Home.
The word shivered in the air like a sarab threatening to disappear. Home. Not any more and not for many years since he’d tried and failed to build his own. They said third time lucky, but he didn’t believe in sayings. Or in anything much any more.
He closed his eyes and heard nothing but air moving up the cliff below him, a distinctive hollow presaging the rise of the afternoon winds. He’d once loved this time of day when the sun finally showed signs of exhaustion from its brutal assault and the desert began changing, all kinds of new forces entering its stark stage. New colours, new animals, new sounds.
It had been so long since he’d just...listened. Absorbed. It had been so long since he’d felt like listening. Since he’d felt anything much at all.
He didn’t know if this was a good sign. He liked not feeling.
At least he’d finally made it. More or less in one piece.
A very tired, aching piece.
Edge glanced up at the keening of a bird swooping in and out of tiny indentations on the cliff face and winced as the glare of the sun made his head pound. He’d finished the last of his water some hours ago, a miscalculation on his part. The hiss of the wind cooled the perspiration on his forehead and nape and he smiled at how good it felt now that he no longer feared for his life. His smile itself felt like a crack in the cliff face, sharp and threatening, but he allowed it to linger.
The sound struck him as harshly as if he had fallen off the cliff and hit the ground.
‘Aimsa!’
It carried out over the valley and for a mad second he was willing to consider he had been wrong about his disbelief in all matters supernatural. But somehow he doubted an ancient Egyptian spirit would be yelling at the tops of its lungs. He hurried as best he could on his stiff legs along the cliff and stopped.
The image was worthy of any of the locals’ tales: carved into a sky ignited into a blaze of orange and mauve by the setting sun was a figure cloaked in a pale billowing gown that snapped and surged under the evening wind as if being pulled towards the lip of the crater by desert furies. Then the figure raised its arms and the wind seemed to carry it upwards, as if preparing to hurl it over the cliff like a leaf.
Edge didn’t stop to think, just vaulted over the boulders and ran towards it, his mind already anticipating the image of this woman casting herself off the cliff.
‘Don’t!’ he called in Arabic. ‘Laa! Tawaqfi!’
The figure whirled, one hand outflung as if to hold him back.
They stood facing each other in mutual shock.
His breathing was harsh from the fear of what he had expected to witness and the need to stop it. But his mind was already rushing ahead with a series of realisations—that the woman who had just keened like a vengeful houri at the top of her lungs into the desert air was neither a local nor a hallucination of his, but something far worse.
Egypt had taught him to always expect the unexpected. Especially when it came to Sam Sinclair.
She was dressed in local dress, and local male dress at that, a cream-coloured gibbeh tied with a red cotton sash around her waist over a simple muslin gown. She was still staring at him, her blue-grey eyes wide and far away, but then the pupils dilated as recognition settled in and with it wariness. For a moment he wondered whether he was mistaken. After all, almost a decade had passed and this was no child. She looked very much like Sam and yet she did not.
Well, she wasn’t Sam any more. She was Lady Carruthers, wasn’t she?
‘I thought you were about to jump,’ he said, his breath still short and her eyes focused even further as she glanced from him to the cliff.
‘Why on earth did you think that?’
‘Perhaps because you were standing on a cliff, screaming?’
‘I did not scream, I howled. These are, after all, the Howling Cliffs. I didn’t expect anyone to be listening. I came here to be private.’
Anger was proving to be a wonderful antidote to fear and shock.
‘I am so dreadfully sorry to have intruded, Lady Carruthers.’
His sarcasm kicked up the corners of her mouth, but they fell almost immediately.
‘And I am sorry I frightened you, Lord Edward. I thought it safe to do so since no one dares come here. These cliffs are haunted, you know.’
‘I do now.’
The smile threatened again, but again failed to materialise. Perhaps this really wasn’t Sam at all. Or perhaps marriage had finally succeeded in taming her where all else failed. If so, it was nothing short of a miracle.
‘Not by madwomen,’ she corrected. ‘But by the protectors of Hatshepsut. Poppy was telling us they think that is probably her temple down there.’
She pointed to the structure at the foot of the cliffs. It and the flanking sphinxes were now completely uncovered as was a broad gravel pathway leading towards a jetty. It looked very small and inconsequential from where they stood, nothing like the sand-covered temple where he’d sat with this woman eight years ago...
A lifetime ago.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. It felt raw and rough with sand.
‘You are staying with Poppy?’
‘Of course. Why else would I be in Qetara?’
Why indeed. His wits had clearly gone begging. Her gaze moved over him again and for the first time he realised how he must look. Filthy, for one. He hadn’t shaved in days, or was it a week now?
‘Where did you come from?’ She looked around, frowning. ‘I would have seen you if you came up from Bab el-Nur.’
‘I haven’t been there yet. I came from Zarqa.’
Her eyes widened, managing to look both surprised and suspicious.
‘You’d best fetch your donkey or camel and come down. It will be dark soon.’
‘I don’t have a mount. I walked.’
Surprise turned to shock and then to outrage. He’d forgotten how expressive her face was.
‘You walked from Zarqa. On foot. On your own.’
‘Yes, on all counts. Is that an offence?’
‘Only against good sense! And what on earth were you doing up here? The desert path leads directly through the valley to the Nile, not to the Howling Cliffs. Were you lost?’
‘I wanted to see the view first.’
Her lips closed firmly on whatever was straining to be said. Then she gave her skirts a slight shake, as if dislodging something distasteful.
‘Well, it’s your hide if you wish to risk it. But I suggest you abandon this romantic conceit and make your way down before dark or you’ll find yourself at the bottom of the cliff more rapidly and painfully than you would like.’
She set off down the path and he followed. The reversal of scolding roles was as peculiar as everything else about his return to Egypt. She was right, though. He’d been tempting the fates walking from Zarqa in the first place and going along the cliff path in his present state was...
Romantic conceit. No one had ever accused him of being romantic. Conceited, yes. Romantic—he’d only been romantic once in his life and that had cost him dearly. He sighed. The path which he’d climbed and descended hundreds of times in his youth felt endless and his legs were a mixture of wool and fire when they finally reached the gate in the high whitewashed walls.
‘It has changed a little since