The Heretic Queen by Michelle Moran Page A

someone had dropped its gaming pieces, now lying abandoned across the tiled floor.
    "What is this?" Merit bellowed, and Iset's harem servants shuddered to a halt, chests still in hand. Even the royal attendants regarded Merit with timid amazement. "Who was responsible for this?" she demanded, and when no one answered, Merit muscled her way through the tangle of baskets and chests. "Somebody is going to clean this up! No one will treat Princess Nefertari's belongings with carelessness!"
    Servants began picking up the scattered pieces at once, and Merit stood over them with her hands on her hips. I waited in the doorway and noticed that Iset's belongings had been placed on a new cosmetics table. There was a fan of ivory and ostrich feathers, and a dress of netted faience beads in a basket. Someone has bought all of this for her, I realized. I wondered if they were wedding gifts from Ramesses, for no one could afford such luxuries in the harem. A gilded bed had been placed against the wall where mine had been, and long silver linens wrapped around its posts. They would be let down at night to cloak Iset from the light of the moon as it fell across the blue tiled walls. My walls.
    "I know you are small, but I'd rather not walk over you, Nefertari." Iset swept past me with her arms full of sheaths and before I could reply, I saw my mother's wooden naos. The gold and ebony figure of Mut had been taken from the shrine in order to move it, and my breath caught in my throat when I saw that the statue had been broken in two.
    "You broke my mother's statue?" I shrieked, and the commotion in the room came to a second complete halt. I leaned over the goddess my mother had prayed to as a little girl and gathered her in my arms. Her feline head had been separated from her torso, but it might as well have been my body that had been broken.
    "I didn't break it," Iset said quickly. "I've never touched it."
    "Then who did?" I shouted.
    "Maybe one of the servants. Or Woserit," she said quickly. "She was here." Iset looked over her shoulder at the other women, and their faces were full of fear.
    "I want to know who did this!" Merit said with soft menace in her voice, and Iset stepped back, afraid. "Woserit would never have touched my lady's shrine! Did you break this image of the goddess?"
    Iset gathered herself. "Do you have any idea whom you are speaking to?"
    "I have a very good idea who I am speaking to!" Merit replied, rage shaking her small, fierce body. "The granddaughter of a harem wife."
    Color flooded Iset's cheeks.
    Merit turned away. "Come!" she said sharply to me. In the hall, she took the broken statue from my hands. "Nothing good will come to that scorpion. Don't worry about your shrine, my lady. I will have the court sculptor fix it for you."
    But, of course, I couldn't stop worrying. Not just about my mother's shrine, which was dearer to me than anything I owned, but about Woserit's warning, too. Her words echoed in my head like the chants we sang in the Temple of Amun. Already, life was changing for me, and not for the better. I followed Merit's angry footfalls to my new room on the other side of the courtyard. When we arrived, she pushed open the heavy wooden doors and made an oddly satisfied noise in her throat. "Your new chamber," she said.
    Inside, the windows swept from ceiling to floor, overlooking the western hills of Thebes. I could see that Tefer had already found his place on the balcony, crouched as proud and confident as a leopard. Everything about the chamber was magnificent, from the tiled balcony to the silver and ivory inlay that shone from the paintings of Hathor on the walls. I turned to Merit in shock. "But this is Woserit's room!"
    "She gave it up for you this morning while you were in the edduba," she replied.
    So Woserit already knew that Iset had taken my chamber when she had spoken to me. "But where will she stay when she comes to the palace?"
    "She will take a guest room," Merit replied, then regarded me