Gooseflesh (chickenflesh?) dots over her flank, her stomach as damp skin meets air. A brief shiver, and she loosens her grip on his sleeve — sinking back a little and reclaiming her posture now that the immediate moment has passed. Composure regained.
And composure is what she needs while she watches him, still. Watching him work, actively patching her up while telling her he doesn't want her to get hurt. Does he...does he need reassurance? A reminder that she does possess a firm sense of self-preservation, despite all evidence to the contrary.
"Despite my personal misgivings about flying," she picks her way carefully through her answer because it belies just how irrational she can (in fact) be, "objectively I can assure you it'll be safe. If for no other reason than you can count on a Windrunner to be exceedingly, annoyingly virtuous."
Oh — this is annoying. This is frustrating. But it's also an excellent opportunity to reinforce a lesson given just a few days earlier.
"I told you Windrunner oaths are about protecting others. Whoever they send, they won't let us leave the ground unless they're certain it can be done safely. It could be Stormblessed himself — who dislikes me as much as I dislike him, I imagine — and my safety would nevertheless be guaranteed. Yours, too."
"My safety's already guaranteed," he points out. The Windrunners could drop him from thousands of feet in the air and let his body turn to jelly on the ground and he'd still be fine.
He finishes applying her new dressing, then lowers the hem of her shirt to cover it. A long contemplative pause follows before—
"—If the Windrunners clear you for flight tomorrow, then we can go."
She stops herself short of saying I don't want you to get hurt either — because maybe his safety is guaranteed, sure, but she saw the real pain he felt chopping off his little finger. Survival doesn't mean safe, does it? A breath out through her nose. That semantic distinction could be a gnarly little essay all on its own. Maybe one she'll feel fit to write once she's back at the tower. Once the dust settles.
Jasnah doesn't move. Doesn't scoot away, doesn't lean back any more than she already needed to in order to let him work. But she does watch him carefully.
"You know," she tilts her head, "that almost sounds like the future Wit is is trying to — perhaps — curtail the queen."
It's not a complaint. Not yet. But on the (potential) eve of their return, she should summon back a little decorum. At least for in front of the Windrunners. Can't have him appealing to them directly, undermining her own presence and will.
If Verso were just a little more attuned to the workings of this world—if he hadn't spent the majority of his time here so far alone with Jasnah in exceptional circumstances—he might understand that this is an indication of what's to come: a return to queenliness and duty and obligation. But he doesn't understand that, not really, and so he stays blissfully unaware of what this return to 'decorum' will actually entail.
Lightly: "—Delay, perhaps. Suspend. But never curtail."
Hands finally free, he rests an elbow on the back of the divan, fingers idly twiddling with a loose thread.
"I think it sounds like your friend is looking out for you." By, yes, stepping on her agency a little—but if she'd really insist upon it, he would relent. "If the Windrunners agree that you're fit to go, you won't hear another word about it out of me."
His twiddling stops, and he holds out a pinky. "Promise."
The word strikes deeper tonight than in any previous instance. Storms. She watches him carefully, suddenly and sharply aware that they'll need to have a conversation about courtly manners sooner rather than later. But she puts it off. Maybe it'll land better behind some closed door at Urithiru than it will here.
For now, she reaches out and wraps two fingers around his littlest one in a clumsy not-quite-handshake. She doesn't know about the custom he's inviting her to partake in, and defaults to assuming it's something it's not.
"You should know," she warns him warmly, "that we take our promises quite seriously."
Oaths. Promises. Words. It comes with the territory of being Honor's chosen people.
Oh. She's so ridiculously charming, and she doesn't even know it. "You're in luck, then."
Tumbling ever deeper into a chasm he's not sure how to climb out of, he smiles, laughs—with her, not at her—and reaches out with his free hand to gingerly pry her fingers off of his, uncurling them one by one. Then, he takes her pinky between his fingers, gently twining it around his.
"This is a pinky swear." There's a serious tone to his voice, but an amused twinkle in his eye. "The most solemn of all promises. Right above blood oaths."
She is an observer to his joke. Invested, but always on the edge of participation. Like — like how his laughter makes her mouth twitch. Or how, once corrected, she does indeed take his little finger in hers (the same one she held days ago) and holds him securely. But there's always still some stiffness in her gaze. As though she's somehow in the moment but also standing just outside of it, watching. Collecting.
Her jaw works around an unexecuted smile. Is there any way to explain to him that even in play, a promise is a serious thing? Even in play, she'll feel compelled to hold him to it. Storms, she wants very much for him to keep his promises. Wouldn't that be nice? After——
"A pinky swear," she echoes with a very strange mixture of disbelief and buy-in. Playful, but absolutely not. Smart enough to see the humour, but serious enough to sidestep it all the same. "You won't interfere with the Windrunners."
Oh, Jasnah. He'll cajole you into being playful yet! (Maybe.) Verso squeezes her pinky with his, doing his best to adopt a similarly serious expression. "I pinky swear to you, Jasnah," he says, solemn, "that I will not interfere with the Windrunners."
And he doesn't. Verso is very careful not to interfere—their word is final, and if they decide that Jasnah is well enough to go, then he'll have to swallow his anxiety and accept that. He does, however, probably overstep the boundaries he doesn't know exist by stepping up to the Windrunners—whoever they might be, and wherever they might meet; don't let me step on your toes here—and jerking a thumb back at Jasnah, saying, "She's injured."
As Jasnah and Verso near the rendezvous at the temple — chosen for its proximity to the city's edge and the shoulder of the mountains — she begins, gradually and deliberately, to shed the informality she's worn these past weeks. The simple Thaylen clothes are hidden beneath a long coat: not Alethi by cut or style, but the closest concession she can make to modesty. By the time they reach the steps, she's walking unaided. If nothing else, she will arrive on her own feet.
Verso, at least, carries the satchel. She isn't doing everything alone.
And then he makes his move — there is something infuriatingly familiar about a silver-tongued artist warming up an audience, flexing and reshaping the contours of a promise as he addresses the Windrunners first. And leads with her injury of all things. Bold. Strategic. Maddening.
Speaking of the Windrunners.
Three figures wait in Kholin blue, though their allegiance lies first with Urithiru rather than the family whose colors they wear. The shortest of them steps forward at once, grinning, and introduces himself as The Lopen (yep) with no small amount of ceremony.
Lopen directs his attention to Verso with a wave. "Hey, gancho. She's injured? What, don't you have any stormlight?" His eyes drop to his hands as he starts counting. "It hasn't been that long since the last storm blew through—"
Jasnah watches the folly unfold, jaw tight.
The other two — Drehy and Lyn, if memory serves — approach with expressions that hover somewhere between apology and resignation. Lyn, a shorter dark-eyed woman, offers Jasnah a respectful bob and murmurs an apology before launching into an explanation. They exchange a brief, efficient conversation — mostly concerning why there are three Windrunners present when Jasnah had requisitioned two.
"Dalinar insisted," Lyn says, simply.
From a few paces away, Lopen pipes up again. "Oi, I'll bet you my next stew duty the real decision-making happened with his wife. Did you see her face at the debriefing? Grumpier than the Stormfather himself. And Dalinar'd know, y'know, on account of—"
Right. Whatever. Verso lets them talk amongst themselves for a moment, although he's clearly uninterested in this back-and-forth about the number of Windrunners and Dalinar and his wife—it's obvious by the restless shifting of his feet that he's just waiting for a lull in conversation in which he can jump back in. Finally, Lopen trails off, and—
"—Back to the matter at hand, Monsieur The Lopen."
The flying that may or may not be happening in a moment. He cants his head toward Jasnah. "Will it be safe for her to fly?"
Oh, but Lopen beams to hear his name spoken with all the mythic weight of its definite article. He claps Verso on the back with unabashed, delighted enthusiasm. Whatever Alethi restraint might look like, this man — Herdazian, emphatically not Alethi — is its cheerful (if annoying) antithesis.
He jerks one thumb at himself, another at his companions, and then — remarkably — a small blue honorspren pops up on his shoulder and promptly manifests several extra thumbs, all of them pointing proudly back at the spren himself. "Her majestical chortana is in good hands, eh? The flight'll be peaceful as napping on a pile of grain sacks in your second-favourite cousin's pantry."
— Drehy, however, steps in before the metaphor gets out of hand. More serious, more grounded.
"How injured, Your Majesty?" At least he has the decency to address Jasnah directly, rather than the strange man beside her whose authority he neither knows nor recognizes. And while it's clear Lopen is somehow the ranking Windrunner present, Drehy and Lyn are not about to let their overeager leader derail the mission at the outset.
Jasnah resists the instinct to touch her side. Resists, too, the urge to glare at Verso.
"Stomach wound," she reports, clipped and low, as they cluster on the far side of the temple in the thin light of early morning. Not exactly subtle. "Two weeks old. Minimal use of stormlight." The look she gives them makes it clear there will be no elaboration as to why. "But I'm confident I can make the trip."
Oh, Lopen is fun. Verso likes this guy—although 'liking' is not necessarily the same as 'trusting with Jasnah's wellbeing'. He's a little on the carefree side for that, so Verso turns his attention to the more serious-minded Windrunners, the ones who don't seem to care to address him.
Confidence is subjective, and her attempt to downplay any concerns with 'confidence' makes his eyebrow twitch in obvious annoyance, but he doesn't say anything about it. Although he's unaware of just how much more buttoned up Jasnah is in public company, he does know that she wouldn't enjoy being curtailed in front of these Windrunners.
"No stitches," he does add, not to irritate her—although he's sure it does—but to make certain the Windrunners have the full picture. "What do you think?"
Lyn hesitates first. She visibly winces when the queen's companion mentions there were no stitches. Though she isn't a medic herself, she's spent enough time in Lirin's clinic to have absorbed the old surgeon's exacting opinions on wound care by osmosis. More than the others, she finds herself reflexively asking the dangerous question: What Would Kaladin Do?
(Answer: scold the queen. Thoroughly. Possibly at length. And, tragically, he might be the only non-Kholin who could get away with it — though Jasnah has far less patience for him than the rest of her family does.)
"H-has the tissue granulated?" Lyn asks, guilt written plainly across her face for even daring to inquire. She elbows Drehy and murmurs something about the field-medic lessons Kaladin drilled into them a few months back. Drehy plants his hands on his hips and sighs — the long, resigned sort of sigh belonging to a man keenly aware that antagonizing a monarch before breakfast is a poor life choice.
Lopen, entirely unhelpful, asks what sugar has to do with any of this. This prompts Lyn to explain — perhaps with more anatomical enthusiasm than strictly necessary — what bumpy, pink new skin looks like when a wound starts healing. Lopen's grin wilts into a queasy grimace.
Sensing the subtle shift in the Windrunners' collective mood, Jasnah directs her attention squarely at Drehy. "You're the one who got Gavinor out of Kholinar, weren't you?" she says evenly. "Compared to fleeing a siege with a frightened child, this is straightforward."
Drehy sighs again, then concedes. "When done properly, the flight's smoother than a cart or caravan." He pauses, recalibrates. "She...you," he corrects himself, addressing Jasnah instead of the unfamiliar man beside her, "will be all right. Lopen's annoying, but he isn't wrong."
Lopen beams, as if this is high praise. Then, he swivels back toward Verso and points at him with cheerful suspicion.
Does he trust the Windrunners? Trust doesn't come easy to him, particularly when it's trusting someone that he cares for in someone else's hands. (A sudden flash of a red ponytail, girlish laughter—you're ridiculous, Gustave.) So, no, he doesn't trust them, but he'd agreed to defer to their judgment, and he's outnumbered. If something happens to Jasnah, he'll just have to handle it.
So, he doesn't argue, just shoots Jasnah a pointed look before Lopen (The Lopen?) addresses him. It doesn't bother him; he's spent decades with people squinting at him and asking who the hell he is. Usually, the situation is a little more fraught than this: scared Expeditioners staring him down, often armed. This is downright congenial.
He extends a hand. "Verso Dessendre. Pleasure to make your acquaintance." It doesn't answer what he's doing hanging around their queen, but he leaves that to Jasnah to decide.
Jasnah could define what they are to one another but she doesn't. Unless someone asks, explicitly, who Verso is beyond his name, she volunteers nothing at all.
"That's a storming mouthful, Verse," Lopen declares at once, happily carving the name down to size. He grins as he says it, clasping Verso's wrist rather than his hand in a grip that's firm, friendly, and unmistakably Herdazian once Verso sees the flint-like fingernails extending like little claws from the tips of his fingers.
"That's Lyn," he adds, jabbing a thumb toward one Windrunner, "and that's Drehy," indicating the other. "They'll be doing all the Lashings. I'm here in case something goes terribly wrong and one of you needs a heroic last-minute save before smacking into a mountainside or something. That'd be bad," he nods toward Jasnah, "minimal stormlight and all."
Only then does Jasnah clear her throat. The shift is immediate — subtle, but unmistakable — as she slides into command.
"I understand it's protocol to assign one Windrunner per passenger," she says evenly. "Can a Lashing be applied to two people at once, or must we remain separate?"
Lopen chortles and tosses out an off-colour remark that earns him exactly zero laughs. Instead, it's Drehy who steps in, reading the tension beneath the question and answering with calm professionalism. "One of us could keep the two of you aloft," he explains. "The other could use Adhesion to keep you together." His gaze flicks briefly to Verso, thoughtful, then back to Jasnah. "Would you prefer that, Brightness?"
Jasnah answers with a single nod. Then she turns to Verso and gives him a look that asks quietly, pointedly: Satisfied?
—Is it disappointing that Jasnah doesn't step in to explain their relation? Perhaps. Mostly disappointing because Verso finds himself unable to specify it himself. He could explain it easily from his side, but Jasnah's own feelings are murky at best. Sometimes he feels as if there's a special closeness between them—the kind between trusted friends—and other times he feels as if they couldn't be more distant from each other.
He raises an eyebrow at the shortened name (he's not a nickname person; he only occasionally tolerates Verver from Esquie because it's difficult to tell him 'no'), but again says nothing, listening to the description of 'Lashing' and 'Adhesion' and trying not to make a face at how unpleasant the wording is. Hopefully, it's more fun than it sounds.
Returning her nod with one of his own, he crosses his arms and steps back beside her to wait for the Windrunners to prepare. As they do, he leans in beside her, no closer than they've been in the past but perhaps closer than Jasnah might like right at this moment, voice quiet as he asks, privately, "Are you nervous?"
Before they step aside on their own, Lyn hands them a pair of packs. Equipment, necessary for the trip. Jasnah busies herself digging through the bag — first pulling out a pair of goggles.
"No," she lies. And the way she frowns at the goggles is enough to indicate just how much of a lie it is. "I have every confidence in the Windrunners, even if they sent the silliest one."
But the criticism has little actual bite. Lopen had been sent on the Aimia mission, too, and he'd handled it well. She manages to keep divorced her dislike of the man with her appreciation for his talents.
The lie is obvious, but he doesn't directly call her out. Instead, he smoothly passes it by as if she'd told the truth in the first place. "It's okay," he assures her, "if we fall, I'll make sure I go first."
Although it might be somewhat traumatizing to have her fall cushioned by someone who'll be, at least for a moment, dead. Ah, well. He slides the goggles on, taking care that the strap doesn't flatten his hair overmuch.
Regardless of what that reality might look like, it is reassuring — for the time being — to be told he'll go first. Selfish of her to feel that way, perhaps, but it can't be helped. A warmth settles in her chest when she understands she can trust those words. Ridiculous as they are.
Jasnah tilts the goggles, not yet putting hers on. When he asks his question, however, she glances up and — and swallows a smile. She maintains a far more careful, buttoned down affect among mixed company. Even with the Windrunners off discussing currents and breezes and altitudes, Jasnah doesn't let herself slip.
Well. Doesn't let herself slip, except to sling her goggles onto her arm and reach out — briefly — to fix a loop of hair that got caught under his goggle strap and was subsequently sticking out at an odd angle. She curls the edge of the strand around her finger and (gentle) tugs it under the strap.
"Do you want the honest answer or the dishonest one?"
Verso grins, crooked and boyish, at her fixing of his hair and subsequent comment. He doesn't take offense to what he hopes is affectionate ribbing more than actual derision of his appearance, saying good-naturedly, "Ouch. That bad, huh?" Leveling her with a look: "The least you could do is lie to me."
"Like someone who lives under the sea," she answers — and who knows whether it's the honest or dishonest version.
Jasnah doesn't rush to don her goggles. Instead, she picks a more rational path through the bag's contents. A second pair of thicker, warmer gloves — which she wears over her safehand glove without removing it. A thick, roughspun cloak with a hood and scarf to protect their faces from the wind. She'd read about equipment like this. And she'd read, too, that Radiants whose bond was functioning appropriately didn't need so much protection. Their stormlight could keep them warm.
Idly, she touches a pocket. Ivory is snuggled down in a casket of linen and tin. Swaddled and safe, much to his own dismay. When they'd discussed it alone, she'd been surprised to hear him take Verso's side — let's not fly yet, not until you're further recovered — but then she'd carefully kept a wall between the two of them learning their shared perspective.
"Adhesion," she warn him, "is going to create a temporary but very persistent bond between us. As if gluing two pages together."
Her warning receives a very mild response. Yes, that's what he thought the point was. Admittedly, he'd expected that she would just hold onto his arm or something the whole time, no magic required, but this works fine, too.
"Somehow, I'll find a way to survive the agony."
And he takes her goggles from her hands, plopping them atop her head.
She wants to plan. She wants to prepare. She wants to ask him how should we be stuck together? but can't quite form the words. Face-to-face? Front-to-back? Side-to-side in a friendly side hug?
Whatever she'd resolved to say, however she'd resolved to ask, gets blown off the map when Verso takes the outright liberty of dropping her goggles onto her head. A mild fear grips her; remarkably, she manages to not glance over at the Windrunners to check whether or not they witnessed said liberty being taken.
With a ground out curse, she fusses with the goggles herself. Actually tricky, given the thick gloves padded for warmth.
Oblivious to Jasnah's horror, Verso's mouth twists as he surveys her post-goggles appearance. A very cute underwater creature. The struggle of putting them on has left them slightly crooked, and he carefully pushes one side down with an index finger before working his own gloves onto his hands.
"Accurate as always, ma pieuvre." Do octopi exist in Roshar? Who knows! He doesn't bother expanding. "Ready?"
Jasnah is very much not ready — so tangled in her own meticulous, spiraling anxiety that it doesn't even occur to her to ask what a pieuvre is. Perhaps she is afraid of heights after all. Or, if not heights, then flying. Nothing about it feels secure or orderly or governed by rules she can interrogate in advance. And however much she insists aloud that the Windrunners are diligent and capable, it isn't the same as trust. Not really. And while she trusts them not to be traitors, it's not the same thing as trusting them with her body.
She shakes out her hands, draws herself up to her full height beneath the layers of fabric and cloak, and gives a nod toward the Windrunners. Ready. The gesture feels momentous to her. It is, quite clearly, just another weekday to them.
Lyn briskly steps in, practical and efficient, and ushers her two charges together as if aligning furniture. With a soft exhale of stormlight, she arranges them into position — close, unavoidably close — binding them side by side. Closer even still than when they'd walked, since their bodies need to be flush with one another for the bond to take. Adhesion takes hold, subtle and inexorable, fixing one of Verso's arms around Jasnah's middle. Lyn gives a stern look that brooks no argument: it's meant to shield the queen's wounded side, to turn his body into her buffer. She has no idea how naturally the thought has already occurred to him.
The result leaves them standing like conspirators caught mid-huddle: hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, arms hooked around one another's backs. There is nowhere to shift without shifting together. Jasnah becomes acutely aware of the line of his ribs, the steady warmth of him, the fact that if she sways, she will sway into him. They stand like that for a long, exquisitely uncomfortable forty seconds.
Then Lopen signals, a trio of whistled notes and a spiral of his fingers in the air. The Windrunners lift first — rising a casual six feet into the air, as if the ground has simply lost interest in them. Drehy swoops in next and applies a Basic Lashing on the two still below. Gravity loosens its grip.
Jasnah's feet leave the ground.
The sensation hits all at once: a hollowing in her stomach, a queer, stomach-flipping lightness that steals her breath. Not falling — not quite — but unmoored. Weightless. Her body protests, instincts scrambling for traction that no longer exists. Her fingers curl reflexively, and for half a heartbeat she clings to Verso not out of practicality but sheer animal reflex.
Air thickens around them as the Windrunners go to work — sculpting currents, fine-tuning vectors, shaping a loose triangular formation. The city drops away below and they all shoot upward, then hover, suspended high above the rooftops.
Lopen skates past on his back like he's swimming through the sky, grinning, and flashes them an enthusiastic double thumbs-up.
"Things are going to get breezy, ganchos," he calls.
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And composure is what she needs while she watches him, still. Watching him work, actively patching her up while telling her he doesn't want her to get hurt. Does he...does he need reassurance? A reminder that she does possess a firm sense of self-preservation, despite all evidence to the contrary.
"Despite my personal misgivings about flying," she picks her way carefully through her answer because it belies just how irrational she can (in fact) be, "objectively I can assure you it'll be safe. If for no other reason than you can count on a Windrunner to be exceedingly, annoyingly virtuous."
Oh — this is annoying. This is frustrating. But it's also an excellent opportunity to reinforce a lesson given just a few days earlier.
"I told you Windrunner oaths are about protecting others. Whoever they send, they won't let us leave the ground unless they're certain it can be done safely. It could be Stormblessed himself — who dislikes me as much as I dislike him, I imagine — and my safety would nevertheless be guaranteed. Yours, too."
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He finishes applying her new dressing, then lowers the hem of her shirt to cover it. A long contemplative pause follows before—
"—If the Windrunners clear you for flight tomorrow, then we can go."
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Jasnah doesn't move. Doesn't scoot away, doesn't lean back any more than she already needed to in order to let him work. But she does watch him carefully.
"You know," she tilts her head, "that almost sounds like the future Wit is is trying to — perhaps — curtail the queen."
It's not a complaint. Not yet. But on the (potential) eve of their return, she should summon back a little decorum. At least for in front of the Windrunners. Can't have him appealing to them directly, undermining her own presence and will.
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Lightly: "—Delay, perhaps. Suspend. But never curtail."
Hands finally free, he rests an elbow on the back of the divan, fingers idly twiddling with a loose thread.
"I think it sounds like your friend is looking out for you." By, yes, stepping on her agency a little—but if she'd really insist upon it, he would relent. "If the Windrunners agree that you're fit to go, you won't hear another word about it out of me."
His twiddling stops, and he holds out a pinky. "Promise."
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The word strikes deeper tonight than in any previous instance. Storms. She watches him carefully, suddenly and sharply aware that they'll need to have a conversation about courtly manners sooner rather than later. But she puts it off. Maybe it'll land better behind some closed door at Urithiru than it will here.
For now, she reaches out and wraps two fingers around his littlest one in a clumsy not-quite-handshake. She doesn't know about the custom he's inviting her to partake in, and defaults to assuming it's something it's not.
"You should know," she warns him warmly, "that we take our promises quite seriously."
Oaths. Promises. Words. It comes with the territory of being Honor's chosen people.
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Tumbling ever deeper into a chasm he's not sure how to climb out of, he smiles, laughs—with her, not at her—and reaches out with his free hand to gingerly pry her fingers off of his, uncurling them one by one. Then, he takes her pinky between his fingers, gently twining it around his.
"This is a pinky swear." There's a serious tone to his voice, but an amused twinkle in his eye. "The most solemn of all promises. Right above blood oaths."
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Her jaw works around an unexecuted smile. Is there any way to explain to him that even in play, a promise is a serious thing? Even in play, she'll feel compelled to hold him to it. Storms, she wants very much for him to keep his promises. Wouldn't that be nice? After——
"A pinky swear," she echoes with a very strange mixture of disbelief and buy-in. Playful, but absolutely not. Smart enough to see the humour, but serious enough to sidestep it all the same. "You won't interfere with the Windrunners."
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And he doesn't. Verso is very careful not to interfere—their word is final, and if they decide that Jasnah is well enough to go, then he'll have to swallow his anxiety and accept that. He does, however, probably overstep the boundaries he doesn't know exist by stepping up to the Windrunners—whoever they might be, and wherever they might meet; don't let me step on your toes here—and jerking a thumb back at Jasnah, saying, "She's injured."
Like a little kid telling on another little kid.
"Will that be all right?"
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Verso, at least, carries the satchel. She isn't doing everything alone.
And then he makes his move — there is something infuriatingly familiar about a silver-tongued artist warming up an audience, flexing and reshaping the contours of a promise as he addresses the Windrunners first. And leads with her injury of all things. Bold. Strategic. Maddening.
Speaking of the Windrunners.
Three figures wait in Kholin blue, though their allegiance lies first with Urithiru rather than the family whose colors they wear. The shortest of them steps forward at once, grinning, and introduces himself as The Lopen (yep) with no small amount of ceremony.
Lopen directs his attention to Verso with a wave. "Hey, gancho. She's injured? What, don't you have any stormlight?" His eyes drop to his hands as he starts counting. "It hasn't been that long since the last storm blew through—"
Jasnah watches the folly unfold, jaw tight.
The other two — Drehy and Lyn, if memory serves — approach with expressions that hover somewhere between apology and resignation. Lyn, a shorter dark-eyed woman, offers Jasnah a respectful bob and murmurs an apology before launching into an explanation. They exchange a brief, efficient conversation — mostly concerning why there are three Windrunners present when Jasnah had requisitioned two.
"Dalinar insisted," Lyn says, simply.
From a few paces away, Lopen pipes up again. "Oi, I'll bet you my next stew duty the real decision-making happened with his wife. Did you see her face at the debriefing? Grumpier than the Stormfather himself. And Dalinar'd know, y'know, on account of—"
He trails off when he sees Jasnah's expression.
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"—Back to the matter at hand, Monsieur The Lopen."
The flying that may or may not be happening in a moment. He cants his head toward Jasnah. "Will it be safe for her to fly?"
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He jerks one thumb at himself, another at his companions, and then — remarkably — a small blue honorspren pops up on his shoulder and promptly manifests several extra thumbs, all of them pointing proudly back at the spren himself. "Her majestical chortana is in good hands, eh? The flight'll be peaceful as napping on a pile of grain sacks in your second-favourite cousin's pantry."
— Drehy, however, steps in before the metaphor gets out of hand. More serious, more grounded.
"How injured, Your Majesty?" At least he has the decency to address Jasnah directly, rather than the strange man beside her whose authority he neither knows nor recognizes. And while it's clear Lopen is somehow the ranking Windrunner present, Drehy and Lyn are not about to let their overeager leader derail the mission at the outset.
Jasnah resists the instinct to touch her side. Resists, too, the urge to glare at Verso.
"Stomach wound," she reports, clipped and low, as they cluster on the far side of the temple in the thin light of early morning. Not exactly subtle. "Two weeks old. Minimal use of stormlight." The look she gives them makes it clear there will be no elaboration as to why. "But I'm confident I can make the trip."
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Confidence is subjective, and her attempt to downplay any concerns with 'confidence' makes his eyebrow twitch in obvious annoyance, but he doesn't say anything about it. Although he's unaware of just how much more buttoned up Jasnah is in public company, he does know that she wouldn't enjoy being curtailed in front of these Windrunners.
"No stitches," he does add, not to irritate her—although he's sure it does—but to make certain the Windrunners have the full picture. "What do you think?"
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(Answer: scold the queen. Thoroughly. Possibly at length. And, tragically, he might be the only non-Kholin who could get away with it — though Jasnah has far less patience for him than the rest of her family does.)
"H-has the tissue granulated?" Lyn asks, guilt written plainly across her face for even daring to inquire. She elbows Drehy and murmurs something about the field-medic lessons Kaladin drilled into them a few months back. Drehy plants his hands on his hips and sighs — the long, resigned sort of sigh belonging to a man keenly aware that antagonizing a monarch before breakfast is a poor life choice.
Lopen, entirely unhelpful, asks what sugar has to do with any of this. This prompts Lyn to explain — perhaps with more anatomical enthusiasm than strictly necessary — what bumpy, pink new skin looks like when a wound starts healing. Lopen's grin wilts into a queasy grimace.
Sensing the subtle shift in the Windrunners' collective mood, Jasnah directs her attention squarely at Drehy. "You're the one who got Gavinor out of Kholinar, weren't you?" she says evenly. "Compared to fleeing a siege with a frightened child, this is straightforward."
Drehy sighs again, then concedes. "When done properly, the flight's smoother than a cart or caravan." He pauses, recalibrates. "She...you," he corrects himself, addressing Jasnah instead of the unfamiliar man beside her, "will be all right. Lopen's annoying, but he isn't wrong."
Lopen beams, as if this is high praise. Then, he swivels back toward Verso and points at him with cheerful suspicion.
"So," he asks brightly, "who're you?"
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So, he doesn't argue, just shoots Jasnah a pointed look before Lopen (The Lopen?) addresses him. It doesn't bother him; he's spent decades with people squinting at him and asking who the hell he is. Usually, the situation is a little more fraught than this: scared Expeditioners staring him down, often armed. This is downright congenial.
He extends a hand. "Verso Dessendre. Pleasure to make your acquaintance." It doesn't answer what he's doing hanging around their queen, but he leaves that to Jasnah to decide.
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"That's a storming mouthful, Verse," Lopen declares at once, happily carving the name down to size. He grins as he says it, clasping Verso's wrist rather than his hand in a grip that's firm, friendly, and unmistakably Herdazian once Verso sees the flint-like fingernails extending like little claws from the tips of his fingers.
"That's Lyn," he adds, jabbing a thumb toward one Windrunner, "and that's Drehy," indicating the other. "They'll be doing all the Lashings. I'm here in case something goes terribly wrong and one of you needs a heroic last-minute save before smacking into a mountainside or something. That'd be bad," he nods toward Jasnah, "minimal stormlight and all."
Only then does Jasnah clear her throat. The shift is immediate — subtle, but unmistakable — as she slides into command.
"I understand it's protocol to assign one Windrunner per passenger," she says evenly. "Can a Lashing be applied to two people at once, or must we remain separate?"
Lopen chortles and tosses out an off-colour remark that earns him exactly zero laughs. Instead, it's Drehy who steps in, reading the tension beneath the question and answering with calm professionalism. "One of us could keep the two of you aloft," he explains. "The other could use Adhesion to keep you together." His gaze flicks briefly to Verso, thoughtful, then back to Jasnah. "Would you prefer that, Brightness?"
Jasnah answers with a single nod. Then she turns to Verso and gives him a look that asks quietly, pointedly: Satisfied?
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He raises an eyebrow at the shortened name (he's not a nickname person; he only occasionally tolerates Verver from Esquie because it's difficult to tell him 'no'), but again says nothing, listening to the description of 'Lashing' and 'Adhesion' and trying not to make a face at how unpleasant the wording is. Hopefully, it's more fun than it sounds.
Returning her nod with one of his own, he crosses his arms and steps back beside her to wait for the Windrunners to prepare. As they do, he leans in beside her, no closer than they've been in the past but perhaps closer than Jasnah might like right at this moment, voice quiet as he asks, privately, "Are you nervous?"
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"No," she lies. And the way she frowns at the goggles is enough to indicate just how much of a lie it is. "I have every confidence in the Windrunners, even if they sent the silliest one."
But the criticism has little actual bite. Lopen had been sent on the Aimia mission, too, and he'd handled it well. She manages to keep divorced her dislike of the man with her appreciation for his talents.
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Although it might be somewhat traumatizing to have her fall cushioned by someone who'll be, at least for a moment, dead. Ah, well. He slides the goggles on, taking care that the strap doesn't flatten his hair overmuch.
"How do I look?"
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Jasnah tilts the goggles, not yet putting hers on. When he asks his question, however, she glances up and — and swallows a smile. She maintains a far more careful, buttoned down affect among mixed company. Even with the Windrunners off discussing currents and breezes and altitudes, Jasnah doesn't let herself slip.
Well. Doesn't let herself slip, except to sling her goggles onto her arm and reach out — briefly — to fix a loop of hair that got caught under his goggle strap and was subsequently sticking out at an odd angle. She curls the edge of the strand around her finger and (gentle) tugs it under the strap.
"Do you want the honest answer or the dishonest one?"
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Jasnah doesn't rush to don her goggles. Instead, she picks a more rational path through the bag's contents. A second pair of thicker, warmer gloves — which she wears over her safehand glove without removing it. A thick, roughspun cloak with a hood and scarf to protect their faces from the wind. She'd read about equipment like this. And she'd read, too, that Radiants whose bond was functioning appropriately didn't need so much protection. Their stormlight could keep them warm.
Idly, she touches a pocket. Ivory is snuggled down in a casket of linen and tin. Swaddled and safe, much to his own dismay. When they'd discussed it alone, she'd been surprised to hear him take Verso's side — let's not fly yet, not until you're further recovered — but then she'd carefully kept a wall between the two of them learning their shared perspective.
"Adhesion," she warn him, "is going to create a temporary but very persistent bond between us. As if gluing two pages together."
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"Somehow, I'll find a way to survive the agony."
And he takes her goggles from her hands, plopping them atop her head.
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Whatever she'd resolved to say, however she'd resolved to ask, gets blown off the map when Verso takes the outright liberty of dropping her goggles onto her head. A mild fear grips her; remarkably, she manages to not glance over at the Windrunners to check whether or not they witnessed said liberty being taken.
With a ground out curse, she fusses with the goggles herself. Actually tricky, given the thick gloves padded for warmth.
"Accurate, yes? Like an underwater creature."
Speaking this time of herself.
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"Accurate as always, ma pieuvre." Do octopi exist in Roshar? Who knows! He doesn't bother expanding. "Ready?"
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She shakes out her hands, draws herself up to her full height beneath the layers of fabric and cloak, and gives a nod toward the Windrunners. Ready. The gesture feels momentous to her. It is, quite clearly, just another weekday to them.
Lyn briskly steps in, practical and efficient, and ushers her two charges together as if aligning furniture. With a soft exhale of stormlight, she arranges them into position — close, unavoidably close — binding them side by side. Closer even still than when they'd walked, since their bodies need to be flush with one another for the bond to take. Adhesion takes hold, subtle and inexorable, fixing one of Verso's arms around Jasnah's middle. Lyn gives a stern look that brooks no argument: it's meant to shield the queen's wounded side, to turn his body into her buffer. She has no idea how naturally the thought has already occurred to him.
The result leaves them standing like conspirators caught mid-huddle: hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, arms hooked around one another's backs. There is nowhere to shift without shifting together. Jasnah becomes acutely aware of the line of his ribs, the steady warmth of him, the fact that if she sways, she will sway into him. They stand like that for a long, exquisitely uncomfortable forty seconds.
Then Lopen signals, a trio of whistled notes and a spiral of his fingers in the air. The Windrunners lift first — rising a casual six feet into the air, as if the ground has simply lost interest in them. Drehy swoops in next and applies a Basic Lashing on the two still below. Gravity loosens its grip.
Jasnah's feet leave the ground.
The sensation hits all at once: a hollowing in her stomach, a queer, stomach-flipping lightness that steals her breath. Not falling — not quite — but unmoored. Weightless. Her body protests, instincts scrambling for traction that no longer exists. Her fingers curl reflexively, and for half a heartbeat she clings to Verso not out of practicality but sheer animal reflex.
Air thickens around them as the Windrunners go to work — sculpting currents, fine-tuning vectors, shaping a loose triangular formation. The city drops away below and they all shoot upward, then hover, suspended high above the rooftops.
Lopen skates past on his back like he's swimming through the sky, grinning, and flashes them an enthusiastic double thumbs-up.
"Things are going to get breezy, ganchos," he calls.
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