Ha. Of course Jasnah painstakingly goes over the reasons that playing such a game would be akin to apostasy, right before saying it sounds fun. He finds it's one of the increasingly numbered things he likes about her. That spark of rebellion.
"Well," he says in a lowered voice, so as not to be overheard, "I wouldn't be opposed to engaging in a little heresy with you."
Heh.
"We'd need a proper deck, though, or you'd need to be willing to part with a few pages from your notebook." So that he could do some arts and crafts with them.
Jasnah's expression narrows with the same quiet assessment that always appears when a surprise is unexpectedly pleasant. She lowers her voice to match his, not only for secrecy but because there is a kind of intimacy to be found in scheming together. And this feels an awful lot like scheming together.
"Part with my pages?" She asks. The line is so so so thin between stern and mock-stern. Maybe there's really no difference at all. "You ask for too much, Dessendre."
He never did actually dissuade her from calling him by that name.
"Though if you intend to construct a deck yourself, I expect the craftsmanship to be impeccable. I refuse to be implicated in blasphemy that's poorly made."
Oh, she's giving him all kinds of positive reinforcement right now. What he likes even more than her spark of rebellion is having that spark turned on him; it feels a little like she's gathered up static electricity and then touched him with it. Little prickles from his fingers to his toes. He should be much more concerned about engaging the queen of a nation in what she's informed him are heterodox acts, no matter how harmless they seem to him, but it's hard to muster up the resistance when he has her attention all to himself like this.
He lowers his voice another notch, and although he wouldn't admit it even to himself, it's just to have an excuse to lean in closer to her. "I'll have you know that my blasphemy," he says, amusement tugging at his lips, "is artisanal."
A soft sound escapes her before she can stop it. Not a laugh, but perilously close. A warm, quiet bubble of amusement that brightens her eyes and makes three nearby sailors glance over, satisfied to see the happy couple glowing. She can't help but inhabit the performance at the same time as she inhabits her sincerity. Ever since he'd brought it to her attention, convincing the crew of their marriage has been mission in the background of all her actions.
"Artisanal." Half-scornful and half-amused. Jasnah appraises him with the same look a wife gives her husband when pretending she's impressed. Or the look a queen gives a man when she may actually be. "You do have a talent for elevating nonsense to prestige."
She tilts her head toward him. Just enough that the space between them shrinks in a way that looks intimate from the outside. Inside, she feels something gentler: a looseness in her shoulders, a surprising ease. Not the electric jolt he feels...but a warmth she rarely experienced and that she's beginning to welcome.
"Go. Try not to disappoint."
Storms, she says it precisely the same way she's given every other command thus far.
Only someone as starved for human connection as him would find this whole interaction weirdly exciting. His mouth twists, and he feels the urge to— well, it hardly matters. Literally any urge he might have at this moment is inappropriate, so he suppresses it.
"I always do," he says before absconding back to their cabin. Along the way, Yann gives him a positively mournful look, very depressed that the beautiful married woman he just met's relationship seems to be going better than he'd thought.
Verso, Jasnah might be about to discover, is a pathological perfectionist. So, he's gone for the next few hours working on this new project, taking pains to neatly tear out each page he needs, folding them up crisply and ripping them into smaller cards after that. Each card is labeled with a number and a suit, and the face cards even get their own little sketches. The queens all sport dark braids, of course.
It's dinnertime by the time he finishes, which he only learns because he goes looking for Jasnah and can't find her. In the mess, instead of grabbing himself a plate, he beelines toward the only prim posture in the room and takes his seat beside her. His fingers tap impatiently on the wooden tabletop.
Is it even important how she spends those hours? Doing something that keeps her well distant from their shared cabin, evidently. Probably off getting recruited to read someone else's mail, now that word is getting around that she'll lend her literacy out to others. She's listening semi-patiently to a one-eyed deckhand wax nostalgic about his dear old ma, detailing the kind of message he'd like to send back home to her, when Verso finds her seated among the ranks of clattering bowls and over-salted stew. Dismissing the homesick sailor, Jasnah shifts her attention fully onto Verso only after he's fully seated. As though his arrival were merely another shift in the ship's balance rather than the gravitational force it actually proves to be.
His fingers tap. Impatient? Eager? That catches her attention.
"A surprise," she repeats, tone deceptively flat. It's not really a surprise, is it? After all, she'd just sent him off to...wait. Can she trust that he actually went off and did the thing she'd bade him to do? Maybe he's about to ambush her with another plot twist, completely separate to card decks and games of predictive chance. Her spoon stills mid-air. She looks him over with the sharp, discerning air of someone who has learned — recently and repeatedly — that Verso is entirely capable of causing problems she did not anticipate.
A beat. She studies him more carefully — his near-vibrating energy, the faint smudge of ink on his thumb knuckle, the unmistakable glimmer of proud secrecy.
Ah. There's a nearly invisible softening around her eyes.
Although it's not immediately evident, there's a sort of little-boy restlessness to him, made obvious not by his overall demeanor but in microscopic movements: the rhythmic drum of his fingers, the tap of his shoe. It's quite possibly the most eagerness and enthusiasm he's felt in decades. He's brought back to childhood, of painting a picture and then gathering the entire family around his room to look at it. Longing to be perceived, as if he might only truly exist through the eyes of others.
But he restrains himself as he always does, dropping his hands into his lap and interlacing his fingers.
"Sure. You know how I feel about delayed gratification."
— Reminding her of that particular confession is a mistake. Maybe. Probably. Absolutely-yes-entirely. Because Jasnah is a scholar. She might not be quite the scientist that her mother is, but she nevertheless has a healthy respect for the scientific method. And right now, right this second, it's time to test a hypothesis.
Just how firm is Verso's belief in delayed gratification? How patient can he be?
At first, there's nothing suspicious about the way she sips stew from the wooden spoon — a dim, faint flicker of stormlight the only indication that she's soulcasting this food too. Nothing suspicious even when she twists her torso when someone calls Brightness Hesina! across the mess and takes his time effusing thankfulness for the three letters she scribed for him earlier that day.
But...hey, the stew should be pretty well-cooled now. So why is she still sipping it like it might burn her if she ate too fast?
"—Not getting a bowl for yourself?"
She eventually asks, barely denting a third of the way through her meal.
Putain, this is taking forever. The metronome of his foot increases just slightly, imperceptible to most but likely not to Jasnah, who is observant to an almost irritating degree. He stretches out his neck, loosening up his shoulders as he might while impatiently waiting his turn.
"Better not to. Delicate stomach and all." Aside from his Depression Appetite™, he'd also like to avoid throwing up on this voyage. He fears Jasnah might kick him out of the cabin if he does that.
While he is trying extremely hard to be patient, he can't help but point out, "...It's getting cold."
Every new escalation in Verso's impatience is a glimmering little victory. Were she less practiced at schooling her emotions, she might even have drawn gloryspren at the sharp cut of pride felt when his toe taps just a little faster.
— All of it is dampened only by the stark, sudden feeling of a different puzzle locking into place. His nursed breakfast biscuits; the bowl he volunteered for her last night. A different hypothesis forms, circling around his condition. Although, it's far to say she's got a leg up on her conclusion 'cause in her experience Wit didn't require food.
Enough, enough. What a bore, thinking about her ex when she could be timing out how long it takes the potential new Queen's Wit to lose the grip on is self-restraint.
"It is," Jasnah acknowledged. "I ate it cold last night, too. Somehow, the chill improves the flavour. I can't explain it."
Is she— she's eating slow on purpose. He can't imagine why, seeing as she'd been just as enthusiastic about the idea of a card game as he had been. More, really. Verso's enthusiasm was far more ignited by the artistry of creation. Of creating something for someone else. The only possible explanation is that she enjoys watching him struggle even more than she'd enjoy getting to the game, which is...
Hm. He taps his foot again.
"Well, that's good. You're eating for two, after all."
Jasnah dips her spoon, stirs the stew, and goes through the painstaking performance of chasing down a lump of something quasi-identifiable as a potato. She chews thoughtfully, swallows carefully, and then sets about the hunt all over again.
Jasnah flashes a smile, just to ensure all her hard work convincing the ship's crew that their marriage is legitimate doesn't go to waste.
"Yes. All thanks to you, gemheart."
Who needs Towers to teach ruthless military strategy when she's got...whatever the Hells this is.
Thunk, thunk, thunk. She taps the edge of the spoon against the bowl, then brandishes it lightly, vaguely in his direction. A go ahead, fuck around and find out kinda gesture. Jasnah Kholin nearly murdered her own cousin because she thought it might secure a safer, better future for this planet. She's not about to blink when threatened with a second fictional baby.
"Think very carefully about what you say next, Verso."
What he finds out from his fucking around is that he finds it strangely stirring when Jasnah says his name in that tone; he wants to keep pushing his luck, hear her say it again, which is probably an indication that he shouldn't. Visibly relenting, he leans back out of her space. "...Take your time, chouchou."
And she most certainly does take her time. In this case, the poor quality of the stew becomes a boon. It almost discourages a person from eating too quickly. But eventually, at a point that certainly strains patience but does not beggar belief, she scrapes the last spoonful from the bowl. Upon finishing, she pushes it away and sits back.
Jasnah doesn't say it, but the glance she spares him seems to impart a well-earned well done.
Aloud, all she says is: "Shall we retire?" As she stands from the table.
Don't have to ask him twice. "Yes, I think we shall." He stands, too, just an instant after she does. The sailor sitting opposite them looks relieved that he'll no longer have to bear witness to this weird, uncomfortable tension.
As he steps out of the mess hall, he turns back, voice lowered and somewhere between exasperated and entertained. "Has anyone ever told you that you're impossible?"
The satisfaction sparks sharp and bright beneath her ribs — he caught her maneuvering exactly, and more importantly, he understood it. Anything less would have been disappointing.
"Frequently," Jasnah replies without missing a step. Then, a tilt of her head, eyes cutting toward him as cross the open deck under a star-speckled sky.
"Has anyone ever told you that you're alarmingly transparent?"
"—No," he can honestly say. "Perhaps you're uniquely talented at seeing through me." Probably not. Seeing through impatience is one thing; seeing through a person is another.
When they return to their cabin, he gathers up the little stack of handmade cards on the desk, straightening them against the desk before turning around and holding them to his chest so that she can't see them. He'd just spent all of this time itching to get back here and show her, but now that they're here, he says, "On second thought, maybe I am hungry. You don't mind waiting, right?"
There's a little half-smile on his face. He's just teasing.
The moment the cabin door clicks shut behind them, something loosens in her — subtly, almost imperceptibly. Her shoulders ease a fraction. Her breath evens. The rigid, watchful tension she keeps coiled behind her ribs on deck finally slips its leash. Here, in this cramped little room with its bolted furniture and laughable porthole, she can allow herself not to treat every passerby as a potential threat.
Naturally, this is the exact moment he chooses to be insufferable.
She watches him shield his little stack of cards with all the theatrics of a man guarding classified intelligence. His posture is so absurdly pleased-with-himself that she refuses even to indulge the metaphor forming in her mind. Alethkar could never actually supply her with the appropriate analogue of a schoolboy hoarding stolen sweets, but it's something along those lines.
"The idea that you could endure even five minutes without revealing whatever you've been itching to show me since dinner?" Her tone is flat but amused. "I don't believe it for a moment."
Her half-smile mirrors his half-smile. Like she'd said: transparent. Then she extends her right hand, palm up, expectant.
"Stop stalling," she says, quiet but implacable. "And hand it over."
So you knew I was itching to show you, he resists saying. Instead, he presses the little stack into Jasnah's palm—yes, pleased with himself, specifically because he's done something that he thinks she will like. It isn't about making something that he thinks is good; it's about making something that other people will approve of. Renoir had always chided him for lacking that internal locus, for looking at his own art with other people's gazes instead of his own.
He sidles up beside her to watch her go through the cards. How similar a Towers deck is to traditional playing cards is still unknown, so he narrates as she looks at them:
"There are four suits of thirteen ranks. Spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs." The patterns of which were all lovingly etched into each card. "Two to ten, an ace, and the court cards—king, queen, and jack." A pause. "I guess you might see them as a king, queen, and Wit."
That bit is the bit she likes best. The I know that you know that I know of it all. Rather than incidental contact or brushing fingers, Jasnah finds her thrill in the complicated web of social behaviors that either devolve or grow between a pair of confidants. And — and she supposes that's a little how she's beginning to view him. Perhaps not a friend, but a confidant. He must be, for her to have stomached even the thought of sleeping in the same room.
She fans the first few cards out against her splayed fingers, eyeing the symbols and patterns. She doesn't need an explanation for what a 2 or 3 or a 4 is, because the pattern does all the heavy lifting for her. Smoothly she swaps those characters in her mind for the appropriate tallies in marks with which she's more familiar.
It is a shade remarkable that he did all this in the hours between being assigned the task and now, minus the detour of sitting and watching her eat her dinner. She might have expected some variance in the size or straightness of the cut. But it's all quite...well, good. Approval hums low and brief in the back of her throat. Unsurprisingly, the craftsmanship of the cards themselves strike her first before the art itself.
But then she cards across the court. The king, the queen, the jack. Her attention lifts briefly when she sees the illustration on the queen. An odd little frown when he flips the jack to a Wit. Nevertheless, that's the one she lifts between two gloved fingers. The Wit of Spades.
"What's the value of the court cards?"
She understands that he's likely waiting for a verdict. He'll get one, if he's patient. But at least this time the delay isn't purposefully inflicted so much as required. A jaunt of time to let her observe, process, and think through her review and how she'll choose to give it.
Verso notes that little frown, wonders if it makes her think of someone she'd rather not remember; she hadn't seemed particularly reticent to speak about her previous jester-musician-whatever he might be, but she did mention that he was unliked. Jasnah probably wouldn't appreciate him creating more trouble for her. He had 'left', she'd said, but maybe she fired him instead, and now the memory is unpleasant.
"We can just call that one the Jack." An easy comment, unbothered, so as to lessen any discomfort she may feel.
"The court cards are all worth ten in vingt-un. The ace can be worth either one or eleven, depending."
There's something philosophical to be said about the worth of a card being determined by the cards around it rather than its own intrinsic value. Verso doesn't have time to ponder that, though, as he's too busy letting his worth be determined by what Jasnah makes of his creation.
With put-on nonchalance: "Go on, you can say it. You're impressed."
Eerie how Verso seems to breath conciliation like it's oxygen. Jasnah hadn't been aware of her own frown or her own hesitation until he was already leaping ahead to smooth it over, smooth it away, dismissing that they should call the card anything other than Jack. Her frown remains; she flickers it towards Verso, instead. She doesn't like this sensation. Of having her feelings managed.
But it doesn't diminish his accomplishment, sorry to say. She flips the card over, looks at its back, and then once again its front. Examines a king instead.
"Better than I expected," she concedes. "Remarkable detail work. Crisp edges."
Probably doesn't quite scratch that itch he's got. Sorry. Not sorry.
Better than I expected is a bit of a backhanded compliment. What did she expect, he wonders, but he tries not to dwell on it too heavily right now. ...He'll dwell on it later, when he's trying to sleep.
"There are... improvements to be made," he admits, endlessly critical of his own work. There's not an imperfection that he hasn't already sniffed out. "But I can work on the backs later."
They're mostly bare, but he has big plans for the intricate patterns he plans to painstakingly draw out on all 52.
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"Well," he says in a lowered voice, so as not to be overheard, "I wouldn't be opposed to engaging in a little heresy with you."
Heh.
"We'd need a proper deck, though, or you'd need to be willing to part with a few pages from your notebook." So that he could do some arts and crafts with them.
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"Part with my pages?" She asks. The line is so so so thin between stern and mock-stern. Maybe there's really no difference at all. "You ask for too much, Dessendre."
He never did actually dissuade her from calling him by that name.
"Though if you intend to construct a deck yourself, I expect the craftsmanship to be impeccable. I refuse to be implicated in blasphemy that's poorly made."
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He lowers his voice another notch, and although he wouldn't admit it even to himself, it's just to have an excuse to lean in closer to her. "I'll have you know that my blasphemy," he says, amusement tugging at his lips, "is artisanal."
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"Artisanal." Half-scornful and half-amused. Jasnah appraises him with the same look a wife gives her husband when pretending she's impressed. Or the look a queen gives a man when she may actually be. "You do have a talent for elevating nonsense to prestige."
She tilts her head toward him. Just enough that the space between them shrinks in a way that looks intimate from the outside. Inside, she feels something gentler: a looseness in her shoulders, a surprising ease. Not the electric jolt he feels...but a warmth she rarely experienced and that she's beginning to welcome.
"Go. Try not to disappoint."
Storms, she says it precisely the same way she's given every other command thus far.
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"I always do," he says before absconding back to their cabin. Along the way, Yann gives him a positively mournful look, very depressed that the beautiful married woman he just met's relationship seems to be going better than he'd thought.
Verso, Jasnah might be about to discover, is a pathological perfectionist. So, he's gone for the next few hours working on this new project, taking pains to neatly tear out each page he needs, folding them up crisply and ripping them into smaller cards after that. Each card is labeled with a number and a suit, and the face cards even get their own little sketches. The queens all sport dark braids, of course.
It's dinnertime by the time he finishes, which he only learns because he goes looking for Jasnah and can't find her. In the mess, instead of grabbing himself a plate, he beelines toward the only prim posture in the room and takes his seat beside her. His fingers tap impatiently on the wooden tabletop.
"I have a surprise for you in our cabin."
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His fingers tap. Impatient? Eager? That catches her attention.
"A surprise," she repeats, tone deceptively flat. It's not really a surprise, is it? After all, she'd just sent him off to...wait. Can she trust that he actually went off and did the thing she'd bade him to do? Maybe he's about to ambush her with another plot twist, completely separate to card decks and games of predictive chance. Her spoon stills mid-air. She looks him over with the sharp, discerning air of someone who has learned — recently and repeatedly — that Verso is entirely capable of causing problems she did not anticipate.
A beat. She studies him more carefully — his near-vibrating energy, the faint smudge of ink on his thumb knuckle, the unmistakable glimmer of proud secrecy.
Ah. There's a nearly invisible softening around her eyes.
"May I at least finish my dinner first?"
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But he restrains himself as he always does, dropping his hands into his lap and interlacing his fingers.
"Sure. You know how I feel about delayed gratification."
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Just how firm is Verso's belief in delayed gratification? How patient can he be?
At first, there's nothing suspicious about the way she sips stew from the wooden spoon — a dim, faint flicker of stormlight the only indication that she's soulcasting this food too. Nothing suspicious even when she twists her torso when someone calls Brightness Hesina! across the mess and takes his time effusing thankfulness for the three letters she scribed for him earlier that day.
But...hey, the stew should be pretty well-cooled now. So why is she still sipping it like it might burn her if she ate too fast?
"—Not getting a bowl for yourself?"
She eventually asks, barely denting a third of the way through her meal.
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"Better not to. Delicate stomach and all." Aside from his Depression Appetite™, he'd also like to avoid throwing up on this voyage. He fears Jasnah might kick him out of the cabin if he does that.
While he is trying extremely hard to be patient, he can't help but point out, "...It's getting cold."
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— All of it is dampened only by the stark, sudden feeling of a different puzzle locking into place. His nursed breakfast biscuits; the bowl he volunteered for her last night. A different hypothesis forms, circling around his condition. Although, it's far to say she's got a leg up on her conclusion 'cause in her experience Wit didn't require food.
Enough, enough. What a bore, thinking about her ex when she could be timing out how long it takes the potential new Queen's Wit to lose the grip on is self-restraint.
"It is," Jasnah acknowledged. "I ate it cold last night, too. Somehow, the chill improves the flavour. I can't explain it."
One more mouthful.
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Hm. He taps his foot again.
"Well, that's good. You're eating for two, after all."
Warfare is clearly the only way to end this.
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Jasnah flashes a smile, just to ensure all her hard work convincing the ship's crew that their marriage is legitimate doesn't go to waste.
"Yes. All thanks to you, gemheart."
Who needs Towers to teach ruthless military strategy when she's got...whatever the Hells this is.
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Hurry up or he will add another fictional child to this story!!! He'll do it!!!!
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"Think very carefully about what you say next, Verso."
First name retaliation, activated!
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No sibling for Gen-Gen.
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Jasnah doesn't say it, but the glance she spares him seems to impart a well-earned well done.
Aloud, all she says is: "Shall we retire?" As she stands from the table.
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As he steps out of the mess hall, he turns back, voice lowered and somewhere between exasperated and entertained. "Has anyone ever told you that you're impossible?"
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"Frequently," Jasnah replies without missing a step. Then, a tilt of her head, eyes cutting toward him as cross the open deck under a star-speckled sky.
"Has anyone ever told you that you're alarmingly transparent?"
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"—No," he can honestly say. "Perhaps you're uniquely talented at seeing through me." Probably not. Seeing through impatience is one thing; seeing through a person is another.
When they return to their cabin, he gathers up the little stack of handmade cards on the desk, straightening them against the desk before turning around and holding them to his chest so that she can't see them. He'd just spent all of this time itching to get back here and show her, but now that they're here, he says, "On second thought, maybe I am hungry. You don't mind waiting, right?"
There's a little half-smile on his face. He's just teasing.
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Naturally, this is the exact moment he chooses to be insufferable.
She watches him shield his little stack of cards with all the theatrics of a man guarding classified intelligence. His posture is so absurdly pleased-with-himself that she refuses even to indulge the metaphor forming in her mind. Alethkar could never actually supply her with the appropriate analogue of a schoolboy hoarding stolen sweets, but it's something along those lines.
"The idea that you could endure even five minutes without revealing whatever you've been itching to show me since dinner?" Her tone is flat but amused. "I don't believe it for a moment."
Her half-smile mirrors his half-smile. Like she'd said: transparent. Then she extends her right hand, palm up, expectant.
"Stop stalling," she says, quiet but implacable. "And hand it over."
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He sidles up beside her to watch her go through the cards. How similar a Towers deck is to traditional playing cards is still unknown, so he narrates as she looks at them:
"There are four suits of thirteen ranks. Spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs." The patterns of which were all lovingly etched into each card. "Two to ten, an ace, and the court cards—king, queen, and jack." A pause. "I guess you might see them as a king, queen, and Wit."
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She fans the first few cards out against her splayed fingers, eyeing the symbols and patterns. She doesn't need an explanation for what a 2 or 3 or a 4 is, because the pattern does all the heavy lifting for her. Smoothly she swaps those characters in her mind for the appropriate tallies in marks with which she's more familiar.
It is a shade remarkable that he did all this in the hours between being assigned the task and now, minus the detour of sitting and watching her eat her dinner. She might have expected some variance in the size or straightness of the cut. But it's all quite...well, good. Approval hums low and brief in the back of her throat. Unsurprisingly, the craftsmanship of the cards themselves strike her first before the art itself.
But then she cards across the court. The king, the queen, the jack. Her attention lifts briefly when she sees the illustration on the queen. An odd little frown when he flips the jack to a Wit. Nevertheless, that's the one she lifts between two gloved fingers. The Wit of Spades.
"What's the value of the court cards?"
She understands that he's likely waiting for a verdict. He'll get one, if he's patient. But at least this time the delay isn't purposefully inflicted so much as required. A jaunt of time to let her observe, process, and think through her review and how she'll choose to give it.
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"We can just call that one the Jack." An easy comment, unbothered, so as to lessen any discomfort she may feel.
"The court cards are all worth ten in vingt-un. The ace can be worth either one or eleven, depending."
There's something philosophical to be said about the worth of a card being determined by the cards around it rather than its own intrinsic value. Verso doesn't have time to ponder that, though, as he's too busy letting his worth be determined by what Jasnah makes of his creation.
With put-on nonchalance: "Go on, you can say it. You're impressed."
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But it doesn't diminish his accomplishment, sorry to say. She flips the card over, looks at its back, and then once again its front. Examines a king instead.
"Better than I expected," she concedes. "Remarkable detail work. Crisp edges."
Probably doesn't quite scratch that itch he's got. Sorry. Not sorry.
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"There are... improvements to be made," he admits, endlessly critical of his own work. There's not an imperfection that he hasn't already sniffed out. "But I can work on the backs later."
They're mostly bare, but he has big plans for the intricate patterns he plans to painstakingly draw out on all 52.
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look i couldn't find a way to make him taking another card more interesting
FAIR.
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slides back in here
the fun never stops!!
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