A dull creak as she settles her shoulder against the divan's back — still seated upright, but hands now folded in her lap. Notably, she'd tossed the cloth over the spanreed too.
"Pick one," Jasnah prompts him. "I have one story about the Wandersail's namesake and another about the third moon. Mishim."
The former might be a bit more depressing than the latter. But has a wonderfully poignant moral to it.
Both sound on paper like something he'd want to hear. Stories about ships and moons! Somehow, though, he imagines that Jasnah wouldn't be interested in telling the sort of story he generally likes hearing. Whimsical, fantastical, adventurous. Tales of deep escapism and wild imaginations.
Ruining whatever plans she (and you) probably had: "Tell me a story about you."
— Joke's on you, Verso Dessendre. You're missing out on a story about how a queen tricked one moon so she could sneak into the sky and have a one night stand with another, different moon. And then have a moon baby.
But instead, suddenly under the microsope lens, Jasnah stiffens where she sits. Not far from where Verso leans his head, her fingers tap-tap-tap on the upholstery. Mildly symptomatic of her racing, calculating brain — searching for a story worth telling without shredding up some part of herself in the process.
"About me," she intones. Buying time. "I think you overestimate how interesting stories about me might be."
"Feel free to embellish at your leisure," he replies easily, and although it's dark, there's enough wry amusement in his tone to know that he's smiling. The stories aren't interesting because of their content, not really. They're interesting because they're about Jasnah.
Mmm. Sooner or later, this is going to be a problem.
That rumination, too, will have to wait. "You tell me yours, and I'll tell you one from the Continent."
His offer of a trade tips her over the edge. All right. Her fingers still. She reaches for the blanket from where it lies crumpled at the end of the divan and draws it around her shoulders with a soft, brief sigh. Movement meets stiffness; she pauses, then settles.
Jasnah doesn't preface the story with when I was a child. She simply begins, voice low and precise, as if recounting a minor historical aside rather than something faintly mortifying — trusting him to infer the context of her youth without being told it.
"A story about stories, then. I used to write fiction." A pause, like a test. As if daring him to react poorly. "I love folklore even now, you know, but I also always found it unbearably didactic. Too many gods intervening at the last moment, too many lessons delivered by divine coincidence. So I tended to rewrite them. Fewer Heralds. No Almighty hand on the scale. Heroines who solved their own problems."
She exhales through her nose, a ghost of a huff. Here she is, after all, struggling to solve her own problem. So reliant on someone else.
"I had notebooks full of them. Shelved behind the conventional texts on philosophy and mathematics and languages. For a long time, they were for my eyes only. And for my cousins' and brother's ears."
Her voice softens, almost despite herself. How it always does when the subject turns to Adolin and Renarin and, yes, even Elhokar.
"They were young enough to listen without interrupting. I would read to them in the evenings, when our parents were occupied. It was the perfect opportunity to edit aloud as I went. Cutting indulgent phrasing, sharpening my dialogue. Elhokar used to carve little figures while he listened. Whittling is, of course, considered a masculine art. But they were dreadful. Misshapen men with axes too large for their bodies. It seemed important, so I told him they were marvelous anyway."
The moment threatens to linger. Too tender, too close to grief. So she moves on, briskly, deliberately.
"Anyway. One afternoon, an ardent found one of my notebooks."
'Poorly' isn't how he reacts. Although she can't see him in the dark, he raises an eyebrow, curious. Fiction wouldn't have been his first, second, or third guess at the type of writing Jasnah enjoys doing. Technical writing, nonfiction accounts of history, opinion pieces—they'd all have been more likely considerations.
—He thinks, for a moment, of the Writers. They aren't a Maman creation, and so he has no real experience with them, but Clea had spoken of them the times that she entered the Canvas and deigned to talk to him. Told him that the fire Alicia had been mangled in, the one that he was supposed to die in, had been set by Writers. Some sort of power struggle between them and the Painters, a war that she had to fight on her lonesome. Is that what Jasnah would have been, if she were from Paris?
But she isn't, and neither is he.
"You are a good writer," he quips. "You know how to build suspense."
Yet another quiet, not-quite laugh slips past her. Of course she understands suspense. Even now. Literary theory had been folded into her education early, and eager child that she was, she'd practiced it at every opportunity. The world had felt larger then. Full of branching paths and conditional futures. Possibility, everywhere.
"He had been sent to catalogue the family library.", she continues her story. "I was careless. I left a notebook on my desk instead of returning it to its place." The words carry a faint edge of remembered irritation. "It was...one of the less conventional stories. And because my father could not read it himself, I believe this qualifies as the first time my work was read aloud by someone who was not me."
A pause. Maybe he can hear the dull sound of her picking at the upholstery.
"That particular tale involved a young woman exposing a corrupt highprince, defeating him in a duel, and winning his Shardblade. Not through divine favour, but through preparation, training, and a willingness to do what was right."
Yes. Saying it aloud now, the throughline is almost embarrassingly obvious.
"There were," Jasnah continues carefully, "concerns raised about tone. And propriety. And apparently the dangers of impressionable young princelings encountering the idea that authority might be earned instead of granted. The ardent took issue with the fact that she won."
The punishment, she explains, was efficient, although not especially cruel: "I was assigned several weeks of supervised prayer under the Devotary of Purity. My notebooks were confiscated for the duration. But my mother did return them all afterward. Quietly. Without comment."
Only later in life did she realize Navani was likely working outside of Gavilar's purview in that instance. But the damage had been done. After that, Jasnah had confined herself mostly to history. Although, as a Versititalian, she still dabbled more in folklore than other historians did.
"And yet," she adds, almost idly, "Renarin still asks for that story. Even now. He insists it was unfinished. I suppose some things leave a longer wake than we intend."
It's a charming little tale. Surprisingly adventurous. It says a lot about Jasnah, though, about the sort of things she prizes. Success through hard work, and knocking highprinces on their asses. In the dark, he smiles.
"Was it unfinished?"
It had seemed to tie up neatly in a bow with her winning of the Shardblade, but perhaps there were story threads left unraveled?
For her, it had been enough that the heroine successfully (and, perhaps, literally) made her point.
"But Renarin..." Jasnah trails off. How to even broach the subject of her younger cousin? Slight and sickly and so so so observant. Sometimes, he said things that made others around him wince and cringe. But Jasnah always appreciated his honesty. Usually, Renarin hated being touched — and she could empathize with him on that front, so they developed a secret signal for one another. For those rare, important times when either actually needed a hug.
"Well. Renarin's arguments to the contrary, and the many alternate endings they spawned, might be another story onto itself."
"It's nice that you got to spend time with your family like that."
Verso aches for the days when he got to do the same; stories were rarely his entertainment of choice, but he'd often played for Alicia's amusement, usually with her humming along. Her vocal cords had been too damaged to do even that, after the fire. Not that she'd been joyful enough to even if she could have.
"Good story. A bit open-ended, though. I'm curious if the author kept writing despite the obstacles."
Jasnah responds at first with a thin note of agreement. A bare vocalization, not a whole word. The Kholin cousins had bonded fast as children, with Jasnah at their head as the oldest. With their fathers so often away on campaign...well, yes. She cherishes those memories. Right up until———
"Are you critiquing my tale? After refusing both of the perfectly adequate and entertaining options I'd already had on deck and offered?"
A quiet, disappointed tut. Although she doesn't much mind. Feedback is a gift; literature requires criticism; something, something, something.
"I was— playfully inquiring if you'd written anything since then." Open-ended, because she hadn't explained what she'd done after having her things confiscated. If she'd kept going, or if the situation put a bad taste in her mouth for fiction. He was being adorable!! Or so he'd thought.
"Did you really think I would criticize your work right after asking for it?"
"I know what you were doing, Verso," she chides — curt, but not indignant. Jasnah's tone settles into that familiar no-man's-land between empirical observation and her own kind of playful reproach. She'd understood his meaning entirely; she's not immune to affectionate humor. But she's also not about to let it pass unexamined.
Because, it's just...
"But don't you think it was — hmm — rather greedy? Asking for more when you'd already taken a mile."
The word lands without heat, but it does not lack weight. Hypocritical, perhaps, given how freely she interrogates him. But she has always preferred asking to being asked. Control, hidden as curiosity.
No, he doesn't think he was being greedy at all. A single story—when he's told her many—is hardly a mile. It isn't like she'd preemptively banned follow-up questions.
But he gets the sense that he's meant to behave a certain way right now, fulfill a particular role. He doesn't mind doing so if it entertains her, keeps that just-adjacent-of-playful tone in her voice.
Jasnah lowers herself onto the divan, careful and practiced, settling with her wounded side up. She curls slightly, as though her centre line now pivots around the point where the back of his head meets the edge of the cushion as he sits on the floor. A conscious accommodation. A quiet geometry of shared space.
So many of her stories are not sad, exactly, but they are strained. Drawn tight by death and circumstance and expectation. It's difficult to speak of her childhood without running headlong into the misery of being taught to live one-handed. Wrong-handed, at that. Difficult to recount her adolescence without brushing against the illness. Impossible to describe her early adulthood without invoking the Vengeance Pact, the fevered spiral into the study of Voidbringers, the years spent trying to understand why the Singers had killed her father.
Silence stretches. Long enough to test patience. Although, this time, not deliberately.
"The author didn't stop writing," she says at last. "She merely changed genres."
The genre change seems a bit sad to him—a loss of whimsy, replaced with something more down to earth. That's what growing up is, he supposes. Losing connection with the imagination and wonder of childhood. Or maybe he'd never even had that wonder at all, seeing as how he had no childhood to truly call his own.
"Alicia would go crazy for you," he notes, idly. "She loves to read and write."
She tucks her gloved left hand beneath her cheek — an improvised cushion, the soft heel of her palm wedged between chin and upholstery. Verso's lukewarm fair enough is proof enough that her instincts were right. None of it is half so interesting as he seems to think it is.
"I want to hear more about Alicia," she says. "Instead of the Continent."
Because a story has already been given. And, by her accounting, one is now owed in return.
Alicia would like that she'd asked that, too. She would pretend she wasn't happy about it, embarrassed, but she'd love to know that someone had an interest in her. She'd always been shown up by overachieving Clea and people-pleasing Verso, and as much as he'd tried to make her feel just as special and talented as the rest of her family, she'd struggled to feel that way. Even at school, she'd never had many friends. For a queen to be interested in her, though, it would have been like a dream come true.
He smiles again, although it's a softer tone in his voice than the wry amusement of before. Alicia always softens him. "All right."
There are things he can't say. Like how their mother made sure that the house fire still happened. That he was completely unscathed, but Alicia was still maimed by her burns. That he wanted more than anything for her to leave that manor and join him on the Continent instead.
But he can share this: "That song I hummed for you on the ship—she always used to hum along when I played piano. She had a beautiful voice."
Had. Not anymore.
"She had absolutely no interest in learning to play, though. I think she thought that if I taught her, then she wouldn't be able to make me sit around and play for her anymore."
Jasnah doesn't shut her eyes. Instead, she continues watching loosely, roughly, at the inky black space she assumes is Verso — sitting still on the floor at the midpoint of the divan.
Had, he says. And with a cluck of her tongue, she remembers the housefire he'd alluded to before. His sister's illness, mentioned in sympathetic counterpoint to her own. And maybe the causes were so, so different but her heart squeezes for someone else whose precious agency was stunted and tangled.
"She's very clever, yes." Always has been—perhaps due to her love of reading, perhaps a natural intelligence. She's always been smarter than she gives herself credit for, but of course she has; although she's nearly a century old now, she's forever sixteen where it counts.
"I wanted a duet partner, so I tried to bribe her," he laughs. "She saw through me."
Her right had drifts to her heart — somewhere loose above it, fingers knitting briefly into the gathered neckline of her (now habitual) Thaylen blouse. Silently, briefly, she feels for her own heartbeat. As if listening to it might make it hurt a little less. Little brothers and little sisters. Maybe she's more sentimental than usual, having reminded herself of Elhokar's stupid little axe-men carvings.
"...Tried to bribe her with what?"
She pokes, pries, asks. But it's a gentler bent, tonight. The curiosity tonight is less academic and more social.
"I told her I'd let her read the books in my room that our parents said were too adult for her." There's something wistful in his voice, a tone he's never been able to train himself out of. Not when it comes to Alicia. With a fond, affectionate laugh: "She told me she'd already snuck in and read them."
Oh, Alicia. She'd been so shy, but bold in many ways, too. More so, before the fire. He wonders sometimes if that's because his earlier memories are of the real Alicia, and his later ones are of the one Maman Painted as a companion. Softer, smaller, quieter. The way she saw Alicia, not the way Alicia really was.
He talks about Alicia like she's still alive. Is that grief, filtering through his grammar? Maybe. Most likely. Just like how is voice warms when he talks about her. The weight of evidence hasn't tipped far enough to make her suspicious, at any rate. But the tense does get noted, considered, and filed away. Because maybe his sister survived the fire, but unless she's afflicted by the same curse as Verso...
She frowns in the dark.
"She would thrive," Jasnah guesses. "A girl like that would make a fine ward."
She should know. She's denied and refused dozens each year.
Alicia would thrive here, Jasnah is right. Just as he has—for some given value of the word, anyway. Things here feel real. It's difficult to enjoy life knowing that your existence is just a poor facsimile of someone else's, but here Alicia could strike out on her own. Be somebody. Maybe even make friends. It kills him to know that he's reaping the benefits of being here while she's—
What? Is she even alive anymore, or has the entire Canvas been scrubbed clean with his absence? He'd been all right with them entering oblivion together, but it leaves a bad taste in his mouth that she might have had to go alone.
"—A ward?" he asks, shaking the unpleasant thoughts away. "You mean like the students you complain about?"
Being horizontal does odd things to a person's voice — to the diaphragm, the throat. Her characteristic thoughtful hum, offered in soft agreement to his question, comes out rougher this way. Thinner. Tired at the edges.
"Something like that," she says after a moment. "It's customary for promising young girls, once they come of age, to petition older, established scholars for wardships. In practice, they're nearly mandatory for anyone serious about scholarship."
A pause. Her words imply little in the way of group classrooms or schoolhouses.
"A ward would work under her teacher. Learn proper research methods. Build foundational knowledge in a chosen field. Make the right connections." A faint emphasis there. "It's meant to be something more than mere instruction. More than being a student, really."
Hence ward. A scholar takes significant responsibility for her ward.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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"Pick one," Jasnah prompts him. "I have one story about the Wandersail's namesake and another about the third moon. Mishim."
The former might be a bit more depressing than the latter. But has a wonderfully poignant moral to it.
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Ruining whatever plans she (and you) probably had: "Tell me a story about you."
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But instead, suddenly under the microsope lens, Jasnah stiffens where she sits. Not far from where Verso leans his head, her fingers tap-tap-tap on the upholstery. Mildly symptomatic of her racing, calculating brain — searching for a story worth telling without shredding up some part of herself in the process.
"About me," she intones. Buying time. "I think you overestimate how interesting stories about me might be."
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Mmm. Sooner or later, this is going to be a problem.
That rumination, too, will have to wait. "You tell me yours, and I'll tell you one from the Continent."
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Jasnah doesn't preface the story with when I was a child. She simply begins, voice low and precise, as if recounting a minor historical aside rather than something faintly mortifying — trusting him to infer the context of her youth without being told it.
"A story about stories, then. I used to write fiction." A pause, like a test. As if daring him to react poorly. "I love folklore even now, you know, but I also always found it unbearably didactic. Too many gods intervening at the last moment, too many lessons delivered by divine coincidence. So I tended to rewrite them. Fewer Heralds. No Almighty hand on the scale. Heroines who solved their own problems."
She exhales through her nose, a ghost of a huff. Here she is, after all, struggling to solve her own problem. So reliant on someone else.
"I had notebooks full of them. Shelved behind the conventional texts on philosophy and mathematics and languages. For a long time, they were for my eyes only. And for my cousins' and brother's ears."
Her voice softens, almost despite herself. How it always does when the subject turns to Adolin and Renarin and, yes, even Elhokar.
"They were young enough to listen without interrupting. I would read to them in the evenings, when our parents were occupied. It was the perfect opportunity to edit aloud as I went. Cutting indulgent phrasing, sharpening my dialogue. Elhokar used to carve little figures while he listened. Whittling is, of course, considered a masculine art. But they were dreadful. Misshapen men with axes too large for their bodies. It seemed important, so I told him they were marvelous anyway."
The moment threatens to linger. Too tender, too close to grief. So she moves on, briskly, deliberately.
"Anyway. One afternoon, an ardent found one of my notebooks."
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—He thinks, for a moment, of the Writers. They aren't a Maman creation, and so he has no real experience with them, but Clea had spoken of them the times that she entered the Canvas and deigned to talk to him. Told him that the fire Alicia had been mangled in, the one that he was supposed to die in, had been set by Writers. Some sort of power struggle between them and the Painters, a war that she had to fight on her lonesome. Is that what Jasnah would have been, if she were from Paris?
But she isn't, and neither is he.
"You are a good writer," he quips. "You know how to build suspense."
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"He had been sent to catalogue the family library.", she continues her story. "I was careless. I left a notebook on my desk instead of returning it to its place." The words carry a faint edge of remembered irritation. "It was...one of the less conventional stories. And because my father could not read it himself, I believe this qualifies as the first time my work was read aloud by someone who was not me."
A pause. Maybe he can hear the dull sound of her picking at the upholstery.
"That particular tale involved a young woman exposing a corrupt highprince, defeating him in a duel, and winning his Shardblade. Not through divine favour, but through preparation, training, and a willingness to do what was right."
Yes. Saying it aloud now, the throughline is almost embarrassingly obvious.
"There were," Jasnah continues carefully, "concerns raised about tone. And propriety. And apparently the dangers of impressionable young princelings encountering the idea that authority might be earned instead of granted. The ardent took issue with the fact that she won."
The punishment, she explains, was efficient, although not especially cruel: "I was assigned several weeks of supervised prayer under the Devotary of Purity. My notebooks were confiscated for the duration. But my mother did return them all afterward. Quietly. Without comment."
Only later in life did she realize Navani was likely working outside of Gavilar's purview in that instance. But the damage had been done. After that, Jasnah had confined herself mostly to history. Although, as a Versititalian, she still dabbled more in folklore than other historians did.
"And yet," she adds, almost idly, "Renarin still asks for that story. Even now. He insists it was unfinished. I suppose some things leave a longer wake than we intend."
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"Was it unfinished?"
It had seemed to tie up neatly in a bow with her winning of the Shardblade, but perhaps there were story threads left unraveled?
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For her, it had been enough that the heroine successfully (and, perhaps, literally) made her point.
"But Renarin..." Jasnah trails off. How to even broach the subject of her younger cousin? Slight and sickly and so so so observant. Sometimes, he said things that made others around him wince and cringe. But Jasnah always appreciated his honesty. Usually, Renarin hated being touched — and she could empathize with him on that front, so they developed a secret signal for one another. For those rare, important times when either actually needed a hug.
"Well. Renarin's arguments to the contrary, and the many alternate endings they spawned, might be another story onto itself."
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Verso aches for the days when he got to do the same; stories were rarely his entertainment of choice, but he'd often played for Alicia's amusement, usually with her humming along. Her vocal cords had been too damaged to do even that, after the fire. Not that she'd been joyful enough to even if she could have.
"Good story. A bit open-ended, though. I'm curious if the author kept writing despite the obstacles."
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"Are you critiquing my tale? After refusing both of the perfectly adequate and entertaining options I'd already had on deck and offered?"
A quiet, disappointed tut. Although she doesn't much mind. Feedback is a gift; literature requires criticism; something, something, something.
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"I was— playfully inquiring if you'd written anything since then." Open-ended, because she hadn't explained what she'd done after having her things confiscated. If she'd kept going, or if the situation put a bad taste in her mouth for fiction. He was being adorable!! Or so he'd thought.
"Did you really think I would criticize your work right after asking for it?"
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Because, it's just...
"But don't you think it was — hmm — rather greedy? Asking for more when you'd already taken a mile."
The word lands without heat, but it does not lack weight. Hypocritical, perhaps, given how freely she interrogates him. But she has always preferred asking to being asked. Control, hidden as curiosity.
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But he gets the sense that he's meant to behave a certain way right now, fulfill a particular role. He doesn't mind doing so if it entertains her, keeps that just-adjacent-of-playful tone in her voice.
"What can I say? I was spoiled as a child."
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Jasnah lowers herself onto the divan, careful and practiced, settling with her wounded side up. She curls slightly, as though her centre line now pivots around the point where the back of his head meets the edge of the cushion as he sits on the floor. A conscious accommodation. A quiet geometry of shared space.
So many of her stories are not sad, exactly, but they are strained. Drawn tight by death and circumstance and expectation. It's difficult to speak of her childhood without running headlong into the misery of being taught to live one-handed. Wrong-handed, at that. Difficult to recount her adolescence without brushing against the illness. Impossible to describe her early adulthood without invoking the Vengeance Pact, the fevered spiral into the study of Voidbringers, the years spent trying to understand why the Singers had killed her father.
Silence stretches. Long enough to test patience. Although, this time, not deliberately.
"The author didn't stop writing," she says at last. "She merely changed genres."
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The genre change seems a bit sad to him—a loss of whimsy, replaced with something more down to earth. That's what growing up is, he supposes. Losing connection with the imagination and wonder of childhood. Or maybe he'd never even had that wonder at all, seeing as how he had no childhood to truly call his own.
"Alicia would go crazy for you," he notes, idly. "She loves to read and write."
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"I want to hear more about Alicia," she says. "Instead of the Continent."
Because a story has already been given. And, by her accounting, one is now owed in return.
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He smiles again, although it's a softer tone in his voice than the wry amusement of before. Alicia always softens him. "All right."
There are things he can't say. Like how their mother made sure that the house fire still happened. That he was completely unscathed, but Alicia was still maimed by her burns. That he wanted more than anything for her to leave that manor and join him on the Continent instead.
But he can share this: "That song I hummed for you on the ship—she always used to hum along when I played piano. She had a beautiful voice."
Had. Not anymore.
"She had absolutely no interest in learning to play, though. I think she thought that if I taught her, then she wouldn't be able to make me sit around and play for her anymore."
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Had, he says. And with a cluck of her tongue, she remembers the housefire he'd alluded to before. His sister's illness, mentioned in sympathetic counterpoint to her own. And maybe the causes were so, so different but her heart squeezes for someone else whose precious agency was stunted and tangled.
"Smart girl," she says.
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"I wanted a duet partner, so I tried to bribe her," he laughs. "She saw through me."
A shrug. "Still no duets."
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"...Tried to bribe her with what?"
She pokes, pries, asks. But it's a gentler bent, tonight. The curiosity tonight is less academic and more social.
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Oh, Alicia. She'd been so shy, but bold in many ways, too. More so, before the fire. He wonders sometimes if that's because his earlier memories are of the real Alicia, and his later ones are of the one Maman Painted as a companion. Softer, smaller, quieter. The way she saw Alicia, not the way Alicia really was.
"She would love it here."
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She frowns in the dark.
"She would thrive," Jasnah guesses. "A girl like that would make a fine ward."
She should know. She's denied and refused dozens each year.
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What? Is she even alive anymore, or has the entire Canvas been scrubbed clean with his absence? He'd been all right with them entering oblivion together, but it leaves a bad taste in his mouth that she might have had to go alone.
"—A ward?" he asks, shaking the unpleasant thoughts away. "You mean like the students you complain about?"
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"Something like that," she says after a moment. "It's customary for promising young girls, once they come of age, to petition older, established scholars for wardships. In practice, they're nearly mandatory for anyone serious about scholarship."
A pause. Her words imply little in the way of group classrooms or schoolhouses.
"A ward would work under her teacher. Learn proper research methods. Build foundational knowledge in a chosen field. Make the right connections." A faint emphasis there. "It's meant to be something more than mere instruction. More than being a student, really."
Hence ward. A scholar takes significant responsibility for her ward.
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NITPICKS FOREVER
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