Padishah’s Consort
Haseki Sultan Bergüzar Hatun is wife to the new Abd-ul Mejid, and thereby a woman of the highest station and no little consequence in the political life of the Empire. Her movements are held close — she enjoys a narrower liberty than most — which is the very reason Osman must meet with her in private; and meet with her he does, in her own quarters, as befits her rank. Of her person and her particular qualities the record says little, yet her nearness to Osman argues a real part in the affairs of the Empire, and the talk about her hints at connexions and influence, though what she can do, and to what end, is nowhere set down.
It has since come to light that Bergüzar is the newly crowned Sultan, seated in state beside her husband the Padişah. She wears a youthful aspect, one the trio knew again from the dreams they had shared. At an audience she brought forth a silver box holding a scroll bound with ribbon, meant to strike from an assassin's mind all memory of their meeting. The Sultan is a formidable worker of magic, one who bends men's memories and may have a hand in the very dreams the company suffered; and though she kept silent throughout the meeting, Aziz, an official allied to Osman Hamdi Bey, carried the discussion for her. They name her the power behind the throne, and the group has cause to fear both her sway and the reach of her arts — the scroll she furnished working as a potent and lasting Modify Memory, able to lift a recollection away for good.
Bergüzar keeps such a memory-erasing scroll, and put it to Hamit the Quartz of Damascus to wipe his mind after his capture; the spell it bears is the very one that had once been laid upon Osman Hamdi Bey. At Yedikule Fortress the agents of the Sublime Porte contrived to shield the Vizier-i Aezam by setting him as bait to take Hamit alive, and once Hamit was taken they turned Bergüzar's scroll upon him and struck their meeting from his memory.
The Sultan Bergüzar Hatun is known for the affection she bears her husband, a tenderness that may well colour her dealings of state, her fortunes being bound up with his own. Sidra al-Najjar has professed a curiosity about her — as to how it is that women work upon their husbands in matters of power — and it may be that Bergüzar takes no small part in the machinations of the court, leaning upon that affection to sway its decisions and its alliances.
Jean-Zera Mongé stands in a marked relation to the Haseki Sultan Bergüzar Hatun. He is himself a worker of magic, who turned his spells against shadowy foes in a passage with the half-corporeal janissary soldiers; he takes an active part in the talk and the enquiries touching Osman Hamdi Bey and the matter of the Sultan's sister, a diviner of great power; and he joins with his fellows to gather word and lay their plans, the approach to the Ghost of March as an ally among them. He sketched a certain sigil from memory, bound up with the mystery of the consort and her sister, and in the fight he loosed a chilling spectral force and enchanted bolts against the shades, a proof of his proficiency in the art.
The company's dreams beneath the Basilica Cistern laid bare Bergüzar's origins: a young woman of the Topkapi Palace harem, she had been schooled to master her anger and her tongue, and, by order of Padishah Mahmud II, was given a diviner's gift — to "gaze upon the world and the future with eyes spying" — a magical pact sealed under the sign of the Eye of Solomon, her child-name given as "Karya." The Shahmeran, in unriddling Osman Hamdi Bey's journal, confirmed that Bergüzar's full power, of a piece with Theodora's own, lies muted so long as her sister, the diviner Mira, yet lives and stays near; upon the lifting of that check her husband the Padishah Abd-ul Mejid's grand design depends, and it was to that end that Aziz Sefa Bey set out to kill Mira. A last and apocalyptic dream showed the party a ruined time to come, wherein Bergüzar's own crowned son, seated upon his father's throne, turned a deaf ear to her plea — "Don't do this" — and set about the casting of a catastrophic Wish. The palace gossip, meanwhile, whispered of a pregnancy and a coming heir bound to the palace.