The real message from the capital arrived nine days later, and it had nothing to do with the fake one Khaemwaset had sent through Bakenkhonsu.
He was in the small mudbrick room he’d started thinking of as his war room though calling it that felt a little dramatic for a space that held nothing but a sleeping mat, a low table, and a servant girl teaching him, very patiently, how to read the garrison’s grain tallies when Meret came in white-faced, holding a scroll sealed with a stamp he didn’t recognize but his borrowed memory did, instantly, with a lurch of old dread.
The royal seal. Not just the capital. The palace itself.
"It came with the tax collector’s caravan," Meret said, holding it out like it might bite her. "The overseer wanted to open it first. I told him royal correspondence is for royal hands only." A pause. "I don’t think he believed I had the authority to say that."
"You probably didn’t," Khaemwaset said, taking the scroll. "Doesn’t matter now."
He broke the seal.
[QUEST UPDATE: WHISPERS FROM WASET The message has arrived. Contents revealed.]
The script was formal, dense with the kind of ceremonial language that took him a full minute of squinting to actually parse, Khaemwaset’s borrowed literacy fighting against Amir’s total
unfamiliarity with hieratic shorthand. When he finally worked through it, the actual content turned out to be almost insultingly short for how much paper it had taken to say it.
Pharaoh Menkheperre the god-king Khaemwaset’s own borrowed memories flinched slightly even thinking about, old habits of fear that apparently didn’t care whether the mind behind them was new had fallen seriously ill. Some kind of wasting sickness, the letter said, without much detail, the way official documents tend to skip past the parts that might cause panic. The Great Royal Wife had assumed regency duties "as a precaution." All princes of the royal line were to remain "in their current postings and await further instruction," pending the Pharaoh’s recovery.
Khaemwaset read it twice. Then a third time, mostly because the phrase await further instruction was doing a lot of quiet, ugly work in a sentence that was pretending to be routine.
"They’re not calling anyone home," he said slowly. "Not even the ones closer to the succession. That’s..."
"Strange?" Meret offered.
"Convenient," Khaemwaset said. "For someone."
He set the scroll down and pulled up the status panel out of habit more than need, though there was nothing new there no quest completion, no notification, nothing but the same steady list of stats that had grown, slowly, over nine careful days of pretending to be weaker than he was.
KHAEMWASET — LEVEL 2
STR 5 | AGI 8 | VIT 5 | INT 10 | WIS 7 | CHA 3 | MA’AT 53
INT had crept up from all the grain-tally lessons, apparently. He filed that observation away too the system rewarded actual effort, not just combat, which meant there were probably a dozen quiet ways to grow stronger that had nothing to do with almost dying to arrows.
Focus, he told himself. A sick Pharaoh, a regent nobody explicitly named as "temporary," and every prince who might challenge that arrangement conveniently told to sit still and wait. That’s not bad luck. That’s a plan.
"Meret. Who is this Great Royal Wife? The one who’s regent now."
Meret’s voice dropped instinctively, even though there was no one else in the room. "Queen Tiye-Nakht. Mother of Prince Ramose." A beat, careful. "The Crown Prince, my prince. Everyone already assumed he’d be named heir eventually. This just... makes it official faster."
There it is.
Khaemwaset didn’t need eight years of court memory to understand what that meant. A sick king. A regent whose own son stood to inherit everything the moment his father either died or was declared unfit to rule. And every other prince every possible rival claim quietly told to stay exactly where they were, far from the capital, far from any chance to gather support or even just be seen.
It was, he had to admit, an extremely well-run piece of political theater. Nothing in the letter was technically a lie. Nothing in it could be pointed to later as proof of anything. It was just... convenient, over and over again, in a way that only made sense if you assumed someone very patient had been arranging pieces on this board for a long time.
[NEW QUEST AVAILABLE: THE REGENT’S GAME A power struggle has begun in the capital. Your exile may no longer be a punishment it may be a deliberate removal from the board. Investigate Queen Tiye-Nakht’s faction. Reward: political intelligence, potential allies, EXP.]
He looked at the quest window for a long moment, and for the first time since waking up in this body, felt something other than fear or grim calculation. Something closer to anger old, borrowed, eight years deep, belonging as much to the boy whose body this used to be as to the man who now lived inside it.
They sent me here to die quietly where no one would notice, he thought. And now that I’m inconveniently still breathing, the timing on ’everyone stay in their postings’ is a little too perfect to be coincidence.
"My prince." Meret’s voice was small. "What are we going to do?"
He almost laughed at the question, not because it was foolish, but because nine days ago he wouldn’t have had an answer either. Now he had at least the shape of one, even if the details were still mostly guesswork and desperation dressed up as strategy.
"Nothing, for now," he said. "We keep being exactly what they expect. A sick prince, worried about his father, too weak and too far away to matter." He rolled the scroll back up carefully, the way you’d handle a fragile artifact you weren’t ready to have anyone else examine yet. "But I want to know everything about Prince Ramose. His household, his allies, who actually runs his affairs day to day, because I doubt very much it’s a seventeen-year-old boy making these decisions himself."
"That’s..." Meret hesitated. "That’s dangerous information to go asking for, my prince. People notice questions like that."
"Then I won’t ask," Khaemwaset said. "I’ll just get good enough at grain tallies that nobody thinks twice about a prince suddenly interested in exactly which supply caravans pass through here, and where they’re headed, and who’s paying for them."
He caught, for just a second, the way Meret looked at him then not with fear this time, and not quite with the old worried pity either. Something more like the look you’d give a puzzle you were starting to suspect had more pieces to it than you’d first assumed.
Outside, the evening horn sounded across the garrison, ordinary and unremarkable, and Khaemwaset found himself listening to it a little differently than he had nine days ago. Not with dread, exactly. More like the way he used to listen to the wind picking up over an unexcavated site a sound that meant something was shifting, somewhere just under the surface, and it was only a matter of time before it broke through into the light.