Her teeth set hard and gritted behind her customary frown. Jasnah simply doesn't see the value in play-acting a beautiful, tender marriage when (to her mind) their existence is that much rarer than a simple, practical partnership. What is Verso expecting from their ruse? A love match? Surely that's less believable.
You could try asking, she prods. Although she'd been avoiding asking too many questions ever since the fuss yesterday. But she supposes this is a different kind of questioning. Less personal? More actionable.
After a sharp exhale, Jasnah retreats back in Verso's direction. She stands close. Close enough that they should be able to whisper and not be overheard. Close enough that she feels his body heat as a soft, slight contrast to the colder sea air tunnelling through the narrow ship corridor.
"Alright. How do you propose we should act instead?"
It's been a long time since someone has been this close to him. He has the absurd thought of Wema and Brightlord Sterling caught in that little stairwell during the highstorm, and his skin prickles all over. It's not that he means to make this into something it isn't—Jasnah has no issue commanding him to do anything else, so he's dubious that she wouldn't have already demanded he do something if she were in any way attracted to him—but he is, at the end of the day, a human being. Red-blooded and lonely. His gaze wanders to the curve of her lower lip, her shapely jaw, her neck.
He is as good at self-restraint as he is at everything else, so his eyes flick back up very quickly. If he leans in a little closer than is strictly necessary to speak quietly with her, then clearly it's on accident. After all, he's tired and still vaguely seasick.
"Usually," he says, trying not to sound like his throat has gone dry, "wives act as if they like their husbands. Just a suggestion, though."
The sudden proximity — initiated by her, maintained by her — is something she weathers with what can only be callled neutrality. Jasnah clearly isn't upset or bothered by the breach in what might be considered propriety. But equally, she doesn't seem to chase it.
Her expression is entirely too cool and unbothered when a rogue wave knocks her nearer. Storms, she even grabs him by the bicep to steady what might have been a full-on stumble as the next wave swells unpredictability after it's brother.
The results are almost (almost!) laughable. Jasnah's thoughts are nowhere near Wema, Sterling, and the storm. Jasnah's thoughts are right here — curling around his 'suggestion' with a spark of confusion and a bucket of... something. Indignation? Frustration?
Anyway, she grips his arm and leans in and channels all that frustration and/or indignation into a single hissed question — asked inches from his ear.
"Do you think I dislike you?"
This time, she can't help herself from asking for the question she wants to ask. The one that, scalpel-like, hones in on the illogical shifting sand she sometimes glimpses between his words. Sometimes, listening to Verso was like reading someone else's correspondence. She felt like she was trying to scribble best-guesses in his margins, all while avoiding interrogating aloud the premise of whatever he's said.
Well. She's back to interrogating. He'd only suggest what he's suggesting if she's already failed to keep up appearances. Except in her mind, Jasnah doesn't have to fake liking him. She likes him. He's interesting and useful and can actually hold a conversation with her that doesn't make her want to tear her hair out from boredom. She figured that was obvious.
Not dislike. That implies a level of attention that he's not yet received from Jasnah. He imagines she regards his existence not dissimilarly to the way she regards their current physical closeness: with neutrality. Saying so seems somehow childish, though, and he hadn't been complaining, only pointing out that endless scowling at him might not sell the story that she'd been fond enough of him to marry him.
He forces himself to focus on the conversation at hand and not the fact that she smells nice, even after two days at sea.
"I don't think I'm presumptuous enough to guess at your feelings," he says diplomatically. "But some of the sailors might be."
Objectively, she knows he's right. She knows it because two years ago aboard the Wind's Pleasure she'd given Shallan what ended up being her last lesson. That lesson had been on on authority and perceptions of power but objectively she understands the same principle applies to any assertion.
You say I have authority as the sister of a king. I do. Jasnah has told Shallan. And yet, the men of this ship would treat me exactly the same way if I were a beggar who had convinced them I was the sister to a king.
So! Yes! Jasnah understands the principle. She understands it intimately. After all, her often carefully arranged appearance adhered to that principle. What she doesn't understand and where she doesn't agree is that she doesn't believe she's given the sailors any reason to doubt their solid Alethi marriage. The illusion she's been casting against their perception feels utterly realistic to most marriages. Hasn't it? Her parents. Elhokar and Aesudan. Even Lirin and Hesina, the tower surgeon and the wife whose name she stole!
Jasnah's grip shifts on Verso's arm. Half stability, half stress ball. She has him sort of...caged against the corridor. It hadn't been intentional. Just a means of being near enough to speak softly, clandestinely.
But she keeps him there while she considers the others. The outlier marriages. Her mother's second marriage to her uncle; Adolin and Shallan. The ones that people whisper about and shaken their heads. Well, fair enough, they shook their heads but didn't doubt the depth of feeling involved.
Her grip loosens. Her hand travels down to take his hand. It's her right hand, her free hand, that interlaces with his.
"Let's try it your way." She offers. Although her tone of voice suggests she's none too confident in the experiment. However, to her credit, she is willing to experiment.
Verso can't help the way his hand twitches a little at the feeling of her palm sliding against his. He hadn't been suggesting that she needed to show him any sort of physical affection—or even verbal affection—just that smiling at him every once in a while probably wouldn't go amiss. But her hand is slightly cooler than his, a pleasant feeling, and he can't bring himself to pull away.
He has half a mind to think that she's doing all of this to torture him, but that would require a level of investment beyond neutrality that, again, he's not confident she has. Besides, she can't possibly know that it's been decades since somebody held his hand. So, no. He's just torturing himself.
"Excusez-moi," he says, carefully stepping around her.
As they step onto the deck — hands linked in holy matrimonial performance — Jasnah tests the contact the way a scholar tests a hypothesis. Her grip begins firm, deliberate, each finger placed with intention. She tracks the shifting pressure between their palms as though charting a physical equation: resistance, transfer of warmth, shared balance on an unstable deck.
A dozen paces later, she alters a variable. Her hold loosens; her fingers reposition. The grip shifts from constant to intermittent, from held to holding. She notes the difference with clinical acuity. Nothing nervous in it. Merely an experiment executed with a living subject she trusts to be at least clever enough to notice he is being studied.
They complete a slow arc around the deck — visible long enough to justify the fiction of a couple who rises early to admire the dawn before requesting water and soap.
Portside, the world is nothing but water and light—pink-gold under the newborn sun, impossibly wide and unbroken. Starboard, a faint smear of cliff holds the horizon steady. Jasnah finds herself unexpectedly relieved. Open water is too vast, too volatile, too indifferent. Systems bounded by land are easier to predict. And control.
She inhales, the sea wind tugging at her scarf and at the loose strands of hair that have escaped it. Then — without loosening her grip on Verso’s hand — she turns her head just enough to study him. Not smiling, not yet, but unmistakably focused. Whatever else may be true, he is at least the solitary object of her attention in moments like these. Intense and undivided.
She wants to ask him about his planet's oceans after the disaster he'd already described. Were there bodies of water outside the city? Tides, moons, winds? She wants to ask how many suns rise there, how many seas he's crossed (few, she guesses, based on his seasickness,) and whether they smell the same. But with a sailor shimmying down a mast scarcely eight feet away, she swallows every question.
Instead, she pitches her voice just loud enough to be overheard, just wry enough to pass for a wife ribbing her sociable husband.
"Have you learned any of the crew’s names?" she asks. "Made any friends yet?"
Dry, but not cold. A gentle implication that of course her gregarious husband charms every soul he meets. It maintains the fiction neatly — and besides, after last night's dinner, he may indeed know which sailor is easiest to approach for a basin, sparing her another conversation with the captain.
The testing doesn't go unnoticed, although he finds it a little odd, as if she's never held anyone's hand before. Perhaps she's just seeing what will be the most—in her eyes—believable and tolerable way to do it. He keeps his hand relatively slack and loose, grip purposefully easy to wrench out of.
He can tell, too, that she wants to ask him something. She only gives him that laser focus when there's something scientific on her mind. When she does ask, though, it's unexpected; his brow furrows for a moment, visibly confused. He cannot imagine her giving a single shit whether he's made friends with the crew.
His eyes flick to the side, to the sailor nearby. Ah.
"Yann," he says, because of course he's spoken to the crew. A cant of his head toward the aforementioned Yann across the deck; one of the youngest members of the crew, a little awkward and lanky. "He'll be happy to help you." He'd made a comment about your pretty wife at dinner and then immediately turned bright red.
Joke's on him! She hasn't held anyone's hand before. Not like this: prolonged and in public. Wit had never presumed except behind closed doors. And before Wit...well. Those experiments remain locked behind doors she has no intention of opening.
She flicks a glance toward Yann — young and earnest — and then back to Verso with a small, assessing tilt of her head. She knows perfectly well that he'd have just as much luck with this errand than she will. It might even be more efficient to let him handle it.
But she recognizes that if she hides now — if she stays conveniently absent — she will only teach herself the wrong lesson. She refuses to be someone who lives behind a closed cabin door because the world is unpredictable.
Her chin lifts a fraction, something faintly defiant in the line of her spine.
"Gemheart," she says, borrowing the endearment she'd used when they first embarked — dry, composed, but coloured with something warmer beneath the surface. "I'll be right back."
Only then does she withdraw her hand from his, careful, precise, like disengaging from an experiment she intends to resume later. She smooths her glove, squares her shoulders, and steps toward Yann with the calm, unassailable confidence of a woman who fully intends to acquire water, soap, and dignity in one fell swoop.
Verso resists the urge to ask if she'd prefer he handled the talking. She chose, so he leans against the railing as she walks away, watching her with a raised eyebrow and trying not to focus on the tingly feeling in his hand.
"Miss Hesina!" Yann says as she approaches, dropping the mop in his hand out of a mixture of excitement-horror at speaking to her. He's already blushing. Verso suppresses an eyeroll. "We all missed your presence at dinner last night— that is, I mean, it was a pleasure to have a woman there— not in a strange way, just..."
Oh. Well. This is... inconvenient. Jasnah flicks a glance over her shoulder at Verso — pointed, narrow-eyed:
did you aim me at this boy on purpose? She would not put it past him. Although it may be unfair of her to think so.
This — this wide-eyed, lanky creature blinking at her as though she's the first woman he's ever seen — is exactly why she prefers libraries. Whatever their theological baggage, the ardents at least possess the sense (or perhaps the terror) to avoid flirting and flattery in the workplace. And more to the point: most men learned early that "attempt to woo Jasnah Kholin" belonged on a list with "jump off a chasm" and "drink chasmfiend venom." Not that this poor boy was flirting. More like fumbling.
"Yann, was it?" She asks, her voice even, giving him a beat to marvel that she knows his name.
"I suspect my husband mentioned it, but I wasn’t feeling well last night."
Only then — deliberately, a practiced stage cue — does her free hand drift toward her stomach. She hates this part of the fiction. Despises it. But she grudgingly acknowledges that Verso's spontaneous invention of an unborn child was, strategically, a stroke of genius.
"I'm still a bit unwell," she continues, mild. "I was hoping to find a washbasin. A stiff-bristled brush. Possibly even some soap...?"
The upward lilt on soap conveys she knows it's unlikely. So be it. If necessary, she'll try soulcasting it herself — she has never soulcast soap, but she is unreasonably confident she can bully the Cognitive Realm into cooperating.
Yes, it was on purpose, and no, it wasn't in order to irritate her. People are much easier to manipulate if they're attracted to you. He knows this well, has extensive experience with casting particularly soulful gazes across the campfire at poor, unsuspecting women—or, if their predilections were obvious enough, men.
Verso watches her touch her stomach and shakes his head in exasperation. Look who doesn't mind Geneviève now.
"Oh! Of course," Yann says, scrambling to go find her a basin. As he does, he calls, "You know, Miss Hesina, I'm flattered that you chose me of all people to ask—" As if getting her washing supplies is a Herculean task. Only a moment passes before he's returning with a basin and brush in hand—and the teeny, tiniest bit of soap anyone has ever seen. Very pre-used. There might be a hair in it.
He holds the supplies out for her to take. "And about your husband," he adds, leaning in just slightly. "If you ever need someone to talk to..." About what he really hopes is her ailing marriage, given the dinner conversation last night. Guy's gotta shoot his shot.
Jasnah accepts the basin and brush with a graceful incline of her head — nearly regal, despite the miserable stub of soap. She notices the hair. She chooses not to react.
But when Yann leans in with that tentative, conspiratorial tilt — if you ever need someone to talk to — her posture stills. Not stiffens. Stillness. Was the sailors' suspicion really that far gone?
She responds to him with a composure so warm it almost hides the razor's edge beneath it.
"How generous of you to offer," she says. "But my husband is..." A beat — she searches for the correct phrasing, something that fits both fiction and truth. "...remarkably steadfast."
She lets the adjective settle. Steadfast. Not charming, not sweet, not romantic. Something firmer. Something earned. He'd earned it last night. All night.
"If I ever need someone to talk to, I have him."
A subtle praise. Not effusive. Not coy. But undeniably loyal in tone — the kind of tone that closes doors gently but irrevocably. Jasnah knows that if she ever needs someone for safe silence, well, she's got Verso for that too.
Her gloved hand adjusts its grip on the basin.
"But thank you, Yann," she adds, with an edge of wry amusement he's hopefully too young to decipher. "If I require counsel about maritime hygiene, I know where to find you."
And with that, she steps back toward Verso — composed, unbothered, and radiating the settled certainty of a woman whose marriage (real or not) is not up for discussion.
To really hit the illusion home, she offloads the entire armful onto Verso with a gentle, affectionate pat on his shoulder.
Edited (omg mobile tagging line break havoc ) 2025-11-29 23:20 (UTC)
Verso takes the items without complaint (save for a small 'oof' as they're unceremoniously deposited into his arms), because, well. He wouldn't expect anything else from Jasnah but utilizing a pack mule so that her—obviously more important!—hands can be free. He does, however, spare poor Yann a glance. The swabbie looks significantly more downtrodden than he had before their conversation, sadly mopping the same spot on the deck floor over and over again.
"He looks as if you just told him he's walking the plank tonight," he notes—what horrible thing did you say to him, essentially.
Jasnah doesn't even spare Yann a second glance. She adjusts the basin in Verso’s arms with an absent, proprietorial tap — hold it steady, the gesture seems to say — and continues walking with him toward the quieter stretch of the deck. Back in the direction of their cabin.
"That," she says lightly, "is the exact expression of a young man who has been reassured that our union is not as rocky as he'd hoped.”
A beat. A tiny tilt of her head toward Verso.
“And. Yes. You were right. Certain rumours needed to be put to rest."
Her tone suggests she considers this basic maintenance, like patching a roof tile or tightening a saddle strap. Filling an inkwell. No emotional weight. No fuss. Just efficient fiction-management.
"If you must know what I said about you, you can ask him yourself."
She's used this tactic before. Leveraging his need to know such things against him. Go tug the thread if you dare, Gemheart. Meanwhile, she's going to wash up.
He does want to know what Jasnah said, of course, and he turns his head to look back at Yann's despondent figure across the deck— but cutting away right now would be so embarrassingly obvious, so he follows her back down to their cabin first, basin and brush and questionable bar of soap in hand.
Once inside, he sets the supplies down atop the desk, mustering up every ounce of willpower not to think of Yann and whatever conversation transpired out of his earshot.
"I'll wait outside the door," he says politely, just in case she's wanting to do a more thorough wash.
Verso's offer is expected, polite, and conventional. And yet the courtesy catches faintly in her chest, somewhere between irritation and something softer she refuses to classify. The irritation is irrational, untraceable, and immediately discarded as useless data.
The door closes with a muted click. She pauses, considers throwing the deadbolt — very sincerely wants to — but leaves it unlocked. Better not to impede his entry if it becomes necessary.
Alone, she steps to the basin and eyes the pitiful fragment of soap Yann had produced. It is, she decides, the exact shade of despair. Her hand hovers over it. Stormlight flickers faintly in the room's lanterns — a reflexive tug. It would be so easy to at least try Soulcasting something clean, proper, civilized. But they are far from safety. Emergencies are not theoretical. And she knows too well the cost of being caught without stormlight to burn. So she chooses the wretched little bar — snaps it in half, keeps the less-offensive piece, and leaves the one with the embedded hair for...later. Or for Verso.
She peels off her safehand glove, sets it aside with deliberate care, then flexes her exposed fingers once — acclimating to the vulnerability, even in solitude. She wets the soap; it barely lathers. Thin suds cling to her palm, slipping between long, precise fingers.
Her hands first. Methodical, almost meditative. Then her face — brackish water stripping away smudged makeup and travel-grime, leaving her bare-featured. There's nothing to be done about cosmetics on a ship; she accepts that fact with a quiet, resigned exhale.
Next, she unbuttons the line of buttons from jaw to waist, lets her havah fall loose, and gives the rest of herself a brisk, efficient scrub. Hard, unforgiving bristles raise red lines on her skin. Cold water trickles down her ribs; her breath catches from the sharp bite of the chill.
Halfway through, she realizes she's humming. Clinging to a distraction as she tries not to think about why this ritual scrubbing is so important to her. Tries not to think too hard about why she hates the build-up of sweat and oils, like being left alone for days...So she hums. Just a fragment. A scrap of melody from Verso's midnight vigil — the one he restarted three times, hoping she slept. She cannot reproduce it accurately; her musical intuition is abysmal. But still it emerges, faint, tuneless, settling gradually into something steady.
When she finishes, she buttons herself back into propriety, rolls down sleeves, and slips once more into her safehand glove. Scrubbed raw, cleaned, recalibrated. She almost tells him through the door that she's done. Almost. But the ruse must remain intact; no husband stands sentinel like a servant. So instead she cracks the door, leans out into the corridor, black hair unbraided and falling in a heavy curtain.
Her expression shifts the moment she sees him — something like a quirk of amusement tugging at the corner of her mouth.
"I left you some soap."
Or rather: she left him the faint, philosophical concept of soap.
Verso looks at Jasnah—bare-faced, damp hair clinging to her forehead, smelling faintly of soap—and says nothing. When he enters their cabin again, he picks up the minuscule piece of soap between his thumb and forefinger, examining it. Carefully, he plucks the hair out. It's long and white, perhaps from one of the Thaylen men's eyebrows or beards. His nose wrinkles involuntarily.
"Merci," he says dryly.
Not keen on wasting time, he gets to work wetting his hair immediately. As his fingers run over his scalp, he lingers absentmindedly at the roots of his hair, wondering if the white is growing in yet. He'll have to find a new way to cover it up here; no more visits to the Gestral barber so that his apprentice can accidentally turn it purple. If there are salons in Urithiru, he doesn't know. Perhaps he should ask Jasnah, or even better, ask if she can do that special magic to turn his hair permanently black the way she transformed his wine.
He breaks off a piece of the already broken-up soap, like splitting atoms at this point, and rubs it between his palms before lathering—for some given value of lathering—it into his hair.
"You can just turn around," he offers. Paranoid as she's been these past few days, he figures she might prefer not to be left out in the hall alone. Besides, he's done his fair share of communal bathing in the river with Expeditioners—whatever preciousness he might have felt about it has been beaten out of him.
— You know, even before he offers for her to just turn around, she probably shouldn't have been watching. But she does watch. She watches him groom the soap. She watches him say that word that he sometimes says when people ordinarily say 'thank you,' whether sincerely or not. She watches him eke out whatever lather he can, and...
And, oh yeah, maybe she should extend him the same courtesy he extended her. It's not that she was eager to see more than she ought to, but she was caught up in thinking through the various linguistic distributional tests that led to her conclusion about what merci means.
Without a word, she turns slowly on a heel. There's no shyness or embarrassment. No blush, no fluster, no anything except a sense of fair play and equitable treatment. Well, apart from the fact that she got the first rinse of the water and he's stuck with the second. She stares at the cabin wall and squeezes water out of the damp ends of her hair.
"Above deck, I wanted to ask," Jasnah's low volume fights against the acoustics of their cabin and the muted splashing of water, "if there was much travelling done by sea on those...expeditions."
Can't simply let the man wash in peace. Maybe he should have asked her to step outside.
No, clearly he can't wash his hair in peace. The questions are charming when they aren't insistent and interrogative, though, when they don't bring to mind things he'd rather forget. So, he humors her.
Muffled, as he shucks his shirt off over his head: "Lumière is separated from the Continent by the sea." As he explains, he gets to work scrubbing down his top half, quick and perfunctory. Bathing is not a particularly luxurious experience for him, given that for the past 67 years he's been without indoor plumbing. "So, every Expedition has to sail a bit." Even the ones who make it no further than the beach.
"And if you wanted to make it to the Paintress's Monolith"—which all Expeditions do, but few have—"you'd have to sail from the Stone Wave Cliffs to the old battlefield, then make your way to Old Lumière and disembark from there."
There's an almost rote quality to the way he describes the journey, like he's done it a hundred times before. He very nearly has.
"Obviously, that's not convenient," he continues, because nobody's lugging a giant ship across a monster-infested landmass like that; it's why he hasn't been on a ship in decades. "But you could also use... Esquie." A whole other can of worms, which Verso is half-certain he's going to regret opening. "He's, uh— imagine a giant, sentient marshmallow that can fly." Makes perfect sense, hopefully??
Hair well and truly squeeze-dried but still damp, and with nothing else to do while she stands turned away from him, Jasnah folds her hands behind her back. Her posture rocks gently with the swell and fall of the ship, muscles firing to keep her stable. Steady. Upright. And fixed enough in place that she successfully resists the urge to glance over her shoulder and ask, pointed, what's a marshmallow?
Distributional tests don't help her here. Is a marshmallow a kind of ship, but one that flies instead of sails? Like the Fourth Bridge. Except the Fourth Bridge isn't sentient, unless you count the spren used in its fabrials. There isn't enough context to narrow down his meaning, so the frowns at the wall and weighs whether it's worth asking after or whether she should continue down the original path of inquiry.
"Is that what you do?" She hems, haws, opts to ask about him directly even though she's had less luck discussing him than the broader context of his world. "Use...Esquie. Rather than sail."
She's talking around his seasickness, of course. Wondering whether it's an affliction he suffers often or avoids.
The hesitation is more out of the multitasking of bathing than it is reluctance to share. Esquie is one of his favorite things in the world. He misses him all the time, and the thought that Verso may never see him again—that Esquie may no longer even exist—is extremely unpleasant. Besides, there's no risk to sharing Esquie with her as there might have been with the Expeditioners. He doesn't have to worry about her climbing on Esquie's back and going home.
It's an incredibly cursory washing of his lower half, as he says, "Yeah. Most of the time. Esquie is my... friend."
Best friend, he can practically hear Esquie say.
He quickly pulls his clothes back on, shaking out his wet hair like a dog. Long-suffering and weary: "But he'll only fly for you if he has Soarrie— oh, that's, uh, his pet rock..." Is Jasnah following all of this?
Her head tilts. Her eyes trace the knots in the wooden walls as her thoughts trace the ups-and-downs of what Verso says. Okay, so Esquie can't be an airship (sentient or otherwise) if Esquie is his friend. His friend with a pet rock. Or — can he be? Her frown deepens, but only the wall gets to witness it. But, eh, who are we kidding? Verso can probably anticipate its existence by now.
Alright. Assumptions recalibrated. Instead of an airship, she imagines a Windrunner. Windrunners transport people all the time, these days. Carrying them long distances via surgebinding. An undignified way to travel, and one that Jasnah has managed to avoid thus far. She isn't sure she'd trust any of them, frankly. Not even Stormblessed. Especially not Stormblessed.
But wait. Didn't he say Esquie was also giant?
"His pet rock." Yep, there it is! Her frown, bending the vowels and consonants just so. "Is the pet rock relevant to the flying, or...?"
Verso, does your friend have an emotional support rock? She's not judging. Well, maybe she IS judging. Just a little. But who is she to throw stones (ha!) when she'd just as quickly admit that she doesn't...really have her own friends.
How do you say my best friend is a giant children's toy who was created by a little boy to help him when he was sad? You don't, obviously. Instead:
"It's— complicated," he says. Does Esquie actually need the rocks, or does he just think he does? Sometimes Verso wonders if it's all just an excuse to get him to go on weeks-long adventures looking for the damn things, but— no. Esquie is the most purehearted creature there is, and quite frankly, Verso doubts that he's capable of deception.
"He has all of these different rocks," he explains, except it doesn't really explain anything, "and he knows them all by name, and he... believes he needs them to do things like swim and fly." Whether he actually needs them or not is up for debate, but if nothing else, it's a psychological block.
"But he's always losing them," Verso finishes with a sigh. Always losing them.
A pause, and then he gently pokes her between the shoulder blades—carefully, so as not to frighten her with his approach. "He'd like you."
Storms, her mind races to formulate the next best question. Does Verso even realize this is the most cooperative and forthcoming he's been on a personal subject since they'd met? Oh, he'd said plenty about piano scores, about Lumière, about dogs. But even when he'd spoke at length about his sister, he'd...
Well. She doesn't dare break the spell. So she's thinking about asking Verso to catalogue the different uses of the different rocks, just to keep him talking. She enjoys him talking. When the conversation aligns just right, and she manages to set him on a tangent, he's just the right mix of quick and...
— Jasnah stiffens under his gentle prod. All his caution can't counteract the deeply alarmist current in her blood. A steep inhale, and the stormlight flickers and dims in the brazier on the wall. It hits her veins like ice, like instinct, although she recognizes seconds too late that it's just him. Letting her know it's 'safe' to turn around. Light leaks from her lips as she turns around, exhaling likely the same amount she would have needed to simply soulcast the damned soap. The light in the room stays dim.
There's an awkward shuffle. An adjusting of her havah, looking away from him as the glow seeps out of her eyes. Magic, wasted on her hair-trigger apprehension. Jasnah clears her throat.
"...—Why?"
Why would he like me? It's a dull, silly, thoughtless question. The kind of question she avoids. But right now, she'll ask it to smooth over the humiliation she feels for jumping at shadows.
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Her teeth set hard and gritted behind her customary frown. Jasnah simply doesn't see the value in play-acting a beautiful, tender marriage when (to her mind) their existence is that much rarer than a simple, practical partnership. What is Verso expecting from their ruse? A love match? Surely that's less believable.
You could try asking, she prods. Although she'd been avoiding asking too many questions ever since the fuss yesterday. But she supposes this is a different kind of questioning. Less personal? More actionable.
After a sharp exhale, Jasnah retreats back in Verso's direction. She stands close. Close enough that they should be able to whisper and not be overheard. Close enough that she feels his body heat as a soft, slight contrast to the colder sea air tunnelling through the narrow ship corridor.
"Alright. How do you propose we should act instead?"
no subject
He is as good at self-restraint as he is at everything else, so his eyes flick back up very quickly. If he leans in a little closer than is strictly necessary to speak quietly with her, then clearly it's on accident. After all, he's tired and still vaguely seasick.
"Usually," he says, trying not to sound like his throat has gone dry, "wives act as if they like their husbands. Just a suggestion, though."
no subject
The sudden proximity — initiated by her, maintained by her — is something she weathers with what can only be callled neutrality. Jasnah clearly isn't upset or bothered by the breach in what might be considered propriety. But equally, she doesn't seem to chase it.
Her expression is entirely too cool and unbothered when a rogue wave knocks her nearer. Storms, she even grabs him by the bicep to steady what might have been a full-on stumble as the next wave swells unpredictability after it's brother.
The results are almost (almost!) laughable. Jasnah's thoughts are nowhere near Wema, Sterling, and the storm. Jasnah's thoughts are right here — curling around his 'suggestion' with a spark of confusion and a bucket of... something. Indignation? Frustration?
Anyway, she grips his arm and leans in and channels all that frustration and/or indignation into a single hissed question — asked inches from his ear.
"Do you think I dislike you?"
This time, she can't help herself from asking for the question she wants to ask. The one that, scalpel-like, hones in on the illogical shifting sand she sometimes glimpses between his words. Sometimes, listening to Verso was like reading someone else's correspondence. She felt like she was trying to scribble best-guesses in his margins, all while avoiding interrogating aloud the premise of whatever he's said.
Well. She's back to interrogating. He'd only suggest what he's suggesting if she's already failed to keep up appearances. Except in her mind, Jasnah doesn't have to fake liking him. She likes him. He's interesting and useful and can actually hold a conversation with her that doesn't make her want to tear her hair out from boredom. She figured that was obvious.
... Wasn't it obvious?
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He forces himself to focus on the conversation at hand and not the fact that she smells nice, even after two days at sea.
"I don't think I'm presumptuous enough to guess at your feelings," he says diplomatically. "But some of the sailors might be."
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Objectively, she knows he's right. She knows it because two years ago aboard the Wind's Pleasure she'd given Shallan what ended up being her last lesson. That lesson had been on on authority and perceptions of power but objectively she understands the same principle applies to any assertion.
You say I have authority as the sister of a king. I do. Jasnah has told Shallan. And yet, the men of this ship would treat me exactly the same way if I were a beggar who had convinced them I was the sister to a king.
So! Yes! Jasnah understands the principle. She understands it intimately. After all, her often carefully arranged appearance adhered to that principle. What she doesn't understand and where she doesn't agree is that she doesn't believe she's given the sailors any reason to doubt their solid Alethi marriage. The illusion she's been casting against their perception feels utterly realistic to most marriages. Hasn't it? Her parents. Elhokar and Aesudan. Even Lirin and Hesina, the tower surgeon and the wife whose name she stole!
Jasnah's grip shifts on Verso's arm. Half stability, half stress ball. She has him sort of...caged against the corridor. It hadn't been intentional. Just a means of being near enough to speak softly, clandestinely.
But she keeps him there while she considers the others. The outlier marriages. Her mother's second marriage to her uncle; Adolin and Shallan. The ones that people whisper about and shaken their heads. Well, fair enough, they shook their heads but didn't doubt the depth of feeling involved.
Her grip loosens. Her hand travels down to take his hand. It's her right hand, her free hand, that interlaces with his.
"Let's try it your way." She offers. Although her tone of voice suggests she's none too confident in the experiment. However, to her credit, she is willing to experiment.
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He has half a mind to think that she's doing all of this to torture him, but that would require a level of investment beyond neutrality that, again, he's not confident she has. Besides, she can't possibly know that it's been decades since somebody held his hand. So, no. He's just torturing himself.
"Excusez-moi," he says, carefully stepping around her.
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As they step onto the deck — hands linked in holy matrimonial performance — Jasnah tests the contact the way a scholar tests a hypothesis. Her grip begins firm, deliberate, each finger placed with intention. She tracks the shifting pressure between their palms as though charting a physical equation: resistance, transfer of warmth, shared balance on an unstable deck.
A dozen paces later, she alters a variable. Her hold loosens; her fingers reposition. The grip shifts from constant to intermittent, from held to holding. She notes the difference with clinical acuity. Nothing nervous in it. Merely an experiment executed with a living subject she trusts to be at least clever enough to notice he is being studied.
They complete a slow arc around the deck — visible long enough to justify the fiction of a couple who rises early to admire the dawn before requesting water and soap.
Portside, the world is nothing but water and light—pink-gold under the newborn sun, impossibly wide and unbroken. Starboard, a faint smear of cliff holds the horizon steady. Jasnah finds herself unexpectedly relieved. Open water is too vast, too volatile, too indifferent. Systems bounded by land are easier to predict. And control.
She inhales, the sea wind tugging at her scarf and at the loose strands of hair that have escaped it. Then — without loosening her grip on Verso’s hand — she turns her head just enough to study him. Not smiling, not yet, but unmistakably focused. Whatever else may be true, he is at least the solitary object of her attention in moments like these. Intense and undivided.
She wants to ask him about his planet's oceans after the disaster he'd already described. Were there bodies of water outside the city? Tides, moons, winds? She wants to ask how many suns rise there, how many seas he's crossed (few, she guesses, based on his seasickness,) and whether they smell the same. But with a sailor shimmying down a mast scarcely eight feet away, she swallows every question.
Instead, she pitches her voice just loud enough to be overheard, just wry enough to pass for a wife ribbing her sociable husband.
"Have you learned any of the crew’s names?" she asks. "Made any friends yet?"
Dry, but not cold. A gentle implication that of course her gregarious husband charms every soul he meets. It maintains the fiction neatly — and besides, after last night's dinner, he may indeed know which sailor is easiest to approach for a basin, sparing her another conversation with the captain.
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He can tell, too, that she wants to ask him something. She only gives him that laser focus when there's something scientific on her mind. When she does ask, though, it's unexpected; his brow furrows for a moment, visibly confused. He cannot imagine her giving a single shit whether he's made friends with the crew.
His eyes flick to the side, to the sailor nearby. Ah.
"Yann," he says, because of course he's spoken to the crew. A cant of his head toward the aforementioned Yann across the deck; one of the youngest members of the crew, a little awkward and lanky. "He'll be happy to help you." He'd made a comment about your pretty wife at dinner and then immediately turned bright red.
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Joke's on him! She hasn't held anyone's hand before. Not like this: prolonged and in public. Wit had never presumed except behind closed doors. And before Wit...well. Those experiments remain locked behind doors she has no intention of opening.
She flicks a glance toward Yann — young and earnest — and then back to Verso with a small, assessing tilt of her head. She knows perfectly well that he'd have just as much luck with this errand than she will. It might even be more efficient to let him handle it.
But she recognizes that if she hides now — if she stays conveniently absent — she will only teach herself the wrong lesson. She refuses to be someone who lives behind a closed cabin door because the world is unpredictable.
Her chin lifts a fraction, something faintly defiant in the line of her spine.
"Gemheart," she says, borrowing the endearment she'd used when they first embarked — dry, composed, but coloured with something warmer beneath the surface. "I'll be right back."
Only then does she withdraw her hand from his, careful, precise, like disengaging from an experiment she intends to resume later. She smooths her glove, squares her shoulders, and steps toward Yann with the calm, unassailable confidence of a woman who fully intends to acquire water, soap, and dignity in one fell swoop.
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"Miss Hesina!" Yann says as she approaches, dropping the mop in his hand out of a mixture of excitement-horror at speaking to her. He's already blushing. Verso suppresses an eyeroll. "We all missed your presence at dinner last night— that is, I mean, it was a pleasure to have a woman there— not in a strange way, just..."
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Oh. Well. This is... inconvenient. Jasnah flicks a glance over her shoulder at Verso — pointed, narrow-eyed: did you aim me at this boy on purpose? She would not put it past him. Although it may be unfair of her to think so.
This — this wide-eyed, lanky creature blinking at her as though she's the first woman he's ever seen — is exactly why she prefers libraries. Whatever their theological baggage, the ardents at least possess the sense (or perhaps the terror) to avoid flirting and flattery in the workplace. And more to the point: most men learned early that "attempt to woo Jasnah Kholin" belonged on a list with "jump off a chasm" and "drink chasmfiend venom." Not that this poor boy was flirting. More like fumbling.
"Yann, was it?" She asks, her voice even, giving him a beat to marvel that she knows his name. "I suspect my husband mentioned it, but I wasn’t feeling well last night."
Only then — deliberately, a practiced stage cue — does her free hand drift toward her stomach. She hates this part of the fiction. Despises it. But she grudgingly acknowledges that Verso's spontaneous invention of an unborn child was, strategically, a stroke of genius.
"I'm still a bit unwell," she continues, mild. "I was hoping to find a washbasin. A stiff-bristled brush. Possibly even some soap...?"
The upward lilt on soap conveys she knows it's unlikely. So be it. If necessary, she'll try soulcasting it herself — she has never soulcast soap, but she is unreasonably confident she can bully the Cognitive Realm into cooperating.
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Verso watches her touch her stomach and shakes his head in exasperation. Look who doesn't mind Geneviève now.
"Oh! Of course," Yann says, scrambling to go find her a basin. As he does, he calls, "You know, Miss Hesina, I'm flattered that you chose me of all people to ask—" As if getting her washing supplies is a Herculean task. Only a moment passes before he's returning with a basin and brush in hand—and the teeny, tiniest bit of soap anyone has ever seen. Very pre-used. There might be a hair in it.
He holds the supplies out for her to take. "And about your husband," he adds, leaning in just slightly. "If you ever need someone to talk to..." About what he really hopes is her ailing marriage, given the dinner conversation last night. Guy's gotta shoot his shot.
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Jasnah accepts the basin and brush with a graceful incline of her head — nearly regal, despite the miserable stub of soap. She notices the hair. She chooses not to react.
But when Yann leans in with that tentative, conspiratorial tilt — if you ever need someone to talk to — her posture stills. Not stiffens. Stillness. Was the sailors' suspicion really that far gone?
She responds to him with a composure so warm it almost hides the razor's edge beneath it.
"How generous of you to offer," she says. "But my husband is..." A beat — she searches for the correct phrasing, something that fits both fiction and truth. "...remarkably steadfast."
She lets the adjective settle. Steadfast. Not charming, not sweet, not romantic. Something firmer. Something earned. He'd earned it last night. All night.
"If I ever need someone to talk to, I have him."
A subtle praise. Not effusive. Not coy. But undeniably loyal in tone — the kind of tone that closes doors gently but irrevocably. Jasnah knows that if she ever needs someone for safe silence, well, she's got Verso for that too.
Her gloved hand adjusts its grip on the basin.
"But thank you, Yann," she adds, with an edge of wry amusement he's hopefully too young to decipher. "If I require counsel about maritime hygiene, I know where to find you."
And with that, she steps back toward Verso — composed, unbothered, and radiating the settled certainty of a woman whose marriage (real or not) is not up for discussion.
To really hit the illusion home, she offloads the entire armful onto Verso with a gentle, affectionate pat on his shoulder.
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"He looks as if you just told him he's walking the plank tonight," he notes—what horrible thing did you say to him, essentially.
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Jasnah doesn't even spare Yann a second glance. She adjusts the basin in Verso’s arms with an absent, proprietorial tap — hold it steady, the gesture seems to say — and continues walking with him toward the quieter stretch of the deck. Back in the direction of their cabin.
"That," she says lightly, "is the exact expression of a young man who has been reassured that our union is not as rocky as he'd hoped.”
A beat. A tiny tilt of her head toward Verso.
“And. Yes. You were right. Certain rumours needed to be put to rest."
Her tone suggests she considers this basic maintenance, like patching a roof tile or tightening a saddle strap. Filling an inkwell. No emotional weight. No fuss. Just efficient fiction-management.
"If you must know what I said about you, you can ask him yourself."
She's used this tactic before. Leveraging his need to know such things against him. Go tug the thread if you dare, Gemheart. Meanwhile, she's going to wash up.
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Once inside, he sets the supplies down atop the desk, mustering up every ounce of willpower not to think of Yann and whatever conversation transpired out of his earshot.
"I'll wait outside the door," he says politely, just in case she's wanting to do a more thorough wash.
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Verso's offer is expected, polite, and conventional. And yet the courtesy catches faintly in her chest, somewhere between irritation and something softer she refuses to classify. The irritation is irrational, untraceable, and immediately discarded as useless data.
The door closes with a muted click. She pauses, considers throwing the deadbolt — very sincerely wants to — but leaves it unlocked. Better not to impede his entry if it becomes necessary.
Alone, she steps to the basin and eyes the pitiful fragment of soap Yann had produced. It is, she decides, the exact shade of despair. Her hand hovers over it. Stormlight flickers faintly in the room's lanterns — a reflexive tug. It would be so easy to at least try Soulcasting something clean, proper, civilized. But they are far from safety. Emergencies are not theoretical. And she knows too well the cost of being caught without stormlight to burn. So she chooses the wretched little bar — snaps it in half, keeps the less-offensive piece, and leaves the one with the embedded hair for...later. Or for Verso.
She peels off her safehand glove, sets it aside with deliberate care, then flexes her exposed fingers once — acclimating to the vulnerability, even in solitude. She wets the soap; it barely lathers. Thin suds cling to her palm, slipping between long, precise fingers.
Her hands first. Methodical, almost meditative. Then her face — brackish water stripping away smudged makeup and travel-grime, leaving her bare-featured. There's nothing to be done about cosmetics on a ship; she accepts that fact with a quiet, resigned exhale.
Next, she unbuttons the line of buttons from jaw to waist, lets her havah fall loose, and gives the rest of herself a brisk, efficient scrub. Hard, unforgiving bristles raise red lines on her skin. Cold water trickles down her ribs; her breath catches from the sharp bite of the chill.
Halfway through, she realizes she's humming. Clinging to a distraction as she tries not to think about why this ritual scrubbing is so important to her. Tries not to think too hard about why she hates the build-up of sweat and oils, like being left alone for days...So she hums. Just a fragment. A scrap of melody from Verso's midnight vigil — the one he restarted three times, hoping she slept. She cannot reproduce it accurately; her musical intuition is abysmal. But still it emerges, faint, tuneless, settling gradually into something steady.
When she finishes, she buttons herself back into propriety, rolls down sleeves, and slips once more into her safehand glove. Scrubbed raw, cleaned, recalibrated. She almost tells him through the door that she's done. Almost. But the ruse must remain intact; no husband stands sentinel like a servant. So instead she cracks the door, leans out into the corridor, black hair unbraided and falling in a heavy curtain.
Her expression shifts the moment she sees him — something like a quirk of amusement tugging at the corner of her mouth.
"I left you some soap."
Or rather: she left him the faint, philosophical concept of soap.
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"Merci," he says dryly.
Not keen on wasting time, he gets to work wetting his hair immediately. As his fingers run over his scalp, he lingers absentmindedly at the roots of his hair, wondering if the white is growing in yet. He'll have to find a new way to cover it up here; no more visits to the Gestral barber so that his apprentice can accidentally turn it purple. If there are salons in Urithiru, he doesn't know. Perhaps he should ask Jasnah, or even better, ask if she can do that special magic to turn his hair permanently black the way she transformed his wine.
He breaks off a piece of the already broken-up soap, like splitting atoms at this point, and rubs it between his palms before lathering—for some given value of lathering—it into his hair.
"You can just turn around," he offers. Paranoid as she's been these past few days, he figures she might prefer not to be left out in the hall alone. Besides, he's done his fair share of communal bathing in the river with Expeditioners—whatever preciousness he might have felt about it has been beaten out of him.
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And, oh yeah, maybe she should extend him the same courtesy he extended her. It's not that she was eager to see more than she ought to, but she was caught up in thinking through the various linguistic distributional tests that led to her conclusion about what merci means.
Without a word, she turns slowly on a heel. There's no shyness or embarrassment. No blush, no fluster, no anything except a sense of fair play and equitable treatment. Well, apart from the fact that she got the first rinse of the water and he's stuck with the second. She stares at the cabin wall and squeezes water out of the damp ends of her hair.
"Above deck, I wanted to ask," Jasnah's low volume fights against the acoustics of their cabin and the muted splashing of water, "if there was much travelling done by sea on those...expeditions."
Can't simply let the man wash in peace. Maybe he should have asked her to step outside.
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No, clearly he can't wash his hair in peace. The questions are charming when they aren't insistent and interrogative, though, when they don't bring to mind things he'd rather forget. So, he humors her.
Muffled, as he shucks his shirt off over his head: "Lumière is separated from the Continent by the sea." As he explains, he gets to work scrubbing down his top half, quick and perfunctory. Bathing is not a particularly luxurious experience for him, given that for the past 67 years he's been without indoor plumbing. "So, every Expedition has to sail a bit." Even the ones who make it no further than the beach.
"And if you wanted to make it to the Paintress's Monolith"—which all Expeditions do, but few have—"you'd have to sail from the Stone Wave Cliffs to the old battlefield, then make your way to Old Lumière and disembark from there."
There's an almost rote quality to the way he describes the journey, like he's done it a hundred times before. He very nearly has.
"Obviously, that's not convenient," he continues, because nobody's lugging a giant ship across a monster-infested landmass like that; it's why he hasn't been on a ship in decades. "But you could also use... Esquie." A whole other can of worms, which Verso is half-certain he's going to regret opening. "He's, uh— imagine a giant, sentient marshmallow that can fly." Makes perfect sense, hopefully??
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Distributional tests don't help her here. Is a marshmallow a kind of ship, but one that flies instead of sails? Like the Fourth Bridge. Except the Fourth Bridge isn't sentient, unless you count the spren used in its fabrials. There isn't enough context to narrow down his meaning, so the frowns at the wall and weighs whether it's worth asking after or whether she should continue down the original path of inquiry.
"Is that what you do?" She hems, haws, opts to ask about him directly even though she's had less luck discussing him than the broader context of his world. "Use...Esquie. Rather than sail."
She's talking around his seasickness, of course. Wondering whether it's an affliction he suffers often or avoids.
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The hesitation is more out of the multitasking of bathing than it is reluctance to share. Esquie is one of his favorite things in the world. He misses him all the time, and the thought that Verso may never see him again—that Esquie may no longer even exist—is extremely unpleasant. Besides, there's no risk to sharing Esquie with her as there might have been with the Expeditioners. He doesn't have to worry about her climbing on Esquie's back and going home.
It's an incredibly cursory washing of his lower half, as he says, "Yeah. Most of the time. Esquie is my... friend."
Best friend, he can practically hear Esquie say.
He quickly pulls his clothes back on, shaking out his wet hair like a dog. Long-suffering and weary: "But he'll only fly for you if he has Soarrie— oh, that's, uh, his pet rock..." Is Jasnah following all of this?
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Alright. Assumptions recalibrated. Instead of an airship, she imagines a Windrunner. Windrunners transport people all the time, these days. Carrying them long distances via surgebinding. An undignified way to travel, and one that Jasnah has managed to avoid thus far. She isn't sure she'd trust any of them, frankly. Not even Stormblessed. Especially not Stormblessed.
But wait. Didn't he say Esquie was also giant?
"His pet rock." Yep, there it is! Her frown, bending the vowels and consonants just so. "Is the pet rock relevant to the flying, or...?"
Verso, does your friend have an emotional support rock? She's not judging. Well, maybe she IS judging. Just a little. But who is she to throw stones (ha!) when she'd just as quickly admit that she doesn't...really have her own friends.
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"It's— complicated," he says. Does Esquie actually need the rocks, or does he just think he does? Sometimes Verso wonders if it's all just an excuse to get him to go on weeks-long adventures looking for the damn things, but— no. Esquie is the most purehearted creature there is, and quite frankly, Verso doubts that he's capable of deception.
"He has all of these different rocks," he explains, except it doesn't really explain anything, "and he knows them all by name, and he... believes he needs them to do things like swim and fly." Whether he actually needs them or not is up for debate, but if nothing else, it's a psychological block.
"But he's always losing them," Verso finishes with a sigh. Always losing them.
A pause, and then he gently pokes her between the shoulder blades—carefully, so as not to frighten her with his approach. "He'd like you."
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Well. She doesn't dare break the spell. So she's thinking about asking Verso to catalogue the different uses of the different rocks, just to keep him talking. She enjoys him talking. When the conversation aligns just right, and she manages to set him on a tangent, he's just the right mix of quick and...
— Jasnah stiffens under his gentle prod. All his caution can't counteract the deeply alarmist current in her blood. A steep inhale, and the stormlight flickers and dims in the brazier on the wall. It hits her veins like ice, like instinct, although she recognizes seconds too late that it's just him. Letting her know it's 'safe' to turn around. Light leaks from her lips as she turns around, exhaling likely the same amount she would have needed to simply soulcast the damned soap. The light in the room stays dim.
There's an awkward shuffle. An adjusting of her havah, looking away from him as the glow seeps out of her eyes. Magic, wasted on her hair-trigger apprehension. Jasnah clears her throat.
"...—Why?"
Why would he like me? It's a dull, silly, thoughtless question. The kind of question she avoids. But right now, she'll ask it to smooth over the humiliation she feels for jumping at shadows.
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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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