"Mandarin juice?"

"...sure."

He calls the waitress over to order that, then, before turning back to her. "So. Surt."

Her eyes turn sharp as she stares at him.

"He's the reason you're doing all of this, right?"

"Was that another 'guess'?"

He shrugs. "Kind of. From the way you reacted around the topic, whenever it came up. And from how you usually dodge it."

"Why are you bringing it up?"

"I want you to be in my party, and I want my party to kill him."

"He can't be killed."

"Seal him. Drive him off. I want revenge."

"Hm."

"My father was the pharaoh."

Wait what.

"I didn't care about him, understand," he says, which is only about 70% true. "But I cared about my sister. My aunt. My friends. Everyone Surt took from me. From everyone else. And I don't want him to take anyone anymore. And I want to drive my dagger through whatever passes for his skull and watch the light go out of his eyes, even if just for a moment. And I don't want him to take anyone, anywhere, anymore. It's been too long."

She... doesn't think she's seen this guy be serious like this before. But it starts making sense of him, a little bit, of how he seemed to be... good. Driven. Skilled. She didn't understand what drove him, when he was coming off like a spoiled boy with nothing at stake, but this? She can get behind this.

"Why do you want me?"

"Why do you want to kill Surt?"

"...I don't have a story like yours."

"What story do you have?"

"I don't."

"And so?"

"So I don't need one. He needs to be stopped, he needs to be—gone. There's nothing more important in the world, I don't need to have lost anyone to know that—"

"This is true of everyone. He's not more important to you than he is to everyone else. He'll kill everyone just as dead."

"I'm not everyone else. I'm me."

"And that's why I want you. Because you didn't have a story, you didn't have a reason, you saw the biggest problem in the world and you decided that it could not stand and that if no one else was going to do anything about it you would. You looked at your options, you thought about it for a long time, and you decided on the path that was most likely to get you what you wanted and you went for it. Nothing will stand in your way."