Chapter 18: The Betrayal of Sisters and Brothers

My father knew more than he ever spoke aloud. After the attack, I watched in dread as certain rooms in the palace were locked behind heavy doors, as if even the air in them had become dangerous. Papyrus scrolls were burned, and I smelled the acrid smoke clinging to the corridors. A letter from Upper Nubia was quietly removed from the archives, vanishing like a dying breath. And a priestess from Karnak, once a constant presence in our ceremonies, disappeared from every procession as if the gods themselves had hidden her away.

It was my Pharaoh, my beloved father, who commanded the silence. Not only to guard our safety, but because he knew that truth, if allowed to slip free, might turn against us. Some truths are like snakes, he once told my mother. Touch them, and they bite.

I was terrified. Terrified beyond measure, not only for myself, though I was only a servant to his greater destiny, a humble daughter of Pharaoh, fragile in the storm. But more than that, I feared for him, as my father, who bore the weight of the double crown, who had never turned away from his duty, whose life was far more precious to Egypt than my own.

I found myself standing in the heart of this unraveling, a trembling princess who had survived a dagger conjured from the shadows. But survival alone was not what I carried now.

I carried something deeper, something colder than fear, heavier than honor:

Knowledge.

And knowledge, I realized, was its own beginning of power, a power that terrified me almost as much as the darkness itself.
----

My head began to spin, a sickening whirl of dread and disbelief. The torchlight around me wavered like water, and I felt the whole world shift beneath my feet.

Who was behind all this?

My mind clawed desperately at possibilities, refusing to settle.

Isis? My sister, with her honeyed voice and dagger-sharp eyes, had long hidden her hungers behind a mask of grace. Could she have unleashed such horror on me?

Nefertiti? The woman whose beauty had turned the heads of priests and generals alike, who had once whispered she would rather see the kingdom burn than yield her place, could her ambition have spilled over into such cruelty?

Or...

My brother?

The thought crashed through me like a spear, impossible, unthinkable. The brother whose arms had once lifted me high in the courtyard, whose hands had steadied me on my first horse, whose laughter had been as warm and honest as sunlight on a winter’s day.

Could he?

No. No, it had to be impossible.

Yet once the seed was planted, it refused to die.

A whisper slithered through my memory, a rumor I had overheard half a year ago in the women’s quarters, when the serving girls thought I was asleep. They had spoken in low voices, frightened, as if the very walls might punish them for repeating it:

That my brother had been seen in secret conference with Isis, not once, but many times, always after dusk, when the palace guards were drowsy, their senses dulled by beer and boredom.

That he had spoken to her with a closeness beyond brotherly love, words that twisted like a lover’s language, dark and soft and dangerous.

They had said, one of them, that they were plotting together, moving their pieces on the board while the rest of us slept, trusting in their shared blood to shield them from suspicion.