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water carriers, slaves bearing tall fans, women carrying trays—all had been dismissed.
    The king would be a while disrobing. The heavy crowns, beard, rings, and jeweled linen overrobe demanded intricate maneuvers to get pharaoh out of them without snagging the royal hair or tangling the beads of a necklace with those sewn on the robe. And each item had to be treated with ceremony by privileged servitors who would be offended if Tutankhamun removed even an earring by himself. This was why the boy often avoided formal robing ceremonies.
    Meren wandered over to a stand of sycamores. A delicate pavilion stood in the midst of this small forest, a bright blue, red, and gold jewel amid the dark green foliage. The quarrel with Mugallu would have to be settled. Pharaoh's harsh words could provoke an exchange of insults during which one side or the other would go too far, inciting war before Egypt was ready. Ay was already handling that problem; Meren had his own duties, others tasks, other worries, not the least of which was his own son.
    Kysen was daily growing more perceptive. Even a few months ago, Meren could have hidden his anxiety from the boy. Wandering across the garden to a line of imported incense trees, Meren sat on the edge of a clay tub in which a myrrh tree flourished. His wrist itched. He pulled a slender pin from the clasp of a wide gold wristband inscribed with his name and titles, opened the hinged bracelet, and removed it.
    He rubbed the white scar on his inner wrist. He could feel the voice of his heart pounding beneath his fingers as he rubbed the skin. Without meaning to, he sank into memories sixteen years old. Then he'd been but eighteen and a prisoner of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten. The king had suspected him of adhering to the old gods when pharaoh had thrown them all out in favor of his own deity, the sun disk called the Aten. After killing Meren's father for refusing to adopt the new god, Akhenaten had imprisoned the son and tested him. Beatings, starvation, threats, nothing had broken Meren and made him confess to betraying the king's parvenu god.
    Meren could still remember the smell of that shadowed cell where they kept him, a smell composed of dirt, sweat, the coppery scent of blood, and the contents of the sandy hole that served as his chamber pot. Meren pounded his fist against the side of the clay tub, willing himself to abandon this senseless reverie. Yet the images flooded through him as relentlessly as the Nile during Inundation. A burly guard kneeling on his arm while others pinned him to the floor. The white heat of a brazier, a glowing brand in the shape of the sun disk with sticklike rays extending from it and ending in stylized hands.
    Then the images became feelings—that brief space between the moment when the brand met his flesh and that first searing agony; the pain shooting up his arm, into his heart; his scream; the feeling of distance, of floating away from his body, even as he broke out in icy sweat.
    Then, at last, the nausea that slammed him back into his body and kept him there to endure the pain.
    Cursing aloud, Meren pounded his first harder against the tub. The memories of pain faded, but not the misery of humiliation. The sun disk scar began to itch again. Meren glanced down at his wrist, smoothed his fingers over the pale circle that formed the sun, rubbed the rays that marked him as a victim of the heretic. Then he replaced the bracelet.
    He should never have taken it off, never touched the scar. The burden of the truth about Nefertiti's death had disturbed memories of that terrible time in his life, memories he'd tried to seal in a deep stone chamber within his ka. But he shouldn't lie to himself. It wasn't just the dangerous secret of Nefertiti's death that robbed him of sleep and heart's peace. It was that other, even more momentous death, the one for which he was responsible. How did one justify allowing a living god, a pharaoh, to be killed?
    He had suspected that Ay