Chapter 20: When the Gods Turned Away

They say the Gods turned their faces away that night.

The sun had bled its last light across the courtyard, setting the walls of the palace aflame with a copper glow. In my mother’s chamber, the air was thick with lotus oil and the faint, acrid bite of burnt incense. The servants had drawn back the curtains, letting the breeze stir the linen hangings that framed her sleeping couch.

I can still see it, clear as if it were etched into my heart. My mother sat on her cushions near the western window, combing out her long, black hair, as a river in the night. She wore a simple white gown, unadorned, because she said even a queen needed to rest like a woman sometimes, not an idol. There was a softness about her then, a humanness, which I loved more than all her crowns.

The last sunlight caught the beads of sweat on her throat; it had been a hot day, and the dusk gave no relief. I remember the way the shadows crept up the walls, swallowing the painted scenes of the gods, as if even they turned away from what was to come.

I had gone to fetch a cup of pomegranate juice for her. When I returned, the room felt wrong, still, too silent. I felt it before I saw it, a heaviness in the air, as if something had broken.

She lay back, her eyes open, but seeing nothing. A thin trickle of blood ran from the corner of her lips, and there was a cut, so small it might have been missed, just beneath her breast. The assassin had been precise, merciless. One single stroke, a blade kissed by poison, they told me later, enough to still a heart that had commanded a kingdom.

I fell to my knees, the cup slipping from my hand and spilling red across the floor, red like her blood. The walls seemed to close around me, and I could not draw breath.

I remember screaming. I remember how the guards came, too late, always too late. I remember how they sealed the doors, how they searched every corner of the palace, and found no one.

And in the days that followed, the whispers began.
Some spoke of a foreign killer, paid by our rivals in Nubia. Some claimed it was an old feud among the priests of Karnak. But others, others, let their voices sink lower, darker:

Was it an act from within?
Was it someone who walked these halls every day?

And then the name that haunted me rose from their lips like smoke: Isis.
My sister.

They said she envied my mother’s favor, resented how the Queen had chosen me as heir, how she had placed the hope of Kemet’s future in my hands. They said Isis had grown cold, distant, and silent in the weeks before the murder. That she had spoken in riddles of a new order, of a world that would not need my crown.