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Eight years before the events of Promise of Blood...

The Baroness Petara loved a good party. She loved the color, the wine, the music; the giddy blur of faces and the gaudy splendor of gilded furniture. The halls of Skyline Palace were lit this evening by hundreds of candelabras and all the nobility of Adro were in attendance, dressed to the nines and preening like haughty birds. At an event like this, Petara loved to assume an air of distracted boredom and watch the flock of vain young men fall over themselves to entertain her.

Petara loved that the rest of the women in the hall knew what she was about and were helpless to stop her, even when their own husbands threw themselves gallantly at her, requesting the honor of a dance or offering her a drink.

Some of the men enjoyed her sporadic flirting. Some of them were there to gain favor – she was a cousin of the king, after all – and even more of them hovered around hoping to spend a night in her arms. She didn’t blame them. Even in her late thirties, Petara was one of the most beautiful women in the room, and a wealthy widow.

On a normal night, she would have taken at least one of the young men home with her, or up to one of the hundreds of spare bedrooms on the second floor of the palace. This, however, was not a normal night. She was not going to be the midnight conquest of some idiot duke’s son. She had her own hunting to do.

The very best of hunters knew when to wait and let their prey come to them. And Petara was the best.

She gave a titillated laugh at something lewd the man next to her whispered in her ear. “I’m sure I couldn’t,” she said, giving him a sidelong glance that told him that oh yes, she certainly could. What was his name again? Frederik. How unoriginal. But he was the third son of a duke with lucrative trading contracts and he had some wonderfully strong arms. Petara liked to mix business and pleasure when she could.

She leaned over to Frederik and whispered, “Call on me at my manor in the Routs tomorrow night at eleven. ” Without waiting for an answer, she extricated herself from his arms and stood against a marble pillar, stretching languidly in a way that would give Frederik all sorts of ideas. She smiled at him over her shoulder, snatched a glass of sparkling wine from a passing servant, and left the stuffy sitting room and the dozen or so suitors all vying for her attention.

It was a relief to be away from them, if she was being honest with herself. The simpering and flattery got old. Petara wasn’t some brainless bauble to be impressed by flattering words, even if she did act the part most of the time. She went out into the hall, sipping her wine thoughtfully, making a mental inventory of the faces she didn’t know. She threaded her way into the nearest ballroom, stopping to greet friends and rivals, then went half way up the grand staircase and turned to watch the dancers on the floor below.