As the waltz ends, Eve excuses herself from Lord Stockton and moves toward Streatfield, carefully avoiding her mother’s sightline from the gallery and her older brother, Porchey, who is home on military leave. Streatfield positions himself directly below where Lady Almina stands and shields Eve as she slips through a closed door into the Library.

Finding the room empty, she follows a sound into the adjacent Small Library, where she finds Howard Carter—a celebrated archaeologist, who her father serves as an excavation patron—holding a book and a small object. Eve has eagerly awaited his return from London, where he consulted Mr. Wallis Budge, keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum, about a scarab unearthed before the war in Luxor, Egypt, at the site of the Valley of the Kings. Carter has tutored Eve in Egyptology for years, and she is thrilled when he calls her a colleague.

Carter reports that Budge agrees the scarab may have belonged to Hatshepsut, and places the small, blue-glazed stone beetle in Eve’s hand. As Carter prepares to share more of Budge’s analysis, he falls abruptly silent. Eve turns to find her mother standing behind them, looking furious.

Two days later, the household and weekend guests gather for an outdoor luncheon on the Highclere grounds near the Temple of Diana. Eve is inwardly restless throughout. When Lady Milgrove invites her to reflect on her upbringing, Eve offers a polished account of exploring the beautiful grounds while suppressing the lonelier reality: long stretches of childhood when she and Porchey were left in the care of servants while their parents traveled or entertained. Lady Almina works to impress the guests with Highclere’s history, though a small exchange with Lord Stockton—who bristles at being corrected by a woman—leads Eve to conclude that her mother’s matchmaking ambitions would not extend to someone like him. When the guests are distracted, Eve quietly draws the scarab from her pocket, privately reaffirming her drive to recover the true story of Hatshepsut and to understand why later rulers worked to erase her from the historical record.

On returning from the luncheon, Eve is intercepted by her mother, who scolds her for keeping to herself rather than socializing with the eligible young men at the gathering. Eve deflects with a promise to do better, then asks for an hour in the Library. Once certain her mother has gone upstairs, she opens a concealed door and slips into the Music Room, where Carter is quietly working with a collection of small artifacts.

Carter resumes the conversation cut short at the ball. The scarab, he explains, does not bear Hatshepsut’s royal names but an earlier one, used when she held the office of God’s Wife of Amun—the most powerful female priestly title in Egypt. This lesser-known designation is why the artifact was initially overlooked, and it makes the find rare. Carter asks Eve to work alongside him examining the other stored artifacts from the same excavation for further connections to Hatshepsut. Eve agrees immediately, and notes that this search may lead them to the undiscovered tomb of Hatshepsut.

The narrative shifts to 1486 BCE in Thebes, told from the first-person perspective of Princess Hatshepsut. Before dawn, her maid, Nedjem, wakes her to fulfill her daily obligations as God’s Wife of Amun, the highest priestly rank in Egypt.

Nedjem guides Hatshepsut through the darkened palace corridors to the temple complex, where she enters the sacred purification pool alone, for only she may perform this rite. After emerging, servants dress her in ceremonial linen and adorn her with an elaborate wig, gold diadem, bracelets, and a collar of gold and carnelian. She then processes to Amun’s sanctuary with the high priest, and together they chant the daily prayers calling on the god to be reborn, a ritual believed to ensure that the sun will rise and the Nile will flood. The high priest withdraws, leaving Hatshepsut alone in the inner sanctum to face the deity’s veiled statue. The weight of responsibility is absolute: The survival of her people, she believes, rests entirely on whether she proves worthy to rouse the god each day.

In the royal audience hall, Hatshepsut observes her father, Pharaoh Thutmose I, preside over a dispute between two tax officials arguing over whether Upper or Lower Egypt should bear the heavier financial burden. Thutmose commands the room to stillness and presses the two men with pointed questions about the meaning of his double crown until they arrive on their own at the conclusion that both regions must share the costs equally—a demonstration of his governing philosophy: Use the symbols of royal and divine authority to guide subjects toward just resolutions rather than simply commanding them.

Afterward, Thutmose instructs Hatshepsut on the necessity of firm, even-handed rule in service of maat, the principle of truth and justice, and she shows she has absorbed the lesson. Once the servants withdraw, the formality between father and daughter dissolves. Thutmose embraces her, calls her by her given name, and tells her she carried herself with exceptional composure—rare, genuine tenderness that briefly lifts the weight of her priestly and royal roles.

While conducting her own audience, Hatshepsut is interrupted by an urgent summons from Queen Ahmes. She runs through the palace to her mother’s chambers, where she finds the queen collapsed on the floor surrounded by her court. No explanation is needed: Ahmes’s grief reveals that Prince Amenmose, Hatshepsut’s older brother and heir to the throne, has died.

Hatshepsut joins the mourning women, recalling Amenmose only in scattered impressions—glimpses of him in lessons, on a royal hunt, returning from a campaign. The fragmentary nature of these memories was deliberate: Royal children were kept at an emotional distance because Amenmose was also her betrothed, marriage between them being necessary to preserve the royal bloodline. She grieves for the brother she never truly knew, for her parents’ loss, and for the future she had expected. When Thutmose enters and finds her on the floor, he steadies her and tells her that the dynasty’s future now depends on her more than ever.

Approaching her parents’ private quarters, Hatshepsut overhears an argument between Thutmose and Queen Ahmes, who demands a decision about succession; he replies that he needs more time to prepare Hatshepsut. When Ahmes presses him on what Hatshepsut has to do with selecting an heir, Thutmose explains that whichever young son he chooses from the harem as the next pharaoh will be too young to rule alone. He envisions Ahmes serving as regent and Hatshepsut as the child pharaoh’s wife and governing partner—a role her years of education, court experience, and priestly authority make her uniquely suited to fill. As Ahmes slowly grasps the significance of the proposal, Thutmose calls out to Hatshepsut, making clear he has known she was listening all along. He takes her hand and tells her they have much to do together.