Asten shrugged. “I was lonely. I wanted the companionship of a beautiful woman. But there was nothing I could do to extend my stay, so I just disappeared when the time came. They cried, but in most cases they got over me fairly quickly.”
“And what happened then with Ahmose?”
“Ahmose isn’t the type to love and leave a girl. When I saw he was getting serious, I intervened.”
Ahmose’s body was tense, his hands tightening into fists. “Why, Asten?” he quietly inquired.
Asten looked at his brother with regret. “Because it would have broken you. You would have done what Amon did, but worse. You would have sacrificed everything just like he did.”
“Then why didn’t you stop him?” Ahmose asked.
“I didn’t stop Amon because”—Asten paused and looked at me—“because she loved him back. Tiombe didn’t love you,” Asten murmured softly.
“It wasn’t your place to judge,” Ahmose said.
“No,” Asten agreed. “It wasn’t. I regretted it as soon as it was done, but consoled myself when I saw your anger. If there was a risk that you would kill anyone, it was me, not yourself, and I made peace with that.”
Ahmose folded his arms across his chest. “Glad someone did.”
“Let us move on to the next question,” Ma’at said. “Have you committed violence?”
“I have,” Asten answered quietly. “I’ve battled the undead. I’ve fought the minions of Seth. I’ve dragged the damned to their tribunals and have ignored their pleas. And”—he sucked in a shaky breath—“I’ve caused the death of an innocent man.”
“Caused?” Ma’at said.
“No. I more than caused it,” he disclosed. Asten’s eyes flicked my way and then he turned his head as if he couldn’t stand looking at me. “In fact,” Asten continued, “I was the one that took his life.”
I gasped, completely shocked that the young man who carried me on his back when I couldn’t walk, who flirted with a glint in his chocolate eyes and a knowing smirk, who showed kindness and understanding to Tia, was a murderer. I couldn’t reconcile the man I knew with what he was saying.
“Perhaps you’d better explain,” Ma’at suggested.
“Lily knows the story about our teacher, how we left the school that day to hunt. It had been my idea. Ahmose and Amon were reluctant to break the rules. I was the wild one of the group, always trying to lead them into trouble. They would never have attacked the jackals if I hadn’t been the first to run into danger.”
Jackals? Tia shook and scrambled backward inside my mind.
Asten continued. “And I only did it because I knew they wouldn’t let me fight alone. The two of them have a royal sort of moral code that I don’t seem to possess.”
“Go on,” Ma’at encouraged.
“Well, that night, after defeating the jackals, we camped and I slunk away, hoping to recover the horns of the ibex.”
“And why did you need them?” Ma’at asked.
“My”—he paused—“mother was yearning for a child, a second child,” he explained. “And I’d taken it upon myself to hunt down a sorceress. She told me that if I ground up the horns of the ibex, mixed it into the fresh milk from a goat that had recently given birth for the first time, and gave it to my mother to drink, that she would then be able to conceive.”
“So you went back for the horns,” Osiris said.
“Yes, and when I did, I found the broken body of our teacher. He was still alive. I collapsed at his side and bid him drink from my skin of water, but it was obvious to me that his chance of survival was extremely unlikely. He’d already lost most of his blood. His lower leg had been removed and dragged off. He’d made a tourniquet from some torn cloth, but there was nothing I could do. Not really.
“Anything I attempted would only prolong his suffering. In the time it would have taken to bring my brothers, he likely would have died anyway. And the idea of leaving him to be devoured alive as I sought them out was unthinkable to me.”
Something broke in Tia’s mind.
“Since you cannot lie when your heart is being weighed, you obviously believe this to be true, and yet you still blame yourself for his death. Why?” Ma’at asked.
Asten didn’t answer at first. He had a faraway look in his eyes, as if he was replaying the grisly scene in his mind, and I wondered how many times over the centuries he’d done so.
“He tried to speak,” Asten said softly. “But no words escaped his