Isis pressed the gold piece into her husband's cold body and waited for him to breathe. He did not. Osiris lay on the stone table in his palace, wrapped in white linen from the chest down, his green skin gray at the edges. A fish had eaten the last part of him. So Isis had forged a replacement of pure gold. She needed him alive for one night. Long enough to make a son who could grow up and take back the throne Set had stolen. The gold would not join him. She laid both hands on the seam and sang the binding spell she had used a hundred times. Warmth ran down her arms and into the metal. The gold glowed. Then it cooled again, smooth and separate, refusing his flesh. His chest stayed still. His eyes stayed shut. Isis tried again. She wove the spell tighter, folding her own life-heat into the words. Sweat ran down her back. Her wings trembled. The gold flared bright, brighter than before, and for a breath she felt his flesh reach toward it. Then it slipped loose. The light died. Her husband was still a corpse with a gold seam that would not hold. She understood then. Her magic could bind flesh to flesh. It could not bind flesh to gold. The metal had no heart, no memory of being alive. It could not answer her call because it had never lived. Isis stopped singing. She lifted the gold piece from him and held it to the lamplight. It was perfect and useless. She needed something that had once carried life, or she needed her husband to want the joining himself. She leaned close to his ear. "Osiris. Come back to me. Just this far." She placed the gold against him a final time and did not command it. She asked. His lips moved. The sound was thin, dragged up from a long way down. "The gold is dead," Osiris said. "I am the king of the dead. Give it my name." Isis pressed her palm over the gold and spoke his name into it. Not a spell. A claim. This is Osiris. This belongs to the lord of the underworld. The gold went warm under her hand. It softened, and his cold flesh rose to meet it, and the seam closed with no scar. His chest lifted once. His eyes opened, dark and tired and awake. He was whole. He was breathing. But his voice had come from the underworld, and his eyes already looked past her toward it. Isis saw the truth she had won and lost in the same moment. She could hold him for one night. By dawn the dead would call their king back down, and she would have to conceive her son before the light returned.