Queen Helga’s Fashion Showings in Constantinople were becoming controversial for their designs and use of translucent silk that often left little to the imagination.  Scant flowing silks with silver and gold threads and trims were often counter to Roman trade practices and Helga’s use of colours were often counter to Byzantine laws and the politics of colour.  Helga’s first Fashion Showings in Constantinople were very successful for all the wrong reasons as determined by Imperial advisors so, it was decided that the Hraes’ Trading Company would no longer be invited to show at the Imperial Palace Fashion Showings.  Queen Helga took the news with her usual candor and decided to continue her summer fashion showings in Constantinople on her own by renting a famous cathouse, The Red House, in the Saint Mamas district of the city.  The establishment was recommended to her by a number of her Hraes’ Trading Company merchant captains and was on the defensive wall along the Sea of Marmara and was even purported to have underground tunnels leading to the beaches outside the Gate of Samathia.  There was even a boathouse outside the walls that had a tunnel going straight into the Red House.  When the owners refused to rent to her, she bought the place for two chests of gold.  Half the Red House clientele were Hraes’ anyway, and the Hraes’ sold them most of their concubine slave girls so, Helga saw it as an investment in her own company.  But the owners only sold her The Red House on condition that she make few changes to the operation that had been established over a century earlier.  Queen Helga agreed to the condition and paid the exorbitant price.  She had other motives.

When Queen Helga took over The Red House, she was in charge of all trade with the Romans and Constantinople because her husband, King Ivar ‘the Boneless’, was often at odds with the Eastern Roman Empire if not at war with it.  She threw lavish dinner parties in Constantinople and she invited the Roman princes and dukes and their princesses and duchesses as well as many knights to the affairs.  She began using her slave trade connections to begin adding Irish and Anglish and Scandinavian princesses to her stable of girls in The Red House.  Many of the princesses were captured during raids and wars in the north and most Scandinavian princesses were gleaned from within the Aesir religious system whereby unwanted births were exposed in sacred groves.  King Ivar had expanded the practice and all ‘exposed’ infants were gathered up by the witches and warlocks who ran the groves and they were all identified and turned over to the slavers of the Hraes’ Trading Company.  Royals wanted sons so, a high proportion of female royal infants were left exposed and were identified as royals and were sent to Kiev separate from the rest of the babies and were raised and trained in special slave schools there.  Queen Helga had plans for these young unwanted and often beautiful princesses and it involved the Roman princes and dukes she was cultivating in Constantinople.