Sita stifled a laugh as he slid his head beneath the blanket.
Afterward, Sita lay on the bed, feeling sleepy and muddleheaded. She stared at the elaborately painted frieze on her wall, which featured a group of men in the marshes, capturing wild birds in a clap net.
Femi bent down to refill his cup from the jug on the floor. When he straightened again, he was holding a papyrus scroll in one hand. “What’s this?”
Sita’s eyes widened. “Hey! Give it here!”
“‘How do I name this love that we share?’” he recited, his eyes scanning the scroll. “‘A love that spills over me like water, and warms my heart like a flame? It has no shape. It is everywhere at once. I breathe it from your lips when we are together, and when you are gone, I feel it in the wind…’”
“Give me that!” Sita said, snatching the scroll, her cheeks reddening.
“A love poem from another man?” Femi teased.
“It’s not from a man,” Sita retorted. “Iwrote it.”
Femi’s eyebrows shot up. “Princess Sitamun, you are full of surprises.”
Sita stuffed the scroll back under the bed where more than a dozen others were stored in a messy pile. “I’ve always loved reading stories about the gods, so a few seasons ago I started writing some of my own. Poems and retellings of the great legends, things like that. I’m working onThe Death of Osirisnow. It’s always been my favorite. It’s so… romantic.”
“Is it?” Femi echoed, sounding unconvinced. “Doesn’t Osiris’s brother Set murder him and cut his body into a dozen pieces?”
“Fourteen pieces,” Sita corrected him, staring at the stars painted on her bedroom ceiling. “Which he scatters all across the kingdom. Instead of simply mourning her husband’s death, Isis turns into a bird and takes to the skies in search of the pieces, and she finds them all except for one. So she fashions the missing part out of gold and puts Osiris back together again.
“Then, with her magic and her love, she stops time and brings him back to life. In that frozen moment, they make love and conceive Horus, the avenger. But when time restarts, Osiris dies again, and they are forced to part. Osiris enters the Duat, and from that day forward, reigns as the Lord of the Dead.”
She smiled. The story and the kissing and the wine were all a comforting distraction from the world outside her bedroom. “Can you imagine loving someone enough to stop time for them?”
Femi looked at her, a bit of sadness in his eyes. “I can imagine it.”
Sita wondered if she’d said something wrong.
He sat up and picked up his schenti from the floor. “I beg your pardon, Princess, but I must be going. The captain of the guard has been keeping a closer eye on the men lately, and if I’m gone much longer, I’m afraid I’ll be missed. A few of the other guardshave been sent away recently, for reasons unknown, and I’d rather not join them.”
Sita thought of the empty wine jug and her soon-to-be empty bed. Already she could sense dark thoughts seeping back into her mind. She felt cold.
“Very well,” she said dully, pulling the blanket tightly around her.
He stopped in the doorway and looked back at her. “Perhaps I could return tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow night I must attend a banquet,” she replied, rubbing her temple. She felt a headache coming on. “Some ambassadors and a prince are visiting from Tash.”
“Ah,” Femi said, nodding.
“I will call upon you again soon,” Sita said, the formality returning to her voice.
It was a dismissal, and Femi knew it. She could tell by the way he straightened his shoulders and nodded crisply, his jaw set.
“Of course, my princess.” And then, “I look forward to it.”
When he’d gone, Sita went to the basin and poured herself some water. She drank three cupfuls, but her mouth remained bitter and dry.
He gives himself to you, and still you treat him cruelly.
Despite his valid reasons, she hadn’t liked that he’d left before she’d wanted him to, so she’d punished him with her coldness.
You’re using him.
She stared at her reflection in the brass mirror, her thick hair pleasantly tousled, her copper skin tinged with the blush of pleasure and drink.
