He watches her with some hint of relief that she does not test his brother or sister-in-laws hospitality by remaining in the oasis as she had been. He looks on the woman he had known as a girl and already he can tell that she chafes under the yoke of her Master - though he thinks it is because that Master lords many more Masters over her. He thinks she needs to get so sand-drunk she can barely see straight, get wild in the free winds of the Eastern Dunes. She has wandered it - but he can tell she has not run them.

They have been like this before, her trying to get a rise out of him, him trying to get a wife out of her - though back then it had been a passing and flippant response to her mother’s meddling. Now he wonders if he was not just a little more inclined to believe there had been some spark of himself that he saw in her, yearned to see in any other. She had come at a time that he had been sore at the world, sore in heartbreak over the Lady In Waiting to his eldest sister favoring Atair over himself. He had looked on Zazu then as a kindred spirit, lovely in her way and so akin to himself, but never as much else - easier that way to tease the ill-headed mother who tried so unabashedly to draw him in using her child.

His mind remembers the weighty restrictions of home and he tells her in no uncertain terms that Antares would hear none of it. None of what she would have to say. He was a king the way he had always preferred now - a wilder king than his father would allow. Sheik, in fact. Not king. Zazu, on the other hand, has more chastisement for him, for their behavior. "If anyone should turn away from the Motherland, it should be me. I was not born to Mira yet I am her loyal servant, even as no more than a trinket, a slave to the people, taken from the Tribe of Shu on the Southern Steppe." He knew the Dunes and Wastes south of Mira, so well that he might have called them his own if his brother ascended the throne. The tribe of Shu was greatest among them - and they all paid great heed when a Prince was Sanctified in Shu’s name.

But in the now, Zazu is running wild with emotions she does not seem to wish to express - for all that it tumbles out of her. "How do you think it must feel then? I do not belong to Mira, not as you or yours brothers. I was born a free spirit, a child of Shu to wander the desert and the plains and run free— run and run and never look ahead but no." He looks on her with sympathy--- but somehow also empathy. He knew his motherland to be stifling for the free of heart and spirit and mind. If only she knew what Mahgrib was like. She’d have died stone dead to have witnessed her potential lot. "Please, where will I be staying for the night."

He is silent and perhaps it might have struck her as interesting, considering the brother with whom he had been most raised with. He is silent, looking at her with a look she might not have enjoyed overmuch - because he looked on her like a man with a thought. A very good thought, a very ‘right’ thought even though no thought could be as ‘right’ as a man could think it. Where will she be staying? A night? "Shu speaks to me in many ways, in many things - you know it to be true because otherwise you would not smart so much when I speak of your form in a race..." He is risking much, he thinks, and his nostrils flare with the internal struggle that begins.

"Stay here." It sounds almost too romantic in tone for his usual boisterousness, his eyes and ears though are nothing but sincere. "I have breathed the freedom you dreamed of since they stole you… Stay for every night until you have no nights left in you." He thinks now that it cannot be coincidence that fate painted them with magnetism so that they were drawn into one another’s company over and over and over. "You are no warrior to force us back - why would they send one of Pakhet instead of Sekhmet or Montu?" He is seeing divine intervention in her coming, sensing in her the forbidden hope that he might have no soul at all and never be beared down by a creature so sedate that it tamed him and ruined him for Shu’s service. "Stay."