There is no reputation to protect in admitting that instead of Ivory's oil sheen and precise geometry, her attention is caught by something else entirely. Something curved. Recursive. Beautiful in a way that makes her pulse misbehave, skittering half into panic at how fundamentally wrong it appears. A cryptic, if she's not mistaken. And there are half a dozen plausible reasons another Radiant spren might be here. None of them inherently dangerous but none of them hers to disclose.
She risks a glance back at Verso, brief and assessing. Could he see it? Possibly. Possibly not. Jasnah has always been better than most at perceiving the Cognitive Realm, but even so, the pattern is faint and barely there. It's a flattened whorl hidden in the barrel's wood grain, easy to dismiss as a trick of light or an overactive imagination. The kind of thing you would never notice unless you already knew how to look and what it looked like.
Her gaze drops, checking the ground, the orientation of her shadow. It behaves as it should. Pointed in the proper direction. She draws in a steadying breath and asks herself, with sudden, unwelcome precision: Is this actually happening? Perhaps she should ask if he can see it too. Anchor the observation. Confirm that the cryptic isn't something she's conjured alone, a phantom born of blood loss and stress and absence and—
Not relevant, Jasnah. Focus.
"Maybe," she finally says, and it's a half-lie at most. "At any rate, I saw something."
Her voice stays level. Casual. Deliberately unremarkable. One step forward. Then another. Only as far as their linked hands allow, the space between them resolving into a measured tether. Two arm-lengths of permitted distance.
Without looking directly, she subtly adjusts her posture, letting her attention slide just enough to keep the barrel and the flattened, pulsing whorl clinging to it in the corner of her vision. Close enough to track. Not enough to betray exactly where her eyes want to go.
Something. Verso thinks again of Jochi's quiet admittance of Jasnah's mother's fears. That she'd made up her correspondents in her head. Is the 'something' she's seeing real, or is it an image conjured by her own mind? He doesn't dare say anything that would suggest so.
Instead, he simply moves along with her, allowing her their wingspan of free rein while carefully stepping behind her. Perhaps presumptuous, given his lack of knowledge of spren, he suggests, "Maybe... you should call out to him." Maybe Ivory is alone and scared, and he just needs to hear her voice. "That's how I located Monoco under that building."
Jasnah glances back over her shoulder, across the short span between them and their joined hands. Her tongue presses to the back of her teeth, turbulent, every line of her posture broadcasting the effort it takes not to say don't be an idiot — particularly when the idiot in question has no real framework for spren at all.
But she reins it in. She has been operating on an assumption: whatever happened to Ivory, it happened in the Cognitive Realm, across a boundary her thoughts and voice couldn't reach once she lost access to stormlight. That assumption has served her well enough so far. But it's still an assumption. And her frustration, however well-informed, is a poor substitute for data.
So, instead of cursing him out, she gives Verso a grudging nod.
"—Ivory?" she calls. The name comes out stiff, awkward. The alley answers with nothing but city-noise. Footsteps somewhere distant, the creak of ship-masts, canvas snapping lazily in the breeze. No voice. No familiar, precise presence brushing against her mind.
But in the corner of her vision, as if answering a question, the cryptic peels itself off the barrel. Not all at once. It rolls, flattening and unfolding as it slips down onto the cobblestones, a shadowy seethe rippling over stone. Responding, she thinks. To Ivory's name.
Her stomach tightens. Why? Ivory loves to warn her about cryptics. They were trouble. They loved lies. They fed on them. Speak one untrue word at a gathering and seven will cluster around you, humming until your ears ring. Even Design — Hoid's spren — had barely been tolerated by Ivory. And Design, in turn, had barely tolerated him.
A cold, sudden panic cinches beneath her ribs. Jasnah stops dead in her tracks. Is this Design? Would that make this day better or catastrophically worse? The thought of the former Queen's Wit reappearing here, of all places, after vanishing so neatly from her life, is almost laughable. Almost.
"Ivory," she tries again. Louder. This time, more command than question. And the little cryptic responds, rolling deeper into the alley.
She starts forward once more, her grip on Verso steadying even as her attention locks onto the flicker-trick of light skating ahead on the ground. Something only she can see. Something she is now unmistakably following.
And without turning back, she adds, almost idly, as if the words have only just occurred to her. Mild, measured, maybe-praise: "You might be onto something."
Jasnah gives him such a look that he expects to be on the receiving end of a lashing from her razor-sharp tongue. His knowledge of spren—and most everything in this world—is lacking compared to hers, and he braces himself for being told just that, and to stay silent unless he has an educated theory to share.
It doesn't happen, though, and in fact she gives him a nod of acknowledgement before, surprisingly, giving his idea a try. He's not certain it will work. He doesn't even fully understand if Ivory is here physically or only as some spiritual remnant. It's a better alternative than standing around hoping he'll appear, though, so he figures it must be worth a shot, no matter how foolish it might feel.
She calls out, and through their linked hands he feels the thrum of anxiety underneath his thumb, at her pulse point. Something has happened, although he can't tell what. She takes a step forward and he follows, thinking in some distant place in the back of his mind how their responsive steps aren't that different from the waltz.
"Did he respond to you?"
Edited (department of redundancy department) 2025-12-31 20:36 (UTC)
...Really, she doesn't want to lie. Not outright. So she can't claim Ivory responded — an amateur fib, easily dismantled. Instead, she leans on a more reliable constant: Verso's ignorance in this world. It gives her room to maneuver, to speak carefully, contingently. Just in case the cryptic is Design. Or just in case it's something else entirely.
Jasnah slows, then comes to a soft halt. The alley splits ahead, and the cryptic has reconstituted itself along the edge of a window box. Hairline fractures in the wood, elegant and wrong. She avoids looking at it directly, partly because the undulating pattern churns her stomach, and partly because she is not prepared to hold Verso's hand through his first encounter with a cryptic.
"No," she exhales her confession. She lifts her chin, looks back at him, and catches his gaze. Anchoring it with deliberate, unwavering eye contact. "Look at me." Soft, but certain. And hoping he'll do as he's told. "There's a...strange spren. Ahead — keep looking at me. Don't try too hard to see it. If you do, it may spook. And it's my best lead."
At least that's entirely true. Although it's not a tactic she'd take if she'd known which of her secrets Jochi had already spilled.
Verso does as she says, eyes on her, but it seems unlikely he would have been able to catch sight of anything even if he didn't. He'd seen nothing similar in appearance to Ivory, although Ivory is so small that he imagines it would be challenging to even notice that a spren was there. It's perfectly possible, really, that Jasnah has a keener eye than him, but—
He thinks yet again of Jasnah's childhood predicament. He hopes, at least, that she has a keener eye than him, because he hasn't any idea how to respond if she's seeing things.
"I would allow the pure-hearted maiden to approach the unicorn herself"—because that's how she's making it sound, like the spren would just sense something about him and take off—"but she was stabbed recently."
Under less pressure, Jasnah would have asked what's a unicorn? Or she might have barked one of her short, breathy laughs and taken immediate issue with why this particular myth insists upon a maiden. There is cultural criticism to be had there. Volumes of it. But she lets the thought go cold on the plate. She's hungry for something else now.
So she says nothing. Which, for Jasnah, is its own concession. She doesn't rush. She turns left into a narrow, dead-end nook off the winding alley and follows the cryptic's pattern as it skates across brick and wood and shadow, slipping from surface to surface until, until, until.
There. Tucked beside old crates and sagging sackcloth, half-sheltered beneath a cart long stripped of its wheels, something catches the light. A flicker of metal. Wrong and bright.
Twice now on their adventure she's surged forward only to be rebounded back into Verso's care. The third time she refuses to be anchored. Jasnah shakes loose his hand and, palm braced against the wall to spare her wound, sinks carefully to her knees on the stone. A grunt escapes her. Then a hissed, thin request for help. Between them (but mostly Verso) the cart is shifted aside.
Leaning against the wall, no taller than the length of Jasnah's index finger, is Ivory. He is all angles and oil-sheen geometry, his impossible little body fixed in place through his tiny eye by a thin metal needle.
Aluminum? She wonders distantly. Or, damnation, silver?
There is no movement. No flutter of awareness. For want of a kinder metaphor, Ivory resembles a cremling mounted in an enthusiast's collection. Pinned. Displayed. Preserved in a parody of life. Jasnah wasn't the only one who was stabbed, it seems. The realization unfurls cold and precise in her gut. If the attack was coordinated, if the enemy possessed one of the disruptive metals capable of harming spren, then this was not merely an assassination attempt. It was a severing.
"—Give me your hand," she orders Verso, sharp and immediate.
The ground is too far for her to bend properly with her own wound screaming its protest, and she needs both hands free. She intends to lift Ivory — carefully, reverently — and set him into Verso's palm so she can examine the damage without jostling him further.
And in the corner of her eye, the cryptic dances across a pane of glass. Its lines ripple. Curl. Pulse. For just a heartbeat, she could almost swear its movements are triumphant.
He's a little sad to have his hand batted away. There's a lack of warmth there where her palm used to be, and his fingers twitch a little involuntarily. He doesn't allow himself to make anything of it. To her, that was nothing more intimate than using a crutch.
The tone of her command brooks no argument, no questioning. Neither does the sight of tiny Ivory run through with a needle. He cups his palms out in front of him, ready to receive what appears to be an injured spren. Careful, gentle. Patient, as he'd said.
"Are spren—?" Immortal, he intends to say, although it seems too close to asking if Ivory is dead or dying to finish the thought. "I didn't realize that they could get injured like this."
He had imagined them to be like the mythical beings he's used to. Impossible to truly harm.
"Spren can be injured via three distinct mechanisms," she says, voice clipped and curt. Lecture-precise. She retreats into facts the way she has always done when panic claws too close to the surface. Leaning on objective truth the way she has, without quite admitting it, leaned on Verso.
"The first is irrelevant here. The second and third both involve the disruption of Investiture. All spren are composed of Investiture that's coalesced long enough to achieve sapience. They can't die," she answers the question he didn't quite ask but she anticipated regardless. "Not in the way we mean it. Death is...different for them."
Her words are firm. Measured. Unshakeable. Her hands are not. They tremble as she settles Ivory into Verso's waiting palms, the minute shiver transferring through her fingertips into the needle itself. The thin metal quivers when she brushes its head, vibrating like a struck wire. Ivory does not move. Should she pull the needle? Storms — what if antilight is involved? But no, she reasons, too fast and too desperately: if it were, this entire block of Thaylen City would have been obliterated in the resulting detonation.
—Has he been pinned here for a week? Damnation. The thought lands like a blow. Why did she stop Verso when he offered to search? Short-sighted. Proud. Self-absorbed.
"Aluminum blocks Investiture," she says, quieter now. "Silver disrupts it. I don't — we don't understand this well enough. It's a fledgling field. Storms, Wit only brought aluminum from off-world a year ago."
Stop prattling and do something. Jasnah draws in a breath so deep it tugs painfully at her wound. She tears her gaze away from Ivory and looks to Verso.
"I'm going to pull it," she says. But she doesn't yet. She hesitates, suspended in that awful, narrowing moment before action — waiting for something she would never ordinarily ask for. Agreement. Objection. Peer review.
It's irrational. His guess will not be better than hers; it will almost certainly be worse. Still. She wants something from him.
Ivory looks so small. He always does, but— it strikes Verso now just how tiny he really is. Fragile, with this needle piercing him. He grinds his teeth a little at the sight. It's... unpleasant. He looks away, toward Jasnah's face instead. It should be a better sight, but the look on it only makes his stomach sink more. She's afraid.
The moment after she speaks is spent silent. Of course it is. She won't want his opinion either way, and so he doesn't even think to have one. His eyes ping-pong from her face to Ivory's little body and then back again, and then—
"Oh."
She's waiting for approval, or encouragement, or any response at all. He swallows. If Jasnah doesn't understand this well enough, he doesn't understand it at all. Anxiety bubbles up at saying the wrong thing and making this worse, at making the fear in Jasnah's eyes grow stronger.
"I think that... he trusts you to do what you think is best."
Verso's words — halting, not quite an answer — land closer to that truth than he realizes. At its core, the Radiant bond is trust. And it hardly matters what he says. What matters is that he answers at all. That his attention steadies her wrist. Her arm. Her spine.
She pinches the needle between her fingers. Still unsure of the metal. Still unsure of the consequences. And then, holding her breath, she pulls. There's no blood. No sound from Ivory. Just the faint, obscene normalcy of it, like plucking a pin from a cushion. The needle drops, striking stone with a thin, bright ping.
"Ivory?" she whispers. Her hands — one gloved, one bare — slide to the backs of Verso's hands, holding him as he holds the spren. As if she's not yet ready to trust herself to take Ivory back alone.
Nothing happens. Then, something does.
A faint stream of stormlight leaks from her pocket, misting upward toward her mouth. She'd pocketed them out of habit, unwilling to wander far without spheres. The stormlight is just enough to dull the pain at her wound without actually healing it — like the Connection is restored, but not yes functioning properly.
Ivory remains still. No movement. No sign of recovery. But Jasnah can feel him again. That reedy-thin presence brushing the edge of her awareness.
Her shoulders sag. Her posture collapses inward with relief.
Verso holds his breath as the extraction occurs. It's an approximation of surgery, like the operations he and Clea would do on their toys as children. Replacing a worn-out button eye (Verso) or performing the world's first head transplant (Clea). Just like the toys, Ivory doesn't wince, doesn't respond at all. It's only by Jasnah's body language that he realizes they've had even a modicum of success at all; although he can't see it, she must be able to feel it somehow, through their bond.
"He would want you to hold him," he says, steadying her hands with one of his as he gently tips the palm holding Ivory, slipping him into her grasp. Selfishly, his fingers stay curled around her hand.
Protests bite at the back of her throat. For all the times Verso answers with I don't know, Jasnah loathes the taste of it in her own mouth. She resents the way hope flares like a false dawn anyway when she inventories the answers she wants to give instead.
Ivory settles into her palm. There is no sign of life. But then again, there never truly is with a spren. They do not breathe. They do not bleed. Ivory, she knows, is capable of remaining perfectly still when it suits him. Even so, this stillness is too complete.
She doesn't pull away when Verso's fingers curl around hers. Instead, her hand sinks into the support he offers, instinctive and unguarded. A platform resting on another platform.
"I'm not certain," she admits at last, carefully. "But I felt stormlight. Just a trace." Her thumb curls protectively around Ivory's angular form. "That suggests he isn't...lost."
She glances up at Verso then, searching his face. "Spren take time to reconstitute themselves. He may need hours. Days." A pause. Two convalescents, then. But at least with Ivory found, Jasnah feels more prepared to move on once she's stable enough to travel. Quieter: "Possibly longer, depending on what exactly was done."
Her gaze drops again, sharp and intent, scanning the stones until she spots the fallen needle. She leans, wincing faintly, and retrieves it with two fingers as if it might still bite.
"We're keeping this," she says, more firmly now. To him. To herself. "Whatever did this matters."
His hand lingers on hers for one more protracted moment before he relents, plucking the needle from her fingers. Strange how something so innocuous could do that much damage to a spren; before this, he'd assumed they were... if not invulnerable, then at least difficult to harm. This, though, looks no different from a sewing needle. It's a bit harrowing to think something so innocuous could do so much harm.
"I'll hold onto it," he says, slipping it into his pocket. When they get back to Jochi's, he'll put it with the rest of their things. For now, though, there's no reason to make Jasnah carry the thing that hurt her spren.
"At least you won't be convalescing alone anymore." He imagines that knowing that Ivory is safe and with her will help greatly with her recovery. "Are you going to be okay to walk back?"
For a moment, her attention lingers on his pocket. She's grateful he takes the needle — truly — but her thoughts remain snagged on the metal itself. If it had been aluminum, surely removing it would have been enough to restore Ivory's sapience. Which leaves silver. Storms.
"Yes," she says at last, testing the answer as much as offering it. That threadbare trickle of stormlight helped. It didn't heal her but it steadied something inside her. Took the edge off the pain. Nudged her forward, so to speak.
"It feels a little like just before I spoke my first Ideal for Ivory." Her head tilts, teeth catching briefly at her lower lip as she turns the memory over. "Like a sip of power. Much, much less than I'm used to."
She looks down at the spren cradled in her palm, fingers cupped protectively around his sharp, unmoving angles.
Then she glances back at Verso.
"Help me to my feet?" she asks — slanted, careful, already halfway trusting he will by the way she takes his arm.
"Of course," he says, and he means it—of course he will. She doesn't need to ask. Although he'd like to lead her by the hand again, he instead lets her take his arm, less helping her and more acting as a pillar for her to steady herself against. Even in this, she has all the real control.
If their connection has been restored, then he wonders if their conditions will influence each other. Seems like the type of question that would send Jasnah on a lecture—perhaps about how stupid he is—so he doesn't ask. They both need to recuperate regardless.
"Come on. You and Ivory could both use some rest."
Maybe, maybe, maybe if she weren't so thoroughly occupied by injury, by Ivory's unnerving stillness, by the unresolved question mark hanging over the attack itself, Jasnah might notice how far into the hairline fractures of her composure she's allowed Verso to seep. How instinctive it has become to reach for him. How unexamined.
It's thoughtless, now, the way she braces herself against his upper arm as she pushes to her feet. Thoughtless, too, that her fingers stay curled there once she's upright, as if the contact were structural — foundational — rather than optional. At least it's her right hand, with Ivory is cradled with care in her safehand. Tucked close and protected.
"All I've been doing is resting," she says, the words coming out closer to a growl than she intends. Tired. That thin, brittle anxiety that sets in once the adrenaline has burned off and reality comes rushing back in. Despite the sharpness of her tone, she keeps hold of him. "With Ivory recovered, we should plan how to extricate ourselves from Thaylen City."
It's a leap and bounds ahead of where she should be thinking; miles past where her body actually is. As if all this enforced stillness had only ever been for Ivory's sake, not her own. As if the stronger she feels, the more intolerable the waiting becomes. The sitting. The being tended to.
Jasnah has never been good at savouring her victories.
"Silly me," Verso says, dry, "thinking a stab victim might require more than a week to recover."
He doesn't argue, though, because at least for the moment, it's only mental labor that Jasnah's attempting to do. If physical labor becomes part of it, he might feel the need to step in—but for now, she can think as much as she'd like. God knows her brain must be constantly moving.
So, he shrugs, lets it roll off his back as they make their way to Jochi's again. Up the stairs is more of a hassle than down the stairs, but they manage it; once he has Jasnah and Ivory settled on the couch, he crouches down to slip the needle into one of the pockets of their bags.
"It might be wise to stay here until Ivory has fully recovered," he says, choosing not to point out that he selfishly enjoys being here, important and needed.
It rankles her that by the time she's back on the couch, after the stairs, she's faintly out of breath. It's a sensation she’s unaccustomed to. Six years of ready stormlight has erased such small indignities, has made enhanced strength and endurance feel like baseline reality rather than the borrowed advantages they actually are.
That, and the sheen of sweat on her brow, the way the back of her blouse clings damply to her spine, are frustratingly visceral confirmations that Verso is right. A week hasn't been long enough. She could argue that it has been long enough, safe enough, that she could now reach out to Fen, the Thaylen queen, and quietly request an Edgedancer to finish what Jasnah couldn't do. But ever-paranoid, Jasnah isn't prepared to make that concession. Not yet. Can she even trust Queen Fen?
Ivory's small, unmoving body rests swaddled in clean linen taken from Jochi's kitchenette, tucked into a slightly ajar drawer of the end table that's served as their dining surface and card table all week. She knows Ivory would loathe this. Visible. Vulnerable. Subject to the whims of human hands.
"There's no way of knowing how long that could take," she counters, clipped but not unkind. Jasnah will not sit here — cut off from crown and people — for weeks on end.
So she bargains. Another indignity she's unused to suffering.
"Over the next few days, I'll get a clearer sense of whether or not I can leverage more stormlight. Heal, properly. If I can, then we move on once I'm back on my feet. Even unconscious, Ivory won't be a burden to carry with me."
"If you can heal, sure," he says, glancing up from their belongings.
It's the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head and a sure you can, honey. She'd only managed a small amount of stormlight once Ivory was returned to her; he's no expert on her magic, but it seems unlikely that she'll be able to do much of anything until Ivory has recovered, too. Still, he doesn't argue the point that if she manages to heal herself, then they can go.
"You're certain taking the Oathgate won't be too hard on him?"
That is, if there's an Oathgate for them to take at all. That still seems up in the air.
— Does her nose crinkle at his initial tone? Abso-storming-lutely. A little human comma in the calm of her expression. One of those little flickers that remind the people around her that she's not wholly a stone. Just three-quarters one.
"Certain enough," Jasnah answers. As though principle won't allow her to simply say yes when there's even a fractional chance of being wrong. "The Oathgates work by leveraging the sprens' native realm. If anything, the brief dip into the Cognitive might help him."
Something she'd already considered. Had she stormlight, she might have opened a small elsegate into the Cognitive Realm and observed whether or not it helped. Pure hypotheticals.
"Provided Thaylen City's is functioning," she unknowingly echoes his thoughts. They'd fled Kharbranth so quickly, there wasn't any time to confirm whether the Oathgate issue was real or fabricated.
Verso makes an internal note to learn more about the Cognitive and spren so he doesn't sound like such an idiot talking to Jasnah. So much lore to study, so little time.
"Yeah," he concedes, "provided."
He stands, making his way to the kitchenette to pour himself and Jasnah each a glass of water. It's been a long day, and he'd love to just crash on the divan, but, well— there's a stab victim there. Another night of killing his back on the wooden floor. The only reason he's looking forward to leaving this place is getting back to his bed.
Calling from the kitchen, he asks, "And if it isn't?"
It's okay, Verso! The average Rosharan doesn't understand this stuff either. It's simply your supreme bad luck to be stuck with one of the few people on this planet who possesses a rudimentary grasp of Realmatic Theory. Sorry, not sorry.
"Then we pay a visit to the Royal Palace and see what the Thaylen queen could do for us."
Verso tries not to get too excited about the sound of that us. He half-convinces himself she's referring to herself and Ivory instead, that he's just the annoying tagalong she got unfortunately stuck with through all of this. After all, she can't even bring herself to call him a friend.
As he returns to the sitting room, he drops one of the glasses on the end table. The other goes on the real table across the room, where he's been sitting and entertaining himself much of the time. "What's the relationship like between Alethkar and Thaylenah?"
"Fledgling, but positive." Jasnah sighs, wondering how much of her own hestitation boils down to misplaced, bone-deep Alethi pride. "Thaylenah was never the target of any of Alethekar's past conquests. But they witnessed more than enough of what happened in other kingdoms to be rightfully wary."
Depending on where he reached in the weighty history tome assigned by Jasnah once-upon-a-time, Verso may already be aware of what she's implying. The Sunmaker's rule, some six hundred centuries ago, where it's said one in every ten Azish people died under Alethi tyranny following the conquering of Azimir.
Dalinar, to his credit, had done well re-establishing diplomatic ties with all the nations that would eventually form the Coalition than she might ever have anticipated. Better than Jasnah would ever have anticipated. Initially, Queen Fen had assumed the overture a ruse in some new Alethi campaign. But, over time, they'd won her over.
"Alethkar has had an unsavoury reputation for most of its existence," she acknowledges. "Which makes diplomacy challenging."
Jasnah leans forward, wincing slightly, and picks up the water in one hand. She doesn't immediately drink.
"Fen and I have corresponded regularly, however. And I trust she would help us. It's the rest of the Thaylen government that gives me pause."
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no subject
There is no reputation to protect in admitting that instead of Ivory's oil sheen and precise geometry, her attention is caught by something else entirely. Something curved. Recursive. Beautiful in a way that makes her pulse misbehave, skittering half into panic at how fundamentally wrong it appears. A cryptic, if she's not mistaken. And there are half a dozen plausible reasons another Radiant spren might be here. None of them inherently dangerous but none of them hers to disclose.
She risks a glance back at Verso, brief and assessing. Could he see it? Possibly. Possibly not. Jasnah has always been better than most at perceiving the Cognitive Realm, but even so, the pattern is faint and barely there. It's a flattened whorl hidden in the barrel's wood grain, easy to dismiss as a trick of light or an overactive imagination. The kind of thing you would never notice unless you already knew how to look and what it looked like.
Her gaze drops, checking the ground, the orientation of her shadow. It behaves as it should. Pointed in the proper direction. She draws in a steadying breath and asks herself, with sudden, unwelcome precision: Is this actually happening? Perhaps she should ask if he can see it too. Anchor the observation. Confirm that the cryptic isn't something she's conjured alone, a phantom born of blood loss and stress and absence and—
Not relevant, Jasnah. Focus.
"Maybe," she finally says, and it's a half-lie at most. "At any rate, I saw something."
Her voice stays level. Casual. Deliberately unremarkable. One step forward. Then another. Only as far as their linked hands allow, the space between them resolving into a measured tether. Two arm-lengths of permitted distance.
Without looking directly, she subtly adjusts her posture, letting her attention slide just enough to keep the barrel and the flattened, pulsing whorl clinging to it in the corner of her vision. Close enough to track. Not enough to betray exactly where her eyes want to go.
If it moves, she'll know.
no subject
Instead, he simply moves along with her, allowing her their wingspan of free rein while carefully stepping behind her. Perhaps presumptuous, given his lack of knowledge of spren, he suggests, "Maybe... you should call out to him." Maybe Ivory is alone and scared, and he just needs to hear her voice. "That's how I located Monoco under that building."
no subject
But she reins it in. She has been operating on an assumption: whatever happened to Ivory, it happened in the Cognitive Realm, across a boundary her thoughts and voice couldn't reach once she lost access to stormlight. That assumption has served her well enough so far. But it's still an assumption. And her frustration, however well-informed, is a poor substitute for data.
So, instead of cursing him out, she gives Verso a grudging nod.
"—Ivory?" she calls. The name comes out stiff, awkward. The alley answers with nothing but city-noise. Footsteps somewhere distant, the creak of ship-masts, canvas snapping lazily in the breeze. No voice. No familiar, precise presence brushing against her mind.
But in the corner of her vision, as if answering a question, the cryptic peels itself off the barrel. Not all at once. It rolls, flattening and unfolding as it slips down onto the cobblestones, a shadowy seethe rippling over stone. Responding, she thinks. To Ivory's name.
Her stomach tightens. Why? Ivory loves to warn her about cryptics. They were trouble. They loved lies. They fed on them. Speak one untrue word at a gathering and seven will cluster around you, humming until your ears ring. Even Design — Hoid's spren — had barely been tolerated by Ivory. And Design, in turn, had barely tolerated him.
A cold, sudden panic cinches beneath her ribs. Jasnah stops dead in her tracks. Is this Design? Would that make this day better or catastrophically worse? The thought of the former Queen's Wit reappearing here, of all places, after vanishing so neatly from her life, is almost laughable. Almost.
"Ivory," she tries again. Louder. This time, more command than question. And the little cryptic responds, rolling deeper into the alley.
She starts forward once more, her grip on Verso steadying even as her attention locks onto the flicker-trick of light skating ahead on the ground. Something only she can see. Something she is now unmistakably following.
And without turning back, she adds, almost idly, as if the words have only just occurred to her. Mild, measured, maybe-praise: "You might be onto something."
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It doesn't happen, though, and in fact she gives him a nod of acknowledgement before, surprisingly, giving his idea a try. He's not certain it will work. He doesn't even fully understand if Ivory is here physically or only as some spiritual remnant. It's a better alternative than standing around hoping he'll appear, though, so he figures it must be worth a shot, no matter how foolish it might feel.
She calls out, and through their linked hands he feels the thrum of anxiety underneath his thumb, at her pulse point. Something has happened, although he can't tell what. She takes a step forward and he follows, thinking in some distant place in the back of his mind how their responsive steps aren't that different from the waltz.
"Did he respond to you?"
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Jasnah slows, then comes to a soft halt. The alley splits ahead, and the cryptic has reconstituted itself along the edge of a window box. Hairline fractures in the wood, elegant and wrong. She avoids looking at it directly, partly because the undulating pattern churns her stomach, and partly because she is not prepared to hold Verso's hand through his first encounter with a cryptic.
"No," she exhales her confession. She lifts her chin, looks back at him, and catches his gaze. Anchoring it with deliberate, unwavering eye contact. "Look at me." Soft, but certain. And hoping he'll do as he's told. "There's a...strange spren. Ahead — keep looking at me. Don't try too hard to see it. If you do, it may spook. And it's my best lead."
At least that's entirely true. Although it's not a tactic she'd take if she'd known which of her secrets Jochi had already spilled.
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He thinks yet again of Jasnah's childhood predicament. He hopes, at least, that she has a keener eye than him, because he hasn't any idea how to respond if she's seeing things.
"I would allow the pure-hearted maiden to approach the unicorn herself"—because that's how she's making it sound, like the spren would just sense something about him and take off—"but she was stabbed recently."
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So she says nothing. Which, for Jasnah, is its own concession. She doesn't rush. She turns left into a narrow, dead-end nook off the winding alley and follows the cryptic's pattern as it skates across brick and wood and shadow, slipping from surface to surface until, until, until.
There. Tucked beside old crates and sagging sackcloth, half-sheltered beneath a cart long stripped of its wheels, something catches the light. A flicker of metal. Wrong and bright.
Twice now on their adventure she's surged forward only to be rebounded back into Verso's care. The third time she refuses to be anchored. Jasnah shakes loose his hand and, palm braced against the wall to spare her wound, sinks carefully to her knees on the stone. A grunt escapes her. Then a hissed, thin request for help. Between them (but mostly Verso) the cart is shifted aside.
Leaning against the wall, no taller than the length of Jasnah's index finger, is Ivory. He is all angles and oil-sheen geometry, his impossible little body fixed in place through his tiny eye by a thin metal needle.
Aluminum? She wonders distantly. Or, damnation, silver?
There is no movement. No flutter of awareness. For want of a kinder metaphor, Ivory resembles a cremling mounted in an enthusiast's collection. Pinned. Displayed. Preserved in a parody of life. Jasnah wasn't the only one who was stabbed, it seems. The realization unfurls cold and precise in her gut. If the attack was coordinated, if the enemy possessed one of the disruptive metals capable of harming spren, then this was not merely an assassination attempt. It was a severing.
"—Give me your hand," she orders Verso, sharp and immediate.
The ground is too far for her to bend properly with her own wound screaming its protest, and she needs both hands free. She intends to lift Ivory — carefully, reverently — and set him into Verso's palm so she can examine the damage without jostling him further.
And in the corner of her eye, the cryptic dances across a pane of glass. Its lines ripple. Curl. Pulse. For just a heartbeat, she could almost swear its movements are triumphant.
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The tone of her command brooks no argument, no questioning. Neither does the sight of tiny Ivory run through with a needle. He cups his palms out in front of him, ready to receive what appears to be an injured spren. Careful, gentle. Patient, as he'd said.
"Are spren—?" Immortal, he intends to say, although it seems too close to asking if Ivory is dead or dying to finish the thought. "I didn't realize that they could get injured like this."
He had imagined them to be like the mythical beings he's used to. Impossible to truly harm.
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"The first is irrelevant here. The second and third both involve the disruption of Investiture. All spren are composed of Investiture that's coalesced long enough to achieve sapience. They can't die," she answers the question he didn't quite ask but she anticipated regardless. "Not in the way we mean it. Death is...different for them."
Her words are firm. Measured. Unshakeable. Her hands are not. They tremble as she settles Ivory into Verso's waiting palms, the minute shiver transferring through her fingertips into the needle itself. The thin metal quivers when she brushes its head, vibrating like a struck wire. Ivory does not move. Should she pull the needle? Storms — what if antilight is involved? But no, she reasons, too fast and too desperately: if it were, this entire block of Thaylen City would have been obliterated in the resulting detonation.
—Has he been pinned here for a week? Damnation. The thought lands like a blow. Why did she stop Verso when he offered to search? Short-sighted. Proud. Self-absorbed.
"Aluminum blocks Investiture," she says, quieter now. "Silver disrupts it. I don't — we don't understand this well enough. It's a fledgling field. Storms, Wit only brought aluminum from off-world a year ago."
Stop prattling and do something. Jasnah draws in a breath so deep it tugs painfully at her wound. She tears her gaze away from Ivory and looks to Verso.
"I'm going to pull it," she says. But she doesn't yet. She hesitates, suspended in that awful, narrowing moment before action — waiting for something she would never ordinarily ask for. Agreement. Objection. Peer review.
It's irrational. His guess will not be better than hers; it will almost certainly be worse. Still. She wants something from him.
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The moment after she speaks is spent silent. Of course it is. She won't want his opinion either way, and so he doesn't even think to have one. His eyes ping-pong from her face to Ivory's little body and then back again, and then—
"Oh."
She's waiting for approval, or encouragement, or any response at all. He swallows. If Jasnah doesn't understand this well enough, he doesn't understand it at all. Anxiety bubbles up at saying the wrong thing and making this worse, at making the fear in Jasnah's eyes grow stronger.
"I think that... he trusts you to do what you think is best."
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She pinches the needle between her fingers. Still unsure of the metal. Still unsure of the consequences. And then, holding her breath, she pulls. There's no blood. No sound from Ivory. Just the faint, obscene normalcy of it, like plucking a pin from a cushion. The needle drops, striking stone with a thin, bright ping.
"Ivory?" she whispers. Her hands — one gloved, one bare — slide to the backs of Verso's hands, holding him as he holds the spren. As if she's not yet ready to trust herself to take Ivory back alone.
Nothing happens. Then, something does.
A faint stream of stormlight leaks from her pocket, misting upward toward her mouth. She'd pocketed them out of habit, unwilling to wander far without spheres. The stormlight is just enough to dull the pain at her wound without actually healing it — like the Connection is restored, but not yes functioning properly.
Ivory remains still. No movement. No sign of recovery. But Jasnah can feel him again. That reedy-thin presence brushing the edge of her awareness.
Her shoulders sag. Her posture collapses inward with relief.
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"He would want you to hold him," he says, steadying her hands with one of his as he gently tips the palm holding Ivory, slipping him into her grasp. Selfishly, his fingers stay curled around her hand.
"Will he be all right?"
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Ivory settles into her palm. There is no sign of life. But then again, there never truly is with a spren. They do not breathe. They do not bleed. Ivory, she knows, is capable of remaining perfectly still when it suits him. Even so, this stillness is too complete.
She doesn't pull away when Verso's fingers curl around hers. Instead, her hand sinks into the support he offers, instinctive and unguarded. A platform resting on another platform.
"I'm not certain," she admits at last, carefully. "But I felt stormlight. Just a trace." Her thumb curls protectively around Ivory's angular form. "That suggests he isn't...lost."
She glances up at Verso then, searching his face. "Spren take time to reconstitute themselves. He may need hours. Days." A pause. Two convalescents, then. But at least with Ivory found, Jasnah feels more prepared to move on once she's stable enough to travel. Quieter: "Possibly longer, depending on what exactly was done."
Her gaze drops again, sharp and intent, scanning the stones until she spots the fallen needle. She leans, wincing faintly, and retrieves it with two fingers as if it might still bite.
"We're keeping this," she says, more firmly now. To him. To herself. "Whatever did this matters."
first work tag of the new year...
"I'll hold onto it," he says, slipping it into his pocket. When they get back to Jochi's, he'll put it with the rest of their things. For now, though, there's no reason to make Jasnah carry the thing that hurt her spren.
"At least you won't be convalescing alone anymore." He imagines that knowing that Ivory is safe and with her will help greatly with her recovery. "Are you going to be okay to walk back?"
ditto. 🥂
"Yes," she says at last, testing the answer as much as offering it. That threadbare trickle of stormlight helped. It didn't heal her but it steadied something inside her. Took the edge off the pain. Nudged her forward, so to speak.
"It feels a little like just before I spoke my first Ideal for Ivory." Her head tilts, teeth catching briefly at her lower lip as she turns the memory over. "Like a sip of power. Much, much less than I'm used to."
She looks down at the spren cradled in her palm, fingers cupped protectively around his sharp, unmoving angles.
Then she glances back at Verso.
"Help me to my feet?" she asks — slanted, careful, already halfway trusting he will by the way she takes his arm.
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If their connection has been restored, then he wonders if their conditions will influence each other. Seems like the type of question that would send Jasnah on a lecture—perhaps about how stupid he is—so he doesn't ask. They both need to recuperate regardless.
"Come on. You and Ivory could both use some rest."
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It's thoughtless, now, the way she braces herself against his upper arm as she pushes to her feet. Thoughtless, too, that her fingers stay curled there once she's upright, as if the contact were structural — foundational — rather than optional. At least it's her right hand, with Ivory is cradled with care in her safehand. Tucked close and protected.
"All I've been doing is resting," she says, the words coming out closer to a growl than she intends. Tired. That thin, brittle anxiety that sets in once the adrenaline has burned off and reality comes rushing back in. Despite the sharpness of her tone, she keeps hold of him. "With Ivory recovered, we should plan how to extricate ourselves from Thaylen City."
It's a leap and bounds ahead of where she should be thinking; miles past where her body actually is. As if all this enforced stillness had only ever been for Ivory's sake, not her own. As if the stronger she feels, the more intolerable the waiting becomes. The sitting. The being tended to.
Jasnah has never been good at savouring her victories.
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He doesn't argue, though, because at least for the moment, it's only mental labor that Jasnah's attempting to do. If physical labor becomes part of it, he might feel the need to step in—but for now, she can think as much as she'd like. God knows her brain must be constantly moving.
So, he shrugs, lets it roll off his back as they make their way to Jochi's again. Up the stairs is more of a hassle than down the stairs, but they manage it; once he has Jasnah and Ivory settled on the couch, he crouches down to slip the needle into one of the pockets of their bags.
"It might be wise to stay here until Ivory has fully recovered," he says, choosing not to point out that he selfishly enjoys being here, important and needed.
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That, and the sheen of sweat on her brow, the way the back of her blouse clings damply to her spine, are frustratingly visceral confirmations that Verso is right. A week hasn't been long enough. She could argue that it has been long enough, safe enough, that she could now reach out to Fen, the Thaylen queen, and quietly request an Edgedancer to finish what Jasnah couldn't do. But ever-paranoid, Jasnah isn't prepared to make that concession. Not yet. Can she even trust Queen Fen?
Ivory's small, unmoving body rests swaddled in clean linen taken from Jochi's kitchenette, tucked into a slightly ajar drawer of the end table that's served as their dining surface and card table all week. She knows Ivory would loathe this. Visible. Vulnerable. Subject to the whims of human hands.
"There's no way of knowing how long that could take," she counters, clipped but not unkind. Jasnah will not sit here — cut off from crown and people — for weeks on end.
So she bargains. Another indignity she's unused to suffering.
"Over the next few days, I'll get a clearer sense of whether or not I can leverage more stormlight. Heal, properly. If I can, then we move on once I'm back on my feet. Even unconscious, Ivory won't be a burden to carry with me."
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It's the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head and a sure you can, honey. She'd only managed a small amount of stormlight once Ivory was returned to her; he's no expert on her magic, but it seems unlikely that she'll be able to do much of anything until Ivory has recovered, too. Still, he doesn't argue the point that if she manages to heal herself, then they can go.
"You're certain taking the Oathgate won't be too hard on him?"
That is, if there's an Oathgate for them to take at all. That still seems up in the air.
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"Certain enough," Jasnah answers. As though principle won't allow her to simply say yes when there's even a fractional chance of being wrong. "The Oathgates work by leveraging the sprens' native realm. If anything, the brief dip into the Cognitive might help him."
Something she'd already considered. Had she stormlight, she might have opened a small elsegate into the Cognitive Realm and observed whether or not it helped. Pure hypotheticals.
"Provided Thaylen City's is functioning," she unknowingly echoes his thoughts. They'd fled Kharbranth so quickly, there wasn't any time to confirm whether the Oathgate issue was real or fabricated.
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"Yeah," he concedes, "provided."
He stands, making his way to the kitchenette to pour himself and Jasnah each a glass of water. It's been a long day, and he'd love to just crash on the divan, but, well— there's a stab victim there. Another night of killing his back on the wooden floor. The only reason he's looking forward to leaving this place is getting back to his bed.
Calling from the kitchen, he asks, "And if it isn't?"
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"Then we pay a visit to the Royal Palace and see what the Thaylen queen could do for us."
We, us. It's subtle — but they're a unit, now.
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As he returns to the sitting room, he drops one of the glasses on the end table. The other goes on the real table across the room, where he's been sitting and entertaining himself much of the time. "What's the relationship like between Alethkar and Thaylenah?"
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Depending on where he reached in the weighty history tome assigned by Jasnah once-upon-a-time, Verso may already be aware of what she's implying. The Sunmaker's rule, some six hundred centuries ago, where it's said one in every ten Azish people died under Alethi tyranny following the conquering of Azimir.
Dalinar, to his credit, had done well re-establishing diplomatic ties with all the nations that would eventually form the Coalition than she might ever have anticipated. Better than Jasnah would ever have anticipated. Initially, Queen Fen had assumed the overture a ruse in some new Alethi campaign. But, over time, they'd won her over.
"Alethkar has had an unsavoury reputation for most of its existence," she acknowledges. "Which makes diplomacy challenging."
Jasnah leans forward, wincing slightly, and picks up the water in one hand. She doesn't immediately drink.
"Fen and I have corresponded regularly, however. And I trust she would help us. It's the rest of the Thaylen government that gives me pause."
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