The Kandake is dying, the throne has no settled heir, and the evidence in a murder points at the one community in Meroe with no power to defend itself.Meroe, around 50 CE. Simeon, the Kandake's treasury official, has spent two decades building a small fellowship of believers that the court tolerates and does not trust. Now the queen who gave him room to worship, without ever sharing his faith, is nearing the end of her reign. Two factions want whatever advantage the succession will give them. One sees Simeon's people as a useful tool. The other sees them as a threat to be crushed before a new ruler is named.Then Pasheru, a quiet archive colleague who was close to baptism, is found dead in the treasury archive, and the scene has been arranged to point straight at the fellowship.The Kandake gives Simeon a narrow commission: solve it quietly, before either rival can use the death to force her hand. His ledgers, his seals, and a lamp that burned longer than it should have lead him to a decade of stolen tribute and to a killer he has trusted for years. Meanwhile Toma, no longer the boy who ran Simeon's errands, works the ironworkers' quarter and the garrison ledgers. He learns that leading the fellowship and controlling it are not the same thing.What Simeon finds will force him to choose in public, inside the Kandake's own court, between the throne that has protected him and the God who claimed him first. The murder has an answer. The throne does not. And there is no quiet way left.The Throne and the Cross is the fourth novel in The Envoy of the Nile series, a Christian historical mystery that follows the Kushite treasurer of Acts 8 from the road to Gaza across the first-century world. Every clue is on the page before the reveal, and each book stands on its own, so new readers can begin here.
