Horrible. —He laughs. It does sound sort of horrible, he supposes. It's just one of those things he'd never thought to question. Like how come nobody ever visits from other countries and why don't we have a military, actually? An old man keeps track of his good and bad deeds all year, then shimmies down the chimney and leaves him presents or punishment. Sure. Why not?
"Père Noël," he corrects, and begins to add a jolly old man riding atop the train, bag of presents slung over his shoulder. Teasing: "Keep disrespecting him like that, and you might only receive coal."
...
"Before you ask, I'm not certain which ethical framework he uses to make his determinations." Still teasing. "But I've been informed that 'fighting with your sister' is a grave offense in his eyes."
A roll of her eyes. Okay, yes, it's all just a story to keep children in line. Like warning them about how Voidbringers will come and eat them up if they don't wash behind their ears. Except the Voidbringers turned out to be real. Not just real, but...
Jasnah takes issue with this sort of moralizing. Like telling someone they'll never be allowed into the Tranquiline Halls. Jokes on them — Jasnah had been correct all along, and there's no such thing. Not how the Vorin Church imagined them, at any rate.
Rising to his tease, she taps a fingertip just outside Père Noël's bag of presents.
Wryly: "Coal is acceptable. Given what you've told me about the trainlines, it sounds like a smart investment."
Oh!! Verso very much enjoys when Jasnah plays along with something rather than dismissing it as foolish or juvenile. He would have expected something along the lines of I don't care what some trespassing old man thinks, but this is better. A grin spreads across his face, lopsided.
"You're exactly right. That's why I was always extra bad every year, so that I could swindle him out of all of that coal."
Obviously, he's bullshitting. Getting on the naughty list would have made him cry.
Well. It's true: she doesn't care what some trespassing old man thinks. But if the trespassing old man is going to lay some unwanted verdict on her, she may as well make this twisted judgmental Christmas gift economy work for her. Y'know. Hypothetically.
"Naturally. You had trains you had to keep running."
Did the very special, very expensive 'live steam' edition of this model train use real coal? Who knows. Not Jasnah. But she's decided that, yes, it must. At least for the fiction of the aforementioned twisted judgmental Christmas gift economy.
Absolutely not dedicated enough to do 'bad' things, though. Or, more accurately, not dedicated enough to let anyone know he had done bad things. Sure, he might steal from the cookie jar before dinner or accidentally snap a string on Clea's harp, but he would have done anything to avoid someone finding out that he had.
"I had these tracks laid out all across my study." Because he'd had a study and a room back then. Infinitely spoiled. "So I could look at them while I practiced piano. That's what I miss."
Or at least it's the safest thing to admit to missing.
Big whoop! Jasnah has a study and a room — and nevertheless finds herself appropriating his two out of any given five nights. But she does try and imagine it: a child's study, chock full with little trains and tracks and a piano.
Hmm. Jasnah pins the page down with a fingertip and drags it across the table. Towards herself.
"Oh." His eyebrows quirk up. It's not like him to deny her anything, and he doesn't want to deny her anything, exactly, but it's just that it's...
He glances at the sketch, a quick dart of his eyes to and away from it. It's not very good. At least, not by his standards. Sure, it got the job done so that he could explain the concept of trains to her, but there's so many things he could do to improve it. All of the little details he'd added had been primarily for fun, not for perfection. He can see a million tiny mistakes that he suddenly wishes he could scrub out.
"If you want art, I could make you something better."
She has sat through enough wardship applicants to recognize the familiar shapes of self-effacement and self-doubt when they surface. Shallan's had suffered from an especially acute strain of it — never quite grasping that progress requires beginning somewhere, imperfectly.
But this isn't that. Verso is no beginner, self-conscious of their ceiling. Rather, he's adept — and nervous about being measured incorrectly. Surely.
Jasnah knows him well enough now to read the tension differently: a backed-into-a-corner discomfort, poorly masked. The quiet panic that something done casually might be taken seriously. That an idle sketch might suddenly become a Piece.
Really, it's fascinating to watch. It also changes nothing. She shakes her head once. Decisively.
"You can make me something better," she says, calm and certain, "even if I keep this one."
Because she is keeping it. That much is settled. How else is she meant to pass it along to Rushu — or one of the other artifabrians — and see whether the sketch can be coaxed into a proper model?
There's a long pause, wherein he considers if he can tolerate Jasnah possessing a piece of him that is so obviously imperfect. What will she do with it? What will she think when she looks at it? How awful to think of someone having eternal access to something he created without trying.
Finally, he says, "Twist my arm, why don't you?" A sigh. "All right."
He can't snatch it away and rip it up into a million pieces. Or he could, but doing so would be even more humiliating than the alternative.
"But you should know," he says, haphazardly signing the corner of the paper before setting the pen down and standing again, "that's hardly my best work."
This, too, is a part of history. If Jasnah can accept entering caricatures of Highprince Sebarial picking his nose into posterity, then Verso can accept that even an imperfect work might get canonized. This railroad runs both ways.
She laughs, lightly, as he signs it.
"I'm not certain it's up to us to judge our own best works. Besides," she places the page carefully and precisely next to her personal notebook. Père Noël, comically straddling a locomotive. She presses her lips tight together before she risks smiling too wide once more. "I don't like it because it's best."
"Well, that's obvious," he says, jerking his head toward the drawing. It's definitely not best. He can imagine Renoir's feedback: why do you never create anything that means anything? Pointless and whimsical.
Verso leans his hip against the desk once more, tapping a meandering little tune on the desk before he says, "You're invited to share why you do like it. A true artist welcomes feedback of all kinds."
She does wonder (briefly) whether he truly believes the all kinds part.
"It's you," she explains — answering a direct call to action without any hesitation, "using the means at your disposable to explain something that matters. To you."
Does he not recognize how appealing that is? Like when an argument's very format feeds into its substance. Or when architecture finds a way to celebrate its supporting structures rather than hide them. His sketch, the train, the little trespassing man atop it all — they met the moment.
"When I see it again, I'll remember the layers of your explanation. One shape at a time. Like the extra circles around the wheels, describing their movement."
Her turn to look away — hesitant, suddenly? — like she's worried what she likes and what he wants her to like — what he's fishing for — won't align.
Verso doesn't have expectations, exactly. At least, not a specific thing that she's meant to say. He does have predictions: a compliment on the shading or the detail work or perhaps an interest in the depiction of a mythological man whose nice/naughty list surely says something she'd find fascinating about the Lumièran moral dichotomy. The compliment she actually gives is far better than all of those combined, and his mouth twitches involuntarily, both corners up.
It's you will rattle around in his head for weeks, at least. For the first time in a very long time—and perhaps for the only time that she or anyone else ever will—Jasnah has managed to make him feel special.
"You have a fascinating way of looking at things," he says, genuine. It's a way of appreciating art he wouldn't have even thought of. Process over outcome. Journey before destination, he supposes. "I don't think half the people have a quarter of the perspective you do."
A flick, a wave of her hand. Dismissing his words, surely. I don't need a compliment in return. Except she catches herself smiling all the same. If anything does manage to pierce the thick shell of rationalism and stoicism, then it might indeed be praise for the mechanics of her mind and how it works. That it's a boon, not a curse.
Except it so radically goes against her narrative — her performance — that she chews it back and swallows the smile whole. Still. There's spirit in her voice as she continues:
"But, since you've made such a fuss, I expect your best next time. So much so that I could identify this Père Noël in person."
It's meant playfully. The same vein as their earlier jokes.
Jasnah must be in a good mood today. He likes when she's sharp and clever and regal, but he likes so much more when she's like this. Casual, playful. Without a sturdy wall of intellectualism and academia between them.
"Oh, you have my most solemn vow—"
He steps back and drops into another kneel, although this one is facing her instead of her desk, and this time he's grinning.
"I will draw you the greatest Père Noël the world has ever seen."
Someone really ought to warn him that — these days, at least — humans on Roshar are Honor's people. And oaths, promises, vows are not trifles here. In the eyes of Honor, it is the keeping of a promise that matters more than the intent behind it.
Does Jasnah believe that? Absolutely not. Unequivocally not.
And yet! There's a strange, traitorous little flip behind her breastbone when Verso says it. Even lightly. Even joking. Even about something as fundamentally inconsequential as a sketch of a half-mythical crook who breaks into houses and spies on children.
How annoying, this reaction.
She reaches out and catches his arm, tugging him up with brisk efficiency — standing up from her own chair in the process — as if the very posture of kneeling is what's gone wrong here and must be corrected at once.
"Get up," she huffs, half-scolding, half-amused, "before a spren hears you and decides to hold you to it."
It's a joke. Mostly. She doubts any but an honorspren would be so unforgiving — and she would never, ever mistake Verso for Windrunner material. (Complimentary.)
Verso laughs—a muscle unused for so many years that it still feels a little strange every time now—but acquiesces, allowing himself to be yanked out of his mock-genuflection and holding his hands up, palms out in the universal gesture of innocence.
"I wouldn't dream of encroaching on your territory." Besides, he assumes that spren are supposed to be intelligent. No clever creature would ever accept a pledge from a person like him. Jasnah had once described the appearance of others in the Cognitive Realm like lights; if that's the case, surely any spren would see that his light is dimmed. "—I'll leave the oaths and magical powers to you."
His oaths will remain 'fundamentally inconsequential' instead.
"That was some sudden movement you displayed." A gesture toward her side. "How is your healing going?"
Standing, now, they're in each others' space — not quite far enough apart; close like they used to be close when he'd be right there at her elbow in case she took one step too many while walking Thaylen City's streets.
And he conjures that time, now, when he asks after her healing. Jasnah lays her palm against the slightly off-side region of her stomach.
"Good," she says. And means it. She sees Lirin, the surgeon, every few days. And thin trickles of Stormlight still make some minor difference. She's almost forgetting that it's still there. Except when she catches sight in a mirror, or while bathing...
Hm. Verso can't quite tell how she feels about her upcoming scar. Although he's aware she hasn't had these abilities her entire life, she doesn't have any scars that predate her oaths, either. Not that he's aware of, anyway. Given how covered up she always is, maybe that doesn't count for much.
Still, he can understand that it could be somewhat distressing. On the other hand, maybe she doesn't care at all, and she's only making idle conversation.
"Hey, we'll match," he lands on saying, gesturing to his face.
Her feelings are untidy. On the surface, this is nothing. It's just a scar. It won't meaningfully impair her ability to rule, to legislate, to command armies — nor even to take to the field herself, assuming Stormlight returns to her as it should. She could, if she wished, extend the thought toward some distant, hypothetical concern about intimacy — but with whom? And after Hoid? Well. That path has already proven unproductive. Best not to entertain it at all.
And yet she grieves the change. Or perhaps she expends so much effort not grieving it that the emotion doubles back on itself. The more she worries the scar might remain, the more stubbornly it seems it will. The more she refuses to think about it, the more it occupies her thoughts anyway. Circular. Self-defeating. Exhausting.
Out loud, she'd insist it's nothing. A nonissue. Her uncle bears scars. Her cousin bears scars. Scars are not disqualifying; of course they're not. They're just an imperfection on a presentation that she's tried very, very hard to perfect.
And then there's Verso. Her gaze drifts from his eyes, breaking contact, to his scar. Her hand twitches at her side, reaching instinctively, before she stills it. The faint smile she'd been wearing lingers. Thinning, but not quite gone.
"We'll match," she echoes lightly, dry warmth threading her voice. "Comme deux gouttes d'eau—"
The idiom had come up on one of the last few nights in Thaylen City. She'd written it down — phonetically — alongside all the other crumbs of words and curses and sentences she'd been collecting. But, oh! How she butchers the pronunciation. It almost sounds like one, maybe two words rather than four separate ones.
Verso breaks out into another grin for what must be a record number of smiles in one night. How novel, to hear someone who can't quite get the accent right. There's never been anyone he's met before this, not a single person, who didn't speak his language with perfect precision. If there's anything Verso enjoys, it's a new experience. Teaching Jasnah to speak like a Lumièran is a memory unique to himself, one he'll never have to wonder who it originally belonged to.
"Comme deux gouttes d'eau," he repeats, enunciating each word so as to emphasize their distinctness. "Two peas in a pod."
The week prior seems to have set the tone for the coming ones, because the next several go on quite similarly. Jasnah no longer expects his presence at meetings he can be of no help in, and not having to endure feeling useless for hours on end helps his mood considerably. He spends the time he would have spent being, yes, background furniture on more enjoyable pursuits: practicing his piano, picking up whittling again, painstakingly drawing her that picture of Père Noël. He sketches Alicia incessantly, afraid he's going to forget what she looks like if he doesn't. It helps to have an outlet of expression, so the feelings don't just pile up inside him with nowhere else to go.
It's still challenging sometimes, especially in the stretches of days where Jasnah is so consumed with her work that he doesn't even seem to register as an afterthought in her mind. They've just gotten off another one of those; he's played Solitaire so many times in the past few days that he never wants to look at that deck of cards again. (At least for a couple of days.) They aren't exactly spending time together even now—he picks at the strings of his guitar while she looks at papers on her desk that are likely beyond his comprehension. He wonders if any of it has to do with that Ghostbloods faction her previous Wit sent her that letter about, but he doesn't ask for fear of sounding politically ignorant. Even if, well, he is politically ignorant.
Instead, he plays gentle melodies as she works; somehow, being background music is less objectionable than being background furniture. He's mostly silent otherwise, save for a few idle comments, until he finally notes a lull in the constant scritch-scratch of her pen and pipes up—still plucking at the strings— "You know, you never took me up on that dance lesson."
Jasnah was not cleared to join Dalinar and the Mink for the Herdazian campaign — despite having spent days helping to shape its strategy. Someone, or a tidy coalition of someones, had made the argument that without plate, without blade, without Stormlight, she was a liability rather than an asset. And she hadn't challenged it. Not seriously. She knows the limits of her own leverage. She knows when pressing would weaken her position instead of strengthening it.
Still. She would have liked to be there. In the tent. In the room where decisions pivot into history. Her generals should see her present and active. Unbroken. So she compensates. Overcorrects. Longer hours. Relentless focus. Paperwork stacked like barricades. And threaded through it all: him.
The music had started almost accidentally, nights ago — she'd claimed his desk, in his room, without thinking. He'd drifted to the piano, and the sound had anchored her in a way she hadn't realized she needed. Tonight, it's her study instead. And it's the guitar, soft and unintrusive, something steady beneath the scratch of her pen. Familiar. Welcome. Chosen.
When she finally pauses, it's not from fatigue so much as an accumulation of thoughts that need sorting before she begins again. She stretches — slow, deliberate — arms lifting overhead before easing back down. She flexes her fingers against the edge of the desk, working tension out of her wrist, her forearm. And in that quiet pocket, she looks up.
He's there. Settled. At ease in her study in a way that still surprises her. Gratitude wells up first. If she has to be left behind, at least she isn't left alone. He's become part of the architecture of her days since the others left.
And then he mentions dancing lessons and (unhelpfully) something else tugs at her memory. A flash of the Shattered Plains. A highstorm. Watching him dance with someone else in a stormshelter.
Hmm.
She lets the silence stretch just long enough to be deliberate before answering And when she does, her tone composed. Almost aloof.
"Are you suggesting I should do so now?"
Her pen remains on the desk. Untouched. She watches him with the measured focus she often reserved for risk assessments. Deciding, maybe, whether or not she'd like for the answer to be yes.
Verso keeps playing. Not concluding the musical phrase will irritate him.
"I wouldn't dream of suggesting what the Queen of Alethkar should do," he says, obviously kind of bullshitting. He's made a few suggestions over their time together. But still, her reaction makes him think that perhaps he should handle this with a little more care. Make her feel like it's her idea.
"I'm just saying," he continues, eyes on the guitar strings and not her. Quite casual, if he does say so himself. "Dancing is good stress relief."
There are many things two people can do together that are good stress relief—he has ample experience with relieving his stress, personally—but very few that he feels he can actually suggest to her, so. Dancing.
"And as you've already seen, I happen to be an excellent teacher."
Jasnah leans back in her chair, shoulders rolling as her posture loosens into something casual-adjacent. Even when she isn't all steel, she's a close alloy — flexible only so far, casual in the way someone gets to be when they know they command the room.
But storms, the effect lands flat when he won't even look at her. So absorbed in his guitar.
So she watches him instead. Or, more accurately, his hands. The careful economy of his fingers as they strum and pluck. All of her attention shifts toward him rather than her statecraft. And annoyingly, this shift is a necessary maneuver: it takes her a minute or two to stop seeing the world as a problem set and start seeing him, instead. A minute or two to shake the ink off her thoughts. She's caught in that liminal space now, between Queen and Jasnah.
A minute or two means the difference between a flinty I don't require stress relief and a more humane yes, Verso, thank you for noticing.
But she gives herself only thirty seconds. So what she offers is:
"We'll see."
As in we'll see how excellent of a teacher you are as she kicks her chair back from her desk and gains her feet.
Please hold a few more moments so that he can finish this song; there are few things in this world that consume his attention more than Jasnah, but unfortunately, music is one of them. If he didn't finish now, it would be bothering him the whole time. Once the chords progress into something with some finality, he looks up, setting the guitar aside.
"You've already seen me teach it," he points out, stretching his neck and loosening his shoulders. Over a month ago now, in that storm shelter, when they'd sat on that settee together and she'd acted like the thought of her being the student in that moment was unthinkable. Of course, he'd been so eager to impress that he'd been happy to walk up to their shelter-neighbors and practically beg one to dance with him; he's not sure he'd be quite so obvious now. Or at least he likes to think he wouldn't be.
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"Père Noël," he corrects, and begins to add a jolly old man riding atop the train, bag of presents slung over his shoulder. Teasing: "Keep disrespecting him like that, and you might only receive coal."
...
"Before you ask, I'm not certain which ethical framework he uses to make his determinations." Still teasing. "But I've been informed that 'fighting with your sister' is a grave offense in his eyes."
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Jasnah takes issue with this sort of moralizing. Like telling someone they'll never be allowed into the Tranquiline Halls. Jokes on them — Jasnah had been correct all along, and there's no such thing. Not how the Vorin Church imagined them, at any rate.
Rising to his tease, she taps a fingertip just outside Père Noël's bag of presents.
Wryly: "Coal is acceptable. Given what you've told me about the trainlines, it sounds like a smart investment."
See? She was paying attention.
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"You're exactly right. That's why I was always extra bad every year, so that I could swindle him out of all of that coal."
Obviously, he's bullshitting. Getting on the naughty list would have made him cry.
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"Naturally. You had trains you had to keep running."
Did the very special, very expensive 'live steam' edition of this model train use real coal? Who knows. Not Jasnah. But she's decided that, yes, it must. At least for the fiction of the aforementioned twisted judgmental Christmas gift economy.
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Absolutely not dedicated enough to do 'bad' things, though. Or, more accurately, not dedicated enough to let anyone know he had done bad things. Sure, he might steal from the cookie jar before dinner or accidentally snap a string on Clea's harp, but he would have done anything to avoid someone finding out that he had.
"I had these tracks laid out all across my study." Because he'd had a study and a room back then. Infinitely spoiled. "So I could look at them while I practiced piano. That's what I miss."
Or at least it's the safest thing to admit to missing.
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Hmm. Jasnah pins the page down with a fingertip and drags it across the table. Towards herself.
"May I?"
Keep it, she means.
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He glances at the sketch, a quick dart of his eyes to and away from it. It's not very good. At least, not by his standards. Sure, it got the job done so that he could explain the concept of trains to her, but there's so many things he could do to improve it. All of the little details he'd added had been primarily for fun, not for perfection. He can see a million tiny mistakes that he suddenly wishes he could scrub out.
"If you want art, I could make you something better."
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But this isn't that. Verso is no beginner, self-conscious of their ceiling. Rather, he's adept — and nervous about being measured incorrectly. Surely.
Jasnah knows him well enough now to read the tension differently: a backed-into-a-corner discomfort, poorly masked. The quiet panic that something done casually might be taken seriously. That an idle sketch might suddenly become a Piece.
Really, it's fascinating to watch. It also changes nothing. She shakes her head once. Decisively.
"You can make me something better," she says, calm and certain, "even if I keep this one."
Because she is keeping it. That much is settled. How else is she meant to pass it along to Rushu — or one of the other artifabrians — and see whether the sketch can be coaxed into a proper model?
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Finally, he says, "Twist my arm, why don't you?" A sigh. "All right."
He can't snatch it away and rip it up into a million pieces. Or he could, but doing so would be even more humiliating than the alternative.
"But you should know," he says, haphazardly signing the corner of the paper before setting the pen down and standing again, "that's hardly my best work."
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She laughs, lightly, as he signs it.
"I'm not certain it's up to us to judge our own best works. Besides," she places the page carefully and precisely next to her personal notebook. Père Noël, comically straddling a locomotive. She presses her lips tight together before she risks smiling too wide once more. "I don't like it because it's best."
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Verso leans his hip against the desk once more, tapping a meandering little tune on the desk before he says, "You're invited to share why you do like it. A true artist welcomes feedback of all kinds."
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"It's you," she explains — answering a direct call to action without any hesitation, "using the means at your disposable to explain something that matters. To you."
Does he not recognize how appealing that is? Like when an argument's very format feeds into its substance. Or when architecture finds a way to celebrate its supporting structures rather than hide them. His sketch, the train, the little trespassing man atop it all — they met the moment.
"When I see it again, I'll remember the layers of your explanation. One shape at a time. Like the extra circles around the wheels, describing their movement."
Her turn to look away — hesitant, suddenly? — like she's worried what she likes and what he wants her to like — what he's fishing for — won't align.
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It's you will rattle around in his head for weeks, at least. For the first time in a very long time—and perhaps for the only time that she or anyone else ever will—Jasnah has managed to make him feel special.
"You have a fascinating way of looking at things," he says, genuine. It's a way of appreciating art he wouldn't have even thought of. Process over outcome. Journey before destination, he supposes. "I don't think half the people have a quarter of the perspective you do."
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Except it so radically goes against her narrative — her performance — that she chews it back and swallows the smile whole. Still. There's spirit in her voice as she continues:
"But, since you've made such a fuss, I expect your best next time. So much so that I could identify this Père Noël in person."
It's meant playfully. The same vein as their earlier jokes.
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"Oh, you have my most solemn vow—"
He steps back and drops into another kneel, although this one is facing her instead of her desk, and this time he's grinning.
"I will draw you the greatest Père Noël the world has ever seen."
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Does Jasnah believe that? Absolutely not. Unequivocally not.
And yet! There's a strange, traitorous little flip behind her breastbone when Verso says it. Even lightly. Even joking. Even about something as fundamentally inconsequential as a sketch of a half-mythical crook who breaks into houses and spies on children.
How annoying, this reaction.
She reaches out and catches his arm, tugging him up with brisk efficiency — standing up from her own chair in the process — as if the very posture of kneeling is what's gone wrong here and must be corrected at once.
"Get up," she huffs, half-scolding, half-amused, "before a spren hears you and decides to hold you to it."
It's a joke. Mostly. She doubts any but an honorspren would be so unforgiving — and she would never, ever mistake Verso for Windrunner material. (Complimentary.)
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"I wouldn't dream of encroaching on your territory." Besides, he assumes that spren are supposed to be intelligent. No clever creature would ever accept a pledge from a person like him. Jasnah had once described the appearance of others in the Cognitive Realm like lights; if that's the case, surely any spren would see that his light is dimmed. "—I'll leave the oaths and magical powers to you."
His oaths will remain 'fundamentally inconsequential' instead.
"That was some sudden movement you displayed." A gesture toward her side. "How is your healing going?"
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And he conjures that time, now, when he asks after her healing. Jasnah lays her palm against the slightly off-side region of her stomach.
"Good," she says. And means it. She sees Lirin, the surgeon, every few days. And thin trickles of Stormlight still make some minor difference. She's almost forgetting that it's still there. Except when she catches sight in a mirror, or while bathing...
"I think — I think it's going to scar."
It was a weird realization when it hit her.
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Still, he can understand that it could be somewhat distressing. On the other hand, maybe she doesn't care at all, and she's only making idle conversation.
"Hey, we'll match," he lands on saying, gesturing to his face.
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And yet she grieves the change. Or perhaps she expends so much effort not grieving it that the emotion doubles back on itself. The more she worries the scar might remain, the more stubbornly it seems it will. The more she refuses to think about it, the more it occupies her thoughts anyway. Circular. Self-defeating. Exhausting.
Out loud, she'd insist it's nothing. A nonissue. Her uncle bears scars. Her cousin bears scars. Scars are not disqualifying; of course they're not. They're just an imperfection on a presentation that she's tried very, very hard to perfect.
And then there's Verso. Her gaze drifts from his eyes, breaking contact, to his scar. Her hand twitches at her side, reaching instinctively, before she stills it. The faint smile she'd been wearing lingers. Thinning, but not quite gone.
"We'll match," she echoes lightly, dry warmth threading her voice. "Comme deux gouttes d'eau—"
The idiom had come up on one of the last few nights in Thaylen City. She'd written it down — phonetically — alongside all the other crumbs of words and curses and sentences she'd been collecting. But, oh! How she butchers the pronunciation. It almost sounds like one, maybe two words rather than four separate ones.
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"Comme deux gouttes d'eau," he repeats, enunciating each word so as to emphasize their distinctness. "Two peas in a pod."
The week prior seems to have set the tone for the coming ones, because the next several go on quite similarly. Jasnah no longer expects his presence at meetings he can be of no help in, and not having to endure feeling useless for hours on end helps his mood considerably. He spends the time he would have spent being, yes, background furniture on more enjoyable pursuits: practicing his piano, picking up whittling again, painstakingly drawing her that picture of Père Noël. He sketches Alicia incessantly, afraid he's going to forget what she looks like if he doesn't. It helps to have an outlet of expression, so the feelings don't just pile up inside him with nowhere else to go.
It's still challenging sometimes, especially in the stretches of days where Jasnah is so consumed with her work that he doesn't even seem to register as an afterthought in her mind. They've just gotten off another one of those; he's played Solitaire so many times in the past few days that he never wants to look at that deck of cards again. (At least for a couple of days.) They aren't exactly spending time together even now—he picks at the strings of his guitar while she looks at papers on her desk that are likely beyond his comprehension. He wonders if any of it has to do with that Ghostbloods faction her previous Wit sent her that letter about, but he doesn't ask for fear of sounding politically ignorant. Even if, well, he is politically ignorant.
Instead, he plays gentle melodies as she works; somehow, being background music is less objectionable than being background furniture. He's mostly silent otherwise, save for a few idle comments, until he finally notes a lull in the constant scritch-scratch of her pen and pipes up—still plucking at the strings— "You know, you never took me up on that dance lesson."
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Jasnah was not cleared to join Dalinar and the Mink for the Herdazian campaign — despite having spent days helping to shape its strategy. Someone, or a tidy coalition of someones, had made the argument that without plate, without blade, without Stormlight, she was a liability rather than an asset. And she hadn't challenged it. Not seriously. She knows the limits of her own leverage. She knows when pressing would weaken her position instead of strengthening it.
Still. She would have liked to be there. In the tent. In the room where decisions pivot into history. Her generals should see her present and active. Unbroken. So she compensates. Overcorrects. Longer hours. Relentless focus. Paperwork stacked like barricades. And threaded through it all: him.
The music had started almost accidentally, nights ago — she'd claimed his desk, in his room, without thinking. He'd drifted to the piano, and the sound had anchored her in a way she hadn't realized she needed. Tonight, it's her study instead. And it's the guitar, soft and unintrusive, something steady beneath the scratch of her pen. Familiar. Welcome. Chosen.
When she finally pauses, it's not from fatigue so much as an accumulation of thoughts that need sorting before she begins again. She stretches — slow, deliberate — arms lifting overhead before easing back down. She flexes her fingers against the edge of the desk, working tension out of her wrist, her forearm. And in that quiet pocket, she looks up.
He's there. Settled. At ease in her study in a way that still surprises her. Gratitude wells up first. If she has to be left behind, at least she isn't left alone. He's become part of the architecture of her days since the others left.
And then he mentions dancing lessons and (unhelpfully) something else tugs at her memory. A flash of the Shattered Plains. A highstorm. Watching him dance with someone else in a stormshelter.
Hmm.
She lets the silence stretch just long enough to be deliberate before answering And when she does, her tone composed. Almost aloof.
"Are you suggesting I should do so now?"
Her pen remains on the desk. Untouched. She watches him with the measured focus she often reserved for risk assessments. Deciding, maybe, whether or not she'd like for the answer to be yes.
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"I wouldn't dream of suggesting what the Queen of Alethkar should do," he says, obviously kind of bullshitting. He's made a few suggestions over their time together. But still, her reaction makes him think that perhaps he should handle this with a little more care. Make her feel like it's her idea.
"I'm just saying," he continues, eyes on the guitar strings and not her. Quite casual, if he does say so himself. "Dancing is good stress relief."
There are many things two people can do together that are good stress relief—he has ample experience with relieving his stress, personally—but very few that he feels he can actually suggest to her, so. Dancing.
"And as you've already seen, I happen to be an excellent teacher."
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But storms, the effect lands flat when he won't even look at her. So absorbed in his guitar.
So she watches him instead. Or, more accurately, his hands. The careful economy of his fingers as they strum and pluck. All of her attention shifts toward him rather than her statecraft. And annoyingly, this shift is a necessary maneuver: it takes her a minute or two to stop seeing the world as a problem set and start seeing him, instead. A minute or two to shake the ink off her thoughts. She's caught in that liminal space now, between Queen and Jasnah.
A minute or two means the difference between a flinty I don't require stress relief and a more humane yes, Verso, thank you for noticing.
But she gives herself only thirty seconds. So what she offers is:
"We'll see."
As in we'll see how excellent of a teacher you are as she kicks her chair back from her desk and gains her feet.
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"You've already seen me teach it," he points out, stretching his neck and loosening his shoulders. Over a month ago now, in that storm shelter, when they'd sat on that settee together and she'd acted like the thought of her being the student in that moment was unthinkable. Of course, he'd been so eager to impress that he'd been happy to walk up to their shelter-neighbors and practically beg one to dance with him; he's not sure he'd be quite so obvious now. Or at least he likes to think he wouldn't be.
"Do you remember the stance?"
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