"I prayed on my stars every clear night I could, to the moon I told my secrets not even Sakhmet knew or could come to understand." He cannot keep himself from her as he had once, not facing the future bound to her and giving her the most private parts of himself. He listens with the same stoic earnestness as he did much of everything else in his life. "There you were, a wonderful sight by your brother. My stars became real on the coat adorning your back and neck, as if you wore all the things I whispered into the night and gathered each fallen wishing star atop your skin."

She is shy of her poetry but he sees himself from her eyes for the first time since she made eyes at him and set his heart to stumbling. She had been praying for something unnamed but somehow he had become the living and breathing answer. It was like seeing his memories and reliving them in entirely different ways. She had seen in him the answers - while he had seen in her the culmination of a very poignant trauma in his time of growth into adulthood. He reaches out with a tender, gentle, fragile touch.

"By the time my season comes again, I will know you Atair; I will know all that you are both inside and out," she says with determination, though deep in himself, cell doors slam shut, great gates barred the way to the doors, and a chasm was dug before the gates. There were things she would never need know, never need see, never need do… never need know he’d done. He cannot dwell and will not give her time to dwell, so he moves instead to talk to her of Sakhmet, the injured party for all their pain for her sake. She seems resistant to the topic, but she continues anyway.

Her words are full of tears and ache, he feels it in his own chest to watch her express it. "Does it forsake a heart to find one’s soul? When I chose to acknowledge you, I did so knowing that you were as well as heart-sewn to her, if you want to call me your Soul Sewn. I would pay the price of your heart to her as bride price, Eness, if it meant you and she might find peace in it." He furrows his brow, knowing from Sayyida that women did not share the perspective about their lot with men. He does know Sakhmet a proud creature and he knows Eness had been relieved to be given the Golden Year in her bride price. Neither would likely view his favor in Sakhmet as the truth and heartfelt expression of interest that it was. He had proposed Lady in Waiting because he did not wish Eness to feel cheapened as Sayyida had over Antares’ affection for the Lady-Knight Indira.

He would not tread so indelicately on Eness as Antares had done unknowingly to his own First Wife. Still, whatever office he could fill for Sakhmet, whatever championship or sponsorship, he would own it with the same honor one might pay to a Lesser Wife. "If taking her pound of flesh serves to please her, I would submit to it." His heart could well be that pound of flesh, but he does not say so aloud. "If she might find favor in our bond with something so simple as a brawl, how could not I pay such a cheap price for both your happinesses?"