If only the trio knew who it was they were so casually making jokes about the palace around. Odi winced inwardly and shot his ‘wife’ apologetic looks when he was certain Senu and her brothers were not watching, which in and of itself was a rare occurrence. While the wicked-tongued street hustler was easy to spot as one to be wary about, she relied rather heavily, unbeknownst to her clientele upon the effective deception perpetrated by her brothers. Exuding the attitude of an unfocused dissolute and a thick-skulled muscle-bound brute respectively, her 2 confederates were the ones anyone who did not want their secret unpacked would have to watch. It was just as well that the princess was not some deluded perfumed idiot divorced from the tricky realities of the street, thought Odion with a smirk as he caught the curl of Nanu’s lip. Engaging with this particular quartet was akin to experiencing a live performance of The Song of the Sands; a riveting story he had always loved to hear Baqr, the wizened old bard recount almost nightly when he returned from his roving way across the scattered bundles of life that speckled the cruel dunes. The part he loved most, as usual, involved the fighting; 2 desperate men facing each other with drawn scimitars, each seeking to best the other, only for the younger of the 2 to reveal, as he diced with death that he had in fact been fighting wronghandedly only to revert to his proper swordarm only for the duel to lurch in his favour whereupon his opponent too revealed his deadly deception mirroring his own, but adding to the fact that he was in fact a woman!<br/><br/>True to his word, he was not long gone from her sight when he returned, without the warhorse who thankfully did not look anywhere near his proud best. To add further to the deception, Odion had hissed an apology before taking his dagger to the horses tail and mane. Abrax did not take kindly to such disfiguring, but was nevertheless placated by the last of the lumps of sugar Odi kept especially as a bribe in such trying circumstances. It was just as well that the trio knew what he was, hiding a warhorse, even with cropped mane and straggly tail was not something a commoner would allow to go unremarked. “Why in Set’s name did you have to be so handsome?” he growled jokingly plastering mud and rank hay over the stallion’s ebony flanks. “If only I could tell you to act less like a destrier and more like a lagabout nag!” All this, of course was uttered in an undertone as the taller of the 2 brothers laughed raucously as he fed the trio’s cantankerous draft horse they had humourously named Pharoah. In truth, Odi had never come across a horse less deserving of that lofty moniker but knowing the true liege of Aegypt, he could tell the king would have been tickled by the comparison.<br/><br/>The irony of Senu’s observation was not lost upon him, and he shot the vagabond a well-practiced scowl. “What? You used to sneak off with the golden children and when we asked you about what you got up to later in the evening you used to love to pretend you were the next Tariq the Taleweaver and enthrall us all with stories of your adventures.” Odi found that he could not look his  ‘wife’ in the eye for fear that he would burst out laughing. Both Nanu and her brother knew all about the ways in which Odi had elaborated on their exploits, as he did similarly when he recounted the goings on of his home, entertaining the royal children with down to earth tales of near farcical fun. “Well I suppose if being a bard paid better I might have chosen that instead of being a palace guard,” he shrugged, looping an arm around Nanu’s waist “but then I would never have met the source of my personal Nile.” The use of the metaphor had Senu snorting with laughter. “I think your darling husband just called you a spring, Fatima,” she chortled, eyebrows dancing roguishly “a real charmer isn’t he?” Relieved to have their girlish amusement interrupted by the insistent rattling of the decanter within which the fragrant dust known as tea was mingling with the water upon a oil lamp, Odi snatched three clayware cups from where they stood inconspicuously upon the hollowed out section of wall, pouring steaming measures of floral scented liquid into each, and offering them to the princess and the pariah in turn before taking his own and giving it a cursory sip. “This is… not terrible.” He admitted.