She is patient with him, he greatest treasure, his Beautiful One. She is patient and though she is firm, she is not caustic or demanding. The creature of anger that rises in him is in part a simple reflection of the anger that he had held for those who kept his child from him. He still rails at it, the idea that there was a Son out there, lost to him, to all he was and would ever be capable of. It is something he cannot even fathom if it had been a daughter - the delight of his fatherhood and gem of his people, lost forever to the traditions that had cost him so dearly.

Her comfort keeps him from dwelling, of being so buried in these once well-hidden emotions, but he feels her stiffen as he speaks coarsely, laying out the evenness of their two faiths as one. He cannot ebb his emotions easily and he has to at first allow his fairness in what he says recolor what she must think of him taking the ‘Lordly’ tone with her in private - a place not meant for edicts or dictatorship. When, by the last words, he is washed clean of his pain and the discomfort of speaking to his private trauma, he asks in a tone much kinder if it would please both their gods together.

He grows tender to her, softened by his awareness of his own imperfect behavior and a crushing love of the woman who stands beside him to ease his suffering by taking some of the burden into her own soul. "I believe that may soothe both sides, yes." She offers a small smile and there is a small pain in knowing he had not tended to her more kindly in the returned rush of his eldest and more dear of pains to his heart. But he has no chance to beg her forgiveness, she is sighing and her breath against his skin heightens his focus on her.

"I hope that I will be everything you hoped a mother of your children to be." He smiles at this, his love growing to burst the seams of his heart with love of her - the child well intangible to him as yet, and a dimmer joy felt than the touch of Sayyida against his side. "You have Sekhmet in your blood enough to face down a lifetime of suppression and leave your father, a wrong tradition in the face of a king you do not know the mind of yet, and now treat me with kindness, even when Pain and Anger turn me to stone beneath your beloved touch… Wife, I am sorry for my ire bringing you discomfort. I swear on my own namesake that it was not for you and I beg forgiveness that I did not bear the feelings better to spare you such a tone in our Sanctuary."

When she touches her side, he tenderly tries to do the same, cautious in case she was not open to such a thing in light of his bad behavior. He is patient now, wishing to provide a balm where he might have burned her. She looks so distant that he almost wonders if he had pushed her away irrevocably, but still he remains. He is glad and refreshed by this change in the future of his new People. He is jubilant that his wife seems to find the new fashioned reverences fair - at least so far as she has told him in the face of his ill humor at the time.

Then he watches a darkness flicker into her gaze while she lightens her expression with a smile and already he knows what she will ask-- or at least what topic was about to be broached. It had always drawn out this look in her - so he knows what to expect in the general sense. "What thoughts have you of the others that joined us here? Have any the potential of a lesser wife for you?"

He chuckles, but it is with ears parted to either side to show his sheepishness. "I think that the lady Eness has too much my brothers eye to have ever thought her more than pleasant to look on and entirely not of my own preference to have in the face of my Beautiful One’s own bounty." He mentions her first because he recalls the sharp sting on his breast as they had come to greet Sayyida. "And her protector is not one, I think, who would ever submit to the office of Wife without the weighty efforts afforded by the future Husband that might win her. I would not be ill suited to such a longsuffering pursuit, but I find myself glad to be in your Right of Golden Year, for all that I stole the shine of it before I ever met you."

He is not flippant, but matter-of-fact. There was not, in those two, a woman that he fancied so well as to earn the ire of the one who had so utterly drank down his fires in the beginning of their season. None could have tempted him this year, not with the fertile ground of his Beautiful One so eagerly gifted to him and her jealousy so potent and pleasing in his eye (because it’s potency had no ground to stand, that is.)

"As for the flaxen woman, I think that she might have the same nature as my brother - longwinded. I had never thought to marry anyone the equal of my brother in words." He looks at her with a twinkle of teasing and giddiness in his eye, the boy who she had never met suddenly very ample in their discussion. "Then, as for the sister who followed Bahadir, I find myself fairly warned that Atair does not trust either of their coming so wholly as to have looked on her with any amount of favor at all. She is only partly of The People, though, so I cannot speak to her mind of our lifestyle in any case."