The brush of her hand at his collar pulls his eyes up from where he’s been sizing up that knee beside him. Stubble has bristled in ginger under the box of his throat, tidy lines gone all coarse with disrepair. A task for tomorrow.

“I’m a cleric,” he says. “It’s the mark of the god I follow.”

She’ll see his thought process as he winds through it: is she going to keep smoking, and if so -- that’s probably fine for a while, actually.

With her hand still on his talisman, he reaches to push out the angle of her bared knee in earnest. Casually making re-arrangements in her bower.

“We don’t chant.”