He is initially wary of them but warms up, slowly. Asks Aroden if they go to Axis too even though they're heathens and foreign and have different gods.

"Maybe. It depends which god they follow. Abadar is worshipped a great deal here," (memories of a quiet place-like-a-library), "and he is lawful neutral." 

So Saba makes some friends, tentatively. Stops being quite so good about following rules. They get kicked out of the library when he yells. 

The price of bread climbs. Osirion enslaves people for theft but this is only so much of a deterrent when there's no food to be had. 

He gets mugged one evening, toddler notwithstanding; they noticed the magic and figured he might have some money on him.

Getting kicked out of the library is unfortunate, but - well, it's probably not normal, or healthy, for a child that age to be so well-behaved, it seems like it might be a sign of how traumatized he was by the storms and the loss of his parents, and Aroden is carefully not angry about it. 

–Even human, in a small weak body that still doesn't quite feel like his, he has quick reaction times, and he draws his dagger in a flash, he's on his feet and shoving Saba behind him. (He keeps his spellbook in a pocket he sewed against his back, now, using the mending spell and a scrap of cloth. His money is in his boot, it could be taken from him by force but it's hard to grab in a short scuffle. His eyes are quick-moving and haunted and implacable, and there's no expression at all in his face; this is usually what happens when all of his attention is elsewhere. 

- they will run away and bother someone else.

He returns the dagger to its sheath in his other boot, and crouches down, holding his arms out to Saba. "I am so sorry. We are safe, now, they left, but - we should be somewhere else, now." 

Saba looks back at him, wide-eyed, and climbs into his arms, and is well-behaved again for the next couple of days (but not too many).

He tells Saba to stay close to him, now, the city isn't safe; he stops leaving Saba at his friends' houses while he makes the laundry rounds, and totes the child with him instead. (He hopes Saba wasn't too frightened by his sudden change in demeanour; it wasn't even on purpose but he expects it helped his defence and so he's not going to try to change that reflexive response.) 

–Things are, in fact, getting bad and they might get worse. So far he's been keeping his head down, being as boring and unassuming as possible while he regains some simple magics and - re-habituates to his current state. He's reluctant to change that just yet, but he starts paying very close attention to what his options are, if he wants to join an organized group of some kind that will provide some defences at the risk of drawing more attention and perhaps putting himself at risk.

If there are riots he's going to leave the city, at least for a little while. He's not sure the countryside is any better, but at least it won't have tens of thousands of very upset people crammed into one place. 

He tries the harder first-level spells every so often, to see if he's mastered magic enough to cast them. 

And one day he can make them work, though on any given day he can only prepare one of them. The wizard's illusion spell is actually pretty good, though right now he has no finesse at all with it; it can fill about forty square feet with whatever he's imagining ought to be there, though it only lasts as long as he's concentrating on it. 

The other spell makes people fall asleep, though with sufficient effort they can throw it off and it won't work on anyone with magical defenses of their own. 

He alternates preparing both, for practice; either is kind of useful in a fight, he can illusion some fog to run away in or try to catch a would-be mugger off guard enough that they fall asleep. If he hasn't used the illusion by the end of the day, which he usually won't have, he'll cast it before going to bed, making different scenes to entertain Saba.

He pays a lot of attention to how people seem in the streets, the general level of unrest and unease, whether it's building or levelling off. He works hard with his cantrips to earn enough that he can feed himself and Saba, and maybe add a little more to the coin he keeps in his boot. (Which he sleeps wearing, nowadays, even in the inn.) 

There's a lot more human misery. There's a little more unrest.  The government has fixed the price of bread and made it illegal to sell it fresh but the loaves can shrink in size and there's a long line even for day-old bread. 

Some of the people he does laundry for ask if he wants a wife, a mother for the boy, they have daughters and too many mouths to feed...

...Wow. 

He tells them he needs to think about that. On the one hand, probably he shouldn't marry someone he hardly knows, who may not want to be married at all, and it's a commitment to a specific person, at a time when he has no idea what his future plans will be except that they're likely to be very weird. Also he - doesn't think his mind is currently set up very well to love a woman, which seems like an unfair thing to impose on a wife. 

On the other hand, he is clearly, at this point, not going with the option of finding Saba a nice home with new surrogate parents. All the families he considers already have too many mouths to feed, and probably won't get out of the city in time if things erupt into violence, although it's looking like maybe they won't. And he's not sure he's providing adequate parenting, and it seems like it would be good for Saba to have a mother. Also it would be convenient for him to have an - ally, he supposes. Or at least a reasonably clever assistant. He wouldn't be able to tell her his identity but he could tell her some of his plans.

After Saba is asleep and no longer demanding entertainment, he folds his arms under his head and stares at the dim rafters of the inn they're staying at nowadays, and thinks through what he's picked up of the local marriage customs and what the expectations would be. 

Men provide for their wives and children, and protect them from danger, and discipline them if they're badly behaved, and set a good example for them. Women maintain their household and care for their children and look after their husbands in old age (which comes sooner for the husband, because men marry almost a decade older than women do). Men can have several wives, so long as they can support them and all their children. Osirion permits divorce in the case that either party has grossly betrayed the foundation of the marriage (adultery, or conviction for a serious crime). 

If he were interested he would have chaperoned meetings with suitable women and if they liked each other all right they'd proceed from there to a marriage. In some parts of the country dowries are expected, but not everywhere.

He gives it a lot of thought. 

From a strategic perspective: it'll make him seem more respectable and trustworthy, and buy him some extra time in the day to just work on magic. It'll also limit his flexibility, potentially a lot, though he could maybe get a woman to agree to long-term separation once Saba is grown up, if the marriage otherwise wasn't working at all. Also he definitely needs to be upfront with the woman in question, inform her that what he wants is very different from the usual Osirion marriage. And, hmm, whether a woman thinks that's a downside or a perk is probably a decent filter for whether he wants her as an ally/assistant. 

He goes back to the family. Says that he's considering it, he does want Saba to have a mother, but it's a significant decision, obviously, and also he's foreign, not from Osirion, and may expect rather different things out of a marriage, though he would of course do right by any wife. He implies, without saying outright, that he's still grieving a wife lost in the storms. (He lost so, so much more than that.) 

If they're still interested given that, he would like to meet the daughter or daughters who might be interested, with a chaperone, to see if they get along. 

There are four daughters! All of them are interested, for a value of interested where it seems to have been distinctly their parents' idea and very much motivated by there not being any way to put enough food on the table right now. He might not care to talk to the oldest one, twenty-one and unmarried because she had the pox badly as a child and still has the blemishes.

Actually, he'll definitely talk to her! (He doesn't feel inclined to care about blemishes, all human bodies look sort of weird to him right now anyway, and at twenty-one she might seem less like a child to him. Maybe.)

He sits down with her and says some things that he made a list of the night before. He has a child already; doesn't want more children, certainly not at a time like this, but does want a mother who will love and help him raise Saba. He comes from a place that's very different, and he's also an ambitious man (he sort of makes it sound like the storms and resulting loss gave him the new life mission of trying to rebuild in the wreckage, which isn't entirely false.) He intends to learn a lot more magic, and he's hoping for a wife who is clever and practical and ideally interested in learning some magic too, if only from the safety of home. Because of that, he expects he can provide well for a family; he's not wealthy right now, of course, but he does have a reliable livelihood.

He isn't sure yet what his future will hold, and it may involve doing dangerous things - he'll have to take on some fights, to continue gaining magical ability past a certain point; though he intends to be quite conservative and only take on survivable fights, he has plans and if he dies he won't accomplish any of them, right. If he leaves her a widow, she'll be a wealthy one; he's not planning to go off adventuring or anything before he's seen to that. 

He is aware that this is not what the usual Osirion marriage looks like, and would understand if she's less interested as a result. 

She listens very carefully and then has five questions, which are: does he have some way with the magic to accomplish not having more children, and is it as she has been not-very-reliably informed Evil, and what are the products of his ambitions going to look like for her and Saba if he does not get himself killed becoming powerful enough for them, and given that not all people can learn magic, how can he tell whether she'd be able to, and would he be willing to give her family money, for the next year, she could probably do logistics so he could get to twice as many houses for laundry in the same amount of time and he could give her a quarter of that.

There are methods and he knows that some of them are definitely not Evil, but also he's going to be very frank with her, and apologetic, that he is probably not ready for activities that result in pregnancy. It's been - a very bad year so far - and he thinks he needs a little more time, but Saba shouldn't wait years for a mother. He suspects that if he does become powerful enough, it'll take decades and Saba will be grown, but he's likely to end up eventually seeking political leadership or - becoming a very eminent scholar, or something. (He still feels very not-oriented to the kinds of things that are feasible as a human who's also trying to operate somewhat undercover.) 

He'll come back to the magic question in a moment. Yes, of course - he would be delighted to have logistical help with a laundry business, if she can learn the cantrip they might be able to do even more than twice as much, and a quarter of the earnings being hers seems very fair, he would even say half if she ends up able to learn the spell. 

To be the kind of wizard he is, he tells her, a person just needs to be reasonably smart, and of course very diligent and patient and willing to work at it. Can she read and write? Do basic figuring? He can give her a couple of quick mental math problems, it's not a very rigorous test of magical potential but it'll give him a sense of whether she can do it at all. 

She can read and write! She taught herself from her brother's books; he went to school and did well and did the books on a merchant ship (lost at sea, of course). She can do household accounting, too, and she's never thought about anything like the math problems at all but reasons through it eventually, frowning. 

He thinks she'll do great! Assuming she wants to learn magic, of course. He thinks that someone will probably be happier married to him if they find magic interesting. (Saba loves magic too, albeit mostly as entertainment.) 

She would definitely like to learn magic! Then she won't be destitute even if he widows her sooner than planned, see, and housework would take so much less time. Also can wizards really make everybody like them all the time, there'd be so much less household conflict. 

He thinks there is a spell for that, although it's complicated and there are some cases where it wouldn't be legal to do that and it would be sort of rude to go around using magic to make people like you more when they would prefer you not, but you can. And, yes, it seems like it might be very convenient sometimes, especially when everyone is so stressed by outside events. 

She looks slightly embarrassed and promises very earnestly that she will not use magic illegally or on him or his friends, just, sometimes it's hard to like people even when you want to and don't prefer to always be frustrated with each other.

Reasonable! And once they knew each other better, which they would by the time she got to that sort of spell, he would probably not mind at all if she wanted to practice it on him once in a while. (He expects he'll be reasonably calibrated within a few months on what sort of person she is and how much trust she deserves.) 

Is she interested, then? 

Yes, definitely! - was he going to also go talk to some other people?