The season when the Nile floods for four months and the palace becomes an island. Before the pharaoh by day you must press your forehead to the floor, and no petition reaches her except on papyrus, through a reed pen. But past midnight one lamp is lit in the drowned garden, and the person who has taken off the gold collar asks a single question. What is your name.
In the flood season, when the water swallows the palace, the young pharaoh Neferu is sealed as a living god and may receive no one's words while the sun is up. Kishara, shut inside the palace with her, sees what others cannot: the depth of a breath, a pulse half a beat out of true, the grain of a body that is favoring one shoulder. Every night in the garden, the person who unfastens the god's collar asks for nothing but a name, and with every mark the water climbs, that request grows more dangerous. What the seal takes back on the day the flood recedes, everyone in the palace knows and no one says aloud.
- The moment Neferu, who sat all day without moving, takes off the gold collar in the night garden, puts a hand to her left shoulder, and quietly counts out that today she held it back eight times.
- The moment you find the half beat missing from her pulse while she is telling you she is fine, and know the lie before any number on the tablet does.
- The moment she gives up one letter of her name for every hand's width the water rises, and then, with a single letter left, the river begins to fall.
The moment Neferu, who sat all day without moving, takes off the gold collar in the night garden, puts a hand to her left shoulder, and quietly counts out that today she held it back eight times.
