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She was alone in the desert on a moonless night.

The air was still and unbroken by the breath of any other living thing. There was only the dunes, stretching into eternity like the primeval waters that covered the earth when the world was new.

A fresh set of tracks disturbed the ground up ahead. They were small and cloven, and she followed them, her feet sinking deep into the sand with each labored step.

The lamb lay in a patch of light, and because there was no moon, she knew that the light came from the creature itself. Blood flowed from a grievous wound in its side, staining its white wool crimson. Despite this, the lamb made no sound. It turned its strange horizontal eyes toward her.

“Beware.”

The lamb’s mouth did not move, yet she knew it was the lamb’s voice that spoke. It was a doleful sound, the sound of unwanted news, of nightmares come alive.

“Beware, for soon the Great River of Khetara will turn to blood.”

She took a step back and pressed her hands against her ears to block out the voice, but it continued.

“Lies will grow fruitful as wheat in the fields, and where once there was order, chaos will reign. A secret shall rise from beneath the earth, and the Red and the White Crowns will be forever broken.”

“Stop,” she said, but the voice did not quaver or cease, even as blood pooled around the lamb and spilled out in impossible torrents, soaking into the desert and spreading across the whole of the land.

“Take heed, Thonis, Great House of Amun! Beware of what is unseen among you!” The lamb roared, and the desert became a chaotic red sea of gruesome, viscous dunes.

“Take heed, Sakesh, Great House of Ra! Beware of what burns and destroys you!”

She felt herself sinking. The lamb floated above the surface of the new sea, its gaze never wavering, its unearthly eyes focused solely on her. She screamed, thrashing in the thick waters until the copper tang of blood filled her mouth.

“Beware! Sorrow and ruin to the Children of the Two Lands!”

Nefermaat woke with a gasp.

She sat up from the reed mat where she slept and looked around her family’s humble home, bleary-eyed and panting. Morning light leaked in through the small square windows on each side, and next to her, her mother and father’s sleeping mats were vacant. She grasped at the threads of the dream, desperately trying to hold on to the words, the images, before—

“Oh, good! You’re up,” her mother said, coming up the mud-brick stairs from the ground floor below. She was carrying a jar of beer under one arm and a cloth-wrapped loaf of bread in the other. She moved briskly. “We’re about to eat. Hurry up and get ready, Neff. You know how your father hates being late to market.”

Neff rubbed her eyes. Whatever tenuous hold she’d had on her dream had vanished, leaving her with a cold, uneasy feeling that she’d forgotten something terribly important.

“I’m coming, Mamet, I’m coming,” she mumbled, and slipped into the woven papyrus sandals at the foot of her sleeping mat. She smoothed out the wrinkles in her white kalasiris dress and adjusted the straps over her shoulders. After washing her face in the basin and combing her fingers through her chin-length curly brown hair, she made her way up the stairs to the roof.

It was still early, so the sun was pleasant and not too hot. Neff took a deep breath of fresh air and gazed around her. Mud-brick homes similar to theirs crowded around them in even lines leading south, punctuated by the great Temple of Bast standing at Bubas’s southern border. Beyond that, Neff knew, lay the lands of Low Khetara—Hurwar, Per-Abu, and Sakesh. They were names she’d heard in stories told across firelight, about a Great War that happened years before she was born. Stories of might and glory, and of King Sematawy’s legendary victory over the southern pretender. To the west was the wide blue finger of the Iteru, and due north on the banks of the river delta lay Thonis, home of the pharaoh and the capital city of the kingdom.

Everything west of the Iteru was the Red Lands. Bearded tribesmen in dark voluminous robes would sometimes venture into the village from across the river to trade with the Khetaran merchants, but they never stayed long. Her father, along with everyone else she knew, didn’t really trust them.

“I’m happy to do a trade,” Neff remembered hearing one of the vegetable merchants say, “But I’m not inviting them to stay for supper!” Neff had never actually met a desert tribesman herself. They usually came to trade for food, tools, and fabric, and weren’t often in the market for the magic scrolls her father sold. They probably don’t believe in that sort of thing , she thought. For a moment, she stared at the golden rolling desert, which seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon, the ghost of that dream still hovering at the edges of her memory.

“Stop wasting time, Neff!” her father called, waving her over with impatience. “Sit and eat!”

He was seated beneath the large woven canopy that took up one corner of the roof, already tucking into the beer and bread her mother had brought up for them from the cellar.

He was bald-headed, with a round face and prominent nose, and wore a crisp linen tunic that Neff’s mother hung on a line every night to keep it from wrinkling. It was tied at the waist with a fine well-stitched belt, a luxury he’d purchased months ago after a week of haggling with the leather merchant. “We’re moving up in the world, Ahura,” he’d told her mother when she balked at the price. “I must look the part. If you want people to respect you, you must command respect! That’s what I always say.”

Neff went to sit underneath the canopy, taking a chunk of bread and cup of beer for her own breakfast.

“It goes without saying that the prosperity scrolls are our most popular items,” her father said through a mouthful of food, continuing a conversation that must have started before Neff joined them. “But you’d be surprised how many love and beauty scrolls I’m selling. Can you believe it? They’re starving to death, but still they come, trading their last onion to look plump and pretty for a lover. Pah! Well, a fool’s trade is as good a trade as any, that’s what I always say…”

Neff’s mother shook her head. She was small and delicate, her hair and skin the soft brown color of a mourning dove. “It’s getting worse every day. There’s hardly anything to trade, and even less to trade for! Do you know how much I had to hand over for a few days’ worth of beans and vegetables?”

“That’s why we need to think bigger. Do you see? To keep up with the changing market. Imeny tells me they do a brisk business in the Thonis market selling curses.”

“Curses?” Neff’s mother exclaimed. The broom she’d been using to sweep the dusty roof stilled in midair. “Pepi. You wouldn’t.”

“I would if they sold, Ahura, yes, indeed. You can’t be squeamish about these things, especially not at a time like this. If we want to keep our heads above water, my dear, we have to give the people what they want, whether it’s good for them or not.”

Neff’s mother scowled but resumed her sweeping with a sigh of resignation. “If you say so, imi-ib. Who’s Imeny again?”

“The jeweler. You know the one. His wife has that mole. Here.” Her father pointed to the side of his face.

“Oh, yes. Yes, of course. The one who oversalts her fish.”

Her father chuckled. “We’ll never share a meal with them again, will we?”

Neff chewed her bread, half listening to her parents’ prattle. Her father’s spell scrolls hadn’t always been so popular, but over the past year, he’d built up a reputation as a merchant of good fortune in Bubas. This had been accomplished through a combination of luck and cunning. Luck because two village women had found husbands shortly after using his love scrolls, and cunning because Pepi made sure that they told everyone in the village all about it. By spending time listening to people at the market every day, her father had grown to understand their fears and desires, and used that information to sell, sell, sell. If the spell worked, the customers always came back for more. If it didn’t, and they returned to her family’s stall to complain, her father merely came up with a logical reason—invariably one that could be blamed on the customer themselves.

Pepi wrote the spells in the common script, a highly simplified version of the “gods’ words” that the merchant class used to do business—but a large portion of the population couldn’t even read that. Writing was considered a magic all its own, and most Khetarans viewed anyone who could do it with a sense of awe. Which made it easy for Neff’s father to tell the disgruntled customers that they didn’t say the words right. “If you don’t say them in the right way,” he’d proclaim, “the magic doesn’t work!”

So they’d buy another scroll, desperately attempt to memorize his instructions, and try again.

He’d send them off with a smile and resume bellowing his famous phrase to anyone in the market who might listen. He’d said it so often, Neff often heard her father muttering it in his sleep.

“Spell scrolls! Very effective! They’ve worked a thousand times!”

The business’s success had allowed them to build the two-story house that her mother so lovingly swept and tidied every morning. Her father was rarely at home. He was always the first vendor at the market every morning, and the last to leave. After their evening meal, he wrote new scrolls until all the light faded from the sky.

When Neff turned six, her father began teaching her to write the common too, so that one day she could help him run the business. At thirteen, she was nearly old enough to work the stall herself, but her father wasn’t convinced that she’d mastered the necessary attitude to be a good salesman. “You give up too easily,” he’d said the day before, when she’d allowed a woman to walk away empty-handed. “All that customer needed was a little more convincing!”

“She said no,” Neff had argued. “What was I supposed to do?”

Pepi shook a finger at her. “The mouth says no, but the heart shouts yes! Couldn’t you hear it? Your problem, my girl, is that you don’t believe in the product.”

Neff had looked down at the scrolls, arranged in neat piles. Cures for headaches, infertility, broken hearts. “But the scrolls don’t really work, do they, baba?”

Her father sucked his teeth. “Hold your tongue, Nefermaat. Have you learned nothing from me? Haven’t I taught you that words have power?” He shook his head. “You’re not just selling a scroll, child. You’re selling hope. Now, I can’t guarantee that my customers will always receive what they desire, but if you make them believe … well, they certainly have a better chance.”

“I’m sorry, Yati,” she’d said. “I’ll do better next time.”

There on the roof, Neff remembered the exchange as her mother ruffled her hair and planted a loving kiss on her head . If the magic works , she thought, why couldn’t it give Mamet the big family she wanted? The concentration of her mother’s devotion, which could have been more comfortably spread across three or four additional children, was sometimes difficult for Neff to bear alone.

“Are you all right, Neff?” her mother asked. “You look a bit pale this morning.”

“Bad dreams again,” Neff replied, taking a drink of the thick, sweet beer.

“Really?” Her mother frowned. “Do you remember what they’re about?”

Neff sighed. “No. As soon as I wake, they fade away.”

“I used to have one about a date palm tree,” her mother said dreamily, leaning on her broom. “I picked the fruit and ate and ate, but my belly was never full. Your father had some ideas about what it meant, but he’s no Hour priest. I think I was just hungry.”

Even if I could afford to visit an Hour priest to interpret my dream , Neff thought, I wouldn’t know what to tell him! She’d only had the dream occasionally at first, but now it came nearly every night. And although she couldn’t remember anything about it, she somehow knew that it was always the same dream, over and over again.

She’d begun to dread going to sleep.

Neff knew that dreams, like words, were powerful. They were messages from the gods. And some nagging, relentless urge kept telling her that she shouldn’t ignore this one. If she didn’t figure out what it meant, she was certain the dream would never let her go.

Her father smacked his lips as he finished up his beer. “Perhaps your dream is telling you to wake up earlier, like your yati, so we aren’t late to market!” he said. He stood up from the table and clapped the crumbs from his hands. “Come on, it’s time to go!”

Neff shoved the rest of the bread into her mouth and washed it down with the dregs of her beer. She was brushing her dress clean when she suddenly remembered what day it was. “Wait!” she exclaimed. “We can’t go to market now. Bast is coming through the village this morning.”

Every year, the village of Bubas had the honor of watching Bast, their patron goddess, be taken from her shrine and brought upriver to Thonis, where the Festival of Bast took place. Neff had never been to Khetara’s capital city, but her friends had said that the streets were lined with gold and precious stones of many colors. She hoped to see it one day, but until then, she and everyone else in Bubas took pleasure in the goddess’s annual visit, when a lucky few would have the opportunity to address her with a question or a prayer.

A question … Neff thought suddenly, an idea germinating in her mind.

Of course! Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

Because you’ll get in trouble!

Then again, how much trouble could it possibly cause?

Neff ran to her father and gripped his arm. “Please, Yati, we must see Bast! We’ve never missed her, and all my friends will be there. No one will be shopping at the market anyway! Everyone in the village will be waiting for the goddess too!”

Neff’s father rubbed his temples. “Ach… we only sold five scrolls yesterday,” he grumbled. “I was hoping to make up for that this morning.”

“We can rush to the stall as soon as she’s passed,” Neff cajoled him. “We’ll stay until nightfall. We’ll stay until midnight! We’ll sell more scrolls, because of everyone visiting from other villages.” Please , she thought. Please let me go.

Her father dropped his head back and stared at the cloudless sky. “Do you hear this, Ahura? I’ve taught her too well.” Then he nodded. “You drive a hard bargain, my girl. Fine, we’ll go. It would probably look bad if we didn’t. But we won’t stay for a moment longer than we have to!”

Neff grinned and craned her neck to plant a kiss on her father’s shining bald head. “Thank you, Yati! Thank you so much!”

Neff helped her mother quickly finish the chores. The goddess would leave her temple soon, and they needed to get a good spot on the street before the crowd grew too thick. Because for the first time in her life, Neff planned to approach Bast with a question of her own.

If anyone could help her remember her dream, it was the goddess herself.

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