It was at this moment Setepenra finally accepted that her parents must be dead.
The young man who had so roughly bundled her out of her bed that horrifying night, Rekhmire, still bearing the faint scars of her nails on his cheek, had become her closest friend, and it was to him she turned in her despair.
‘Tasherit and Neferne don’t seem to care,’ she sobbed. ‘They say we’ll be going back soon now. Ankhesenpaaten will send for us, but how can I bear it without father and mother? What happened to them Rekhmire? Why has everything changed?’
Rekhmire, whose name meant ‘wise-like-Ra’, sighed. He was young, but he had already noticed that the one certainty in life is change. He knew his father did not want the little girls troubled with too much political detail. He told her only that some ba
