"I do! Especially when they're about, oh, two or three, small enough to sit on my shoulders and still working on sentences. Do you?"

"Oh yes! Small children are wonderful. I love them at that age." He gets quiet, as though asking to share a secret. "Have you thought about... having children? A family?"

"I've always assumed I would one day like my older sisters. I think I'd like at least four."

He silently wishes he'd studied up on the royal family, including the other sisters. "Oh, how many sisters do you have? Do they all live in the Dome as well?"

"I have three full sisters and eleven half-sisters, though some of the half-sisters are older than me by enough that I don't know them too well. And I have two full brothers, fourteen half-brothers. The brothers all live in the Dome but six of the sisters have married out. They do come by regularly, though, to attend weddings and meet new babies and catch up and so on."

He nods, making a mental note to try and figure this out sometime when he's in a less stressful situation. "That's... quite a lot."

"People closely related to the Pharaoh need to give Abadar many choices for who can best bear his mantle when the succession comes around."

"Of course." He nods. "Though I hope you won't find it offputting if I say I'll be more than happy to stay clear of that whole deal."

"I don't know how to guess how likely it is that my children will be chosen. It's hard to wish they wouldn't be much like my brother, but we don't have enough generations to be really sure what weighs on the decision."

"Indeed. Abadar's will is... truly difficult to divine. I don't imagine anyone can know for sure how he makes his decisions," he says with a wry smile.

"Well, the pharaoh my brother has an idea, and he seems to have said what he had to say about it," she replies, smiling back.

"I suppose your brother is much more practiced than I at communicating with Abadar. While I am his loyal servant, I would not say he is always the most clear in his direction."

"One of my nephews says that when he's rich enough he will buy Abadar a pen so he can write us letters, but I doubt that's the problem."

Shawil laughs. "A pen. I'll have to remember that. But no, I doubt that's it either."

"In that particular nephew's defense, he's four."

"A splendid age. Small children are such a joy. I had never hoped to have my own, but now it doesn't seem impossible."

"Why hadn't you expected to? Even adventurers eventually settle down, most of the time."

"Well I... I don't really think of myself as an adventurer. I'm an Inquisitor, and I have a job, and that job seems to pretty similar to what adventurers do. But I didn't know it would end up this way."

"Besides," he says quietly after a pause. "It's a pretty dangerous career. I wasn't sure I would make it this long." He silently wonders if she's thought about the danger of his line of work, and whether the possibility of him not making it back alive makes her reconsider this whole thing.

"That's true," she says soberly. "You don't think you'd want to come back if you moved on to Axis?"

"Assuming I make it to Axis... Not everyone makes it to the afterlife, much less the one they hope for. But I want to be here as long as there is need of me, whether that's the job, or... something else."

She nods. "- oh, that's probably our lecturer."

The lecture is on the Law of comparative advantage; it's a popular lecture topic for those lectures aimed at courting or married couples. The Law of comparative advantage is the reason that no one willing to work will go without work, and the reason that none are threatened by the strength of another, in a Lawful society, and the reason that households are more than the sum of their parts, and the reason that Abadar alone among the gods relates to His followers as trade partners, despite the fact that we are humble and weak and small, and He is great beyond our imagining; and the regard Abadar holds for every person is rooted in this, the knowledge that there are things best done by them.

It's a good law, and a good lecture, and Nebetah attends very seriously to the contents.

Shawil pays attention as much as he can, though he has heard lectures on the subject before. But he can't help stealing a glance at the young woman next to him."

She smiles back when she catches him glancing.