The rider from the capital didn’t come for him.
That was the first thing Khaemwaset learned, crouched behind the half-open shutter of his room while Meret went to listen at the courtyard gate. The messenger was headed further south, to the mining outposts near the second cataract, and had only stopped here to change horses and grab a night’s rest. Routine business. Nothing to do with a half-dead exiled prince at all.
He should have felt relieved. Mostly he just felt stupid for panicking.
Not everything is about you, he reminded himself, lying back against the thin sleeping mat with his heart still going too fast. Even a garrison town has other business than trying to kill one teenager.
Still. He didn’t sleep that night, not really. He lay still with his eyes half-closed, running through the day’s events over and over, the way he used to lie awake replaying a dig log looking for the detail he’d missed. Somewhere in the last eight years, someone had decided a sickly, ignored prince was no longer safe to leave sickly and ignored. That decision hadn’t come from nowhere.
By the third night, he had a working list of suspects that started and ended with one name.
Overseer Bakenkhonsu.
He got his first real look at the man two days later, and it wasn’t the look he expected.
Khaemwaset’s fractured memories had painted Bakenkhonsu as a background figure a heavyset man who handled the grain counts, who Khaemwaset had maybe spoken to a dozen times in eight years, always briefly, always about nothing important. In person, standing in the dusty yard outside the granary stores with a scroll in one hand and a scowl already forming, he looked exactly as unremarkable as the memories suggested.
Which was, Khaemwaset thought, either very good acting or very bad planning on someone’s part.
"My prince." Bakenkhonsu’s bow was correct in every technical sense and respectful in absolutely none of them. "We heard you took ill again. I’m glad the gods spared you."
The gods. Khaemwaset noted the phrase, filed it, didn’t react to it. Everyone here spoke that way a habit of speech more than a statement of fact, the same way people back home said "thank god" without meaning anything religious by it at all. He’d need to remember that this world ran on that kind of language constantly, and that it probably didn’t mean what it sounded like it meant, at least not to him.
"I’m told the wine ration made several people sick that night," Khaemwaset said. Not an accusation. Just an observation, offered the way you’d mention the weather.
Something flickered behind Bakenkhonsu’s eyes there and gone so fast that if Khaemwaset hadn’t spent a decade learning to read the smallest disturbances in three-thousand-year-old dirt, he might have missed it entirely.
"A bad batch, my prince. I’ve had the overseer of the cellars whipped for it already."
A bad batch that happened to reach exactly my cup, and no one else’s.Khaemwaset kept his face as blank and unremarkable as he could manage.
[PASSIVE SKILL TRIGGERED: DOUBLE TONGUE — Bakenkhonsu’s statement registers as 62% deceptive.]
He almost smiled at that. Almost. A number confirming what his gut already knew wasn’t nothing, but it also wasn’t proof, and it definitely wasn’t a plan. Sixty-two percent deceptive told him the man was lying about something. It didn’t tell him what, or how far up the chain it went, or who else might already be watching to see how the "sickly prince" reacted to a granary official who’d nearly killed him.
So he did the only thing that made any sense.
He acted exactly like nothing had happened at all.
"Good," he said, letting his voice go a little vague, a little tired, the voice of a boy who’d rather be back in bed than standing in a dusty yard talking about grain counts. "See that it doesn’t happen again. I don’t have the strength to be sick twice in one week."
Bakenkhonsu’s shoulders relaxed by a degree Khaemwaset was fairly sure the man didn’t even realize he’d been holding.
[QUEST UPDATE: A GAME OF MASKS — Deception maintained. Bakenkhonsu’s suspicion reduced.]
[EXP GAINED: 15]
It should have ended there. It didn’t.
Three days later, walking the narrow path between the garrison well and the servants’ quarters with Meret a step behind him, Khaemwaset heard the whistle of something moving through the air a full half-second before his borrowed body’s instincts screamed at him to move.
He didn’t move fast enough on his own. The body was still too weak, too slow, eight years of neglect not undone by three days of paranoid vigilance. But something in the system reacted where he couldn’t, a burst of unnatural speed flooding down through legs that had no business moving that quickly, throwing him sideways into the dirt as an arrow buried itself in the mudbrick wall exactly where his chest had been a heartbeat earlier.
[EMERGENCY REFLEX TRIGGERED passive skill consumed: FIRST INSTINCT (one-time use).]
[HP: 22/40 — no damage taken.]
Meret screamed. Somewhere across the yard, a second whistle cut through the air, and this time Khaemwaset was already moving, dragging himself and half of Meret’s robe behind the corner of the well before the second arrow hit the dirt where they’d both been standing.
His heart was hammering so hard it hurt. His hands, when he looked down at them, were shaking worse than Meret’s had been over that water jug three days ago.
Okay, he thought, and was almost impressed with how steady the thought came out even while the rest of him wasn’t steady at all. So it wasn’t just the wine. Somebody’s serious about this.
[NEW QUEST: SURVIVE THE HUNTER — An unknown assailant has attempted to kill you a second time. Identify the threat before the third attempt succeeds.]
There was no third arrow. By the time the garrison guards came running too slow, too late, exactly as useless as an exiled prince’s personal guard had apparently always been — whoever had fired from the rooftop across the yard was long gone.
Bakenkhonsu arrived last of all, out of breath, red-faced with what looked, infuriatingly, like genuine alarm.
"My prince! Are you hurt? Who would dare"
"I don’t know," Khaemwaset said, and let his voice crack, just slightly, the way a frightened, weak boy’s voice would crack after nearly dying twice in one week. It cost him nothing to look afraid. He was afraid. He just wasn’t only that.
Because underneath the fear, something else was doing math. An arrow from a rooftop meant a trained archer, not a random opportunist. A second, near-simultaneous shot meant either two archers or one very skilled one resetting fast — either way, more resources than a disgruntled granary official should have easily on hand. And Bakenkhonsu’s shock, if it was real, meant the order to kill him hadn’t come from the man standing in front of him at all.
Which means whoever wants me dead is patient enough to use Bakenkhonsu as a shield without telling him everything,Khaemwaset thought, letting Meret help him to his feet with hands that were, he noticed distantly, still shaking. Or Bakenkhonsu’s a better actor than I gave him credit for. Either way. I’m not weak enough yet to survive a third attempt on luck alone.
[STATUS PANEL UPDATE]
KHAEMWASET — LEVEL 2
STR 4 | AGI 8 (+2) | VIT 4 (+1) | INT 9 | WIS 6 (+1) | CHA 3 (+1) | MA’AT 52
[NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: HUNTED INSTINCT — passive. +10% chance to sense danger one second before it manifests. Cooldown: 24 hours.]
He looked at the notification for a long moment, standing in the settling dust with an arrow still quivering in the wall three paces away, and felt the fear underneath his ribs slowly curdle into something colder and far more useful.
Two attempts.He filed it away, next to Bakenkhonsu’s lie and the horn from the capital and his mother’s death eight years ago that everyone still called a fever. Somebody out there thinks I’m still the boy who almost died from bad wine and worse luck. Let them keep thinking that a little longer.
"Double the guards on my quarters," he told Bakenkhonsu, voice still shaking just enough to sell the fear. "And send word to the capital. My mother’s family should know I’m... unwell again."
It wasn’t a real message. It wasn’t going to reach anyone who could help him. But it would go through Bakenkhonsu’s hands on its way out, and Khaemwaset intended to be watching very, very closely to see exactly who reacted to it.