“Stay with me, sena! Stay with me!” Karim said, shaking her and patting her cheek.
Sitamun sat up and slapped his hand away. “I’m fine!” she announced. After a few deep breaths, she continued. “That monster put your heart into his own chest, and it…it healed him. Wove his body back together like threads on a loom—most of it, at least. I thought he would find me and kill me too, but he left. When I finally got up the courage to come out, I saw you, and…” The next words were choked with emotion. “I didn’t know what to do. You were dead, and I was all alone. So I started wrapping you in your robes, to bury you, but then a blue amulet fell out of your pocket.”
The scarab amulet from Setnakht’s tomb, Karim thought.
“It had a message on one side written in the gods’ words,” Sitamun went on. “This is the heart of a king.” I read it, and something came over me. It was as if I suddenly understood what Ineeded to do, like I’d been possessed by some kind of spirit.” She shook her head. “I’m not explaining this very well.”
“Keep going, sena,” Karim urged.
“I told you that the kingdom still needed you. I told you to come back.”
Karim shivered, the hazy memory of her command reverberating through his body.
“And then I put the amulet inside your chest.”
Karim lurched backward. “Youwhat?”
Sitamun looked up at him, her eyes haunted.
“That stone was a heart,” she explained. “Or at least, it had the potential to be. The word is the deed, remember? From my lips to the gods’ ears. Somehow, by saying it, I made it happen. I made it true.”
Karim touched his chest with a trembling hand. He didn’t want to believe it. But the scarab-shaped scar, the heaviness in his chest, and the supernatural lightness of his body forced him to accept what the princess was saying. He felt good,toogood. He had enough energy to climb out of the valley and race to the horizon, to swim straight across the river, to fight a dozen men with his bare hands—and yet there was a burden on his soul that frightened him. Suddenly, he felt like a trapped animal.
“What did you do to me? What did your Khetaran magic turn me into?” he asked.
Sitamun’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about? I saved your life! You haven’t changed. You’re still you!” Then she focused on his eyes and grew pale. “Aren’t you?”
Karim half growled, half shouted something unintelligible and began to pace. “Just like a Khetaran, hey? You want something, you take it. Did you ever stop to think that maybe I didn’twant…whatever this is? That I didn’t want to come back?”
The princess stood to face him. She wore a simple white dressthat clung to her curves in a way that would have been distracting if Karim hadn’t been so mad.
“Unbelievable!” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “You go on and on about this oracle and how it’s our destiny to save the kingdom, and then when you’rebrutally murderedand by some miracle I bring you back—thisis the thanks I get?”
Instantly they were both yelling at each other. Karim told the princess exactly what he thought of her and her cursed, nonsensical kingdom, and Sitamun used some particularly colorful language—including comparisons to a variety of farm animals and assorted vermin—to describe what she thought of him. They were shouting at each other, red-faced and gesticulating wildly, when a dog barked.
Sitamun froze.
Whatever insult Karim had been about to volley next never left his lips. He turned to see a pointy-eared shadow rising from behind one of the boulders nearby.
“Behkai?”
At the sound of his master’s voice, the big black dog came galloping toward them. He crashed into Karim at full speed, his tail a blur of motion, his massive paws planted on Karim’s shoulders as he licked his face with unbridled joy.
“Ugh! Behkai! Stop!” Karim cried, trying and failing to push away the amorous snout. “I know, I know. I’m alive! I, too, am surprised!”
Panting and drooling, Behkai then directed his affections to the princess, licking and nuzzling her hand.
“What a good boy,” she said, bending to kiss him on the head.
“Hmph,” Karim grumbled. “She gets the royal treatment, I get assaulted.” He squinted at the dog. A patch of white fur in the shape of a man’s hand covered the left side of Behkai’s face. Even his eye had turned a cloudy, blue-white color. “What’s that?”
“Behkai tried to protect you and the monster touched him,” Sitamun replied. “A burn, perhaps?”
“Doesn’t seem to hurt him,” Karim said as he gently stroked the white mark. The dog squeezed his eyes in pleasure, pushing his head against Karim’s hand. “Been through a lot, haven’t you, boy?”
“We all have,” Sitamun said.
Karim gazed up at her, saw the pain in her eyes, and sighed. The anger had gone out of him.
