...Best? Define best! Jasnah almost opens her mouth to demand that he do exactly that, but ultimately she knows better than to put the power of definition into anyone else's hands.
Stiffly, she pries his fingers off the book's spine. A silly, mirrored gesture to how he'd pried her hand off his knee at breakfast. Then, clearing her throat, she scoops the book up off the table and leafs through its pages.
Here, she went on a screed about neglected tertiary characters. There, she questioned the appeal of watching a man train sweatily at the duelling grounds. And on yet another page...actually, she quickly snatches up her pen and crosses put one particular piece of commentary with such conviction that it tears the paper.
Finally, she settles on something. Splaying the book open, she hands it to him. The chapter is infamous. Half-whispered among ardents, axehound-eared by bored lighteyed girls. The scene involves Wema and Brightlord Sterling, trapped together in a narrow tapestry-lined stairwell during a highstorm, pressed too tightly against one another to maintain propriety. The author wastes no time. Breathless glances, trembling hands, and the entire catalogue of Alethi-sanctioned impropriety.
Along the margin, Jasnah's annotations carve their own counter-narrative.
When Wema shivers as Sterling steps close — her body trembled like a leaf in the storm's early breath — Jasnah's neat script slices the line:
This degree of trembling suggests a mineral deficiency, not romance. Someone give the woman salt.
Half a page later, Wema's safehand glove comes off — each button described with the reverence of a holy rite. Sterling catches her bare wrist, lifting it toward his lips.
Jasnah's pen digs slightly into the paper: The perennial fixation on the safehand remains unimaginative. Authors treat it like a hinge between chastity and oblivion. Predictable.
But then Sterling bends to kiss the inside of Wema's exposed wrist. The prose turns molten, all devouring hunger and shuddering devotion. Then, written neatly:
...I will concede the gesture holds power. The wrist is vulnerable. Symbolism well-chosen, even if the execution is overwrought.
When Wema breathes, If we are discovered, I shall be ruined, the entire margin is overtaken by irritated script that grows sharper with each line:
Again with 'ruin.' Tiresome. The idea that a woman's worth is undone by desire insults logic. Civilization does not collapse because a woman does or does not enjoy touch
When Sterling presses closer, bracing an arm beside her head and crowding her against the embellished tapestry of the Sunmaker's victory, and next to a description of his smoldering gaze and heroic bearing, she adds briskly:
Mediocre man, dramatic stance. Still mediocre. Underlined twice.
Yet when the writing quiets — when Sterling touches his forehead to Wema's, steadying her rather than overwhelming her — Jasnah places a small, discreet mark.
In smaller script: This is believable. A gesture of reassurance rather than spectacle.
And when Wema, breath hitching, raises her bare safehand to his cheek — terrified of discovery, yet offering trust — the margin bears only: ...effective. The trust lands.
The line He held her unhidden hand as though guarding a secret is underlined.
On the corner of the chapter's final page: Alethi fiction reveals its neuroses plainly. All is honour, impropriety, inheritance. It fears desire because desire cannot be legislated.
...And while Verso reads, Jasnah provides a stunning performance of being unbothered, finishing her cold stew.
Verso reads more slowly than usual, partially because he quickly finds that reading on the sea makes him feel a little ill again and partially because of Jasnah's notes. It's a little embarrassing, honestly— he'll read a passage and find the prose exciting and romantic, and then Jasnah's neat script will be there to tell him all of the reasons that he's wrong.
He gets the feeling that the hand part of it all is meant to be a bit more titillating than it is, especially judging by her harsh critique of it; it's not that he's unenthused by it—as a musician, he's of course intimately interested in hands and fingers, the deft movement of them on instruments and... other things—but there's no real sense of taboo there, nothing to make it seem so wrong but so right the way the narrative attempts to.
—Briefly, he wonders if it was inappropriate for him to have touched her hand this morning, even while gloved. A flick of his eyes upward, watching her for a moment, before they turn back down to the page. She would have scolded him for it if it was, surely.
When he reaches the end, he has no idea what to say. He certainly has no idea why she chose this chapter for him to read. Is it some sort of test that he doesn't know the answer to? He worries his lower lip, rereading her final thoughts.
"That's, uh, a very perceptive point. About desire." He really has no clue if he should speak any further on that particular topic. If he avoids it completely, she might find him prudish and childish. If he speaks on it too much, she might think him uncouth and licentious.
So, instead, he quickly turns it around on her. "You didn't seem to find the scene very exciting."
Jasnah polishes off the last bite of cold stew. Was it good? No. But she'd been hungry, and it had been edible. She didn't really expext more than that from her meals even back in Urithiru.
She pushes the empty bowl to the corner of the desk. And she wonders whether it's a step to far to tell Verso to take it back to the mess on her behalf. He brought it in the first place, after all. By his own logic (see above re: the book being his) the bowl was his. His responsibility too.
Hmm. He took longer to read it than she anticipated. Hadn't he read faster in the storm shelter? Maybe he's not as deft a reader as she thought he was. It doesn't occur to her that he might be wasting his time trying to decide how best to respond.
Finally! He speaks. Jasnah leans back on her chair, watching him closely.
"Why should I? Every book of its ilk contains a scene just like that one. To that author's credit, theyre usually more contriv. A closing door snags a sleeve. A medical emergency requires it to be unbuttoned. Yet another mediocre man happens to walk in while the progagonist's hand is bare."
A dismissive wave of her hand. Yes, the gloved one.
"Wema showed at least an ounce of agency. Half-marks."
"Well, some would argue that it's contrived for a reason."
Because people want to read about it. Because they find it, as he'd said, exciting. Readers are willing to overlook obvious ploys for the characters to experience intimacy because that intimacy is the reason they're reading the novel in the first place.
But not Jasnah.
"You don't like that sort of thing?" —Mon dieu, he cannot just ask her that. "In... fiction."
She takes a moment before answering him. Long enough to signal that she's weighing her words, longer still because she's deciding how honest she's willing to be.
When she finally speaks, her tone is level, crisp, almost instructional. Whatever he intended with his question, she narrows her scope intentionally on only the hand stuff.
"I understand it must seem bizarre to you how Vorin culture places such a disproportionate weight on the safehand. But to see literature cling to that fixation — again and again — does not feel romantic. Rather, it it's a reinforcement of the same dogma the ardents peddle."
Her thumb taps once against her gloved left palm, a ghost of irritation that slips through her composure.
"And repetition is dull. Predictable. I have read a dozen novels in which a woman's sleeve is undone in precisely the same way. The same breathless gasp. The same trembling. The same unthinking reverence paid to the exposed forearm. The vein of the wrist. The curve of a thumb that is functionally identical to its opposite."
Her eyes narrow slightly as she holds up both hands. Waggles the thumbs on both.
"It is the sleeve I object to even more than the glove. The entire contraption turns a perfectly ordinary limb into a stage prop."
There's a hint — just a hint — of exhaustion in her exhale. But she doesn't elaborate further.
Because there's a fly in the ointment of this particular topic. Jasnah, who still wears a safehand glove.
Jasnah, who — before necessity forced her into commoner's garb — kept her left hand not only gloved, but fully sleeved. Jasnah, who could probably discard all of it by the simple power of her throne...but hasn't.
Her critique lands cleanly, rationally, surgically. And the small hypocrisy of it sits there between them like a bead of ink that didn't quite dry on the page.
"A perfectly ordinary limb?" he asks, book dangling from his hand as he cocks his head, brow furrowed. "That's how you see it?"
If he sounds skeptical, then it's because he is. Sure, he sees it as an ordinary limb, but he's not the one covering it up. Twice over, most of the time. She'd even worn a glove when he'd showed her how to play piano, and that surely interferes with the ability to properly feel the vibrations underneath the keys.
Why braid her hair? Why rouge her cheeks? Why do any of the things that fall under the performance of femininity? The honest answer is that once upon a time, even those closest to her had cast aspersions on her ability to know real from not. Good from bad. And ever since, Jasnah's insurance policy against a repeat occurence was to perform impeccably. Oh, she defies the church and rewrites the law...but no one can accuse her of being anything other than the ideal representation of Alethi femininity. Live it long enough, and it gets under the skin.
But this challenge he's laid at her feet. Her fingertips. A fractal slice part of feels poorly routed. Badly wired. Like the finest thing in the world would be to bare her left hand to... absolutely no fanfare at all. Wit had been mistaken when he'd tried to appeal to the taboo of it all, sneaking kisses against her knuckles. It had turned her stomach.
Jasnah's chin tips. She wasn't testing him earlier. But she's testing him now. Will he react how he wants to react, or will he react how he thinks she expects him to react? Sterling-like, all agog at Wema's bare fingertips.
She pushes back the chair. In one broad stride, she's close enough to snatch the book back from where it dangles in his grip. Jasnah tucks it under her arm and, stubborn and curious, curls two bare fingers under the hem of her long safehand glove.
"Excellent question."
Smoothly, she shucks the leathet off her wrist, her palm, her fingers.
Oh. Verso blinks a couple times, surprised. It had been a sincere question, one out of genuine curiosity; a slight challenge, perhaps, in that he'd been obliquely undermining her claims of being above such irrational beliefs, but he wasn't so bold as to believe she'd rip off a glove that he's come to understand is a necessary component to Alethi propriety.
He can't tell how he's meant to respond. Maybe she expects flattery, for him to compliment her slender fingers and tapered wrist. Maybe to even acknowledge her hand would be considered so hugely inappropriate that he should say nothing at all.
It's not alluring. It's also not not alluring, although that may have less to do with the actual bearing of her hand and more to do with the proud cant of her chin, the provocation in her expression, as if daring anyone to tell her what she can't do. —No, it's definitely more to do with that. He swallows.
A moment passes in silence before he lifts his own left hand, wiggling his fingers. "Now we match."
Jasnah clutches her glove tight in her right hand. Annoyingly, removing it brings some measure of pleasure and relief. Skin, open to the air. Able to feel a drafty breeze that whips through even a well-sealed cabin. Her safehand hasn't been bare since...? Since before they left for Kharbranth. Her fingers close slowly onto her palm.
She can't shake the weirdness. Although it's not a heart-racing, knees-weakening experience for her, it does feel oddly intimate. The kind of thing done in private. Like cleaning your teeth.
... But then he wiggles his fingers back at her, says something absurdly true, and Jasnah's safehand flies to her lips to contain a bark of laughter. She parlays the laugh into a cough instead.
"Just an ordinary limb," she echoes. His response causes some kind of reaction in the pit of her stomach. It isn't desire or lust or fear-of-ruin. Just...joy? Maybe joy. Or delight for how bizarrely beautifully secular the interaction feels. No one is making a big deal about it.
Those three words (now we match) do more to fix him in her affection than anything else that came before. Pity she's bad at expressing so, however.
Except in the brief moment she raises her hand and wiggle her fingers in answer. Short, shorter than his wave, and her arm quickly falls back to her side where her torn sleeve almost covers her again up to the first knuckle.
"Makes the chapter seem all the more ridiculous. By contrast."
Nah. Homegirl just really doesn't get erotica. Too much nudity and sex, not enough careful learning-exchanging-bonding-trusting leading up to it.
The corner of Verso's mouth twitches at that little return-wiggle of her fingers. She does have nice, slender fingers. Well-suited for pianism. He makes a mental note not to give up on the instruction, to write her out some lessons in theory once they return to Urithiru. At least there will be one person with which to share his love of the instrument.
"Would you care to hear my annotations?" Since he can't write them down, they'll have to be spoken aloud instead. For the best, probably. Better for them to be ephemeral and unmemorable. "I think that— it wasn't about the hand."
All right, yes, maybe it was about the hand, but not in the way she so disparagingly seems to think.
"It was about trust. And vulnerability." There's a lot he's yet to learn about this culture, but clearly the safehand is a private, personal thing. Something not to be shown to just anyone. (He tries not to feel strange about the fact that it's just been shown to him.) "It's about deciding that someone is special enough to share something you've always had to keep hidden."
So maybe he's a secret romantic, what of it. He clears his throat. A little more analytical, detached: "And in the story, the physicality just acts as a conduit for that sort of theme."
Edited (just me using the same word a million times again) 2025-11-27 00:34 (UTC)
Jasnah considers his point with a thoughtful stillness. Her marginalia had already circled similar themes — trust, vulnerability, the small gestures that reveal rather than perform. So yes, she'd been thinking in that direction. But it's different hearing him arrive there on his own.
Something sharpens in her expression when he speaks. Not the icy, pedagogical blade she uses to cleave apart bad arguments — but something finer, brighter, almost hungry in its attention. Verso could hardly be faulted for mistaking the two; interest and correction live in the same muscles on her face.
Unsure what to do with her safehand, she lays the bare palm flat against the desk. A deliberate placement. Too deliberate. Not shame. Vulnerability. A physical reminder of the very concept they're discussing.
She nods, slow and precise, along the edge of his reasoning.
"I will concede the scene functions as a conduit," she says. A beat. "One too often poorly handled."
Was that a pun? Hard to tell. Her expression remains hard and unreadable and unforgiving, with maybe just a little shimmer of amusement.
"One contrived paragraph to establish trust," she goes on, "followed by pages of what that trust supposedly unlocks. These authors forget that trust is a practice. A discipline. Not a fabrial — something switched on by proximity or the removal of a glove."
Forget the maybe-pun! Because Jasnah did just imply she prefers her romances slow-burning. Measured. Earned. A relationship built with intention, not theatrics.
Jasnah gestures with her free hand for him to continue. More. Please.
Oh. More? He'd imagined he'd say his piece, she'd explain all of the reasons that he's wrong, and then he'd take her bowl back to the mess with his metaphorical tail between his legs.
"Well, uh," he starts, fumbling a little out of surprise. "I don't think it's about unlocking anything."
You don't have to unlock physical touch with emotional closeness. He's well aware of that. He's had plenty of ill-advised hook-ups in the wilderness that included no amount of closeness at all; they'd been incomparable to the way it had felt with Julie, when even the slight brush of her fingertips had excited him because it had meant he was wanted.
"It goes together." He interlocks his fingers, as if showing the overlap. "The physical and the emotional. Or— it can, under the right circumstances."
But she doesn't need him to mansplain the concept of physical intimacy to her, and besides, it already feels like he's exposed more of his personal, private thoughts than he's strictly comfortable with. So, he adds, "In fiction."
In fiction. Yes. Precisely. When she'd gestured for more, she had hoped for more literary criticism. Like, what did he think of the highstorm as a precipitating event? Did he also find the binary choice of respectable suitor and passionate suitor nauseating? But no. He sounds more like he's defending the notion of intimacy itself. And... fair. Now that she reflects on the way Wit used to interrupt her work or her discussion with a tender-but-abrupt kiss on her safehand fingertips...? Less overlap; too much shortcut. Jasnah's expression darkens as she starts to unwrap that thought.
Best not to ruminate on that. She gives her head a curt shake, banishing the idea that maybe it had been some deficiency in Wit and not in her.
Yes. Time to move on quickly. She rallies her heart and her brain.
"Clearly, the safehand reveal is a staple in Alethi epic romance." She clears her throat. For once, she tries not to sound too curious. "What would be it's corollery in Lumière?"
"I'm not actually a romance novel aficionado," he points out with a laugh. "I prefer adventure stories, remember?" Lest she forget that she was the one who pointed him to the tawdry romance section and not the naval adventures. Said something about getting a cultural education.
But he has read some romance novels for the sake of edification. Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre. One can't rightly call them Lumièran when they came from the outside world, but it makes no significant difference. They still follow Lumièran cultural standards— or perhaps Lumièran cultural standards follow them.
"But I guess..." He taps his fingers against the desk, contemplative. This is an academic discussion, but it still feels a little flustering to talk about alone in here with Jasnah so near him. "It would be the first experience of intimacy between two characters." Jane Eyre saving Mr. Rochester from the fire, the way he'd held onto her hand in gratitude and been reluctant to relinquish it. The buoyant happiness she'd felt afterward, so feverish she couldn't sleep. "The touch of a hand, or a kiss."
A moment, and he realizes he's inadvertently suggested that somehow that's what her reveal is to him. He still hasn't quite categorized what it is to him, but he knows it isn't that. Not when even Jasnah calls it a perfectly ordinary limb. "As a story beat, anyway. I'm not sure, uh, culturally."
And – yep, right around now she starts to feel a sort of itch in her safehand. Like she should be hiding it away again. Vorin convention is bone-deep, it would seem, even when she doesn't believe in it. So instead, she conspicuously folds both hands together in her lap. Right fingers curled tightly over left.
She's starting to feel a little irritated with herself, frankly. Having made a point of learning swordplay with her (gloved) left hand to prove a woman can 1) participate in a masculine art and 2) use her safehand to do it, it seems silly to entertain any anxiety over the current situation. A situation she caused for herself.
A little too caustically: "Yes, yes. Adventure stories. Are they all somehow devoid of sentiment by virtue of being adventure stories? I doubt it."
Oh. The mood shifts, something in the air turning stale. Verso gets the distinct feeling he's done something wrong. To be fair, he always feels a little bit like that, but the feeling strengthens as he watches her cover her left hand with her right.
"Yeah," he says, forcing the most lighthearted tone he can muster. "All rough-and-tumble. Not a teary eye to be seen."
Should he apologize? He's not sure what to apologize for, but it feels like he needs to do something to fix this. The responsibility, as always, falls to him. A beat passes in awkward silence, and then he grabs the now-empty bowl he'd brought for her.
"I'm going to take this back to the mess." An excuse for her to cover her hand while he's gone.
Jasnah is very likely the most accomplished scholar of her generation. And she's determined to be a shrewd, consequential leader. But she might as well be one of the ten fools when it comes to catching and comprehending the effect she has on him when her mind is off digesting thoughts that are barely relevant to his existence.
Well. Barely relevant other than how he continues to inconveniently catalyze these thoughts in her.
So Jasnah pins him with an odd, confused stare. Why is he quitting their conversation when it's as yet only half-held? He was sharing opinions! She was learnin things. Her frown threatens to deepen into a scowl. She doesn't want him to leave yet. But it also doesn occur to her that she could ask him to stay, ask a different question, or implore him to return wait and return the bowl tomorrow.
"Fine," she intones. And when she waves a hand to dismiss him, she hesitates for only a moment before deliberately using her safehand. "Go."
He drops the bowl off in the empty mess, passing by Torreth on his way back with a somewhat miserable look; "Didn't take my advice, did you?" Torreth calls after him, which he blatantly ignores.
When he returns, he only lets himself glance briefly at her hand to see if it's been covered, before quickly looking elsewhere, as if the peeling wood on the wall is fascinating. "So," he announces after a moment, "I'll keep watch tonight while you sleep."
...Alone again. Jasnah doesn't much mind the solitude, although she can't bring herself to pick the novel up again. Instead, she scratches a few shorthand notes about the sailors' stories. But her heart isn't quite in it.
She touches the paper grain with the edge of her left thumb. It's unusual to go bare-handed with anyone – not just men. And paranoid abd preoccupied with her own appearance as she is, Jasnah has hers gloved more often than not. Before he returns, she stares hard at the knuckles and nails and the lines on her palm. Then, with a heavy breath, she pulls her glove back into place.
But makes a silent, private promise to practice this immodesty more often. With him at least. Someone who might find it unremarkable. Maybe it'll help her find it unremarkable too.
By the time he returns, she has tidied away her pen and ink. The book (and her annotations) is back in its pile with the rest. She's standing by the porthole, watching the first moon rise, when he reminds her of their little trade-off. His offer to be here while she sleeps. Or his offer to be here while she tries, at any rate.
Temper cooled (because it was never about him anyway) she eyes the bolted down cot. At least no one can accuse it of being too soft.
"Verso," she almost almost almost hesitates on his name as she sinks down to first sit on the cabin bed. "What's a dog?"
Verso, she says, and his shoulders stiffen slightly as he waits for the scolding that doesn't come. In fact, she doesn't seem to be irritated at all anymore, although he can't help but notice that she did cover her hand. The relief he feels from her not being upset with him bubbles over, and he can't resist the urge to— laugh. "What?" A dog? That's what she's asking about right now?
Maybe it's her way of distracting them both from the fact that she's allowing herself to rest. He doesn't point out how out of place the question is, just sits on the bench, turned around so that he's facing her.
"A dog is—" Wow, another thing that's difficult to explain. Hard to imagine a world where they don't exist. "It's an animal. Small, sometimes really small and yappy." He approximates the size of a little toy bulldog. "Sometimes bigger, maybe yea high." The size of a Beauceron. "We keep them as pets. Companions."
Surely, the question is appropriate. It's something about which she's curious and it (shouldn't?) tread so closely to his immortal that she risks rebuffing him again. Hopefully. Jasnah will need to plot a more delicate approach to learn more on that topic, sure, but for now? Dogs.
She ignores his laughter. If she doesn't acknowledge it, it might as well not exist. Unlike the internally sourced shame over revealing her left hand to him, she finds nothing wrong with filling in the gaps of her ignorance.
However, she doesn't ignore his explanation. Sounds like an axehound. Although she's never had one as a pet, Elohkar had a brace of axehounds when he was younger. Truthfully, she didn't much see the appeal.
"I see," she answers. "Best not to include one in our cover. If we must have a pet, say axehound.”
There it is again. Helpfulness articulated like a command.
"Oh. Well, a hound is a sort of dog, so—" Maybe it's just another one of those little eccentricities of Roshar, like wine. "They're probably the same."
Don't tell him. He's had a hard enough day as it is.
"And," he adds, leaning his elbows on his knees, "we don't have to have a pet." In this fictional family of theirs. The corner of his mouth twitches again. "I just thought it might be nice. You know, keep the children company..."
He's teasing. Trying to show that everything is still exactly the same now that she's bared her safehand, that he's not going to be weird about it.
Fortunately for him, she doesn't know enough about dogs to shoot the appropriate holes into his 'they're probably the same' theory. Unfortunately for him, he's in for a rather spike-y awakening sometime in the middle future.
Jasnah's mouth holds its stern line a moment longer. Torn between two competing options: first, explaining how meaningless it must be to add to this fiction and, second, letting him add to it precisely because it's fiction.
Instead of saying anything immediately, she engages in the grand awkward experiment of...laying down and rolling into her back. Now, she can look sternly at the ceiling. Her shoulders shimmy uncomfortably. Her hands...Storms, what should she do with her hands? They settle stiffly at her side.
"One child on the way. One axehound."
It's not a negotiation. It's a rehearsal. See, Verso keeps dropping new details in her lap. Storms! What if he'd said the thing about the dog in front of Torreth. Whatever this fiction is, they need to agree on its details.
(It isn't lost on her that fiction remains the ghoul of the day. From lies to literature to cover stories.)
She turns her head, cheek smushed against the hard barely-a-pillow. A tremulous alarm bell deep in her instincts chides that she's likely never looked less queenly than right now. That's a problem. Quickly, she straightens her neck and looks at the ceiling again. Presence matters. Perspective matters.
"... Any other details I should know before breakfast tomorrow?"
That is, has Verso improvised anything else on the spot?
Sure, one axehound. Just wait until Verso accidentally refers to it as fluffy.
Flat: "If anyone asks, my favorite color is gold." Like the sun, like the accents on the Expeditioner uniforms, like the crown on Esquie's head. He has not actually shared this particular detail with Torreth (or anyone else). He's barely shared anything at all! A master at using lots of words to say nothing, Verso has mostly been pushing the conversational topic back to Torreth. His son, his daughter, his apparently very annoying brother-in-law.
"I can actually keep it together, you know." It's not sharp, just a little fondly exasperated. "You don't have to worry about our cover story."
Then, a little more sincere, he adds, "I'm not going to do anything to jeopardize your safety here."
Or rather, she wants to believe. Wants it to be true. Wants to trust that he won't muck it up through no fault if his own but simply because he's been thrust into a strange land with strange people and strange ways. Her time lost in Shadesmar was a little of the same. And Wit has told her so many stories of other planets (careful, anonymized, sanitized of information he thought she needn't know) that she can at least drum up enough empathy imagining how she might struggle if suddenly dumped on, say, Scadrial.
So, yes. She isn't so pessimistic or blind to Verso's character thus far that she hasn't adjusted his label to something nearer to ally in her mind. It isn't the first time he's gently pledged himself to her safety, although she's equally certain it's got little and less to do with loyalty. Although what mind of madman chooses GOLD for their favourite colour?!
Even so, she files it away. The previous Wit had silver braiding on his uniform. Maybe Verso would prefer gold.
When her mind roiled like this, the previous Wit would tell her one of his careful, anonymized, sanitized stories. Something to help her chew down the day's problems, although he claimed there was never any moral to the tales. Sometimes, ahe slept.
Maybe Verso would...
"The waltz." She remembers the word. She annunciates it with care. "The one you hummed while dancing..."
But then her mouth gums up. She won't ask for what she wants, but she'll bait a hook.
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...Best? Define best! Jasnah almost opens her mouth to demand that he do exactly that, but ultimately she knows better than to put the power of definition into anyone else's hands.
Stiffly, she pries his fingers off the book's spine. A silly, mirrored gesture to how he'd pried her hand off his knee at breakfast. Then, clearing her throat, she scoops the book up off the table and leafs through its pages.
Here, she went on a screed about neglected tertiary characters. There, she questioned the appeal of watching a man train sweatily at the duelling grounds. And on yet another page...actually, she quickly snatches up her pen and crosses put one particular piece of commentary with such conviction that it tears the paper.
Finally, she settles on something. Splaying the book open, she hands it to him. The chapter is infamous. Half-whispered among ardents, axehound-eared by bored lighteyed girls. The scene involves Wema and Brightlord Sterling, trapped together in a narrow tapestry-lined stairwell during a highstorm, pressed too tightly against one another to maintain propriety. The author wastes no time. Breathless glances, trembling hands, and the entire catalogue of Alethi-sanctioned impropriety.
Along the margin, Jasnah's annotations carve their own counter-narrative.
When Wema shivers as Sterling steps close — her body trembled like a leaf in the storm's early breath — Jasnah's neat script slices the line:
This degree of trembling suggests a mineral deficiency, not romance. Someone give the woman salt.
Half a page later, Wema's safehand glove comes off — each button described with the reverence of a holy rite. Sterling catches her bare wrist, lifting it toward his lips.
Jasnah's pen digs slightly into the paper: The perennial fixation on the safehand remains unimaginative. Authors treat it like a hinge between chastity and oblivion. Predictable.
But then Sterling bends to kiss the inside of Wema's exposed wrist. The prose turns molten, all devouring hunger and shuddering devotion. Then, written neatly:
...I will concede the gesture holds power. The wrist is vulnerable. Symbolism well-chosen, even if the execution is overwrought.
When Wema breathes, If we are discovered, I shall be ruined, the entire margin is overtaken by irritated script that grows sharper with each line:
Again with 'ruin.' Tiresome. The idea that a woman's worth is undone by desire insults logic. Civilization does not collapse because a woman does or does not enjoy touch
When Sterling presses closer, bracing an arm beside her head and crowding her against the embellished tapestry of the Sunmaker's victory, and next to a description of his smoldering gaze and heroic bearing, she adds briskly:
Mediocre man, dramatic stance. Still mediocre. Underlined twice.
Yet when the writing quiets — when Sterling touches his forehead to Wema's, steadying her rather than overwhelming her — Jasnah places a small, discreet mark.
In smaller script: This is believable. A gesture of reassurance rather than spectacle.
And when Wema, breath hitching, raises her bare safehand to his cheek — terrified of discovery, yet offering trust — the margin bears only: ...effective. The trust lands.
The line He held her unhidden hand as though guarding a secret is underlined.
On the corner of the chapter's final page: Alethi fiction reveals its neuroses plainly. All is honour, impropriety, inheritance. It fears desire because desire cannot be legislated.
...And while Verso reads, Jasnah provides a stunning performance of being unbothered, finishing her cold stew.
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He gets the feeling that the hand part of it all is meant to be a bit more titillating than it is, especially judging by her harsh critique of it; it's not that he's unenthused by it—as a musician, he's of course intimately interested in hands and fingers, the deft movement of them on instruments and... other things—but there's no real sense of taboo there, nothing to make it seem so wrong but so right the way the narrative attempts to.
—Briefly, he wonders if it was inappropriate for him to have touched her hand this morning, even while gloved. A flick of his eyes upward, watching her for a moment, before they turn back down to the page. She would have scolded him for it if it was, surely.
When he reaches the end, he has no idea what to say. He certainly has no idea why she chose this chapter for him to read. Is it some sort of test that he doesn't know the answer to? He worries his lower lip, rereading her final thoughts.
"That's, uh, a very perceptive point. About desire." He really has no clue if he should speak any further on that particular topic. If he avoids it completely, she might find him prudish and childish. If he speaks on it too much, she might think him uncouth and licentious.
So, instead, he quickly turns it around on her. "You didn't seem to find the scene very exciting."
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She pushes the empty bowl to the corner of the desk. And she wonders whether it's a step to far to tell Verso to take it back to the mess on her behalf. He brought it in the first place, after all. By his own logic (see above re: the book being his) the bowl was his. His responsibility too.
Hmm. He took longer to read it than she anticipated. Hadn't he read faster in the storm shelter? Maybe he's not as deft a reader as she thought he was. It doesn't occur to her that he might be wasting his time trying to decide how best to respond.
Finally! He speaks. Jasnah leans back on her chair, watching him closely.
"Why should I? Every book of its ilk contains a scene just like that one. To that author's credit, theyre usually more contriv. A closing door snags a sleeve. A medical emergency requires it to be unbuttoned. Yet another mediocre man happens to walk in while the progagonist's hand is bare."
A dismissive wave of her hand. Yes, the gloved one.
"Wema showed at least an ounce of agency. Half-marks."
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Because people want to read about it. Because they find it, as he'd said, exciting. Readers are willing to overlook obvious ploys for the characters to experience intimacy because that intimacy is the reason they're reading the novel in the first place.
But not Jasnah.
"You don't like that sort of thing?" —Mon dieu, he cannot just ask her that. "In... fiction."
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She takes a moment before answering him. Long enough to signal that she's weighing her words, longer still because she's deciding how honest she's willing to be.
When she finally speaks, her tone is level, crisp, almost instructional. Whatever he intended with his question, she narrows her scope intentionally on only the hand stuff.
"I understand it must seem bizarre to you how Vorin culture places such a disproportionate weight on the safehand. But to see literature cling to that fixation — again and again — does not feel romantic. Rather, it it's a reinforcement of the same dogma the ardents peddle."
Her thumb taps once against her gloved left palm, a ghost of irritation that slips through her composure.
"And repetition is dull. Predictable. I have read a dozen novels in which a woman's sleeve is undone in precisely the same way. The same breathless gasp. The same trembling. The same unthinking reverence paid to the exposed forearm. The vein of the wrist. The curve of a thumb that is functionally identical to its opposite."
Her eyes narrow slightly as she holds up both hands. Waggles the thumbs on both.
"It is the sleeve I object to even more than the glove. The entire contraption turns a perfectly ordinary limb into a stage prop."
There's a hint — just a hint — of exhaustion in her exhale. But she doesn't elaborate further.
Because there's a fly in the ointment of this particular topic. Jasnah, who still wears a safehand glove. Jasnah, who — before necessity forced her into commoner's garb — kept her left hand not only gloved, but fully sleeved. Jasnah, who could probably discard all of it by the simple power of her throne...but hasn't.
Her critique lands cleanly, rationally, surgically. And the small hypocrisy of it sits there between them like a bead of ink that didn't quite dry on the page.
She doesn't acknowledge it. She never does.
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If he sounds skeptical, then it's because he is. Sure, he sees it as an ordinary limb, but he's not the one covering it up. Twice over, most of the time. She'd even worn a glove when he'd showed her how to play piano, and that surely interferes with the ability to properly feel the vibrations underneath the keys.
"Why cover it, then?"
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Why braid her hair? Why rouge her cheeks? Why do any of the things that fall under the performance of femininity? The honest answer is that once upon a time, even those closest to her had cast aspersions on her ability to know real from not. Good from bad. And ever since, Jasnah's insurance policy against a repeat occurence was to perform impeccably. Oh, she defies the church and rewrites the law...but no one can accuse her of being anything other than the ideal representation of Alethi femininity. Live it long enough, and it gets under the skin.
But this challenge he's laid at her feet. Her fingertips. A fractal slice part of feels poorly routed. Badly wired. Like the finest thing in the world would be to bare her left hand to... absolutely no fanfare at all. Wit had been mistaken when he'd tried to appeal to the taboo of it all, sneaking kisses against her knuckles. It had turned her stomach.
Jasnah's chin tips. She wasn't testing him earlier. But she's testing him now. Will he react how he wants to react, or will he react how he thinks she expects him to react? Sterling-like, all agog at Wema's bare fingertips.
She pushes back the chair. In one broad stride, she's close enough to snatch the book back from where it dangles in his grip. Jasnah tucks it under her arm and, stubborn and curious, curls two bare fingers under the hem of her long safehand glove.
"Excellent question."
Smoothly, she shucks the leathet off her wrist, her palm, her fingers.
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He can't tell how he's meant to respond. Maybe she expects flattery, for him to compliment her slender fingers and tapered wrist. Maybe to even acknowledge her hand would be considered so hugely inappropriate that he should say nothing at all.
It's not alluring. It's also not not alluring, although that may have less to do with the actual bearing of her hand and more to do with the proud cant of her chin, the provocation in her expression, as if daring anyone to tell her what she can't do. —No, it's definitely more to do with that. He swallows.
A moment passes in silence before he lifts his own left hand, wiggling his fingers. "Now we match."
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Jasnah clutches her glove tight in her right hand. Annoyingly, removing it brings some measure of pleasure and relief. Skin, open to the air. Able to feel a drafty breeze that whips through even a well-sealed cabin. Her safehand hasn't been bare since...? Since before they left for Kharbranth. Her fingers close slowly onto her palm.
She can't shake the weirdness. Although it's not a heart-racing, knees-weakening experience for her, it does feel oddly intimate. The kind of thing done in private. Like cleaning your teeth.
... But then he wiggles his fingers back at her, says something absurdly true, and Jasnah's safehand flies to her lips to contain a bark of laughter. She parlays the laugh into a cough instead.
"Just an ordinary limb," she echoes. His response causes some kind of reaction in the pit of her stomach. It isn't desire or lust or fear-of-ruin. Just...joy? Maybe joy. Or delight for how bizarrely beautifully secular the interaction feels. No one is making a big deal about it.
Those three words (now we match) do more to fix him in her affection than anything else that came before. Pity she's bad at expressing so, however.
Except in the brief moment she raises her hand and wiggle her fingers in answer. Short, shorter than his wave, and her arm quickly falls back to her side where her torn sleeve almost covers her again up to the first knuckle.
"Makes the chapter seem all the more ridiculous. By contrast."
Nah. Homegirl just really doesn't get erotica. Too much nudity and sex, not enough careful learning-exchanging-bonding-trusting leading up to it.
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"Would you care to hear my annotations?" Since he can't write them down, they'll have to be spoken aloud instead. For the best, probably. Better for them to be ephemeral and unmemorable. "I think that— it wasn't about the hand."
All right, yes, maybe it was about the hand, but not in the way she so disparagingly seems to think.
"It was about trust. And vulnerability." There's a lot he's yet to learn about this culture, but clearly the safehand is a private, personal thing. Something not to be shown to just anyone. (He tries not to feel strange about the fact that it's just been shown to him.) "It's about deciding that someone is special enough to share something you've always had to keep hidden."
So maybe he's a secret romantic, what of it. He clears his throat. A little more analytical, detached: "And in the story, the physicality just acts as a conduit for that sort of theme."
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Jasnah considers his point with a thoughtful stillness. Her marginalia had already circled similar themes — trust, vulnerability, the small gestures that reveal rather than perform. So yes, she'd been thinking in that direction. But it's different hearing him arrive there on his own.
Something sharpens in her expression when he speaks. Not the icy, pedagogical blade she uses to cleave apart bad arguments — but something finer, brighter, almost hungry in its attention. Verso could hardly be faulted for mistaking the two; interest and correction live in the same muscles on her face.
Unsure what to do with her safehand, she lays the bare palm flat against the desk. A deliberate placement. Too deliberate. Not shame. Vulnerability. A physical reminder of the very concept they're discussing.
She nods, slow and precise, along the edge of his reasoning.
"I will concede the scene functions as a conduit," she says. A beat. "One too often poorly handled."
Was that a pun? Hard to tell. Her expression remains hard and unreadable and unforgiving, with maybe just a little shimmer of amusement.
"One contrived paragraph to establish trust," she goes on, "followed by pages of what that trust supposedly unlocks. These authors forget that trust is a practice. A discipline. Not a fabrial — something switched on by proximity or the removal of a glove."
Forget the maybe-pun! Because Jasnah did just imply she prefers her romances slow-burning. Measured. Earned. A relationship built with intention, not theatrics.
Jasnah gestures with her free hand for him to continue. More. Please.
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"Well, uh," he starts, fumbling a little out of surprise. "I don't think it's about unlocking anything."
You don't have to unlock physical touch with emotional closeness. He's well aware of that. He's had plenty of ill-advised hook-ups in the wilderness that included no amount of closeness at all; they'd been incomparable to the way it had felt with Julie, when even the slight brush of her fingertips had excited him because it had meant he was wanted.
"It goes together." He interlocks his fingers, as if showing the overlap. "The physical and the emotional. Or— it can, under the right circumstances."
But she doesn't need him to mansplain the concept of physical intimacy to her, and besides, it already feels like he's exposed more of his personal, private thoughts than he's strictly comfortable with. So, he adds, "In fiction."
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In fiction. Yes. Precisely. When she'd gestured for more, she had hoped for more literary criticism. Like, what did he think of the highstorm as a precipitating event? Did he also find the binary choice of respectable suitor and passionate suitor nauseating? But no. He sounds more like he's defending the notion of intimacy itself. And... fair. Now that she reflects on the way Wit used to interrupt her work or her discussion with a tender-but-abrupt kiss on her safehand fingertips...? Less overlap; too much shortcut. Jasnah's expression darkens as she starts to unwrap that thought.
Best not to ruminate on that. She gives her head a curt shake, banishing the idea that maybe it had been some deficiency in Wit and not in her.
Yes. Time to move on quickly. She rallies her heart and her brain.
"Clearly, the safehand reveal is a staple in Alethi epic romance." She clears her throat. For once, she tries not to sound too curious. "What would be it's corollery in Lumière?"
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But he has read some romance novels for the sake of edification. Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre. One can't rightly call them Lumièran when they came from the outside world, but it makes no significant difference. They still follow Lumièran cultural standards— or perhaps Lumièran cultural standards follow them.
"But I guess..." He taps his fingers against the desk, contemplative. This is an academic discussion, but it still feels a little flustering to talk about alone in here with Jasnah so near him. "It would be the first experience of intimacy between two characters." Jane Eyre saving Mr. Rochester from the fire, the way he'd held onto her hand in gratitude and been reluctant to relinquish it. The buoyant happiness she'd felt afterward, so feverish she couldn't sleep. "The touch of a hand, or a kiss."
A moment, and he realizes he's inadvertently suggested that somehow that's what her reveal is to him. He still hasn't quite categorized what it is to him, but he knows it isn't that. Not when even Jasnah calls it a perfectly ordinary limb. "As a story beat, anyway. I'm not sure, uh, culturally."
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And – yep, right around now she starts to feel a sort of itch in her safehand. Like she should be hiding it away again. Vorin convention is bone-deep, it would seem, even when she doesn't believe in it. So instead, she conspicuously folds both hands together in her lap. Right fingers curled tightly over left.
She's starting to feel a little irritated with herself, frankly. Having made a point of learning swordplay with her (gloved) left hand to prove a woman can 1) participate in a masculine art and 2) use her safehand to do it, it seems silly to entertain any anxiety over the current situation. A situation she caused for herself.
A little too caustically: "Yes, yes. Adventure stories. Are they all somehow devoid of sentiment by virtue of being adventure stories? I doubt it."
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"Yeah," he says, forcing the most lighthearted tone he can muster. "All rough-and-tumble. Not a teary eye to be seen."
Should he apologize? He's not sure what to apologize for, but it feels like he needs to do something to fix this. The responsibility, as always, falls to him. A beat passes in awkward silence, and then he grabs the now-empty bowl he'd brought for her.
"I'm going to take this back to the mess." An excuse for her to cover her hand while he's gone.
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Jasnah is very likely the most accomplished scholar of her generation. And she's determined to be a shrewd, consequential leader. But she might as well be one of the ten fools when it comes to catching and comprehending the effect she has on him when her mind is off digesting thoughts that are barely relevant to his existence.
Well. Barely relevant other than how he continues to inconveniently catalyze these thoughts in her.
So Jasnah pins him with an odd, confused stare. Why is he quitting their conversation when it's as yet only half-held? He was sharing opinions! She was learnin things. Her frown threatens to deepen into a scowl. She doesn't want him to leave yet. But it also doesn occur to her that she could ask him to stay, ask a different question, or implore him to return wait and return the bowl tomorrow.
"Fine," she intones. And when she waves a hand to dismiss him, she hesitates for only a moment before deliberately using her safehand. "Go."
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When he returns, he only lets himself glance briefly at her hand to see if it's been covered, before quickly looking elsewhere, as if the peeling wood on the wall is fascinating. "So," he announces after a moment, "I'll keep watch tonight while you sleep."
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...Alone again. Jasnah doesn't much mind the solitude, although she can't bring herself to pick the novel up again. Instead, she scratches a few shorthand notes about the sailors' stories. But her heart isn't quite in it.
She touches the paper grain with the edge of her left thumb. It's unusual to go bare-handed with anyone – not just men. And paranoid abd preoccupied with her own appearance as she is, Jasnah has hers gloved more often than not. Before he returns, she stares hard at the knuckles and nails and the lines on her palm. Then, with a heavy breath, she pulls her glove back into place.
But makes a silent, private promise to practice this immodesty more often. With him at least. Someone who might find it unremarkable. Maybe it'll help her find it unremarkable too.
By the time he returns, she has tidied away her pen and ink. The book (and her annotations) is back in its pile with the rest. She's standing by the porthole, watching the first moon rise, when he reminds her of their little trade-off. His offer to be here while she sleeps. Or his offer to be here while she tries, at any rate.
Temper cooled (because it was never about him anyway) she eyes the bolted down cot. At least no one can accuse it of being too soft.
"Verso," she almost almost almost hesitates on his name as she sinks down to first sit on the cabin bed. "What's a dog?"
And why does their fake family need one?
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Maybe it's her way of distracting them both from the fact that she's allowing herself to rest. He doesn't point out how out of place the question is, just sits on the bench, turned around so that he's facing her.
"A dog is—" Wow, another thing that's difficult to explain. Hard to imagine a world where they don't exist. "It's an animal. Small, sometimes really small and yappy." He approximates the size of a little toy bulldog. "Sometimes bigger, maybe yea high." The size of a Beauceron. "We keep them as pets. Companions."
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Surely, the question is appropriate. It's something about which she's curious and it (shouldn't?) tread so closely to his immortal that she risks rebuffing him again. Hopefully. Jasnah will need to plot a more delicate approach to learn more on that topic, sure, but for now? Dogs.
She ignores his laughter. If she doesn't acknowledge it, it might as well not exist. Unlike the internally sourced shame over revealing her left hand to him, she finds nothing wrong with filling in the gaps of her ignorance.
However, she doesn't ignore his explanation. Sounds like an axehound. Although she's never had one as a pet, Elohkar had a brace of axehounds when he was younger. Truthfully, she didn't much see the appeal.
"I see," she answers. "Best not to include one in our cover. If we must have a pet, say axehound.”
There it is again. Helpfulness articulated like a command.
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Don't tell him. He's had a hard enough day as it is.
"And," he adds, leaning his elbows on his knees, "we don't have to have a pet." In this fictional family of theirs. The corner of his mouth twitches again. "I just thought it might be nice. You know, keep the children company..."
He's teasing. Trying to show that everything is still exactly the same now that she's bared her safehand, that he's not going to be weird about it.
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Fortunately for him, she doesn't know enough about dogs to shoot the appropriate holes into his 'they're probably the same' theory. Unfortunately for him, he's in for a rather spike-y awakening sometime in the middle future.
Jasnah's mouth holds its stern line a moment longer. Torn between two competing options: first, explaining how meaningless it must be to add to this fiction and, second, letting him add to it precisely because it's fiction.
Instead of saying anything immediately, she engages in the grand awkward experiment of...laying down and rolling into her back. Now, she can look sternly at the ceiling. Her shoulders shimmy uncomfortably. Her hands...Storms, what should she do with her hands? They settle stiffly at her side.
"One child on the way. One axehound."
It's not a negotiation. It's a rehearsal. See, Verso keeps dropping new details in her lap. Storms! What if he'd said the thing about the dog in front of Torreth. Whatever this fiction is, they need to agree on its details.
(It isn't lost on her that fiction remains the ghoul of the day. From lies to literature to cover stories.)
She turns her head, cheek smushed against the hard barely-a-pillow. A tremulous alarm bell deep in her instincts chides that she's likely never looked less queenly than right now. That's a problem. Quickly, she straightens her neck and looks at the ceiling again. Presence matters. Perspective matters.
"... Any other details I should know before breakfast tomorrow?"
That is, has Verso improvised anything else on the spot?
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Flat: "If anyone asks, my favorite color is gold." Like the sun, like the accents on the Expeditioner uniforms, like the crown on Esquie's head. He has not actually shared this particular detail with Torreth (or anyone else). He's barely shared anything at all! A master at using lots of words to say nothing, Verso has mostly been pushing the conversational topic back to Torreth. His son, his daughter, his apparently very annoying brother-in-law.
"I can actually keep it together, you know." It's not sharp, just a little fondly exasperated. "You don't have to worry about our cover story."
Then, a little more sincere, he adds, "I'm not going to do anything to jeopardize your safety here."
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Softly: "I believe you."
Or rather, she wants to believe. Wants it to be true. Wants to trust that he won't muck it up through no fault if his own but simply because he's been thrust into a strange land with strange people and strange ways. Her time lost in Shadesmar was a little of the same. And Wit has told her so many stories of other planets (careful, anonymized, sanitized of information he thought she needn't know) that she can at least drum up enough empathy imagining how she might struggle if suddenly dumped on, say, Scadrial.
So, yes. She isn't so pessimistic or blind to Verso's character thus far that she hasn't adjusted his label to something nearer to ally in her mind. It isn't the first time he's gently pledged himself to her safety, although she's equally certain it's got little and less to do with loyalty. Although what mind of madman chooses GOLD for their favourite colour?!
Even so, she files it away. The previous Wit had silver braiding on his uniform. Maybe Verso would prefer gold.
When her mind roiled like this, the previous Wit would tell her one of his careful, anonymized, sanitized stories. Something to help her chew down the day's problems, although he claimed there was never any moral to the tales. Sometimes, ahe slept.
Maybe Verso would...
"The waltz." She remembers the word. She annunciates it with care. "The one you hummed while dancing..."
But then her mouth gums up. She won't ask for what she wants, but she'll bait a hook.
"Are there others?"
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i lied, sends this tag in another direction
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a short but very meaningful tag
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my turn for a short but effective tag.
mom said it's my turn
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look i couldn't find a way to make him taking another card more interesting
FAIR.
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