She'd done this before. When they were deep in an argument, and he said something that hurt her or upset her, she'd shut down. It became the parade of the ice queens, then, all of them passing by in a row and revealing nothing with their faces of ice and their hearts of stone. She was the leader of that particular parade. Sharaf thought maybe time would have fixed that, but... he couldn't tell if she really was different or not. If this was something more than petty anger on her part. Certainly it wasn't something he was going to discover just by standing here. She was turning away from him. He couldn't see anything but those legs.
"I think I said you were specifically ignorant."
She didn't laugh. Sharaf didn't blame her. It wasn't funny. He'd been many things in his day. Arrogant, and selfish, and even cruel when it suited him. This wasn't the sort of thing that he would have wished upon her. Strange people visiting her, and her trying to send him away, because she actually felt something other than pride in herself. She made herself alone far more than others simply left her alone. The worst damned thing was, she couldn't see it - or didn't want to, afraid of what it would mean.
"You can live a long time afraid, but you aren't really living," Sharaf finally grimaced his way through the thing he should not say. "I'm not one for running away, no matter what the odds are. And I won't let anyone scare me into doing something I didn't plan on in the first place. You can be scared if you want, but if you can't deal with it, you can go back to Qas Burus and I'll find my own way."
At the end of it all, he didn't want her hurt. He also didn't want to die because she was afraid. There were a lot of great ways to make it through life unscathed. Taking someone who was afraid of dying and failure along with you, then counting on them to guard your back and light your way, wasn't one of them. Sharaf might have considered it in his younger and more foolish years. There was a great deal that could go wrong with it. She'd have to pick. He sure as hell wasn't going to do it for her.