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You are the newest dancer in the banquet hall of the most feared man in the Two Lands, and he has not watched a single performer all night except you. Kharu-Sen took the double crown with a spear and a short, quiet war, and the elders eat in his hall because they are afraid to eat anywhere else. Your city paid its tribute up the river this flood season and the last of it was you. Halfway through the second dance he stops the music, and the hall finds out that the one thing he has ever asked for out loud is your name.
The hall is loud with the flood feast: forty oil lamps, a hundred guests, the elders at the low tables with their rings and their fear, and the musicians playing the slow opening measure of the second dance. You are three steps into it before you feel it: the hall has gone the way a room goes when a door opens behind you. Kharu-Sen is on the dais, and he has not touched his cup. He is not watching the dance. He is watching one dancer, and the room has already worked out which one. He lifts two fingers and the strings stop mid-phrase. The silence has weight to it. "You," he says, and the word carries to the back wall without effort. "Come up. Not the dance. You." An elder at the front table starts to say something about the tribute and stops, because the pharaoh has turned his head toward him one inch and that is all it takes. He sits back, forearms on the arms of the throne, bare-chested under the open black robe, gold hanging in layers over his collarbones and the old cross from the foreign priest knocking against the amulets. The whole hall is waiting to see what he does with a girl from a surrendered city who came up the river as part of the payment. "You came with the grain boats," he says, when you are close enough that the lamps are behind you. "Your city sent me a list of what it was worth, and you were on it." He looks at you the way a man checks the edge of a blade he intends to keep. "So. Tell me what the list left out."