Page 138 of Tomb of the Sun King

Constance’s eyes narrowed. “Areyouoffended by it?”

“No!” Neil blurted out in reply.

“Then why would you worry about what most people think?”

“Because…” Neil began automatically, then caught himself. He drew in a breath. “Because I am not as brave as you are, Connie.”

Constance considered Neil quietly. “I am not sure you have ever called me brave before. There’s been reckless, menacing, ‘a short and holy terror,’—”

“That was when we were children,” Neil cut in nervously, “and you were trying to use my spectacles to burn holes in the carpet.”

“Which never did work,” Constance complained.

“That’s because I’m nearsighted,” Neil automatically explained. “Nearsighted vision is corrected by concave lenses, and concave lenses spread light out rather than focusing it.”

Constance’s look grew a little more thoughtful—and a touch more intense. Neil felt the weight of it like a prickling electricity.

“I would have told you that, if you had asked first,” he finished awkwardly.

“I shall keep that in mind for next time,” Constance replied.

Silence lingered. The hull of the ragged boat creaked beneath them as they glided along with the current. The waters of the Nile lapped softly at the boards. In the reeds on the shoreline, an ibis startled, lifting into great-winged flight.

“I am still cross with you,” Constance noted.

“I am still rather cross with myself,” Neil admitted.

“And you are an abysmally bad haggler,” she added.

“Yes,” Neil agreed. “Nor do I have any wish to get better at it. It makes me extremely uncomfortable.”

“I will say, I was surprised that someone like Mr. Bates would choose to be friends with you,” she mused, and then caught herself. “Sorry. I think that might have come out wrong.”

There had been nothing particularly vicious in her words. Neil still stiffened with a quick, reflexive hurt—perhaps because the question she had just voiced was one that he had wondered about himself on more than one occasion.

“Sometimes I think he just adopted me out of pity, like a three-legged cat,” he offered a little glumly.

Constance studied him quietly from her place by the tiller. Her dark curls were gilded by the falling sunlight. Neil was once again struck by how extraordinarily lovely she had become, and for perhaps the first time since she had skidded into his tomb at Saqqara, he met her eyes without feeling like he had to steel himself to it.

The moment stretched like a held breath, woven through with the creak of the lines and the soft rhythm of the rippling water.

“For a scholar, you have quite a few things left to learn,” Constance finally said, her voice surprisingly soft. “Though do tack us to port, please, before we run into that rock.”

“Oh, bugger!” Neil swore, hurrying to tug the lines.

?

An hour later, the landscape opened into a broad, flat plane. Beyond a fringe of green marsh, the arid ground was painted orange with the decline of evening and peppered with crumbling ruins.

Though Neil had never been there, he still recognized the lines of those ancient foundations from dozens of sketches and reports. He was looking at Tell al-Amarna, home to the dusty remnants of Akhenaten’s empire.

Little was left of the heretic pharaoh’s once-great capital. The palaces and temples had been reduced to low, ragged boxes on the ground, punctuated by the lonely sentinel of the odd surviving column.

The gleaming white length of Julian Forster-Mowbray’s dahabeeyah was tied up at a wharf below a small mud-brick village that crouched at the edge of the plain. TheIsiswas alight with lanterns, silhouetting the figures that moved across the deck.

Neil crouched lower into the felucca, hoping the sun at his back would help shadow his features.

“That’s Reis Hassan and some of the crew,” Constance said, lowering herself a bit as well. “But I don’t see Julian or his mercenaries, and there are fewer crewmen than there ought to be.”

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