The princess bit her lip, then asked, “Why wouldn’t you want to come back?”
Karim ran a hand through his curly brown hair. “I didn’t have to face the consequences of my actions if I was dead. Now I do. That is more curse than blessing. Already I have the deaths of two innocents on my conscience. Who knows how many more there will be?” He stabbed his chest with one finger. “It was my heart that gave Setnakht life! Mine! Whatever disaster comes, comes because of me! Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
Sitamun’s nostrils flared, and Karim remembered everything she had confided in him. The death of the little girl. The murder of her father. The twisted machinations of her brother and his rise to the Khetaran throne. And Sitamun’s involvement in it all.
“You know I do,” she said softly.
Karim shook his head and looked to the horizon. The sun sat upon it now, a great golden ball perched on the edge of the world. The heat of its early-morning rays filled him, as it did for all Red Lands tribesmen, with the need to move forward.
“What now, hey?” he asked. “You’ll make your way to Bubas and try to raise an army?”
“No,” Sitamun said. “I’m going with you. To Perset.”
Karim’s eyes bulged. “You are?”
“Yes.” The princess sailed past him and plucked her blacktravel robes from the ground where they’d fallen. Squinching her nose in distaste, she vigorously shook the sand from the fabric before swinging it around her shoulders. “Now that I’ve seen what this Setnakht can do, it’s obvious that even a great army may not succeed in defeating him. Not without more information about the heka used in his resurrection. He has a plan, that’s clear, and if we’re to have any hope of stopping him, we must have one too. And as you said yesterday, this lost city of Perset may be the only place to find answers.” She sniffed. “So, let’s go. We have a lot of ground to cover.”
Karim, shocked and delighted at this unexpected turn of events, hardly knew what to say. “Well…good!”
Behkai looked back and forth between them with intense anticipation, mouth open, tongue lolling.
“Yes, she’s coming after all,” Karim told him. “I hope you’re happy.”
To his credit, Behkai seemed very happy.
Sitamun waved a hand toward the campsite. “Gather our things, will you?”
Karim scoffed. “Who died and made you god?”
The princess rolled her eyes and began climbing out of the valley, Behkai trotting at her heels.
“Hey!” Karim shouted, scrambling to locate something to cover his nakedness. “Where do you think you’re going? Wait for me!”
2Rae
Rae held the scrap of papyrus in her shaking hands and began to read aloud.
“‘A letter from Raetawy to her mother,’” she recited haltingly. “‘How are you, Mamet? I hope your life with our ancestors in the West is joyful and free of suffering.’”
She sniffed and glanced up at the makeshift shrine. In spite of repeated warnings from Menk and Omari, Rae had snuck back to the farm and salvaged her mother’s sculpture from the scorched remains of their house. Everything else had been stolen or burned, but the small stone statue had fallen off its pedestal out of sight and had been left behind by the nomarch’s men. It was chipped and blackened when Rae found it, but she’d washed away the soot in the river and found that the damage wasn’t too bad.
The sculpture was a bust made in her mother’s likeness, with long black hair flowing in thick waves over both shoulders, and her round, smiling face painted in yellow ochre. Her name in the gods’ words—along with a wadjet eye of Ra—was written inblack along the front. Some of the paint had washed away, but she could still read her mother’s name.One day, she’d thought,when this is all over, I’ll make it look new again.
She’d brought the sculpture back to the ruins of the old palace, where she and the other Horizon rebels had been staying. The brewer’s murder had triggered a citywide search for Rae and all her associates, and Rahotep’s palace turned out to be an ideal hiding place. It was situated on the southern edge of Sakesh, just north of the farms and not far from the banks of the Iteru. The place was considered bad luck and full of mutu—so most Low and High Khetarans alike did their best to avoid it.
Rae had found a small room with a window overlooking the river, cleaned it up, evicted several scorpions, and made it her own. When she’d returned there with the sculpture the night before, she’d set up her mother’s shrine using some broken bricks as a makeshift pedestal. “Don’t mind the mutu, Mamet,” she’d said to the shrine, adding a chunk of dried fish and some water in a potshard as offerings. “The spirits here have a right to be angry.”
Rae hadn’t slept. Instead, she spent the night writing the letter by candlelight.
Her mother had died not long after the Great War, when Rae was only a baby, so she had no real memories of her. But her father had reconstructed her through stories—recollections of her kindness, her strength, her sense of humor—until her mother’s shape had been built into the landscape of Rae’s mind like a temple.
Since her father’s abduction, that temple had been the only place she found refuge.
Rae sniffed again, her lower lip trembling as she read the letter to her mother’s shrine.
“‘I miss you,’” she said. “‘I would say that I wish you were here, but you are safer where you are than in Sakesh. Life is notgood here. There is hunger and drought, and the High Khetarans rule over us and take what little we have for themselves.
“‘I joined a group of men to fight for our freedom, and the resistance was going well until we were betrayed by one of our own. People died. Some of them by my own hand. And Yati”—she gasped, hardly able to go on—“Yati was taken, and the farm was burned.’”
