Worn, he made the path between Pharaoh’s camp and the sesh’s atelier. Traversed so frequently in night that the earth was worked and smooth as polished iroko.
This stillness stayed with him. He kept seeing again in his mind her small bounce as she worked. Her thin tail in sheets of rain just before the dark swallowed it. A voice was gone, and likewise, he could not shake the blankness he felt in not hearing it.
Not a length away— restrained, stymied and full of half-spent energy, he stared in.
Sitamun.

memories returned, but at their edges a fracturing remained. sitamun felt with some cold certainty that she was changed. she was not a physician, nor a soothsayer, nor sorcerer, but she no longer felt whole, as if something vital would never return. often she told herself that these were only the anxieties of the invalid, but found herself unsure from time to time.
when sapair arrived, her eyes opened to alight upon the roof of the bower, and then slid toward him. her body followed, sitamun rising gingerly into a half-raise. setemhotep seems to think you would march upon jakten if i did not come back, she said, and her voice wavered a little in the utterance.

Thin, wavering, the voice is still hers.
“Setemhotep talks too much,” jodai whispers at last with no gruffness to hide what tremor relieves his word. Feet shift on the reed matting, restless. Useless. The bower is dim, sharp with pulp of healing plants and the sweetness of breath. Sitamun's silhouette is thinner now, fragile in ways that anger him and half-swallowed in a fur. Sapair steps inside as she rises.
“Lie back,” a soldier’s voice is too jarring for the small chamber, “your head…”
Eyes lower to the edge of the bedding where one scarlet wrist lay exposed.

sitamun did as she was bid, touched by the concern of the powerful captain at her bedside. it is his job to talk much and worry for us all, she defended lightly of the sesh, though it was to the scarlet lion she reached now. come here. worry no more.
her wrist belonged to him for its kissing; if she could but touch the round hardness of his shoulder, the fellahin meant to wind her claws there, to hold fast to him. my head hurts, sapair, but that is all.
her memories would come back; the flashes of half-visions would cease. they were only remnants of her brush with the Field of Reeds, but here she was now, bound to her ka, flesh in this living world.