Yes, Pharaoh had marched. Each step sure and certain as a young bull grown fresh into its horns. The gleam of black fur groomed to a fine sheen under golden sun, and a body honed to race miles across red sands without tiring rippling underneath. Lips that moved sleek as the ripples of Ra's heat upon the horizon, and a voice of spiced honey. Hotep allowed himself to picture it all again in his mind's eye as Sitamun spoke, and hummed an absent affirmation.

She appraised the water and he scoffed, an appeasement to mark his presence still in the conversation, but the image she had evoked distracted him.

Then she spoke of desire, and he was pulled sharply from his musing.

Hotep blinked. Inhaled. And stared at her briefly again with furrowed brow, making plain his search for the motive in her asking. Had he been meant to think of the words that went unspoken? Did she turn the subtleties of womanhood upon him, in attempt to... ensnare?

No. Not that. He did not believe it of Sitamun. He hoped he did not believe it.

But he remembered the suspicion of an ill-fitting interest in her, once already. And perhaps it was not faded, despite the surfeit of more suitable options easily within her reach. Perhaps she had brought him out here with more than bathing in mind at the first.

He would not allow his voice to assume it. If he was wrong, it might be a great insult. To witness the cosmos restored, to see Satriya prosper, to live to a ripe old age and be weightless before Ma'at, and go on undying without wanting until the Waters wash all and all else away but the two serpents.

His lip quirked, Or did you have a meaning of less broadness in mind?