Five days later, the message came. Surrounded by Baalat, Edarru, Weremkhet, and Meresamun, Istara broke the seal and unrolled the scroll, her hands trembling.
My lady Istara, Princess of Kadesh, wife of Mursili III, King of Hatti, I write to you in sincerity and sorrow. While in the final stages of the Libyan campaign, Lord Commander Sethi's entire division fell to an ambush. There were no survivors. Scavengers have prevented his body from being found--
Her chest tight, Istara stopped reading. Her eyes moved to the pharaoh's cartouche inked at the bottom of the lengthy letter, where the final paragraph outlined provision for Sethi's son. She could deny it no longer. Not once had she felt Sethi's disappearance--no emptiness haunted her heart--but the pharaoh's name, marked in black ink and outlined in gold told her otherwise. She had been wrong. Sethi was gone. Obliterated. His soul consumed. Baalat had been right. The once-goddess eyed the letter, tight with anxiety. Istara handed it to her and sank onto the ledge of the lotus pool. Edarru and Weremkhet crowded in to see, their faces ashen. Edarru backed away, pale and trembling. She fled, calling out for the servants to bring Nesu, her grief spreading, a fire, until the whole household wept and wailed, the keening of the servants rising, a flood of misery.
His hands shaking, Weremkhet stripped himself of his finery. His collar, armbands, and belt tumbled against the stone flags, their gems breaking free, skittering, across the courtyard into the flowerbeds, chaotic.
"How shall I go on?" he cried to the sky, bereft. He stumbled to a night brazier and smeared handfuls of its cold ashes over his face and chest. "All my life I have served him," he wept, plaintive. "How shall I live? Who am I without Commander Sethi?" He wandered away, rubbing his hands against his elegant kilt, staining it with his sooty hands, his eyes glazed with tears, the last vestiges of his composure deserting him.
Baalat finished reading the letter. It fell from her fingers to the sun-drenched stone flags, where it lay, forlorn, its hateful words stark in the brilliant light of a new day. Meresamun joined Istara, her thin grip a constant as Istara drifted away, lost in a sea of black, its dark tide pulling her down, drowning out the clamor of grief--the high, frightened wail of Nesu, rising in intensity, caught in the torrent of misery; the questioning, nervous barks of Sehetep, unanswered.
"My love," Baalat grieved, anguished, sinking to her knees. "Where are you? What has become of you? Will I even dream of you?" Burying her face in her hands, she sobbed, hollow, hopeless.
Istara rose and went, unseeing, to Sethi's apartment and closed the door, the thick panels of carved wood shutting out the worst of the tumult. Numb, she leaned against it, and looked over his things, drinking in every detail, all of it left untouched since his departure five months earlier. His bed, where he had made love to her more times than she could remember; the cushions piled up, messy, the way he liked them. On the bedside table, one of his rings, a scarab, carved from malachite, where he had left it.
She went to his cupboard and tugged on its latch. Hammered closed for the season, it held fast against her trembling fingers. Crying out, rent by despair and frustration, she rammed a stone vase against it until the hasp shattered. Within, Sethi's kilts, folded into neat piles.
Sinking to her knees, she dragged the contents of an entire shelf to her, breathing in the scent of his perfume--cinnamon and myrrh--the purity of it corrupted by the faint, resinous tang of cedarwood. A fragment of a forgotten memory triggered, sudden and visceral, so strong it felt as if Sethi were right there beside her. She closed her eyes, reliving the memory of his hand against her face, his thumb brushing over her lips, parting them before he kissed her, deep. Her heart, silenced for the last five days, jolted to life, raw, aching, empty.
She gathered up his kilts, the weight of them almost doubling her over, and stumbled to his bed, clutching the heavy, starched linens against her chest--all that remained of him, a man who no longer existed, even in spirit.
Pressing her face against the crisp material, she drank in his scent, enduring the burning blades of a hundred daggers slicing through her soul, severing him from her, forever. She eyed his ring on the table, meaningless without him, and pressed it against her heart, hollow, lost, bereft.
Clinging to all that remained of Sethi, she willed the last vestiges of his presence to protect her against the shadows of despair creeping across the floor, where they surrounded her, and waited, patient, hungry, determined to consume her.