"That must have been very hard for you. The time I've spent here will be the longest I've spent away from mine in objective time since our second was born." 

"Duty takes us where it takes us."

"Are any of your sons serving in the crusade?"

He laughs. "That one I will regretfully decline to answer. Tar-Baphon would love to know. Since your second was born? How old are your children, these days?"

"Our oldest  – that is, Naima's oldest – is almost seven, and the others are two and just three months."

He is too diplomatic to look slightly shocked. "She was widowed?"

Élie is too far from home to realize he said something slightly shocking! 

"Yes. Before we met. Just before we met, actually – I was the only scrivener in her village at the time, so I read out the will, though I don't think we actually spoke to each other for another year after that. 

Tariq was a good man. He's in Axis, and I believe very happy there. They spoke when she had enough money to have him raised – he would have done his duty to her and the baby, had she needed him, but it wasn't his choice, and by then she didn't."

"Well, I would imagine not. It is good that she asked him, though, and that he would have returned. That - resembles a marriage." Unlike whatever Elie and Naima are doing.

"Unlike whatever it is we're doing?"

"I have no doubt that you swore vows to each other and meant them."

"Please don't worry about offending me. I would be a very poor adventurer if I came all this way into the past just to object when the natives don't share my strange foreign customs. To me a marriage is a partnership between two individuals, founded on trust and mutual affection, for the purpose of building a family and strengthening in the face of life's challenges. – If you asked Naima, I think she'd say that it's when two people contract to form a household, with the husband protecting and providing for his wife, and the wife bearing and raising their children and managing their goods, and that we're just unusual people." 

"Naima sounds like the more sensible of the two of you. There are all kinds of arrangements among two people; the thing that makes marriage marriage is that the commitment is lifelong, and embodied in children, who need a mother and a father and the contributions of both of them."

"I have never for a moment doubted that Naima is the more sensible of the two of us. But our marriage will last at least until we die – if we die – and our children have two parents."

A mother and a father, he said, not 'two parents', which seems like a bizarre faceless empty thing to replace it with, but he's not going to argue. "And everything else a child could want, I have no doubt."

"I try. I mean – I hope so. I don't pretend to be an authority on everything children could want. I haven't encountered many really good parents in my life, so I'm sure there are things I'm missing."

"The hardest years, I'd say, are when they're old enough to be men but not old enough to be wise men. They bristle at being treated like children, and you try to remind yourself it's their right to die of it while dearly hoping they, instead, won't."

"When Rahim was three he almost drowned in a canal because I was squeamish about interfering with his natural right to self-determination. He'd determined he wanted to see the big boat up close.  

– I've since learned to interfere much more freely around large bodies of water, but that always is the challenge, isn't it? We can tell ourselves that they're small and weak and know infinitely less than we do, and so we're entitled to do whatever we like with them, but then the gods could say just the same of us. It's terrifying to have that much power over another person. I never understood until I became a father how easy it is to abuse it – to talk myself into doing something because it's in their best interests, when it's really for my own convenience – and then sometimes it is in their best interests, and that's worse."

"I can't say that it would give me pause to discipline a three year old. You want them to grow up into men who aren't idiots. Once they are men, though, I do find it difficult to step away. It isn't a kindness to anyone, to protect them from Heaven whatever the cost."

"I hope my children will grow up to be wise. I'm just not sure that discipline produces wisdom, or just obedience. As a father, I can only – no. I can try and make them a world where none of them feel they have to get up to half the things I was doing at sixteen." 

"They'll want to, though. You're the whole world, to them, and the more you do the more they'll be determined to live up to."

"That frightens me sometimes. I don't wish to be arrogant, but – I don't want to leave them an impossible task."

"Well, whatever comfort it is, I think a moderately great archmage's son grows up with as much of a complex as an exceptionally great archmage's son."

"What about his daughter?"

He looks baffled. "Well, daughters don't have the same impulse to live up to their fathers."

"You must remember, there's her mother to think of."