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Meela Nais is not Anck-su-namun.This is difficult for her to remember.Oh, but the littlest things bring it out. Dust on a breath of dry air. The head of sun against her skin.Every color is a flash of memory, like saturated paint against the reality of her own, simpler past.Meela is not Anck-su-namun, but she has forgotten how to be anyone else.—The earliest, clearest memory beats against her skull with every beat of her heart, rings in time with the rushing blood.There are high walls, green things growing, the scent of good warm earth.There is her mother, and a sister, the first little sister, still so young as to cling to the wet-nurse in search of bared breast.Ankhesenpaaten is not so young as that, not so young that she doesn’t feel the adult conversation flow around her.She hovers near the wet-nurse, awash in the tension around her. The raised voices echo in the tiny courtyard. She watches her mother pace, gesture, voice low and furious. She would like to cry, but she is too old, and children’s tears are for the baby, and anyway nurse has given her a date to eat, instead of crying.The argument means nothing to her. Merely an eddy in the smooth waters of her life.This first memory, inconsequential, as languid as summer heat, the last moment of calm before the storm.——What can Meela’s childhood be, to palaces, bright and gilded?Dirty, dry, dusty. Years of watching, wide-eyed, as the world changed around her. Wars and riots and revolutions and filthy grave-robbers who call themselves historians.Thieves is all they are, robbing the Meela’s past away.Meela’s childhood is twelve years of her own dark-eyed reflection in still water and pitted mirrors.She pretends it is nobility she finds in her own gaze.—-There is a child.Ankhesenpaaten cannot breathe for the wonder filling up inside her.All the long hours of labor, bloody and excruciating: forgotten. Nine aching months bearing the pharaoh’s burden within her: nothing, to the small creature she holds.A child.Ankhesenpaaten clings to her daughter in the following months. To her daughter, and the nurse, who was also nurse to Ankhesenpaaten. These are the months when everything changes: when her father dies, and her mother bears the crook and flail alone.The world turns, the babe grows, and now it is mother and uncle together; uncle alone; and now, oh.Now it is only Ankhesenpaaten and Tutankhaten alone, to be pharaoh and queen.Ankhesenpaaten is grateful, then, for nurse, who cares for her and her brother the king; and for nurse’s husband, who will surely guide them in this trying time.—Meela loses the child, of course. How not? Her body was too young, too slight, to bear the burden.It is only right, and yet, it is a failure that lodges tightly beneath her heart, a finger of stone within her frail flesh.Hours of blood and pain and terror, for nothing. It would break a lesser girl. It does not break Meela, no. Not her, who is desert stone beneath her skin.It is a strength she calls on when she must be cruel.And with every moment leaning upon that strength, it grows.And Meela begins to see the darkness in her gaze for what it is. She begins to see herself, for who she is, and was, and will become. Dark eyes, Egyptian eyes, beautiful and raging.There’s the important part: rage, not sorrow. Sorrow she will not permit. Sorrow belongs to lesser creatures, who would have felt childhood’s end upon them and been buried by it. Meela is more. Meela is rage and hate and vengeance, a goddess in mortal form, a queen remade.Meela is forged in the fires that would have seen her burned, and men will follow her for it.—Ah, ah, dead, the pharaoh is dead.Four pharaohs has she had and lost, now, Ankhesenamun-who-was-Ankhesenpaaten. It is too much to bear: how does one lose father and mother both, how does one survive husband after royal husband? Too much.It is nurse she weeps to, now as always before; nurse who loves her, who will keep her upright in the face of what she must do.And there, the question: what must she do? A queen who has borne no sons to succeed their fathers, who has borne only one daughter living, what can she do?Ankhesenamun’s thoughts run wild, and in that space between pharaohs, she scrambles for anything that she can hold to. Even the unthinkable: she sends a missive to Suppiluliuma of the Hittites, and offers marriage— she, daughter of a god!Yes, she, daughter of a god. She would marry a foreign king before giving over to nurse’s husband, who has no right to the throne, none! Only Akhenaten’s uncle, only an adviser, a traitor!There, yes, something she will not speak, clenches her teeth against, though it rises in her throat like bile: traitor indeed, who helped her husband to his death! Ankhesenamun knows what they would call her if she spoke: mad, grief-struck, and then all her meager power would be as fleeting as the wind.She will not marry him. He has no right.—When Meela encounters Hafez, it’s pure accident.Accident? Call it serendipity, rather. It’s so much harder, with each passing year, every moment, to separate the twinning cords of Meela and Ankhesenamun. She will cross the street with one breath, and come back to herself hours later, the intervening time spent in unchangeable political entanglements. She will turn her face to the warm sun, and find herself lamenting father and brother, find herself half-tempted to whisper prayers to the golden disc, find herself raging against men millenia dead for slights beyond counting.She has money, now, and it is Hafez who gives it direction. Hafez who sees her for what she is, standing in his museum.Meela doesn’t care how he knows. She only cares that it’s true; she’s not mad, and she remembers truly.Now there is hope. Now there is a plan.—In the end, it does not matter: pharaoh, without her approval, without the power of her lineage, without Isis’ blessing.And she is the least of his wives, without power to gainsay her marriage, without so much power as a concubine. And for the nurse who loved her so: hah! How much more she loves being queen, which is not her rightful place, but Ankhesenamun’s!Now, the most decision she makes is: will she poison herself today, or no?(It is always no, if only for her daughter, who would have no friend left in this court of serpents, who might take Ankhesenamun’s place if she chooses to join Osiris, and that is beyond bearing. Oh, her daughter is no less strong, no less the daughter of gods, but Ankhesenamun can spare her so little, only this: she will be no child-mother to an usurper's spawn.)She is making that decision again the day he first appears. Sitting alone, pharaoh’s least wife in pharaoh’s least garden on the hottest day of the year, hoping that Aten will scorch the water from her body and take all choice from her.There and then, Imhoteph comes.Ankhesenamun’s heart lurches, and beats again, and again and again and again.For the first time since her little husband died, Ankhesenamun breathes free.