Sethnakht did not leave after the interview. Khaemwaset had half expected the general to ride out within a day or two, satisfied enough with a garrison boy’s shaky story to file it away as an anomaly not worth further attention. Instead, three days passed, and Sethnakht was still there, moving through the garrison with the quiet, watchful patience of someone who had decided to solve a puzzle properly instead of guessing at it.
Which meant Khaemwaset spent those three days doing the hardest acting job of his short second life.
New quest available. The Long Game. General Sethnakht is observing you closely. Every interaction is being weighed. Reward, trust. Failure, exposure.
He didn’t need the notification to know that. He could feel it in the way conversations in the garrison yard went quiet half a beat too fast whenever the general walked past, in the way Bakenkhonsu had suddenly become almost painfully polite to everyone, in the way Meret kept glancing toward the commander’s quarters like she expected soldiers to burst through his door any minute.
The trick, he decided, wasn’t to disappear. Disappearing would have looked exactly as suspicious as it was. The trick was to become boring in a very specific, very deliberate way, and to do it while quietly learning everything he could about the person watching him.
He started with the grain tallies.
It wasn’t subtle exactly, sitting in the storeroom each morning going over supply numbers with Meret while the garrison hummed along around them, but it was consistent, and consistency was its own kind of camouflage. A prince obsessed with counting sacks of barley didn’t look like a prince capable of putting four armed men on the ground. It looked, if anything, like exactly the harmless, slightly odd behavior of someone with too much time and not enough purpose, which was, Khaemwaset reflected, more or less true of him anyway.
Sethnakht found him there on the second morning, standing in the doorway for a long moment before speaking.
"Counting grain, Prince Khaemwaset."
"Someone should," Khaemwaset said, without looking up from the tally scroll. "The overseer’s numbers don’t always match the caravan manifests. I find it interesting."
That last part wasn’t performance. It was, uncomfortably, entirely true, and he heard himself say it before he’d fully decided whether honesty was the safer play here or not.
Sethnakht crossed the room slowly and looked down at the scroll over his shoulder, close enough that Khaemwaset caught the faint smell of horse and leather and something underneath it, sharper, like the desert itself. "Show me."
He hesitated only a second before sliding the scroll over. It felt like handing someone a piece of evidence in an investigation he wasn’t entirely sure he was the suspect or the investigator in.
"Here." He pointed to a column of figures. "Grain delivered to the garrison stores, according to Bakenkhonsu’s own ledger. And here." A second scroll, one he’d copied from memory of the caravan manifests two weeks earlier, in an afternoon he’d told Meret was for practicing his handwriting. "What the tax caravans actually recorded leaving the southern depot for this garrison, the same month."
The numbers didn’t match. They hadn’t matched in five of the last eight months, by his count, always by a small enough margin that any single discrepancy looked like careless bookkeeping rather than theft.
Sethnakht studied the two scrolls for a long, silent moment, and Khaemwaset watched something shift behind those dark, careful eyes, recalculating.
"This is a meticulous piece of comparison for a boy who claims he doesn’t remember how he beat four raiders with a rock."
There it was. Khaemwaset had been waiting for the trap to close since the moment he’d handed over the second scroll, and here it finally was, precise and unhurried, exactly the kind of quiet correction he should have expected from someone this sharp.
Passive skill triggered. Double Tongue. No deception detected in your grain analysis. Contradiction with prior statement now flagged by observer.
"I remember numbers better than I remember violence, General," Khaemwaset said carefully. "Fear does strange things to a person’s memory. I’ve always been better with figures than with fists. That hasn’t changed."
It was thin. He knew it was thin even as he said it, a patch stretched too tight over a hole that kept widening every time Sethnakht looked at him too closely. But thin cover held better than no cover at all, and there was nothing to be gained by panicking in front of the one person here sharp enough to notice panic as its own kind of confession.
Sethnakht didn’t push further, not immediately. Instead the general set the scrolls down and looked at him directly, an assessment that felt less like suspicion now and more like genuine, uncomfortable curiosity.
"Bakenkhonsu has held this post for eleven years," Sethnakht said. "No prince before you noticed the discrepancy. No garrison commander flagged it either." A pause. "Why does an exiled prince with no political standing and, by his own account, no memory for violence, spend his mornings quietly building a case against the man who controls his food supply?"
Because someone had used that man, knowingly or not, to try to kill him. Because the answer to who had wanted his mother dead eight years ago was buried somewhere in this garrison’s accounts, or in the capital’s politics, or somewhere in the space between the two, and grain tallies were the only thread he had that no one had thought worth watching closely.
He couldn’t say any of that. Not yet. Maybe not ever, to this particular person, no matter how much some instinct he didn’t fully trust kept insisting Sethnakht might actually be worth trusting with it eventually.
"Boredom, General," he said instead, and let a little of the honest exhaustion of the last month bleed into his voice, because exhaustion, at least, wasn’t a lie he had to work at. "Eight years of being forgotten teaches a person to find their own reasons to stay useful. Numbers were simply what was available to me."
Sethnakht was quiet for long enough that Khaemwaset started counting his own heartbeats, an old, useless habit from a life spent waiting for lab results that mattered less than this silence did.
"You’re a strange puzzle, Prince Khaemwaset," the general finally said. "A sickly boy who isn’t sickly. A forgettable prince who apparently forgets nothing. Four dead raiders who tell one story, and a set of grain ledgers that tell a very different one."
New skill unlocked. Steady Under Scrutiny. Passive. Reduced likelihood of visible panic when directly confronted by a perceptive opponent.
"I could say the same of you, General," Khaemwaset said, and meant it more than he expected to. "A commander with better things to do than chase down a garrison-town skirmish, still here four days later, comparing grain scrolls with a prince nobody in the capital bothered to write letters to."
Something in Sethnakht’s expression moved then, quick and almost involuntary, the corner of the mouth twitching toward something that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite suspicion either. Khaemwaset filed the reaction away carefully, the way he filed everything now, uncertain yet what it meant but certain it meant something.
"Careful," Sethnakht said, low, almost amused despite everything. "That’s a bold thing to say to the person deciding whether to report you as a threat or an asset."
"Which way are you leaning, General?"
The question came out before he’d fully weighed the risk of asking it, and for a moment he thought he’d finally pushed too far, said too much, let too much of the version of himself that read palace politics like a strategy game slip through the careful mask of a frightened, forgotten boy.
Sethnakht didn’t answer directly. Instead the general picked up both scrolls, rolled them together, and tucked them away with the unhurried economy of someone who had already decided something and simply hadn’t chosen to share it yet.
"I’ll need copies of these," Sethnakht said. "And I’d advise you keep counting grain, Prince Khaemwaset. It seems to suit you."
It wasn’t an answer. It also wasn’t a dismissal, and as the general left the storeroom, Khaemwaset found himself staring after the retreating figure with a feeling he hadn’t expected to have toward the most dangerous person he’d met in this entire strange, borrowed life.
Something close to relief. Something close, uncomfortably, to hope.