"...I don't think that teaches the same thing?" Shrug. 

"What same thing?"

"Uh, I think letting people fool around before marriage teaches different skills than renting them."

"Maybe. Wouldn't know and unless one of you faints am not likely to have an opportunity to investigate." Pause. "Well, unless Fazil faints."

"He's not as uptight in bed."

"You know, someday we're going to get into a fight, and I will have prepared nothing but Silence spells for shutting you up, and we'll die, and you'll deserve it."

"I guess if you faint I'll remember that," Belmarniss tells Hagan.

He pretends to feel dizzy. Fazil slaps him.

"Kinky."

"I'm going to need to get married while everyone I know is off questing in Tian Xia."

"I'll send extremely weird presents that leave your wife with a lot of questions!"

"Oh, like what?"

"Hmmm.... poisons in fancy glass bottles. Cursed jewelry. Not, like, seriously cursed, the kind that makes you incredibly clumsy for three minutes or makes you only able to see invisible things. Pictures of random children that look like him."

"Hopefully he'll find a wife only after leveling enough to cure serious reputational wounds."

"I think Abadar has guidance on this." He closes his eyes and hums to himself. "...money. Abadar says that the spell to cure reputational wounds is just money."

"I shouldn't have told you you're usually funny, it's gone to your head."

"Does that work, in practice - what are the going rates -"

"I mean - people value a lot of things in a spouse, including their reputation and their character and their job prospects and their finances. These trade off to some extent, right, like a rich man of known dreadful character might have as many options as a poor one of sterling character. But they trade off imperfectly, and in general I'd expect that the sort of people who will marry a poor man of good character are more my sort than the ones who'll marry a rich man with a scandalous reputation. Even though I am going to be a rich man. With -" sigh - "something of a mixed reputation."

"Not just on my account, surely? Hagan is fully conscious!"

"No, no, it's the adventuring and the criminal case in Taldor and the father and admittedly some amount the adventuring companions but not too much."

"I wouldn't want to be doing you any serious reputational wounds. Adventuring's disreputable?"

"Compared to working in the church, which is what most clerics do."

"How'd you settle on this?"

"I worked in the church for ten years. I was blessed at fourteen, I was twenty-four when my younger sister was married. I - didn't feel like it was what I was meant to do with the rest of my life. Abadar didn't directly say anything but gave me a cleric level on my very first adventure, which seemed suggestive."

"Any guesses why?"