Page 25 of Gift of Dragons

Thutmose’s health was waning. Potential usurpers were swarming around them like flies around rotten flesh.

A few possibilities could play out once her husband was dead. The most probable and least tumultuous one was this:

She could immediately marry a powerful noble. Her status as the King’s Daughter would legitimize even a non-royal’s bid for the throne.

But, as her father had taught her, she already staged the game many moves ahead in her mind.

None of the nobles would be satisfied with a peaceful rule. Despite the legitimacy she would bring, there would always be those who would seek to make a widow of her once more and use her for their own gains. She would be traded from warlord to warlord while the kingdom was thrown into chaos. All of her father’s work, built painstakingly over decades, would be quickly undone.

Any other possibility led to the same conclusion, just faster. A civil war could begin the moment Thutmose breathed his last. Maybe even before that, as long as he was too weak to appear in public, and there was no clear male successor.

Heba didn’t have much time to dawdle. The physics gave Thutmose at most a year to live.

She and her husband knew. The High Priests knew. Members of the Council knew. And gods knew who else.

There was only one way out of this. It was a path of treason and death if found out.

She stopped in her pacing and looked at Shai, standing still and observant in the shadows of her chamber as always.

For the sake of peace and prosperity, her father’s legacy, her own legitimacy and safety, she must take matters into her own hands.

Shai was her key.

He would be her greatest savior, or her irrevocable downfall.

Chapter Four

“Freedom is the power to choose our own chains.”

—Jean Jacques Rousseau

Shai sensed the imperceptible shift in his Queen before she even turned toward him.

When she looked at him, her gaze enigmatic, he did not see the warmth and even friendship that he usually saw. Instead, a frozen wall of unreadability stared back at him.

She was the Great Queen in that moment, not his Heba.

“If I asked anything of you,” she began slowly, choosing every word with precision, “would you do it?”

He paused only a moment before answering. And only to show her that he, too, considered his words before he gave them.

“Were it in my power, aye, I would,” he answered solemnly.

She walked a bit closer, stopping almost within arm’s length.

She never came too close to him. They touched only out of necessity when he protected her. They’d always been conscious of the invisible boundaries between Master and slave; between royalty and prisoner of war.

Heba was ever observant of proprieties. From what Shai saw, along with everyone else, she was a magnanimous and wise Queen despite her youth, and a dutiful wife.

She was ever above reproach.

“If I asked you leave to… use your body, would you allow it?” she said softly, her voice barely a husky whisper.

Shai’s entire body froze.

Every muscle, every tendon, every hair and every bone.

The very blood seemed stalled in his veins, his lungs stilling, heart jolting to a deafening halt.