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.
Verso knows what it feels like to be in flight—he's ridden around the Continent on Esquie's back enough times—but to be weightless is something else entirely. His feet dangle, scrabbling for ground that's barely there, and he tightens his hold on Jasnah as if she might slip away even despite the magic binding them together. His tiptoes brush against the ground, and then there's nothing there at all as they shoot further into the sky—
Uncharacteristically demonstrative, he shouts, "Whoo!"
Directly into Jasnah's poor ear, in fact. By accident, but nonetheless. Although the arm around Jasnah grips her as securely as he can, his free hand flies up, fist in the air. Unlike Jasnah, he doesn't feel queasy or unsettled or even the slightest bit afraid. This is, without a doubt, awesome.
They hover in place, an obscene distance from the ground. Jasnah's heart feels like it's floating up into her chest, pounding at the back of her throat in muted, biological panic. Like bodies are not meant to do this. Like the laws of nature themselves are quietly rebelling. Rich, considering what she is capable of. But logic is nowhere near her now, not as she twists her gloved fingers into his clothing and levers herself nearer — nearer, despite his shout of childish joy.
Nearer, despite the audience. The need to steady herself against something is so instinctive it barely registers as a choice. And the something just happens to be him.
When he whispers instead of shouts, she has to cant her head toward his to hear. Drehy sets them onto a current and the wind surges past, tilting them horizontal in a way that has her clinging to him all over again, grip tightening, breath catching.
"How is it," she grits out through clenched teeth, "that you can stomach this but not the sea?"
A neat deflection, avoiding any commentary on the queasiness etched across her face.
How can she stomach the sea and not this? The unsteady waters had made his stomach churn, tossing his body from side-to-side in ways he couldn't fully control, but this feels light, free. There's wind whipping the fabric of his clothing, hood already fallen off, hair kept somewhat in place only by the strap of his goggles.
If he chose to examine the truth, he'd wonder if perhaps the only reason he feels this childlike wonder is because of a mother's memory. Because she remembers what her son was like when he was eight and loved adventure and trains better than she does when he was twenty-six and had, presumably, his own grown-up secrets to hide from her.
He doesn't choose to examine the truth, though. Not now, when he's flying through the air and experiencing the sort of uncomplicated joy he hasn't felt in 7 decades.
"Hey, don't look down," is his non-answer. "Just look at me. I won't let you fall."
Well. He won't let her get injured from a fall, technically, but that's getting into semantics.
There's turmoil inside her. A give-and-take tension between shuttering all her senses and gritting her way through this ordeal — and then there's the other alternative: siphoning off a little of his excitement, harnessing it for herself, focusing on him instead of the height. She's already halfway to disassociating when she hears him. Just look at me.
So she does. And she can't see all of him — all of his expression — from this too-tight angle. But she can see enough, in raw up-close detail, that she allows herself to focus on Verso. She starts by mentally mapping his scar. Her attention is high-intensity, and silent except for an uncharacteristically agreeable nod.
This could never have been possible without the weeks that preceded it. Days on days on days of sharing his personal space just to stand up and sit down. It's easy (well, easier) to trust the person whose as good as had his fingers in her guts, holding her together. And who then held her together every subsequent day.
As they clear the mountains, as Drehy's current tips them deeper into a sorta-horizontal angle, Jasnah holds tighter — turning her cheek so she can speak directly into his ear, hoping to be heard against the noisy wind.
"They'll take us back over Longbrow's Strait and the Tarat Sea. It'll be some time before you see land again. But when you do, it'll be Marat. Or perhaps Greater Hexi. Then, the mountains of Ur."
Reciting facts. Setting expectations. Controlling what she can, which happens to be a a whispered geography lesson.
He can tell what she's doing. Relying on something familiar and safe to keep her heart steady, her stomach unturned. Verso uses that same technique every time he deflects from something uncomfortable with a half-hearted joke.
It always works better when someone goes along with it. So, as they travel high over the waters, he asks questions more befitting of Jasnah than him: is that saltwater or freshwater? How long does it go for? What sort of creatures live in the waters? Under other circumstances, they aren't the sort of questions he'd usually ask, but he nods along to every answer offered regardless as if it's the most interesting thing in the world.
He does the same as they finally make it to land. What's this place called? Who lives here? What's their culture like? Anything to keep her focused on the conversation instead of the nausea in her stomach.
Once they're finally back on the ground in Urithiru—and they manage to extricate themselves from each other—he offers an encouraging hand on her shoulder and a, "You did good." His eyes drop to her stomach for a split second, and he asks, "Still in one piece?"
Jasnah's georgraphy lesson shifts to politics and economics as one of his idle questions prompts her to explain the fine Marati rugs and furniture imported from this region of the world. She sticks to high-level facts. Trade numbers. Summit discussions. But now and then something personal slips through. Marat gifted me a sizeable rug at my coronation — remarkable how well they matched dyes to Kholin blue.
On occasion, Drehy and Lyn swap out responsibility for keeping the pair alight. And as the trip progresses — once they hit top speeds, into the mountains — it's hard to tell whether she nuzzles in close for safety or for warmth against the windchill. Conversation halts in favour of sheltering her face against his shoulder.
But then, Urithiru. The Windrunners bring them to a grand balcony at a mid-point on the tower, easing off on the Lashings until they all come to a relatively soft landing. Jasnah's heels skip-jump-trip a little as she finds her footing. Brusque and stiff, she steps back and — considering his question — nods once.
"Whole and accounted for. Thank you," she says with gratitude that's just on the far side of warm.
But then reality shutters into place. In the corner of her attention, she watches the three Windrunners snap to attention. They cross their arms over their chest in the customary Bridge Four salute. Two figures walk out onto the balcony. Well, two figures, but one is holding a toddler on her hip: Dalinar, Navani, and little Gavinor.
Steel slips back into Jasnah's spine. Even when the little boy clambers out of his grandmother's arms and comes rushing across the balcony to greet her, they both stand there like awkward solemn creatures standing off against one another and who don't quite know what to do. He pouts. He says something about how it's good that she's returned because he really didn't want to be king if she hadn't. And Jasnah awkwardly pats a gloved hand on his head, leaning down just far enough to gift him her goggles before redirecting him to play with the Windrunners. He looks so much like his father, she thinks.
"Dessendre," she says in a stern tone but soft volume as the toddler runs off. Jasnah pulls off the thicker gloves she'd worn in-flight, leaving behind just the thinner leather glove on her safehand. "Time to meet Urithiru's Bondsmiths. "
The woman — oh, well, there's no mistaking the her. This is Jasnah's mother. But it's the man — hard-faced and wearing a practical blue uniform — who reaches out and takes Jasnah by the arm. Navani hovers nearby, the very picture of a mother who would like nothing more than to embrace her daughter but doesn't quite know how to initiate the hug.
"Uncle," she pats Dalinar on the bicep. Jasnah is tall, but he's taller. "Your penmanship is improving."
Suggesting once and for all that any weird, clumsy writing on the spanreed back in Thaylen City had been this man's doing.
Verso, who'd moments before been completely unselfconscious about his appearance, rips off his goggles with a quickness, swiftly smoothing his windswept hair down. He takes a small step closer to Jasnah and the gaggle that's come to meet her, and then—
waits.
He expects to be instantly introduced, as that is the polite thing to do; when she doesn't, he starts to wonder if maybe she never intended him to be introduced at all, and he takes that small step back again. But she had said it was time to meet them, so— he takes the small step forward once more.
The process repeats a few more times until he's standing behind her, quite literally twiddling his thumbs. It's too late now to jump in and introduce himself, but he's also spent too much time loitering around to just leave. He busies himself by picking at a loose thread on his shirt like it's impossibly fascinating.
Conversation turns quickly — abruptly — to an inquiry about the border with Emul and Tukar. And it says perhaps a bit too much about Jasnah that she's willing to let Verso shadow her while she absorbs these few key updates about how coalition forces have managed these past two weeks. Jasnah argues with her uncle on a handful of points, but it never grows heated.
It takes Navani clearing her throat for the third time to break-up the little military tête-à-tête between her husband and her daughter. And even then, it's Dalinar who winds down the conversation. Clearly, he's a man well-accustomed to navigating the choppy waters between both Kholin women.
"Is this the 'ally' you wrote about?" Navani asks of Verso. Although she has a similar presence and composure to her, she's also evidently more of a political creature. Warm, even when she doesn't need to be. Smiling and gracious. "Are you who I have to thank for seeing my daughter back to me?"
Jasnah interjects: "Verso Dessendre — let me introduce the King and Queen of Urithiru. Dalinar and Navani."
It's complicated. They rule Urithiru as monarchs. And then there's Jasnah, who rules Alethkar. But Alethkar is occupied. So she rules from Urithiru, but doesn't rule Urithiru. Don't think about it too hard.
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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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Uncharacteristically demonstrative, he shouts, "Whoo!"
Directly into Jasnah's poor ear, in fact. By accident, but nonetheless. Although the arm around Jasnah grips her as securely as he can, his free hand flies up, fist in the air. Unlike Jasnah, he doesn't feel queasy or unsettled or even the slightest bit afraid. This is, without a doubt, awesome.
Laughing, he glances her way—
"You're turning green," he whispers.
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Nearer, despite the audience. The need to steady herself against something is so instinctive it barely registers as a choice. And the something just happens to be him.
When he whispers instead of shouts, she has to cant her head toward his to hear. Drehy sets them onto a current and the wind surges past, tilting them horizontal in a way that has her clinging to him all over again, grip tightening, breath catching.
"How is it," she grits out through clenched teeth, "that you can stomach this but not the sea?"
A neat deflection, avoiding any commentary on the queasiness etched across her face.
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If he chose to examine the truth, he'd wonder if perhaps the only reason he feels this childlike wonder is because of a mother's memory. Because she remembers what her son was like when he was eight and loved adventure and trains better than she does when he was twenty-six and had, presumably, his own grown-up secrets to hide from her.
He doesn't choose to examine the truth, though. Not now, when he's flying through the air and experiencing the sort of uncomplicated joy he hasn't felt in 7 decades.
"Hey, don't look down," is his non-answer. "Just look at me. I won't let you fall."
Well. He won't let her get injured from a fall, technically, but that's getting into semantics.
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So she does. And she can't see all of him — all of his expression — from this too-tight angle. But she can see enough, in raw up-close detail, that she allows herself to focus on Verso. She starts by mentally mapping his scar. Her attention is high-intensity, and silent except for an uncharacteristically agreeable nod.
This could never have been possible without the weeks that preceded it. Days on days on days of sharing his personal space just to stand up and sit down. It's easy (well, easier) to trust the person whose as good as had his fingers in her guts, holding her together. And who then held her together every subsequent day.
As they clear the mountains, as Drehy's current tips them deeper into a sorta-horizontal angle, Jasnah holds tighter — turning her cheek so she can speak directly into his ear, hoping to be heard against the noisy wind.
"They'll take us back over Longbrow's Strait and the Tarat Sea. It'll be some time before you see land again. But when you do, it'll be Marat. Or perhaps Greater Hexi. Then, the mountains of Ur."
Reciting facts. Setting expectations. Controlling what she can, which happens to be a a whispered geography lesson.
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It always works better when someone goes along with it. So, as they travel high over the waters, he asks questions more befitting of Jasnah than him: is that saltwater or freshwater? How long does it go for? What sort of creatures live in the waters? Under other circumstances, they aren't the sort of questions he'd usually ask, but he nods along to every answer offered regardless as if it's the most interesting thing in the world.
He does the same as they finally make it to land. What's this place called? Who lives here? What's their culture like? Anything to keep her focused on the conversation instead of the nausea in her stomach.
Once they're finally back on the ground in Urithiru—and they manage to extricate themselves from each other—he offers an encouraging hand on her shoulder and a, "You did good." His eyes drop to her stomach for a split second, and he asks, "Still in one piece?"
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On occasion, Drehy and Lyn swap out responsibility for keeping the pair alight. And as the trip progresses — once they hit top speeds, into the mountains — it's hard to tell whether she nuzzles in close for safety or for warmth against the windchill. Conversation halts in favour of sheltering her face against his shoulder.
But then, Urithiru. The Windrunners bring them to a grand balcony at a mid-point on the tower, easing off on the Lashings until they all come to a relatively soft landing. Jasnah's heels skip-jump-trip a little as she finds her footing. Brusque and stiff, she steps back and — considering his question — nods once.
"Whole and accounted for. Thank you," she says with gratitude that's just on the far side of warm.
But then reality shutters into place. In the corner of her attention, she watches the three Windrunners snap to attention. They cross their arms over their chest in the customary Bridge Four salute. Two figures walk out onto the balcony. Well, two figures, but one is holding a toddler on her hip: Dalinar, Navani, and little Gavinor.
Steel slips back into Jasnah's spine. Even when the little boy clambers out of his grandmother's arms and comes rushing across the balcony to greet her, they both stand there like awkward solemn creatures standing off against one another and who don't quite know what to do. He pouts. He says something about how it's good that she's returned because he really didn't want to be king if she hadn't. And Jasnah awkwardly pats a gloved hand on his head, leaning down just far enough to gift him her goggles before redirecting him to play with the Windrunners. He looks so much like his father, she thinks.
"Dessendre," she says in a stern tone but soft volume as the toddler runs off. Jasnah pulls off the thicker gloves she'd worn in-flight, leaving behind just the thinner leather glove on her safehand. "Time to meet Urithiru's Bondsmiths. "
The woman — oh, well, there's no mistaking the her. This is Jasnah's mother. But it's the man — hard-faced and wearing a practical blue uniform — who reaches out and takes Jasnah by the arm. Navani hovers nearby, the very picture of a mother who would like nothing more than to embrace her daughter but doesn't quite know how to initiate the hug.
"Uncle," she pats Dalinar on the bicep. Jasnah is tall, but he's taller. "Your penmanship is improving."
Suggesting once and for all that any weird, clumsy writing on the spanreed back in Thaylen City had been this man's doing.
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waits.
He expects to be instantly introduced, as that is the polite thing to do; when she doesn't, he starts to wonder if maybe she never intended him to be introduced at all, and he takes that small step back again. But she had said it was time to meet them, so— he takes the small step forward once more.
The process repeats a few more times until he's standing behind her, quite literally twiddling his thumbs. It's too late now to jump in and introduce himself, but he's also spent too much time loitering around to just leave. He busies himself by picking at a loose thread on his shirt like it's impossibly fascinating.
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It takes Navani clearing her throat for the third time to break-up the little military tête-à-tête between her husband and her daughter. And even then, it's Dalinar who winds down the conversation. Clearly, he's a man well-accustomed to navigating the choppy waters between both Kholin women.
"Is this the 'ally' you wrote about?" Navani asks of Verso. Although she has a similar presence and composure to her, she's also evidently more of a political creature. Warm, even when she doesn't need to be. Smiling and gracious. "Are you who I have to thank for seeing my daughter back to me?"
Jasnah interjects: "Verso Dessendre — let me introduce the King and Queen of Urithiru. Dalinar and Navani."
It's complicated. They rule Urithiru as monarchs. And then there's Jasnah, who rules Alethkar. But Alethkar is occupied. So she rules from Urithiru, but doesn't rule Urithiru. Don't think about it too hard.
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