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Ⅰ.
“Nice hair,” said a voice from behind Ialai.
“Fuck off,” Ialai said reflexively. She had gotten enough teasing from everyone she’d met about her stupid hair, black with blonde and red streaked through it. Storms, once her mother got over herself about “being proud of her heritage” or whatever…
“I wasn’t being sarcastic. I think it’s cool,” said the mysterious unknown person. Ialai spun around to see her. She was a spindly thing, tall and gloomy. Hair put up in the traditional braid, faux-emeralds in her hairpiece, left hand fiddling inside her safehand sleeve like someone who had just recently needed to start covering it. She was the third ward, presumably. Ialai had already met the insufferable Javalai a couple hours earlier.
“Oh. Well, thanks, I guess,” Ialai replied. She stuck her freehand out. “Ialai Matal.”
“Shalanah Sadeas,” said the other girl, returning the handshake.
“Sadeas? Like the highprince’s daughter?” Ialai gasped. If this girl was rich rich…
Shalanah snorted. “I wish. My great-grandpa was the highprince. My dad’s just fourth dahn, and that’s just because he’s a Shardbearer. Or, was. He lost his Blade in a duel. Still has the Plate, though.” She paused. “You have a blasphemous name.”
“I have three older brothers. Mom wanted a girl so bad. She got a little overexcited when I was born.” She grinned. “I’m the favorite, of course.”
“Lucky,” Shalanah muttered. Ialai decided to change the subject.
“I’m the politics of the Arts Science Politics Young Wardship,” said Ialai. “What about you?”
“Arts,” said Shalanah. “Not drawing, though. I’m terrible at that. I like to write.”
“Cool. What do you write?”
Shalanah lowered her voice. “Do you know what Shardhammer romance is?”
Ialai squealed. “I love Shardhammer romance! I’ve never met anyone else that does! Oh, we’re going to be best friends.”
“Well, I’m writing a Shardhammer romance about this man, Torol. He’s a second-born son from a poor family so he didn’t get as good training as his brother. But he fights so intensely, so powerfully, that he catches the eye of his general, Jezolin. He’s a bit older, but not by much. Bigger, hairier, more muscular, stronger. So you’d think he’d be the classic sword to Torol’s sheath. But actually as Torol trains and gets more and more skilled it becomes increasingly clear that he’s going to be the one to take Jezolin instead.” Shalanah hesitated. “I don’t know how I’m going to censor it for the program so I don’t have to turn in smut to my mentor. But I’ll figure that out when I get there.”
“That sounds so hot. I’ve got to read it at some point,” Ialai said, unable to keep a conspiratorial smile off her face.
“I’ll show it to you sometime. I’ve done tons of research on battle strategy and swordsmanship and day to day life out on a campaign as research. Mostly for the story. Also because it’s interesting.” Shalanah was starting to look a little bit more open, less like she was going to start crying any second.
“Masculine interests, eh? You into spicy food?”
“I’ve never had it,” Shalanah said. “Parents wouldn’t let me, and I don’t have any brothers to steal it from.”
So she wasn’t picking up on the euphemism. That probably meant she was just an ordinary good Vorin brightlady. A shame. She was cute.
Although she is younger than me, Ialai thought. Probably barely twelve to my almost thirteen. Pretty sheltered too, it sounds like. She might have just never heard it before. We’ll see.
Ⅱ.
Ialai and Shalanah quickly became inseperable. They studied together, ate together, had their own inside jokes. They stayed in each other’s rooms far after lights-out, and got in plenty of trouble for it. Neither of them cared.
Shalanah was coming out of her shell, though she still had peculiarities. Plenty of times, after the day was done when she and Ialai were studying in each other’s rooms, the first thing Ialai would do would be to change out of her formal clothes and into a looser, more casual dress meant to be worn with a glove. All of that meant undressing, letting Shalanah see her in undergarments and with safehand bare. It wasn’t weird (although Ialai sometimes wished that Shalanah would make it weird, make it sensual), but Shalanah never did the same. If she wore a havah all day, it would stay on even when Ialai was in Shalanah’s room instead of the other way around. What was up with that?
But still, Shalanah was not the nervous, shy girl she had been at the beginning of the wardship. She was good at gossiping, could really go for the throat. When the girls had to memorize passages from famous playwrights and recite them, she was the one that put the most into her performance. And most of all, she was not the picture of sweet innocence Ialai had assumed she was. She knew something of violence. She had started, and won, several fistfights with roaming teenage boys of ill repute, and the only reason she didn’t get in trouble for it was that Ialai didn’t tell anyone. “I know how to stab someone to death. Almost did it once, too. He caught me before I could do it, though, and he was bigger and stronger, so it didn’t end well,” she had said once. “But someday I’m going to make sure he fucking dies.” Ialai did not ask any further questions.
This night, however, was more relaxed, with Ialai poring over the history of the Sadeas highprinces three centuries ago, and Shalanah hard at work writing erotica about two soldiers fucking. “Your stupid ancestors are so boring,” Ialai complained.
“Storms, that sucks for you. I’m having a blast trying to think of a sexy word for butthole,” Shalanah replied.
“Entrance,” said Ialai, not looking up from her book.
“Entrance?”
“Trust me. People go crazy for entrance. Sounds romantic.” Ialai wrote down some notes and a timeline without committing any of the information to memory.
“I don’t want it to be romantic. These are two military men, getting raw and sexual. They don’t know flowery language. They just want to fuck,” Shalanah said.
“Fine, then say asshole. Can I read what you have already, by the way?”
“You can read the version I’m turning in for my mentor. The heavily censored version. She’s disappointed in the story, though. Being stupid.” Shalanah rifled through a drawer until she found a thick stack of papers. “She’s always saying stuff like, oh, you’re making Torol too perfect. He needs flaws to be compelling. Well, I don’t want him to have flaws. I want him to be perfect and sexy and desirable but also a total badass who can do anything. The story doesn’t work unless he’s all of that.”
“Naturally,” Ialai said drily. She was reading a wrestling scene. Jezolin’s thick, meaty body made Torol feel frustratingly small in comparison. Short, skinny. A turner of heads, but not a person who is good on the battlefield. But he could still persevere. He may not have looked strong, but he had physical strength nobody knew about. Sweat dripped down his back as he grappled with Jezolin, both of them getting a feel for each other, feeling the way they felt in the grip of each other. Things were going Torol’s way. He managed to pin Jezolin to the ground, felt him underneath him, panting, eyes wild. There was an unreadable look on his face… was it desire a close unshakeable bond between friends?
It needed work, but it did give her an idea for a pickup line that would hopefully break the massive heap of tension the two of them shared every time their hands brushed or they maintained eye contact for a little too long. If she could say something about a close unshakeable bond between friends, Shalanah would pick up on it. She just had to bring it up in a casual way. “So I hear Javalai is seeing a boy,” she said.
“She won’t shut up about him. It’s all she ever talks about. I’d never act like that,” Shalanah complained.
“I don’t know. I feel like I could be that annoying about the right person to show her how it feels.” Ialai bit the inside of her cheek, suddenly very nervous. “What about you?”
Shalanah was staring at her with a deathly serious look in her eyes. “I don’t currently feel that way about any of the boys I’ve met around here.”
“Any girls?” Ialai asked. It’s worth a try. Even if it ruins everything it’s worth a try.
At this, Shalanah leaned over and pulled Ialai into a kiss. It was an open-mouth kiss, which Ialai was more than willing to match, and although the kiss was very much two young teens who didn’t know what in Damnation they were doing, when they pulled away and Ialai opened her eyes again, she saw a flurry of passionspren. She’d never attracted those before.
“Does that answer your question?” Shalanah said softly.
“Thank you for not making me have to stand in front of you and confess my feelings. Storms.” Ialai straightened out her collar, which had gotten a little rumpled during the kiss.
“I haven’t ever felt this way about a girl before,” Shalanah admitted. “But it feels real. Feels like I want to stick around you until I get to the age where I get married off.”
“For sure,” Ialai said. “I mean, I’ve felt this way about other girls before, but you’re the first one who wanted me back.” She didn’t want to think about Shalanah getting married off, or getting married off herself.
Ⅲ.
Though most people in wardships stayed with their mentors year-round, being sixteen or seventeen and old enough to be out on their own, Ialai and Shalanah were both young enough that they’d be going home to their families near Middlefest and wouldn’t come back until Kelek’s month. Shalanah hadn’t known about this ahead of time, and was angry about it, but Ialai was… fine with it. She’d miss Shalanah deeply, but it wasn’t the end of the world. They’d both come back eventually.
Today the pair of them were trying to avoid thinking about this and think about hunky boys kissing instead. They were in the shady bookseller’s, the one who didn’t mind a barely-teenager and a preteen rifling through the self-published man-on-man smut in the back of the store, and Ialai was trying to find something worth reading.
“This one is about a man and his ardent,” Ialai said, but Shalanah was standing transfixed flipping through a book titled Confessions of a Literate Man.
“It’s not a Shardhammer romance, it’s a memoir, but I want this one,” Shalanah said.
The book was more of a lengthy chapbook than a traditional book, with cartoonish illustrations in the margins. It was perhaps the only copy that existed anywhere. Shalanah looked more embarrassed buying it than she ever did buying her smut.
Ialai, having older friends back at home who were girls into other girls, was vaguely familiar with the concept of literate men. They lived in anonymity, never talking about their childhoods or where they came from, and had childless marriages with their lovers. They bound their chests with special garments, injected sap derived from a mystical tree in the West for hairier bodies and lower voices, claimed that they grew up as sickly young boys who had never been trained for battle but were ready now and wanted to learn.
A lot of things about Shalanah made more sense in this light.
Shalanah tore through the book, and talked about it nonstop with Ialai. “I can’t believe it. I can become a boy. I can do it. Someday maybe I’ll get to do it and I won’t be-“
“In a wardship?” Ialai said.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. I just need to find someone willing to teach me how to fight. I know all the theory, I learned it for my writing project, I just need to figure out how to do it. And get on that sap.”
“You have a long way to go, I think,” said Ialai. “Like, you don’t even have a name picked out.”
Shalanah shifted uncomfortably, then mumbled, “I’ve had one picked out for a while now. If I were a boy, I mean. What I’d want my name to be. I just can’t use it because I’m using it for the Shardhammer romance.”
“You don’t have to not use a name just because you’re writing about someone named the same thing, Torol,” Ialai said.
There was a pause, and then a single gloryspren. “I really like that. It’s nice to hear another person call me that. You should call me that from now on, when we’re alone. So I can get used to it, so I respond to it like it’s what I was born with once I can get out of here and become highprince of the Sadeas princedom.”
“That’s gonna take a lot of murder. Luckily, I’m making connections every day.” Ialai grinned. “As long as I get to be your wife.”
“I wouldn’t have anyone else,” Torol said, and he kissed her on the cheek.
Ⅳ.
Coming home for Middlefest was fine. Ialai told her parents she was seeing a boy she’d met in the village, his name was Torol, and she really saw a future with him. No use contacting his parents for setting up a betrothal yet, as he was secretive about his background (this much was true), but rest assured he was from a good family.
Ialai stole clothes that her slight, small older brother no longer wanted, or that no longer fit. Old takamas, once-trendy formalwear. Trousers, shirts. Anything that didn’t have a safehand sleeve. In addition, she put out her feelers and managed to get her hands on an old binding garment. She planned to give them to Torol once they were back together.
The second Torol and Ialai were back at the wardship, they compared notes about their breaks. “Mine was boring,” Ialai said. “Not as much to do there as I remembered.”
“Parents sucked as usual, but I met an older boy who’s teaching me how to fight. He says I’m a natural, and I’ve already got the basics of ordinary swords pretty much down. He’s staying down here in the meantime, and I’m going to learn about Plate and Blade from him soon. And Shardhammers.”
Ialai snorted. “Sometimes I forget those are real weapons.”
“I don’t know if it counts as cheating, when you and I aren’t together, not really, but he’s been… intimate with me. Because girls in battle is his kink. And I mean, I don’t really want it, he’s too old for me and the way he fucks me is not the way I want to be fucked, but it is what it is. He’s the stronger one, he gets to take what he wants. It’ll be different once I can beat him.” Torol said this all casually, as if he was talking about something as innocuous as skipping rocks on a lake.
Ialai didn’t know what to say, so she just said, “It’s not cheating. We aren’t official. It’s fine.”
But now, they were alone in Torol’s bedroom, hoping and praying as hard as they could that nobody would come in on them and get them in trouble. “You okay changing in front of me?” Ialai asked.
“We’re practically betrothed. It’s fine.” Torol shimmied out of his havah, reached for the binding garment and put it on as quickly as possible. This was the first time Ialai had seen Torol in any state of undress, and rather than get flustered or aroused by it, she focused in on his left arm, a few angry red cuts mingled in with the purple-brown scars that went up his forearm. She didn’t confront him on it, knowing that this was behavior that could get him sent to the ardents. She instead focused on Torol pulling his hair free, letting it cascade around his shoulders (had it always been so curly?) and pulling a small bit of hair into a topknot. A traditional Alethi soldier hairstyle from the Sunmaker’s time.
“Here’s your pants,” Ialai said, handing him the rest of the clothing and watching him pull it on. It didn’t fit quite right, was a little baggier on him than a tailored outfit would be, but in a Sadeas princedom uniform, standard seven years ago…
“Storms,” Torol whispered, giving himself a once-over in the mirror. “It looks good. I look good.” Gloryspren popped up above his head. “I don’t want to wear anything else ever again.”
Ialai grinned.
V.
Torol had his position in the wardship terminated when he was fourteen, when Javalai tattled about the pornographic scene he was writing in the common area. This was apparently fine with Torol, who was glad to not have to read The Way of Kings for class, but still meant he was going back home, away from Ialai. And Ialai couldn’t stand this.
“Was it worth it, Javalai? Were the cheap thrills you got from having the grown-ups tell you what a good girl you are worth kicking an innocent young woman out of an academic career?” Ialai had told her mockingly one evening at dinner.
“She wasn’t innocent. You and her were having sex with each other,” Javalai said indignantly. “I didn’t have proof of that, but I had proof of her writing indecent fiction. For class even!”
“We’ve never had sex,” Ialai lied. They’d been quietly practicing on each other.
“Then why were you in her room so much?” Javalai said, a smirk on her face.
“Fuck off, Javalai,” Ialai said. Storming girl.
Ialai got letters from Torol. They were difficult to read emotionally. All the troubles he’d never been able to talk about in person came through in his letters. Father’s temper is worse than ever, and I’m getting hurt because I don’t know when to quit, he’d say one week. Mother says she’s quitting drinking, but I give her four days before she’s back to her two bottles of auburn every day. There were the little victories. I’m getting so good at fighting with Plate. I wish I could fight with a Shardblade, so when I win one, I’m not unprepared. There were the outpourings of feelings. I don’t think it’s going to get better. I’m going to be stuck here forever. I wish I were dead.
One week, Ialai got a letter that was just three words long. I’m marrying Abador. The older boy teaching him how to fight. Ialai figured this wasn’t by choice. Torol never seemed all that fond of him. The letters in the following weeks were largely apologetic. I’ll miss you so much, Ialai, but there’s no other way with my situation. Besides, it’ll get me away from my family faster. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. The wedding’s called off. Abador isn’t marrying me, and he’s not doing any more training with me, either. Mother’s pregnant again so Father’s gotten rid of all the auburn and won’t let her get more. This is causing a lot of arguments. I wish you were here to help me through this. Can you maybe find a way to make Abador die?
There was absolute silence for a few weeks. Ialai sent an assassin as promised, her first hit ever. It gave her a rush of excitement, made her feel grown up and like she was helping in some small way. But that didn’t stop Torol’s ten-year-old sister, the only real supporter in his family, from sending a message. Torol is in Mourn’s Vault Hospital. He tried to kill himself. They’re still trying to decide if he should be sent home or to the ardents. He wants to see you.
Ialai sent out a request for a leave of absence that evening, but did not wait for formal approval. She rode all by herself to Mourn’s Vault.
“I’m here to see Shalanah Sadeas,” Ialai said at the front desk, and after a fair bit of bribery to make sure she was let in, and a thorough check to make sure Ialai wasn’t bringing in anything that could be used for harm, she was led to a room being watched over by a rotating team of nurses and ardents.
“They let you come,” Torol said, relieved, in a weak voice. “You dyed your hair.”
“I was sick of getting shit for it. Besides, if I’m going to be wife of a highprince someday, I need to look presentable, right?” Ialai tried to smile, but seeing Torol, hair done up in a braid, in a non-standard hospital gown that was colored like a prison outfit, safehand covered, was not something that inspired smiles. “What happened?”
“The blackbane I used was too fresh,” Torol said. “It didn’t paralyze me, it just gave me muscle spasms and a seizure. I’m okay now, they’re just keeping an eye on me.” He paused. “I was so sure I was never going to see you again.”
“You sure tried your hardest to make that come true,” Ialai said. “I’m glad you fucked up.”
“I don’t want to go back home,” Torol said slowly. “I don’t want to go away to the ardents, I’m on my best behavior so they don’t do that to me, but I don’t want to go back home either. My family hasn’t even bothered to visit me.”
“Then come live with my family,” Ialai said. “They’d love to take you in.” This was a lie. If Torol didn’t appear masculine enough, his presence would confuse and shock them and leave both him and Ialai to fend for themselves out in the wider world. But if it kept him alive…
“Okay. I’ll try to make that work,” Torol said, and Ialai breathed a sigh of relief.
Ⅵ.
Torol and Ialai soon took up lodging in a luxury hotel. It was the kind that usually housed important lighteyes making political visits to the Sadeas princedom’s capital, the ones not close enough to get to stay in the highprince’s many guest rooms. Ialai knew people who knew people, and because of this she was able to stay as long as she wanted for free.
The two of them set up shop for what would be their most ambitious plan to date: killing their way through Torol’s family tree and pinning it all down on his father. This would take a lot of work, but not as much as expected. It seemed a lot of families had only one son, or none at all. This left Torol’s father sixth in line for the throne, a perfectly reasonable amount of murder to spread out over a year.
It was easiest, and less suspicious, to kill off some of Torol’s closer relatives first. Close was still a relative term; his father had one younger sister and no living parents, but the second cousins and such were still people Torol had met before, known personally. “They weren’t anything special. The world isn’t missing much without them,” he had said callously once, and Ialai agreed out of principle. Nothing was more important than being the person in charge.
Torol turned fifteen, Ialai was going on sixteen. They still lived in the hotel. Torol had managed to get men’s clothes tailored to fit him and had burned all his old clothing, and managed to find someone who would sell him the sap he needed. Ialai went into town to touch up her hair dye once a month. They eked out an existence, just barely.
By now there were only two people between Torol and the throne. The original highprince, and Torol’s father. It was taking a lot of political acumen for Ialai to pull off assassinating the most important person in the princedom, but it helped that he had lots of enemies, one of whom was Torol’s father himself. This would make him being behind this even more likely in the eyes of the public. But then, what was Sadeas princedom politicking if not the most corrupt force in all of Alethkar?
“Congratulations, heir apparent,” Ialai said to Torol on the day of his father’s coronation.
“My stupid baby brother is probably still the quote unquote heir apparent. I’ll have to go on the record as his eldest son who was never on the records. It’ll track because Mother was always so terrible at getting this stuff submitted.” Torol pulled a face. “Not anymore, of course. She actually stuck with the not drinking after my brother was born, and is a new woman now or something. I don’t believe her. But if she knows what’s good for her, she’ll keep her mouth shut.”
“I’m thinking the next step from here is… have you heard about the Kholin highprince? How he went and declared himself a king, and now he and his brother are trying to unite Alethkar?”
“Vaguely,” Torol grunted.
“Well, he needs an ally, and you’re all for the idea but your father is not, so we just have your sister send them a letter saying please take care of him for us,” Ialai said. “We’ll probably have to go down to your family to meet up with the new king. Is that okay?”
“I mean, I’ll do what I have to do,” Torol replied.
When everything worked out, when Dalinar Kholin stood, covered in blood, above Torol’s father’s corpse, Ialai noticed a glint in Torol’s eye, as if he was seeing the most attractive man to ever live. Dalinar did seem Torol’s type. Bigger than him, stronger than him. Probably pretty hairy if he took his shirt off. Definitely the Jezolin of their relationship. She was okay with this, as long as Torol let her watch and remembered that she came first. A real life Shardhammer romance!
“Who’s the twelve year old?” Dalinar asked Gavilar.
“The new Highprince Sadeas,” Torol said indignantly.
“And the girl?” Gavilar said
“That’s Ialai. My betrothed.”
“Seems kind of creepy for a grown woman to be betrothed to a twelve year old,” said Dalinar.
“I’m fifteen,” said Torol.
“Of course you are,” said Gavilar gently. “But it doesn’t matter, as long as you can fight.”
“Try me in a one-on-one ordinary sword duel. I can fight, I swear,” Torol insisted.
Ialai got to watch, with great interest, Torol and Gavilar dueling it out on the lawn. Torol managed to kick Gavilar’s ass at the last second, which left them both surprised. “This kid’s a natural,” he said. “We could really use him.”
“I’ll make sure someone writes you,” Torol said a few days later, once he was officially highprince and had made provisions for his campaign. “And when you’re done with your studies, I’ll marry you.”
Ialai smiled as she rode her horse back to the town where she had been learning. She had a future ahead of her, and Torol was happy. And that was all she could have asked for.