At the queen’s pronouncement, the crowded hallway became even more chaotic, and Femi was pulled away by other guards to launch a search for the pharaoh.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Sita before disappearing down the hallway.
“She has told no lies, O Amun,” Montuhotep droned on, “nor has she closed her heart to the suffering of the innocent—”
Maet’s mother seemed oblivious to both the high priest and the news about the king. She continued her mournful cries, the strands of her black hair falling to the stone floor as she ripped them free. They collected around her in a soft nest of pain, one Sita imagined she would sit in for the rest of her life. She might fly from it from time to time, but she would always return to brood there, in her profound, unspeakable loss.
Sita felt cold. She knew she’d allowed the girl to die. Keeping Mery’s secret had been no different than feeding Maet the poison herself. Somehow she’d imagined that the girl might still pull through, that she’d refuse to eat any more of the cakes, that her youth would save her.
She’d been wrong, of course. And Maet had died, a lambsacrificed on the altar of Mery’s grand plans for the kingdom.
Sita watched Maet’s mother, alone inside her grief.
Was it worth it?she wondered.
Her eyes suffused with tears, she tore away her gaze, taken by a sudden desire to make herself useful.I should help them search for Father.
She walked briskly back down the hallway, past her own chambers, until she reached the palace’s main hall. Several guards were already there—one interrogating poor Ineni about how the king could possibly have slipped away—but they took no notice of her.
Something soft brushed past her legs, and she looked down to see the striped cat. She snaked around Sita’s ankles, her tail erect, but when it was clear Sita had no treats nor affection to offer, she moved on, making her way on silent paws toward the pleasure garden.
Sita found herself following.
Outside, the lotus was in full bloom. The fishpond was black and still, the white flowers dotting its surface like stars on a night sky. All around, the trees huddled in shadow, and from within their boughs the nightjars sang.Kroo, kroo! Kroo, kroo!The green herbaceous smell and the quiet beauty of the garden seemed incongruous with everything happening inside the palace walls.
Then she saw someone sitting on a bench across the way, under the sycamore tree. A thin, huddled apparition.
“Father?”
The figure didn’t move. Sita hurried under the tree’s canopy, blinking until her eyes adjusted to the darkness.
King Amunmose sat on a stone bench flanked by jasmine bushes, staring past her to the garden beyond. He wore a fine white tunic, edged in crimson thread, which draped loosely over his body. He wore neither a crown nor a headdress, and his wispy,elderberry-dyed hair, the color of an old bruise, shivered in the breeze. Shadows clung to his jutting cheekbones and the hollows of his eyes. He didn’t react to her arrival.
“Father?” she repeated.
He turned to her then, his eyes luminous and somehow too large. For a moment, he didn’t speak. Then: “I had the dream again.”
His voice was dry and so soft that Sita thought she might have imagined hearing it.
“What dream?” she asked.
He raised an unsteady hand to his forehead. “The snakes. The red and the black. The one that bites, and the one that…” He looked at Sita, actually focused on her, as if he were seeing her for the first time. “I trusted the priests. I followed their instructions. I did…everything.” The last word came out choked with impotent rage.
Sita grimaced. Ever since the Bast Festival, she’d avoided being in her father’s presence. She knew if she spent too much time with him, if she allowed herself to stop thinking about Mery’s reasons for doing what he was doing, if she for one moment forgot about the future and remained in the present, if she allowed herself tofeel—her weak heart could destroy everything.
You’ve come this far. You can’t turn back now.
“Please, Father,” Sita said, moving closer to him. “Let me take you back to your chambers. Everyone is looking for you, and—”
“She’s gone, isn’t she?”
Sita paused, breathing into the silence.
“I’m sorry, Father.”
The king’s head dropped.
After a long while, he spoke. “I know I have done wrong,” he said, staring once again into the middle distance, speaking to everyone and no one, and Sita least of all. “I know I have fallenshort of greatness and that a host of malevolent spirits may have brought this condemnation upon me, for both what I’ve done and what I’ve failed to do. But why…?” His voice broke, and his shoulders crumpled. “Why did they have to takeher?”
