. When a beautiful woman deceived her
cruel husband, and he plotted his revenge -- and so set
in motion his own destruction.

For from that commonplace tragedy -- a wife’s
unfaithfulness and its discovery by a furious husband --
all the rest flowed, unstoppable as a river in full
flood, relentless as time. Its force altered forever the
lives of everyone trapped within its current. But the
game we all played began long before any of its players
were born. It began in the decadent court of old Babylon.
It began when a man I would not meet for many years saved
the life of a woman I would never know.…