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.
Promising young girls. He likes to hear Alicia referred to that way; it conjures something warm and proud in his chest. How long has it been since she'd been referred to that way in the present tense, and not 'what a pity—she was such a promising young girl, until the accident'.
"She'd like that, I think." Maybe not the more scientific aspects, but if perhaps she could learn under a master painter or author.
"...And what do promising young boys get to do? Hit each other with sticks?"
"Likely, if he's lighteyed. Even more so if his family has plate or blade to inherit."
And despite having had Ivory for six years now, Jasnah's only recently taken up sword lessons herself. She's little better than a novice student. Elhokar and Adolin had been assigned to the Kholin swordmaster at such a young age. Only Renarin had been held back — mostly due to his seizures. But even in the last few years, he'd been taking lessons with old Zahel.
"But there are plenty of trades available in the masculine arts. Carpentry, tailoring, cooking. There's a surgeons college in Kharbranth."
And then there's all the building, farming, fishing, shipping, etc., industries around the continent. But none of it quite has the same intense wardship arrangement as the feminine arts.
"If a young man wants to study, to write, to read — he almost certainly will be pushed towards the Stormwardens or the Ardentia."
A twist in her tone suggests how poorly she likely thinks of both options. What a bizarre way to sideline half of a population into illiteracy.
Ugh. Carpentry, tailoring, cooking—all things he is unfortunately bad at. There'd been no need to learn tailoring and cooking in his childhood, and it's not like he had anyone to impress out on the Continent. His carpentry skills are highly questionable, too, although he likes to think the hut he built isn't so bad for someone with absolutely no prior experience.
The point is— as a sensitive musician type, he truly does not belong among Alethi men.
He should tell her to go to sleep now, but he doesn't. "The Ardentia are the bald men," he says, because unfortunately he knows very little about them besides that. "The ones who read." What makes them different from other men, he's not yet sure. "Who are the stormwardens?"
A snort of laughter slips out of her — half-muffled, half-amused. Not at his expense, exactly, though she doesn't bother clarifying that. She's simply delighted by how efficiently he's reduced the entire Ardentia to being bald.
"Bald men and women," she corrects, gently but automatically. "It's the priesthood, and women can join it as readily as men. Once they do, they’re treated as something closer to genderless." A pause. "For instance, women in the Ardentia aren't required to cover their safehands. Men read and write."
The explanation settles into the dark between them, offered without ceremony — a bite-sized lecture. Even at this hour.
"As for stormwardens," she continues after a moment. "They claim to predict highstorms. Mostly charlatans. Their methods aren't especially sophisticated — and they're fond of attaching themselves to other kinds of nonsense. Like Digitology. The idea that you can determine someone's personality by the width of their fingers."
She lifts her hand into the dark, palm up. A vague, waggling shape in the barely-any-light.
"In case you were wondering," she says lightly, "it has yet to prove illuminating."
Hm. Verso holds his hand up in front of his face, squinting in the dark. He does believe you can tell things about someone from their fingers. For example, his are littered with calluses from repetitive piano-playing. Maybe not enough to tell his whole personality, but— there might be some small amount of truth in the pseudoscience.
"What would I be?" he asks, although he realizes the question is perhaps unclear. "If I were from here."
A nice little thought experiment. He likes to play with this sort of idea, pretend at being real.
She clarifies. Because here is a broad category. If he was Shin or Azish or even Thaylen he might have followed some similar path — musicianship. And while it's not impossible to imagine a man picking up an instrument (especially a two-handed one) the sort of man who might make his living that way would have much, much darker eyes. In fact...
"A brightlord of at least the sixth dahn, I suspect," she answers. Her guess is based on what she's been able to glean about his family status. Leisure enough to pursue hobbies. Landed lighteyes, the likes of which doesn't require a livelihood to keep a roof over their head or food in their belly.
But that's still a very abstract, impersonal guess. Jasnah pauses, considering the pure light tone of his eyes — higher dahn even than sixth, maybe.
"Highprince of Revels," she concludes with a smile.
'Brightlord of the sixth dahn' sounds very fancy. Lumière hadn't had nobility, although he supposes if it had, he would have fallen under that category. The Dessendres had been undoubtedly the wealthiest family around, although it's not something he ever thought about when he still lived there. It had only been once he lost that lifestyle that he realized it was notable to begin with.
"That's not real," he accuses. Highprince of anything sounds fake. So— fantastical. Of course, he loves fantastical. "...Is it real?"
A huffed laugh— "That would've been fun." Although he has the feeling she'd have no interest in him at all if he weren't from another world. Sometimes he wonders if she doesn't just put up with him for the information she can glean. "Would the queen deign to come to my parties?"
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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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"She'd like that, I think." Maybe not the more scientific aspects, but if perhaps she could learn under a master painter or author.
"...And what do promising young boys get to do? Hit each other with sticks?"
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And despite having had Ivory for six years now, Jasnah's only recently taken up sword lessons herself. She's little better than a novice student. Elhokar and Adolin had been assigned to the Kholin swordmaster at such a young age. Only Renarin had been held back — mostly due to his seizures. But even in the last few years, he'd been taking lessons with old Zahel.
"But there are plenty of trades available in the masculine arts. Carpentry, tailoring, cooking. There's a surgeons college in Kharbranth."
And then there's all the building, farming, fishing, shipping, etc., industries around the continent. But none of it quite has the same intense wardship arrangement as the feminine arts.
"If a young man wants to study, to write, to read — he almost certainly will be pushed towards the Stormwardens or the Ardentia."
A twist in her tone suggests how poorly she likely thinks of both options. What a bizarre way to sideline half of a population into illiteracy.
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The point is— as a sensitive musician type, he truly does not belong among Alethi men.
He should tell her to go to sleep now, but he doesn't. "The Ardentia are the bald men," he says, because unfortunately he knows very little about them besides that. "The ones who read." What makes them different from other men, he's not yet sure. "Who are the stormwardens?"
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"Bald men and women," she corrects, gently but automatically. "It's the priesthood, and women can join it as readily as men. Once they do, they’re treated as something closer to genderless." A pause. "For instance, women in the Ardentia aren't required to cover their safehands. Men read and write."
The explanation settles into the dark between them, offered without ceremony — a bite-sized lecture. Even at this hour.
"As for stormwardens," she continues after a moment. "They claim to predict highstorms. Mostly charlatans. Their methods aren't especially sophisticated — and they're fond of attaching themselves to other kinds of nonsense. Like Digitology. The idea that you can determine someone's personality by the width of their fingers."
She lifts her hand into the dark, palm up. A vague, waggling shape in the barely-any-light.
"In case you were wondering," she says lightly, "it has yet to prove illuminating."
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"What would I be?" he asks, although he realizes the question is perhaps unclear. "If I were from here."
A nice little thought experiment. He likes to play with this sort of idea, pretend at being real.
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She clarifies. Because here is a broad category. If he was Shin or Azish or even Thaylen he might have followed some similar path — musicianship. And while it's not impossible to imagine a man picking up an instrument (especially a two-handed one) the sort of man who might make his living that way would have much, much darker eyes. In fact...
"A brightlord of at least the sixth dahn, I suspect," she answers. Her guess is based on what she's been able to glean about his family status. Leisure enough to pursue hobbies. Landed lighteyes, the likes of which doesn't require a livelihood to keep a roof over their head or food in their belly.
But that's still a very abstract, impersonal guess. Jasnah pauses, considering the pure light tone of his eyes — higher dahn even than sixth, maybe.
"Highprince of Revels," she concludes with a smile.
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"That's not real," he accuses. Highprince of anything sounds fake. So— fantastical. Of course, he loves fantastical. "...Is it real?"
A huffed laugh— "That would've been fun." Although he has the feeling she'd have no interest in him at all if he weren't from another world. Sometimes he wonders if she doesn't just put up with him for the information she can glean. "Would the queen deign to come to my parties?"
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