It doesn't look very fine to her, but then she's not the one being asked, so. She nods.

It's pretty usual to sleep naked, in Osirion, or at least in her part of Osirion, but she mostly hasn't been doing that over the course of the last month, since they've been doing crazy adventuring things and occasionally getting attacked by scorpions and spiders at night. She's going to pretend that people normally sleep in their normal clothes, or possibly that she's doing that because she isn't entirely sure they're not going to be attacked by Thuvians in the middle of the night. One of those. She probably doesn't have to specify which, she just has to act like this is the obvious normal thing to do, even though it isn't, and even though there isn't really call to care, because if Élie did want to have sex with her it's not like she would refuse, or even particularly mind, or even mind at all, necessarily, given that he's theoretically her husband even if it doesn't quite exactly feel like that, probably because she first conceived the idea of marrying him less than twelve hours ago. It might be less than six.

Whatever. She'll take the bed and not do anything that'll make it harder to respond to a fight in the middle of the night. Rahim can sleep beside her, safe between her body and the wall of the ship.

Élie is still half-assuming that Naima doesn't mean to treat this like a real marriage, obviously. Whatever else happened today, at least the child is safe. As for the rest of it – well, he should probably think about it at some point. But he's awfully tired. The floor of the cabin really isn't so bad. 

Rahim wakes up only once in the middle of the night. He doesn't do that every night, anymore - he's getting close to a year old - but he wakes up tonight. She sleepily nurses him back to sleep, and manages to make it through a few minutes of aimless thinking before it occurs to her to wonder whether he's woken up Élie and whether she needs to do anything about that.

He has woken up Élie, who is doing his level best to lie very still and look like he wasn't about to cast magic missile at a nonexistent intruder! He's not getting his spells back, is he?

Well, it's dark, so if he's not being obvious about being awake, she'll count herself lucky, nurse the baby back to sleep while only half-awake herself, and then settle down again and go back to sleep.

She has no trouble getting her spells back in the morning, although after that she does have absolutely no idea whether she's going to manage to change clothes at any point during this trip, or whether it's kind of uncalled for to be thinking this much about the logistics there and not just going for the obvious - 

Actually this is dumb. Is Élie awake by the time she finishes communing?

Yes, but he's gone out to prepare his own spells on the deck. ....no such luck. 

Well, in that case, might as well solve her problem while she's been given an obvious solution! She can change her clothes and brush her hair and try not to think about what she's going to do if he walks in in the middle of this process. Not that that should actually be a problem at all, it's just that it seems like it might end up being kind of awkward anyway.

If no one interrupts her, she'll nurse Rahim again, and if no one interrupts that, she'll put him in his sling and see if there's anything around to eat.

There's bread. It's ...edible. 

"Naima!," he says when he sees her. "Have you had breakfast yet? We're lucky, I don't think this can be more than three months old." 

Oh good, they're speaking. ...she's not sure why they wouldn't be speaking, actually, but somehow it's kind of a relief anyway.

"Not yet, just finished getting Rahim his. I guess it's fine as long as it gets us to Alexandria." She thinks it's just stale, not actually dangerous, so she'll do her best to eat it and avoid directing any complaints in this particular direction.

chomp chomp this sure does contain calories. "I saw the captain earlier, apparently we're stopping in the next village for supplies. They were expecting to restock at Mut, but obviously that didn't work out." 

"Oh, that makes sense. I hope they're not all overrun by scorpions."

It transpires that the villages are not, in fact, all overrun by scorpions, although Mut isn't at all the only place along the river that's been hit. Naima still has most of the money she earned the last time they were in Alexandria, and she figures it's enough that she doesn't particularly need to worry about the cost of enough extra food to avoid having to worry about whatever the rest of the crew considers food. Does Élie have anything he wants her to buy, while she's buying stuff anyway?

Élie has never gotten the hang of the way Osirians haggle and is appropriately grateful to give her his list. " – just a minute, I'll write all that down for you" 

"There's not much point, I couldn't read it. I'll remember it."

"Oh."

Élie is sort of abstractly aware that most Osirians are illiterate, in that they keep asking him to write out their wills and certificates of birth and marriage. Naima's different, though, Naima's clever. It seems to him that  intelligent people ought to wake up one day with the ability to read like mushrooms popping up after a rain; certainly he can't remember not knowing. 

"...what's that like?"

"Uh, well, what's it like when someone says something in a language you don't know? I know that there's a language there, but I wouldn't know how to tell what's being said in it. Or written."

Well that's no way for a person to live. 

"I'll – do you want me to teach you?"

" - um, sure."

That sounds painfully disinterested, a half-second later, but it takes that half-second for the offer to catch up with the parts of her that think about things, which don't often seem to include the part that determines what words first come out of her mouth. She would like to learn to read. She would very much like to learn to read, more than she wanted to learn Taldane, which she picked up very determinedly in bits and pieces, listening to Galtan refugees having exchanges in front of her without any thought to whether she could understand them. And - it's not accurate to say that she's never been taught anything, Saira gives instruction on the teachings of Abadar to children and adults alike, and Naima has always been very diligent in her attendance, but -

It feels a bit like how it felt when he immediately said yes after being asked to marry her. The sort of thing one should have had to wring out of someone, with clever arguments or hard work or repeated rounds of bargaining, and which instead is just being handed to her, like he's not even aware that the thing is an unreasonable gift.

She should probably say something about any of that, but the words aren't really helpfully untangling themselves for her.

Élie just wants to get this problem solved as quickly as possible. What in the world is this society doing with itself. Even Cheliax gets this one right and the idea that anything about Chelish pedagogy might be admirable offends him personally.  It's one thing to spend one's life trapped in a little village like Mut and quite another to spend it – really trapped, in mind as well as in body, with no way of knowing any other kid of life except what passes by on the riverboats or with the refugees from Galt. Especially if for strange, lonely, difficult children, as Élie is starting to suspect Naima must have been. He was. The day he found a stained leaf of Hosetter's Imperial Betrayal tucked underneath the endpaper of a vanished's classmate's history book was when that loneliness became bearable. 

"If you don't mind, I'd like to start right away." 

" - okay. Before or after the shopping trip?"

Right! That was going to happen. "As you like. I'm not very particular about food, anyway." 

"Well, I'm not very particular about food, but reading does sound easier to do while the boat is moving."

"In that case I'll start preparing a lesson." He's never taught an adult to read before. He's never actually taught anyone to read before. One generally starts with letters, right? 

"Okay. Well, uh, thank you."

She's practical about buying precisely what she needs, and doesn't dawdle; the last thing she wants is to leave the river boat waiting on her, or, gods forbid, be forgotten in town. The walking takes a bit of time, but she's back inside an hour.

He has prepared a primer. It has all the letters of the alphabet in written in neat Taldane, and followed by all the letters of the alphabet in Osirian, followed by the ligatures and alternate letterforms crammed into the margins because he remembered those existed somewhere in the middle and the boat didn't have a lot by way of loose paper.