Thanks! I cringed when I hit 'spoke' being used as a dialogue tag at the very start, and it just got more and more out of character from there on. ('Spoke' aside, it's not actually all that badly written -- the challenge was to see how I could get the characters to come out with those same sentiments in an interaction that was at all plausible...)

I need to do something about the double use of 'cloak' in the last paragraph ("the whisk of a dark cloak"/"settling around him like a cloak").