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Chapter Text

The fact that a disproportionate amount of the boys who undertook the witcher trials were killed during them was not an obscure one, by any means - the statistic, too, was quoted as three out of ten boys surviving often enough to be somewhat common knowledge to those who cared enough to actually bring up the topic. It was too bad that most people simply didn’t; perhaps, Jaskier thought idly, if they did, they’d have a tad more respect for the witchers everybody loved to scorn.

Or perhaps - and this was more than a little likely - Jaskier was just a tad bit biased on the matter.

Either way, the three to seven ratio was something he’d known before he’d known most things, as well as the specifics involved with the little fact - such as it was the Trial of the Grasses that killed most of these, as the vast majority did not take too well to the mutations that were used to make one a witcher in the first place.

See, everyone had expected Jaskier to end up as one of the seven rather than the three throughout his younger years, and nobody had been particularly shy about saying it. Why would they? Jaskier himself had accepted it as a fact long before he’d even actually had to do anything. He’d been soft, emotional, and altogether not someone who would fare too well in situation involving extreme violence... or any kind of violence, really. Not to mention, he’d been so scrawny and weak that the general consensus had been that he’d drop dead the moment anyone tried to induce any kind of mutation in him, so it didn’t really matter all that much anyways.

Nobody was more surprised than Jaskier himself when he emerged on the other side, soft and emotional and very much alive. His expectations he’d had for himself had very much been subverted - he’d thought that, on the very slim chance that he did manage to survive the trials, he’d come out of them cold and harsh, his childish idealism tempered by the cruel realities of his world, as well as the supposed suppression of emotions that he’d been told would occur along the way.

Either he was a tad stronger than he’d thought himself to be, or merely far stupider, and Jaskier had no idea which it was.

Regardless of which it was, though, he had quickly abandoned the Path once he was out in the world. He’d chosen a name, and pursued what he truly wanted in life - and it was music, not fighting monsters, because of course it was - and he’d only deigned to act as a witcher until he gathered the not insignificant amount of coin needed to buy himself not only a glamour but the discretion of its creator, which had cost almost as much as the damn thing itself.

If anyone who’d ever known him could see him now - and Jaskier wasn’t entirely sure why he hadn’t, in fact, ended up crossing paths with another witcher, since it wasn’t as if he’d been avoiding them, and given that he’d very specifically ensured that his glamour would also cover his scent to avoid any identification by that route, they shouldn’t have been avoiding him either - if anyone who’d ever known him could see him know, he doubted they’d be too surprised.

Miffed, sure, maybe a bit amused, but definitely not surprised.

As to how well life as a travelling bard was treating him, though - well. If the cry of abort yourself that Jaskier currently found being hurled at him was any indication, he was as much unsuited to it as he was to wandering around hunting monsters. Sure, he wasn’t bad, by any means, but for some reason - and Jaskier suspected the stone-cold witcher upbringing - he just didn’t have that instinct for what would really click with his audience. At least, he hoped that was it.

Ordinarily he would have called it a day and moved on to the next town, but something, or rather someone, had caught his eye.

There was a witcher in the tavern.

Another one. A witcher that was not, in fact, currently making an utter fool of himself under a glamour with a lute, in front of a crowd that was providing him with his next meal via heckling.

This witcher also seemed like a very grumpy one, who didn’t seem like he’d appreciate a stranger waltzing up to him and striking up a casual conversation.

Still, Jaskier’s bleeding heart reasoned, he looked so lonely.

The rational part of him, the one that agreed that trying to make friends with Geralt of fucking Rivia, because of course that’s who someone with Jaskier’s luck would run into, out of a misplaced sense of pity and compassion, was a stupid idea, was loudly overshadowed by the dominant, idiot part of him that seemed to love to make terrible decisions on a regular basis.

So naturally, Jaskier found himself loitering in front of the witcher, with absolutely no idea what to say to the damn man.

“I love the way you just... sit in the corner and brood.”

“I’m here to drink alone.”

Ah. Well, that hadn’t worked at all. Attempt two, then.

“Everyone else here has had some kind of review for me, except for... Well, you,” and that was a terrible way to strike up a conversation, well done Jaskier, but he needed some kind of excuse to talk to the man. “So, come on! Three words or less. Don’t want to keep a man with... bread in his pants waiting.”

Geralt of fucking Rivia regarded him for a moment - and that moment was just long enough to make Jaskier wonder uncomfortably if he’d just put himself on the Butcher of Blaviken’s personal shit list - before apparently deciding to humour him.

“They don’t exist.”

“What don’t exist?”

In hindsight, three words or less was a terrible stipulation.

“The creatures in your song,” the other witcher elaborated gruffly.

Of course they didn’t exist! Jaskier wasn’t stupid, he knew damn well the kinds of things one could expect to find lurking in the wilderness, but there was this little thing called artistic license, wherein he could elaborate certain aspects of a story to achieve a greater impact...

He bit his tongue. The last thing he wanted to end up doing was patronising the man.

“And how would you know?” he asked instead.

If Jaskier had been slightly drunker, he’d have sworn that that was incredulity he saw in the witcher’s eyes.

“Oh, fun,” he said instead, slowly, hoping that his acting skills passed muster and he didn’t come off as suspicious... which was unlikely, if one were to be realistic about it. “White hair, big old loner, two very, very scary-looking swords... You’re the witcher! Geralt of Rivia!”

The Geralt of Rivia himself, however, had gotten up and started to walk away, clearly done with the bard that had decided to graciously interrupt his brooding. Jaskier merely got up and followed him.

“Called it!”

He hadn’t really called anything, but it felt like a cool thing to say at the time.

Of course, the man kept ignoring him, but Jaskier found himself comfortably ignoring his ignoring. He had seemed lonely, at first, and now Jaskier wasn’t surprised at to why - Geralt of fucking Rivia seemed like a poster child for every single stereotype of witchers that had ever been conceived.

That did not mean he was allowed to continue being lonely and miserable, though.

Not on Jaskier’s watch.

He decided at that moment, then, that Geralt’s business was to be his business, until the man learnt to lighten up a little. Possibly longer than that. In fact, hopefully longer than that. Jaskier was the type to get rather easily attached, and he did rather feel like Geralt would be the kind of person he’d enjoy the company of - regardless of how much of a nuisance he found the bard to be.

He loitered around a few steps behind Geralt, so as to only seem vaguely stalker-ish rather than overtly so, whilst the man took a contract from a villager to hunt down a devil that had been stealing grain.

Now, Jaskier may have been a pretty shit witcher, but even he was reasonably certain that devils did not exist.

Whatever it was, though, it would make a damn interesting fight to watch - Geralt of Rivia, the strongest of the witchers, could be relied upon to deliver a good show, after all. Unlike the bard currently trailing him, he was actually suited to a life of monster-fighting, and was damn good at it. Perhaps Jaskier could even get a song or two out of it? A real-life battle that he could actually bear witness to seemed like much better subject material than... Well, the stuff that got him pelted with bread and told to abort himself.

Okay, fine, Jaskier was willing to concede that he had a teeny-tiny, incy-wincy, minuscule little ulterior motive in deciding to attach himself to Geralt.

Not that that was his sole motive! He did, after all, stand by the opinion that the man was in desperate need of a friend.

He just... happened to also stand by the opinion that having a figure such as Geralt of Rivia as a muse for his songs would be great for his career. And really, Geralt should be pleased at this, given the hit that his reputation had taken after Blaviken, even if it was partially his fault for committing mass-murder in the middle of the town. That was generally an action that should be avoided. Jaskier himself had never committed mass-murder, but even he knew that that was something that should generally be done away from the eyes of the public.

The bard snapped out of his contemplation once Geralt began to move away from the local, quick to embark on the quest which he had been tasked with.

“So... A devil, huh?”

Geralt didn’t acknowledge Jaskier’s presence, but that was fine. They had time, after all, and there was nothing quite like a near-death experience to bring people together. No need to rush.

“I don’t suppose you need a hand, at all? Because I have two. One for each of the... uh... devil’s horns.”

This time, he did get a response, in the form of a grunted dismissal. “Go away.”

“I won’t be but silent back-up,” Jaskier promised, quite truthfully - if he did deign to intervene in any way, it would most certainly be in a manner that Geralt could not play witness to. He’d spent too much time and effort and coin procuring the glamour he wore to blow his cover just because a situation got minorly inconvenient.

Geralt again chose to utilise his apparently favoured tactic of ignoring his brand new travelling companion.

That was fine. Jaskier could speak plenty enough for two people. “Look, I did give your criticism some thought, you know, and I realised that real adventures would indeed make much better subject matter for songs, and you, good sir, smell like you are absolutely chock-full of them. Adventures, I mean. Amongst other things. I mean, what is that? Is that onion? It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, you smell of death, and destiny... Heroics, and heartbreak...”

“It’s onion,” the witcher interrupted gruffly, not even sparing Jaskier a passing glance.

Ouch. Now that... That was a proper dismissal. Was that better or worse than the ignoring?

“Right. Right, yeah,” Jaskier continued, pretending that he hadn’t taken the hint for what it was. “Ooh, I could be your barker! Travelling along with you, singing the heroic tales of the mighty Geralt of Rivia, the Butcher of Blaviken!”

Geralt and, by extension, his horse stopped in their tracks. The witcher turned slowly to face Jaskier, who had his moment of realisation a tad too late for it to really mean anything.

Crap. He shouldn’t have said that. He should not have said that. Jaskier of all people should have known better, that was clearly not a kind title, of course he would resent its use-

“Come here,” Geralt grunted, and Jaskier did, ignoring his instinct to not do that, and instead start running as fast as he could in the opposite direction - how quickly he’d allowed all his competence in battle to shrivel up and die, if that was his first impulse in this situation - placing himself at the Witcher’s mercy.

“Yeah?”

Jaskier had no idea how much Geralt had held back on the gut-punch he delivered, if he’d held back at all, but it had Jaskier doubled over and doing his best not to fall to the floor despite the stronger physique he had under the glamour, winded to boot.

Yeah, he’d fucked up a little bit there.

Still, he filed the incident away for further contemplation. Apparently even Geralt of Rivia, the most witcher-y witcher out there had feelings too - and Jaskier had managed to hurt them within, what? Less that half an hour of knowing the man?

“Come on, Roach.”

So he could talk to his horse, but not to Jaskier?

Well, he’d have plenty of time to coax conversation from the man, provided he managed to stick around long enough. Preferably without unwittingly delivering a mortal blow to the man’s pride.

Jaskier righted his lute on his back, and set off to catch up with the man who had just sucker-punched him in the gut.

He was, he thought to himself, truly a master of good life choices.

Chapter Text

“Coën,” Julian mumbled, half-asleep, and he heard a soft noise of affirmation from his friend. “Coën, do you think it’ll hurt?”

“Probably,” Coën said, an edge to his voice, filled with an emotion that Julian couldn’t quite place. “I mean, it changes your entire body. Mutates it a lot. It can’t not hurt.”

“Mm.”

“Are you scared?”

Julian, at that moment, just wanted to scream at his friend, and cry, and yell that of course he was scared, he was going to die, and it was going to be soon, and, thanks to this whole goddamn witcher thing that nobody in their right mind would think Julian had any chance of surviving, he was going to die in unimaginable pain. Of course he was. It was like the whole concept of witchers themselves was built around the goal of causing as much drawn-out pain as possible.

But Julian was too tired, or too... something, he supposed, to actually do any of that. Instead, he just let himself slump against his friend’s shoulder.

Coën, after a second’s hesitation, leant his own head atop Julian’s.

“Are you scared you’re going to die?”

Julian let out a weak snort of laughter. “No, Coën, I’m scared that I’ll live to see another fucking day. Of course I’m scared because I’m going to die.”

He could hear his friend’s frown in his voice, as the older boy tried to console him. “It’s not a sure thing that you’re going to die, Julian. You have the same odds as any other one of us.”

The shake of his head was minute, but, leaning against each other as they were, Coën must have felt it. “No. Everyone else is stronger.”

“Why? Because they decided to pick up the battle-hardened warrior act at eight fucking years old? Give me a break, Julek, I thought you were smarter than that.”

Julek. He hadn’t been called that in years, not since-

“I meant physically.”

That made Coën snort in amusement. “The hell did they pull that from, then? You’re all kids. None of you are going to have the musculature of a grown man. Especially not you lot, you’re not even eight.”

“You’re kind of a kid, too, Coën.”

“Compared to you little ones, I might as well be an adult.”

It was true that there was somewhat of an age gap between Coën and the rest of the trainees - Julian was barely seven, and he was by no means the youngest, whereas Coën was somewhere around his twelfth year of life. It had been a little odd to Julian at first that he should be present - the general witcher consensus was that the younger the boys were, the better, since then less time and effort was wasted training boys who did not survive the mutations, the Trial of the Grasses - and, they’d told him, only three out of ten of them did - but if Coën, who’d shown up one day at Kaer Seren a few weeks before Julian himself was left there, was deemed to be adequate witcher material, then he was adequate witcher material.

Still, to call Coën an adult was a stretch.

“Why’d you come here?” Julian asked instead, voice small.

“I had to,” Coën said, vaguely. “I doubt anyone’s here because they want to be. Except maybe Andras.”

“Andras is a dick,” Julian slurred, before launching into a childish and unflattering impression of their peer. “Look at me, I’m Andras, I’m so much better than everyone else, because I ran away from home to be a witcher because I’m so fucking stupid!”

“Fucking stupid is right,” Coën smirked, giving Julian a faint poke. “Don’t listen to any of the crap he spouts. I’m fairly certain he’s told everyone they’re going to die at some point.”

“He’s told me most, though. And everyone agreed.”

“Because you’re a sane, normal person. And they don’t know how to handle that.”

“Sure,” said Julian, and Coën never failed to be surprised by how much sarcasm such a young kid could inject into his voice.

“Besides, you’re not the only one they fling shit at. They go after everyone, including each other.”

“Even you?”

“Even me,” Coën snorted, but Julian was fairly certain that most of Coën’s reassurances were only meant to make Julian feel better. Even if anyone did throw jabs at the older boy, he knew how to handle them, unlike Julian. “I swear, if Andras is the one who dies, we’ll all be celebrating.”

Dying.

Right.

The Trial of the Grasses was looming in front of them, and Julian was going to die.

Oh, fuck, Julian was going to fucking die.

He was going to die, and precious few people were going to care. Hell, maybe the only person who’d actually give a damn that he ever existed was Coën. He was going to die, and he was going to die alone and forgotten and not really having done any of the things he’d wanted to do with his life.

He remembered being four, almost five, in a grand house that was far more warm and welcoming than Kaer Seren, excited about the lute that one of his tutors had shown him, and played to him, seemingly delighted that the aloof and fanciful child he was charged with had deigned to pay attention to him for once. He remembered begging his mother to let him learn.

He remembered never thinking that anything bad could ever happen to him, remembered his mother kissing his cheek goodbye for the last time, cradling his newborn baby brother.

He remembered the journey.

He remembered not really getting it until he arrived at Kaer Seren.

He got it now, though.

“Julian,” Coën said, breaking the silence. “I don’t know who’s going to die and who isn’t. But if you die and I don’t, I promise I’ll remember you.”

“Name all of your horses after me,” Julian demanded, suddenly a lot more confident. “If I die, you have to name every single one of your horses Julian Alfred Pankratz.”

Coën laughed. “You don’t need to die for me to do that, Julian. That’s a great idea. I’ll name all of my horses Julian Alfred Pankratz anyways, and then I’ll have to put up with the fact that you’re competing over the spot of ‘Favourite Julian’ with my horse.”

“Hey!”

Julian’s voice, though indignant, was tinged with amusement. Coën smiled. They simply sat in silence for a while after that, as the moon climbed higher in a sky Coën could barely make out, what with the small window that let light into the musty little room - the room that was most notably not their dorm - being at the very edge of his peripheral vision.

“I’ll have you know,” Julian murmured, though his eyes were closed and voice sleepy, “that I will always be the better Julian.”

When they woke the next day, as the sun was climbing into the sky, they were still leaning against each other, albeit now both sporting terrible aches in their necks from their unorthodox sleeping positions.

When Julian was taken to the room later that day, he tried to be glad that what was probably his last night was at least spent with Coën. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, in all honesty - he’d meant to live every second of the night and treasure it, before the agony that he knew awaited him in the morning.

Erland of Larvik, the grandmaster of the School of the Griffin, watched as they prepared for Julian’s trial... for Julian’s death. Coën had sworn that the old witcher had a soft spot for Julian, which Julian had considered - after all, Erland probably knew of his noble heritage, and it was widely accepted that he held chivalry in high esteem, and that was a concept Julian had already been familiar with. He probably liked Julian’s education, and Julian’s articulate speech, and Julian’s background, rather than Julian himself.

The boy could make out no hint of sorrow behind the man’s eyes as he watched him, the his young heart thumping loudly and fast in his chest. Why would there be any? He had watched countless boys suffer this fate. Julian was not special.

“Sit,” Erland commanded, gesturing towards the bench... or was it a pallet? Regardless, it was long, wide, and wooden, and Julian took a seat.

He wanted, desperately, with all his being, to ask what was going to happen. To ask how he was going to die. But try as he might, Julian’s dry throat couldn’t get the words out.

“You have questions,” Erland stated, and Julian tried to agree, but his throat still wasn’t cooperating.

Instead, he nodded his head and bowed, hoping that Erland wouldn’t take his silence for contempt.

“You will be given potions,” the witcher told the boy, and Julian liked to imagine that there was a softness in the man’s tone that was surely just a product of his own desperate, wishful thinking. “Multiple potions, over the course of several days. These potions will induce the mutations that make a witcher, a witcher. Your metabolism, your flesh, the whole of your body... All will be altered in the process. The side effects will be extremely unpleasant, as you well know. You are to drink this potion, and you will remain on the pallet. Do you understand?”

Julian, heart racing faster and louder than it ever had before, nodded thickly.

Erland held out a vial to Julian, and the boy took it. It was thick, and clear in colour.

He held it before his eyes, blinking away tears. What if he smashed the potion and ran? What if he refused to drink it? What if he-

If he didn’t drink the potion, he’d be alone in a world where he had nowhere to go, not anymore.

Kaer Seren was where he belonged now. And in Kaer Seren, he was expected to drink the potion.

Julian closed his eyes, letting the tears fall, and downed the potion in four gulps.

At first, nothing happened.

He opened his eyes.

Saw Erland.

And then

Julian felt the pounding in his head first of all, fading from nothing to excrutiating pain within the span of a few seconds, spikes of pain intensifying as if it were a horse, galloping towards-

And then it was unbearable, and his hands were clutching his head, and he couldn’t see Erland anymore, though he was sure his eyes were open. He pressed his fingers, his uncomfortably warm fingers, to his forehead, because it felt like his head was being rent in half, as if his brains were about to explode and come bubbling out of his forehead if he didn’t hold it in. He couldn’t see where he was, he could barely feel - he heard his body making contact with the wooden pallet but all he could focus on was how his head was going to burst, he was going to die, he was going to die-

And he felt something warm in his throat, something harsh and coppery and warm, and barely he heard is own hacking cough as something warm and thick and wet splattered over his chin, he couldn’t feel anything other than the tearing, boiling onslaught raging in his skull.

He heard it again, that raw, rasping burst of air and blood trying to escape his throat, which felt raw and rough like that time he skinned his arm but it wasn’t his arm, it was his throat, and the pain barely registered in his mind because it was to busy burning, he was burning, he was coming undone from the inside out in a maelstrom of searing agony.

Julian was dying.

Julian wished he was dying.

He was so stupid, he thought, before the thought was burnt up, burnt up or melted by the assault that his mind had become. Did he really want to live? Had he really wanted to feel the blistering barrage of pain spreading across his body like a river, like a plague?

What was he doing? Could he move? Could he feel anything beyond the scalding pain that he’d become?

There was liquid in his throat. There was liquid in his throat, why was it going the wrong way? It was cold and welcoming and it was met by a tumult of warm copper coming from the other direction, and it was gone, and Julian was engulfed in flame, he couldn’t see, or hear, or feel, or think, and he wasn’t

He couldn’t

He was so-

He was gone.

When Julian came to, his head - his head was pounding, it was pounding, but it wasn’t burning. His body felt limp, and weak, and exhausted, but the ache was nothing compared to the flames that he’d been a second ago.

The flames that had engulfed him.

He couldn’t move, but he could feel. His breath rattled in his throat, but he could feel it. It was over. He was tired, gods, he was tired, but it was over.

It was over, and his mouth tasted of the bland soup Coën was always telling him to finish up instead of copper.

“You’ve done well,” he heard Erland’s voice say. “You’ve done well, Julian.”

He simply lay there for a while, exhausted and burnt up. He felt his muscles twitch, glad to be free of the pain, and then he heard Erland say drink this, but his heart wasn’t pounding, it was, too slow, something was wrong, but his arm reached out anyways, and he felt the viscous liquid pour down his throat, and he didn’t want to burn again, but it wasn’t his head or his body that shattered into a thousand pieces, it was his eyes.

The pain wasn’t a maelstrom of fire this time, it was sharp and tangible, and it was like daggers were being pushed into his eyes. Was he going blind? Oh, fuck, was he going blind? His hands, warm and sticky with something, reached up, unbidden, clawing at his face, trying the get the daggers, get the blades, get them out, but then his hands were pulled back by something cold, someone cold, they were holding him back, but his eyes, his eyes were being cut, they were being cut out of his head and he couldn’t stop it-

Julian heard his own scream, high and thick and pained, tearing itself from his throat. He needed to stop it, he needed to stop the daggers from pushing into his skull, he needed his hands free, fuck, but then he felt something in his throat, it was the cold, it was water, he was being given water, and he choked it down as best he could, he tried not to scream, he was trying not to scream, but his eyes, damn it!

The next time the pain abated, and the blades in his eyes turned into itches, like the itches he’d get if he stayed outside in the spring too long, back in the gardens in Lettenhove, he was lucid.

He let out a weak noise that could have been anything, but definitely meant exhaustion and pain, and he felt a cool hand on his shoulder.

“Julian,” came Erland’s voice. Was that his hand on Julian’s shoulder?

“I-” Julian coughed.

“You did well, Julian,” Erland said, and Julian was fairly certain that it wasn’t just his imagination this time - there was a hint of softness to his voice.

“I- I just-” Julian managed weakly. “I- Food.”

A gruff chuckle greeted his ears, and a dizziness engulfed him as Erland helped him upright. “Julian. Focus. Focus on my voice, and do not open your eyes, yet. I’m going to feed you, now.”

Julian was internally a tiny bit mortified that he was currently being spoon-fed by Erland of Larvik himself, but gratefully swallowed the soup that the grandmaster witcher offered him.

He didn’t much care, anymore, that the soup tasted like dust and parchment.

He gulped it down greedily.

Julian felt Erland leave, assumedly once the soup was finished, and he leaned back against the wall.

His heart felt wrong.

It had been racing when he first entered the room, he know, pounding like the world was going to end, but now, he could barely feel it. The soft sound of his own heartbeat seemed so... sparse. So slow. So strange.

Julian cracked open his eyes.

He realised his mistake immediately when he was assaulted by a rendering of the world around him in overwhelming clarity.

A scream tore itself, inadvertently, from his throat. The light was too much, fuck, it was too bright, and it made Julian’s head ache as it tore its way through his eyes and into his skull. It hurt, damn it, it hurt so much, it was like his entire field of vision had been taken up by the fucking sun, and it... it burned.

Oh, fucking shit, it burned.

By the time Julian had managed to stop screaming, and by the time he had adjusted enough so that he could see without causing himself excruciating pain, he was greeted with the image of Erland in front of him, the ghost of a smile on the witcher’s face.

“I did tell you not to open your eyes,” he chided, tone softer than Julian had ever heard it.

“I’m sorry,” Julian mumbled, voice hoarse from screaming.

Now that he could actually see, Julian could make out his surroundings reasonably well.

The musty, barren room wasn’t, as he’d first assumed, bathed in daylight - it was night, and yet he could make everything out in more clarity and detail than he’d previously been able to in the brightest of daylight. What had happened to his eyes? Was this why Erland’s were yellow?

He looked down, catching sight of his more immediate surroundings. His pallet was covered in dark, sticky stains of what Julian could only assume was his blood, and, upon closer inspection, his hands, and torso, and most likely his face too, were similarly bloodstained. There was something else, vomit, perhaps, splattered everywhere, too.

It must have been from when he was burning.

There were a thousand things he wanted to ask, as he looked up, shaking, and met Erland’s eyes, but he could only stammer unintelligible syllables.

Erland chuckled. “I assume you have many questions.”

“I-” Julian sucked in a long breath. “Yeah. Yes. I- What’s happened to me?”

“The potions have been successful, Julian. The mutations have taken hold, and you have completed the Trial of the Grasses.”

“There’s more,” Julian said flatly. “More trials after this one.”

“Yes, there are more trials,” Erland conceded. “But I doubt that there is any chance at all of you dying given that you’ve gotten this far. The remaining mutations are, comparatively minor, and the Trials of the Mountains is more like a physical examination than anything else. The ones you’ve had are the most severe.”

Wait.

“Was it only two potions, then?”

“Oh, no,” Erland said. “I suppose you wouldn’t much recall the worst of it. After a certain point, it does tend to simply blur together.”

Julian hadn’t given it much though beforehand, but he now realised that Erland, too, must have gone through the same Trial a long, long time ago.

“My heart,” Julian muttered instead. “It’s... wrong.”

“A witcher’s heart beats four times more slowly than a man’s does. It just means that the trial worked.”

“And... my eyes.”

Erland winced. “Ah, well, that was my mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ordinarily, the night vision would be part of the Trial of the Dreams, but...”

“You’re old and decrepit and mixed up the potions?” Julian grinned cheekily, earning himself a swat from Erland, which set off a ringing pain in his head. “Sorry.”

Erland sighed. “It was something to that effect, yes.”

Julian giggled.

“Congratulations, Julian. You’ve completed the Trial of the Grasses.”

“What about Coën?”

“Do I look like I can be in multiple places at once? I’ve been busy tending to you, Coën hasn’t had his trials yet.”

“Can I see him?”

“If you can stand.”

It turned out that Julian could not, in fact, stand, his limbs still too weak from the pain to properly support him, but it didn’t matter anyways in the end. The familiar, raven-haired figure of his best friend appeared in the doorway and launched himself at Julian despite the blood, shit and vomit, tackling him in a hug and eliciting a yelp of pain in response. The older boy immediately pulled back in a flurry of curses and apologies, which Julian could only grin at.

“You survived after all,” Coën said, and Julian could see his smile even in the dark. “And Andras really was full of shit. I don’t want to say I told you so, Julian, but-”

“You told me so,” Julian smirked, and gingerly pulled Coën into a hug.

Julian had finally managed to get up and drag himself to get washed a day and a half or two after the trial, and the only thing that managed to coax him out of the bath, in the end, was Coën informing him that the next trial taking place was Andras’.

At this, he had, of course, donned clean clothes and, with Coën by his side, made his way to where Andras lay, covered in his own blood and phlegm, and vomit and shit.

Andras’ breath was wheezing, rattling around in his throat like there simply wasn’t enough of it to fill up the space despite the blood oozing out. He was trembling, weak from the fits and convulsions that had plagued him, and Julian looked down at the boy with yellow eyes that held no sympathy.

”J- Ju-”

Whether it was weakness or the lack of air that caused Andras to be unable to finish the word, Julian didn’t know. Instead, he took his clammy hand in his own, looking for all the world as a friend comforting another in his dying moments.

”I won’t miss you,” Julian said softly, “I won’t even think about you. No one will.”

And Andras went limp.

Chapter Text

Jaskier sat, hands tied to those of Geralt of fucking Rivia, back-to-back with the man in the middle of a damn cavern, bound too tightly and inconveniently to stage any kind of grand escape. It had seemed like a simple enough job - a sylvan was stealing grain, so they would stop it stealing grain.

There.

Easy.

At least, it had been a perfectly simple and smoothly-handled situation right up until they had figured why the sylvan had been stealing grain, after which one thing led to another, and here they were, bound together on a cavern floor, at the mercy of whoever the sylvan was in cahoots with. Jaskier was also fairly certain that he could recall shouting, loudly, something about the sylvan’s mother fucking a goat. Or had that been Geralt? Jaskier couldn’t possibly have said.

This was all going brilliantly.

Geralt was grunting and struggling against the bonds behind him, something that Jaskier wasn’t even going to try. He did not, by any stretch, feel like sacrificing his wrists to the witcher’s escape attempt, no thank you. He needed them unbroken and unmarried by rope burns to play the lute, after all.

Still, Jaskier knew, the air of frustration around the other man was almost tangible. Who knew that it was so easy to get the famed witcher so wound up?

“This is the part where we escape,” he whispered lowly, doing his best to throw a glance at the other witcher, and failing. Mainly due to the back-to-back position in which they were bound, but definitely not helped by Geralt’s squirming.

“This is the part where they kill us!” Geralt hissed, and Jaskier briskly reconsidered his prior estimate of how much of a roar could be effectively conveyed by a whisper.

“Who’s they?”

The question was swiftly answered, not by Geralt, but by the elf who delivered a swift and painful kick to the side of Jaskier’s head, accompanied by something in Elder that he couldn’t quite make out thanks to the sudden burst of pain that overtook his head at the behest of his attacker’s boot.

“Elves,” Geralt grunted, a tad too late for his explanation to be warranted, because Jaskier had eyes too, but he didn’t dwell on that - he couldn’t dwell on that, not when the discordant twanging of familiar strings so dreadfully tore his attention away from Geralt and to whatever was being done to his poor, innocent instrument.

“Oi, that’s my lute, give that back!” Jaskier cried, catching the attention of precisely nobody. Geralt grunted as he, too, caught their attacker’s boot on his person. “Geralt! Quick, do your... your witcher-ing-”

“Shut up!”

“No-”

At that point, the elf currently kicking the shit out of them decided to join the conversation, barking at them to either shut up, or... hold a table? Really, Jask? Erland would be so disappointed him him if he ever found out that that mistake had even crossed Jaskier’s mind. It was so simple that it was embarrassing.

“My Elder speech is rough, I only got part of that,” Jaskier groaned, making a mental note to brush up on his language skills. Surely he hadn’t gotten so rusty over a few simple years of disuse?

“Humans,” the elf snapped, glaring at them with the intensity of a thousand suns, “shut up.”

“Ah, got it, thank you so much,” Jaskier replied, switching to Elder himself, and letting a generous amount of sarcasm trickle into his voice.

The elf, apparently, was not impressed, given the response Jaskier had apparently elicited.

“Do you want to die right now?”

“As opposed to later?” Geralt growled, a note of incredulity tainting his tone.

Jaskier noticed what was about to happen this time a tad faster than last time. Oh god, she was going for-

“No, please not the lute-!”

Still, the bard was cut off by the impact of the elf’s blow and the twanging of strings from his instrument as her conspirator decided that he’d rather see it as lumps of wood and string rather than anything remotely playable. Fuck. These elves... they really were vindictive bastards, weren’t they? Aside from physical damage, they had also now decided that it was apparently a fantastic idea to start dealing emotional damage, too. That was brilliant. Absolutely wonderful. Jaskier was about two seconds away from cursing her with every single colourful word he’d ever heard Coën utter, and a few more. That was his damn lute!

“Leave off!” Geralt roared. “He’s just a bard.”

Jaskier was not, in fact, just a bard, by any stretch, but he appreciated the sentiment.

Besides, was that Geralt of Rivia, showing concern for his wellbeing? Jaskier was touched. Truly. And in a much nicer way than when Geralt had sunk his fist into his gut on the road.

Somewhat less fortunately, their elven captor did not appear to share this sentiment. Nor did the one who was apparently rhythmically timing the destruction of Jaskier’s lute to match the blows struck by his friend, the absolute fucking dick.

“You don’t deserve the air you breathe! Everything you touch, you destroy!”

That was a bit rich, given that it was set to the background tune of Jaskier’s lute’s slow journey from an instrument to a pile of scrap.

A voice entered his head, unbidden. They went to hide in their golden palaces- fucking Lettenhove. His fucking tutor from fucking Lettenhove. Of course that would pop up now, right at the most inconvenient of times. Perhaps Jaskier should ask the violent elf to kick him, with exceptional vigour, in the head, so that he might forget all the damn lies he’d languished in at that place altogether.

What with the state of this hovel and, perhaps, the fact that they were living off of grain stolen from Posada by a sylvan, Jaskier found the whole golden palaces rhetoric that his tutor had fed him in his very early youth to be rather difficult to swallow. Not that he hadn’t smelt a rat far earlier. He definitely had. He wasn’t a fool.

He hadn’t. In his defence, though, he’d been a tad too busy to ponder the veracity of claims a long-forgotten man had made to him in his very early childhood, and the ubiquitous acceptance of the myth gave him little incentive to ponder it, omnipresent as it was.

Oops.

Still, he wasn’t about the let the elves just wander around breaking people’s lutes. That was just excessively rude.

“Oh, we destroy everything we touch?” Jaskier chuckled, somewhat manic. “Who’s smashing up my lute again, then?”

“The world is much larger,” snarled the elf, “than your damn lute.”

Jaskier received another kick for that one, but it was hardly the worst thing he could have said.

Not that that wasn’t somewhat of a bare minimum standard to set, but still. He, at least, wasn’t the one kidnapping innocent people - or witchers, rather - and engaging in the wanton destruction of their property.

That was also a very rude thing to do, by Jaskier’s standards.

Even ruder was the fact that they were now focusing on beating the ever-loving crap out of Geralt, who had done even less to offend the elves than Jaskier himself, to the point where he could smell the familiar coppery tang of blood in the air, and, judging from the more subtle facets of its scent, it was definitely Geralt’s.

“Still!” Jaskier found himself roaring. “Does the size of the world excuse your cowardice? You hide behind your thieving sylvan scapegoat, and you beat a bound man, too scared to even look him in the eye?”

At this, the elf’s tone softened, becoming almost dangerously quiet. “That’s it, then? We steal from the innocent to thrive in our golden palaces, torturing our poor victims on a whim? Tell me, do you like my palace?” She moved to crouch in front of Geralt, not Jaskier, and moved out of Jaskier’s peripheral vision completely, leaving him with no expressions to match to her soft, bitter voice. “Does it live up to the tales you humans tell, then?”

A crunch, and a yelp. Given the shifting movement of the man he was tied to that accompanied the sound, Jaskier was inclined to assume that Geralt had headbutted the elf the moment she had made the mistake of approaching him. The bard twisted, attempting to confirm his suspicions. Indeed, the elf was reeling back from a blow.

Jaskier smirked.

“Take that, pointy,” he called, delighting a little too much in something he had played little to no actual part in. Still, she had it coming. It wasn’t typically a gesture of goodwill, after all, to wail on restrained captives.

His smugness soured and bled away, however, when she didn’t get up. In fact, concern started welling up in him when she started coughing, of all things - had Geralt broken her rib and punctured a lung with a headbutt, of all things?

“Wait, what’s- what’s wrong with her?” Jaskier asked, trying his best and most damndest not to sound concerned for the woman who had just beaten the shit out of them and, even to his own ears, failing abysmally.

“She’s sick,” hissed another voice.

“Oh, and who’s this, then?” Jaskier groaned, at the unfamiliar figure who entered alongside the sylvan, the grain thief.

“He’s Filavandrel. King of the Elves.”

“Not a king,” Filavandrel corrected. “Not by choice.”

Right. Well. That was a bit of an awkward declaration to respond to, at any rate, especially for Jaskier given the fact that he’d just hurled a fair few insults at his kind. And, given Geralt’s prior demonstrations of the full extent of his verbosity, Jaskier didn’t doubt that he would, indeed end up being the one doing all the talking.

“You were stealing for them,” Geralt realised... only now? That was rather slow of the man.

“I felt for them,” the sylvan retorted. “They were forced out of Dol Blathanna.”

“But they chose-” Jaskier began, but he was cut off before he could finish. That was going to make him look rather bad, then, given that he couldn’t in fact provide context, now, for what exactly it was that they chose.

“Do you know anyone that would choose to leave their home? To starve? To have a sylvan steal for them?” Filavandrel hissed. Jaskier wanted to bite back and say of course not, fuck, he couldn’t even bring himself to try and leave Kaer Seren even when he thought he was going to die... But then, it wasn’t like he could just admit that.

“Toruviel,” he continued, ignoring Jaskier completely after his rebuttal - in a manner not conductive to any kind of conversation at all - and turned to face the elf who’d beat them up. “No one was supposed to get hurt.”

“What’s two humans in the ground when countless elves have died?” Toruviel snarled.

“One human,” Geralt corrected, snarling, and it was somewhat amusing to Jaskier, the confidence with which they were both wrong. There were no humans among them. “And you can let him go.”

Had Toruviel hit Geralt a little too hard in the head? Why was he being so- Oh. He likely just wanted to be rid of his newfound, unwanted companion. At least he cared enough to want Jaskier to leave him alive rather than as a corpse.

He could work with this.

“Then Posada will that learn we’ve been stealing,” Filavandrel countered, as if Jaskier was some sort of common snitch, incapable of keeping his mouth shut. In hindsight, Jaskier had not done much to counter that assumption, but still. He did have some sense honour. Erland had made sure of that. “The humans will attack. Many will die... On both sides.”

Hadn’t Filavandrel himself just undermined Jaskier’s motivation for grassing the elves up to Posada’s residents? Or did he simply think humanity was cruel enough to disregard casualties on their own side to ensure the deaths of their opponents?

Unbidden, Jaskier’s thoughts drifted off to a man with a thick, brown beard and steely blue eyes and answered his own question. Some of them probably were.

“The lesser evil,” Geralt grunted, his shifting posture indicating that he was raising his head to look up.

That was... entirely not the right thing to say in the given situation.

“No matter what you choose, you’ll come out bloody, and hating yourself,” he continued, and Jaskier wanted to scream. “Trust me.”

There was a better solution here! One that involved no dying whatsoever! The solution wherein they all worked out a cordial agreement and left each other alone, in peace! Was everyone here so stubbornly entrenched in their own bloody worldviews that they couldn’t simply come to a civil accord? And why was Jaskier feeling like the reasonable one in this situation?

“That’s the problem,” Filavandrel said, lowering his voice as he, too, crouched in front of Geralt. “I can’t. This is necessary.”

Well, if Filavandrel wanted to pay for his trust issues with Jaskier’s and Geralt’s blood, more power to him. Jaskier wasn’t about to dig himself into an even deeper hole, respect-wise, in front of the man. Besides, if an elf came to close to his head with a weapon, he could always fall back on his esteemed tactic of using the benefits of his witcher trials and years of training to run the fuck away.

So, the bard held his tongue.

“I understand,” Geralt said, leaving Jaskier hoping against all hope that he wasn’t about to let Filavandrel off him over some grain. “As long as you understand that it won’t be long before you follow me in death.”

Fucking shit. He was. He was about to let someone kill him over grain, as if they couldn’t simply strike a mutually beneficial bargain that involved Geralt lying about having dealt with the sylvan and Filavandrel taking his posse somewhere with arable land.

At this point, Jaskier felt like he must have missed something, or oversimplified too far, because there was no way that two such respectable men would lead themselves so far down the path of stupidity guided only by stubbornness. This wasn’t even caution. Caution, paranoia even, Jaskier could understand. This was sheer, unadulterated idiocy, and, had Jaskier himself not also been at risk of feeling its very permanent effects, he would have laughed out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

“Yes, because they pushed us from viable soil. Even chaos is polluted,” Filavandrel said. “Synthetically enhanced so that even humans can make magic.”

Okay, Jaskier did feel a little bad for him then. It was, after all, his family and his ancestors that had done the pushing. Maybe Geralt’s, too, but Jaskier’s had almost certainly been involved. They were nobles, after all. They wouldn’t have kept that status without a tiny bit of elf genocide. Not that Jaskier was surprised.

Too, it was a tad bit ironic that Filavandrel would preach to a witcher about synthetic enhancement.

“Chaos is the same as it always was,” Geralt countered, reminding his companion just how done he was with this whole damn conversation. “The humans just adapted better.”

“You say adapt, and I say destroy.”

At this point, Jaskier had begun to zone out a little.

“You are choosing to starve,” rumbled the witcher, and finally, something Jaskier could agree with. Still, he tried not to let it show on his face. It would look preposterously bad for him, as a human, to do so, given the history of unkindness the elves had suffered under them, and that was putting it mildly. “You’re cutting off your ear to spite your face.”

“You think this is about pride?” Filavandrel snapped.

Yeah, a little bit. Jaskier might have said it out loud if he actually wanted to die. Sure, he felt bad for the man and his people, but there were so many other things he could have done in this situation to resolve his problems. Like simply moving to a settlement with arable land. Apparently, though, the elves had a fatal struggle with the concept of adapting.

Filavandrel wasn’t finished. “My elders worked with humans, and got robbed of all they had, and when they fought back, they were slaughtered. The Great Cleansing, humans call it. I called it digging a mass grave for everyone I loved. And now the humans watch these very fields grow, our infants fertiliser for their grain. I don’t wish to bury anyone else.”

The bitterness and anger and pain in the elf king’s voice was palpable, and Jaskier could understand Filavandrel’s stance a little bit more. That kind of thing... It could well be expected to leave a man with long-lasting scars.

That did not mean that Filavandrel’s handling of his current situation, however, was by any means, good.

It was very... not good, in fact. It was absolutely abysmal.

He opened his mouth, and closed it. It was not his place to speak.

“I was once Filavandrel of the Silver Towers,” he whispered. “Now I’m Filavandrel of the Edge of the World.”

In a strange way, Jaskier could relate. He, albeit barely, could recall how it felt to be forced from comfort, to be forced from one’s home- though not to the extent that Filavandrel probably could.

He was glad, in a way, he hadn’t voiced his thoughts about Filavandrel’s competence. The man didn’t deserve to hear it from someone wearing human skin.

“If I bring my people down from these mountains, it would mean bowing to human sovereignty. They’ll make slaved of us, pariahs of half blood children!”

“Then go somewhere else,” Geralt said, with directness and surety, his words the only thing stopping Jaskier from blurting the same thing at the apparently severely myopic elf king. “Rebuild. Get strong again. Show the humans that they are more than what they fear you to be.”

“Like you, Witcher?”

“I have learnt to live with them,” and was that a smile Jaskier heard in Geralt’s rough voice? “So that I may live.”

Amateur, Jaskier thought idly.

Toruviel stood, suddenly, brushing off the sylvan. “Please, my king. There are others. A new generation.”

Wasn’t that a change of heart? If only she’d had it before deigning to beat a pair of bound men. Even so, Jaskier was in no way about to complain.

She continued. “Evellien who wish to fight! Let us take back what is ours. Starting now.”

Oh, right. Of course that was what swayed her. Never mind, then.

Still, it was none of Jaskier’s business what her reasoning or actions were, here on out, unless that reasoning was still to kill the two witchers in front of her that had been so rudely taken hostage. In that case, her reasoning and actions were absolutely, completely, and utterly Jaskier’s business, thank you very much.

Filavandrel drew his dagger.

Oh, shit.

The hapless bard had really thought that the situation had taken a different turn.

“Wait!”

The sylvan was the one to halt Filavandrel’s hand, and Jaskier mentally apologised for the goat-fucking remark. That had been rude of them.

It had been true, of course, and very witty, even if he did say so himself, but the fact remained that it was also rather poor form given that the sylvan was now the only thing standing between Jaskier and his imminent execution via sulky elf king.

“Torque, stand aside!” Filavandrel roughly shoved the sylvan - Torque - away from him.

“The witcher could have killed me,” Torque said, a note of pleading in his voice, “but he didn’t. He’s different. Like us.”

The sylvan only received another shove for his trouble, but Jaskier felt gratitude swelling up in his chest anyways. Granted, he was advocating for Geralt’s survival rather than the bard’s, but Geralt did seem to be rather fond of Jaskier’s not being dead, for some reason, so he decided not to take it too personally. Gift horse, and all that.

“If you must kill me,” Geralt rumbled, “I am ready.”

Wait. No. The witcher had veered off in the exact wrong direction. Wasn’t the whole point of this conversation to convince Filavandrel not to off the pair of them for the heinous crimes of humanity which - and this was true - had been committed by individuals who were not, in fact, Geralt and Jaskier?

Geralt continued, unfazed. “But the sylvan’s right. Don’t call me human.”

If that was the hill that Geralt of fucking Rivia was ready to die on, Jaskier was going to scream.

Filavandrel moved, slowly, circling the bound pair like a predator would its prey. Brilliant. Perfect. Wonderful. Was he going to kill both of them, or just Jaskier? Was that why he was circling around towards them?

Jaskier tensed, ready to dodge, to run, but it was the rope that took the force from the blade’s strike rather than any part of Jaskier’s body.

Oh, thank bloody fuck.

“You’re not going to kill us. That’s- that’s nice.”

Apparently he’d taken a lesson or two in articulation from Geralt.

“I stand by what I said,” Filavandrel uttered. “I don’t want to bury anyone else.”

“Right. Well, uh, thanks, then,” Jaskier stammered in reply.

The chink of coins interrupted the very awkward moment, and Jaskier turned to see Geralt shove the coin he’d been given at Filavandrel, eliciting a reaction of poorly concealed surprise from the man.

“Take it,” he grunted. “It’s the coin for getting rid of the sylvan.”

Wordlessly, Filavandrel did, and Jaskier debated whether or not it was a good idea to ask if he - if they, rather - were allowed to leave.

“Thank you,” the king said.

Jaskier, meanwhile, had bigger problems.

His lute, his livelihood and one of his most prized possessions, lay in pieces on the floor. As he turned over the splintered pieces in his hand, all hope that the damage was reparable immediately faded from his mind. With a grimace, he realised that he wouldn’t even be able to purchase a replacement, poor as he was.

He was keeping his bread in his pants, for crying out loud. Jaskier was not a man of many resources.

“Goodbye, my dear lute, which I am sadly far too broke to replace,” Jaskier muttered, in unpracticed Elder, hopefully loud enough for Toruviel to hear. “I do hope that I manage to find an alternate livelihood before I starve to death.”

A scoff from the elf in question assured Jaskier that she did, in fact, hear his complaints.

“Jaskier,” Geralt said, and oh, look at that, the man had bothered to make note of his name! Jaskier was touched, truly. “Let’s go.”

“Wait.”

The interruption had come from Filavandrel himself, causing both men to turn back.

“You speak Elder, bard?”

His eyebrows were quirked upwards in surprise - was fluency in the language a rare occurrence, then? Of course it was. Who would need it, other than the elves themselves, a few witchers, and the odd pretentious noble?

“Somewhat,” Jaskier replied briefly. “I’m relatively educated.”

“Indeed. I don’t suppose it would have to do with-”

“My amazing intellect?” the bard interrupted, before Filavandrel could say glamour and send his entire life to shit on the off-chance that Geralt turned out to also be fluent in Elder - and, given the way his day had gone thus far, it would not surprise him in the slightest. “My father valued knowledge. He taught us many things that I considered useless at the time.”

“So it seems.” Filavandrel pursed his lips. “Take my lute, then. I have no desire to cause someone’s needless suffering.”

Wait. What?

Was he actually, genuinely, offering his own lute to Jaskier? To keep? That... did not make sense. By all rights, Filavandrel should want to hang on to his instrument, a relic of his culture as it was.

Apparently, Jaskier’s face still showed his emotions as if it were a book to be read, because Filavandrel gave him a small, half-smile, and offered him the instrument.

“Take it, and use it well,” the king bade him.

An idea was already forming in Jaskier’s mind. It was not a particularly nice one, by any means, but it would be effective, and kill two birds with one stone - save Geralt’s reputation from the whole... whatever that had happened at Blaviken, and remove all suspicion that Filavandrel and his people were hiding out anywhere in the land. It would be rather mean, of course, especially given that it was with Filavandrel’s own lute that he would bring his plan to fruition, but Jaskier was no stranger to expediency.

“I will,” Jaskier promised, a glint of something not quite mischief in his eyes.

Chapter Text

Kaer Seren was, for the first time in Julian’s memory, quiet.

The silence that had settled over the keep like a thick smog was unfamiliar, and, despite the freeing lack of judgement and jeers that Julian really should have learnt how to ignore long ago, the changed atmosphere that permeated his home was wrong, somehow.

No. Not somehow. He knew exactly how it was wrong.

The keep felt dead, with only the three of them. Julian knew he should have been overjoyed - he’d survived, and so had Coën, after all, like he’d barely dared daydreamed before the Trial of the Grasses - but he couldn’t dislodge the twisting feeling in his gut that told him that something was missing, something was gone.

The halls were too big, too immense, too empty, and the dorm he and Coën had so often snuck out of for privacy seemed so dead and hollow with but two occupants that sleeping in there just didn’t sit right with them.

In his head, Julian knew that the cull at the Trial of the Grasses was severe. He knew, he knew, damn it, that it was three out of ten. He’d heard the statistic being thrown around, by boys his age and younger, almost on the daily, and he knew that had meant that after the trials had come and gone, only two or three of them would be there to remember it. Still, despite that, despite everything, Julian couldn’t help but feel like some part of Kaer Seren had died, too.

It was like all the life had been sucked out from the inside, leaving only a hollow husk being, a shell of his old home that was just off enough to not really feel like home at all. Sure, there were the older witchers, those who had already passed the trials, but aside from during the winter, they were seldom present, and the only ones Julian and Coën really interacted with at any rate were those who taught and trained them.

Lessons had intensified, now that Erland and Old Keldar were free to focus their energy on mentoring two witchers instead of eight - although Julian had a sneaking suspicion that the only reason that there had been eight of them to begin with is the older witchers knew that they only wanted one, two at the most - and Julian found himself and Coën always being busy, always having something to, up to their ears and drowning in training exercises and ingredient lists and extensive notes on how to defeat whatever monster they happened to be focusing on that week, not to mention all the extra things that their mentors had them learning that Julian knew weren’t part of the witcher training.

And yet, perfection was expected from them anyways, regardless of what they were actually doing. Whether it be a physical exercise or something Julian had to learn off by heart and recite back to his mentor, he and Coën were expected to accomplish whatever it was with the utmost competence.

Furthermore, Julian had a sneaking suspicion that the grandmaster witcher’s illustrious standards for the bare minimum proficiency in any given task had been surreptitiously raised after the Trial of the Grasses had left him with only Julian and Coën.

“He’s a slave-driver,” Julian grumbled to his friend one evening, body aching from a day spent occupied with strenuous activities that even his fancy, sort-of witcher muscles protested vehemently against. “Erland of Larvik is a fucking slave-driver.”

“That he is,” Coën murmured, collapsing on the floor of the room - their room, where they’d spent their last night before Julian had faced his first trial. It was, for the most part, the only part of Kaer Seren where the silence was not as deafening, having always been meant as a quiet refuge, away from the eyes of the other boys and their antics, so the effects of the sudden emptiness were muted somewhat. “Still, I suppose it’s better that we have harsh training now and go out there prepared than the other way round. I’d much rather be told by Erland that my sword skills aren’t up to par than a kikimora that’s tearing me limb from limb.”

“I know,” Julian said, his puppy-eyed expression somewhat sabotaged by the eerie yellow colouring of his eyes. “But you don’t have to preach at me about it. That’s Erland’s job.”

Coën snorted. “And if he were half good at it, I wouldn’t do it, but here we are.”

“He can probably hear you,” Julian smirked. “He’s probably thinking up a really horrible circuit for tomorrow as retribution.”

“Eh. It’s a big keep, Julek. I’ll take my chances,” the older boy shrugged, but Julian knew him well enough to be able to tell that the nonchalance was feigned. It most likely hadn’t occurred to him that the older witcher was not as forthcoming with privacy as he seemed.

“Sure. Unrelated, you’re trembling because it’s so cold,” he said, playfully flicking Coën’s arm.

“I’m not trembling! I’m merely... I’m generating heat,” Coën finished lamely. “Kaer Seren is cold as all shit in the winter.”

“It’s not winter, yet, though,” Julian pouted, but tackled his friend in a hug anyways.

Coën, surprised by the sudden attack, stiffened on instinct as he felt wiry arms wrap themselves around his torso.

“Hey, hey, what are you doing, Julek?”

The older boy’s voice was soft, no hint of accusation or annoyance, and after a second’s hesitation, he, too, wrapped his arms around his friend. Julian snuggled further into the embrace, making himself comfortable.

“You said you’re generating heat, and if that’s true, it’s only fair that you share.”

Coën snorted. “You could just say that you want a hug.”

“I could.”

They sat there for a while, Coën running his fingers through Julian’s long brown hair, which the younger boy adamantly refused to cut, citing that it would piss his father off to know that his son was sporting such a bird’s nest on his head.

It had grown so much since the Trial of the Grasses. Had it really been so long already?

“Are you going to work alone?”

“Hm?” Coën’s reply was somewhat absent, unfocused.

“As a witcher,” Julian clarified. “Erland said that witchers worked alone.”

“I don’t know. Why, do you want to be a witcher duo, then, Julian? We’d scare all the locals shitless, I don’t doubt. Just imagine, you’re minding your own business as a hapless local, and not one, but two overly menacing witchers stride into the town. They’d go crazy. Why are there two of them?” he imitated a high-pitched, terrified voice, though the quality of the impression was somewhat lessened by the grin he was sporting, “I didn’t even know that they travelled in pairs! It would be quite funny, actually, if it didn’t mean we’d get paid half as much.”

“Mm,” Julian hummed, noncommittal, as if he really didn’t care that much anyways. “But we’ll stay friends, though, right?”

“Obviously,” Coën snorted. “You don’t need to spend all your time with someone to be their friend, as long as you care about them.”

“I know.”

“Sure you do. You just need reminding, sometimes, you clingy little bastard.”

“You take that back,” Julian threatened, sounding as menacing as one possibly can whilst having their hair stroked, snuggled against their friend’s chest.

“Not on your life,” Coën grinned.

“Take it back, or...”

Julian trailed off, racking his brains for a threat.

He came up empty. As trainee witchers, the two of them had precious little belongings, and such precious little to threaten each other with, and there was only so far one could go with unflattering future horse names... especially once it was remembered that, if a threat of such a nature was carried out, the general public would end up bearing witness to a witcher calling his horse Coën but Taller and with Better Hair. Not exactly the image one wanted to have when one also wanted to get paid to fight monsters.

Unless...

“Take it back,” Julian smirked, “Or I’ll dull your blades on purpose.”

Coën gasped in exaggerated outrage, recoiling at the affront. “You wouldn’t dare, Julian.”

They younger boy’s grin was wicked. “I would.”

“Coën, Julian,” came a voice from the doorway, and both boys froze.

Erland of Larvik stared down at them, face steely and unyielding as ever, with something in his eyes that Julian couldn’t quite place, but was entirely sure was a bad sign regardless.

“If you have time to plan such daring exploits,” the older witcher said, tone indecipherable, “then I place my complete confidence in your ability to complete a few... nighttime training endeavours, shall we say? Take your swords and equipment, and come with me.”

Neither of them were willing to say anything, but Julian was sure that his expression matched the one Coën sported, with a thousand undeclared curses written all over his face.

Still, if Erland said that they were going to train, then they were going to train. The base rule of Kaer Seren, or rather the School of the Griffin, in fact, was that Erland’s word was to be treated as law.

Scrambling to their feet and falling into line behind Erland in quiet tandem, the two trainees followed the man outside, where the first snows of the season had already fallen.

“I’d have done this later,” Erland said, tone deceptively conversational, “but Keldar is returning from his excursion earlier than expected.”

Julian held in a hiss. Coën, he knew, was fond of the old witcher, but Julian... It would be something of an understatement to say that Julian was not. Old Keldar taught them monster knowledge, and was a very wise and learned man, with little patience or tolerance for stupidity and inattention.

It was only natural that Julian would harbour an intense mutual dislike towards the man, after all, flighty and scatterbrained as he was.

That, and he reminded him a little of his father and tutors back in Lettenhove, who’d spout the same rhetoric about politics and family trees and history that Keldar did regarding monsters and creatures he would be expected to slay.

Namely, he was of the well-voiced opinion that Julian was an incompetent idiot who would surely not amount to anything if he did not severely reform his act. Not that the boy didn’t give as good as he got - his verbal battles with the man, as Coën, too, would admit despite his rather straight-laced approach to his lessons, were a sight to behold. Julian, thanks in part to his noble upbringing that he so wrinkled his nose at, was an exceptionally verbose boy, and the insults he exchanged with his teacher only grew more creative as time went on.

Coën swore up and down that Julian had managed to elicit a small bit of grudging respect from the man.

Julian didn’t believe him.

“We’ve arrived,” Erland said, interrupting they boy’s musings. “Tonight’s exercise will be practical. I will leave you here for the night, and return for you in the morning. I expect for you both to have at least fought something by sunrise. Am I understood?”

As the boys declared affirmative responses, they exchanged a relieved glance between themselves. As Erland’s endeavours went, this one was fairly tame.

The catch was, of course, that only one of them possessed night vision.

“He didn’t say we couldn’t fight together,” Julian mumbled under his breath, as Erland’s figure began to retreat.

“I do recommend that you fight separately on one occasion, for your own sakes,” Erland called back, not even bothering to look back, and Julian winced. Damn that witcher hearing.

“So, according to Julian logic, he could probably hear me from fuck knows where back in Kaer Seren, but he clearly wouldn’t pick up on you mumbling something before he’s gotten twelve steps away,” Coën grinned, flashing his teeth as he smiled at his friend.

Julian scowled. “Shut up.”

They decided to stick together, for the first part, whilst they took stock of their surroundings. There was that saying, after all - something about only fools rushing in where wiser men fearing to tread. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely applicable to the given situation, but the underlying sentiment of the benefits of exercising caution could still be appreciated.

Coën took the front - he was taller, stronger, and altogether the best equipped to handle a direct attack - and Julian, smaller, more agile, and much more capable of actually seeing what lurked in their surroundings, took the rear, casting his eye around in the hopes of picking up danger in a wider range, that he could see and Coën could not.

The folly of ingraining habits in a fight, or indeed any situation that involved the wilderness, had been reiterated to the trainees more than most anything else, by Erland and Keldar, too, on some occasions, though he had ceased to utter such phrases after Julian’s tendency to argue with the man about absolutely anything had caused one too many arguments over the rote memorisation of monster types and methods of dispatching them technically counting as ingraining habits in a fight. Still, it was a lesson that both Coën and Julian had taken note of, so they agreed to split up once the hour was up, if circumstances were favourable.

“There!” Julian’s hiss was sudden, hand already flying to the hilt of his silver sword before he really even began giving Coën any real information. “A couple steps behind you, to your left.”

Coën, his own silver sword in his hand, turned towards the given direction.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s crouching.”

“Fuck, do you think I should stab it?”

“Doesn’t look like anything we shouldn’t stab,” Julian murmured, trying his hardest to keep his voice loud enough that Coën would hear it without alerting anything else.

Coën, sword unsheathed, approached the creature, whilst Julian moved away, keeping his back to him, alert. It wouldn’t to for the pair to be surprised from behind, focused on their current target as they were. It was generally accepted, not even simply among witchers, but at large, that when the opportunity was there, someone should always be watching one’s back.

The sound that Coën’s sword made as it came into contact with the monster was not the wet, squelching crunch that Julian expected. It seemed drier, and quieter, and in an instant, he realised why.

“It’s dead,” Coën whispered. “It’s a giant centipede, but it’s dead.”

“What’s one doing here, then?” Julian’s question, hissed into the night, came out sounding a little more frustrated than he meant it to. “I though they only lived in the Brokilon forests.”

“Ha! I knew you paid attention to Keldar,” Coën grinned, his smug pride audible in his voice.

“I do not,” Julian grumbled, affronted. “Come on. We do actually need to fight something properly, for Erland.”

“Right.”

Leaving the mysterious dead centipede behind, the moved forwards, keeping up their formation. Coën in the front, Julian in the back. Coën as the muscle, Julian as the lookout.

Casting his eyes around, Julian tried his best to catch sight of anything vaguely killable within his peripheral vision. The forest seemed eerily quiet, given that Erland had led them there specifically to fight. Julian almost wished that something big would come bowling out of the trees, ready to attack them - anything to alleviate the growing tension and fear pooling in his stomach.

He didn’t like this at all.

Peering in front of Coën, he tried to make out any sign of-

“Coën, stop, now,” Julian hissed, tugging on the back of his friend’s shirt.

Alert, as was expected of a witcher, Coën raised his sword before him, whilst simultaneously taking a step back as per Julian’s warning, squinting into the distance to try and make out what the younger boy had seen.

A large, slightly swaying, arm-shaped plant loomed in the shadows, some way away, but judging from the way Coën was squinting at it, he couldn’t make it out, distant as it was.

“It’s an echinops.”

“Fuck,” Coën groaned. “Thanks for the heads up.”

Julian shrugged. “Wouldn’t want you to go out like a baby thanks to a plant, poison spines or no.”

“I feel like a better statement here would be not wanting me to die at all.”

“Sure, sure. So, what are we going to do?” Julian frowned.

“Silver will take it out,” Coën said, almost absently. “Or incineration, but that’s not an option until we start learning the signs. The problem is that, even before could we get close enough to fight the giant plant, we’d be shot by poisoned spines.”

“Thank you for the run-down on how we’re going to die, oh Coën the walking library,” said Julian, voice heavy with sarcasm. “I feel so much better now that I know how we might have defeated the monster that will surely kill us had we been a bit more competent.”

Coën poked Julian’s side, and handed him his silver sword.

Julian opened his mouth, and closed it again. Out of the two of them, Coën had the better aim, edging Julian out on accuracy by a margin large enough to be counted as significant. Furthermore, he was stronger - his age and physique gave him an advantage in that area, meaning that he would also be the one most likely to be able to hurl the sword far enough to actually hit the echinops.

But Coën couldn’t see in the dark, unlike Julian. He had to make the throw by default.

And if he didn’t make it, one or both of them would be down a silver sword.

Julian’s greatest strength lay, somewhat unusually for a witcher, in agility and evasion, but even he wasn’t stupid enough to think that he could dodge projectiles moving faster than the eye could see.

“If we die,” Julian said, narrowing his eyes on his target. “If we die, it will probably be my fault, but you’re not allowed to say it.”

“No promises,” Coën grinned, patting Julian’s shoulder before swapping positions, Julian in the front, and Coën acting as lookout in the back.

Julian was by no means weak, even at his young age, thanks mainly to his witcher physiology, but also his rigorous training. His aim, too, could not be described as shoddy, but the fact remained that he was significantly less likely to successfully hit the echinops than Coën. He had a chance, sure. But it was not a good one.

Inhaling sharply before lobbing the sword, Julian put all his strength into his throw. The sword sailed neatly through the air, before hitting the echinops squarely in the stem... pommel-first.

Shit.

“Did you hit it?” Coën yelped, barely finishing his sentence before Julian collided with him as he leapt backwards, to ensure that he was, without a doubt, outside the range of the echinops’ spines.

“Yes and no,” Julian scowled, picking himself up from atop his friend where they’d fallen. “I got it perfectly in the middle.”

“But?”

“It spun, and it landed pommel-first.”

Coën swore under his breath. “Do you think you can get it this time?”

“Hopefully.”

Julian stood in position, turning his body sideways this time, taking careful aim. If he wanted the sword not to spin, he’d have to throw it like a spear, but the grip required for that would reduce his strength.

Frustratingly, if he wanted the sword to reach, it had to spin.

However, if it spun horizontally instead, it would be certain to cut through the plant if it hit at the epicentre of its spin.

Closing his eyes for a brief moment, Julian groaned to himself. If only he’d thought of that before wasting a throw.

At least he knew where to aim, now. Small victories.

Stealing himself and inhaling sharply, he prepared to make the throw. If this didn’t work, they’d be down two silver swords, and in the best-case scenario, that would only lead to them failing the exercise. It was too bad that the only living creature they’d happened to come across was so... difficult.

Putting all his strength behind the throw, Julian hurled the sword - Coën’s sword - at the echinops, eyes tracking in anxiously as it spun through the air and, thank fuck, sliced almost straight through the stem of the plant. The sword had not, as Julian had hoped, hit the echinops at the centre of the movement where the force would be the greatest, but it had worked.

“I got it!”

“Nice! Can we grab our swords, then?”

“Yeah,” Julian said, already moving towards the dead plant, Coën shortly behind him.

The echinops was dead, its stem almost completely severed approximately at the halfway point between the roots and the eerie, almost hand-shaped bud at its apex. Picking up his sword from the ground and Coën’s from where it had struck the plant itself, Julian surveyed the plant for a second, before hacking the top off completely, albeit at a higher point, and slipping the dead echinops’ severed remains into his belt. It was annoyingly bulky, but he would be able to manage.

Besides, if it got in his way, he could always drop it at a later point in time.

Coën raised an eyebrow.

“What’s that for?”

“Proof.”

They set off again, into the mountainside forest, moving silently and swiftly, as befitting of one who did not wish to make a target of themselves. The echinops stem was cumbersome and awkward against Julian’s leg, but he adapted his movements to favour the burden, leaning slightly to redistribute his weight.

The milky moon that hung limply in the sky above the mountains surrounding Kaer Seren did little to illuminate the forest, and gloomy shadows clung to the undergrowth like a veil, dark enough that even Julian had begun to have trouble making things out in the undergrowth.

They split up, after a while, Coën deciding to stick to the more open areas where his poor night vision would not be such an advantage, and Julian doing the exact opposite.

Weaving his way through the trees, Julian tried his best to ignore the creeping numbness in his toes and instead focus completely on his surroundings. It was bitingly, achingly cold - the combination of largely untempered ocean winds blowing in from the sea, as well as the mountain chill, ensured that the area was bleak and chilly for a good portion of the year, and, with the winter approaching, the weather had only gotten worse.

Fucking Erland and his fucking endeavours.

Julian watched, and pressed forward, but constant vigilance was draining, and he hadn’t even gotten any sleep since the previous night, thanks to his slave-driver of a mentor. Still, he moved with swiftness and surety, despite the tendrils of fatigue tapping at his skull, despite the stinging chill of the air, despite the awkward weight of the echinops against his leg.

It occurred to him, then, that if the monsters weren’t going to stumble upon him, he should go looking for one, as foolish as that seemed to an outsider’s logic. Of course that’s what they had to do - the witcher was generally the one who went looking for the monster, rather than the inverse.

Surveying the ground, Julian scanned his surroundings for anything that might suggest that something had recently passed through the area, and quickly happened upon something that indicated exactly that. A single, smudged paw print, large and seemingly fresh - wolf.

A wolf was not, indeed, a monster by conventional standards, but it was something to fight, and ultimately there had been no restrictions on what, specifically, they should face off against - and if that wasn’t a gleaming invitation for Julian to say fuck it and run after the oversized dog, he didn’t know what was.

Tracking, of course, was an essential skill for any witcher, and Julian was well-versed in it, having been taught even before the trial that had culled all of his and Coën’s peers. Despite the meagre clues he had been left, he was soon following, with confidence, the path he was sure the wolf had taken a while earlier.

He could do this, easily. A wolf was one of the easier things to hunt he could have stumbled upon in the thick forests outside Kaer Seren, seldom traversed by any but the witchers of the keep or those who had business with them.

Julian didn’t falter in his pursuit, and that was his mistake - with a yelp, he barely caught himself before tripping down a sheer cliff, down a shallow gulley and right into the midst of a wolf and its sleeping pups.

He didn’t even have time to think of a curse before the adult of the pack had leapt up, and launched itself at him.

The opportunity did arise, however, for him to yell something when the damn creature embedded its fangs into Julian’s shoulder.

“Fuck!” Julian shrieked, scrabbling for his steel sword with his free hand, the one which was not currently at the mercy of an angry animal - his left. Of course the damn wolf had to go for his dominant arm. Of course it did.

When the wolf finally let him go, it was not thanks to Julian’s struggling and kicking, but rather, it seemed to have tired of the attack and let him free only to come back around for another pass at the boy.

Ignoring to the best of his ability the throbbing pain in his shoulder, from which blood was undoubtedly dribbling, Julian pulled his steel sword free from its scabbard and lifted it in his left hand as confidently as he dared. Despite the warnings of his mentor, Julian had not, in fact, ensured equal competence in skill with both his hands.

If he didn’t end up crawling back to Kaer Seren with one less arm than he’d left, he was going to take Erland’s stern advice a tad more seriously in the future.

Putting one foot forward in a mirror of a familiar stance, Julian raised his blade to meet the wolf that now charged him. Surely, this would be an easy kill. Surely, the wolf’s own momentum would bring it to be impaled on his sword, ending the encounter in Julian’s favour-

Surely, he wasn’t this unlucky.

The wolf, apparently having recognised the danger of a sword for what it was, struck low, teeth fastening around Julian’s calf, rather than attacking his torso. With an undignified scream, the boy went down, and all semblance of tactics and grace vanished from his movements.

Fuck.

He was better than this. He was better than to be killed by a measly wolf.

Slashing blindly, his blade hit something hard, and he felt something warm splatter on his leg. Moments later, he felt the teeth gripping his leg let up, as the wolf let out a howl of agony. He’d hit it.

He brought his blade down, again, as the wolf tried its damndest to carve a chunk out of Julian’s leg in return. This time, he felt his arm hit the ground unimpeded, signalling that he’d missed his strike.

Undeterred, he moved again, a stabbing motion thrusting his weapon towards the animal. This was, of course, accompanied by a muted burst of pain from his injured shoulder, but Julian couldn’t bring himself to focus on it if he wanted to. The tell-tale grating squelch of a successful strike met his ears, and he pulled himself away from the wolf, freeing his legs as well as his sword, and righting himself as best he could.

Now that he was back in a more advantageous position, he could see the damage he had done to the wolf. He’d sliced the face, removing an eye, and stabbed through the throat from the side. Julian winced. Judging from the position of the wounds, it was a wonder he hadn’t carved through his own flesh as well as the wolf’s.

Was the animal alive, or dead? Julian rather thought alive, but it wouldn’t hurt to make sure. Readjusting his grip on his sword, he took a heavy step towards the wolf, and, with all his strength, brought the blade down on its skull.

Even if the slit throat hadn’t killed it, that surely would.

Julian choked in a breath, acutely aware that he was shaking. That had been too close for comfort. One mistake had given the wolf the upper hand, and that had almost cost him a fight that should, by all rights, have been easy.

Well, regardless, it was over. And the echinops remains were almost intact, to boot.

Sheathing his steel sword, sticky with blood as it was, Julian took out his silver sword - it would do to be prepared - and hoisted the dead wolf onto his shoulders as best he could. Given his stature, he ended up looping its front paws around his neck and wearing it as though it were some kind of cape, the blood oozing gently from its wounds staining his hair and clothes.

Hoping against hope that nothing else in the woods deigned to attack him, he began to make the trek back to the clearing Erland had left them in.

It was slow going, especially with the weight of the wolf and the echinops he was lugging with him as proof of his kills, not to mention the wounds to his leg where the wolf had bitten and scratched him. His worries of making it back too early faded - at this speed, he’d take far longer to make the journey than he usually would.

The adrenaline from the fight started to fade a little, and, annoyingly but not unexpectedly, the pain in his leg and his shoulder began to intensify. The wounds were by no means dangerously deep, but the wolf had been strong enough to break skin and sink its fangs some way into the muscle. Hopefully, the wounds were not deep enough to leave a lasting scar. Bite marks were so ungainly.

Julian walked, going step by arduous step, vaguely aware of the moon sinking in the sky. Why had he had to go so damn far off into the woods? The twisting pain plaguing his leg did not agree with the long trek ahead of him.

Still, he could make it. He could most definitely haul his two trophies back to Kaer Seren and then complain endlessly while he tended to his wounds. Wasn’t the clearing a significant detour from his current position, anyways? It would be far easier to just return directly to the old keep, rather than meet at the expected point.

Swallowing deeply, Julian changed his course. Coën was going to murder him for scaring him with such a stunt, but it was better than spending a few extra hours limping around on an injured leg with two very heavy accessories.

The path he took was steep, but, given the barren nature of the cliffs and rocky plains that surrounded it once he had cleared the forest, made up for what it lacked in accessibility and comfort, it more than made up for by making it nigh impossible for anyone or anything to sneak up on him. Using his sword as some kind of staff to assist his ascent, Julian found himself inching up the path, his open wounds burning thanks to the exertion of the climb, far slower than he would have liked.

He’d calculated that he’d arrive at Kaer Seren an hour or so before dawn, but the sun was already creeping over the horizon when he collapsed at the gates of his home. Emptiness and coldness be damned, Julian thought. He would never, ever take Kaer Seren for granted again.

Of course, he must look a right sight to anyone who saw him. Covered in blood, sweat and grime as he was, Julian was sure he resembled some unfortunate that had been abandoned there far more than he did a witcher, despite the circumstances.

His eyelids drooped, and his last thought before falling into sleep’s quiet embrace was something about wolf corpses as pillows, and then Julian was finally at rest, chest rising and falling with calm, muted breaths, curled up under the grand arch of Kaer Seren’s entrance.

In spite of the rather inadequate hospitality of his current position, it was nice. He hadn’t slept so restfully in a while.

It didn’t last, of course - a light sleeper, Julian was woken by the sound of approaching footfalls with an ache in his head and a sting in his shoulder and leg. Blinking the vestiges of sleep from his bleary eyes, he saw that the sun had risen out of the last few moments of dawn somewhat recently, and that two figures approached the great keep.

“It does seem that your worries ended up being unwarranted, Coën,” and that was Erland’s voice speaking - nobody could speak as clearly as the grandmaster witcher.

Coën was there, as expected, they were returning from the excursion after all, but there was something off about his expression. Something fragile, as if he were trying to hold himself together from the verge of breaking - but it melted away when he saw Julian sprawled on the floor before him.

He had barely pulled himself up into a seated position before Coën ran at him and tackled him in a hug, knocking Julian right back over again, and skidding a little.

“You’re a dick, Julian,” Coën whispered in his ear, clinging to the boy as if he would vanish if he didn’t hold on tight enough. “You’re such a fucking dick.”

“Hi, Coën,” Julian gasped, trying not to suffocate in his friend’s embrace.

“Never do that again, you stupid fucking arsehole,” Coën threatened, voice thick with emotion, and Julian felt something wet on his cheek as if brushed against him. “I thought you’d died, for fuck’s sake. You never showed up at the clearing, we waited for you, but you just... You never came, and we left without you, you complete and utter pillock! Fuck, Julian, I thought you were dead.”

“My leg got bitten in a fight. This way was shorter.”

Julian’s strangled explanation was weak and ineffective, even to his own ears. He supposed it was true - it was rather a dick move of him to simply leave Coën waiting. He hadn’t thought of that, not at the time.

“Yeah, you idiot, I gathered.”

“I’m sorry,” Julian offered, sincere. “I didn’t mean for you to think that- that I was dead. I just went the other way. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Coën whispered, and his voice was so strangely small and broken that Julian found himself wondering who the reassurance was really meant for. “I get why you didn’t come back, but fuck, Julian, if you ever pull shit like that again, I’ll come kill you myself if my heart doesn’t give out on me first. You complete and utter douchebag.”

Julian hesitated for a moment, shoulder throbbing, but then decided to throw his arms around Coën anyways and return the hug, despite the twanging protests of his now much less fresh wound.

“I’ll try not to,” he said, and he meant it - had Coën been the one to fail to show up at the clearing, Julian realised, he’d probably have skipped the stoic grieving and gone straight to manic howling, Erland’s presence be damned. “I killed a wolf, though.”

“I can see that.”

A brief moment of silence passed, and Coën pulled away from the embrace. Julian could see his expression change from overwhelming relief to something approaching dawning horror.

Oh.

“Julian,” the older boy said, yellow eyes narrowed in suspicion as well as concern. “How much of the blood is yours?”

Oh, shit. It was becoming increasingly likely that the lecture he feared wouldn’t be coming from Erland of Larvik after all, if Coën’s current expression was any indication.

“Ah,” Julian managed, weakly. “Not most of it?”

He looked pleadingly at his mentor as Coën began to fuss over him, acting for all the world as if he really were Julian’s older brother, but all Erland had to offer was the beginning - the merest hint - of a smile.

Chapter Text

Jaskier had, in fact, had a horse once. This was back before he’d decided to pursue a bardic career under a glamour - one that he had paid quite the pretty penny for, in fact - but hey. It had happened. Every witcher he knew of had a horse. When one was in the habit of travelling great distances, it only made sense to have a horse, unless one was particularly masochistic and enjoyed carrying ungodly amounts of equipment and supplies on their back whilst traversing the continent. He'd not been the dissenting voice in that particular regard.

However, as it stood, Jaskier currently did not have a horse, because what was a bard to do with a horse? It was far too expensive a creature to keep when one relied primarily on the goodwill of drunken crowds in taverns for income.

Geralt, the White Wolf of Rivia, the much nicer, upgraded nickname courtesy of Jaskier himself, did have a horse. The horse was named Roach, which was admittedly a much better name than the one Jaskier had cursed his steed with back when he had one - Lófasz had meant horse dick in some dialect or other that Jaskier had stumbled across in his travels, and really, it had been utterly hilarious at the time, even it was a nightmare to spell - and Geralt clearly cared for her, given the fact that Jaskier had, in fact, picked up on the fact that the witcher was far more willing to hold a conversation with Roach than with him.

Naturally, Jaskier was not allowed even to touch Roach.

Although he had ridden on horseback a significant amount of time whilst travelling as a witcher, the bard was no stranger to covering ground on foot - he had walked a lot of places, a lot of the time, either when he decided that his poor, unfortunately-named horse deserved a break, or, much more pertinently, after he’d decided to become a travelling bard a year or so ago, and gleefully deprived himself of the opportunity to ride at all. He was well-used to walking, and could keep up with Geralt and Roach, no problem.

That did not mean, however, that he would suffer the indignity of being made to travel alongside a mighty witcher and his esteemed mount on foot in silence.

Apologies to Geralt of fucking Rivia, but if he had decided to attempt to get rid of Jaskier by heartily inconveniencing him, he was damn well going to have to deal with the consequences of his decisions.

“Surely, it wouldn’t hurt to allow me to ride alongside you, Geralt? I weigh next to nothing, I’ll have you know, Roach won’t even know I’m there... Or, she wouldn’t, were it not for the fact that I am, once again, carrying all of our conversations for the both of us.”

Geralt grunted.

“Geralt! My feet are no doubt more blister than flesh, at this point, and you won’t allow me even a small bit of respite?”

The witcher raised an eyebrow at Jaskier’s claim, and alright, fine, it was pretty easy to tell that he was exaggerating just a tiny little bit, given the jaunty pace he kept, but that didn’t make Geralt any less mean.

“I’m going to die, you know,” Jaskier announced magnanimously. “I’m about three minutes away from passing out from exhaustion and becoming crow fodder when you leave me in the dirt, cherishing your blessed silence.”

This did earn him a look from Geralt, but it wasn’t a look - if anything, Geralt was assessing his claim before deciding to sort it, swiftly and firmly, into the bullshit pile.

“You’re fine,” he grunted, and Jaskier gave him a wounded look.

“I most certainly am not!”

The White Wolf had, however, once again decided simply not to bother with the bard, persistent as he was. Truly, Jaskier felt insulted at how easily the witcher managed to ignore his every move.

He did, though, attempt to keep up his complaints and wear the witcher down, but saw little success. Really, it was most impressive - they had managed to reach the town that awaited them on their path without Geralt having relented, and Jaskier had truly been made to walk the whole way.

Well, if that was what it took for the witcher to warm up to him, so be it. Jaskier would shoulder the burden, ungracefully and full of complaints as he was wont to do.

The town that they had made their destination was a shitty little hovel named Beled, with one shitty little tavern that doubled as a shitty little inn for the pair to stay in. Jaskier, now that Toss a Coin was earning him an actual living as a bard and he no longer had to scrounge at scraps to sustain himself, did not quite allow the joy that came from finally being able to afford a room to curb the disappointment he felt at the state of the hovel they’d no doubt be staying in that night, reeking of pestilence as the whole damn town was - unless, of course, Geralt decided to move on before that could happen, in which case Jaskier had an entirely different set of things to complain about. Like the dirt. And how it got stuck in his hair whenever he had to sleep on the forest floor.

He didn’t know, not really, how much of the complaining he did was genuine, and how much was just lip service so that he might be able to continue a conversation, however one-sided, with the witcher. He did rather suspect that it was mainly the latter - unlike he claimed, Jaskier was not quite a stupid nineteen-year-old who had languished in the luxuries of his noble family for most of his formative years, and thus he wasn’t as used to affluence as he claimed. In fact, he was quite accustomed to the general unglamorous lifestyle of a witcher, for the obvious reasons.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t about to absolutely lay into the abhorrent quality of Beled’s public services the moment he was out of earshot of anyone he might substantially offend.

The two of them, having their priorities sorted in similar fashion, sat in the tavern nursing lukewarm ales, and Jaskier allowed himself a brief moment of pride at the progress he’d made with the witcher. Not only did he no longer outright tell Jaskier to go away and leave him be, he also allowed the man to sit with him as they drank. Ordinarily, he would have chalked that up as a small victory, but with Geralt, he might as well have made a stunning emotional breakthrough what with how relentlessly he seemed to work against any semblance of companionship that Jaskier had to offer.

“Witcher,” came a voice, interrupting Jaskier’s musing and, most likely, the silence that Geralt was finally enjoying. “I’ve got a job for you.”

The speaker - the owner of the tavern - was a stocky, middle-aged man, ragged and stinking of... the gods only knew what, really, but Jaskier could hazard a guess that the last time the man had bathed, Jaskier had most likely still been a mere human being.

Geralt grunted at him.

“There’s been a creature, attacking and murdering our townspeople. I’ll give you sixty ducats to get rid of it.”

“Double that.”

“I’m not made of money, witcher!”

Jaskier snorted into his ale. “Could have fooled me, what with your extortionate prices.”

This had not been a wise declaration, by any means. The general consensus on the matter was that one did not simply insult an individual whose hospitality one wished to indulge in, but, in fairness to Jaskier, the prices the man kept were indeed eye-wateringly high, and his proposed compensation to Geralt laughably low. The man who’d wanted him to deal with a grain thief in Posada had paid him over double the reeking, shambling mess of a man’s offer, for crying out loud.

Besides, Jaskier reasoned, the guy was also a dick, and the bard believed staunchly in giving at least as good as he got.

The man himself, however, had a vastly different opinion on the situation.

“And you! What do you think you’re doing?”

Jaskier had several answers for the man, all of which would serve only the purpose of digging himself deeper into the hole he’d made for himself. “Just... Making conversation.”

Damn it. All those years learning from Erland and he had not, in fact, managed to imitate the art of sounding deceptively even when he spoke, enough to make the other person, his partner and opponent in his verbal ventures, feel like an idiot regardless of the situation. No, when Jaskier did it, he just sounded like a pillock himself. Tosh.

“Is that right, bard? Well, you won’t be sleeping here tonight, I’ll tell you that,” the innkeeper snarled, and Jaskier supposed that that was to be taken as a threat.

“Oh no,” he said, deadpan and plaintive. “Whatever shall I do without all those horrific diseases I would have contracted from staying in this... fine establishment?”

“Jaskier.”

Geralt’s grumble of a warning could equally have been for the benefit of the bard, or his coin, but, given the vein that had begun to throb on the forehead of the apparently quite easily agitated innkeeper, was quite timely. Much as Jaskier enjoyed saying things he probably shouldn’t have, he did not much enjoy the consequences. After all, how was he to look his fellows in the eye if word got out that he’d had his teeth kicked in by a whoreson who had the hygiene standards of a defecating ox?

Not mollified in the slightest, the innkeeper glared at the pair of them. “I’ve half a mind not to pay you at all, witcher, if your companion wants so badly to burn away any goodwill anyone might have for you.”

“You do realise that if this is a town-wide problem, he can just get a contract from someone else,” Jaskier couldn’t help but point out. Really, it was like the man thought they were stupid.

The man shot him with yet another piercing glower, which Jaskier met evenly, with the confidence of a man who had been booted from taverns regularly enough to to have had experience with the situation.

“Fine,” grunted the man. “I’ll give you a hundred ducats, witcher, and I’ll allow the bard to stay, but then you’re to get rid of the creature before the morn.”

“He got a hundred and fifty for dealing with a grain thief,” Jaskier interrupted, earning himself two glares, this time.

Fair enough.

“A hundred twenty, and a half-price room, if the bard shuts up for the rest of the night.”

“Deal,” Geralt said, a little too quickly for Jaskier’s liking.

He would have protested the injustice inflicted upon him, were it not for the fact that it would have cost Geralt his compensation. The things he did for this man...

He did, of course, accompany Geralt on the actual hunt for the mysterious creature that was apparently massacring the people of Beled, and, once they were out of earshot of the unpleasant innkeeper, Jaskier immediately struck up another conversation with his companion.

“So, what creature do you think it is that’s wondering from house to house, murdering the innocent?”

“Don’t know,” Geralt grunted. He was feeling especially verbose that night, then, if he was actually deigning to answer Jaskier’s flippant queries with actual words.

“Ooh, do you think it’s a vampire? That would make a terrific song, I’ll tell you that much. The mighty White Wolf of Rivia felling a vampire, in the most disgusting little hovel this side of the continent!”

“Hm.”

They had entered the contract with little information - the cause of death, and the circumstances under which the attacks themselves occurred, were given to them in painfully brief and uninformative statements. Apparently the murders were gory and happened at night, which was about as helpful as them saying that the victims were dead and had not been dead earlier. It was all a little ridiculous, to be honest.

Still, the lack of information passed on by the innkeeper was not particularly worrisome. They had, after all, swiftly been directed to the local mortician - a nice enough young lass, the innkeeper had leered, who’d moved to Beled a few months ago and picked up her father’s old trade. With the promise that she would likely have at least one of the corpses on hand, unburied, for the witcher to examine, the pair set off quickly to the girl’s place of abode.

They had found her house quickly enough - it reeked of death, which was fitting enough for a place full of corpses, and a significant enough amount of them, too, given the fact that the inhabitants of the town dropped like flies anyways, due to the remarkably subpar conditions that left Jaskier more surprised that anyone was still living there at all. What with all the deaths from starvation, malnutrition, exhaustion, dehydration, and all the various diseases one could practically smell festering in the grotty little streets, the recent epidemic of killings had made little impact to the overall death toll in the town - which was, by some wonder, still sustaining a constant population despite the lethal conditions.

Geralt had not deigned to knock or ask permission to enter - rather, he had simply barged through the door as if he had no manners at all, surprising the girl within, who looked up, startled but not particularly fearful, from the body she had been hunched over, as the witcher entered.

Jaskier slipped in after him, a tad less forcefully.

“You the mortician?” Geralt grunted, polite as ever.

“Yes,” she said, seemingly unfazed by the impromptu home invasion. “You’re a witcher.”

“Do you have the bodies?”

“I have one, a victim from two nights ago that I’ve yet to bury,” the mortician said, getting up from her current corpse. “Let me fetch it for you. I can’t remember his name, but he was a rowdy drunk. Lukas down at the tavern was always complaining about him.”

She let out an awkward little laugh as she went away to fetch the body.

“That tavern-owner seems like he’d complain a lot about anyone,” Jaskier grumbled, to the ears of nobody in particular.

Returning with a body almost twice her size, the slight mortician tried to set it down gingerly on the the free examination bench adjacent to the one she’d been hunched over, and failed miserably - due mainly to the sheer size of the corpse she was lugging rather than due to any lack of strength on her part. Who knew hauling dead people around for a living would be so conductive to building one’s strength up?

“Here he is,” she said, brushing curly blonde hair from her eyes with fingers that seemed perpetually bloodstained. “The latest murder victim, for one witcher and his... associate, I suppose.”

How cruel, that even a complete stranger would deny Jaskier’s budding friendship with Geralt.

Stepping towards the body, after the white-haired witcher, Jaskier took it upon himself to also subtly look over the body.

The man must have looked even more of a sight at the scene, as even now, the blotches and stains of his own blood on his skin were overwhelmingly prominent, despite the fact that the body had seemingly been cleaned somewhat for the examination. The man’s torso, too, was covered in wide gouges from which blood would have sprayed as he died, likely in utter agony. A jagged slit, too, something from a claw, most likely, ran across his throat, exposing his gullet to the world as though whatever creature had attacked him had sought to open a little window into his neck. His chest, too, had suffered the same fate - flesh and bone alike had bean cleaved through in clean, swift strikes, leaving its contents bared for the world to see. The man’s stomach, however, had suffered the worst of the damage, though - Jaskier was fairly certain that the only reason that the man’s diced insides were, in fact, still inside him at all was due to a fair bit of posthumous intervention.

It was gruelling.

Curiously, however, there was no smell of any kind of creature on the man at all.

Despite the wounds being consistent with some kind of mauling, from an animal with most formidable claws, there was no scent indicating such a thing at all. Whatever had killed the man, it hadn’t been a creature - Jaskier, as well as the rest of the world, had yet to discover any living being that was entirely scentless.

Surreptitiously, he eyed Geralt, to see if the man had come to a similar conclusion. What with how stoic and non-verbal the man was most of the time, Jaskier had taken it upon himself to attempt to learn how to read him.

The witcher’s face was impassive, as he stared down the mangled corpse of the man.

See, attempt had been the operative word, there. Jaskier had attempted to learn to read Geralt, with an unfortunately limited amount of success beyond the now intrinsic familiarity with the Geralt is ignoring the bard expression he so often wore.

“Not a monster,” he grunted, finally.

“Wh- what?” the mortician laughed, seeming sceptical. “But he was mauled. Look at him!”

“No scent. He wasn’t attacked by any creature.”

“What do you think happened, then?”

“Curse.”

“A serial curse, Geralt?” Jaskier snorted. “And who would cast it? Last I checked, there weren’t any sorcerers deigning to wander around backwater towns like this long enough to cast curses left and right!”

Geralt of fucking Rivia, insufferable as he was, merely glanced at the bard with a steely glint in his eye, and repeated himself. “There’s no scent.”

“There’s no wizard, either!”

Jaskier’s voice was raised a little bit, but it was performative, a vector to carry his incredulity across to his audience and nothing more. Still, the mortician’s eyes flickered to him, nervously, and he shot her an apologetic look. It wouldn’t do to terrorise her in her own house, after all.

“Jaskier. It was not a creature.”

The bard made a strangled noise. “That doesn’t mean it was a curse!”

“What was it then?”

And that, right there, was the question. Geralt was right, it definitely wasn’t a creature, but a serial cursing? Really, that kind of thing was just... It was stupid, and pointless, and dumb. Besides, surely if an experienced sorcerer wanted to commit murder, a plague of some sort would have been a much better choice, especially in a place such as Beled where the inhabitants were contracting everything left and right anyways.

Still, though, that didn’t exactly disprove that it was a curse, it just proved that Jaskier would have made a much better murderer than whoever this idiot was.

“Right, then,” he relented, nodding to Geralt. “What should we do, in that case?”

Geralt simply set off.

Rolling his eyes, Jaskier, as always, followed him.

Perhaps he should have expected this, after all, what with witchers not particularly being too geared towards human affairs - Jaskier seemed to recall some mocking leers about witchers being idiots if they thought they could take the law into their own hands, come to think of it - and Geralt of fucking Rivia specifically being so anti-social that he wouldn’t be able to tell a truth from a lie even if it bit him in his spiteful, horse-riding arse, but to call Geralt’s investigative technique lacking would be the understatement of the century.

The oaf’s idea of how to adequately catch a murderous, curse-happy sorcerer was to wander around the town, asking for a sorcerer.

Jaskier’s head hurt.

“Geralt,” he said, for the thousandth time, hoping against hope that the man was not simply ignoring his pleas out of spite. “Geralt, this isn’t how this works. You aren’t going to find a reclusive, killer sorcerer by bloody asking around the place if anyone’s seen one! You’re just giving him a warning to pack up, leave, and take his gaudy curse elsewhere!”

“Hm.”

Oh, dear gods.

“Geralt, whoever it is that’s doing the cursing isn’t going to deliver themselves to you on a silver platter just because you asked them to!”

Still, the witcher paid him no heed. Right, then. That was fine. It wasn’t like Jaskier wanted them - wanted him - to actually do something productive, or get paid, after all. If Geralt wanted to waste a week chasing sorcerers in the most blatant fashion possible, who was Jaskier to stop him?

One thing this whole incident was giving him, though, was a little bit of insight into the reasons that people didn’t like witchers taking the law into their own hands, so to speak. It was most likely thanks to the fact that they were astonishingly bad at it.

The sun had started to set over the damn town of Beled, dipping below the horizon in its customary, colourful send-off, when Geralt’s sorcerer-quest actually yielded a result, to Jaskier’s utter amazement. Apparently the whole world was just very, very stupid today. Or perhaps Jaskier was finally going mad.

“Heard you were looking for a sorcerer,” the man who’d approached them spat, looking like no sorcerer Jaskier had ever seen before - a tad bit too rotten and diseased, in his opinion.

“Yes,” Geralt grunted, Jaskier still trying to process that they had actually found a sorcerer. They had found a sorcerer, in Beled, with Geralt’s absolutely bloody awful technique.

Was the sorcerer innocent, then? Or was he simply revealing himself to throw off suspicion? Jaskier had been wrong about the reasons witchers weren’t advised to get involved with human affairs after all. It wasn’t that they were crap at it. It was the fact that it would drive them absolutely fucking insane, apparently.

“My name is Darius,” he said. “I am capable of the most grand of sorcerous acts.”

“Such as?” Geralt prompted gruffly.

Darius replied with a flourish, grandiose and over-the-top. If this was the man who had cursed the townsfolk to be mauled, Jaskier could see why he’d gone with something so flashy. He was the very definition of gaudy.

“Why, my dear witcher, surely you are familiar with acts of sorcery,” Darius winked, and Jaskier raised an eyebrow at him.

However, neither he nor the White Wolf paid the bard any attention. That was fine. At least Jaskier was getting a break from this nonsense. When they left Beled, hopefully with Lukas the innkeeper’s coin, Jaskier was going to make a great number of hints as to why Geralt should stick to monsters only from here on out. Besides, hadn’t he picked up the Butcher of Blaviken moniker after a similar incident? It seemed that Geralt of fucking Rivia had not learnt, in all his years of life, how to leave well enough alone.

“I am indeed,” Geralt replied to Darius. “But I’m curious as to what kind of sorcery you yourself are capable of.”

“Oh, anything you might desire. Enchantments, potions, protection, and the like...”

“How about curses?”

Darius stopped in his tracks.

Jaskier tried his best not to roll his eyes. Did Geralt realise how that sounded? A witcher asking for a curse. Honestly.

“If that is what you so desire, my witcher.” The man’s voice was cautious now, flamboyance drained from his stout frame.

“My friend means no ill will to anyone, I assure you,” Jaskier interrupted lazily. “He’s merely curious as to your capabilities. He’s met quite a few sorcerers in his time, I should think - he’s appraising you.”

You’re welcome, Geralt. Honestly, one would think that someone as intimidating as him would have some sort of clue as to the kind of impression he gave off, but apparently the White Wolf of Rivia was either clueless or didn’t care.

Darius schooled a smile back onto his face. “I suppose I could do curses, too, then, witcher.”

Fuck it, this conversation was taking entirely too long.

“So if I wanted to have someone killed, you could curse them for me? If I had the coin, of course, my good... sorcerous acquaintance,” the bard interrupted, drawing Darius’ attention.

“I- Yes, I suppose I could. But be warned, these magics are-”

“Great!” Jaskier grinned. “Great, that’s great, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you outright, as both me and my friend are a little out of our depths here... you know, this investigative thing isn’t really either of our area of expertise. Honestly, this sounds like the set-up to a bad joke of all things, doesn’t it? A witcher, a bard, and a sorcerer all walk into an alley... Did you curse the good inhabitants of the town of Beled to be mauled to death by some mysterious force or not?”

“I- what?”

The silence that followed Jaskier’s outburst was palpable, and the expression of incredulous confusion that appeared on Darius’ face told the witchers everything they needed to know. At least, it told Jaskier everything he needed to know. Geralt... well, one could never really tell with Geralt. His mind was an enigma, and Jaskier had no idea how it worked.

Wait, no. Jaskier hazarded a glance over at the witcher, who had a pensive look on his face.

“You’re not a sorcerer,” Geralt said slowly.

Oh.

“I- I-” Darius squeaked, before wilting, his demeanour changing entirely. “No. I’m not. But damn it, I have to make a living somehow here, and it’s not like there’s that much you can do in a shithole like Beled! I don’t see how exactly it’s your business anyways, witcher - haven’t you monsters to hunt?”

“There are no monsters in Beled.”

“What about the one tearing people apart?”

“Curse.”

“Oh.”

Another moment passed in an awkward bout of silence, and the three men just stared at each other for a little bit. It was rather uncomfortable.

Regaining his composure, Darius glared at Geralt. “Well then, what are you doing poking around in our business then, witcher? Go back to whoever paid you, return their coin, and leave us be. If it’s not a creature, it’s a person, and that’s not your jurisdiction.”

“Your critique has been heard and duly noted, my good fellow, thank you very much,” Jaskier said smoothly, very clearly looking down at the man. “We will, of course, be out of your collective hair in a moment, but don’t you have better things to do than preach at us? Townsfolk to swindle, perhaps, or diseases to contract?”

With one last glare at the pair of them, Darius scuttled out of the dim alley, leaving Geralt looking at Jaskier with somewhat of a contemplative expression.

“You mentioned disease a lot.”

Oh, sweet gods above. Was Geralt of fucking Rivia attempting to start a conversation with him, Jaskier the most humble of bards, unprompted, and with no ulterior motive to boot? He never thought he’d see the day.

“Yeah, well, it reeks,” he said, and would you look at that, it’s him who’s gone and pulled a Geralt this time. “I mean, what with the amount of mould and rot and other disgusting little surprises lining the streets, it’s a wonder we haven’t actually caught anything yet, honestly.”

Geralt gave a small, noncommittal hum.

“So, should we leave, then? Tell the charming innkeeper that thank you very much, but it was a person, sir, and make our way towards the next town, where they might actually have a monster that needs hunting? Because honestly, that sounds like a great plan. We should go with that plan.”

“Jaskier. The people are still in danger.”

“The people don’t want you here! You heard Darius, and I know he doesn’t hold the minority opinion! If they want to be massacred so badly, let them! Don’t stick your neck out for people who’ll condemn you for it!”

“I never took you to be a cruel man, Jaskier,” Geralt said, and wasn’t that rich coming from a man who’d barely ever deigned to speak properly to him? Why was it Geralt’s place to make assumptions about Jaskier’s character, and act so disappointed in him when he never even bothered to get to know him in the first place?

Jaskier knew what he’d signed up for when he decided to follow Geralt from Posada, and he was a patient enough man, but damn it, if Geralt couldn’t be fucked to say two words to him most days, who was he to try and take the moral high ground?

“I never took you to be an idiot, Geralt of Rivia,” Jaskier retorted. “But if you want a repeat of Blaviken, go ahead. We’ll see if my singing’s good enough to fix your reputation a second time.”

Geralt flinched, and yeah, okay, that had been a low blow. Jaskier didn’t know exactly what had happened in Blaviken, but he’d heard the rumours, and he could take an educated guess.

“Sorry,” Jaskier back-pedalled. “Sorry. That was cruel.”

Gods, he was so tired. What was he even doing anymore?

Geralt was still looking at him. Had he done something? Stupid question, of course he had, he’d brought up that whole Blaviken mess that he knew the man was sensitive about. But why-

Wait.

Something clicked in Jaskier’s mind, something irrelevant to the current situation of maybe having ruined his definitely budding friendship with Geralt - something that was so obvious, that in hindsight, he felt slightly stupid for not having seen it earlier.

He looked up, glamoured-blue eyes locking with bright yellow.

“Geralt, remind me,” he said. “You said that there was no scent on the bodies. What about the townspeople?”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t the bodies have the scent of other people on them?”

“Yes,” Geralt frowned. “But nobody else in the town smelt of death. Not bloody ones.”

“But someone did.”

The witcher frowned, the how do you know that he seemed reluctant to voice written all over his face. Jaskier sighed dramatically.

“Think about it. Who, in the town, would pass under your... smell-detector, unnoticed?”

The witcher’s expression was still disconcertingly blank.

Nope. This wasn’t going anywhere. Damn Geralt of Rivia, seemingly so intent on ruining Jaskier’s big moment of revelation.

Screw it.

“It was the mortician, the mortician is the murderer.”

Surprise overtook Geralt’s features, in an expression that the bard would treasure forever. It was almost visible, the way the pieces were clicking together in his mind. Of course it was the mortician. What with the expectation that the scent of death would cling to her, as well as the fact that she would have most likely have seen enough mauled bodies to be able to convincingly falsify one, she seemed like a perfect suspect, in retrospect.

Jaskier remembered the gaping throat and shivered. She’d most likely sliced the dead man’s vocal chords to stop him from crying out and drawing attention as she killed him.

“Fuck,” Geralt said, and Jaskier had to agree.

“So, what do we do now?”

Geralt’s brows furrowed, as he drifted off into thought. It would have been surprising - highly surprising, indeed - if the thought of Blaviken didn’t cross his mind.

Why couldn’t the creature simply have been a creature? A particularly intelligent and stealthy alghoul, perhaps, or even a vampire... It would have been so much easier. There wouldn’t have been the whole moral issue of whether the townspeople would decide that a human life taken by a witcher, murder or not, was enough ground to chase them out of Beled completely in the middle of the night.

But no. Life, or destiny, or whatever it was, seemed determined to be a dick. Nothing could ever be simple. You go to hunt a grain thief, you stumble upon a ragtag bunch of elves struggling to survive. You take a contract to kill a creature mercilessly slaughtering the inhabitants of a backwater town, of course it’s going to turn out to be a serial killer! Why wouldn’t it! Gods, it was just like one of those philosophical thinkpieces, written only by the most pretentious of scholars, where the real monster turned out to be humanity all along.

It was such a steaming load of bullshit that Jaskier felt like banging his head against the wall. Even Filavandrel’s stubborn myopia hadn’t been this frustrating.

“Jaskier,” Geralt said, and the bard blinked. “What should we do?”

At this, he had to laugh - but it wasn’t entirely an unhappy sound. There was a degree of genuine joy in there, alongside the incredulity. “You’re asking me what we should do,” Jaskier grinned. “Does that mean we’re friends now?”

“What?”

“I’ll take that as a yes, then! Oh, my next ballad will be one for the ages - how the White Wolf of Rivia and his beautiful and intelligent bardic friend saved the town of Beled from a vile and monstrous killer!”

Exasperation settled over Geralt’s features, but that in itself was progress in Jaskier’s book. Who’d have thought that all it took was to end up trying to catch a serial killer together?

“Jaskier. The mortician.”

Oh. Right. They actually had to do something about the murderous undertaker. Well, that rather put a damper on the situation, given that Geralt’s usual solutions amounted to kill it, while Jaskier’s rather more extensive set of actions to be taken included such faithful masterstrokes as kill it, run away, and, on a few memorable occasions, delegate.

None of these were particularly helpful in the given situation - killing people was firmly taboo, running away would solve nothing as the danger was not to them, and there was nobody to delegate to.

Actually, on second thought, leaving Beled forever still sounded very appealing.

“What if we captured her?” Jaskier mused. “Actually, what if I captured her? The big problem here is that people don’t like witchers taking the law into their own hands, so to speak, but if an ordinary human bard were to capture the insane and very dangerous murderess, nobody should have any complaint, right? Then we could simply deposit the strange and, in hindsight, most definitely insane woman on the doorstep of whoever it is that deals with these things here and be on our merry way.”

Geralt grunted.

“I’ll take that both as an agreement and an acknowledgement of my under-appreciated genius, then, shall I?”

But Geralt never got to answer, seeing as how then, because this was a shitty day and an even shittier situation, a scream shattered the night. Powerful and overwhelming, like a wounded animal - Jaskier knew that it was her, it was the damn murderer, and, judging from the way Geralt started sprinting like the world was ending in the direction if the sound, so did he.

Groaning to himself, Jaskier readied himself to follow, to run after Geralt and help him save whatever unfortunate individual had drawn the ire of Beled’s resident psychopath, when he felt a hand at his scruff, and a blade at his throat.

Brilliant.

Glancing backwards, he attempted to get an eyeful of his attacker, scent almost completely hidden under layers of grime and shit, probably - masked. It was masked, and blended perfectly with the natural reek of the town’s streets, evidently odious enough for the average person to pick out too, given with how perfectly the probably-the-mortician had managed to match it.

“How?” Jaskier rasped. “I didn’t even suspect you until literally three minutes ago!”

“Well then, maybe I’m just smarter than you,” the definitely-the-mortician said, grin evident in her voice. “I’ve been following you for ages, stupid.”

“Of course you have.”

Unbidden, his mind flickered back to when he’d raised his voice in the woman’s house earlier that afternoon. He’d thought he’d put her one edge with his yelling, when really...

When really what had spooked her was they fact that he and Geralt had seen through the creature ruse. She either hadn’t known of or hadn’t expected a witcher’s heightened sense of smell, and hadn’t expected it to come into play. She was careful.

Fuck, she was careful, and she was good.

“Was that scream just a distraction for Geralt, then? How’d you organise it?”

There was that smirk in her voice again, audible even as her dagger bit deeper into the flesh of his throat. “He’s stupidly noble. And there are plenty of kids bumming around in the streets that can be easily bribed. Pass messages along faster than any messenger can, too.”

It really was quite lucky for the bard that she liked to boast of her exploits so much, but then, what was the point of going to so much effort for one’s plans if nobody would ever know of them to appreciate it? Either way, it suited Jaskier - another second spent bragging was another second he spent breathing, and another second to plan. He’d had his throat slit before, enough to damn near kill him, and he couldn’t say he was too eager to repeat the experience, now or ever.

It was really too bad for the mortician, though, that she was so small. And, unknowingly, so much weaker than Jaskier.

He leant back, and fell, atop the woman holding him hostage. She didn’t - couldn’t - keep her balance, but she kept her grip, tightened it as soon as she started to fall, but Jaskier had already taken advantage of her split-second of surprise, and was reaching up to grab her arm. His fingers fastened around it, pulling her dagger away from his throat, and when they hit the ground, steel didn’t bite into his flesh as it surely would have had he been even a little slower. He felt, he heard the air rushing out of his would-be killer’s lungs, winding her, and he took that little window of opportunity to spring up and away from her reach, twisting the weapon from her hand as he went.

One did not, after all, forget all those years of witcher training just because one had acquired a glamour and a lute, after all. Too bad the mortician hadn’t seen that coming.

Too bad for her, rather. It suited Jaskier just fine, if you asked him.

Clambering to her feet, the grimy woman pulled out yet another dagger, and launched herself at Jaskier.

She was small, slight and fast, but there was no real technique behind her movement. Jaskier dodged her first strike easily, not even needing to parry her blade. It was clear that she had not trained to fight - she relied on overwhelming her opponent more than anything else, and that simply wouldn’t fly against a witcher.

Jaskier was fast, too, he had trained for speed, and he’d trained his speed for agility. Still, he was so used to fighting larger, more stationary opponents - this was definitely going to be an interesting duel.

The woman stood opposite him, having turned once she’d overshot. Why wasn’t she taking the offensive? Oh, well. Jaskier shrugged and ran at her, twisting around her blade and sinking his, with a backhanded grip, into her shoulder from behind as he passed, his own momentum freeing it from her flesh as he continued on his trajectory.

A scream, choked off, tore itself from her throat - she’d meant to mute it, but hadn’t prepared for the pain. Jaskier took another pass, this time slashing for her throat, and the gargling chokes that followed his strike told him that he had struck true.

How very anticlimactic.

He followed her wide-eyed gaze as she fell - oh. His medallion lay on the floor, having fallen out of its hiding place in his doublet’s inside pockets.

So she knew for sure, then.

Jaskier walked over to where it lay and picked the medallion up, wiping it off and replacing it on his person.

Not a minute later, Geralt ran back into the alley.

“Jaskier!”

“Geralt.”

His yellow eyes alighted on the dead body of the mortician - the mortician Jaskier had killed, the one who he had chosen to kill despite the fact that he’d certainly have been able to apprehend her had he wanted to. The woman he had killed partly to keep his cover, but then again, partly because she most definitely deserved it.

“You-”

Jaskier gave a weak shrug and an almost-smile, and tucked the dagger he still held into his belt. “Turns out, she wasn’t all that great in a fight.”

There were inconsistencies with that statement, glaring and obvious - everything from the dagger in the dead woman’s hand, to the abundance of blood on the body, too much to have leaked out after death - but either Geralt didn’t care to look, or he just didn’t want to say.

“She set a trap,” the White Wolf said. “She wanted to kill you.”

“It is true that ladies love throwing themselves at me,” Jaskier said, but he was too tired to accompany the joke with a smile. “Do you want to collect the coin, or..?”

Geralt shook his head. “We should leave.”

Jaskier closed his eyes. “If only you’d thought so earlier.”

“The town is safe. A hundred and twenty ducats aren’t worth the hassle.”

“Next time, if it’s not a monster, we’re not getting involved. I’m starting to notice a trend of it never really ending well.”

“We’ll be sleeping in the forest,” Geralt informed the bard, the barest hint of a smile on his face. “Though your hair already looks a mess.”

“Yeah, I fell.”

Something wet landed on Jaskier’s nose, and he looked up towards the sky. Clouds hung over the shitty little town of Beled, and, as raindrops began to fall, Jaskier stood - better leave whilst the streets were still merely grimy instead of outright swampy.

“You’re bleeding.”

Oh. That was right. The death-dealing mortician had cut him, after all, before he’d beaten her. It was barely a scratch. Jaskier was reasonably certain that after the scab had healed, there wouldn’t even be a trace of it under his glamour, shallow as it was.

He grinned. “It’s barely a scratch, Geralt. Though it’s going to sound amazing in my next song - how I heroically almost had my throat slashed as I took care of a serial killer all by myself!”

The White Wolf snorted. “Nobody likes a self-serving ballad.”

And, at a campsite just south-east of Beled, that was the excuse Jaskier cited back to Geralt, that it would be downright arrogant to sing a tale of his own exploits, as inwardly, he despaired utterly at the complete lack of rhymes for mortician.

Chapter Text

Julian wasn’t stupid, by any stretch of the mind - regardless of how determined he was to play the fool at any given moment. He knew as well as anyone that attentiveness and competence were expected of him as a witcher, not for the sake of whoever was mentoring him, but for himself. To fail to perform adequately in his training was only a method to ensure his death, either via trials or after them, as a fully-fledged witcher. So he did - he did perform to the best of his abilities, internalising every lesson, every little scrap of advice tossed his way.

The trick, though, lay in appearances. Was he paying attention when old Keldar lectured at them, grilled him and Coën on the given monster of the day? Absolutely. Was he also going to look like he was paying attention? What, and give Keldar the satisfaction? Not a chance. The man had cemented his fate the first time he’d snarked at Julian for not knowing the answer to a question. He had been downright rude. Whilst the cantankerous old witcher did not suffer fools gladly, Julian himself did not suffer arseholes gladly, and so had been born a truly majestic rivalry between teacher and student - a feud so astounding, that surely, if any witcher were the slightest bit lyrically inclined, there would have been ballads written on the subject.

At least, that’s what Julian swore. Coën, on the other hand, was of the opinion that Julian could do much better in his rivalries than winding crabby old men up.

In a way, he was right, Julian supposed. It simply wouldn’t do to acknowledge Keldar as a worthy opponent, when all the man seemed to do was be boorish and surly in Julian’s general direction whenever the answer he blurted out to his gruff questions was not, in fact, perfectly correct.

Then again, he knew that at least some of the older witchers from their school found Julian’s distaste for old Keldar highly amusing, and the boy loved to lavish in the attention it got him when they returned for the winter, and word of Julian’s antics inevitably reached their ears.

“You know, as entertaining as it is, there are better things to be known for than an irksome thorn in someone’s side,” Coën had said to him, once.

“I’m not known as a thorn in someone’s side, thank you, Coën. I’m very much a general problem,” Julian had retorted, earning a snort from his friend.

Even so, Julian’s childish feud with the instructor, much to the delight and amusement of onlookers, continued. And really, it wasn’t like Kaer Seren had an overwhelming amount of entertainment opportunities, either. And the boy was rather good at putting on a show.

Despite the bleak winter and the annual return of the other Griffin witchers - or perhaps because of it - the training had intensified, their previous exercises seeming almost laughably easy compared to their current regimen. Julian and Coën began every day at the crack of dawn, before the sun was even a sliver over the horizon, and their drills only ended after the sun had set, with minimal breaks in between for respite.

Sometimes, they garnered themselves an audience, now, and whenever one of the older witchers were caught observing them, they would, without fail, be volunteered by Erland as a sparring partner for either Julian or Coën, which was always fun.

Julian got the feeling that they were holding back less and less every passing day, and wasn’t that a fun way to add to his collection of bruises? Beaten up by a man decades older than him.

The lessons with Keldar, though, in contrast, had only gotten far more amusing. What with having an abundance of witchers in the keep, coupled with a fair scarcity of tasks, Julian’s childish tomfoolery had gotten him an audience.

“The difference between a graveir and a ghoul, then, Julian, if you insist on being so below standard,” Keldar glared at the boy. “If you’re so unable to recall anything at all, you might at least be able to tell me this.”

“One has two syllables, the other only one,” Julian drawled, earning himself a snort and a shake of the head from Coën, who was hiding his smile by pretending to be highly engrossed in a compendium of... something or other.

“Are you daft, boy?” Keldar barked, rising, as always, to the bait.

“Good question. Perhaps if you were truly as intelligent as you claimed, you could find the answer yourself, oh Master Witcher.”

“In that case I shall confirm my suspicions. Tell me, boy, how do you expect to survive if you cannot answer such a simple question?”

“Oh, I heard a little bit of charm goes a long way out there,” Julian said lazily, blinking his yellow eyes.

“Charm! I suppose you’d charm a bloedzuiger to death, then?” Keldar growled. “Maybe sing it a sonnet and hope for it to keel over?”

“You don’t sing sonnets, you recite them. Have you no culture at all, old man?”

There was a vein twitching in Keldar’s temple - a sign that this conversation was to be short-lived from that moment onwards, halted by Keldar hurling some punishment or other in Julian’s direction in the very near future.

He’d try to make the next few insults count, then.

“Enough with your ceaseless chatter, boy! Hold your tongue and at least attempt to learn something, despite your raging incompetence.”

“Perhaps I could do better if my teacher were more concerned with actually teaching, and less so with attempting to verbally eviscerate his students.”

“If you treated my tutelage with any kind of respect, perhaps I wouldn’t have to!”

“That’s funny. The way I remember it, you were the one who decided it would be awfully amusing to insult me whenever I gave a wrong answer. But perhaps my memory simply doesn’t serve. It would, after all, be unheard of for the esteemed Keldar to actually be incorrect for once. What an enigma.”

“I suppose you’ll be rather less conceited, boy, when you receive your punishment,” Keldar snarled, and Julian blinked at him before continuing, unfazed.

“Oh, gods, no. I wouldn’t dream of being so rude to my esteemed and respected mentors and predecessors.”

He felt satisfaction spark in his chest, then, when Keldar’s composure finally broke completely.

It was slightly less amusing when he was given his punishment. His transgressions had been deemed minor enough that he shouldn’t suffer physically from them - indeed, if he did end up having the shit beaten out of him every time he opened his mouth to insult Keldar, Julian wouldn’t have been much more than a walking mass of bruises and scar tissue, at this point, but in his opinion, Keldar grudgingly handing him a bucket and rag, no doubt still fuming from the lesson, and having him missed-a-spotting for hours on end in the bitingly cold halls of the keep was worse. Physical trauma, he could take, he was vaguely a witcher, after all, but the achingly bitter winter chill that Julian swore was freezing the water in the bucket solid was another thing entirely.

Even more annoying was the fact that his punishment was taking place during dinner-time, the one occasion when he and Coën could actually hold a conversation with the other Griffin witchers. One of them, a good-natured man with long, curly hair and a thick beard, had even taken to giving him constructive criticism on his insults - something Julian highly appreciated, as it simply wouldn’t do to get complacent in his feud with old Keldar.

The fact that he was close enough to hear the vague noises of the other witchers enjoying their meal was simply salt in the wound.

Julian scrubbed at the same area of the hall for the umpteenth time, knowing that, despite Keldar’s adamancy, he had not, in fact, missed the spot given that it was still wet from the last time he’d gone over it. This was mean. The old Witcher’s retribution was utterly disproportionate, in Julian’s opinion - it wasn’t like he could have a nice, long, back-and-forth with himself, after all, with no other party complicit. He could only hope that Keldar didn’t think this meant he was winning, however. If the old man thought it fit to take their feud to levels beyond snark in his lessons, Julian would take that invitation to do the same himself. Perhaps he’d have to enlist Coën’s help for a few of his ideas, but...

“Missed a spot,” Keldar informed him, and Julian shook himself, annoyed, from his thoughts to glare at his nemesis.

After a while, the chatter from the dinner that the others were no doubt indulging in - and it was unbelievably petty of Keldar to give up his own meal just to make Julian miserable, really - started to die down, and after a while, the clear sounds of fighting picked up, some way away, to replace the clinking of cutlery and idle, laughing conversations.

“Do you know what they’re doing?”

Keldar grunted. “Having a spar, boy, what do you think?”

“Can I go watch?”

“Could’ve, if you hadn’t missed a spot.”

Julian followed the old witcher’s eyes to where he was glaring at the floor.

“Oh, for the love of- It’s still wet!”

The old witcher harrumphed at that, the glint in his eyes delivering a clear message - if Keldar said that Julian had missed a spot, then Julian had missed a spot.

Fucking Keldar.

“If I, perchance, presently answer the questions that I did not answer in class, may I be permitted to attend the spar that is currently ongoing?” Julian tried, and earned himself an amused glance from Keldar, of all things.

“It boggles the mind, how you’ve managed to retain so much of your noble upbringing from so little time actually spent having it.”

Keldar actually sounded entertained, which was the second factor that contributed to Julian’s surprise. The first factor, however, was a tad more significant.

“How did you know I was a noble? I never told anyone, or at least, I don’t think I did. Other than maybe Erland.”

“And yet you make it so obvious, it’s a wonder the entire School doesn’t know.”

Julian flashed him a winning grin, to which the old witcher rolled his eyes. “Go on, then, boy. Let’s have your recapitulation of the lesson.”

Perhaps, despite his initial thoughts, the recital of everything he’d been so adamant he didn’t know earlier was a victory for Julian rather than Keldar, in the end. The stunned look of abject shock on the man’s face was something Julian would treasure until the day he died. Apparently, Keldar hadn’t quite been aware of the extent to which he was playing up his incompetence, which was, to Julian’s mind, one of the best things ever to happen to him. He could barely hold in his laughter.

“Right, then,” Keldar said, pulling himself back together far too soon for Julian’s liking - he’d wanted to treasure the moment for a little longer - and staring at the boy. “I do believe that’s that, then. Run along to the spar, boy. But I must warn you that it’s that, or dinner.”

“Yes, sir,” Julian grinned, dropping his rag into the bucket and taking off before old Keldar could complain.

He followed the noise into one of the larger halls of the keep, not quite as large as the main atrium, but not much smaller. He slid into the room as subtly as a dragon with a sledgehammer, sprinting to the bench where all the spectators were seated, and depositing himself neatly on Coën’s lap.

“Hello to you too, Julian.”

“The bench was full,” Julian defended, making himself comfortable.

This was true, the bench was full - the number of witchers who had returned to winter at Kaer Seren wasn’t huge, but it was more than Julian had been expecting, especially given last year’s turnout. Around a dozen of them had shown up - perhaps a few more, Julian hadn’t counted - but what with the constant complaining of dwindling numbers, it had definitely been more than Julian had assumed would show up. And apparently, there were a few more witchers from their school who hadn’t shown up for the winter.

Either way, there were definitely more witchers than bench-space.

“It’s okay, you can just admit that you’re clingy. I won’t judge,” Coën crooned, earning himself a glare with no real indignation behind it.

The smirks a few of the surrounding witchers shared were not subtle by any means.

“What did I miss?”

“Witchers hitting each other with swords. One of them has a club. Erland complaining about their utter lack of technique.”

As if on cue, Erland called out to one of the witchers sparring. “Good gods, Henrik, are you angling to get yourself killed? Your form is sloppier than my current trainees, and believe you me, that is an issue in its own right!”

Julian snorted. “Hear that, Coën? He’s even shittier than you and your footwork.”

“On the contrary, Julian, I do believe that our esteemed grandmaster was referring to you and your atrocious form.”

Erland shot the both of them an unamused glance, before turning his attention back to the fight.

The match-up was even, with both witchers having similar techniques and skill levels. From an outside perspective, their battle looked cooperative, rather than competitive, as the two men both seemed to be involved in a kind of dance of blades, making every swing parrying every strike perfectly, but neither being quite able to gain any kind of significant upper hand.

Even if one of them - presumably Henrik - did have a form sloppier than the other.

“Alright, the two of you, sit down or else we’ll be here all night,” Erland commanded, eventually. “And Henrik, I hope you don’t mind sharing a few lessons with young Julian and Coën, there, because as is, you’re a raging embarrassment to the School of the Griffin. It’s really a wonder you got any jobs at all, having let yourself become so complacent.”

Henrik, a strapping man with a shock of red hair, and altogether someone who was very intimidating in appearance even without the yellow eyes of a witcher and the fair few scars that littered his skin, looked downright meek under Erland’s gaze. His opponent, a smaller man with narrow features, smirked at him.

“And you!” Erland turned on him, the smirk immediately finding itself wiped off the other witcher’s face. “The fact that you couldn’t get an upper hand when Henrik’s form was worse than that of most children I’ve trained is nothing to smirk about! Do you all revert to helpless babes the moment you leave the keep? Gods, I’d like to see someone competent sparring tonight too, to convince me that the centuries I spent training you were not, in fact, wasted!”

The witcher boasting a club stood, gave Erland a brisk nod, and walked into the room. Seemingly mollified, the grandmaster witcher looked up and down the row of seated witchers, waiting for another volunteer.

Before he - or, perhaps more likely, Coën - could stop it, Julian’s hand was in the air and he’d leapt up from his perch atop his friend, clearly volunteering to fight.

Erland raised an eyebrow.

“Can I fight him?”

Coën made a noise something akin to being strangled.

With exasperation almost tangible in the air, Erland replied with all the vigour of a man who had spent his entire day herding cats. “You won’t be let off training tomorrow if you break something, so bear that in mind.”

“My bones will stay intact, I swear it!”

“Not a bet that I’d take in your favour, Julian, but by all means, go ahead.”

Julian ambled over to the rack of weaponry beside the bench, followed by his friend, whose face spoke volumes about Julian’s latest stunt and also somehow managed to warn him of an impending lecture about impulse control, and picked up a sword, testing its weight in his hand.

“Not that one, Julek, that’s the one with the broken hilt.”

“Why are we keeping a sword with a broken hilt?”

“To keep us observant and on our toes, probably. I don’t know.”

Coën clapped Julian’s shoulder sympathetically as he began to make his way towards the middle of the room, towards his opponent.

“Try not to get beaten up too much. I’d like to actually get some sleep tonight, and I can’t do that if I’m too busy trying to piece you back together.”

“I’ll be sure to try to silence myself, lest my groans of immense pain inconvenience you too much, Coën.”

That earned him an amused snort from his friend... or was it disbelieving? Either way, Coën seemed mollified enough to be entertained.

“But seriously, Julian. Good luck.”

“When have I ever needed it?”

“You mean, aside from all the times you’ve crawled into my lap after you’ve done something similarly stupid, more purple and red than anything else?”

Julian brought his free hand to his heart, gasping exaggeratedly. “That never happened, Coën, my good friend! Wherever did you come up with such lies and slander?”

It was bravado, mainly, but Julian was confident in it. Surely, it was better to retain some sort of confidence and optimism in any given situation than to simply resign oneself to hopelessness all the time, no? Regardless, even if it wasn’t, it allowed Julian to have rather a lot more fun in the moment than if he deigned to resign himself to the stoic and grumpy life of the more boring of witchers. If the expectation of the general populace was that witchers should unlearn how to enjoy life, then Julian would take immense satisfaction in flipping them the bird.

Of course, this was all a rather long-winded way of saying that Julian would only admit that he had made a stupid decision over his own dead body.

Coën re-took his seat among the spectators lining the side of the hall, as Julian took to the middle of it, to face his opponent.

It was one of the more intimidating returning witchers - a large and burly man, with more scars criss-crossing his skin than Julian had ever seen on one person before.

“Well, go on, then, Julian. Sparring too often with the same opponent breeds habit, after all,” Erland said, impassive as he watched Julian adjust his grip on his sword, trying not to seem to obviously nervous. “Habit gets you killed in a fight.”

“I know.”

“Good. You may begin.”

Trying very hard not to think about how his entire School was going to watch him getting his arse kicked for entertainment - and really, when Julian had admitted to liking having an audience, he meant having an audience to impress, not this - he raised his sword and fell into a ready stance.

“I heard you with old Keldar,” the witcher grunted, before raising his own weapon - a club, for the chance to inflict maximum blunt-force trauma. Excellent. “Not up to your usual standard.”

Rolling his eyes, Julian focused on the weapon in his opponent’s hand. “I’m so sorry to disappoint you twice in one day, then.”

What his opponent’s reaction was, Julian didn’t know, because he was all of a sudden far too preoccupied with dodging the club that came swinging at him. Throwing himself out of the way, Julian hit the ground by the man’s leg, rolling out of his reach, skidding and turning around before fully coming to his feet, to keep his opponent within his line of sight.

The scarred witcher, meanwhile, had barely recovered from his blow, and only turned once Julian had had ample time to prepare his next move. The man was slow, slower than Julian and definitely slower than Erland, which gave him an opening to strike against him, to go on the offensive rather than the defensive. He sprung at the man, and, rather than leading with his sword, he swung it round in his hand so that his grip was back-handed. Planting his feet firmly on the man’s shoulders, Julian pushed off into a backflip, letting his trailing sword cut a slice in the man’s back as he twisted in mid air.

He landed a tad less lightly than he’d meant to, bringing his sword back into its original position, and barely managing to parry a blow from the man’s club as he finally brought it around.

The sheer force behind the blow was something Julian hadn’t expected, and his meagre weight was not enough to hold him in place as the steel of his sword bit into the wood of the club. Were it not for the fact that his blade was now somewhat stuck in his opponent’s weapon, Julian would surely have gone flying.

Whether or not that would be a good thing was debatable, as when the burly witcher recovered from his strike, Julian was yanked away with the club.

Shit.

It seemed he had two options, then, the first being to drop the sword and try to recover it later, but only a fool would let himself be willingly disarmed in such an unfavourable situation.

Instead, he took advantage of the fact that he was apparently light enough to be lifted by the man, and, switching to a two-handed grip, used the hold of his sword as a handhold as he swung his body up, aided by the preexisting momentum of the club’s movement, to deliver a kick, as hard as he could, with the full force of his weight behind it, to the man’s throat.

It was a dirty move, but an effective one - winded, the man dropped his weapon and reeled back, instinct driving him to clutch at his throat.

Julian barely heard Erland’s angry bark of what the fuck are you doing directed towards the scarred man, or at least something similar to that effect, focused as he was on freeing his weapon.

Before the man could recover enough to lunge for his weapon, Julian yanked on his sword in an attempt to drag both it and the club from his reach, and it turned out that the club was a whole lot heavier than he’d assumed; Julian was barely able to move it.

This was no time to focus on the implications of that, however, as Julian yanked again, and finally felt something give. Another pull, and another, and he was just about able to pull his sword free from the club and jump out of the way before the scarred man recovered and lunged for his sword.

Attempting to parry, then, was out of the question - Julian’s only hope was to dodge. Furthermore, he had no hope of actually defeating the man - even his slash at his back had elicited no reaction, and, aside from stabbing him - generally to be avoided in a friendly spar - Julian couldn’t hope to wound him to any actual effect.

Ducking under yet another strike from the club, Julian decided, then, to outlast the man - surely the spectators would quickly get bored of him, and Erland would call another match.

The scarred man was strong, but he was slow - Julian was able to nick his back again, having been able to make a swift pass from behind, before he could recover from his swing. He was, however, also willing to fight with his fists - Julian barely saw the blow coming from the man’s free hand, focused as he was on the club.

Throwing himself gracelessly to the side, the blow, aimed for his midriff, clipped his shoulder, sending him flying. Julian could only think to throw his sword lest he impale himself on it landing before the force of his body coming into contact with the ground sent a shock of pain running through his body. Hearing the clatter of his sword some way away, he pulled himself up and tried to orient himself - the scarred man was to his left. Oh, dear gods, the scarred man was charging at him.

Abandoning his sword completely, because he was stupid as all hell, apparently, Julian ran, too.

Right away from the scarred witcher.

Straight towards the wall.

Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, his gambit failed - the witcher was, after all, not a single-minded monster but rather an intelligent hunter - and he heard his opponent cease his charge, not deigning to follow him where he could use the environment to his advantage. Apparently Julian wouldn’t be able to make use of the wall after all - he’d meant lead his pursuer until he was alongside it, only to kick off of it and slip behind him, but that was evidently too transparent.

Oh well, it had been a bit of a shot in the dark to begin with. At least he’d made it closer to his sword.

Lunging for his weapon, Julian caught it neatly in his right hand as he executed a roll across the floor. As soon as he came out of it, he turned, once again opposite his opponent.

There was a significant amount of distance between them, and Julian was the one who charged this time, much to the evident surprise of his opponent. He saw the man ready, lifting his club, and it was that that Julian leapt onto, using it as a leverage point to access the man’s upper torso, thrusting his sword towards his shoulder.

However, the man wasn’t as slow as Julian had counted on.

The moment he realised exactly what the boy was angling for, he’d lifted his club, matching Julian’s trajectory, and hit the boy as he leapt, pushing him up and causing him to overshoot. His blade cut through only empty air, and he sailed over the man’s shoulder, crashing, feet-first, into the ground and skidding a little before his back, too, hit the stone floor.

The air was forced out of Julian’s lungs by the impact, but still he picked himself up off the floor. He was going to be sporting a fair few bruises tomorrow, he could tell.

Shit. His leg, he’d hurt his leg. It wasn’t broken, but he was bleeding - he was bleeding?

Oh, that was brilliant. That was bloody brilliant. He’d cut himself with his own sword whilst he was falling, of course he had. His right leg now sported a decent-sized gash, from which blood was slowly, very slowly, seeping.

Growling, he fell once again into a ready stance, before remembering. The echinops. He’d ended up throwing his sword - he couldn’t replicate the throw exactly, it wasn’t appropriate for the circumstance, but he could do something else. Breaking into a run, Julian did his best to ignore the pain throbbing in his leg. His speed only slightly impeded, he raised his sword and once again twisted his grip, but rather than affecting a backhanded grip, he hurled it towards the man like a spear.

His aim, unlike with the unfortunate plant, was not true, and instead of embedding itself in the scarred man’s shoulder like he had hoped, the sword cut a medium-sized gash in his left arm and clatters to the floor behind him, on the other side of the hall, leaving Julian unarmed.

Julian was unarmed.

Fuck.

Julian was unarmed, and he was also a bit closer to his opponent than he would have liked, with only a few strides left between them. This time, the man did not wait for Julian to take the offensive, but rather, lunged at him, club swinging, and Julian caught it in the stomach - he suspected, as he went flying once again, that the man had struck his midriff rather than his chest to avoid breaking his ribs. Small mercies.

Tumbling to the ground once again - and immeasurably grateful that he still hadn’t managed to break anything yet, Julian pulled himself to his feet again, and this time even he could feel how sluggish his movements were. Still, the man had unwittingly given Julian what he needed - more distance - and he broke into a run, charging the man for what was possibly the last time.

He was taking a gamble here, he knew. He was unarmed, and small, and his opponent was built like an ox, wielding a club heavier than Julian could lift, and unaffected by the three cuts Julian had managed to gift him.

Using all his strength, he leapt and pushed off the club - this time with his hands, and not his legs. With barely enough momentum to execute the flip, he managed - barely - to complete the move, legs fastening blindly around the man’s neck as he squeezed with all his might.

“Is he choking him?”

A voice from among the spectators reached his ears as Julian pulled his torso up, so as not to provide the man with a target - much harder to punch someone when they were wrapped around your head, after all. He could feel the man begin to struggle for air underneath him, he did it-

And then the scarred man calmly reached up and fastened his own burly hand around Julian’s throat.

Alright, then.

Julian gasped in as much air as possible before the scarred man’s casual choke cut his air supply off completely, and focused. Focused on keeping tension in his thighs, focused on holding his breath, focused on outlasting his opponent, he’d had him longer, after all - before the sound of a club dropping to the floor and a hand locking around Julian’s thigh, prying it from the man’s neck with almost insulting ease because of course, the man could swing a club likely five times Julian’s weight, of course he could just pull him off like he was nothing, and the pressure relaxed on his throat as he went flying across the room again.

This time, Julian didn’t climb to his feet.

“I’m surprised it took you this long to beat a child, Bruno.”

Julian didn’t need to open his eyes to hear the shrug that the scarred man - Bruno - gave. “Eh. He was an alright child. Fought a bit dirty.”

“Don’t tell him you were toying with him, you’ll hurt his pride,” Erland said - and was that a joke? Well, this was a fantastic time for the man to grow a sense of humour.

“Knew he wasn’t fighting me for real,” Julian murmured from the floor, head ringing. “Lasted longer than two seconds.”

He heard a snort, at that, but he couldn’t possibly ascertain whose.

“Eh. You did better than I thought,” Bruno’s voice said, and when Julian finally opened his eyes, he could see his hand, outstretched, offered to his beaten opponent.

Julian took it, gladly. “Thanks.”

Limping over back to Coën, he collapsed onto the boy’s lap again.

“Does it need stitches?” Coën asked, and Julian shrugged.

“Dunno. Didn’t check.”

“You’re probably in need of some kind of first aid, if you’re dropping pronouns, and everything. I swear, I spend more time patching you up than anything else. I’m wasted as a witcher,” he sighed theatrically. “I should’ve been a healer.”

“M’fine. Wanna watch the fight.”

Bruno was once again in the ring, and his opponent now was the curly-haired witcher who had brainstormed insults with Julian one night.

Sadly, Coën was having none of it. “When you prove to me that you are in fact capable of making sound decisions, Julian, you can choose whether or not I have a look at the injuries you’ve gotten pulling your latest stupid stunt.”

“I make sound decisions just fine.”

“Yes. Because deciding to fight a man three times your size with five times your strength was a brilliant idea, Julek, truly.”

“I don’t see why-”

This time, Erland himself interrupted the boys. “Julian. Stop protesting and go, the both of you. And for the love of the gods, have Coën stitch your wound before it becomes infected.”

Julian and Coën both nodded their assent, before getting up, Julian trying not to limp too obviously.

“Oh, and boys,” Erland called, almost as an afterthought. “You might want to think about finally getting some actual furniture for that little storage room you don’t think I know you’ve moved into - and don’t deny it, I can smell that you haven’t slept in the dorm for years - because if subtlety’s what you’re going for, you’re fooling no one.”

Coën stared at the man, stunned, and Julian shot him a questioning look over his shoulder.

“Go,” Erland shooed, and they did, leaving the witchers to their fights, as Julian pretended that his leg was fine all the way to their room, where Coën left Julian before swiftly running off and returning with all the equipment necessary to stitch Julian’s wound - a needle, threat, and clean rag for him to bite down on.

“It’s really not that bad,” Julian protested, but Coën silenced him with a look.

“It’s deep enough to need stitches, is what it is, you reckless idiot.”

“You’re awfully mean when I’m injured, you know,” Julian pouted, and Coën shook his head, equal measures fond and exasperated.

“It’s a discouragement tactic. Also, you stress me out a lot when you pull stunts like that, so bear that in mind the next time you decide it would be a great idea to fight an absolute mountain of a man for fun.”

“Aww, you care about me!”

Coën snorted, incredulous. “Of course I care about you, you idiot. Otherwise I’d just let you wander around making every bad decision you could ever make, on purpose. I swear, I’m this close to cuffing us together to keep you in check.”

“You’re so clingy, Coën,” Julian sing-songed, and received a rag to his face for all his troubles as Coën finished threading the needle.

“Bite that.”

Pointedly not biting down on the rag, Julian stuck out his leg for Coën to stitch.

“Are you trying to prove something? Bite the rag, idiot.”

“Mmf.”

After that, Coën settled easily into the rhythm of stitching Julian’s wounds - the practice he’d gotten was evident in the surety with which his needle pierced the skin and threaded through. The small, even stitches holding Julian’s skin closed were a far cry from some of the jagged work visible on some of his other scars - much to Coën’s chagrin, Julian seemed intent on curating a collection before even leaving Kaer Seren.

“You’ll end up looking like Bruno if you keep this up, you know,” Coën muttered.

“Bruno looks cool.”

“Not the point.”

“I know.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be biting down on the rag?”

Julian waved a dismissive hand. “I wanted to see if I’m used to it. And I’m used to it.”

Coën sighed, deeply and emphatically. “Julian, my dearest friend, I hope you know that that’s not a good thing.”

In response, Julian only smirked.

Having draw the needle through Julian’s skin one last time, Coën finished off the stitches and examined his handiwork. The threads were positioned evenly across Julian’s skin, closing the wound efficiently and neatly.

“You give me too much practice,” Coën sighed, taking one last look at his workmanship before meeting Julian’s gaze.

“You’re welcome.”

“It’s still not a good thing.”

“You say that like I shouldn’t get injured at all.”

Coën snorted, sidling up to sit beside Julian, touching his shoulder with his own. “I don’t deny that it’s inevitable that you get injured, but you get injured excessively, because apparently self-restraint is a dirty word in your head.”

Julian, in response, rested his head on his friend’s shoulder. “I like to have fun.”

“They should never have let you near weaponry,” Coën pointed out, not without a hint of mirth in his voice, and Julian snorted.

“They just don’t know what fun is.”

“On the contrary, Erland seems perfectly happy to enable you, for some unknown reason.”

“Because I’m charming and amusing.”

Coën hummed, considering. “That, or he wanted to have you showcase your abysmal form.”

“Or maybe teach you a lesson about footwork.”

“Maybe from Bruno.”

Indignantly, Julian twitched a little as he glanced up at his friend. “Hey!”

“I only meant that to showcase footwork, one does need to keep their feet on the ground.”

As the moon climbed higher into the sky, illuminating the mountains that separated Poviss from the sea, the two boys huddles closer together - and yep, they were definitely going to take Erland’s advice to get some proper damn furniture, because it seemed that Kaer Seren was in a perpetual state of always getting colder.

“Julian,” Coën murmured. “Next time you do something stupid, at least take me with you. If only because I’m amazing and fun, if not entirely for my peace of mind.”

“Sure,” Julian whispered back. “I hope you realise that you’re now obligated to join me in my shenanigans, no take-backs.”

A strangled sound left the older boy’s throat. “Please tell me you don’t have anything planned already.”

“I love you too much to lie to you, Coën,” Julian grinned. “Sorry.”

“Fucking hell, Julek.”

Julian’s sweet smile was far too innocent for Coën to be entirely comfortable with it.

Chapter Text

Jaskier was, perhaps, not the wisest of men, but even he could tell when something was abjectly stupid and generally not at all worth doing.

Mainly through experience.

“Geralt,” he groaned, for perhaps the thousandth time, because, apparently, it was now his responsibility to talk the man out of accepting all the contracts he absolutely should not, under any circumstance, accept. “Please tell me that you agree with me, that this contract sounds like a terrible, terrible idea.”

He was answered with a dissatisfied grunt.

Travelling with Geralt of fucking Rivia was enlightening in that Jaskier now knew exactly what it felt like to be the voice of reason in a situation, and he most certainly did not enjoy it. And really, you’d think after Blaviken and Beled - in fact, perhaps they should just avoid places beginning with B since they were all so clearly and obviously bad news - that Geralt would somewhat understand that some contracts were best left well enough alone.

Whilst Jaskier was no expert - Geralt had been a witcher far longer than he had, after all, and Jaskier’s approach to taking contracts had been more along the lines of if it sounds fun and pays well than anything else - he did at least have enough experience to be able to tell that accompanying a dishevelled man who was rather obviously some kind of noble wearing a rather pitiful disguise on a three-day journey to Temeria as hired muscle reeked of ulterior motive. Especially given that the man was by no means unprotected, given his entourage of guards he tried to pass off as his friends. They were fooling nobody.

Well, not exactly nobody. They were fooling Geralt most admirably - apparently, even though he could track and identify a monster from the barest of clues, when the time came to apply such skills in any kind of social context, the big oaf suddenly turned clueless, every little detail ever to exist flying over his head with impeccable grace.

Jaskier had experienced as much in Beled, anyways, much to his chagrin.

“I think that, regardless of how pleasant the company and the ale has been,” Jaskier said, sending Geralt another meaningful glance that the man remained blissfully oblivious to, “it would perhaps be better for all of us involved - with the possible exception of your eminence, but not your coin purse, which would be undoubtedly better off - if we did not get mixed up in all this shady business of yours and gracefully declined your contract.”

“Shut up, bard,” the noble scowled. “I want the witcher to deal with whatever monsters we might stumble across on our trip, I’m not paying for entertainment.”

“Sorry, but we’re something of a two-for-one deal. You hire the witcher, the bard tags along, you know how it is, so if you don’t find that acceptable then you can kindly take your business elsewhere, and-”

Jaskier found himself being ignored most thoroughly, as the unpleasant nobleman turned away from him and decided to engage with Geralt instead. “Two thousand orens if you take the job, witcher.”

“Done,” Geralt grunted.

Well, he could fuck right off, then, if that was all the thought he gave to Jaskier’s magnanimous and helpful advice. It was like he wanted to end up walking into the stupidest and most avoidable terrible situations he possibly could.

Or maybe it was the two thousand orens. It was, after all, excellent pay - far above what Jaskier would have offered in his situation. Or perhaps this idiot noble had more money than sense - it wouldn’t surprise Jaskier, he was perfectly aware of the lack of common sense that followed the upper classes around, and yes, there was a crack to be made at him in there somewhere - or maybe... just maybe, the man was desperate.

Either way, the man was far more trouble than he’d ever be worth, and Jaskier was sure that there was a rather rude ballad in there for his troubles - possibly somehow less flattering than the one he’d written about old Keldar, even.

“Pleasure doing business with you, witcher,” he smiled, leaving all those present with a newfound understanding of the emotional range a rat could display.

“Hm.”

“That means yes, by the way,” Jaskier snarked, glaring pointedly at Geralt before turning his attention back to the noble. “Fear not, my esteemed sir, I do indeed speak Rivian, for all that they enjoy communicating through grunts and hums. I shall well be available to serve as a translator.”

“Jaskier.”

“Ooh, or, prompt him into using his big-boy words! I can do that, too.”

The noble pinched the bridge of his nose. “That won’t be necessary. Like I said, I have no need for a bard.”

Jaskier grinned. “Sadly for you, Geralt and I are a package deal. You can’t hire one without ostensibly hiring the other.”

“Yes, he can.”

“Maybe for my performances, that’s true,” Jaskier conceded, shooting the witcher another glare. “But unfortunately, where he goes, I also go.”

“Unfortunately,” Geralt huffed, and it would probably have been inaudible had Jaskier not also possessed the hearing of a witcher. Really, the man was just rude.

“Very well,” the noble sniffed, clearly displeased, but not willing to argue with a jumped-up bard any longer. “Meet me by the cart in half an hour, at the road towards Temeria.”

With that, the man and his posse got up to leave, wooded benches scraping and screeching across the uneven flagstones of the tavern floor.

Jaskier took the opportunity to inconvenience them a little more. “Wait, my good fellow! What is it that we might call our most esteemed benefactor?”

Scowling, the noble glanced back at them one last time. “Adam,” he bit out, in a tone that left Jaskier and probably half the rest of the tavern certain that the whatever the man’s name was, it was in fact anything but Adam.

With that, he finally turned tail and left the dimly lit tavern, and Jaskier leant conversationally over to Geralt.

“Say, didn’t you kill a bruxa at a stop on the road to Temeria a few years ago? I remember hearing about that.”

Geralt grunted, which Jaskier took as an affirmative.

“Ooh, what was that like? I could make an epic out of it, I’d wager.”

Downing the rest of his ale, Geralt stood, slammed his tankard down on the table, and made towards the door, the only exit to the dimly lit tavern. Ah. He was mad at Jaskier, then. Still, it was hardly the bard’s fault that Geralt was so unable to recognise a bad deal when it slapped him in the face!

Getting up, hurried and not bothering with the rest of his ale, Jaskier did his best to catch up with the witcher without also incurring the eternal wrath of any of the tavern’s other patrons by unwittingly shoving them into their tankards or meals. It was not an easy task, by any means - the advantage granted to him by years of training was somewhat countered by the sizeable lute on his back, but still, Jaskier managed to weave his way through the crowd most admirably.

“Geralt! Geralt, you can’t be mad at me for trying to get you not to take the contract! He’s bad news, and you know what happens when this kind of thing happens, remember Beled?”

“Beled worked out fine.”

“I almost had my throat slit and you ended up not getting paid!”

“Hm.”

“Oh, so that’s it, then? Your desire for coin outweighs your desire for not getting tangled up in another massive shit-show far outside your usual scope? Sorry for trying to save you the trouble, then, my dear friend!”

Geralt, however, was apparently quite finished with the conversation. Not even turning to look at Jaskier, he strode onwards, at a good pace, no doubt hoping that the bard would have to strain to keep up.

Unfortunately for Geralt, Jaskier was quite good at keeping pace with the witcher - secret witcher training notwithstanding, Jaskier wasn’t that much shorter than his companion, despite the illusion provided by his glamour. He could keep up just fine, much to Geralt’s evident chagrin - Jaskier really had gotten better at reading him.

A part of him wanted to confess his suspicions about the nobleman who’d hired Geralt, tell him exactly why he thought this whole thing was a bad idea - but who knew who was listening in at any given time? Jaskier had made that mistake once, and that was enough times for him to learn to never make it again - he’d dabbled in espionage once, mainly because he’d thought it was a good way to earn coin without gaining notoriety, what with his saving his name for his eventual bardic career, and he’d very quickly picked up on the tricks of the trade. One of the more significant ones was don’t blurt out your suspicions randomly, because that was always a brilliant way to get caught.

It had been a fun venture - Jaskier, a witcher coming the continent for minor jobs to gather enough money for that damn glamour, had been offered a hefty sum to utilise his talents to do some spying on a local lord, and, given the pay and the promise of secrecy, and he’d jumped at the chance. Then he’d said the wrong thing at the wrong time and ended up spending a week in a dungeon before he’d managed to break out.

Good times, those had been.

They caught up with Adam and his friends evidently sooner than they’d been expected, and they greeted Geralt with a nod, and Jaskier with a glower - really, it wasn’t like having a free entertainer was such a bad idea, especially given the sour mood that seemed to cling to the most decidedly not merry crew.

“Are you ready to leave?” Adam asked, the impatience seeping into his voice masking enough urgency that Jaskier found himself getting ever more curious as to just whose bad graces the man had managed to land himself in.

“I need to get my horse,” Geralt frowned. “Bard, stay here.”

Great. He was bard-ing him. Really, it wasn’t like Jaskier’s offence had been that great. Sure, he’d tried to get him out of a contract, but it was a bad one, surely even Geralt could see that. A man dressed as your average traveller with five armed friends, with two thousand orens to throw around, needing a witcher for protection? Jaskier’s dislike of the contract stretched beyond an instinctual urge to punch Adam’s face in. The whole situation was fishy, and Jaskier did not much like fish.

Even so, Jaskier found himself relenting. Geralt was a frustratingly stubborn man - he had far more willpower than the bard did, at any rate. Figuring it best to go along with this terribly made decision until it came time to unmake it, he decided to engage Adam or perhaps one of his entourage in pleasant conversation.

“So,” he said, casually inserting himself into the midst of men currently glaring at him like he’d personally taken it upon himself to fuck all of their mothers, “lovely weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

Silence met him.

He had been prepared for that, given their earlier impression, but Jaskier had trained for these situations. Having been travelling with Geralt for a while, he’d learnt how to carry a conversation beautifully - at least to his mind. There were some who would find issue with such a statement, especially given the use of the adjective beautifully to describe Jaskier’s latest foray into verbally sticking his foot in his mouth, but it couldn’t be denied that he knew how to talk enough for two people, and probably even more.

“It’s very nice, and grey. Rainy, too, so the paths will be a right nightmare, but that should be fine, what with your cart of excellent quality.”

The cart, which Jaskier took in as he paused, was one of the type used by farmers and the like to haul straw and produce on the roads, and a rather aged one at that. There were many words that one could use to describe it - rickety, old, rachitic, haphazardly built, ramshackle, flimsy, shit - but it was most certainly not of excellent quality.

“Anyways,” Jaskier continued, even as the scowls directed at him grew ever more fierce and unfriendly, “I do rather think we got off on the wrong foot back there in the tavern - what with your contract being somewhat suspicious and me being my dear friend’s voice of reason that he patently chooses to ignore at any given opportunity - but seeing as how we’re going to be travelling together, it would do to call that... water under the bridge, so to speak, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Fuck off, bard.”

Jaskier met the man with a charming smile. “I feel like this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Until whoever was chasing Adam caught up to them. Then, of course, Jaskier and Geralt were going to bail on them post-haste.

The thudding of hooves on the dirt road behind them alerted the bard that Geralt and Roach were approaching, and saving him from the utterly miserable tragedy of a conversation that Jaskier was currently struggling through, far sooner than any of the impatient and unfriendly men currently keeping him company would have picked up on.

Thank the gods. Trying to converse with six irritated Geralts at the same time was evidently a task outside of Jaskier’s current remit.

“Witcher!” Adam immediately perked up as Geralt came into view, no doubt eager to set off. “Are you ready to leave?”

Geralt gave a affirmative grunt, at which Adam clapped his hands. “Excellent! Witcher, I assume you shall ride your own mount?”

A stiff nod. Of course Geralt would ride Roach, that much was obvious - it was Jaskier who had no mount. Not that anyone seemed particularly bothered, other than Jaskier himself. Lovely.

“So, should I just ride with you lot, in the cart?”

“You are mistaken if you think you’re coming with us, bard.”

“Well, that’s just a matter of semantics, isn’t it? Am I coming with you? No. Am I travelling with Geralt, who is coming with you? Yes. Are you going to want to travel faster than a bard can manage on foot? Most likely.”

From the unimpressed looks he was getting, Jaskier’s charms were having absolutely no effect.

“Free entertainment?” he tried.

In the end, Geralt came to his rescue, thank the gods. “The bard comes,” he grunted.

Adam’s scowl was sour enough curdle milk as he grudgingly granted Jaskier and Filavandrel’s lute entrance onto his cart, before climbing onto the front of it to drive, one of his men accompanying him. With two in the front and five plus all the supplies in the back, it was a wonder the cart could fit them in the first place.

Perhaps luckily for Adam, who seemed to appreciate the presence of a bard as much as most people appreciated infected wounds, Jaskier soon realised as they set off on the road that he would not, in fact, be able to get his lute out to play properly, given the spatial constraints of the cart. The first few minutes of the journey passed in relative silence, punctuated only by the beating of hooves against the ground, and the alarming creaking of one of the cart’s wheels.

It was not, in fact, Jaskier who struck up a conversation in the end, but one of the men, who started murmuring something that he thought Jaskier couldn’t hear about the bard’s unwanted presence.

Perhaps, if he’s raised the point that his presence on the trip was non-negotiable, they wouldn’t have been so desperate to hire Geralt. Or maybe they would have, if Jaskier’s suspicions were correct. Either way, he was here now.

He was here, and he was feeling very insulted.

After ten minutes of his unwanted company proving to be the most interesting conversation topic, he decided he’d had enough of their unsubtle murmuring.

“You do know I can hear you, right?”

“Good.” To their credit, the whispering men did not look even slightly abashed.

Ouch.

“Don’t you have other, better things to discuss?”

A snort. “Like you’d know intelligent conversation if it bit you in the arse, bard.”

“Ooh, what big, long words you’re using there,” Jaskier retorted, more than a little condescending. “Careful, are you sure you know what they mean?”

“Intelligent is not so difficult a word,” came another voice, another one of the men.

“Precisely my point, thank you. This one’s not too astute, is he?”

“Speak for yourself, bard. At least he knows where he’s not wanted.”

Jaskier snorted. “Trust me, I’m under no such illusion. I’m very well aware that you’d sooner throw me in a ditch than have me occupying your space, but alas, the next time you hire a witcher, you should perhaps check whether or not he is the one, single witcher on the continent with a travelling companion.”

He was fairly certain that he heard Geralt let out the tiniest of groans at that. Eavesdropper.

“So, what does a bard want with a witcher, anyways? Protection?”

“Inspiration. And who knows, maybe I just like him, too.”

One of the men - the first one to start whispering - let out a laugh at that. “Are you saying you’ve gone and made friends with a witcher?”

“Yeah, roundabout.” Jaskier didn’t like the man’s tone. Then again, he didn’t find anything at all about any of Adam’s little group likeable at all, so he deigned to ignore the unpleasant edge to the definitely-not-a-guard-sir-oh-no’s incredulous query.

Another one of the group, the oldest, a balding man with greying hair, whistled at that. “What is the world coming to, eh? Witchers collecting friends? Next we’ll be having vampires moving into our towns, I tell you! Word is, witchers don’t have feelings, bard. I’ll doubt he cares about anything but his coin in the end.”

Apparently people who were wrong tended to be very confident about it. It would have amused Jaskier, had he not felt a strong sense of indignation on Geralt’s behalf - so much for not having feelings.

“A pity you don’t save that bravado for when you talk about something you actually understand? I understand that that somewhat limits your opportunities, but really. Surely looking like a fool to strangers isn’t quite worth the banter.”

“And you’d know better?”

“Better than you, seeing as how I’ve actually at least spoken to a witcher before.”

Jaskier felt like he was digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole with these men, but he didn’t much care. He’d extended them an olive branch, if they threw it back in his face than that was their problem.

“Hey. Bard.”

Gods, did they want him around or not?

“Yes? My name is Jaskier, by the way, but I’m listening.”

“Play us something, then, if you’re catching a ride with us.”

Raising an eyebrow, the bard gestured pointedly at the truly tiny amount of space remaining in the cramped cart. “And I should get my lute out, how?”

“You’re sitting right at the edge, the neck should just hang over the edge, and the lad beside you can handle a bit of elbow. Come on, bard!”

With a roll of his eyes, Jaskier freed the lute from its case - a difficult task given the circumstances - and hoisted it into position on his lap. “Any requests?”

“Play us something of your own,” commanded the old man. “And please, don’t make it that Toss a Coin shite, play something worthwhile.”

Well, that wasn’t how one got into a bard’s good graces after all. Given that he was, in fact, in the habit of immortalising his and now Geralt’s adventures through song, it didn’t seem like to wonderful an idea to try his patience. Still, it would be amusing to try and work five unpleasantly grumpy personages and their spectacularly sour leader into his next work and imagine them seething as he spread it around on his travels.

A song of his own, though? Jaskier’s career as a bard was still in its infancy, but he had written plenty of songs as a witcher, though he had not performed them, due to lack of opportunity. His problem, then, was not if he had something to sing, but which of his songs it should be.

The one about Keldar was out. Not only was it a tad too petty to truly be entertaining for an audience stripped of context, he’d managed to rhyme a truly astonishing amount of things with the man’s name, and switching every instance of the name out with elder, lest Geralt recognised the name, unlikely as that may be, would turn the song far too heavy on the slant rhymes.

Everything he’d ever made up about Coën, too, wasn’t in the running, because an eighteen-almost-nineteen-year-old bard like Jaskier supposedly was would not, under any circumstances, have been able to go around immortalising the exploits of two witchers... unless he’d taken up adventuring and composition in his childhood, which was a bit of a stretch.

Perhaps one of his own exploits? Yes, Jaskier had written songs about his own travels, sue him, but it had been perfectly good material!

No. That was asking for trouble.

“Bard? You gonna play anything for us or not?”

Jolting Jaskier back into the present, he realised that all attention was on him. “Sorry. Trying to think of something that might please you.”

“Got nothing?”

Jaskier scoffed, a picture of incredulity. “As if.”

Not particularly wanting to sing of forgotten muses and heartbreak to the men who enjoyed looking at him like they were picturing exactly what it would be like to snap his neck, Jaskier settled, in the end, on a ballad he’d written alone and sleepless one night, an eternity ago, bitter at the world and one man in particular. It was a tale of cruelty and hatred, and, most importantly, it was vague enough to plausibly be completely fictitious.

There once lived a man,

Held in most high regard

So what did he do, then,

To anger a bard?

The man was a noble,

With riches and wealth

As we drank every night,

We all toasted his health!

So courteous and friendly

I did trust his intent

So when he said “come, boy!”

Unfaltering, I went.

The man was a noble,

With songs to his name

Praising his deeds and his

Likeness, the same

The man was a noble

Held in high regard

Of course it was easy

To trick a young bard!

When I did go with him

With faith in his lie

I did not expect him

To take me to die

I followed him into

A torturous pit

Abandoned I thought

That this surely was it

Alone amongst monsters

And poisons galore

With less to my name

That a common man’s whore-

“That’s a shit ballad, son,” spat the old man, cutting Jaskier off mid-performance.

“Hey! And I was just at the bit where the bard fights a monster, too, do you know how hard it was to get that to rhyme?”

Another one of the men - a boy, rather, scrawny and no more than seventeen years of age - pitched in with his own critique of the ballad. “Why is the main character a bard? If he fights, wouldn’t it make more sense to write a knight?”

Jaskier glared at him, affronted. “You can deliver criticism when you listen to the whole thing.”

“Do you have anything interesting to sing us, bard, or are you really going to try and pass that mewling off as a ballad?”

It was the old man again - Jaskier was beginning to dislike him properly, rather than just in a passing, I don’t like you but I’m also going to forget about you the moment we part ways manner. What was wrong with his ballad? It was one of his first ever good ones, than you very much, and it wasn’t always that he performed such a personal work! Adam’s posse had absolutely no respect for music.

“What do you want to hear, then?” the bard grumbled, trying to appear less miffed than he actually was.

“Something good.”

“Of course, of course, though, could you be a little more vague, though, perhaps? I don’t think your request quite covers every possible song in existence.”

The old man snorted. “Something lively. Something that’s not filled with excessive preening and posturing. Something that’s not about how intelligent and wily you imagine yourself to be.”

“The song is fictitious, old man, that means it’s made up. It’s not about a real event involving real people. It’s in the first person as a stylistic choice.”

“We all know what you were going for, bard.”

He uttered this with all the confidence of a man who had immediately and self-assuredly leapt to the wrong conclusion.

Jaskier smirked at him. “If you’re curious, the bard ends up getting mauled and losing a hand, so he can never play again in the end. Because he’s a bard. And it was a monster. And he never did get revenge on the noble.”

“Sure, of course that’s what happened.”

“I could finish the ballad for you if you like, if you’re not convinced.”

The old man waved a hand. “I’d rather spare my ears.”

At that moment, Jaskier debated finishing it just to spite him, but thought twice about pissing off the men who had let him travel along with them only because Geralt had told him to. He doubted they’d have any qualms about kicking him off the cart, and Jaskier very emphatically did not want to end up walking to Temeria.

Instead, he decided to play every single drinking song he’d ever come up with, and he had a rather wide arsenal of those. They’d been a great hit over winters at Kaer Seren, even if everyone always forgot all the words by the morning.

The old man, at least, seemed mollified, and a tad bit amused at Jaskier’s repertoire.

It was such a shame they wouldn’t be meeting again - Jaskier would have loved to bear witness to his reception of his next composition, featuring an unbearably contrarian and cantankerous old bastard of a man.

They made camp late at night, far past the time that Jaskier and Geralt would have ordinarily, when the moon had almost reached its zenith. Grumbling and groaning as they unloaded both themselves and their equipment from the cart, a quiet bustle overtook the group, and Jaskier went over to where Geralt sat by his own fire, markedly separate from their benefactor’s little encampment.

“So, how was your journey, all... not squished between people who want to throw you in a ditch?”

Geralt grunted.

“I’m assuming that means that it was lovely and peaceful.”

“I heard your singing.”

Jaskier brightened, fixing his full attention on the witcher. “And?”

“I didn’t know you had so many songs. Especially not drinking songs.”

Snorting, the bard waved a hand dismissively. “My family was full of alcoholics.”

“Was.”

Did Geralt... actually care about Jaskier’s family? The bard hid a smile. He’d truly come so far. Then again, maybe he was just curious, but a start was a start.

“Yeah, I... haven’t actually seen them in a while.”

This was true. It had been quite a few years ago that Jaskier had last wintered at Kaer Seren, finding himself a tad too caught up on his quest for a glamour. Whoops. He really should go back at some point.

“Where are you from?” Geralt interrupted his musings with yet another question.

“Metinna,” Jaskier lied easily.

“Metinna. Your accent doesn't sound like it. Not Redania?”

“Eh, I travelled quite a bit as a kid.”

Technically true. The journey from Lettenhove - a Redanian enclave in Kerack, which Jaskier supposed he could thank the accent for - had been long and arduous, and then had lived in Kovir... or was it Poviss? Whichever one of the two united kingdoms Kaer Seren technically fell in, he wasn’t sure, but then, nobody needed the specifics. As far as he knew, nobody had been too interested in mapping the political boundaries of a mountain range in a witcher school. Either way, he’d lived there for a while as a kid. And an adult. In fact, the only time he’d spent not living in Kovir - or, more specifically, a keep barely in Kovir, where the mountains met the sea - was the six years he’d lived in Lettenhove and his travels as a witcher and, later, a bard.

On the other hand, he’d liked Metinna. The people weren’t too vitriolic and the food was good.

“What about you?” Jaskier asked. “Are you actually from Rivia?”

It was interesting - Jaskier knew Kaer Morhen was in Kaedwen, but Geralt’s accent was all Rivia. By contrast, Jaskier knew that he spoke with a mixture of his own accent from Lettenhove and Coën’s Poviss intonation - had Geralt been older, then, when he was made a witcher? Or was the Rivian accent simply so stubborn?

“Yes,” Geralt grunted, and that was that. In all honesty, Jaskier felt a little jealous that Jaskier had such a coherent sense of identity. The bard was by no means Koviri, but he’d rather die before announcing himself to be of fucking Lettenhove, or Redania in general.

It was rather curious, to him, that Geralt would consider himself to be of Rivia, still.

“You’re quiet.”

“Composing, or trying to,” Jaskier said, and yeah, okay, he felt a little bit bad for lying to Geralt - especially since he was making an attempt at conversing with Jaskier - but his cover was important - he hadn’t spent years worth of savings on his glamour just so that the worst detective he knew could figure him out. “You should hurry up and fight something, because at the moment, all I’ve got is that the people who hired us are rude.”

Geralt gave Jaskier a look, which the bard took to mean that Geralt was not amused. Pity.

They fell into a silence unusual for them, but it was a comfortable one - the silence of two men deep in their own thoughts, rather than the unnatural quiet that settled over men who wanted to converse but couldn’t. The night was punctuated only by the crackling of the fire and the distant conversations of Adam and his men, and it was, Jaskier would admit, rather nice. Despite his fondness for idle chatter, the still quiet was a welcome break after a long period of singing.

So of course the damn fleder had to launch itself down from the boughs of the trees around them at that very moment.

Jaskier barely had time to curse as he rolled out of the way, catching Geralt drawing his silver sword out of the corner of his eye as the fleder landed where Jaskier had been sat a second ago.

Thank fuck for his quick reflexes.

Pulling his currently highly useless and vaguely rusted dagger - the one he’d liberated from the mortician in Beled - from his boot, he got to his feet and turned to face the fleder.

He wasn’t about to fight it, not in front of witnesses, in front of Geralt, but he was damned if he was going to give the damn lesser vampire a chance to get the drop on him. He liked his flesh un-mauled, thank you very much

Geralt, on the other hand, was finally earning his keep. Raising his sword, he assumed a ready stance only to launch himself at the fleder a moment later.

He swung his sword in a wide arc, aiming for the fleder’s neck, but the creature saw his strike coming soon enough to move to dodge it, and what would have been a fatal blow instead caught its arm rather than its neck, cutting a deep gash in its flesh but leaving it alive. Blood splattered to the forest floor.

Emitting a loud screech, the fleder swiped at Geralt with its uninjured arm, which the witcher parried with his silver blade. The vampire’s momentum was enough that the impact severed its limb, and Geralt took advantage of the opening provided to take another swing at the fleder’s neck, this time striking true. The silver sword embedded itself in the creature’s flesh, sinking almost the whole way through and near decapitating it before the resistance provided by the fleder’s muscle and bone halted the silver.

With a grunt, Geralt’s left hand grabbed the fleder’s shoulder and pulled, and his sword sliced through its neck completely, head falling gracelessly to the floor as blood spilled like wine, overflowing from a cup, from the stump Geralt had created.

Quick, mostly clean, and efficient.

The men’s chatter and bustle had stopped, as they paused in whatever they had been doing to witness Geralt dispatch with the fleder.

“I’m impressed, witcher,” Adam said, breaking the silence. “It seems you are as efficient as they say you are.”

Geralt, as customary, answered him with a grunt.

“Is that your weapon, bard?” their benefactor continued, turning his attention to Jaskier. “It’s shit.”

“I stole it from a murderer.”

Adam snorted and raised his eyebrows.

“She almost slit my throat with it,” Jaskier continued, and Adam chuckled, though it was a tad too mocking to seem wholly good-natured.

“And you lived? This seems to be quite the story.”

Jaskier shrugged. “She was, what, yay-high? And built like a twig, too. It wasn’t very hard.”

“Is that so?” Adam mused, before straightening his posture and quite deliberately changing the subject. “Well. We’ve got leftover food we can share, witcher, bard... so there’s no need for the White Wolf to go hunting tonight. Come, the two of you, eat with us.”

After moving their personal spot a little further away from all the fleder blood, the witchers did indeed join the rest of their group to eat. Apparently, one of the things that had been taking up so much space in the little cart was a sack filled with smoked fish. Jaskier wasn’t even going to ask. Did none of Adam’s guard know how to hunt?

Either way, Jaskier wasn’t going to complain about the free food, even if he did harbour a dislike for fish. He was all too happy to relieve Adam of his resources.

“So, Temeria,” Jaskier started, having gotten bored of seeing how obnoxiously he could nibble of his fish. “Nice place. How come you’re headed there?”

One of the men - a bearded fellow, the one who’d first started whispering in the cart - shot him a glare, but Adam waved him off. “Why does anyone go anywhere? I have business there.”

“What kind of business, if you don’t mind me inquiring?”

“I do mind, actually, bard, but I’ll tell you. I’ve an old friend there who owes me a favour - quite a few, actually, of both old friends and favours - and I’m cashing it in, which I can’t do from a kingdom away.”

Jaskier hummed. “Where are you coming from, then? Lyria? Rivia?”

“Aedirn,” Adam huffed. “We were staying with another friend of ours for a while. And yourself?”

“Oh, we met a good few months ago in Dol Blathanna, and we travelled south for a while, but then we turned around and headed for Aedirn like yourselves.”

“Interesting,” said the noble, in a bored tone. “And where are you headed?”

Jaskier shrugged, not particularly invested in keeping the awkward conversation interesting, just alive. “Kaedwen, maybe?”

“Not Redania?”

At this, Jaskier turned and nudged Geralt. “Where are we heading, after this, then?”

Geralt grunted. “North.”

“Informative,” Adam said dryly. “So, tell me, how does a witcher end up acquiring a personal bard?”

“He showed up. Started following me.”

“We’re friends,” Jaskier corrected, elbowing Geralt, to which the man did not react.

The old man guffawed. “What conflicting accounts!”

“I apologise on behalf of Geralt’s dishonesty, then,” Jaskier said, grandly. “He’s so unused to having a friend that he doesn’t dare admit it.”

Adam chortled at that, and Jaskier couldn’t help but notice that the man had a very nasty laugh.

They got up early in the morning the next day, at the crack of dawn - Adam was very clearly not in the business of wasting time. He hurried his men along as they packed up all their belongings, not bothering to help them - obvious noble - and they were ready for departure in record time. Evidently whatever Adam wanted to do in Temeria, it was very time-sensitive.

Jaskier had kept a curious eye and ear out, but, despite Adam’s false urgency and the fact that a noble had deigned to take up a false identity to travel in the first place, he hadn't actually managed to give Jaskier any kind of clue that he might be being followed or hunted, strangely enough. Nothing in his conversations or demeanour had implied such - even those that Jaskier had not been meant to hear - and Adam was by no means a good actor.

Strange.

The thought that Adam was, perhaps, simply a paranoid travelling noble didn’t quite sit right with Jaskier. The man was up to something, damn it, and Jaskier could only hope his scheming didn’t end up screwing him and Geralt over.

Still, he had little time to muse, as the men he was once again unfortunately packed in the midst of started demanding more entertainment. So much for not needing a fucking bard, then, if they planned to sing Jaskier hoarse anyways. He should demand payment for this.

“Can I sing Toss a Coin, then?”

“Not on your life, bard. The damn song’s spreading like a fucking disease and I’d like to go at least a week without hearing it again,” the old man grunted.

“What do you want from me, then? You don’t want the drinking songs, you heard them yesterday, you don’t want my ballads, because you don’t like them, but you do want something I’ve written... You’ve slightly run me out of options, here!”

The old man grunted. “Sing something lively, then. Fuck if I know what.”

Yep, he was definitely not going to flatter the old man if this journey proved interesting enough to immortalise.

He ended up singing jaunty folk songs and assorted ditties throughout the morning, and in the end, they started to grate on his nerves, too, but the old man seemed mollified.

However, it did seem that the rest of the motley crew shared Jaskier’s opinion, as they desperately attempted to engage him in conversation between every song - something that he was most grateful for. If he never heard another jaunty little folk song, it would be too soon.

Oddly enough, in between the lifeless performances that the old man demanded, it turned out that the men were rather good conversationalists. The bearded man turned out to be extremely well-read, and they spent a while discussing different poets - poets that Jaskier had mainly only heard of in passing, what with his circumstances - but it turned out that the bearded man needed very little prompting, and was more than happy to carry the conversation himself. The boy turned out to have an extensive knowledge of botany - his mother had been a gardener - and another one of the guard, a surly, stubbly, man, seemed all too willing to talk for hours about all the different routes one could take through the Brokilon forest without getting killed.

The day passed in pleasant conversation, and the tension that had permeated the air - at least from Jaskier’s perspective - had all but dissipated.

It was almost... nice.

Naturally, then, that was the moment that an arrow - crossbow bolt? No, definitely an arrow - would choose to embed itself in Jaskier’s left shoulder.

Fuck.

He allowed himself to cry out, to alert every member of the group to the attack, and in the blink of an eye, the whole entourage was armed to the teeth and ready to fight.

The smug satisfaction of being right was at once curbed when the old man’s crossbow bolt hit a target and revealed an assassin.

From the smell of it, the assassin wasn’t alone. The scent was faint, likely masked - of course they’d know that Adam had hired a witcher, if they knew his plans well enough to ambush him - but once Jaskier knew what to look for, it was there. Three in the shadows of the trees, two more up in the branches.

Jaskier was definitely sitting this one out, if not for the sake of his cover than for the sake of his poor shoulder.

“Fuck!” Geralt’s shout as he no doubt realised exactly why he’d been hired in the first place and what the situation was served as the signal for the fight to start.

Shoving the lute as well as himself down flat against the boards of the cart, Jaskier did his best to stay out of sight, ignoring the pulsing pain in his shoulder. With any luck, they’d mistake him for a corpse rather than an easy target.

Even so, Jaskier slid the rusty dagger from his boot. It was always good to be armed.

His position made for a poor vantage point, but he could make out the fight nonetheless. The old man fired another crossbow bolt into a treetop assassin, who’d given his position away by loosing an arrow at Geralt, which he had deflected easily with his steel sword. A dagger-wielding man had sprung at the boy, engaging him in a knife fight of spectacular speed, and the bearded man drove his sword through the throat of another assassin who’d leapt at Adam with a pair of short swords.

Jaskier was stealing those when the others were done. Gods, he missed his short swords.

The last treetop assassin, armed with a crossbow rather than an arrow like his counterparts, loosed a bolt at the old man, which embedded itself neatly in his forehead, signifying the moment of impact with a spray of red.

There went their only ranged fighter.

Evidently, he was not the only one to realise this, as the bearded man leapt for the fallen crossbow, getting a bolt to his arm for all his trouble. Short of ammunition, he pulled the bolt that had hit his older comrade from his skull, and fired it right back at the assassin.

Meanwhile, the boy had lost to the dagger-wielding assassin - evidenced by the neat red gash that had been sliced in his throat, but the surly man quickly leapt to engage him.

Wait. There had been six assassins. Four were dead. One was still fighting.

Then one was-

Jaskier swore under his breath as the sixth assassin landed, light as a cat, in the cart.

Slashing that the man’s ankles with his shitty dagger, Jaskier sprung as best as he could from his hiding place.

His blade bit empty air, as the assassin leapt neatly out of the way, with not a moment’s surprise or hesitation.

Fuck, fuck. Jaskier needed to lead the man into the fray, make him Geralt’s or someone else’s business, and fast.

The assassin’s weapon of choice was, evidently, also a dagger - no, a pair of daggers. This was to be a close quarters fight, then, and that meant that Jaskier’s pierced shoulder was suddenly a bigger disadvantage than it would have been a minute ago. He didn’t much fancy his odds, here.

So he’d have to cheat.

The assassin wasted no time, slashing at Jaskier’s left side, which the bard parried with his own blade and brought his knee up to sink into the assassin’s stomach.

His opponent, however, noticed his move before he executed it, and twisted out of the way. Taking advantage of the moment, Jaskier rotated his own blade, looping it around the dagger he’d parried a moment earlier and continuing the movement to twist it out of his opponent’s grasp entirely, grabbing the dagger out of the air with his left hand as it fell.

Striking again the moment he had recovered, the assassin slashed at Jaskier from above, and the bard parried with both blades, crossing them diagonally and catching the incoming attack between them.

Then, he leant backwards and pulled.

Shoulder twanging in protest, and the arrow moving uncomfortably in his shoulder, he rolled backwards into the thicket, pulling his opponent with him. The moment they were out of sight, Jaskier dropped his daggers, and brought his fingers up into a familiar shape, a familiar sign, and cast Axii.

It was somewhat satisfying to see his gambit work, seeing the assassin stumble into the fray himself.

Less satisfying was the realisation that the only two left standing were Geralt and Adam, who was looking far worse for wear, a large gash across his right arm whose bleeding he was desperately trying to staunch.

Upon catching sight of the final assassin, Geralt did away with him with a simple thrust, piercing the man’s rib cage in a single fluid move.

Well, shit.

“Jaskier!” Geralt called, no doubt looking around for the bard.

“Here,” Jaskier called from the thicket, not bothering to get up. He could see how far through his shoulder his roll had pushed the arrow, and the sight of almost the full length of an arrow covered in his blood poking through him was disconcerting, to say the least.

“Jaskier,” the witcher repeated, as his face appeared above Jaskier’s sprawled on his back as he was.

“Hey, Geralt. Hi. Ow. That hurts.”

“Shit.” The witcher’s grip was gentle as he gingerly lifted the fallen bard from the thicket, and Jaskier would have appreciated it a lot more if the arrow wasn’t currently jostling uncomfortably in his shoulder.

Really, Geralt was always so nice when he was injured. He should really do it more often.

The witcher placed him down in the cart, softly, and got to work on the arrow.

Wait. Did the glamour also provide the illusion of the correct, human amount of bleeding? Of all the details that he’d given when having it made, that wasn’t something he’d specified. Oh, sure, he could come up with a system that showed wounds and scabs, but hid whatever scars he collected when they healed, but he couldn’t remember to specify that the glamour should also bleed him right.

Fuck.

His panic must have shown on his face, because Geralt patted his uninjured shoulder in a reassuring, if awkward, gesture.

“Don’t worry, Jaskier,” he rumbled, but his eyes were worried. Other than witcher potions, a limited amount of thread and a needle, and the odd few bandages, they had no medical supplies, and the bard couldn’t very well just go for the bloody potions.

He needed a solution, and fast, before Geralt realised he wasn’t bleeding nearly as much as he should have been - Jaskier rather thought that the reason he had not yet done so was the smearing caused by him agitating the wound during the fight.

“Geralt!” Jaskier gasped, struck by inspiration. “Geralt, cauterise the wound!”

“What?”

“Burn it shut, fuck!”

Geralt’s brow furrowed, and he immediately got to work, utilising an Igni to light a fire to heat an unbloodied blade in a rather dramatic fashion, before quickly removing the arrow and using the flat of the blade to burn the wound shut. Jaskier hissed, more at the acrid stench of burnt flesh than anything else.

“Are you sure this will work?” Geralt grunted, as he flipped Jaskier around to cauterise the entry wound, too.

On a normal human being? Not a fucking chance. On a witcher? Jaskier had shrugged off arrow wounds before, and he was pretty sure Geralt had, too. He’d be fine. Probably.

Nodding, Jaskier tensed as the burning blade was pressed to his shoulder once more.

“Are you alright?”

Geralt of fucking Rivia, enquiring after his health? Yep, Jaskier really needed to get injured more often.

“I’m grand,” he grinned, giving the witcher a double thumbs-up and wincing.

“Good.”

Satisfied that Jaskier was no longer on the verge of bleeding out, the White Wolf turned his attention to Adam.

Oh, this was going to be fun.

“Is this why you hired me?”

The man visibly paled. “Uh- I- Not specifically, really, I just... Well, I knew I was being tracked and I wanted a deterrent. I didn’t know that they’d do... this!”

“I am a witcher,” Geralt said, voice low. “And I hunt monsters. I’m not a bodyguard for you to hire.”

Adam flinched. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry for the deception, but it was necessary - they would have killed me!”

“Your politics are none of my business. Pay me now, and you’ll go to Temeria alone. I’ve no desire to be involved in... whatever this is any further.”

“Of course,” Adam said, regaining some of his composure, and handing over the hefty coin pouch.

Jaskier, meanwhile, had slipped off to collect his daggers - both the one from Beled and the one he’d liberated from the assassin, which was of much higher quality. The mortician’s weapon was dull, rusty in some places, and carried more chips than Jaskier could count, but the assassin’s weapon was shiny and well looked-after.

He’d keep them both, he decided. As a reminder of all the lovely people in the world that wanted to kill him.

Rejoining Adam and Geralt, Jaskier remembered the short swords he’d wanted and picked them up, too, earning Geralt’s incredulity.

“What? They look cool,” he defended, trying his best to get the scabbards off the dead man. “Besides, he’s not got any use for them anymore, he’s a bit too dead for that.”

“You’re remarkably comfortable with death, for a bard.”

Jaskier shrugged. “People die all the time.”

In the end, Adam piled the corpses in the cart, intending to give his men a proper burial upon reaching Temeria, and, after scavenging their weaponry, the assassins were buried properly by the side of the road so as not to attract ghouls or the like.

“Out of interest, whose business are you out here on?” Jaskier asked as the man prepared to leave them for Temeria.

“None of yours,” he snorted.

“It is kind of our business, seeing as you almost got us killed.”

Adam glowered at them, most fiercely. “Someone in Kerack.”

Then, without a second glance, he mounted the cart and started off, not even a goodbye for the two men he so readily inconvenienced.

That was rather rude of him.

“So,” Jaskier said, breaking the silence, and trying not to focus too much on the stench of blood, thick in the air. “Where to?”

“Kaedwen,” Geralt grunted, and right, winter was approaching. He no doubt wanted to make it back to Kaer Morhen to meet with all his Wolf friends, which would leave Jaskier alone for a whole season, unless he wanted to run back to Kaer Seren... which he actually didn’t, not now that he finally had the opportunity to further his bardic career. The places he’d go, the songs he would sing...

“Right, then,” Jaskier grinned, and started down the road, his new short swords looking particularly out of place paired with his fancy doublet. “Kaedwen it is.”

Chapter Text

The room was large and well-lit, the orange glow of the torches flickering in the breeze. It was a draughty place, but that worked out well, in the end - the chamber was, after all, used for training, and nobody particularly wanted to lounge in the reek of sweat long after whoever had been using it had left. Indeed, had it not been for the draught, it was likely that the odours left by hundreds of long-dead students would still permeate the room, and that would have been a nightmare and a half for everyone.

It was currently occupied by the two students of Kaer Seren, the two pupils of a school vastly reduced in capacity. They were caught up in a spar, under the watchful eyes of their teacher.

Steel met steel in a sluggish dance, the tired finality of two boys at the end of the day, who had been training since the crack of dawn, evident in their movements.

Coën’s sword slashed down through the air, and Julian raised his own blade to meet it, halting the blow a scant two finger-widths away from his face.

That was a little bit too close for comfort.

He withdrew his blade from where they had been locked, side-stepping neatly to the right and sliding his sword out from under Coën’s, and turning the motion into a slash at his friend’s calf that Coën blocked with one swift movement, bringing his sword down to be parallel to his leg.

He didn’t let their blades lock again - as he caught Julian’s strike, he pushed against it, forcing Julian’s sword-arm away, and leaving him wide open.

“Julian, if you ever leave such a wide opening in front of me again, you’re mucking out the stables for the rest of the winter,” Erland’s deep voice cut into the fight, as Julian pivoted away, out of Coën’s range, to recover his stance.

Choosing not to retort - Julian valued his free time, after all - he instead slashed at Coën’s side, a strike which was easily parried by the older boy, and this time, when he followed it up with a thrust aimed towards Julian’s chest, he countered it easily with his own blade, moving back a minute amount.

From there, the fight sped up, the movements of both boys becoming faster and more fluid. Every strike was countered, every parry perfectly in place, and Erland raised an eyebrow at them.

“One of you, please try to get the upper hand over the other. It’s not a dance, it’s a spar, and you’re not a pair of third-rate actors trying to put on a performance.”

Julian countered a diagonal downwards slash from Coën, meeting the steel of his friend’s sword with his own perpendicular blade a comfortable distance from his shoulder.

“I don’t know, I think this is going well.”

“It’s a sword fight,” Erland snorted. “Not a battle of endurance.”

“Can’t it be both?”

Recovering from the earlier blow, Julian pulled his blade from the parry and turned the movement into an upwards slash, that Coën dodged rather than parried, unfortunate as the angle was. Taking advantage of the split-second in which he was completely out of Julian’s range, he stepped smoothly behind him and pushed his blade forwards in a thrust, tapping his back neatly as Julian tried in vain to reach him with his sword.

He turned to look at Coën with betrayal in his eyes, as his friend took the victory.

“I win.”

“That’s not fair! Your arms are far longer than mine!”

Coën grinned. “That sounds like a you problem, unless you resolve only to fight things that are smaller than you.”

“Monsters don’t understand the concept of cheating, though, Coën, but you do!”

Before Erland could interrupt the bickering that had broken out among the two, another witcher entered the room, presumably to bear witness to their unenthusiastic sparring. It was the curly-haired witcher - and he did have the most magnificent curls, cascading down his back, almost to his waist, and surely a significant inconvenience in a fight - who had brainstormed insults with Julian that one night.

Belatedly, he found himself realising that he probably should have actually learnt the man’s name, as the witcher in question turned to Erland.

“Mind if I watch?”

“Not at all,” Erland said, gesturing for the man to sit. “Though I am curious as to why you aren’t currently in the kitchen. Isn’t it your turn this night?”

The curly-haired witcher huffed. “Henrik has politely requested my absence.”

“I can’t quite imagine him ever sending you away, Rook.”

“He sings quite a different tune when he’s cooking. I handed him the salt we got in Novigrad instead of the packet from Skellige, and he asked if I was trying to poison him.”

“Is there a difference between the two?” Erland queried, earning a shake of the head from Rook, before turning to Julian and Coën. “The two of you, another match. Rook came to watch your sparring, not to discuss his culinary ventures.”

Julian frowned. “Really? Because it sounded more like he was here to discuss his culinary ventures, actually, seeing how he-”

“Julian, the longer you dawdle, the longer you stay. Go again, and don’t dodge anything you can parry.”

Huffing a discontented sigh, he raised his sword and fell into a familiar stance. The end of the day was always a slog - Julian didn’t know anyone who would actually spar properly after a day of strenuous activity and mind-numbingly dreary lessons. At the end of the day, all anyone could conceivably want was a nice, hot meal and possibly also a bath, if it was a particularly good day, and then to collapse into bed and finally rest. Witcher training was tiring, damn it, and Julian was tired.

He raised his sword and struck at Coën, a simple downwards slash that his friend parried easily, but it was sufficient enough to start the spar.

Julian recovered the moment their swords met, bringing his weapon round in an arc and aimed a lateral blow at Coën’s waist, which was blocked fluidly with a twist of his sword.

This wouldn’t do. They were matched again.

Coën had the advantage of reach over Julian - being a few years older and consequently taller, he was able to hit Julian while he was outside the younger boy’s range. That was, in Julian’s humble opinion, highly unfair and rather rude of life. It skewed the odds out of his favour most annoyingly.

He brought his sword up, slashing at Coën’s shoulder from above, trying to keep him on the defensive, where he couldn’t take advantage of his superior reach. Coën parried the strike clumsily - the manoeuvre to bring the sword from where it had been his side to meet the blow awkward and difficult.

Pressing his advantage, Julian quickly aimed a slash at Coën’s midriff, which he met a tad more easily, but Julian wasn’t giving him a second to take the offensive. He slashed low, then high, then low, Coën meeting his sword with his own each time, not giving Julian a proper opening.

This was somewhat less than ideal. Whilst Julian’s primary goal was to keep Coën on the defensive, battles of endurance were not his preferred modus operandi. Far from it, in fact - it was far too drawn-out and exhausting a method, in his opinion. Still, he needed to prevent Coën from being able to press his advantage, which meant that he’d have to be patient and wait for an opening whilst maintaining a steady offence.

Ideally, he would have played to his own strengths - his speed and agility - but, as Erland often intoned, over-reliance on one specific tactic was to be avoided, not to mention that a witcher was expected to excel in all kinds of combat, and Julian... Julian was many things, but substandard was not one of them.

So he pressed the frontal offence. His sword clashed with Coën’s, again and again in a frenzied dance, feet not quite scuffing the floor as they circled the room.

Their blades met above Coën’s left shoulder, then by his knee, and again near his midriff. Julian’s sword moved fast, darting between each attack, not letting up, and Coën met each strike with a neat parry, their blades clashing only briefly before moving on to the next attack.

Sweat beaded on Julian’s brow. If they had to spar again after this, he was going to scream.

His sword moved swiftly and fluidly, cutting gracefully through the air as he moved the blade up to slash at Coën’s arm, and that was his mistake.

The strike was more of a cut, and it was far enough to Coën’s right that he didn’t need to parry, and Julian knew he had lost the moment Coën stepped to the left and out of his range, tapping the side of his neck with his sword in the split second of an opening that Julian had provided.

“Fuck off, Coën.”

Coën smiled sweetly at him. “You did admirably well.”

“Shove it,” Julian retorted, sticking his tongue out in a petulant manner, though there was no real anger behind his words.

Erland stood from where he had been seated, regarding the pair with a steely gaze.

“That was better,” he acquiesced. “But again, the aim is to gain the upper hand against your opponent. If you settle into a cooperative rhythm, you’re doing it wrong. For now, though, we’ll leave it at that. Rook, do you have anything to add?”

The witcher shook his curly head. “Nothing of interest.”

“Then we should be going. Undoubtedly, dinner is soon to be ready, and I don’t fancy our odds of getting any if we leave it all in the hands of a dozen witchers.”

Shoving his sword almost carelessly back into the rack, Julian followed the older witchers as they filed out of the door, followed closely by Coën.

“You could have kicked me,” he said, almost nonchalantly. “Or tripped me.”

Julian snorted. “What, and give Erland another reason to have a go at me? You cannot rely so much on fighting dirty, Julian, what if the monsters you fight have an unparalleled sense of honour and take great offence to it?”

Coën snorted.

“If you rely too much on underhanded tactics, you will not cement your skills solidly enough, Julian,” Erland interrupted from down the hall, not looking back as he chastised the boy.

“Convenient how you always forget about witcher hearing until it comes time to shush me, isn’t it, Julek?”

Julian scowled. “At least I remember he has it sometimes. That’s far more than you ever do.”

“And yet you remain notoriously terrible at keeping anything a secret from him.”

“That’s not true!”

Smirking, Coën flicked Julian’s ear. “Then how, pray tell, did he catch wind of your inane scheme to shovel horse shit into the library in the name of your and Keldar’s supposed feud? Because it wasn’t through me, I’ll tell you that much.”

Julian’s cheeks would surely have gone bright pink, had his circulation allowed for it. As it was, he simply gave Coën a light punch to the arm, trying - and failing - to not betray his embarrassment. “If I didn’t like you so much, I’d have kicked you in the throat.”

“As if you could reach, you pipsqueak.”

“Hey!”

They bickered good-naturedly the rest of the way, earning a few faint grins from Rook, who was evidently using them as a source of entertainment.

He couldn’t say he blamed him. Julian was well-known for his theatrics... Or at least, he liked to imagine he was.

The atrium they shared their meals in was filled already, the only other absentees being Keldar, no doubt still mooching around in his damn library, and whoever it was that was in charge of the food that night - Henrik, it was Henrik, the red-headed witcher. The table they all sat at was long, benches lining it, and Erland took his seat at the far end, whilst Julian, Coën, and Rook slid into place nearer the other end of the table.

Henrik entered not long after, bearing decent-smelling food - a luxury at Kaer Seren. Witchers did not make good cooks.

Julian hadn’t really expected to get too close to any of the witchers that had come to winter - there were leagues of difference between them, after all, between a boy who was hardly halfway through the trials, and a seasoned witcher who had been walking the path for many years. Sure, they were amicable, exchanging the occasional few jokes and barbs, but for the most part, Julian and Coën kept to themselves, not really getting all that well acquainted with any of the other witchers. That was for after they finished the Trials.

There was, however, an exception to this trend.

Henrik, who had been yelled at for poor technique during every spar he’d had that winter, was one of the more outgoing witchers that had come to winter at Kaer Seren. His scarred, freckled skin boasted of a fair amount of experience as a witcher, but he was light-hearted and easy-going in a way that contrasted starkly with the pessimistic and sometimes downright maudlin air that hung over most of the witchers at Kaer Seren, when they weren’t busy fighting or getting drunk enough to forget their own names.

They were pleasant enough company, sure, and dinners were always far more interesting when they were there, trading barbs and exchanging stories of contracts fulfilled in the past year... But Julian could count on one hand the members of their company had ever been properly happy, insofar as Jaskier had experienced, and they were him, Coën, and Henrik... Perhaps also Rook, too, beneath his unfalteringly calm demeanour. He kept Henrik’s company, after all, and his amiable grin was rather infectious.

So, highly unsurprisingly, it was their company that Julian and Coën chose to keep.

The two older witchers didn’t seem to mind this, and Henrik in particular enjoyed recounting tales of his exploits to the boys, clearly eager for the new audience to his tales. He spoke of daring exploits, fights against sirens and griffins and leshens, of defeating monsters with heroism despite the scorn of the people he saved.

Indeed, Henrik was halfway through one such story during a meal, of a time when he did battle with a chimaera, when he was interrupted.

“That never happened,” Rook pointed out mildly, taking a sip of ale.

“Sure it did!” Henrik squawked. “It was majestic and glorious!”

“I was there. You tripped on a stick, of all things, and landed flat on your arse, and you only slit the chimaera’s neck because you started waving your sword around like an imbecile, while I was trying to fend off its bloody father.” Rook raised a thick eyebrow, and turned to the boys sitting opposite them. “Don’t believe a word he says. It’s embellishment, all of it.”

Julian smirked. “I figured.”

Henrik spluttered. “You did not!”

“We know what embellishment sounds like, Henrik,” Coën retorted, with a wicked grin. “We’re not naïve enough to swallow all of your shit.”

“Oi!”

“If it helps soothe your ego, I have spent a very long time around Julian, and he insists on exaggerating absolutely everything, from the colour of the sky to the taste of his soup.”

Henrik’ eyebrows shot up into his hair, an expression that was more of intrigue than the dramatic, betrayed look he had sported a second ago, and he turned to look at the boy in question. “Ah! A kindred spirit, then!”

From the look of Coën’s face, he’d realised exactly what he’d done. “No. No, you can’t. You can’t get all buddy-buddy with each other. Julian alone is already giving me grey hairs! I don’t think my heart could handle two overly dramatic idiots!”

Rook snorted at Coën’s theatrics, the irony of his antics not exactly lost on him. “Don’t worry. I’ve known Henrik since he was a kid someone dragged up here, and I’ve travelled with him after he trained, too, so you can take it from me that he’s pretty benign. All bark and no bite.”

Coën glanced at Henrik and Julian, both of whom were smirking at them with pure glee. “It’s not that. I’m worried about what Julian will do to Henrik. We’ll wake up tomorrow and they’ll have dressed all the horses in old Keldar’s clothes!”

Raising his ale to his lips once more, Rook considered the statement a while, before letting a gentle, serene smile overtake his face. “Tell me you wouldn’t want to see that.”

“I-” Coën started, but paused. “I... would actually like to see that. Just a little bit.”

Julian’s howling giggles were loud enough to catch the attention of every witcher in the room. “Damn it, Coën, now that you’ve said it out loud, we can’t do it!”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something better, Julek. I have faith in your ability to cause chaos.”

The boy gasped, bringing a hand to his heart, and a shit-eating grin spread over his features. ‘Why, Coën, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Shut up,” Coën muttered, but there was fondness in his voice. Julian smirked.

“Aw, look, Rook, they’re like miniature versions of us,” grinned Henrik.

Rook shook his head in exasperation. “You can’t look at every slightly mouthy kid and his friend and declare that they’re miniature versions of us.”

“And who, pray tell, is going to stop me?”

The bearded witcher rolled his eyes, almost imperceptibly, and muttered something that may or may not have been I might.

“Yep,” Julian grinned. “Definitely not us. Coën would never stop me, he’d join me.”

Rook returned the smile. “Don’t make Henrik too jealous, now. He’s far too old to be crying on my shoulder and I’m trying to train him out of it.”

“Hey!”

Henrik’s indignant spluttering was loud enough to draw the attention of several of the other witchers, who cast amused glances their way before turning back to their own conversations. Evidently, winding Henrik up was considered to be an enjoyable pastime at the keep.

Pointedly ignoring the snickering of his companions, the red-haired witcher launched back into the tale he’d spun of his exploits, loosely based on true stories.

To hear Henrik tell it, he had been separated from Rook in the fight - and they’d met completely by accident not an hour beforehand, as they occasionally did, having unknowingly taken the same contract from two separate villages - and was facing down a formidable chimaera sporting several exacerbated injuries from a noonwraith, but still managing to put up the fight of his life.

Rook’s amendments, however, clarified that he was fighting an adolescent chimaera whilst Rook took on the creature’s father, having left the smaller beast to him in the first place because the idiot had decided to take a contract despite knowing full well that he was nowhere near recovered from the strenuous run-in with the noonwraith.

“-And then, I slashed at it’s throat with my free arm as it pinned me down with gusto!”

“You tripped over and it pounced on you, so you started screaming and flailing and hit it by accident.”

“Killed it in one strike!”

“You nicked its throat so it leapt back, and started frantically slashing at it. Still screaming, if I recall.”

“Shut up, Rook! Despite my harrowing injuries, I pressed on, and removed its head as proof swiftly and easily.”

“You were crying and asked me to do it.”

“It slashed my stomach open!”

“No, you ripped your stitches.”

“Fuck off,” Henrik grumbled. “How am I supposed to make a good impression if you keep slandering me?”

Rook opened his mouth to reply, but Julian beat him to it. “By actually doing something impressive, Sir Witcher.”

Henrik reeled back in mock offence. “Why, you-”

“Get him, Julek,” Coën grinned, and Julian smirked back wickedly. Rook sat back, amusement written all over his features.

“Please, do not get me,” Henrik feebly protested. “My ego is a very fragile thing, you know.”

“That just means you have to train it, Sir Witcher,” Julian smiled, startlingly menacing for a child. “I can help you with that.”

The red-headed witcher’s face seemed caught between a fair few emotions, ranging from horror to amusement, and then to something that betrayed that he was most likely contemplating whether or not it would be acceptable for him to tell a child to fuck off.

“Say, Julian,” Coën interrupted sharing a mirthful glance with the boy, “Henrik was the one who cooked tonight, wasn’t he?”

“I do believe he was,” Julian realised slowly, fixing the ginger man in his sights.

“He was,” Rook confirmed, a small smile playing at his lips, earning himself a quiet hiss of traitor from his friend.

“I suppose it would only be fair to... evaluate his skill, then, wouldn’t it?”

“No! What have I ever done to you, young Coën?”

Rook grinned. “Shying away from criticism, Henrik? How unbecoming of a Griffin Witcher.”

“I take it back,” Julian said. “He’s exactly like you, Coën.”

Henrik groaned theatrically into his hands. “Next winter, I am holing up in... shit, a cave, or someone’s barn, I don’t know, just... away from you two little menaces.”

Julian raised a delighted eyebrow at the man, who was undoubtedly biting back his own grin. It wasn’t every day, after all, that a witcher was able to engage in such high-quality banter, as stoic and gruff as most of them tended to be.

“Julian here is an excellent judge of quality,” Coën continued, ignoring Henrik’s objections. “He will taste your food and deliver an analysis and verdict.”

“He’s already fucking eaten half of it!”

Rook swatted the back of his fellow’s head. “Don’t swear at the children, fool.”

Indignantly, Henrik elbowed his attacker in the side. “You’ve heard them talk, Rook, they swear more than the bloody rest of us put together!”

“Children, children, please,” Coën grinned, raising his arms in a placating gesture. “Please, show Lord Julian your respect.”

“You should listen to him,” Julian smirked, making a show of placing the tiniest morsel of meat into his mouth, all the while maintaining eye contact with Henrik.

The meal itself was pleasant enough, if a bit unusual for the keep - meat with potatoes that someone had apparently lugged up the mountains, instead of various stews and soups - and it was seasoned, too, indicating that Henrik had at least been trying to aim for a bar higher than simple nourishment as he cooked.

The meat - venison, undoubtedly the catch of one of the older witchers - was well done, and seasoned in a way that, whilst still somewhat bland, was a step above what most of their peers were capable of. Indeed, in Kaer Seren, where the average cooking ability seemed to peter off at skin it and stick it over a flame until it’s not raw anymore, the meal stood out as particularly pleasant. Clearly, Henrik had his hobbies.

“It tastes like utter shit,” he announced, magnanimously, and Henrik clutched Rooks arm, gasping loudly.

“You hear that? You hear that, Rook? My humble offerings have been spurned by a child! How will I ever recover from this slight?”

“You’ll live.”

“I will most certainly not! I can hardly see you taking this in stride if he’d insulted your lute-playing, Rook!”

This was met with a deafening silence, as Julian and Coën, as well as several other curious Griffins, turned their attention to Rook, who had suddenly gone very still.

Julian was the first to speak, yellow eyes wide and curious.

“You play the lute?”

His voice was loud and excited, almost a yell, and Rook shifted slightly.

“That he does,” Henrik smirked. “That’s what the mysterious bag he came in with was, by the way, the one he insisted was just spare supplies. It’s quite a story, actually, let me tell you.”

Rook snorted. “If any of it resembles the truth, I’ll be shocked, my friend.”

“Shush, Rook, you’re just jealous of my story-telling capabilities,” the red-headed witcher dismissed, “So, it goes like this. We were still travelling together after leaving here, last spring, and we were a few days from Ard Carraigh, where we were planning to part ways for the year, when we get to this village in the morning that wants us to take care of a monster in the woods. Rook took the job, I’d taken the last one, and so he goes into the forest and I go to the inn and buy a drink, and he comes back at dusk with a lute.”

“Consider me impressed, Henrik. That’s actually accurate so far,” Rook interrupted, most of the witchers having turned back to their own, marginally less interesting conversations.

“Of course it is, would I ever lie?”

“Frequently.”

Ignoring Rook’s reply, Henrik continued. “Anyways, we were in the village, and Rook comes back at dusk with a lute, and I ask him what took him so long, and why the lute. And then he said that the man who’d offered him the contract - a very nice man, by the way, pretty comfortable with the whole witcher thing - didn’t have enough coin to pay him and they offered him the lute instead, but that’s not all. When I asked him why he took so long to do the job - it turned out to be an adolescent wyvern, by the way, but that still shouldn’t take a whole day - you know what he said?”

Julian shook his head, enraptured.

“He said he didn’t want to take the lute without knowing how to play it, and could he please teach him some?”

Rook groaned. “Please, shut up.”

“Is he any good?” Julian asked, interest evident on his face.

“Hardly,” Rook mumbled, just as Henrik simultaneously grinned and said yes.

Julian dropped his fork by his plate, and leant over the table, coming face-to face with Rook.

“Teach me.”

Rook blinked. “You want me to... teach you to play the lute?”

“Yes!”

Raising thick, dark eyebrows, Rook looked at the boy before him. “I’m no expert.”

“But you know more than I do.”

“That’s true, I suppose,” Rook said. “I’ll do it if you don’t mind losing an hour or so of sleep.”

“I don’t!’ Julian chirped, and so Rook nodded, and they went up to his room, all four of them - one new lute teacher, an odd student, and two spectator witchers who were very, very interested to see the forthcoming spectacle unfold.

Rook’s room was in the upper levels of the castle, in the same corridor, he’d said, as Henrik’s. The winding steps taken to get to that point were worn but sturdy, reaching upwards in a long but steady spiral across most of the keep’s floors. The scuffed, shiny depressions in the centre of each step betrayed the traffic that the stairs had likely experienced back when the School of the Griffin had been operating at maximum capacity, before Kaer Seren got so damn empty.

Julian had heard, at one point, that these had been the elder witchers’ quarters, back when they were all still alive. Now, it was inhabited only by returning witchers who came here in the winter.

Rook’s room had once been grand, the once-grand wooden panelling and the ornate furniture, chipped and cracked and fallen into disrepair, betraying as much. Its current occupant, however, seemed less than concerned with the state of the room - all of Rook’s belongings were still neatly in his pack, which had been deposited onto the desk that undoubtedly had not been used to write on in centuries.

The lute that Henrik had spoken of back in the atrium rested in an oddly-shaped leather case, not distinct enough to immediately be recognisable for what it contained, but accommodating enough for the lute to be supported within it. Rook opened it carefully, and withdrew the lute - a spruce instrument with many strings... Strings that looked suspiciously familiar.

“Are those guts?” Julian asked, eyeing the lute.

Rook tilted his head slightly. “Yes, that’s what they string lutes with.”

“Huh. Nice.”

“So, do you want me to show you a few chords, or just tell you what to do?”

Julian considered his options for a moment. “Show me, it’ll be easier if I know what it’s supposed to sound like.”

“Alright.”

As Rook settled the instrument in his lap and tried the strings, tuning the lute, Coën leant forward to whisper in Julian’s ear, knowing full well that he couldn’t keep any other witchers from hearing it if he tried. “If this pans out, you’ll be able to write that ballad about old Keldar.”

Julian smirked. “I know.”

Rook gave the instrument a few strums, frowning at it.

“It sounds fine,” Henrik called, busying himself with poking around in Rook’s pack.

“Just because you’re tone deaf, Henrik, doesn’t mean the rest of us are, too. And rummage through your own belongings if you’re missing something so badly.”

Henrik ignored him.

Giving the lute strings a few final, grudgingly satisfied tugs, Rook strummed a chord, crisp and clear. It rang out, sharp and melancholy, disturbing the comfortable atmosphere that had settled into the room.

Rook strummed it again, louder, and waited for the final echoes of the sound to cease before speaking.

“G minor. It’s my favourite. There are more complex variants, but I don’t know them.”

Julian grinned. “Can I try?”

“Of course,” Rook said, shifting as he handed the instrument to the boy. “Here, you need to hold down these strings, put your fingers here, there, and there - a little to the left - that’s it.”

Deftly positioning his fingers in the correct positions on the strings, Julian strummed the lute, a slightly less clear rendition of the chord Rook had played filling the air.

“Lift your hand up slightly, so that your palm isn’t so close to the... neck thing,” Henrik waved, casting a glance at the boy, and Rook raised an eyebrow. “What? I know how sounds work. He’s muffling it.”

Heeding Henrik’s advice, Julian raised his hand a little, the angle of his fingers against the neck of the lute becoming wider. He gave the lute another strum, and this time, the chord was sharp and clear, just as Rook’s had been.

“If you shift your top finger down a little - about there, that’s it - that becomes G major.”

Strumming the new chord, another sound rang out, similar and yet wildly different the the sorrowful G minor. Where the minor was sad and wistful, the major was brighter, happier than its counterpart.

Shifting his fingers, Julian strummed a G minor again, before shifting back to G major.

“How about A major? You’ll have to move all of your fingers, this time - shift them up there, hold down that one slightly to the left... Okay.”

Rook’s calloused hands hovered above Julian’s, pointing and gesturing to the correct positions but never touching either the lute or the boy’s hands - he didn’t need to. His faint gesturing was enough.

Julian strummed the chord, another more jovial sound ringing out, and Rook smiled.

“Lift that top finger and you get A minor.”

The minor was once again more melancholy, cutting through the quiet of the room like a blade.

Julian pressed his finger down once more, A major ringing out before the minor chord’s echoes had really faded out, and then shifted his grip entirely to play G major once more, followed by G minor.

“You’re picking up on that annoyingly fast,” Henrik commented, still rootling through Rook’s pack.

Julian smirked. “Maybe I have a talent.”

The lilt in his voice was joking, but Rook nodded and him, a smile on his lips. “If you put your fingers here, and move that one down there, that’ll make a C major.”

They cycled through Rook’s repertoire of chords quickly enough, moving from C to B flat to D sharp and then to E, and Julian memorised the chords with surprising ease, strumming them confidently, with misses and false notes present, but not as overwhelmingly as one would expect from a beginner.

“If you tune it differently, you can end up with a whole different set of chords,” Rook mumbled. “But I don’t know them.”

“These are cool,” Julian grinned, strumming a D sharp minor. “It’s not like I have anything to play, myself. How did you remember all the chords?”

“I wrote them down,” Rook said, fishing out a loose, folded sheet of thin parchment, slightly ragged and rather worn, from the lute case. Unfolding it, he revealed a multitude of crude, labelled diagrams, showing different positions on what was surely meant to represent lute strings. Each diagram sported an almost uncharacteristically neat label - evidently, Rook had better handwriting than his artistic skills betrayed - naming the chord.

Jaskier regarded them carefully, before turning his attention back to his strumming. Choosing to vary the chords a little, he strummed a G major, followed by a D sharp major, then a B flat major and an F major to finish it off, repeating the odd little sequence over and over, amusing himself.

“Your first composition?” Coën said, only half-teasing.

Julian shook his head. “Too shit for that.”

“I don’t know, I think it counts,” Coën grinned. “Needs some words, though?”

“Please, do not ask me to rhyme so late at night.”

The raven-haired boy pouted. “But it’s your first composition!”

Henrik snorted from the back of the room. “Let’s hear the lyrics, kid.”

Julian rolled his eyes, continuing his strumming. The chords were not dissonant, but there was a certain clunky awkwardness to the tune, betraying his lack of expertise with the instrument.

Unlike the melody he imagined, so unlike the one he was able to create, words came easily to Julian - they always had. He’d always been unusually verbose. He cast his mind around for a topic, trying to think of something to sing about. Precious little had happened in Julian’s life thus far, young as he was, and he had no desire to sing about the Trials, or anything mundane, which just left...

There once was a king

Thought of with respect

His subjects all thought

They knew what to expect -

It was a silly verse, and it didn’t match the cheery, awkward melody at all, but he had the rest of forever to rework it.

Handing the lute back to Rook, along with a promise that he would be back for it every day for the rest of the waning winter to try and play it, he and Coën made their way out of the older witcher’s room, and started back towards their own room, situated a few floors down and on the other side of the keep, near the front where Rook’s quarters were near the back of it.

They walked back down the spiral stairs in a comfortable, tired almost-silence, Julian humming tunes and muttering lyrics, snippets of a song about a two-faced king and an unloved prince.

Coën broke the silence first. “Am I reading too much into this, or is that a metaphor?”

The humming stopped, fading out softly, as Julian considered the question. “It’s supposed to be a metaphor, yeah.”

“Don’t.”

“Sorry?”

Laying a hand briefly on his friend’s shoulder, Coën did not slow his pace, and he did not meet his eyes. “Don’t sing about that. It won’t do any good to dwell on it.”

“My father?”

“Yeah. It’s... It’s damn depressing, is what it is. Thinking about how you’re here because someone who was supposed to love you was a little too willing to give you up. So... please, Julek, sing about something else. Something happy.”

Julian nodded, long, tawny hair falling in front of his eyes.

“Yeah, he was a dick. Terrible muse for a first composition. How about a song about Keldar?”

Coën groaned. “You’re going to actually write ballads about your supposedly ballad-worthy rivalry now, aren’t you, you little songbird?”

“Yep.”

“Why not sing about Henrik’s exploits with the chimaera?”

Julian grinned. “Brilliant idea, Coën! What would I do without you?”

“Sing really depressing songs, probably. And have far uglier scars.”

“Hey!”

Coën snorted. “You’re terrible at stitching wounds, Julian. I bear the proof on my skin.”

“Hey! As if your earlier work is any better,” the younger boy said, pointedly gesturing with his right hand, where an ugly scar marred his arm, starting halfway up his forearm. “The stitching on this is ridiculous, and it’s on my sword arm!”

“Both of your arms are your sword arms, Julian, I’ve seen you with those flashy little short swords. You can’t fight a kikimora with a finesse weapon.”

“I can certainly try. The Vipers seem to manage.”

“Henrik is not a reliable source on anything, Julek, so I wouldn’t trust his word on the Viper school’s fighting practices before you can verify it.”

Julian huffed, crossing his arms, keeping his lips firmly pressed together.

“I’m teasing,” Coën amended, glancing down at his friend.

“I know. I’m just tired.”

Coën nodded, at that. “We’re here.”

“I know where we live, Coën,” Julian snorted, but he all but collapsed onto the pile of blankets they’d started to use as a makeshift bed as soon as he pushed open the door to the former storage room.

They’d thought of dragging an actual bed or two from the dormitory into the storage room, but they’d come to the accord that they’d been sleeping on the floor for so long that a bed would feel weird anyways, and this way they could save both space and effort. The blankets, however, were welcome - Kaer Seren got deathly cold in the winter, probably something to do with being in the mountains.

“We should get a chest or something to keep our things in, one of these days,” Coën mused, pulling a clean shirt out of the pile on the floor. “Julian, get changed, or else you’re sleeping on the cold, bare floor. I refuse to share a blanket with someone who still reeks of today’s training.”

Julian muttered a muffled protest, but grudgingly pulled himself up from the blankets.

Coën tossed him a bundle of red and brown - clean clothes.

“I’m tired, Coën,” Julian complained, but dutifully began to change behind Coën’s back regardless.

“I know you’re tired. It’s late,” Coën said, folding his dirtied clothing and setting it down, putting it aside with the other dirty clothes they had accumulated at an alarming rate over the past few days.

The sweaty tunic that hit the back of his head moments later signified that Julian, too, was once again in clean clothes.

“Charming,” Coën grumbled, setting his friend’s clothes down before making his own way over to the makeshift blanket pile that they shared. “Your manners are impeccable, Julek.”

Julian hummed, curling deeper into the blankets, his silence a testament to his exhaustion. Coën lay down carefully beside him, shuffling under the blankets with minimal movement.

“G’night, Coën,” Julian mumbled, snuggling deeper into the blankets and, by extension, Coën’s side.

“Goodnight,” Coën whispered, absently running a hand through Julian’s hair. “You fucking lark.”

Julian grinned at him, eyes still closed.

Chapter Text

Jaskier had not been back to Kaer Seren in decades.

It had been a veritable age since the keep had last played host to him for the winter - he promised himself every autumn that this year, this year would be the year he returned, the year he reunited with his friends, who, annoyingly enough, he seemed fated to avoid on the Path... But it never was. He’d abandoned the Path hastily two decades, or maybe three, after the Trial of the Medallion, and he’d leapt at the opportunity to retire as a witcher, so to speak, and, save for the occasional winter where the lonely homesickness had gotten too much to bear, never looked back.

He’d never even considered returning to the Path after he slid on the glamour - and really, it was a marvellous piece of work, disguising everything, from his most prominent features, his scars, his eyes, his teeth, with canines far too sharp to be human, to even the most subtle little clues. His scent, his heartbeat, all masked. It even had an ingenious system of masking new scars, too - an injury, be it a cut, a bruise, or a scab, would show neatly through the glamour, and heal leaving never a blemish visible - unless, of course, he were to take it off. Aside from the minor issue with the bleeding, a tiny little oversight, really, it was perfect.

Jaskier found himself removing exceedingly rarely, seldom having a reason to, and he was somewhat used to seeing years’ worth of new scars that he didn’t know he’d accumulated on his body whenever he did deign to slip the worn anklet off.

The point was, it had been a small eternity since Jaskier had returned to his keep, even despite his friends and brothers tethering him there. It wasn’t, as one might have assumed, Jaskier’s utter lack of respect of the witcher lifestyle that kept him from returning for winters.

Gods, no, it was simply circumstance. Circumstance that things had just kept... Things had just kept happening, really, and he found himself not having been back to Kaer Seren in, oh, a decade or two?

Of course, it sounded bad when it was phrased like that.

Jaskier massaged his forehead with the heel of his hand, headache pounding in his head. He’d spent the most glorious winter in Oxenfurt - this time, his excuse was that Kovir was far too far from Kaedwen, and if he went up to the keep in the mountains, he’d end up snowed in till after winter had passed, and Geralt ‘I don’t have any friends’ of fucking Rivia would be long gone.

If he wanted to catch him, Jaskier knew, he’d have to nab him in Kaedwen, outside of Kaer Morhen, before he could get very far and force Jaskier to put actual effort into tracking him, and there was a reason that he avoided such covert, somewhat shady activities - that reason being that they got very boring and annoying very quickly. That was why he was leaving Oxenfurt, still in the middle of winter, really, to travel to bloody Kaedwen, of all places. Kaedwen. They really couldn’t have picked a bigger shithole to build Kaer Morhen in, could they? Or were Velen and Nilfgaard simply already taken?

It was a good plan, to catch Geralt as he was leaving Kaer Morhen, a great plan, and it had all gone to shit last night when his old friends had decided to take the occasion to get completely and utterly shitfaced. Witchers were hard-pressed to suffer hangovers, but Jaskier had drunk enough the previous night to kill three ordinary men, and to lay a fourth low for two weeks.

Maybe that was why he was reminiscing so much. It was hard to care all to much about the past, after all, when one was having to actively concentrate on walking.

He was very glad he had invested in a horse - a most majestic grey mare that, during one late night of drunken shenanigans, his so-called friends (culpability actually fell on the shoulders of himself first of all, and then some of his closer acquaintances, but he’d be damned before he admitted it) had thought to kindly train to respond to the name Bollocks. But, regardless of the name, a horse was a horse, and Jaskier had absolutely no intent whatsoever to walk to Kaedwen. That was absolutely where he drew the line. Walking to places? That was fine. Entering Kaedwen? He was capable of the act, yes. Both at the same time? That was far too much effort for far too little payoff.

Despite his low opinion of the place, he had no particular quarrel with Kaedwen. His animosity towards the kingdom stemmed, quite simply, from the fact that the food was bad and the ale was worse, and Jaskier preferred to spend his time elsewhere - Temeria, Metinna, Redania, even Cintra, on occasion - where life was far more pleasant. He’d known enough unpleasantness to last a lifetime.

Three lifetimes, actually, if this fucking hangover was to be included. His head was pounding and he felt sick to his stomach - how had he managed to get this drunk on a bloody witcher’s metabolism? How had nobody noticed how bloody much he’d had? Had whoever owned the fine establishment where he’d no doubt downed half of all their stock simply shrugged it off as just a bard thing?

Jaskier groaned to himself, and hoisted his aching body clumsily into the saddle that adorned the back of his unfortunately-named horse, pack and lute jostling uncomfortably. This was awful, he’d have to make a mental note never to go out drinking with Oxenfurt alumni ever again. He was fairly certain that at least one of his fleeting companions had actually managed to kill himself via alcohol poisoning last night, if his drink-addled memory was to be trusted - it was ridiculous.

Given that Jaskier wasn’t about to start on such long journey the next day, he would absolutely doing it again. Drinking oneself into a coma was so much more fun with careless poets than gruff and stoic witchers.

As it was, however, the aches and various pains of his massive hangover were only exacerbated by the rhythmic jolting of his unfortunately-named horse. It felt like his brain was being shaken around by his head, and, had it not been highly important that he get to Kaedwen before Geralt could fuck off and leave his barker scouring the continent, he would most certainly have taken a day to rest.

By the evening, he was a good way away from Oxenfurt, Bollocks the horse having proved a speedy mount. He decided, rather than to waste time looking for a village with an inn, to simply set up camp where he was, somewhere in the Redanian forest. Despite the shared border between Redania and Kaedwen, Oxenfurt and Kaer Morhen were both at the opposite ends of their respective kingdoms, in what Jaskier was sure was a massive geographical middle finger in his specific direction by life itself, to ensure that his journey was annoyingly and unnecessarily long.

“Come on, girl,” he muttered to the horse, as he coaxed his poor mare towards a campsite, where Bollocks followed him with remarkable compliance. He’d evidently chosen a very pleasant and even-tempered mount. It was such a shame that a gaggle of raucously drunk lutists had named her so unfortunately.

Bollocks, however, seemed perfectly content - and gods, what he’d not give to have the horse respond to any other name, if only to save his dignity when he inevitable ventured amongst the general public with the horse - and settled down quickly in the clearing, whilst Jaskier removed his admittedly quite heavy belongings from her back.

She deserved some rest, too.

Jaskier had, after realising that he would be following around a witcher for the foreseeable future, immediately stocked up on all the supplies he’d deemed unnecessary for life as a travelling bard - who needed a quality bedroll when most nights were spent in an inn? A cheaper, lighter one would do fine. The Path was far more demanding than idle travels, after all, and he’d saved himself a great amount of trouble and coin by lessening his load of equipment down to the bare minimum.

The things he did for Geralt, honestly.

Still, he wasn’t complaining. The higher quality bedroll he’d nabbed himself during a sale in Oxenfurt was heavenly after so many occasions spent sleeping wrapped in what might as well have been a scrap of parchment - the utter lack of quality was really despicable - and he actually felt comfortable as he lay against it, propped up against a log, strumming his lute idly.

The fire crackled merrily as the sky darkened. He’d set it with an Igni, he wasn’t so invested in his cover that he’d forgo such easy convenience when he was so completely alone, and its crackling was calm and soothing. His headache was rapidly fading - thank the gods for witcher metabolism - and so he decided to amuse himself by the fire, play a few songs.

Jaskier loved company, loved performing, but there was something to be said about the comfortable freedom of being completely alone, unseen by outside eyes who were so willing to evaluate his songs and draw conclusions from them.

His fingers strummed the lute idly, a familiar chord progression springing forth - a simple melody at its core, reworked so many times over the years, the tune shifting from the clunky compositions of a beginner to something smoother and more refined. It did, to Jaskier’s annoyance, sound somewhat like he’d tacked some bells and whistles onto an unskilled, simplistic composition... Mainly because that was exactly what he’d done, but then, the tune was one of his first compositions. It was rather annoying, really - nostalgia prevented him from changing it too much, but the flaws and errors of an awkward child so present in the clunky, repetitive tune made him itch to rework it entirely.

In the end, he’d left it half-arsed. The subject matter of the song alone ensured that no audience other than himself would ever hear it, and he could, albeit grudgingly, accept the poor composition under such a condition.

“Do you want to hear a song, girl?” Jaskier crooned, turning his attention to his idling mare, who flicked an ear as he spoke.

The poor creature. To think she’d actually been named Bollocks.

Jaskier took the horse’s silence as agreement - and really, how was a horse going to protest a performance? He strummed the chords again, smoothly transitioning from the simple, idle progression into the opening notes of a song that he’d written so long ago.

In a mountainside keep, where the library lies

And nobody quite dares to go

Lives the old man, so unkempt, grey, and wise,

Who bleats about all he does know.

All the pages of books, stashed away from the world

He prides above all else that’s real,

A shame, than when all of his scrolls are unfurled,

He still cannot manage to feel.

Respect he demands, his own manners be damned,

As if he were some sort of czar!

He looks down upon us, like a wolf to a lamb,

And sneers upon all that we are

With his oily grey hair and his petulant eyes

He ridicules every young man

He talks with a tongue only built to chastise

And scorns us simply ‘cause he can!

Well, old man, I tell you, that you are a fool,

If you think that we’ll let this slip by

You are the pest of the whole Griffin School

And it’s high time that we told you why!

The melody of the song was simple and repetitive, with the odd flourish peppered in here or there, as Jaskier expanded on his childish composition. He’d been ridiculously proud of himself when he’d first finished it, and he could remember humming it and quoting it almost religiously back in the keep, him and Coën always ending up giggling at it regardless of the fact that any comedic value that the song may have held had been well and truly exhausted by the end of the first week of ceaselessly repeating it.

Jaskier grinned to himself, and barely restrained himself from asking the horse for an opinion. Bollocks would not be able to actually answer such a query, and he wasn’t about to pick up Geralt’s habit of conversing with his horse. Not to mention, Jaskier and Bollocks didn’t know each other well enough, by any metric, to launch into deep, reminiscent conversations - Jaskier was talkative, yes, but he had no intention of spilling all of his deepest secrets to a stranger, even if said stranger was a horse.

“Are you alright there, Bollocks?” Jaskier asked instead, trying to manage the statement with a straight face, to limited success. This was technically not yet a conversation with his horse, though, and poor Bollocks didn’t deserve to be ignored.

The horse glanced at him, before turning her attention back to the lone, small patch of grass growing at the base of a nearby tree - not something he’d expected to stumble across in the middle of winter, but something that he was grateful for. It kept the horse occupied, which was a good thing.

Jaskier slid Filavandrel’s lute back into its case, before curling up in his bedroll. The sun had barely set, but if they were to rest now, they could begin their journey before dawn the next day, and be none the less exhausted for it.

Despite the uncomfortable, hungover start, the journey seemed to be going well.

Forgoing meditation in favour of actually sleeping - really, the bedroll was just so damn comfortable - Jaskier relaxed, the cold winter air barely a bother, and watcher the embers of the fire he’d conjured out of his damn hand die down as he drifted off into a light sleep, surrounded by the the rustling of the winter breeze through the forest and the quiet scuffling of various creatures.

It was nice. Calming. Jaskier didn’t usually go in for this kind of thing, and he knew he’d be bemoaning his lonely fate to his apathetic horse by the day after tomorrow, but for now, he could enjoy the peace and quiet.

It was such a shame that it didn’t last.

Jaskier had, predominantly during his stint as a proper witcher, been awoken by bandits looking to loot his stash of belongings and perhaps kill him while they were at it, and he knew how to deal with this kind of situation.

Barely roused from his sleep, he reached for one of his daggers - the one from the assassin, which he’d tucked into a sheath-like pocket he’d sewn into his waistband, it was convenient and nicely hidden - and, as swiftly as an arrow, swung it to press lightly against the neck of the unfamiliar figure standing over him, his other hand grabbing the wrist that had a second ago been reaching for him.

He opened his eyes to see a willowy woman, dressed in flowing garments far too light for the winter, standing over him, not looking the least bit perturbed.

He could feel his medallion buzzing faintly where he’d stashed it in his bedroll, by his feet.

Sorceress.

“Oh, good,” she said, looking as impassive as she sounded, voice a drawling monotone. “I have the right bard.”

“The right-” Jaskier repeated, incredulous. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Doesn’t matter,” the sorceress shrugged. “All I need to know is who you are. Or verify it, rather.”

Jaskier scowled, shifting out of his bedroll, and stood, not loosening his grip on the woman’s wrist or removing the blade from her throat. Perhaps the sorceress had nothing to fear from his meagre attack, perhaps steel was still a threat to her, Jaskier didn’t know - his knowledge on their kind was lacklustre at best, not really deeming it to be pertinent information for either a witcher or a bard - but like hell was he about to do anything that could conceivably be misinterpreted as a gesture of deference or trust.

The sorceress looked at him with the same expression of apathy.

“Why are you here, then? Harassing a lowly bard?”

“You’re no lowly bard,” the sorceress said, peering at Jaskier with interested green eyes. “You are the witcher who sought the aid of one of my colleagues for a glamour, are you not?”

Oh, fuck. If this wasn’t the absolute worst thing that the sorceress could have thrown in his face, then Jaskier had no idea what was.

“Who’s asking? I just think, you know, that it’s a bit unfair of you to come after me with my life story and not even give me an introduction,” he drawled, trying to school his face to be as uninterested as the sorceress’ and perhaps only slightly failing.

“I’m an associate of the one who made your glamour - the reclusive one with red hair, who never gives a name, in case you desire proof. You promised her a favour alongside all the coin, did you not?”

“It’s not transferable,” Jaskier scowled. “I promised the favour to her, not whichever one of her friends felt like calling it in first. I’m not some kind of dog at your collective beck and call. If she wants to collect it, she can come and get it herself.”

“She’s dead.”

“It’s still not transferable.”

The sorceress sighed. “That’s a shame. Almost as great of a shame, in fact, as it would be if I were to break your glamour.”

Jaskier just about managed to stop his right leg, the one that wore the anklet, from twitching. She likely already knew where it was, but he would not volunteer any information, regardless.

They stood, silent, for a moment.

“You couldn’t,” the bard tried. “She made it to be damn near indestructible.”

“Damn near,” the sorceress repeated, with particular emphasis, and Jaskier got the message, loud and clear. Fuck. He’d built his damn life around that fucking glamour.

Apparently all the good that had done was make him ridiculously easy to blackmail.

“Right, right, got it,” Jaskier said, loosening his grip and holding his hands up in mock surrender - the effect only slightly lessened by the fact that he still held a dagger. “If you are going to conscript me into your service against my will, though, my fair lady, might I at least ask your name?”

The sorceress exhaled a little, almost imperceptibly. “Lohere.”

“Right. Thank you. I’m-”

“Julian of Kovir, I know.”

“I was going to say honoured to make your acquaintance, but that works too,” Jaskier shrugged, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t end up calling him that in public. As witchers went, Julian of Kovir was a very obscure one, but the chance that someone would recognise the name was still there.

He’d paid far too damn much for that fucking glamour.

“What do you need me for?”

Lohere raised an eyebrow. “Our mutual friend was killed in a... shall we say, a skirmish, that broke out between parties hunting a specific little tome. The person who killed her is a member of a certain noble house.”

“If you say I have to go in and commit mass-murder, I’m going to... I’m going to do something very unpleasant,” Jaskier threatened.

Nodding, the sorceress turned to survey Jaskier’s impromptu campsite, belongings, and horse. “It’s hardly mass-murder, it’s one man and his idiot posse.”

“And how big is his idiot posse?” Jaskier scoffed. “Mass-murder, like I said. Let me pack my stuff at least, you utter prick.”

Lohere nodded, face still devoid of emotion. “Thank you for choosing to help me, Julian.”

“Is that what we’re calling your blackmailing me, now?”

The sorceress did not deign to respond to that, and Jaskier instead set about packing up his belongings and shrugging on his doublet. The sun had not yet risen, and Jaskier was implicitly thankful for his enhanced eyesight. If he’d had to stumble around the campsite, unable to make anything out as he packed his belongings, then this day would definitely have made the top three worst days he had ever had, and given that he had lived for decades longer than anyone thought and also was a witcher, that was saying something.

He managed to pack up and attach all of his belongings to Bollocks in record time, slipping his medallion into his doublet’s inside pocket when he was sure that Lohere couldn’t see him doing it. Don’t let the sorceress glean any useful information, and all that. Call him paranoid, but he was rather out of his element here, and carelessness was far more likely to kill him than overt carefulness.

“So, who do I need to murder to get you off my back?” Jaskier queried, projecting an air of cheeriness that he most certainly did not feel. “Because I’ll have you know, I do have somewhere to be after all the morally reprehensible acts you’ve conscripted me for.”

Lohere didn’t answer him, instead choosing to shoot him a sideways glance as she opened a portal. “I’d have thought you’d be more principled, Julian. You didn’t take very much convincing.”

“I spent a good quarter of a century trying to get myself enough coin for this glamour, I’m not about to let you destroy it in a fit of petulant rage. But I’m sure you knew that already.”

Hoping against hope that this wasn’t some kind of ploy to get him in a dungeon, Jaskier grabbed his horse’s reins and led her through the portal. Fuck, he really needed some kind of plan to get himself out of this mess and to Kaedwen within the two weeks he’d given himself. He hadn’t really accounted for getting accosted by random bloody sorceresses and portalled to who-only-knew-where when he was planning his journey.

Jaskier and poor Bollocks emerged from the portal in a large, stone room decorated with various tapestries - an atrium of some kind, then. It seemed like the kind of gaudy place that a sorceress would inhabit. Lohere emerged from the portal swiftly, striding past him and gesturing for him to follow.

The bard ignored the sudden queasiness in the pit of his stomach in favour of not looking like a weakling in front of the mage

Casting a look around to see if there was any indication for what he should do with Bollocks, and finding none, Jaskier shrugged and started after Lohere, horse still in tow.

Lohere glanced back to see if he was keeping up only once, raising a slight eyebrow at the continued presence of the horse, at which Jaskier shrugged once more. The sorceress did not seem to take issue with Bollocks’ continued presence, and Jaskier eventually had to leave her anyways, as they encountered a staircase - a tragically untraversable landscape for a horse.

Following Lohere up the stairs and into a little room filled with all manner of magical artefacts with an artificial spring in his step, Jaskier took stock of his surroundings. The view from the windows showed flat land, covered in forest, and a small village a little way down a cliff.

“Where are we?”

The inquiry was leisurely and amiable, and this time, the sorceress graced him with a reply. “Pocegodor. It’s still in Redania, don’t worry.”

“Doesn’t sound like a very Redanian name.”

“It’s not, the founder wasn’t from around here,” Lohere said, waving a hand dismissively. “But that’s neither here nor there. I need you to do a job for me, and then you may leave.”

Jaskier inclined his head, indicating for her to continue.

“I’m sure you’ve heard of the recent discovery of... shall we say, a rather sought-after ancient text, written by a mage many hundreds of years ago, containing knowledge thought to be long-lost.”

“I can’t say that I have, witch. My interest in the affairs of your lot is next to nonexistent.”

“A mighty shame,” Lohere said, in a tone of voice that all but emphasised her extreme disinterest in Jaskier’s opinions. “Either way, it was rediscovered recently, and many a party was sent on a quest to retrieve it. I’d tell you the full story, but impatient as you are, I suppose it comes down to the fact that two of the parties ended up making it to the book, and a fight broke out among them, killing our mutual friend and destroying the tome.”

“A true loss,” Jaskier bit out, sarcasm dripping from his tone.

“It rather was,” mused the sorceress. “But now, for your task. This all happened a few months ago, and the cad who murdered my associate and destroyed what was possibly the most valuable text on the continent, at the time, has evaded my attempts to deal with him most expertly. He plays the incompetent remarkably well, and has wormed his way into the protection of many a powerful man under the guise of a paranoid, if imbecilic, nobleman with money to throw around.”

“Sounds hilarious, for you to be continuously thwarted by someone playing the fool.”

“Make no mistake,” Lohere sniffed. “He is a very smart man, for all he acts an idiot. He projects such an utter lack of charisma that people think they’ve immediately sussed him out upon meeting, when in reality...”

“Is there a specific story there?”

“Only that he’s managed to stay one step ahead of every hired man I’ve sent after him, frustratingly enough.”

Jaskier raised an eyebrow. “So... what? You decide to hire a witcher to overwhelm him?”

“Precisely.”

“You do know we have a code of neutrality regarding human affairs, right? At least, my lot does. You should have gotten a Viper, or maybe a Cat. They wouldn’t object.”

“Ah, yes, the famous Griffin honour. You did seem to abandon it rather quickly, Julian. But you were the logical choice, you know - I don’t have to pay you.”

“Oh, come on- You’re blackmailing me!” Jaskier protested, throwing his arms up in a frustrated gesture. “There’s a difference between being honourable and throwing away decades of work and the life you’ve built for yourself to show that rude sorceress - who could probably kill you with magic anyways - who’s boss!”

Lohere snorted. “Don’t think I don’t know you won’t turn on me given the first sign of an opportunity, witcher. I know how your kind rationalises.”

“What do you mean, my kind?”

“Noble idiots like the Wolves and the Griffins. It won’t work out well for you, just look at what happened to the Butcher of Blaviken.”

Jaskier’s stomach dropped. He’d only really heard the rumours of what had happened - namely, that Geralt slaughtered a fair few people in the town square a decade or so ago - but if this sorceress was referencing that now...

“I also know, Julian of Kovir, that you won’t ask after it from me. You’ll not be wanting to go behind your travel companion’s back, I assume?”

Bloody fuck, had Lohere done her research.

Or maybe she’d just heard his songs.

Still, Jaskier merely smiled amiably. “Trying to get a story from Geralt is like pulling teeth from a wyvern. What happened?”

“A mage offered him a contract to kill a cursed girl. He refused, and ended up doing it anyways, but far less discreetly.”

“You’re so talkative, until you actually say something of interest,” Jaskier grumbled. “Go on then, Lohere. How do I find your mysterious murder-noble?”

“He’s with a friend of his in a safe-house near Ellander. He’ll be the one with the face of a boor and a scoundrel, but you’re to wipe them all out, Sir Witcher.”

“Can I get a name?”

Lohere pressed her lips together in a smile. “Oh, he uses so many aliases, I’m sure it wouldn’t matter.”

Jaskier rolled his eyes. “If you want me to kill him, at least describe him, damn it!”

Grudgingly, Lohere did. His target, apparently, was a man with long, dark hair and narrow, watery-blue eyes, a description that was so pathetically lacking that Jaskier began to wonder if it was a requirement to be as vague as humanly possible if you wanted to get a witcher to do something. It was ridiculous - Lohere could have been describing half the men on the bloody continent.

The sorceress was, in addition to frustratingly cryptic, also apparently unwilling to waste the slightest bit of time. After having deemed the conversation with Jaskier to have gone on for long enough, she cut him off abruptly, and demanded that they move on.

At Lohere’s insistence, Jaskier had prepared to commit the murders she demanded of him at once.

He’d strapped his short swords and their scabbards to himself, and dressed in light, black clothing for the job, specifically not anything offered by the sorceress. If Jaskier was to double-cross her - and really, he had absolutely no intent to slaughter a man who’d pissed off a sorcerer, if anything, Jaskier should have been thanking him for his service, he’d had enough encounters with arrogant mages to last a lifetime - he wouldn’t accept gifts from her with open arms. There were so many traps, so many little spells that could be woven into something as simple as a shirt.

No, Jaskier spent the last of his dwindling funds - why the fuck had he blown all his coin getting shitfaced in Oxenfurt, again? - on his own assassin-like garb during a quick visit to Pocegodor. It was an investment, he told himself. It was an investment and a necessity, to prevent anyone from suspecting that a humble bard was the one attempting assassinations left and right this fine winter’s evening.

So there he stood, face covered by a simple, black mask, looking for all the world like a child’s caricature of an assassin, as he waited for Lohere to portal them to Ellander. Lohere had been most insistent on coming along - probably something to do with her trusting Jaskier about as far as she could throw him, which was fair enough and completely warranted.

It would make trying to get out of this whole mess without besmirching his vaguely-defined morals. Damn mages. Couldn’t they do their own dirty work for once?

The portal to Ellander - or rather, to the middle of some woods some way away from Ellander - was made before the sun had reached its zenith, and Jaskier, Bollocks, and Lohere were suddenly a fair distance from a building that Jaskier assumed was the safe-house. This time, Jaskier gave himself a few moments for the queasiness to settle before glancing to Lohere, who raised an eyebrow at him.

“Well? That’s the house. Go on, do your job, and I’ll leave you to your mundane business,” the sorceress said dismissively. “Believe me, I’m just as eager as you to have this over with.”

Jaskier raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you have a burning desire for revenge against this man, or something?”

“Not personally, witcher. Our mutual friend and I are both representatives of a powerful man, who did not take kindly to having his prize destroyed.”

“And you’re telling me this, why?”

“In case you get any ideas about turning your blade on me, Julian of Kovir. Now go.”

Jaskier snorted. “Of course, I wouldn’t want to anger your very powerful and extremely real boss, now, would I?”

Lohere rolled her eyes, almost imperceptibly.

At the sorceress’ gestured dismissal, Jaskier started towards the safe-house at a leisurely pace. This would have been far easier a feat to accomplish at night, but Lohere evidently cared not for the little details that were involved in an assassination.

The safe-house was designed to be hidden - it was buried in a copse of trees, looking for all the world like a simple stone cottage even to Jaskier’s suspicious eyes. Slinking through the shadows, sticking to the trees - and gods, it had been forever since Jaskier had done anything with such stealth - he made his approach with the utmost care.

He could hear, with his annoyingly sensitive ears that made performances just so much more taxing, the faintest echoes of voices as he pressed himself to the wall. Evidently, the safe house stretched far below the ground.

That made sense - it was a nobleman’s refuge, after all. Of course it was going to be more sophisticated than a cabin in the woods.

Unfortunately for Jaskier, this made the safe house rather difficult for him to infiltrate - no windows, one sturdy door, and the bulk of the building being underground lent itself quite nicely to making the place rather more troublesome to enter. Not that that wasn’t the point of a safe house, but the bard allowed himself to be frustrated about it regardless - he didn’t want to be here in the first place.

Fuck, if he was killing anyone, he’d rather it be Lohere, the blackmailing bastard.

Still, he had to at least pretend to be doing the job the sorceress wanted of him. His glamour was integral to his life, these days - one couldn’t exactly draw a crowd performing with a scarred witcher’s visage and piercing yellow eyes, after all - and, annoyingly enough, Lohere wasn’t exactly giving him enough time to plot against her.

There was something off about this, Jaskier realised, as he climbed onto the roof of the safe-house, where the wood, reinforced with stonework as it was, was far more likely to give under pressure than the wall, and was far more subtle a way in than the door. Trying the thick planks, he managed to dislodge one fairly quietly, though it was a strain even for his strength. There was something off about Lohere’s whole scheme. Surely, surely it would be easier for a sorceress to simply end the man’s life herself? Pay off a Cat or a Viper, or even mind-control a witcher to do it instead of resorting to lowly blackmail?

Too, something else irked him. I don’t have to pay you, she’d said. Had she run out of funding? How did a mage run out of money? Humans were more than willing to flock to them for magical solutions to their problems, Jaskier knew. It would have been so much simpler for here to hire a witcher willing to do anything for coin than to force the hand of someone as unwilling as Jaskier.

And then, there was the bluff of the supposedly powerful mage she worked for. What was with that?

Jaskier had no idea, but something clearly wasn’t right.

He removed a section of the roof, requiring a surprising amount of strength to do so, and dropped through it, quiet as a mouse.

There was no sentry posted, and by the smell of things, Jaskier could make out that there were only three people occupying the safe-house, and that all three had been here for a while.

Oddly enough, there was something familiar about one of the scents. Jaskier was sure he’d smelt it before, somewhere, but he couldn’t quite place it. It had been a recent thing, he was sure, but positive identification drifted just out of his reach. He knew this. He knew this, damn it!

Sticking to the shadows cast by torches flickering in the draught, moving silently and swiftly, Jaskier followed the sounds of faint conversation deeper and deeper into the safe-house, deeper into the earth.

He happened upon the two men in a dimly lit corridor.

One of them, a portly man dressed in fine clothing, was talking animatedly about something Jaskier wasn’t listening to, because the other man - the other man, whose long black hair and narrow, pale blue eyes marked him as Jaskier’s target - the bard recognised.

He held himself with an unfamiliar air of authority, any hint of the personality Jaskier had come to expect from him vanished without a trace, and he suddenly understood what Lohere had meant, back in Pocegodor. His target carried himself with a decisive grace, and his gaze was steely and harsh, eyes calculating, and his demeanour was wholly undecipherable.

But Jaskier would know the man who was definitely not named Adam’s face anywhere, fresh in his mind as it was.

“-That damn sorceress!” The portly man was speaking, a touch of desperation to his tone. “Come on, old friend, it’s been three weeks since the last assassin she sent, and we know she’s getting desperate! We need to strike back!”

“No,” Adam said coldly. “If I’ve told you once, then I’ve told you a thousand times, so listen to me, damn it, for once in your pathetic little life. It was a mistake to kill the first mage, and I’ve absolutely no inclination to anger their merry band any further. Lohere will tire herself out eventually. Her coin has dwindled and her magic is weaker now than ever before, no doubt as a result of that asinine bargain she struck. It’s a game of waiting now, we’ve already won the fight. If you cock it up for me, my friend, it won’t be any sorcerer you have to worry about.”

The man spluttered. “And let them win?”

“This is no war, damn it. My aim is to stay alive, and I’ve all but won on such a front.”

“You would fold before a sorceress?”

“I would rather live than sign my own death warrant for the sake of my pride, you imbecile!” Adam’s eyes were burning with cold fury as he turned his gaze upon his companion.

“Your pride? The mages have been hunting you like an animal!”

“And I have survived it. Is that not enough?”

"Ferrant de Lettenhove!" the portly man cried. "Are you out of your mind?"

Jaskier's stomach dropped at the exclamation, and he must have made a noise, because Adam - no, Ferrant - fixed his gaze upon him.

"Introduce me for our company, then, why don't you?" he snapped, coldly, at his friend, before turning to Jaskier. "I assume you're Lohere's latest attempt? I can't tell if I should be impressed or disappointed."

Jaskier wanted to reply, but his throat had closed up under the mask.

He put his hands up, instead, stepping out from the shadows.

“That’s a new one,” Ferrant said, observing Jaskier with keen interest. “Usually, I’d expect a tad bit more violence.”

Finding his voice, Jaskier spoke, putting on a thick Kaedweni accent. It wouldn’t do for anyone - especially this man, to recognise his voice and join the dots. “You said Lohere was weak?”

Ferrant raised an eyebrow - and he really was a brilliant actor, Jaskier could see no trace of the persona of Adam in him at all - and his gaze bore into Jaskier intently, scrutinising him, thinking, before finally speaking.

Truly, Ferrant de Lettenhove had played Jaskier for a fool back on their journey, too.

“Blackmail,” he said, with some finality. “Her coin has finally run out, then.”

The pieces all fit into place. Lohere was using Jaskier because he was a last resort. Her power was dwindling - she’d likely only entertained such a long conversation with him, only allowed him the trip into Pocegodor to recover her stamina to create another portal.

“What kind of deal did she strike?”

“Oh, just... promised her life to an arcane creature of some sort in exchange for power, and got duped. But that’s mages for you - never satisfied with what they have, and so, so arrogant,” Ferrant waved, shifting into a more conversational demeanour that put Jaskier on edge.

Jaskier hummed.

“Are you going to kill her?”

It was the portly man who spoke, then, earning a cold look from the man Jaskier was probably some kind of great-uncle of, which didn’t really bear thinking about, and interrupting the conversation.

Still, it was only polite to answer the question. Jaskier, at least, had manners. “Why should I? If she has no power, she is no longer a threat to me.”

“You’re just going to leave?” Ferrant drawled. “After breaking into my safe-house like this? You’re good, for a last resort. A little too good for me to be comfortable with.”

Fucking great. Was his entire bloodline biologically mandated to be full of utter douchebags?

“Are you going to kill me, then?” Jaskier sighed. “Because I would really rather you didn’t. I have places to be, after all, and Lohere has thrown my schedule off enough.”

“It’s nothing personal,” the noble assured him. “I simply would rather not find my throat being slit one night after failing to dispose of a threat.”

Jaskier groaned. Fuck this. Fuck every single little detail about this whole stupid situation. He just wanted to get to Kaedwen, damn it. He’d abandoned the Path specifically to avoid this kind of wholly stressful situation.

“Why is this all suddenly on me? I didn’t even want to be here in the first place. Trust me, I have absolutely no inclination to come after you. I don’t care about you,” the bard tried.

“And yet, I care a great deal about what you could do to me.”

Fucking great. Fucking brilliant. Fucking nobles, fucking mages, fucking everything. If he believed in Destiny, Jaskier would swear that it was trying to annoy him back into being a witcher.

“Look, Mister de Lettenhove, I am absolutely sure that this is wholly unnecessary, so I’ll just take the opportunity to-”

And it was only his quick reflexes that allowed him to draw one of his short swords and parry the sword that swung down towards his shoulder from behind him.

The third person whose scent he’d smelt, of course. Of course.

Ferrant’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, looking at the weapon intently.

Brilliant. Jaskier really, really hoped he didn’t make the connection between the scavenging bard on the road Temeria and the masked figure currently regretting his entire existence in a safe-house near Ellander.

His attacker withdrew his sword, and struck again, doing nothing except giving Jaskier time to turn sideways, keeping both Ferrant and the third person in his peripheral vision as he parried once more, drawing his other sword.

At the end of the blade was a tall, lanky girl, her armour bearing the familiar Lettenhove crest. She held a longsword, and swung it with surety.

“Come on,” Jaskier ground out, making sure his false Kaedweni accent didn’t slip. “If you let me go, I swear on my sword arm that I’ll never bother you again. Ever.”

The girl simply slashed at Jaskier’ midriff, a strike which he ducked under, bending backwards, hands touching the floor for just a moment before he pushed off and rose again and twisted out of her range - just long enough for both the girl’s and Ferrant’s blades to slice through air above him, his unpleasant relative’s weapon aimed exactly where his neck would have been.

Two on one it was, then.

The girl moved with surety, with strength, and Ferrant’s posture - to Jaskier’s immense disappointment - did not feature the peacocking frivolities that most nobles fancied. Instead, his movements were practical, efficient.

Jaskier hated him already.

“You know, if you don’t stand down, I may have to kill you,” the bard said, dodging a diagonal downwards slash from the girl and stepping straight into the line of Ferrant’s blade, which he parried with ease before slashing at the girl’s abdomen with his other hand, moving his foot to snake behind her leg and pull, unbalancing her.

The girl stumbled, but did not fall, though she did not manage to completely parry the short-sword, which she managed to push back only far enough that the cut Jaskier landed on her stomach was an inconvenience rather than a fatal blow. Jaskier ducked under the swipe she sent his way, recovering quickly, and caught Ferrant’s downwards slash between his two blades, forming an X-shape.

“Last chance to let me go,” Jaskier warned, pulling his short swords away from Ferrant’s blade and ducking low, slashing at their ankles in a wide, circular motion.

The girl dodged the move just about in time, but Ferrant wasn’t so lucky. The noble let out a hiss of pain as Jaskier’s sword cut into his calf.

The pair of them struck in tandem, aiming down before he could stand, and Jaskier caught both blades on his short swords, once again crossed, back parallel to the ground as his ascent was interrupted. Sensing an opportunity, Ferrant twisted his wrist, moving the end of his blade down and carving a neat gash into Jaskier’s stomach.

It was not a fatal would, especially not by witcher standards, but it was deep, and Jaskier let out a hiss as he pushed his blades up, shoving both enemy swords away from his flesh and giving him space to stand, stepping forwards and turning to keep his opponents in his sight.

That was that for taking the defensive, then. If this was a fight to the death, Jaskier was only too happy to oblige.

Not bothering to wait for either the girl or Ferrant to move, Jaskier launched himself towards the space behind the girl, swinging his left blade, the one closest to her, in a wide arc. His momentum and strength combined to give his strike enough force for his blade, when it hit its mark, to take the girl’s head off completely in a veritable fountain of red.

The bard landed, lightly as a cat, and Ferrant held his hands up, though not dropping his sword.

“I surrender,” the man bit out.

At least he could admit when he was beaten. Sighing, Jaskier motioned for him to drop his sword, not sheathing his own weapons even when he was sure that Ferrant’s hands were empty.

“You’ll leave me alone forever, then? No bounties on my pretty, mysterious head?”

“No,” Ferrant conceded, still eyeing Jaskier with that uncomfortable, calculating gaze of his. “What will you do about Lohere?”

The bard’s brow furrowed as he considered his options. “Kill her before she can spread the word about my sensitive spot, I suppose.”

“You’ll end up with sorcerers hounding you.”

“That sounds very much like a problem for tomorrow,”

“Suit yourself,” the noble said, eyeing the bloodied corpse of his guard on the floor.

Jaskier debated nicking the sword off the girl’s corpse, before deciding against it - it would certainly blow his cover if he started carrying it around - and retraced his steps before the coppery tang of blood overwhelmed his senses too much.

He all but ran out of the safe-house, only slowing when it came time to hoist himself out through the hole he’d made in the roof. Hopefully, he would never have to cross paths with Ferrant again.

It seemed, too, that Lohere’s information was a bit out of date. Jaskier remembered the man’s so-called idiot posse - they’d been felled by assassins before the winter, he’d been there. Apparently, she did not keep as sharp an eye on things as she wanted Jaskier to think - not if the bard knew better what had befallen the motley crew than she did.

Harbouring no doubt that his hands would be slick with blood that was not his own before the day was over, Jaskier ambled over to where Lohere sat, exactly where he’d left her. Seated beside Bollocks, some way away from the safe-house.

He caught her eyes as she approached, glittering green meeting cornflower blue. She didn’t speak until he was close, standing before her, the girl’s blood still coating one of the blades he held.

“Is he dead?”

“Who, Ferrant de Lettenhove? Sure,” Jaskier said, finally dropping the accent.

“And his men?”

“Also dead,” the bard said, and that one wasn’t even a lie! It simply hadn’t been by his hand, but that was on a need-to-know basis. And Lohere didn’t need to know.

Lohere smiled. “Thank you, Julian. I knew you’d come through for me.”

Jaskier returned her grin. “Now, we just have one tiny thing to discuss.”

“Oh?”

“Why you lied to me.”

Lohere froze. “What do you mean, lied to you?”

“I mean,” Jaskier said, loftily, “exactly what I said. You conscripted me under false pretences. I’ve no idea why I couldn’t call your bluff earlier, to be honest. I thought I’d gotten rid of the hangover by that point, but oh well.”

“Hang on, Julian-”

She was cut off by the sudden presence of Jaskier’s clean sword through her throat. A small, choking noise escaped the sorceress, and Jaskier looked down at her with merciless eyes.

“Sorry, Lohere,” he said. “But I can’t have you gossiping about me.”

Instead of withdrawing his sword, Jaskier wrenched it upwards, a resounding cracking sound ringing out as the sorceress’ neck and head were forced back, almost at a right angle. Skin, muscle, and bone tore to accommodate the movement, and warm, red blood bubbled out of Lohere’s gaping throat.

It wasn’t as cruel as it looked, Jaskier was sure. And if it was... Well. She shouldn’t have gotten involved in Jaskier’s affairs if she wasn’t prepared to deal with Jaskier himself.

Not giving the body of the second person he’d killed that day another thought, Jaskier hoisted himself up into his horse’s saddle, suddenly and painfully aware of the gash in his stomach. It could wait, until they were far enough away from the safe-house near Ellander than Ferrant de Lettenhove would not accidentally stumble upon him whilst he was enjoying his newfound freedom.

Blood had begun to seep into his shirt, stained black by monster ichor - he’d had to use Axii on the vendor back in Pocegodor to even begin to be able to afford it - but Jaskier couldn’t make it out, so the shirt would probably be fine. He had to admit, that was a nice change from his usual routine. The one little mishap and it’s ruined routine of his usual fine clothing did begin to get a bit annoying - he could only buy so many new clothes, and the Path was not kind to them. Of course, he’d have to repair the good-sized hole Ferrant had created in it, but it was completely salvageable.

He pulled off his shirt along with the mask, lest his wound scabbed around the fabric, and shoved both of the garments into one of his saddle-bags at random, before nudging his horse forwards. Bollocks sped forwards, and Jaskier steered her neatly in what was almost certainly the direction of Kaedwen, towards Kaer Morhen. If there was one good thing to come out of this, then it was most certainly the fact that Lohere’s portalling had actually gotten him a small bit closer to his destination, even if he did have to cross the Pontar again.

Jaskier’s wound was still bleeding when he came across the river - sooner than anticipated, apparently the safe house was a bit further north of Ellander than he’d originally thought - and he stopped on the banks. Hopefully, he could make use of the river water to clean off, as well as taking a break to stitch up his wound.

He was very glad he’d stocked up as if he was expecting to walk the Path again, back in Oxenfurt. He didn’t much fancy a dirty, Lettenhove-style infection in his abdomen when he had no coin to pay for a healer.

Rummaging around in his pack, he found what he was looking for - a small first aid kit, intended for use on wounds he didn’t want to draw Geralt’s attention to. Otherwise, he was perfectly happy to pilfer from Geralt’s supplies.

He uncorked a bottle - just alcohol, not a potion - and started to disinfect his wound. Honey was cheaper, yes, but also so sticky, so Jaskier figured he’d make the sacrifice and pay extra for alcohol - vodka, specifically. It was a beautiful compromise, it could tend to all sorts of injuries - he could use it to disinfect the physical ones, and, if it was a mental wound, he could simply down it.

Jaskier rationed the vodka as best he could - he had no coin left, no way to replenish his supplies for the foreseeable future - and, once he was satisfied that his wound would not be getting infected any time soon, he threaded a needle and began to stitch his wound.

He’d become far too accustomed to the feeling even as a small child at Kaer Seren, and, while he still couldn’t suture a stitch as neatly as Coën, whose hands were almost ridiculously steady, he’d had a fair bit of practice with the craft, and he fell into the familiar movement easily enough, needle and thread slipping neatly through skin.

He sewed his shirt as well, while he was at it, and washed both it, his swords, and himself clean of blood in the icy Pontar - it made sense to take advantage of what was in front of him there and then, even if it was highly uncomfortable.

Jaskier had spent the morning murdering, for crying out loud - the last thing he wanted to do was also freeze his arse off in an icy river. However, the bard was no stranger to sacrifice, and he figured that braving the freezing waters was preferable than spending the next week or so trying desperately to get the bloodstains out of all his belongings.

He settled into a comfortable routine after that - he’d ride during the day and made camp at night, singing all the songs that betrayed his origins to his horse in front of a crackling fire, hunting for food, and trying his hand at cooking increasingly complicated meals and inevitably failing.

It was a comfortable routine, but a dull one, and by the time he reached the last village before the road turned into the barely-trodden path that led to Kaer Morhen, Jaskier was craving someone - anyone - to talk to. He played at a tavern most nights, scraped together a small amount of coin that wasn’t enough to spend on a room if he’d wanted to, and ended up camping by the foot of the mountains every night.

And to think, he’d worried that the whole sorceress thing would make him late to Kaedwen.

Spring had barely arrived, the snow only starting to melt, when Jaskier encountered the first witcher departing Kaer Morhen. He was sitting on a rock by the dirt path, strumming an old song - it was one about a particularly rowdy Griffin witcher that Jaskier knew was long-dead, one of the ones that he didn’t dare sing the words to in public - when the man, riding a horse well-laden with supplies, passed by him.

His first thought was to realise that this was not Geralt.

His second thought was to call out to him anyways.

“Hello!”

The witcher glared at him, and Jaskier gave him a tiny wave.

Silence followed, a silence that seemed to stretch for all eternity. Then, the witcher spoke.

“What do you want?”

“To say hi,” Jaskier shrugged. “I’m lonely.”

A scoff. “That sounds like your problem, then, not mine.”

“It is. But you stumbled into me, and consequently also my problem, so you’re involved now.”

The witcher turned to leave, but Jaskier stood, placing Filavandrel’s lute gently on the ground, and moved to intercept him. “I’m Jaskier, by the way, what’s your name?”

“Jaskier. Did you pick that out yourself, bard?”

“I did!” Jaskier chirped, pointedly ignoring the mocking tone that accompanied the unknown man’s words. “Do you like it?”

“No.”

“There’s no accounting for taste, then, I suppose,” Jaskier shrugged, acutely aware that this was probably a tad bit rude, but then again, the man had also been less than cordial to the bard. “You didn’t answer my question, by the way, and I’m afraid if you don’t tell me your name I’m going to have to start guessing.”

The witcher scoffed at him, clearly not amused, and Jaskier smiled in a vaguely threatening manner - a look that, he knew, was highly ineffectual on a bard’s smooth face.

“Is it Sourpuss?” Jaskier tried, earning himself a ferocious glare. “What? I wouldn’t have to guess if you just told me.”

“Shut it, bard.”

“Right, not Sourpuss then. Then how about Dick? Short for Richard, of course.”

A throaty growl emerged from the witcher’s throat. Evidently, Jaskier was getting on his nerves. He wondered, briefly, if he could annoy the witcher into some kind of camaraderie, before deciding against it - a little because it would be rude, but also because he didn’t need two whole Geralts at the same time.

“If I tell you, will you fuck off?”

How rude.

Still, Jaskier did have a more important matter to attend to in the coming few days - and that important matter had white hair and spoke mainly in grunts, hums, and swear words, with the occasional growled Jaskier thrown in, too - so the bard could grant this second surly witcher reprieve from him charms.

For now.

“Alright, Dicky,” Jaskier said, cheerily.

“It’s Lambert,” the witcher growled. “Now stop blocking my horse.”

“As you wish, Dicky- sorry, Lambert.”

With a wink and a grin, Jaskier stepped neatly out of Lambert’s way, and the witcher rode off after shooting Jaskier one last glare.

He probably thought that that was the last he’d see of the bard.

Jaskier was looking forward to their reunion.

Lambert rode off quickly, not looking back, and Jaskier returned to his lute. Bollocks was grazing somewhere a little ways off the track, but she’d proven herself a loyal creature, always ready to come at Jaskier’s call, and so he was happy to leave the horse to her own devices. Within a minute, he’d already fallen back into aimless strumming, circling back through all those old melodies that he didn’t play anymore. He missed them.

He blamed his overwhelming focus, to engrossed in his music, for the fact that he didn’t hear Geralt approaching.

“Jaskier.” The familiar grunting voice cut through Jaskier’s reverie, music coming to a sudden halt as he looked up and focused on the witcher, mounted neatly atop Roach.

“Geralt!”

“What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you, what do you think? How am I to sing of your heroic exploits if you’ve fucked off to... To the gods only know where, really, without me?” Jaskier’s face was a mask of teasing hurt, but judging by Geralt’s furrowed brow, he either didn’t register the teasing part or didn’t care.

“How long have you been here?”

It seemed that the White Wolf felt particularly verbose that day, if he was carrying on such a long conversation unprompted.

Or maybe he just wanted to get Jaskier to confess to stalking him, so that he could properly berate the bard.

“Few days, give or take,” Jaskier shrugged. “I rode out from Oxenfurt not long ago. And before you ask, I knew where to come because, despite your best efforts to never answer me anything, I do know what Kaer Morhen is and where to find it.”

“Never told you I was going to Kaer Morhen.”

The bard scoffed. “It was hardly a stretch to guess. You said you wanted to spend winter in Kaedwen and told me to fuck off - and you don’t seem like the type to keep long-term friends who’d let you hole up with them for a whole season. Occam’s Razor, and all that.”

Geralt merely grunted.

Jaskier grinned. “Give me a second to grab my belongings, and then we can be off.”

The White Wolf didn’t respond, which Jaskier took as an acknowledgement. Slipping Filavandrel’s lute gently into its case before hoisting it onto his back, he turned towards the edge of the road and shouted, loudly.

“Bollocks!”

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Geralt mouth the word, incredulous, an expression that he tried to hide but only became more intense as Jaskier’s mare galloped into view.

“You named your horse Bollocks,” Geralt said flatly.

“Ah. Well. Not exactly,” Jaskier clarified, as he hoisted himself into his saddle. “You see, it went like this - I was in Oxenfurt for the winter, meeting up with some of my old acquaintances, and they invited me out for a drink. I’d just bought a horse, and I mentioned as much, and they all felt that it would be ridiculously funny to train her to respond to something absolutely asinine and stupid.”

“Hmm,” Geralt mused, and Jaskier could feel the scepticism emanating from him even at such a distance.

“Geralt of Rivia! You really think I’d curse such a magnificent creature with such a crude name?”

At Geralt’s slight smile, Jaskier threw his hands up in fraught betrayal. “No. I don’t believe you. I will not entertain such falsehoods from a man who told me he was from Rivia just to shut me up in the middle of a perfectly nice conversation! You’re not of Rivia! And don’t try to deny it, I followed up on my suspicions over the winter. You’ve been there precisely twice - I checked. Your exploits are remarkably well-documented, you know.”

The white-haired witcher snorted. “So you figured. At least when I lie, it’s concise, though, Jaskier. Besides, most witchers aren’t from the places they say they’re from.”

“I know that,” Jaskier said, pointedly ignoring Geralt’s raised eyebrow and hastily amending his statement. “What? Lots of people do it, in all kinds of professions - that shit-weasel Valdo Marx is as much from Cidaris as I’m from Nilfgaard! But it’s not my fault for being duped, you have the accent.”

Geralt offered a noncommittal hum.

“That got me thinking, Geralt Not of Rivia - why do you have the accent if you’re not actually of Rivia? And it led me to the conclusion that, to be more convincing, you learnt the Rivian accent for the sake of the name. And I’d get it, if it was something like... Like Cintra, or somewhere similar, but Rivia? Rivia’s a shithole, Geralt!”

“It makes sense with the name.”

“I’ll bet it does,” Jaskier griped. “But nobody else does that! No one takes the accent!”

“Or maybe you’re just a shit actor, Jaskier of Metinna,” Geralt returned, much to Jaskier’s offence.

“Geralt!”

Jaskier’s indignant squawk was enough to draw a smile from the normally surly witcher, though, so he would take the insult with grace. Geralt seemed to be in an unusually good mood.

“So, how was your winter, Geralt?” Jaskier tried, changing the subject gracelessly. Geralt noticed this - of course it was now that the man became perceptive, that made perfect sense - and smirked.

“Good,” he grunted. “Yours?”

Oh, sweet Melitele. Geralt of Rivia, asking after Jaskier? He wasn’t even mortally wounded! The bard would be sure to treasure this moment forever.

“It would have been great, I assume, if I could remember most of it,” Jaskier grinned. “Bards are not a sober bunch.”

Geralt huffed.

“So, Geralt Not of Rivia, my good friend, where are we headed to?”

“Not your friend,” Geralt grunted, and just like that, the mood was soured slightly, again. It was as if a switch had been flicked, the man’s oddly amiable but welcome teasing dissipating at the drop of a hat, replaced with the familiar, dismissive stoicism that Jaskier had grown accustomed to.

Was it something he’d said?

“Are we going north? South? Or maybe just forwards, wherever the road takes us?” Jaskier said, falling back into their customary routine of talking enough for the both of them. “I heard that there’s lots of work in Temeria around this time of year, maybe we should head there? I’d say we could go north towards Kovir, but it’s always so cold there, and-”

“North,” Geralt grunted, and Jaskier sincerely hoped that had been his plan all along, because if he decided on that direction simply to spite Jaskier, the bard would... Well. His feelings would be very hurt, if that was the case.

Jaskier chattered about nothing as they rode - talking about everything mundane he could think of, from the colour of the sky to the texture of the road and how unbearably ugly the architecture of Kaedwen was, keeping up a steady stream of chatter until nightfall, when they stopped in a village near the Gwenllech river - a village that, upon being greeted with Geralt’s mildly intimidating visage, immediately had its inhabitants vying for Geralt’s attention about a contract for a griffin.

A griffin. How poetic. Jaskier would have appreciated the coincidence a tad more, if the villagers weren’t currently insisting that the witcher slay the beast at that very moment, uncaring that it was night and that the man had been travelling all morning.

Really, that was just rude.

Jaskier tried to intervene of Geralt’s behalf, making excuses for him, and trying to talk the villagers into letting the man rest first - it would be so much easier, he reasoned, for him to take down a griffin well-rested - but they were having none of it.

And that was how Jaskier found himself trailing behind a grudging Geralt, horses left nearby, just far enough away that they wouldn’t get caught up in the fight, as Geralt tried his very best to order the bard to stay with the horses and out of his way.

Picking his way through the forest with easy grace, a few paces behind his companion, Jaskier did what he did best - completely disregard Geralt’s instructions.

“So, a griffin,” he said, keeping his voice just quiet enough to be unobtrusive and just loud enough to be annoying. “I simply must write a song about one of those! Hey, Geralt, what rhymes with griffin? Oh, absolutely bloody nothing, that’s what. Spiffin’? No, that wouldn’t work.”

“Shut up,” Geralt hissed, holding his silver sword firmly in his hand. “And stay back, bard.”

“Alright, alright,” Jaskier shrugged, doing absolutely nothing to change the situation.

“Jaskier.”

“Isn’t that the griffin, by the way?”

Geralt’s eyes locked onto the shape Jaskier gestured at, and swore under his breath, steeling himself for the inevitable attack.

The griffin charged, and Geralt’s sword swung up to meet it, cutting a gash across the creature’s chest. Jaskier furrowed his brow at Geralt’s chosen brute-force tactic - he would have dodged the charge, instead, and attacked the beast from an angle it couldn’t defend from.

Still, the tactic seemed to work well enough for Geralt, as he seemed fairly unbothered by the massive fucking griffin that had just barrelled into his sword. Not waiting for it to move, Geralt slashed at it again, but only managed to nick the creature’s vast chest this time, as it reared back from the swinging blade before it could do any real damage.

That was always annoying.

Geralt pressed forward, striking diagonally at one of the griffin’s legs - why a frontal assault? Jaskier winced as Geralt was forced to dodge the griffin’s beak as it bore down upon him, though still managing to cut the creature’s leg enough for it to screech in pain.

Was the ridiculous favouring of frontal assaults just a Geralt thing, or a Wolf School thing? Erland had trained him and the other Griffin Witchers to attack from all angles, taking advantage of an opponent’s blind spots and presenting less of a target.

Personally, Jaskier thought that that was the superior method, but what worked for Geralt worked for Geralt, even if it was horridly inefficient. There was a reason Geralt was lauded as one of the most notorious witchers on the continent - a reason other than Toss a Coin - and it was in part thanks to his competence.

Rigidity and all, Jaskier was fairly certain he’d last about two minutes in a fight against the man. His strikes were strong, and sure - and to be able to block a griffin was a feat Jaskier would not even dare to attempt.

Jaskier eyed the fight lazily, watching as Geralt advanced against the griffin, landing strategically placed strikes that carved large gashes into the griffin’s skin, weakening and slowing it. His mind, by now, was elsewhere, trying to work the moonlit fight into a series of metaphors, and brainstorming chord progressions.

Geralt was more than a match for the griffin, which was perhaps why it caught Jaskier so completely off-guard when he heard the witcher yell. His attention was once again fixed on the White Wolf, expecting him to have made some kind of false move but finding him completely unhurt, the blood he could smell was definitely the griffin’s and not Geralt’s - Jaskier was not expecting the injured creature to blindside him and send him flying and it crashed into the idling bard.

He barely had time to think of a sufficiently colourful curse before the stinging whip of pain in his abdomen caught up with him - of bloody course he’d rip his stitches wide open, why wouldn’t he! He’d thought they were healed enough, but apparently not so.

And then he crashed into the forest floor and skidded over a protruding tree root.

That was most certainly not making it into the ballad.

Jaskier recovered from the fall swiftly enough, pulling himself up into a sitting position just in time to see Geralt’s sword slice through the griffin’s neck, the witcher giving his fallen prey barely a second glance before swiftly striding over towards Jaskier, face shadowed with a hint of concern that, a few short months ago, Jaskier wouldn’t even have even noticed was there. He was getting better at reading the witcher, he realised, with some satisfaction.

“Jaskier,” Geralt said, gripping the bard gently by the shoulders.

Shit. This probably wasn’t the kind of thing a human would be able to shrug off... or most likely even survive, come to think of it. Jaskier hadn’t even broken a rib. Should he fake a concussion?

No. That would be cruel.

“I’m fine,” Jaskier huffed weakly.

“You’re bleeding.”

“Not a lot.”

“Let me see,” Geralt pressed, gentler than Jaskier had ever seen him.

“It’s fine.”

“Jaskier. Let me see.”

“You’re such a mother hen,” the bard declared, rolling his eyes, but lifted his chemise all the same.

Geralt’s eyes widened. “This has been stitched before.”

“Yeah, I got stabbed, slightly,” Jaskier grinned. “Bit of a disagreement with an old acquaintance.”

“We’ll need to stitch it again. Take that off, and don’t move.”

“Should I take it off, or not move?”

“Jaskier.”

“Alright! Alright, I’m taking it off,” Jaskier said, surrendering to Geralt’s glare as the witcher glanced back at him, having left to grab supplies to stitch the bard’s abdomen back together again. He shrugged off his doublet and peeled off his chemise with care, trying not to smear the blood that had begun to seep into the fabric anywhere else.

He was bleeding far, far too slowly, still - he really had overpaid for the damn glamour - but hopefully, it wasn’t too noticeable this time. In all likelihood, Geralt would be far more likely to assume that the wound was simply not that deep than jump to the conclusion that Jaskier was secretly a witcher.

Returning with the horses, because apparently that was easier than just grabbing the supplies, Geralt kneeled down in front of Jaskier and prepared to tend to his wounds.

“I can do this myself, you know,” Jaskier grinned, as Geralt began to clean the open gash, and set about removing the old thread that now lay, ineffectually, in what was once again a gaping wound in Jaskier’s stomach.

He’d sewn it up so neatly, too.

“You’re a bard,” Geralt said flatly. “When have you ever stitched a wound?”

“I’ll have you know, I have been injured before!”

Geralt hummed, as he threaded a needle to stitch the laceration to Jaskier’s abdomen - again. It really was so rude of the griffin, he’d been so careful with his stitches, making sure they were absolutely, perfectly neat and straight. Far neater, in fact, than what Geralt was currently doing - now, there was a man who prioritised efficacy over aesthetic.

“Can’t you be a bit neater about it, Geralt? I mean, I am going to be wearing this on my skin for the rest of my life, and I’d appreciate you not making a complete and utter hash of it.”

Geralt’s brow was furrowed, and he had a look of concentration far beyond what was needed for his current task. He paid no heed to Jaskier’s complaints.

The bard continued to whine. “Geralt! You’re doing it all crooked!”

Still, the witcher paid no heed to the his chatter, which perturbed Jaskier. Usually, he got at least a dismissive hum or a grunt, or something, but Geralt simply finished stitching the gash in silence.

Brow still furrowed, his sharp, yellow eyes met Jaskier’s blue, before his gaze drifted down to the bard’s left shoulder.

His exposed, unmarred shoulder.

Oh, fuck.

Chapter Text

The strumming of chords had become a constant sound in the keep over the winter, with Julian slipping into Rook’s quarters to borrow his lute whenever he had a few minutes to spare. The halls of Kaer Seren echoed with the twanging of strings more often than not, as Julian made use of his limited free time to attempt mastery of the instrument - a feat that proved to be rather more difficult than expected without a teacher - and it seemed that the keep had grudgingly accepted that the boy would not, in fact, grow bored of the lute.

Even if he did get a few looks every time he bumped into one of the witchers whose quarters were not out of range of the sound of his late-night strumming - that was, to say, most of them.

He had expected Rook to take the instrument with him, come spring, given that it belonged to him in the first place, and he admittedly enjoyed playing, but, much to Julian’s surprise, he’d woken up one morning in the early spring to a fully-geared Rook, complete with weaponry, standing outside his and Coën’s room with the lute, saying that he would be able to acquire another on the Path, somewhere. Julian, on the other hand, was not allowed to leave the keep, Rook had reasoned, so it was only logical that the boy keep the instrument.

If Julian had tackled the man in a hug right there and then... Well, nobody had to know.

The keep once again fell silent - or at the very least quieter, no place containing Julian would ever be completely silent for any amount of time - as the snow thawed, and the Koviri mountains once again grew safe to traverse. The familiar rhythm of the daily routine that they kept to, of training and study, seemed to be much more boring and monotonous when Kaer Seren was so empty. It was suffocatingly boring - Julian considered that perhaps, Erland should take more students on simply to fill the damn keep up a little bit.

Sure, perhaps the fact that there were only two witchers there to teach - and had been, ever since a nebulous but undoubtedly tragic event that Julian had not yet managed to pry from any of his fellows - but that could be remedied, if Erland deemed it something that he wanted to remedy in the first place.

Who knew why he hadn’t? Probably Keldar, in all honesty, but Julian likely never would. It wasn’t done to question the personal decisions of the Griffin Grandmaster.

And, despite his love of crossing boundaries, he wouldn’t pry into the matter. Whatever had occurred to reduce the School of the Griffin from a flourishing school run by hundreds of witchers to... well, this... It was likely not a pleasant event, and Julian did have some understanding of tact, to the astonishment of likely everyone who knew him.

Still, it was something to ponder, and ponder Julian did.

It was beginning to drive Coën mad, he could tell - his friend had almost begged him to please experiment with the lute instead of pondering the history of the School of the Griffin, because by the gods, he needed something to ground him in reality lest he start believing he’d died training one day and his current life was all a cruel illusion.

In response, Julian had begun composing a song, to see if he could get Coën to regret such a declaration.

“The chords are too close.”

Julian quirked an eyebrow. “So now you’re a musician, Coën?”

“Funny. No, I just have functioning pair of ears and a brain. They’re too close together.”

“Alright, alright, I’ll move it up a little. Though Melitele only knows how I’ll do that,” Julian said, thinking back. Back to Lettenhove, where he’d once watched a minstrel strum a lute, when he’d been young and naïve enough to think that his life was going to be a beautiful one. The memory was faded, tempered by age. Even as young as Julian was, he’d met the minstrel so long ago, before Kaer Seren, before... Well. Before everything.

The man had been jaunty and amiable, plucking out increasingly more complicated tunes at Julian’s behest, and chattering to him about music theory, simplified for his barely four-year-old audience. It had been a nice memory, one of the few that he had from back before everything had gone down a rather different path than was expected, and one of the only ones that didn’t contain the Viscount.

Still, now that he thought about it, he was vaguely aware that the minstrel had said something about chords along the line of what Coën had just mentioned, so he decided to take the advice on board.

Either that, or Julian had begun to make things up and misremember, but either way, he shifted his grip on the lute, and the new chord that rang out seemed much more fitting. The tune was more... smooth, the melancholy notes of the chords flowing in a much more natural manner.

“See?”

“Shut up, Coën,” Julian glowered, though there was a fond undertone to his voice.

“That’s a cheery tune. Got any lyrics to go with it?”

“As a matter of fact, I do!”

“Let’s hear them then.”

“Okay. It’s allegorical, by the way, so-”

Coën snorted. “Yes, yes, I know, you’re using a story about an evil noble and a hapless bard to tell your father to fuck off without actually saying it. I have heard your muttering, you know - I just thought you’d go with something about Keldar, first.”

“And have my first composition be about something so utterly mundane as Keldar? Coën, my good friend, you wound me.”

The raven-haired boy grinned and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “My bad. Let’s hear it, then.”

Julian launched into song, a tad haltingly, stopping every time he hit a false note, but Coën didn’t comment. The melody was simplistic and repetitive, the same few chords repeating on the lute. His voice was uncertain, wavering - it was always hit or miss whether he actually managed to hit the right note - but he stumbled over the awkward lyrics coherently enough for the most part.

There once was a noble

Held in high regard

Why would he want to

Trick a young bard?

He was well-esteemed

And he had songs to his name

That praised all his deeds

And his person the same

He spoke honeyed words

And he hid his intent

So when he said “Come, boy!”

Unfaltering, I went.

And when I went with him

Believing his lie

I did not expect him

To take me to die.

Julian halted, furrowing his brow as the last note echoed around the room. “That’s pretty much where I got up to.”

Furrowing his brow, Coën considered the song. “It’s not bad, but you start too many sentences with and. And your syllable count is off in a few places.”

“Hah!” Julian stood and made his way over to his corner - or rather, the corner he kept his belongings in, given that the empty room they’d inhabited proved resistant in nature to their attempts to acquire some kind of cupboard or other storage item - and gathered a small sheath of parchment. “Well, I’m sure I can rise above such terrible missteps with the assistance of the great Coën!”

The boy in question raised an eyebrow. “I’m no wordsmith, Julian.”

“You taught me most every swear word I know!”

“Because you were, what, seven? You were seven and you didn’t know them yet. It’s hardly a sign of a loquacious vocabulary.”

“You can’t use the word loquacious to describe your vocabulary whilst denying your verbosity and expect me to take that at all seriously, you know.”

“Alright, just don’t blame me if your song turns out shit.”

Julian snorted. “I do reserve the right to veto any terrible decisions, Coën, don’t worry.”

“As expected of the... what was it? Baron de Lettenhove?”

“Flatterer. It’s Viscount. Or, technically only the viscount’s son... Maybe not even that. Does being a witcher automatically strip you of your birthright, or, if I were to go back and proclaim myself not dead, do you think I could reclaim it?”

Julian’s tone was light, joking, but there was a bitter undercurrent to his words, and Coën winced upon hearing it.

“Sorry.”

“Hm?”

“About bringing it up. Let’s not sour the mood, here, Julek. Show me those lyrics.”

Obligingly, Julian offered the parchment, and his friend took it, making a big show of squinting at Julian’s chicken-scratch, and earning an indignant, if amused, squawk from his friend, along with some paltry defences of his handwriting - something about protecting witcher secrets from run-of-the-mill bandits.

“It’s hardly a code if it’s impossible to decipher a meaning, Julek. It’s just nonsense, in that case.”

“You’re rude.”

Coën smiled. “I had an excellent teacher in that regard.”

He received a brilliant smirk in response.

The lyrics themselves - insofar as Coën could make them out, hindered as he was both by the dark and Julian’s script - were scrawled on the parchment exactly as he had sung them. Frowning, Julian’s gaze darted between his friend and the paper as he waited for him to say something.

“The why would he want to trick a young bard bit is a bit clunky,” Coën said, finally. “He was well-esteemed and he had songs to his name just needs to go, I don’t know what you were thinking, and the rest is alright, I think.”

Julian’s brow furrowed, yellow eyes glinting in the dim moonlight. “Fuck, am I going to end up having to rewrite this every few weeks?”

“You’d do that anyways,” Coën grinned.

“How about what did he do, then instead of why would he want to?”

“Sounds good. Maybe use mislead instead of trick?”

“The words in that line are short for dramatic effect, you boorish illiterate.”

“Illiterate is an adjective.”

“Which can also be a noun, so fuck off, Coën.”

“Fucking off.”

“Do you have anything to write with?”

Coën frowned. “Don’t you?”

“I had this shit charcoal pencil that i nicked from Keldar, up until it snapped in half. And then the halves snapped in half. But that was more to do with me being mad that it snapped in half in the first place.”

“Well then,” Coën sighed. “I guess you’ll be writing with little pencil stumps, then.”

Julian huffed.

Gingerly lifting the charcoal stump to the parchment, he proceeded to edit his text, changing the lines that they’d discussed with the utmost care and precision. It was almost admirable, the effort he put into immortalising the lyrics in such an illegible scrawl.

He was well esteemed fell out, in favour of being replaced with another reiteration of there once was a noble - because repetition was a valid literary technique, thank you very much, Coën - and replaced the and he in the following line, favouring a simple with, correcting the issue of syllable count and monotonous reiteration in one fell swoop.

“Make believing his lie into something fancier,” Coën said, almost absently.

Careful fingers, trying not to smudge the writing, danced over the paper, making a few more corrections and editing, before Julian tried to sing the lyrics out loud again.

There once was a noble

Held in high regard

What would he do, then

To trick a young bard?

There once was a noble

With songs to his name

That praised all his deeds

And his person the same

He spoke honeyed words

As he hid his intent

So when he said “Come, boy!”

Unfaltering, I went.

And when I went with him

With faith in his lie

I did not expect him

To take me to die.

The lute joined the song halfway through, almost as an afterthought, as Julian fell deeper into his performance. By the end, he was barely faltering - the improved flow of the words no doubt aiding his timing of the lyrics.

Humming, Coën nodded his approval. “Good. Now you just have to finish it.”

A grin, as Julian leant back atop the blankets, clutching Rook’s lute to his chest. “Speak not of the future, my good friend - the here and now should take priority.”

“Is that Julek-speak for I’m a lazy bastard?”

“Might be.”

“Have you abandoned clinging to me in favour of clinging to the lute?”

“Jealous?”

“Of a fucking instrument?” Coën snorted. “Only a little bit.”

“Aww.”

“Don’t you aww me, you little menace. Now put the lute away and go to sleep, or even Melitele herself will be unable to save you from Keldar’s wrath when you’re late to his lesson tomorrow, and I will not be dragging your half-asleep deadweight of a self to the library again.”

Julian grinned wickedly. “It’s okay, you can admit you were just embarrassed when you dropped me.”

“I dropped you on purpose so you’d wake the fuck up!”

“And I, too, always yell oh fuck, I’m so sorry, are you okay when I do something on purpose.”

“I was diverting suspicion.”

“You dropped me by accident and you felt bad about it.”

“Slander.” Coën crossed his arms. “That’s complete and utter slander and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Smirking at his friend, Julian got up and gently placed Rook’s lute on the floor. It was by no means a quality instrument, scratched and banged-up as it was, with no decorative additions save for some faded, peeling red paint that someone had covered it with, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t going to treat his prized possession with anything but the utmost care.

Even if the utmost care that Julian could provide was not dropping the damn thing. Witcher keeps were generally not the most useful places to try and maintain an instrument, supplies-wise.

“Although,” he mused, turning back to Coën, “if tomorrow comes and Keldar is still droning on about the theory behind the fucking Signs, I’d rather face his wrath after sleeping in.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” Julian sighed, falsely morose as he quite deliberately collapsed directly on top of Coën before rolling off of him, to his own patch of blanket. To his credit, Coën didn’t even squeak, though if that was thanks to his witcher training or the fact that Julian had pulled this stunt more times than he could count remained unknown.

“Goodnight, Julek, and I warn you - if I wake up to your foot in my face again, I will abandon all my morals and punch you in your small child face.”

“You wouldn’t,” Julian smirked. “You’re still haunted by the guilt of dropping me.”

He got Coën’s elbow in his face for that one.

The keep was quiet; even though the silence that bore through the halls was familiar, even though neither boy had known the keep to be full - even with raucous wintering witchers or a full cohort of boys before the trials, it had been so, so empty - it still felt odd, wrong-footed somehow, for it to be so hollow. Perhaps it was the ample evidence that it had been full, once, all the unoccupied lodgings and classrooms gathering dust, or simply the unnerving absence of stimuli, but the eerie quiet never quite became something that anyone was accustomed to.

The silence spoke volumes, whispering a story that something, something terrible had happened there, in the now-cold halls of the Griffin keep.

But whatever it had been, it clearly hadn’t been deemed relevant to any of the trainees’ knowledge.

The sun was known to rise early above Kaer Seren, though if it was the normal kind of early or a special, even earlier variety of earliness specifically designed to torment trainee witchers, no one knew - and so dawn came far sooner than anyone was comfortable with. The silvery moon dipped below the mountain peak, the distant slivers of the ocean not visible beneath the morning dew, as the sun peeked over the horizon and bathed the world in a rosy glow.

Julian, as was his habit, did not rise early.

“Julek.”

“Mmf.”

“Julek.”

“Shut up.”

“Do you want me to end up carrying you again?”

“And get dropped first thing in the morning?” Julian slurred. “No thanks.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“Thank you.”

Grumbling, Coën hoisted Julian out from under the blankets, unceremoniously depositing the boy on the cold, stone floor.

“There we go, I didn’t drop you. Now, get up.”

“Mmf. Tell Keldar I died.”

“Julek.”

“Coën.”

“I’m going to kick you unless you get up.”

At this declaration - on the off-chance that the threat was not, in fact, a bluff, and it was always fifty-fifty with Coën - Julian sprang up off the floor in a hasty movement, eyes wide and alert.

“There we go.”

Julian wished dearly that Coën would cease his self-satisfied smirking, if only so that he could wallow in his laments for his lie-in uninterrupted, but he was up now, and so his morning had already been irreparably ruined - a side effect, really, of his being up before midday in the first place.

Let it never be said that Julian formerly Alfred Pankratz was a morning person.

Keeping up a steady stream of grumbling and banter, the two trainee witchers made their way through the keep, one neat and tidy, the other with sleep-mussed hair and rumpled clothes that he’d oh-so-clearly slept in.

Their echoing footfalls through the castle weren’t quite loud enough to be significant by normal standards, but no doubt a witcher’s hearing could pick them up easily, given the circumstances - there was no way Julian could know for sure, yet, but looking at how their teachers could always tell when they’d been dawdling, or taken a detour, it seemed like a foregone conclusion. How far did the echoes ring to the more sensitive ears? Julian was curious.

Too, it was far more interesting a topic to ponder than the theory behind the fucking Signs.

Much to Julian’s chagrin, old Keldar had, over the not insignificant time he’d spent inhabiting the keep, managed to learn to read Julian quite adeptly, and Julian had, in turn, realised that his feigning-disinterest-but-actually-listening face and his genuinely-not-paying-attention face had some kind of discrepancy between them that could easily be picked up on, if one knew where to look, and he had thus far failed to find it and correct it.

Julian had been incredibly disappointed to find out that the emphasis on magic that the School of the Griffin was rumoured to have manifested itself in the form of hours and hours poring over the various constructions and deconstructions of all the witcher Signs that Julian had heard of and a hundred more that he hadn’t - signs that even Erland said weren’t in use anymore, mainly for reasons involving them being inconvenient to cast - instead of anything actually remotely engaging, under the watchful gaze of at first only Keldar, but later also Erland, who was keen to aid in this specific part of the theory.

And Julian - well, he was all but falling asleep over his books. The exact mechanisms of Heliotrope were not quite enough to keep him awake at fuck o’clock in the morning.

“Julian!”

The voice that jolted him out of his inattention was usually Keldar’s, but this time, it was Erland’s frustrated tone that cut through his daydreaming. Julian jumped, caught in his disregard, and looked at the keep-master with innocent eyes.

“I understand that you like to play the fool,” Erland said, evenly. “And I won’t begrudge a child their fun, especially not a witcher. There is, however, the unspoken expectation that it does not come at the cost of your training. See to it that you do not fall into such a trap again.”

Julian swallowed. The man’s tone was deceptively calm, his words even more so, but there was a message hidden in his declaration - the implication that if Julian couldn’t get his act together, Erland would force it. The man was not in the habit of making threats, but his meaning was clear. He was being warned, now - his next announcement would be that of action.

No Griffin would ever be so crass as to talk back to the Grandmaster of the school, that was certain - it simply wasn’t done, to question the man - but Julian’s frustration must have shown in his eyes, or his face... most likely his eyes, though, as he’d learnt the hard way that the slit-pupilled eyes of a witcher were remarkably easy to read. Either way, Erland took pity on him, and Julian was a tad more glad than indignant at that.

“I’ll tell you why I insist on such a thorough knowledge of the signs, Julian,” he said. “My reasoning is based in sound logic. Tell me, have you ever fired a crossbow?”

Julian nodded - he had, and Erland knew it, but he recognised a segue when he saw one.

“When the bolt is fired, you feel a recoil, as the force applied to the bolt to propel it forward pushes the crossbow itself back, in simple terms. But a crossbow is built and handled in a way to minimise this recoil, and make it safe to shoot, so that when you loose a bolt, the back end of the weapon doesn’t end up stuck through your shoulder.

“It’s much the same with witchers, though the difference is that you never know whether those... mitigation mechanisms, though for the Signs rather than recoil, are strong enough until after the Trial of the Dreams. The Grasses focus mainly on the physiological, after all. It is, to put it mildly, a tad hit-or-miss. I was one of the first witchers, and back then, this wasn’t known information. I remember when I was asked to cast Aard for the first time, I had no issue, but a friend of mine was not so lucky - the force of the sign blew his arm clean off.

“You can understand, I hope, why I’d rather you have a knowledge of each sign you might ever need to cast, rather than letting you at it and dragging you to the infirmary missing chunks of your body - or your mind, even.”

Erland’s gaze was piercing, and Julian felt... not exactly humbled, but certainly put in his place a little, beneath it. He pushed down the urge to squirm, before replying in a calm, clear tone.

“Understood, sir.”

“Good. You will come with me after this lesson to ensure that there are no gaps in your knowledge. The Trial of the Dreams is fast approaching, and I will not have you limping back in having damaged your mind with a mis-cast Axii.”

Julian wanted to protest the loss of his breakfast break, but couldn’t find it within himself to actually do so, as he turned to his book to study the workings of a sign - a name, given in the fancifully crafted title script, too obscured in a font that was at least two centuries old, and harder to read than his own hand - that would cause temporary blindness in the target and apparently needed the world’s most uncomfortable hand position to cast.

He could see why it fell out of favour. Axii was just so much more versatile and convenient.

Perhaps the cautionary tale of a boy blowing his arm off with a simple Aard had spurred him on, perhaps it was the reminder that the Trial of the Dreams was beginning to loom over him, but Julian managed to spur himself on and wade through the study of the signs, pointlessly in-depth as it was. He was fairly certain he’d never find himself wanting to cast the blindness sign - he’d deigned to name it the Sign of George, just to have something to call it by as the author had never reiterated its name, but regardless, he studied most dutifully.

He doubted that all this intricate study was necessary - doubted that any of the other schools even considered all this cramming to be at all useful, even, not when they could just circumvent the problem of backfiring signs by simply waiting till after the Trial of the Dreams without all of the bells and whistles. Still, he considered, perhaps he could utilise some horrendously impractical signs - such as the newly renamed Sign of George - someday to make his life easier.

It was something he’d heard Erland say. “Every skill learnt, no matter how seemingly useless, is an advantage gained.”

Julian would know - he parroted it back at him every time he brought the lute down, and Erland would roll his eyes almost imperceptibly, his stoic façade slipping ever so slightly.

Perhaps when the man wasn’t working them to the bone, training him and Coën in swordplay, physical endurance, agility, the most ridiculously impressive array of assorted weaponry, every language the man had picked up in his centuries of life, from Hen Linge to various Koviri dialects scarcely spoken ever since Common was made the kingdom’s official language, the detailed mechanisms behind the Signs, alchemy that was far beyond the required knowledge to brew witcher potions...

The point was, if the man ever stopped commandeering almost all the time between dawn to dusk and past it to run them ragged, Julian would most definitely have made it a personal challenge to get that façade to slip as often as he could, if only he had the time and opportunity to try.

Every skill learnt was an advantage gained, indeed. If Erland was going to use that to explain away his gruelling schedule - and really, given that he, too, was getting up at sunrise to train two boys, he’d pulled the exact same short straw in life that the trainees had... Well, then, Julian could damn well use it to excuse his hobbies.

Not that anyone had ever said anything outright about his lute-playing being a pointless pursuit, surprisingly enough - the most he’d gotten were reminders that it was his own time he was eating into, so he better not use that as an excuse to sleep in, and gods, Julian, if you want to play that thing can you please fucking tune it, the latter mainly from Rook - but still. He enjoyed flipping Erland’s rhetoric on him.

Either way, as the days blurred into a dull monotony that was still simultaneously a whirlwind of activity, time began to slip through Julian’s fingers. The weeks of training bled together in the way that they had done every year, after the reprieve of winter, the break in the routine that a gaggle of returning witchers brought, each day a disarrangement of training exercises and lessons focused on honing various skills committed to memory.

The one momentous occasion that really stuck out in the nowhere-time between the winter and the ever-looming deadline of the Trials - the only significant event in that time, really - was the day that Erland deemed a Swallow potion that Julian had brewed high enough quality to actually deign to drink it rather than immediately disposing of it, before declaring it to be woefully subpar.

That had been rather amusing.

Still, the routine remained dull, if intense, and fleeting.

Oh, it was so, so fleeting.

It was as if the barest amount of time had passed before the day of the Trials came, and yet, simultaneously, an eternity seemed to have managed to manifest itself in the first few months of spring. Either way, the routine of the keep was broken eventually, when it was declared to a largely empty hall that the Trial of the Dreams would commence in the morrow - Julian first, because of course it was Julian first. Some days it felt like he was naught but the sacrificial lamb of the Griffin school.

Alright, perhaps that was a tad bit overkill, but a little embellishment of the details was warranted here and there. Being a sacrificial lamb was so much more poetic than being dissatisfied with a lot he’d metaphorically drawn.

Although, all things considered, the second Trial was so much less risky than the first. His survival, this time, was the likely outcome, for one - it was hard to see the Trial of the Dreams as the same kind of insurmountable obstacle that the Trial of the Grasses had been. It was merely an event, to Julian’s mind - he supposed that was hubris, but hubris was so much more comfortable than terror over whether or not you’d even see the summer.

There was no heart-to-heart in the dark of their room before the Trial of the Dreams, which Julian honestly was rather glad for. There were so many more pleasant things one could do in their free time than contemplating mortality or bemoaning their lot in life, after all, like badly playing the lute.

So that was exactly what he did.

“Possibly your last night in this mortal realm and you’re singing about Keldar being a douchebag of proportions you just made up.”

“Every night is possibly everyone’s last night in this mortal realm if you’re contemplative and boring enough.”

Coën snorted. “Are you implying that death comes only to the uninteresting?”

“Au contraire, as they probably say in Toussaint - or they did, a hundred years ago, probably, given Erland’s age - I’m saying that the more exciting you are, the less you contemplate death. There are so many more interesting things to contemplate.”

“What, like your imaginary feud with your instructor?”

“I resent the use of the word imaginary as a descriptor of our legendary battle of wits, but essentially, yes.”

Julian leant against the wall, idly strumming broken chords, and Coën raised an eyebrow at him.

“You snark at him and he humours you.”

“He gets far more pissed at me than I ever do at him. He hardly humours me, he damn near pops a blood vessel most days.”

Julian played a little flourish on the lute at that, and smirked at his friend.

“Julek.”

“What? Admit it, our feud is legendary and the stuff of ballads. In fact, I’ve started writing one, would you like to hear it?”

Not waiting for an answer, he began strumming his lute, playing the opening bars of the song.

Once before the days were bleak

And when the sun was bright

There stood a grand Witcher School

So proud and free of blight

Then, one day, a young man came

Was Trialled, and survived

Thus ended Kaer Seren’s peace

The day Keldar arrived!

Here he came, and here he stayed,

And here he grew quite old

Was there any Griffin boy

That Keldar did not scold?

Facts he knows, and facts he bleats,

Reciting from old books

A shame that’s all there is to him-

Mind and face like a crook’s!

Julian bowed mockingly after performing his little ditty - not quite a ballad, as he’d claimed, but undoubtedly a song about Keldar. Coën hummed appreciatively.

“The rhyme scheme’s good, but I feel like you lost the ball on the last line a little bit.”

“Did I ask for your criticism, Coën?” Julian sulked, turning his nose up in a theatrical fashion. “I’ll have you know, I spent hours trying to find a rhyme for tomes, but the best I could come up with was gnomes, so you see, it could have been a lot worse.”

“I’m sure,” Coën snorted. “You’ve changed so much, Julek. This time last Trial, you were convinced that you’d die and we complained about Andras.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t repeat such a thing. I swore to He Who I Shall Not Mention that nobody would ever think about him after he died, and I do try to keep my promises.”

Coën gaped. “You said that to him?”

Julian hummed.

“Julek!”

“What? He was a dick! And then he died, you know, so he didn’t really have a lot of time to get his feelings hurt.”

Pressing his lips together in a thin line, Coën shook his head disbelievingly, though there was mirth in his eyes. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Appreciate my rapier wit?”

Coën snorted. “Just try not to whisper horrible things to any more children on their deathbeds, alright?”

“No promises.”

“I don’t know what I expected there, but I have to say that I am both unsurprised and disappointed.”

Julian crossed his arms. “I’m younger than him. Or, I was.”

“Entirely not the fucking point, thank you,” Coën retorted, his fond grin betraying his amusement.

“But of course, mother.”

“Do you think you’ll be playing the lute with enhanced witcher hearing next week, or is that too much?”

The change of subject was a bit awkward, but what was a bit of clunky conversation between friends? There was hardly any need to dance around topics with careful wording when one was with one’s closest confidantes, after all.

Julian considered Coën’s question with an almost theatrical expression of ponderment. “I suppose I’ll have to wait and see. But one remark about finally having some peace and quiet will cement my choice.”

Coën grinned. “You’d bleed at the ears for the sake of pettiness, Julek?”

“But of course, Coën, my good friend. I would dare not let such a petty thing besmirch my good, hard-earned reputation.”

“Would that be your reputation as the menace of the School of the Griffin, then, that you seek to protect?”

“Precisely.”

For all he could give the excuse of a bit of noble education and the flowery language of the books of Kaer Seren’s magnificent library to explain his verbosity, Julian knew that it still amused Coën to no end to hear an eleven-year-old speak like he was giving speeches to higher nobility. He would have been offended, had he had a slightly higher opinion of himself - and by no measure could he be known as humble, that was a ridiculous idea, but still - but as it was, Julian simply grinned and used that little fact to polish his little monologues and dialogues a bit more, tailor them to his audience of one.

He did so enjoy putting on a performance.

Coën continued, a small smirk playing on his lips. “But have you truly earned such a reputation? Reducing Keldar to ranting rages - which, yes, I will concede does happen - is something most anyone can do, and having a hobby hardly qualified as being menacing. Bruno likes to cheat at Gwent, you know, he’s invented some truly awe-inspiring bluffs - and that is far more frustrating than the twanging of strings in the night.”

“Coën! Is that a slight? Are you challenging me to defend my honour?”

A snort. “As if you ever had any honour.”

“You wound me!” Julian gasped, advancing on Coën. “Your sly tongue rends my very being with this slander!”

He pressed an accusatory index finger to Coën’s chest, and immediately realised his mistake - realised exactly what it was that he’d just betrayed to his friend.

“You’re shaking.”

Coën’s previously mirthful eyes were flooded with warm concern, as he gently placed a hand on Julian’s shoulder.

He tried very hard not to squirm under the comforting pressure.

“Yeah,” Julian said, staring intently at the floor. “Looks like it.”

“Julek. Talk to me.”

“What do you want me to say?”

Coën rolled his eyes. “Hiding shit’s not going to help anyone, you fucking martyr. You’ll only make yourself miserable.”

“I’m not miserable!”

“Maybe not,” the older boy hummed. “But you’re definitely sitting on something, and it’s clearly not doing you any good, so you might as well spit it out.”

Julian glared at him.

Evenly, Coën stared back, entirely unperturbed and unwavering, and spoke again, in a light tone. It was probably to make Julian feel at ease, and most annoyingly, it did exactly that. “Come on, Julek. I’m older than you, wise, and full of good advice.”

“You’re an idiot,” Julian said, trying to keep his voice flat and only mostly succeeding.

“Are you scared?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not going to die. I’m not scared of the Trials.”

Coën raised an eyebrow. “Are you trying to devalue your own emotions for yourself or for others, shit-for-brains? Because it’s not as impressive as you think it is. You can be scared of things that won’t fucking kill you.”

His voice was soft, so soft and warm despite the insults he delivered - the insults that let Julian keep just a bit of dignity as Coën broke through his façade of nonchalance so easily. Julian was glad for that.

He was glad for Coën. He always seemed to know what to do, which was equal parts annoying and fucking relieving.

“Fine. I’m scared.”

Coën said nothing, he didn’t need to - he just pulled Julian into a warm hug.

“I’m scared because it’s going to fucking hurt. And I’m- I’m a witcher, I’m not supposed to be afraid of pain-”

“Bullshit.”

Julian laughed, a sad, hiccuping noise laden in shame. “Right, right, I’m a kid, so that makes it fine-”

“Please stop saying stupid things, now, Julek. It’s pretty fucking normal to be afraid of pain, it’s not a good fucking thing and there’s some pretty solid reasoning as to why you’d want to avoid it, be scared of it. Sure, being used to getting bashed up when you’re as dumb and reckless as you are is one thing - and you’ve got so many scars already I’d swear you’ve already been out on the Path already if you weren’t such a midget... Not a compliment, by the way - but Julek. Come on.”

Coën flicked the scar that crossed Julian’s lips - it had been a deep wound, had cut all the way through the skin, parted it completely before Coën had taken it upon himself to stitch the skin back together again - deep enough that it would most likely never fade.

He’d cried a bit when he got it.

Julian squirmed in Coën’s arms. “Stop being all mentor-y, it’s weird.”

“Do you want me to get Erland to lecture you, then? Because I can absolutely do that. I can tell him what an utter unhealthy idiot of a child you’re being, and then you’ll get a lecture on emotional repression from a man who’s centuries old and pretty fucking done with all of this bullshit.”

Despite himself, Julian laughed.

“Honestly, though, Julek, who do you think wouldn’t be scared of the Trials? Especially after they know exactly what the fuck they are? I’m scared too, you know. You fucking idiot.”

“You’re an idiot,” Julian mumbled.

“As the owl says to the robin, or whatever the fuck,” Coën intoned, reciting an old Koviri saying - a saying that made absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever without the second part, a part that most people left out for no discernible reason other than possibly to irritate Julian specifically.

“It’s the owl says to the robin that it has a big head.”

“Hm... I think something got lost in translation there, a little bit, it sounds so much better in Koviri.”

“It still doesn’t make any fucking sense when you only say half of it, and besides, nobody speaks Koviri anymore, the official language of Kovir has been the Common Tongue for ages. Just pick a normal saying like everyone else.”

“Glad to see you’ve got your priorities in order, Julek. Won’t admit to being scared of possibly the most terrifying thing in the world, and yet you get up in arms about a saying.”

Julian smirked. “You can let go of me now, by the way.”

“I can.”

Coën didn’t move.

“Please let go of me? I want to play the lute.”

At this, Coën relented immediately, and retreated to the blanket bundle, affecting the posture of a rapt audience-member.

The effect of the extremely interested air he projected was somewhat mitigated by the fact that Julian had not yet started playing yet, but he couldn’t bring himself to mind. Perhaps Coën was humouring him a little bit, but he wasn’t trying to hide that he was humouring him, which made it oddly... Well, endearing, Julian supposed, rather than condescending or patronising like he would have expected.

Too, Julian liked that Coën wouldn’t give false compliments. He’d been hesitant with criticism at first, preferring to stay silent rather than give an honest opinion, but Julian had made it very clear that he appreciated bluntness and honesty from his friend, over any paltry attempt to spare his feelings, and Coën had gotten the message.

It was odd, really. For someone with such a propensity with words and a penchant for obfuscation, Julian would have expected himself to shy away from Coën’s straightforward bluntness. The gods only knew he wasn’t capable of it himself.

Still, things worked, the way they were, no matter how seemingly odd, and Julian simply began to sing.

He sang bits and pieces of his own compositions, Redanian folk songs he’d been taught before his tutor at Lettenhove stopped showing up, bawdy drinking songs the returning witchers had taken to chanting some nights, a Skelligan ballad Henrik had half-arsed the recital of a dozen times after staggering into Rook’s room, absolutely pissed out of his mind, whilst Julian and company were poring over the lute...

There was a lullaby Rook remembered his sister had sung to him before he’d been claimed as a witcher, an ear-worm of a song that had become popular in Poviss a few years ago that Julian had reconstructed - poorly - from lines muttered by several witchers, under their breath as they worked... Julian performed his surprisingly extensive repertoire with all the grace and skill of a self-taught child, a beginner at his craft. It helped his performances that he had an ear for music, but in the absence of practice and skill, he couldn’t quite manage the distinct clarity, smoothness and depth to the music that he was aiming for.

Eventually, he began to tire, singing simpler melodies, simpler tunes, and Julian knew that he should rest soon - showing up exhausted to the Trials was sure to be a mistake.

Still, he knew what a fucking nightmare it was to adjust to heightened senses - it had been bad enough when it had just been his eyes, and Julian was acutely aware that despite his earlier bravado, there was no way that he would even be able to strum one of the strings of the lute without being immediately struck by the overwhelming desire to be struck death.

The last song, he decided, would be something soft and quiet and pleasant - a lullaby from Lettenhove, one that his mother used to sing to him. It wasn’t terribly creative a tune, crooning and simple, so it was easy enough even for Julian to improvise an accompaniment.

When all the stars above us

Burn brightly in the night

We’ll sit under them in silence

And marvel at the sight

Of light and dark and quietness

Upon us like a shroud

And all the stars above us,

They shine onwards, never cowed.

It was a sweet song, slow, comforting in a way few things from Lettenhove could possibly be. The song had remained buried in Julian’s memory, half-forgotten and irrelevant, for years - perhaps that was why he could still find comfort in it. Either way, its soft simplicity stayed ringing in Julian’s ears for a long time after the final note ceased its echoing.

Or, perhaps, if the song was still in Julian’s ears despite the silence in the room, it was still echoing, after all.

Pity. He was trying to commit the silence to memory. He’d never much appreciated it, he hated it, but if tonight was the last time he would experience it to such a degree, he still wanted to remember it.

Would the bland gruel Erland called soup be overpowering, after the trials?

Julian wondered how eerie Kaer Seren would be when the awful silence was loud.

His mind was running at a thousand miles an hour, thoughts disjointed and fleeting.

Was he... Was he panicking?

His hand found Coën’s arm in the dark, and grasped it tightly. He wouldn’t panic, he wouldn’t. Being scared was one thing, he could grudgingly concede Coën’s point on that one, but panic-

It was unbecoming. What about his reputation-

What about-

What reputation, anyways? One between four people?

It was only the Trials. He was being a baby, he’d been through them before, couldn’t he fucking grow up already-

But it was the Trials-

Fuck, fuck-

He clutched Coën’s arm tightly, and apparently his grasp was a little too tight, because Coën stirred, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck-

“Julek?”

Julian didn’t whimper. He simply wasn’t the sort.

“Oh,” Coën whispered. “Julek.”

He wasn’t panicking. He was fine. He was in his gods-damned room, in a blanket pile, not in the stupid fucking chamber with Erland’s stupid fucking decoctions, so why was he so, so-

Why was he so fucking terrified?

Without saying another word, Coën pulled Julian into a hug. From this close, Julian could smell Coën’s unique scent, of smoke from the fire in the atrium that he liked to tend and underneath that, something soft and warm and familiar that Julian couldn’t put a name to, a scent that was just Coën - did witchers smell that kind of thing from a distance?

Either way, it was nice.

And waking up still in the bear hug of his best friend - fuck it, his brother, Coën was his gods-damned brother in all but blood, at this point - it was reassuring in a way few other things were.

“Never thought I’d wake up before you, Coën.”

A tired grunt, laced with the vestiges of sleep. “It’s the nerves.”

“I know. It’s still weird.”

“It’s nowhere near sunrise, Julek.”

“The perfect time to get some breakfast, don’t you think?”

Coën groaned as he stretched. “You’ll only throw it up later.”

“It’s the Trials,” Julian snorted. “I’ll throw up regardless.”

“True enough,” Coën shrugged, blinking, yellow eyes still dull and tired. “But I can and will deny all involvement if we’re caught.”

“They’ll probably be able to smell you.”

“I can still deny my involvement. Just to spite you.”

“Come on, then, traitor,” Julian grinned, and wriggled out of Coën’s grip most expertly.

“As you wish, sir.”

They made their way quietly down the corridors, slipping through the shadows with practiced ease. Julian wouldn’t quite say he knew the keep like the back of his hand - the back of his had, after all, was dull and vague and a perfect image of it was hard to call to mind. The layout of Kaer Seren, on the other hand - there was nothing Julian was more familiar with. He knew exactly where to step to minimise the echoing footsteps that would otherwise alert the two older witchers to their presence.

Or, at least, he thought he did. Perhaps he’d been lulled into a false sense of security.

Suspicious.

They arrived at the kitchen without hassle, and set about looting the most luxurious ingredients from the cupboards. Granted, at a witcher keep, that didn’t account to very much - but in the end, it wasn’t exactly about the quality of the food, it was about the thrill of the crime - insofar as some harmless looting from a stock of supplies shared by four people could be termed a crime.

“I found the bread!”

Coën snorted. “It’s fucking bread, Julek. It’s not that exciting.”

“It’s illegal bread.”

“Ah, my mistake, then. Please allow me to partake in a meal of illegal bread, then.”

“But of course,” Julian said solemnly, breaking a chunk of mildly stale bread off of the loaf and handing it to his friend. “It tastes far better than normal bread, thanks to the addition of illegality.”

“It’s stale fucking bread.”

“A feast, fit for kings! If kings were thieves.”

“They are,” Coën nodded, biting into the wholly unremarkable bread. “You think they earned their palaces through hard fucking work?”

“An excellent point, Sir Coën! Thusly,” Julian broke his own chunk off and tore a shred off of it with sharp teeth, enjoying the so-called feast, “it stands that this is indeed a meal fit for kings by virtue of it being stolen from the public.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

“Yes, mother,” Julian said, chewing the bread. “You know, I think we should add some more flavour. Do we have any jerky?”

“You’ll ruin jerky for the rest of your life if you taste it through the Trials,” Coën warned, but got up to search the cupboards regardless, happening upon the jerky in a matter of seconds. “Want some?”

“I have reconsidered my earlier request and rescinded it.”

“Thought so. More for me, then, my partner in crime.”

“Fuck you.”

Coën shrugged and paired the jerky with the bread, whilst Julian glared at him, jealousy in his eyes.

Generally, witchers were supposed to maintain some degree of control over the shapes of their pupils, but this skill was not one that Julian had mastered as of yet, and he knew it brought Coën no end of amusement to see his feelings betrayed by his fucking eyes time and time again when he was trying to make a statement.

He felt a slight bit betrayed at the hint of a smirk that Coën was sporting, possibly at the fact that he had jerky and Julian didn’t, but he wasn’t about to risk ruining one of the world’s most convenient foods for himself for the sake of one illegal breakfast.

It was still a wonderful breakfast - possibly one of the best that Julian had ever had, complaining about various things, from monarchies to to the weather, which, in the Koviri mountains, ranged from ‘cold’ to ‘excruciatingly cold’ - and it was entirely too soon when Erland of Larvik walked into the kitchen with a surety to his movements that befitted a man of his experience and mirth in his eyes that directly contrasted it.

“I regret to have to interrupt this cheerful meal, but I would like to start the Trials before the rest of the Griffins return for winter,” he said, the joke most likely only there to soften the blow of his instruction.

Had it been anyone else standing there, Julian would have sniped back, said something along the lines of I don’t know, I’d quite like Rook to be there to hold my hand, but one simply didn’t talk to Erland of Larvik like that, and Julian did not cross every line he was presented with - just most of them.

Julian just got up and followed the Griffin grandmaster wordlessly.

Way to ruin a morning.

They made their way swiftly to the chamber that the Trial of the Grasses had been held in so long ago. Apprehension pooled in Julian’s stomach - fuck, the last time he’d been here, he’d simply been resigned to his inevitable fate, and now...

He’d never have expected that the steadfast surety of knowing that he was going to die would be preferable to the knowledge that he’d come out of the Trials feeling uncomfortable in his own skin, drowning in overwhelming input from the world around him.

It had taken him weeks to shake the migraines that followed him whenever he opened his eyes after the Grasses, and dealing with the same thing for touch, taste, hearing, and smell all at the same time was, quite frankly, a terrifying prospect.

“Can’t we...” Julian’s mouth was dry, as his sentence was cut off by his traitorous throat. Can’t we do this later? Can’t we do them one at a time? Can’t we not do this at all?

He swore he’d end up giving himself whiplash, shifting between cheerfully apathetic and fucking terrified like this.

Erland, for his part, afforded him the dignity of his silence - no chastisement, no reminders.

Julian was glad for it.

His emotions were always bound to catch up with him - he knew that the lingering fear at the back of his mind, the imprints of the Grasses, would come to the forefront eventually - but he couldn’t help but feel slighted, betrayed by his own mind. Life was so much more enjoyable when one was a little too blasé for their own good... But the Trials would never be something to be taken fucking lightly.

Julian wouldn’t go so far as to say that his life philosophy was stupid, but he’d admit that it didn’t apply in this particular situation. Some things were just meant to be miserable.

Erland didn’t speak - he didn’t have to, Julian needed no instruction. He sat down on the pallet wordlessly, and Erland held out a decoction.

He’d told them, one lesson, that this used to be done intravenously, but the equipment required for such a procedure had been destroyed long ago, and required rigorous maintenance to remain functional, as well as thorough sterilisation before use. Consuming the required potions and poisons the traditional way was, however, no less effective than the intravenous administration of the Trials, even if it was a tad more difficult to administer - in the end, however, the decision had been made, and so that was what would happen.

There was no hesitation this time, no idle thoughts of resignation and regret, before Julian’s senses were once more consumed with the searing, frosty tendrils of pain that he seemed to be submerged in, the sour taste of bile rising in his throat.

There was no hesitation, not on the part of Julian and certainly not on the part of.

Not on the part of-

Fuck, fuck, no hesitation... On the part of what?

On the part of the fucking decoctions-

His thoughts slipped from his grasp, slipped from his mind as they were replaced by a swelling pressure in his skull that stole his senses and threatened to overwhelm him, to burst him, overwhelming him like the embrace of some kind of malevolent fucking god-

He shuddered, and the movement served only to intensify the agony, the clammy, piercing tendrils that gripped him becoming poison in his veins, stinging and burning and tearing, and it was agony - untempered by anything that he’d felt before, not numbed at all by his first Trial, clawing and wrenching its way through him, and then,

Everything exploded in a cacophony of torment.

And then,

Nothing.

Julian blinked.

Were the trials over? So soon?

He tried to stand, but couldn’t, eyes adjusting to the gloom-

The gloom. Darkness, the likes of which he hadn’t seen before the Grasses, consumed all he could see, the faintest glow of light prickling at his peripheral vision.

So - this wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.

A dream? A nightmare? An unconscious delusion, his mind trying to fill in the gaps, the gaping holes in his knowledge where the agony had settled?

Whatever it was, it was a reprieve, at least.

The pounding in the back of Julian’s head began to register, the burning strain in his muscles - the Trials, bleeding into the illusion his mind had supplied him with.

He couldn’t move. Why couldn’t he move? This wasn’t- this wasn’t real. It was a dream, a nightmare, but he should be able to move.

Peering into the gloom, Julian could make out darker areas of shadows, quasi-familiar shapes that faded whenever his dull eyes tried to focus on them, the source of the warm sunlight never visible, so omnipresent and yet just out of view.

Why couldn’t he move?

He was trapped, and panic was steadily rising in his stomach. This wasn’t even real.

The bleed-through of pain from the trials flared up, catching his attention, and Julian couldn’t help but wish he was back in the throes of his own agony, because at least there he knew what was going on, knew that it was the Trials, it was only the Trials, but this-

Was it supposed to be like this? He doubted it, sincerely doubted it. The Trial of the Dreams wasn’t a literal Trial in his fucking dreams.

And yet, here he was.

Trapped.

He was all but a hostage, confined in a way he though he never would be again - why couldn’t he move?

Dust particles caught the light, the warm light that lurked in the corner of his eyes, just out of reach, and Julian couldn’t breathe. It was too dark, too awfully empty, he was being held captive in his own fucking mind, and then the whispers started.

Hint of voices, echoes of things he may have heard years ago, or just empty words that his mind supplied, barely there at first, mocking him, taunting him, lying to him, the murmurs crescendoing and thundering around him, engulfing him, tearing at his ears and suffocating him, like a raging storm of sound, and Julian couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but lie there, helpless, and drown.

This was... It was cruel.

It was so needlessly cruel.

The white-hot agony Julian knew he was feeling began to register, intensifying and gripping him, bleeding into the dream, clawing its way through every fibre of his being, inundating his senses, and it was such a particularly delicate flavour of excruciating that he couldn’t help but strain against his unresponsive, leaden limbs, his entire body screaming at him, telling him that he should be writhing in pain.

A scream tore itself from his throat, and finally, finally, the illusion shattered.

The illusion shattered, and Julian felt his burning, freezing body convulse, so limp and boneless yet so brittle and ready to shatter, the familiar tang of blood and bile amplified a thousandfold on his tongue, screams tearing themselves from a throat that was so hoarse and dry that the very air he breathed grated against him, pained him, and all the while, the thunderous sense of overwhelming noise never left him.

This was no whisper from his past, no mocking echo, no - just an unwavering torrent of sound, sound and so much more, stifling him and consuming him, his own screams an assault on his senses.

He was drowning, he was drowning, every movement agony, every single sound, movement, everything an assault.

Julian was simply.

He was damn near dying.

He barely registered when it was over, the pain receding far too slowly and leaving a lingering ache, but the sound and the smell and the taste of his own insides on his tongue and the unfathomable pressure gripping every single part of his skin, crawling and scratching at him... They all remained far, far too vividly.

Distinctly, he could feel the tight tracks of dried tears on his cheeks, hear the haggard gasps of breath escaping his chest.

He was lying on something soft, something fabric, a far cry from the wood of the pallet he’d passed out on, the familiar outlines of stone cobbles under the warm textile layer - he was in his and Coën’s room.

How he’d gotten there was little mystery - and, had the circumstances been any different, he’d have smirked to himself as he wondered if it was Keldar, Coën, or the Grandmaster of the Griffin School himself that had carried him across the keep. As it was, he could barely focus on anything at all that wasn’t the maelstrom of sound and scent and everything that surrounded him.

If he concentrated - and it was so, so, hard to concentrate, when his skin was crawling and his head was about to burst - but if he concentrated, he could hear so much. The whistling of the tiniest breezes and through-droughts that cut through the keep, the echoes of footsteps through the empty keep, so far away and yet so loud, and, ever so faint yet right in his ear - screaming.

A familiar voice, howling in agony - no doubt, Coën was going through the Trial of the Dreams now that Julian was done with it. He shuddered, the movement involuntary and painful, and tried his best to get lost in the maelstrom again.

His own heartbeat, his breathing, thundered loudly in his ears, a constant sound against the cacophony he’d found himself plunged into, and yet it wasn’t enough to completely ensnare his concentration.

He could hear shouts, hurried footsteps, Erland and Keldar’s worried communication, and all of a sudden, his tired, aching body was alert once more.

Julian found himself unable to track to conversation, hearing only snatches, odd words amidst the cacophony, Coën and Trial and reacting and mitigate, hardly giving any kind of context for the discussion, but the tone, he could hear perfectly.

And there was really only one thing all this could mean, Julian thought, the cold feeling of dread pooling in his stomach, and it was the simplest, worst outcome - Occam’s razor, the principle was - and with a spasming shudder, the boy steeled himself and dragged his throbbing body to it’s feet.

His legs were weak, trembling under his weight as he staggered forwards, but fuck it, he could do this.

He had to, he couldn’t just lie, unresponsive, on his fucking blankets, when the scenario that the undertone to his mentors’ voices indicated was undoubtedly playing out.

Because what, other than the most terrible of terrible outcomes, could be indicated by that dreadful hint of panic?

Chapter Text

“Jaskier.”

Well, fuck. This was hardly an ideal situation. Jaskier was beginning to wonder, in fact, if the whole glamour thing was at all worth it in the first place - the trouble it had brought was far more than it was worth, it seemed to him. But, regardless, this was not the time to let his mind wander.

“Geralt.”

His voice, as light and unworried as he could make it, was schooled into a façade of evenness - he was, first and foremost, a performer, and he’d gotten much better at it since his brief, disastrous stint as a spy - and he followed the witcher’s gaze to his shoulder, where he knew that he’d been betrayed by his glamour once again.

“Jaskier,” Geralt repeated, as it was becoming increasingly clear that the bard was not, in fact, about to start clarifying anything about the whole missing a rather large burn scar situation - least of all how and why he’d come to be missing it. “Explain.”

Now that, Jaskier knew, was an opportunity. He could do precisely what he’d been doing for the past... well, quite a significant number of years, really... and simply lie his arse off. It’s so much easier to bed a stranger without them asking leading questions about your scars - not that Jaskier bedded quite as many people as he claimed, but a convenient cover story for his more illicit affairs was a convenient cover story for his more illicit affairs - and he could hope to the gods Geralt wasn’t familiar with the average price of a glamour, especially one so permanent and intricate.

Part of him, however, just plain didn’t want to. It was hypocritical beyond all measure to expect Geralt to trust him when he didn’t even feel inclined to share such a basic fact about himself as the fact that they were, in fact, of the same - or at least eerily similar - stock. The fact that the main reason for the glamour in the first place was to conceal this was Jaskier’s main excuse for his silence, but he couldn’t avoid the implications of said silence.

Ah. Fuck. Well, in the words of more than one person, Jaskier (or even Julian, once upon a time) had always been a little bit of a bastard.

Or, revised opinion, a lot a bit of a bastard.

“It’s... It’s just a glamour, you know. For vanity’s sake. The awkward scar questions made things very... well, awkward after the first few times... Though I suppose you’d know, wouldn’t you?” Jaskier chuckled softly, ducking his head.

He should have been an actor, really.

Geralt’s face twisted a little, at that, but he said nothing. Of course he didn’t. It made sense for the vain bard to be... well, vain about the whole thing, and for all Geralt could identify a monster from a few misshapen claw marks, Jaskier doubted the man would ever be able to fully comprehend human intent.

“So-” he began, but Geralt cut him off.

“For fuck’s sake, Jaskier!”

Geralt’s tone was rough, anger evident in his posture - fuck, even his pupils were narrowed into the thinnest of slits, barely visible against the gold of his irises - and all Jaskier could do was blink. “Sorry?”

“Don’t presume to lie to me, bard,” Geralt hissed, through gritted teeth, and - oh, hell.

“Lie to you? The fuck would I be lying about? The broader perceptions of scarring amongst bedmates picked up in-”

“That’s fucking rich of you, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

A low, throaty growl made its way from Geralt’s throat, and Jaskier - despite his composure - flinched. “Do you really think me so stupid, bard, that you assumed I wouldn’t notice?”

“Notice what? I’d genuinely like to know, Geralt, what you possibly could have noticed about me that I haven’t already told you, because apparently, only one of us is capable of normal communication!”

Right. That was a low blow, with Jaskier mentally wincing as soon as the words left his mouth, but fuck, hadn’t Lohere’s impromptu decision to show up been such a perfect demonstration of why he should keep his fucking cover at all costs? As much as Jaskier liked Geralt, he liked not being blackmailed into random killing sprees a lot, too.

If only he could communicate that sentiment.

“You know,” Geralt snarled, “what I fucking noticed, bard. You’re too comfortable with danger, and it’s not recklessness, is it? You’re just that confident.”

“Geralt, you can’t possibly-”

“Let me finish, bard. The mortician in Beled - she could kill without raising any suspicion, track us a day without either of us noticing and set up an ambush - and yet you managed to take her down. The assassins in the forest - you’d think it was lucky that they didn’t come after you, wouldn’t you? The bard with an arrow in his shoulder, the weakest target - but they did, didn’t they?”

Jaskier swallowed. “I didn’t kill-”

“You didn’t kill him. You didn’t have to, he stumbled right into me just fine. And come to think of it, what kind of human is so desperate to have an arrow wound cauterised?”

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

“Well, excuse me for not being an expert in bloody medicine! I went to Oxenfurt for the seven liberal arts and that was it, Geralt, I never took medicine, and I didn’t know if I was going to bleed out where I stood! And don’t even start about you knowing better, because I can tell you, witcher injuries are fuck-all next to human ones!”

“And yet you admitted to being able to suture a stitch not five minutes ago.”

Damn it all to hell. He had. Could he not keep his mouth shut for a single bloody moment?

Jaskier faltered. “Fine. Yeah. I know a bit of medicine. But fuck me, Geralt, and arrow had gone through my shoulder, so excuse me if I wasn’t thinking entirely straight!”

“It’s always what’s convenient, isn’t it? You don’t know medicine, but you do, you’re weak and hapless, but you’re not, you talk about yourself and yet when I ask, you wave your hand and say it’s irrelevant, it’s unimportant-”

“At least I bother to fucking talk! I swear by Melitele’s fine bosom that this is the longest conversation you’ve had with me to date, and you’re yelling at me!”

Geralt growled again, a low, throaty sound that made Jaskier bristle, equal parts affronted and on edge. “Bard.”

“Witcher.”

“What are you?”

“What am I?” Jaskier laughed, his voice a tad higher than it should have been. “What do you mean, what am I? What do you think?”

“I don’t know-” and gods, the forced evenness in Geralt’s tone was so infuriating that Jaskier wanted to scream- “hence, why I’m asking.”

“Ooh, hence, that’s a big-boy word, isn’t it? Where was all of this verbosity in the past fuck-knows-how-many months, then?”

The subject change was extremely unsubtle. His rhetoric professor would be rolling in his grave, had he been listening - not that he was dead, but Jaskier’s ineloquent declaration surely would have killed him if he’d heard it.

“Jaskier, just tell me, damn it. What are you?”

“A bard? A man? A hapless travelling companion to your intimidating, witchery self?”

“You know exactly what I mean, bard,” Geralt snarled, narrowing his eyes. “Don’t play stupid, it’s not a good look on you.”

“Oh, okay, so you’re interrogating me now? Really, Geralt?”

“No.”

Jaskier threw his arms as wide as he dared, not wanting to pull at the stitches in his abdomen with the sudden movement. “What is this, then? A bloody... A friendly chat?”

“An opportunity.”

“A- An opportunity! An opportunity, he says! An opportunity to what, lay bare my entire life story, just because you asked? I’ve given you an explanation!”

“You wanted to travel with me, bard, and I let you. I’d say you owe me a bit of-”

“I don’t owe you shit, Geralt of Rivia. In fact- in fact, I’ll leave, right now, if you want me gone so badly!”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” Geralt repeated, his voice far too calm and far, far too soft.

“What- the fuck do you mean, no? I’m my own person, I can do whatever I want!”

“Right. You’re the only one allowed to make decisions for other people, I apologise for forgetting.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Ridiculous, am I? You followed me in Posada, came to Kaer Morhen because you knew I wouldn’t seek your company out.”

That was... a fair point, actually.

Jaskier bit his lip. He didn’t have much of a leg to stand on in this argument, and he knew it - Geralt was right, and Jaskier had, annoyingly, talked himself into multiple contradictions.

And, out of the two of them, only one of them had actually enrolled to study rhetoric at Oxenfurt, and he was certain beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt that it wasn’t Geralt.

“Right,” he huffed, deflating. “So why am I not allowed to leave, then?”

“Because I don’t trust you.”

Well, that was one hell of a declaration, delivered casually enough that Jaskier had to let it register for a moment - and then, when it did, he did his very best not to visibly react, because fucking hell. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, then, that kind of thing?”

Geralt snorted - actually snorted - at that. “If you didn’t have anything to hide, you wouldn’t be so blatantly hiding something.”

Hells, Jaskier’s underestimation of Geralt had apparently been brutal. He supposed that this was comeuppance for his hubris, then - he’d gotten so very complacent, letting his assumptions guide him in a way that he thought had been drilled out of him.

The whole bard thing had gotten to him, it seemed. He’d fucked up so confidently, he hadn’t seen it coming.

Or maybe he was just presumptuous. Overconfident. Arrogant.

That was not something he wanted to think about at all.

“We should go. Get paid for the griffin,” Geralt said, interrupting Jaskier’s half-hearted contemplations.

Damn it. That had been his opportunity, his chance to rebut the accusation levelled against him, and he’d missed it. That was practically an admission of guilt all on its own - not, it seemed, that Geralt needed one, as seemingly intelligent as the man apparently fucking was, now.

Had Jaskier really been the wilfully oblivious one all this time?

“Sounds like a plan,” he agreed softly, as Geralt went back to retrieve the griffin’s head.

Technically, his cover wasn’t blown properly just yet. It didn’t have to be, either - there were a thousand possible explanations he could give for all the incongruences that Geralt had so neatly picked up on if Jaskier deigned to collect his thoughts properly, even after this whole debacle of a confrontation - but on the other hand, he’s expected Geralt’s trust, trust was most emphatically a two-way street. One-way trust tended to have other names. Like ‘manipulation’. Or ‘betrayal’.

Jaskier let out a quiet hiss of frustration. Was he really considering-? Right after the whole Lohere shit-show, too? Ridiculous. If anything, that should have been the brightest, most glaring example as to why entrusting people with the knowledge of his glamour was a ridiculously stupid thing to do.

He blamed his Griffin upbringing for his internal conflict, really. He’d always thought his rampant assholery to be rather remorseless, right up until he had to confront it.

Geralt removed the griffin’s head with a few precise, heavy strikes, as Jaskier watched, somewhat disoriented. Why was this a conversation he was having with himself? He could easily rationalise his secrecy; he should rationalise it, even, given the years and years he’d devoted to making sure his current lifestyle was viable, that his cover was impeccable, and yet he was seriously considering blurting out his deepest secrets to a man he’d know for a matter of months - but why?

Sure, Geralt had raised a lot of valid points against Jaskier, but that had - for better or for worse - hardly done much to discourage him from doing whatever-the-fuck-he-so-desired for the best part of his life.

Actually. Perhaps that was a problem in itself.

Fuck.

Jaskier groaned and leant back against a tree, his stitches pulling uncomfortably.

This was one hell of a situation.

He lingered there, a tad longer than he’d perhaps intended to, caught up in his own thoughts - until Geralt so unceremoniously interrupted his ponderment.

“Bard. We need to get back to the town.”

Blinking, Jaskier snapped himself out of his thoughts and focused on his... his companion, now, he supposed - he wouldn’t claim friendship after their argument, he wasn’t that presumptuous.

Geralt stood right at the edge of Jaskier’s periphery - griffin head slung over his shoulder, probably halfway back to the horses already what with how dangerously close they’d tethered them.

“Indulge me a moment of rest, witcher,” Jaskier retorted, scowling. “We can’t all run around like idiot chickens, right after getting stitched up. And badly, might I add! Gods, that scar’s going to be horrible.”

“Who knows? Maybe it will make like the other one and disappear.”

“Fuck you.”

He did, however, start making his way towards the horses, pointedly not looking at Geralt whatsoever - the sooner they made it back, after all, the sooner Jaskier could collapse into a real bed and sleep on the whole issue that had suddenly blown up in his face.

The whole argument left a bad taste in his mouth, if he were to be completely and unwarrantedly honest with himself... And he didn’t much want to be, not when the truth was so often such a massive inconvenience. Surely Geralt himself would understand - that the reality of things was so often a muddy quagmire of derision and arbitrary restrictions based on what the world at large deemed acceptable and unacceptable, the fact that sometimes a certain amount of secrecy and deception were necessary when there were so many who would wish you ill on sheer principle...

Bullshit. Jaskier had no reason to keep his secret from Geralt - he considered the man trustworthy, someone he respected, someone who - and he’d tried to judge this as impartially as he could, easy as it was to cultivate bias - was honourable almost to a fault, rough around the edges, but still so dependable and good.

And sure, he didn’t owe Geralt any information, but Jaskier still felt wrong-footed. He had, without a doubt, handled the situation poorly.

Ah, fuck. It was ridiculously late in the evening to evaluate the full extent of his and possibly Geralt’s moral failings. The moon was far too near its zenith for it to be a good time for anything even vaguely approaching a session of serious contemplation, besides which, morality was beginning to grate on him. Yes, being a deceptive bastard wasn’t generally a good thing, but what were his other options? Accept that he’d been dealt a shit lot in life as a witcher, and move on?

Hardly.

The point was, to come to some kind of conclusion, that he needed to be a great deal drunker than he currently was to deal with the issue at hand. He’d contemplate the nuanced moral ramifications of his illicitly acquired bardic career when he was seeing bloody triple. Not now.

Bollocks, the unfortunate horse, had been led some way away by Geralt, right alongside Roach, by the time Jaskier shook himself free of his unwelcome ponderment. He resisted the urge to roll his eyes as he took the reins from Geralt as he caught up.

What the hell did the ridiculous man think he was going to? Run away on horseback, whilst the witcher had all the coin? Not bloody likely. He’d slept on the forest floor enough consecutive times in the last few weeks that he’d have tagged along back to the inn with Geralt if he’d put a dagger to his neck.

Geralt stared at him, brow still furrowed, as if he were still trying to piece together whatever it was that Jaskier had so poorly hidden, and the bard’s urge to stick his tongue out in retaliation was not one he fought against, allowing himself to indulge in a small moment of childishness.

In a small movement that Jaskier had at some point gotten almost uncomfortably familiar with, Geralt rolled his eyes, and for a moment it was as if nothing had happened, that Jaskier hadn’t just yelled at him for having the audacity to state the uncomfortable obvious.

He shouldn’t, by all logic, be mourning a friendship he’d never really had - and come to think of it, he’d spent so much time dismissing the fact that yes, Geralt was a competent man in his own right, and Jaskier was just too caught up in his own problems to acknowledge that, that he doubted that he was in any position to feel slighted - and yet.

Here he was.

Doing exactly that.

“It’s nice to be able to hit the road alongside my favourite travel companion again, at any rate, even despite the circumstances,” Jaskier mused out loud, as much to distract himself from his thoughts as to try and turn the silence between them into something less strained. “Gosh, I’ve missed your stoic and silent company, Roach.”

Geralt pointedly didn’t react - and really, it was just like the first time he’d tried to tag along after the man, except this time they had the allusions to their faint almost-camaraderie that they’d built up looming in the distance behind them, and Geralt’s exponentially more worrying newfound suspicions of Jaskier, too.

Like that would stop him trying to unfuck the mess he’d happily knitted himself into.

“Geralt,” Jaskier said, trying his best to catch the man’s attention. “Geralt, do you think that-”

“Shut up, bard,” Geralt snapped, fixing Jaskier in a glare, Roach’s reins gripped tightly in his hands - tightly enough that it must have been uncomfortable for him, biting into his hand even through the glove he’d put back on after stitching Jaskier up.

Gods, the griffin fight seemed like it had been years ago, instead of a scant half-hour or so.

“That’s rather rude of you, witcher. You don’t even know what I was going to ask you if you thought.”

“Something pointless.”

“Pointless- I’ll give you fucking pointless, Geralt! You know, some people do quite enjoy conversing for conversation’s sake, right? It’s generally known as a social interaction, you see, it happens when two people decide to mutually enjoy each other’s company... Do they teach you nothing in witcher school?”

The withering glare he received in response to that deserved to be immortalised on at least three separate canvases by Oxenfurt and Lan Exeter’s best artists. That look... That look could bring down armies through sheer derision.

Jaskier glared right back, knowing damn well that his threatening face was not as threatening as he liked to pretend it was, not under a glamour designed rather specifically to offset the more threatening aspects of his visage, but he supposed he’d made his point well enough - the point being that he was rather displeased with the vaguely defined situation he was currently in.

It didn’t sit right with him, the frustrating amount of things he’d wilfully overlooked, just because they were inconvenient to him. Perhaps his rivals had been onto something, he mused, when they’d called him arrogant. Well, Valdo fucking Marx had called him arrogant. Keldar had been more of a fan of the word conceited, come to think of it.

He snorted at the memory. “I suppose you’ll be rather less conceited, boy, when you receive your punishment,” as if scrubbing a goddamn floor would humble him at all. As if having misbehaving trainees polish the damn halls had been about anything more than Kaer Seren’s tragic inability to employ janitors - which, for the record, it hadn’t, so Keldar could shove it with his ridiculous preaching.

But that was a digression. He’d all but written Geralt off, assumed he wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care to look based on very little information, and generally taken no care whatsoever to ensure that he could keep his secret long-term. Possibly, he’d also insulted Geralt’s intelligence quite a bit in the process, but that was something to contemplate at a far later date.

Jaskier was, however, not above feeling a little bit stupid. Of course Geralt would have noticed all of Jaskier’s little tells - he was a witcher. That was his job.

This was all such utter bullshit.

It was chilly, in the woods, but not as cold as they had been a week or two ago, the bitterness of winter receding to make way for the humid warmth of spring and eventually, the unpleasant, sweltering heat of summer. For now, though, it was just slightly to the left of comfortably cool.

In a pleasant turn of events, the thudding of hooves and quiet, barely-there footfalls of two men were the only sounds of any significance within even a witcher’s range of hearing - and thank the gods, because like hell did they need yet another monster to fight - and Jaskier found himself focusing on the bloodstains that Geralt’s person now sported, in the absence of anything better to occupy himself with.

The viscous, almost-ichor that had seeped into his armour was griffin blood, Jaskier knew from experience if not by smell, and it was an utter bitch to scrub out of anything. That was the merit, he supposed, of black armour - griffin blood stains weren’t as vexingly obvious.

The blood that stained his hands, though, was Jaskier’s, and suddenly the bard was incredibly glad for the pungent odour of dead griffin that hung over Geralt like a miasma. As far as he knew, whatever enchantment had been woven into his glamour that masked his scent had its limitations (distance, he was fairly sure, was a factor - the glamour couldn’t exactly stretch) and the last thing he needed was Geralt sniffing out his secrets from his blood.

Wait. Damn it. He was contemplating the situation again. Jaskier shook his head. His situation was precarious, yes, but salvageable - he could stop fretting at any moment, he was only winding himself up.

“Geralt?”

No answer.

“We didn’t get rooms at the inn before we left for your contract, did we?” Jaskier asked, knowing full well that they hadn’t. The villagers had been so eager to send Geralt off after their local monster problem that they’d had no time to stop anywhere at all, let alone negotiate a room at the inn.

“Hm.”

“At any rate, they’ll probably let us grab a room still, given that most people were awake enough to send you after the damn griffin.”

The head thumped against Roach’s side, where it was secured beside Geralt’s miscellaneous belongings. Dear gods, it was right on top of his pack. Had the man somehow missed the message that griffin blood doesn’t wash out?

“If they don’t give us a room, we can make camp,” Geralt grunted, paying Jaskier’s squawk of protest no heed. “Or, you could charm the innkeep into giving us a room.”

“Charisma doesn’t work on the sleeping.”

“Hm.”

“Really- hey!” Belatedly, Jaskier realised what Geralt had been alluding to. “Are you accusing me of charming people to like me? The- the nerve, Geralt! I’m not some kind of one-trick peon who uses magic to compensate; people like me because I’m personable!”

Geralt simply raised an eyebrow at him as he continued to splutter indignantly.

“Just because someone has a modicum of social skills... I swear to Melitele’s fine bosom, Geralt, you... you... That’s ridiculous, even given the circumstances!”

Jaskier met his companion’s eyes, and... was that a smirk?

Right, he had to amend his opinion of the situation post-haste. Geralt was joking. Geralt was joking, and so, consequently, he was clearly, by all measure, completely and utterly, uncontestably in a court of law, entirely and wholly, with the kind of certainty that most academics could only dream of having, most deeply and insurmountably, unavoidably (unlike his taxes), unquestionably fucked.

Tugging on Bollocks’ reins, Jaskier stuck his nose in the air and picked up his pace, making it abundantly clear as he overtook the other man that he would not stand for Geralt’s jabs any longer. He had his pride, damn it.

Though he couldn’t deny, his chest did feel a little bit lighter.

They’d split up when the reached the town again, Geralt going to claim payment from the alderman and Jaskier to book them a room at the inn - and it would, in fact, have to be one room, for reasons that were both a mixture of Jaskier’s coin still being entirely depleted from his bad decisions in Oxenfurt and the fact that Geralt was reluctant to take his eye off of Jaskier long enough for him to leg it - much to Jaskier’s surprise.

He’d been under the impression that the witcher wasn’t about to let him out from under his watchful, scrutinising gaze for the next century or so... But, on the other hand, they did have something of a time constraint to deal with, given that innkeepers were not mysterious beings that didn’t require sleep, and if they failed to book a room in time, they would end up having to camp - and gods, was Jaskier tired of camping.

Then, too, came the caveat that if Geralt didn’t drop the griffin’s head off with the alderman as proof of kill and whatever else it might be used for, they’d have to sleep with a griffin head in the room, or perhaps be denied a room on the grounds that large and bloodied monster heads were banned from most establishments this side of Cintra, where the preferred term for for monster head was “Queen Calanthe”.

And perhaps Geralt had his doubts about how far Jaskier would be willing to run with enough coin to pay for their business at the town’s inn and only their business at the town’s inn, fished out of his coin purse and handed over to the sheepish, still-broke bard with a grumble.

Credit where it was due, Jaskier really wasn’t going anywhere, not when he had the allure of a real bed to look forward to.

The inn was - as, unfortunately enough, was predicated of these kinds of backwater establishments - rather ramshackle and dirty and generally subpar as far as establishments went, but, by some miracle, still open and accepting guests despite the hour, and Jaskier felt his day - or what was left of it - looking up a little more. It seemed that he was getting that bed after all.

Too, the place had a stable - evidently, they were used to the odd traveller coming through - and thus, Roach and Bollocks were stabled under Jaskier’s watchful eye, and their packs (the griffin blood was still wet and sticky on Geralt’s but Jaskier figured that his doublet was a lost cause anyways) slung over his shoulder.

“Hello,” he called, cheerfully announcing himself to the bored-looking inkeep and three remaining drunkards at their tables as he crossed the threshold.

The innkeeper eyed him. “You come in with that witcher?”

“I did indeed, my good lady. He’s delivering the griffin’s head to the alderman as we speak, and I’m here to book a room for the both of us on his behalf.”

“Don’t think you’ll be getting dinner, at this hour, bard.”

“I’ll be sure to curb my presumptuousness, in that case. We require only a room, oh, and...” Jaskier began, then hesitated, looking down at his own bloodstained midriff - did he really have to tear his stitches so violently? He was fairly certain the wound hadn’t bled this much when he’d received it.

Regardless, he supposed this was one occasion on which he needed a wash as well as Geralt.

“A bath?”

“Ah... Yes, my apologies.”

The innkeeper snorted. “I’ll bring one up for you and the witcher, but you’ll be sharing.”

Jaskier winced. He somehow doubted that they were at the point in their relationship where bath-sharing began to occur, especially given the recent step backwards in regards to exactly how much Geralt trusted him.

“That’ll be brilliant, thank you.”

He grinned brightly at the innkeeper as he began to count Geralt’s coin - almost exactly the correct price, a little more, but one did get rather good at estimating prices on the Path, Jaskier supposed - much to the innkeeper’s apathy.

In fact, given the speed, the force with which she shoved the room key towards him, with a handkerchief, no less, not at all willing to take it into her hands, she was all too happy to be rid of him.

To each their own, then.

“Up the stairs, third room down the left. Bath’ll be there in half an hour.”

“Much appreciated.”

The drunkards at their tables paid him little heed as he strolled past them, and up the stairs as indicated, finding the third room on the left quickly and easily, as he was wont to, as a man who was both sober and not so wholly unintelligent. It was, as he’d expected, pretty shitty, the furniture old and cleaned about as thoroughly as a dog’s asshole - the lingering, rancid smell of old vomit still hung about the room. Someone had been sick all over the floorboards, and, judging from the staleness of the scent, it had been a while ago.

Jaskier wrinkled his nose, as he set the packs down in the corner.

Hopefully, the griffin blood was strong enough to overpower the scent completely, as the lesser of two evils, but he doubted it. A Witcher’s sense of smell could pick out even the slightest of odours - they were, frustratingly enough, designed to withstand being overpowered. The mustiness of the sheets, the wood, too, of the furniture, even the almost rust-adjacent tang of the key...

He could pick them all apart, isolate and identify them - that’s what he was supposed to be able to do, it was how he was designed.

All in all, the room was a shitty one, but not so shitty that Jaskier wouldn’t gladly enjoy the reprieve from the forest floor. It was dirty, half-dilapidated, and somewhat cramped, but passable.

The bed, however, was a double one.

That’d be fun, after their whole argument.

Jaskier groaned, collapsing against the wall. No doubt there’d be hell to pay if he got blood on the musty sheets.

He’d fucked up with Geralt, royally, and now he had one of two options. To double down on his cover - competently, this time, because Melitele’s tits, Geralt’s query had caught him completely, embarrassingly off-guard and he was supposed to be better than that - or to tell him the truth.

What would happen, then? They’d probably go their separate ways, and Jaskier would simply have to hope that Geralt didn’t sell him out.

Wasn’t that grand? His plans for companionship thrown out, his very identity as Jaskier thrown into question.

It wasn’t that Jaskier didn’t trust Geralt, but once information was known, it couldn’t be unknown.

And Jaskier had spoken with enough mages, enough unsavoury characters, too, to know that known information didn’t have to be freely given to be spread.

It was a cumulative thing. Exponentials could come into play, too. Like a disease.

And Lohere proved that there were at least some mages who had use for an easy-to-blackmail witcher.

But Geralt was a good man.

Careful, too.

Bollocks.

He didn’t really have much of a leg to stand on, there.

Decisions... Decisions were difficult.

It hadn’t been that long a day, surely, but Jaskier was tired.

So tired.

His eyelids were heavy.

He could barely keep himself awake.

Lethargic. That was what he was.

No energy.

All he could do was fall asleep to the scent of blood, vomit, almost-rust, and... alcohol?

But the footsteps that accompanied the stench - one of the drunkards - were quiet.

Soft.

Precise.

The key... the key wasn’t rusted.

Shit.

Shit.

The key wasn’t rusted.

Jaskier was just fucking stupid.

He shook his head.

Whatever this was- whatever this was, it was strong. No wonder the innkeep hadn’t wanted to touch the key.

This was why Geralt had caught onto him. He’d gotten far too fucking lazy, had he forgotten that he wasn’t actually a hapless bard?

Almost-rust. And, underneath, an earthy scent.

A mixture, he was sure, of some kind of liquid that his skin would absorb, and... that was from the bloody poison nut tree. Strychnine.

A muscle twitched in his shoulder. Definitely strychnine.

Gods, if he were human, that much would have killed him.

Convulsions. Lethargy. Possible asphyxiation.

But merely coating a key wouldn’t get him that far.

Just knock him out a little.

No antidote, even Golden Oriole didn’t work against the nasty little bugger (Keldar had given three different speeches about that nice little tidbit) but White Honey... White Honey would combat the effects, somewhat.

The footsteps were getting closer.

Geralt’s pack.

He’d dropped it, he realised, not far from where he’d collapsed. White Honey. White Honey.

Jaskier swallowed, and hoped to all that was good and holy that the Wolves used the same potion-to-bottle system as the Griffins.

Dragging himself over to Geralt’s pack, he reached out, heavy, twitching fingers fumbling over the fabric. White Honey. He had to get the damn potions. If the bottles were different, he could fucking eyeball it, but it was a moot bloody point if he couldn’t get to the bottled in the first place.

Thank Melitele that Geralt kept his reserves in his pack.

The clasp, the clasp - there! The pack came open, and Jaskier scrambled through it, blinking desperately through the fog that had settled in his mind, trying to find the box of potion bottles that held Geralt’s potions.

His fingers closed around wooden edges.

The footsteps were getting closer.

Jaskier could take an educated guess as to why they were so slow. The not-a-drunkard wanted to ensure the strychnine solution had taken effect properly, rather than take him on when he could still get a hit in - the joke was on him. Jaskier flipped open the box, and of course the wolves standardised their potion bottles differently, of course they did...

The footsteps felt so mockingly light.

Shit, shit, shit.

He pulled the potions up and dropped them, one by one - Swallow, Tawny Owl, Blizzard, Golden Oriole, Swallow again, yet another Swallow, Cat, Cat, another Cat, Golden Oriole, White Honey - White Honey. He was sure of it. The clear, yellow liquid - White Honey.

Uncorking the bottle, Jaskier downed it - and it definitely was White Honey, thank Melitele - and took a deep breath.

It’d take effect in a short while, but until then-

Until then, he had to be ready.

Concentrate.

Fight the fucking poison.

Like the first time he’d run the walls at Kaer Seren.

His entire body had been burning, screaming at him to stop, but - he didn’t have to.

So he’d just kept going. Pushed forwards.

It was almost the same thing.

(It really wasn’t.)

He just had to keep going.

Deep breaths.

Jaskier was better than this. No way would he lose against a toxin from a tree called the poison nut.

The footsteps drew closer.

Fuck it.

He pulled the two short swords - the two incriminating short swords he really should have gotten rid of, given that Ferrant de bloody Lettenhove had probably made note of them - out of the depths his own pack, fumbling a little less with the fastenings, this time.

He clambered to his feet

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

His head was clearing.

He brought his hands up in front of himself, fingers forming a familiar shape, palms dry enough to be comfortable holding onto this hilts of his swords, and then.

The not-a-drunkard finally burst through the door and leapt at him, and Jaskier cast Heliotrope just before the moment of impact, the force of the man’s blow as he brought a dagger down on the shield wrenching his weapon from his hand.

Giving him no time to react, Jaskier spun round, left hand using his short sword to slash at the man’s now-unarmed hand, his right throwing Aard - only to meet resistance.

A shield.

Sorcerer.

He turned the motion of his right hand into a slash towards the man’s midriff, and, lightning-quick, his opponent pulled a rapier from his belt and parried, resisting the force of Jaskier’s blow.

His other hand, his other short sword, jabbed at the man’s exposed side, but failed to strike true, a hand snaking under his blade and grabbing his wrist in a vice-like grip.

Whoever the man was, he was good. He had Jaskier, an honest-to-god witcher - a poisoned witcher, but a witcher nonetheless - matched. That was fucking worrying.

“Julian,” he leered. “Julian, Julian... of Kovir, I am led to believe? Truth be told, I had no idea if our pet theory was remotely correct before you so kindly confirmed it for me. Playing bard, dogging the steps of a witcher so much stronger than you... How pitiful.”

“Why, my good fellow, do you happen to be a fan? Or did you and Lohere simply compare notes often?”

Surprise flickered across the man’s face - and, had his position not been so precarious, Jaskier would have outright laughed at the inanity of him having this conversation with someone all dressed up like the village alcoholic.

“Lohere knew of your guise? Of course she did, she always was close with the other... But it matters not. I must say, I didn’t think you would be so eager to reveal yourself as a witcher, Julian.”

Jaskier grinned. His hands and the man’s both were trembling from the strain, but neither of them were giving any ground, locked so perfectly together, evenly matched as they were.

Unstoppable force and immovable object, indeed. He’d have to try and put that in a song - the sheer amount of force that there could be behind a moment of utter stillness.

“The fact that I’m awake...” Jaskier grinned, doing his level best not to sound strained, “and fighting you, that would have given me away anyways, and... Well, you know. I like my advantages put to good use.”

And then he shot an Igni from his left hand.

Caught up in the stalemate as he was, the sorcerer had no time to defend against the attack, no time to throw up a shield or nullify Jaskier’s sign, and he let out a howl as the burst of flame that erupted from Jaskier’s hand caught him neatly across the cheek, letting go as he stumbled back in shock.

“Witcher bastard!”

“Half-right,” Jaskier said, ducking low and lunging, slashing at the man’s leg from the left and his midriff from the right. “My parents were married.”

The man recovered quickly, dodging Jaskier with a fluidity and grace so unbefitting of his current guise, and Jaskier continued to press his offence, the man almost mirroring him as they danced around each other, Jaskier’s swords slicing through the air, the rapier deflecting every strike with swift accuracy.

Pressing forward, Jaskier forced the sorcerer back. The White Honey had taken effect, the lethargy and the muscle spasms - that thank the gods, had not acted up during the fight - from the strychnine fading.

The sorcerer met every strike, metal clanging against metal, and Jaskier finally found the rhythm, the flow, of the fight. He could win this.

He just needed to outlast the sorcerer.

His griffin medallion brushed against his chest as the fabric of his doublet moved, the pocket brushing against his chest whenever his left arm crossed his chest.

The sorcerer wasn’t tiring. Fucking hell, the sorcerer wasn’t bloody tiring.

Where the fuck was Geralt?

A thought - as Jaskier’s blades met the rapier once again, both swords pulling away from the parry almost as soon as their blades clashed into one another, striking low with his left and deflecting the rapier’s jab with his right - a thought crossed his mind.

The innkeep had known not to touch the strychnine-solution coated key.

There was every chance that the alderman was holding Geralt up, deliberately.

Fuck.

This had been planned so much more meticulously than Jaskier had initially thought.

His leg snaked around the sorcerer’s and he pulled, unbalancing but not tripping him, and then swiftly parrying a clumsy swipe.

“Enough!”

Eyes widening as he caught the meaning behind the sorcerer’s exclamation, Jaskier raised his hands to form Quen, but he was too slow - the sorcerer’s goddamn shockwave caught him before his fingers could twist into the shape of the same, and he felt his swords being wrenched from his hands as he was flung across the room, colliding with the opposite wall forcefully enough to leave cracks in the wood, before he slid gracelessly to the ground, landing in a heap.

A twinge in his abdomen told him that his stitches had been ripped, again. So much for witcher healing.

And, come to think of it, fuck griffins strong enough to reopen a wound that had all but completely healed by the time it had met with the unfortunate creature.

Jaskier pulled himself to his feet, faster than he should, by all rights, have been able to, but not fast enough, and the sorcerer was on top of him, restraining him, before he could completely recover.

Fuck, fuck.

The man pushed him down, roughly, and Jaskier fell, far too unbalanced to resist, but not enough that he didn’t try to roll out of the way was he fell - and that was a mistake.

And that... that was a fucking mistake.

The bitter tang of strychnine filled the air, and Jaskier barely registered what that meant before it was in his fucking eyes, and that was just straight poison, nothing mixed in with it to help his skin absorb it, and there was no way the white honey was protecting him from that fucking much - who carried strychnine powder on them, in a fight? Who did that?

Jaskier blinked furiously, and could barely even think to bolt before the sorcerer was pushing him down again, and all he could do was kick and bite and struggle, and gods, he’d rather be spilling his guts about his witchery past to Geralt and the rest of the world than-

Wait.

That was it.

Twisting and struggling against the sorcerer’s grip, Jaskier shifted his goal slightly to the left.

There was no way he was getting out of here on his own terms.

The poison was already slowing him down.

Geralt wasn’t coming.

But... He would be.

Even if only after Jaskier was gone.

Writhing as much as he physically could - distract him, distract him, don’t let him realise - Jaskier twisted his right arm toward himself, as with his left, he pushed at the sorcerer’s face, and he was almost there, he almost had it-

His fingers reached, weakly, far too weakly, towards his chest.

The sorcerer pushed his left arm down.

Jaskier couldn’t resist him.

But he almost had it.

Almost.

There.

The faint, rumbling breeze, accompanied by the faint smell of ozone, that signified a portal opening registered in his senses as his griffin medallion tumbled from his hand, quietly, to the floor.

And then, Jaskier surrendered, losing the fight well and truly, and strong, uncaring hands pulled him through the portal as consciousness deserted him.

Chapter Text

The world was too much.

It was eerie, insofar as Kaer Seren had always been too quiet, too empty, the echoes of all the boys and men - the Griffin witchers that called the keep their home - and the wrongness of the hollow keep being too loud for Julian made his stomach churn... That, or he still hadn’t recovered quite as much from the mutagens as he’d thought.

He screwed his eyes shut tighter, focusing on his too-loud breathing, the slow heartbeat that hammered in his chest far too audible for his liking. It was better, he supposed, to focus on what was meant to be there in the first place - and the sharp, whistling through-draughts that filled the halls, too empty to be maintained rigorously enough, it seemed, to prevent them.

The ambient sounds that he’d previously been deaf to were drowning him, almost, and he’d laugh about how pathetically obvious his and Coën’s supposed sneaking must have been if he wasn’t so laughably weak and helpless.

Helpless.

That was what he was.

The worried, almost frantic exchanges between Erland and Keldar had long since ceased, and the silence was either a good sign or a very, very bad one.

Kaer Seren was a bloody witcher keep.

Julian was under no illusion as to which eventuality was more likely.

He’d long moved past expecting any kind of reassurance, not daring to hope that Coën would be brought up to their room, not after what he’d heard. Theirs had been a large cohort - thirty boys, and the number made sense, given the great, empty keep, with not enough instructors to oversee more than one class at a time.

Thirty boys, and Julian had been there to see twenty-eight die (not personally, the reek of bodily fluids and rot did get to you after a while, but he had known twenty-eight now-dead would-be witchers, which was the point) - it really had been a massive stroke of luck, in fact, that the two survivors of the first round had been himself and Coën.

It seemed that his luck had finally run out.

Julian curled in on himself even more, pressing his face into the blankets and breathing in, uncaring as to how each new sensation, each new texture and sound and smell, was like a dam being burst, crushing him under immense weight.

The blankets smelled of Coën, of the sweet apple-honey-rust scent that Julian had never much been able to properly appreciate, before - he knew what Coën smelled like, how could he not, when they shared a living space the way they did? But he hadn’t been able, before, to isolate what it was.

There was a chance that Coën was alive and well, of course - but it was a chance that Julian wouldn’t be hedging his fucking bets on, not when he knew all too well the lethality of the trials - that, and the fact that he wasn’t stupid, it was written in his goddamn books that the Trials had always been the responsibility of mages, not the witchers themselves, and it didn’t take a fucking genius to put two and two together and figure that that was why the death rate had been triple what it usually was in their cohort.

The salty smell of tears was seeping into the blankets, and his eyes were wet around the edges. Julian kept them screwed tightly shut.

Fuck Erland, and fuck Keldar, fuck this whole damn School.

Coën hadn’t - Coën hadn’t even done anything wrong. He’d been, in Julian’s opinion, the best trainee in the keep - insofar as that actually meant anything with only two trainees in the keep as a rule.

But.

The point was.

The point was that he was probably dead.

Julian... Julian didn’t know what to do with that. He just... He didn’t. He didn’t know.

He was a witcher, sort of. He should have known how to fucking deal.

Should have.

Didn’t.

And then, the door was pushed open.

The door was pushed open, and Julian froze, because the the scent that overwhelmed his senses now was one of rot and potions and fruits on a summer day, of honey and the orange rust that gathered on the old swords that Erland had them cleaning whenever they’d taken the piss a tad too much, it was Coën.

Coën was alive.

Julian would have laughed, if he could have - but it felt like there was something sharp and jagged stuck in his throat. Of course Coën was alive - he was Coën, he had to be, why had Julian ever doubted him in the first place? Perhaps his brain was still fucking... fucking potion-addled, or whatever. Sweet Melitele above.

“Alright there, Julian?” Erland asked, and there it was, the awkward, post-trials kindness in the man that Julian remembered from the first time round.

“You’re a fucking asshole,” he muttered in return, and Erland snorted, depositing a limp, pale Coën beside him with a gentleness that was wholly uncharacteristic of a witcher.

Julian’s relief, however, was short-lived, lasting approximately only up until he actually took a look at his friend.

Melitele, he was so much paler than he should have been. The little scars on his cheeks, the remnants of a childhood illness, stood out even more starkly against his brown skin, so papery and fragile and delicate, in all the ways that he shouldn’t have been. It was as if Coën had had the life drained out of him, all the warmth and colour sapped from his very being, leaving only a hollow shell behind.

Blood had dried on his eyelids, the edges lined by a ring of dull, brownish-red that someone hadn’t quite managed to wipe away properly, and his breathing was far too shallow, and he was cold, so cold, Julian could tell even with the distance between them.

He dragged himself up, into a seated position, ignoring the protests of his still-weak body, to properly level a glare at Erland, ignoring the sudden dizziness that overwhelmed him.

“What’s wrong with him?”

Erland raised an eyebrow. “He’s just gone through the trials, Julian, some level of weakness, of injury, is to be expected.”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Julian hissed, taking care to keep his voice low. “I bloody know you’re weak after the trials, but that’s- Coën’s past fucking weak. He’s barely fucking alive, and you’re gonna tell me what the fuck you did to him!”

It simply wasn’t done, in Kaer Seren, to talk to Erland of Larvik so casually and disrespectfully, but Julian was well past the point of caring.

“Julian.”

“If I weren’t a witcher- if I weren’t so close to him, I’d have thought he was dead, and I heard you shouting, in the trials! So, what the fuck did you do to him, you... you barmy old codger?”

“A temper tantrum, Julian? If you’ve recovered enough for your caterwauling, you’ve recovered quite enough to run the walls.”

“Answer my question!” Julian swallowed. “Please. Answer my question. He’s my best friend. Then I’ll run the walls for you. Sir. But I... I want to know. I have to.”

Erland sighed, the kind of long-suffering sigh that was primarily reserved for misbehaving children or rowdy baby witchers - one that, Julian knew, was difficult to elicit from the man, but one that he’d found being directed at him on more than one occasion.

“Sir-”

“It’s likely not what you’re thinking.”

Julian raised an eyebrow disbelievingly, and pointed a now-steady finger at his own eyes - because fuck, if he was going to get pulled up for wanton disrespect anyways... in for a copper, in for a crown, as they said, in all those crown-using countries.

“I’ll admit I made a mistake there, boy, but that wasn’t the case with Coën. You know the risks, of the body rejecting the mutagens, and that was what happened here - some kind of adverse reaction, but he pulled through.”

“Pulled through?” Julian hissed. “He looks like he’s dead.”

“I assure you, he’s very much alive.”

“Alive’s not fucking- he’s not- you-”

“Julian,” Erland said, golden eyes narrowed. “Your arguing accomplishes nothing. Something that is done cannot be undone, most certainly not the Trials, but it can be fixed. You can continue to hiss and spit and cause both yourself and Coën discomfort, or you can be silent and help him.”

A thousand retorts sat on the tip of Julian’s tongue - but you don’t know shit-all about the trials, we both know that it was the mages who did them being the main one - but he stayed quiet, contenting himself with simply glaring at the Griffin Grandmaster.

“What do I do then?” he asked, not without a note of petulance in his voice. “Sir.”

“Monitor his condition. Alert myself or Keldar if it worsens. Don’t make any unnecessary noise, for the obvious reasons. But, like all boys after the Trials, he should recover in time, unassisted.”

Like all the boys you didn’t fuck it up for, rather.

“Yes, sir,” Julian said, his glare getting no less poisonous as he acquiesced, dipping his head politely enough for it to be mocking.

“You’re running the walls before dawn for a week, mind, Julian.”

“Understood.”

He hoped that his unrepentant glare was evident to his mentor, who simply checked Coën’s limp form once more, brief as can be, before leaving.

Julian flipped him off.

Coën’s shallow breaths filled the room, once Erland had left and there was nothing else louder left to focus on, and Julian found himself growing anxious again.

Recover unassisted, his arse. He knew what it was like to come out from after the Trial of the Dreams - he’d been disoriented, sure, and overwhelmed, and everything had felt, everything still felt, like Julian was trapped at the bottom of the ocean, being crushed under the weight of his surroundings - but.

But Coën just looked like death had paid him a visit during the Trial, had paid him a visit and intended on staying, and Julian was afraid.

Witchers didn’t get scared. Witchers weren’t supposed to feel bloody anything, according to the general populace, because Julian had, in fact, heard at least some of the more popular rumours about witchers before his shitlord father had dumped him at Kaer Seren, but here he was.

Perhaps Erland and Keldar really had royally fucked up with the Trials, if Coën was dying and Julian was still feeling things.

They should hire a mage again.

“Coën?” Julian whispered.

The deep breathing of his best friend, his only friend, didn’t break its quiet, haggard rhythm enough to answer him.

Well.

Far be it from Julian to be the one to disturb the steady, shallow pattern of inhalation and exhalation that told him that Coën was at least still alive. Fuck it, he’d listen to the awful sound till the end of his days, as long as it didn’t stop.

Julian startled awake to the sound of a cough.

He’d become something of an incredibly light sleeper after the Trials, though whether that was a direct effect of the mutagens, or more closely linked to the fact that every sound had tripled in loudness, Julian didn’t know. The point was, he’d gotten used to stirring, cracking his slit-pupilled eyes open, at the slightest of noises, or movements in his periphery.

The odd thing this time was that he hadn’t meant to fall asleep to begin with, and it really was a sloppy mistake to make, falling asleep without one’s knowledge or any kind of intent to do so - that was something he should have gotten out of the habit of doing before the Trial of the Grasses, even, foolish as it was of a witcher to let his guard down like that - but what with the utter post-Trials misery that he was currently in the midst of, he felt like once was a forgivable mistake.

And, he’d jumped at the sound of a cough, blinking swiftly back into the world of the living, so it was, by that metric, doubly forgivable. Erland couldn’t have him run the walls, or rearrange the library shelves, or whatever it was that he decided would be the best retribution for Julian’s sloppiness this week, for a misdeed he was unaware of, so it was fine.

But, he’d startled awake to a cough.

Ice started to pool in his stomach as he realised that the cough that had awoken him hadn’t been his own.

“Coën?”

Julian’s voice was a tad shriller than he’d meant it to come out, but still quiet, and he shifted his attention to look at his friend, lying on the blankets a good way away from where he usually slept relative to Julian, what with all the post-Trials sensitivity.

Coën had turned, of his own volition, onto his side, facing away from Julian.

“Coën?”

His breathing was deeper, now, and some of the greyish, deathly undertone had receded from his clammy, brown skin, as far as Julian could see, at least... The back of Coën’s neck, if nothing else, looked to be recovering at least a tad.

Getting to his feet as quietly as he could - which was fairly so, given all his training - Julian tiptoed closer to Coën, trying to gain a better angle of observation, his footfalls disconcertingly loud on the stone floor.

Coën’s breathing was still far too slow, far too even, for him to have awoken... Julian had to assume that he was still unconscious.

Brushing sweat-sticky strands of his hair from his eyes - and it really had gotten long, he needed to tie it back properly - he strained his neck, trying to peer closer without disturbing his friend, without getting close enough for his presence to be disruptive.

Coën was looking far better - like he was asleep, maybe a bit ill, but resting, no longer seeming to be on the brink of bloody death, the way he had been a few... what was it, a few hours earlier?

Alright. He’d bite. Maybe Erland had been onto something with the whole he should recover in time, unassisted thing. Given that the man had been around since the dawn of time (or the first witcher experiments, whatever, the difference was fundamentally the same), that wasn’t particularly surprising, but Erland had been known to make mistakes before.

Well.

Julian had known him to make one mistake.

The point was, there was a precedent for Erland of Larvik not being all-knowing, and Julian wasn’t just going to blindly go along with everything. The last time he’d done that, he’d ended up at a witcher keep.

It was an odd thought, actually, just how long he’d been at Kaer Seren. He was so much older, so much taller now, than when he’d arrived - and fuck, he was technically a witcher, now, wasn’t he? A proper one. Something inhuman, something other.

That was a fun musing.

When he left Kaer Seren, again - provided that he was one of the witchers who did, in fact, leave Kaer Seren, because he was under no illusion that he couldn’t still manage to find a way to accidentally off himself, slip on the pendulums, for example, or end up facing off against something truly heinous in the mountains...

When he left Kaer Seren, it would be as something unwelcome amongst the rest of humanity, and wasn’t that charming? All this training, all this pain, and he’d come out of it stronger and ready to get swindled on monster contracts by aldermen who didn’t like him and spat on by any hapless villager he had a hand in aiding.

He knew the stories.

Sighing as quietly as he could, Julian leant against the stone wall of the room and slid down to the floor, pulling his knees up to his chest, eyeing Rook’s lute in the corner.

It was a bit sad, he supposed, that he’d never be able to learn to play it properly.

But monster contracts would probably make for brilliant songs, on the other hand. There was a thought that was far more fun to think about. The best songs were always the ones that told some kind of story, of battle and triumph - what was a successful contract, if not a triumph?

The post-Trial blues were getting to him... were those even a thing? Eh. It was all neither here nor there, really.

Coën coughed again, and Julian leapt to his feet on pure instinct, as his friend moved in his sleep again.

“Coën? Are you awake?”

Julian’s voice was as quiet as he could make it and Coën stirred and moved just a little bit, just enough to signal that Julian was being too loud.

It was the most wonderful thing that Julian had ever seen. Standing, stock-still, by the doorway, he simply pressed his hands to his mouth - ostensibly to stop any sound from escaping, but he had its doubts about its effectiveness - and just. Stood.

Coën was going to be okay.

The walls of Kaer Seren were... Julian had no idea how to put it.

Well, he did, but it was so unpoetic. None of the descriptors he could ascribe to the experience really felt right, it was a damn shame, and a waste of his literary talents, to boot.

The thing was, the walls were really fucking loud.

And sure, he’d run the walls before - often - hundreds of times since arriving at Kaer Seren. Nobody had actually fallen off, in his cohort, though two boys had come close - Tibor and Marton, he knew, despite the fact that he didn’t actually care about the dead boys in his cohort, or their names, or their faces that were beginning to look every-younger in his mind’s eye.

Tibor - a grumpy kid, a year or so older than Julian had been, always hanging around with bloody Andras, of all people - had overshot on the corner, he remembered, he’d thought he had more space to make the turn than he actually did, and almost slipped off of the edge of the wall, only catching himself on the crenellated wall at the last moment.

Truth be told, Julian had no idea why Kaer Seren, a witcher keep, would need a crenellated wall in the first place, but it had been luck for Tibor that it did, otherwise he’d have died a bit earlier and a lot less painfully than he actually did.

Marton, on the other hand, had undershot a corner, and ended up clinging to the opposite wall - somehow - and climbing back up again. It had been mildly impressive to watch.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was that now, unlike the last time he’d run them, before the Trial of the Dreams, the walls were almost unbearably loud now.

The whistling of the mountain wind was a sound that Julian would have described as deafening, had he not been so acutely aware of the distant howling and calls of every single creature on the damn mountain and probably the next one over, not to mention the echoing of his footsteps on the wall itself.

He would rather have been rearranging an entire ten shelves of library books with old Keldar huffing over his shoulders, because this was utter hell.

Though, he supposed he had been given fair warning, and he knew very well that it wasn’t done to yell at Erland of Larvik the way he had (“familiarity breeds contempt,” his father had once told him, a distinct sneer curving up the right side of his face, and how it burned to realise that, in this particular situation at least, he was right), even with the excuse of the Trials in his arsenal.

His breathing was still even as he made his third circuit, the sun barely peeking out from behind the horizon. Just focus on putting one foot in front of the other, don’t focus on the world, just run the bloody wall.

It was so much easier said than done, not to focus on the single loudest sound that Julian had ever heard in his life.

“Alright, boy!”

Julian skidded to a halt, peering down into the courtyard, where old Keldar had called for him.

“I think I’m supposed to keep going!” Julian yelled back.

“I’m the one who decides that.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s Erland!”

“Boy, are you sure that you want to be picking fights in your situation?”

Julian grinned to himself, and leant further over the inside edge of the wall, fixing old Keldar well and truly within his sights.

“I’m arguing the case in favour of my punishment, old man, so I’d say - yeah.”

“Get off the wall before I Aard you off.”

Julian laughed. “Would you actually do that? Actually?”

“Normally not until I’m sure you know how to land, but I’ll make an exception for you.”

“That’s so sweet of you!”

Keldar growled. “Get off the damn wall, Julian.”

“Say please.”

The stream of Igni that swept past Julian, to the left enough of his person that it was ineffective as anything but a warning, let him know that he was testing Keldar’s patience, and, with a huff, Julian started to clamber down from the wall.

No need to end up serving two punishments at the same time, after all.

He hit the ground with a soft thump, dropping the last length of the wall, and twirled round gracefully to face Keldar, quirking a brow, and shaking his head to get his hair out of his face.

“Your hair tie’s come loose.”

“I noticed,” he huffed, as he started after the older witcher, pulling the fabric tie from his hair completely to fix it. “So, what’ll it be today? More obscure and increasingly ridiculous signs? Alchemy? Quizzing us on the bestiary again?”

Keldar snorted. “Better have too many signs for too many purposes than not enough.”

“Is that experience talking?”

“This keep doesn’t have enough dirty halls to keep up with your insolence, boy.”

Julian quirked an eyebrow. He didn’t much understand Keldar’s proclivity for referring to the trainees as boys - unless they’d squirrelled a secret other cohort away in the underground levels, or somewhere, there were only two boys in the keep to begin with, and Julian was not a particularly difficult name to remember... neither was Coën, but he supposed the elderly did have their fair share of memory problems.

“Come on, Keldar, sir, tell me a story,” Julian needled. “Did you ever have to use George to escape a hardy monster?”

“Geo-”

“Yeah, the Sign of George! Inflicts temporary blindness on an enemy for as long as it’s held, you know the one.”

Julian smirked up at the old witcher, who glared back down at him.

“You mean, the Sign of-”

“George. I renamed it, it’s called George now.”

“Melitele save me,” Keldar murmured.

“So, did you ever make a harrowing escape thanks only to the sign of George? Because, let me tell you, Axii seems so much easier for... well, anything you might use my good friend George for.”

Julian fell into step beside his mentor - a classic flaunting of his lack of etiquette, the Griffins had a thousand rules for propriety, and of course, the old rule of people boasting lower status being required to walk behind those above them unless otherwise invited figured the list.

Then again, if you asked him, he’d say that trying to properly enforce propriety with a grand total of two students was a failed endeavour to begin with. Keldar had, at least, stopped reacting too strongly to Julian’s casual shows of disrespect.

It was somewhat disappointing, but at least he was scrubbing less floors.

“We’re going over the bestiary alphabetically,” Keldar snapped.

Julian shrugged. The threat didn’t faze him - he’d always had a good memory, a good head for memorisation, it was why he could be so comfortable in half slacking off all the time without increasing the likelihood that his apathy would get him killed swiftly on the Path. Much.

Too, whilst it might have been incredibly petty of him, he did rather enjoy throwing Keldar for a loop. It was one of his favourite hobbies, alongside the lute he hadn’t touched since the night before the Trials.

“No stories, then?”

“Not with that attitude, boy.”

Julian hummed, before overtaking Keldar in speed completely, wandering down the halls at a far brisker pace than his mentor, but slowly enough that it was still technically a walk. Mainly because jogging through the halls was an activity more befitting the younger boys, the pre-Dreams cohorts... if there had been any.

Gods, trying to keep a hierarchy amongst a grand total of two students was as difficult as it was stupid and pointless. They could bring back hierarchy when they had another cohort, it was simple.

That said, Julian was making an effort not to run in the halls, if only because tiring oneself out at the literal crack of dawn in Kaer Seren was an abysmally stupid thing to do, and even he, a well-known curator and executor of abysmally stupid deeds and misdeeds, could recognise the reasons it would be unwise.

Or reason, rather, in the singular. One tired mistake could mean the difference between life and death, given the nature of the things they were dealing with. Whilst they’d been lucky enough to only suffer one loss in their cohort before the Trials, before Julian had even arrived at the keep, it had still been an easily preventable casualty, and between that and the older witchers’ many, many anecdotes, the fear of utter incompetence was well and truly instilled in Julian’s soul.

Not enough that he’d, say, conduct himself properly in his lessons, of course, but it was there.

Coën was waiting for him in the library, watching him through odd eyes that were no longer squinting.

And Julian did mean, odd.

“Coën, my dearest and beloved brother-in-arms,” Julian greeted, striding through their doors and making his way over to him, clambering over three inconveniently-situated desks in the process and depositing himself near enough to his friend that there was no mistaking his egregious violation of personal space - one that earned him a warm ruffle of the hair he’d just got done tying back again.

The older boy’s lips twitched up in a smile in response. “Julek.”

“Are you aware that your sclera are red, by the way?”

“Well, fuck me running, I hadn’t noticed!” Coën’s sarcasm was heavy enough that Julian couldn’t possibly miss it, but he ignored it most ardently anyways.

“I figured someone ought to tell you, then, so you’re welcome.”

“You’re a little shit.”

“It’s my finest and most redeeming quality.”

“Sadly enough for you, it does seem to be.”

“Hey!” Julian shoved him, earning his hair another mussing. “So are the eyes a temporary thing, or...”

Coën huffed, rubbing his cheek with one of the hand not currently committing an honest-to-fucking-Melitele crime against Julian’s hair.

“See, Julek, you’d think so, but...”

“Unbelievable.”

“It’s not-”

“It’s un-fucking-believable, Coën. How in all the eleven hells do you cock up that badly? What possible circumstances could-”

“Julek, calm down.”

Julian squirmed a little more at that, just to be contrarian. “No, I’m not done being angry on your behalf, Coën. They screwed up your eyes!”

“Julek. It’s only a... a cosmetic oddity.”

“Which makes it okay?” Julian hissed, suddenly a lot more acutely aware of what, exactly, the twenty-eight lost others in their cohort were emblematic of.

Hint, it wasn’t Erland and Keldar’s amazing Trial-administration techniques.

“Julek, what’s done is done,” Coën growled back. “And I’d rather you not... soapbox about me the way you’re trying to.”

The door creaked as it opened for Keldar to enter, but neither boy paid him any heed.

“I’m sorry for giving a shit, then!”

“Julek. Julek, listen to me. It was a bad reaction, it could have happened to anyone. It’s water under the bridge, don’t... Don’t burn the bridge over this.”

“That’s a shit malaphor,” Julian sniped. “And you can’t write it off as a coincidence, not when the three-in-ten survival rate wasn’t even three in bloody ten for us, it was less than one.”

“So now, you suddenly give a shit about our cohort? After all these years? Of course you do, now that you have something to preach about,” Coën snarled, perhaps a tad angrier, more venomously than he’d meant to, or perhaps Julian had finally worn his patience all the way down.

“I’m not-”

“You are, you utter dick. Hypocrisy, thy name is Julek bloody Pankratz.”

“What, now I’m suddenly not allowed to be mad about the fact that people got hurt and died,” Julian threw his hands up in a gesture of poorly-exaggerated frustration, “because it looks disingenuous?”

Coën sighed, the wind leaving his sails. “Julek, I don’t mean... Damn it. You can be mad about the Trials, of course you can - I’m mad about them too, I’m mad that they’re so bloody lethal. But...”

“But what?” Julian growled, twisting the fabric of his sleeve in his fingers.

“You didn’t care about our cohort at the Grasses - and it’s... they’re- they were, they were people, too, they were kids. It feels... disrespectful of you to only bring them up as a tragic example when you’ve got a point that needs proving... Julek?”

Julian glared off into the distance, focusing on anything he could that wasn’t Coën.

Sure, their cohort had been full of assholes that had pushed him around in the handful of months that they’d all been around together at Kaer Seren, what with Julian having arrived the latest and being one of the scrawniest boys there and thus practically painting an advertisement for what an easy target he’d be on his head, but that didn’t mean he didn’t care that they’d died. It was why he brought them up - because more of them had died than should have.

Forget that - it was the fact that they’d all bloody died in the first place.

Sure, maybe he hadn’t given all that much thought to it earlier, but... But, thinking he’d lost Coën to the Trials had been something of an eye-opener for him.

Was that selfish of him? Was that Coën’s point? That he only started to give a rat’s arse about the Trials and their death rate and their dangers when he’d personally stood to lose someone close to him, when Coën himself had gotten hurt rather than some dick who’d shoved him around from behind when he was paired up with one of his mates in fencing practice?

But surely, that was better than continuing not to care at all?

“Julek, hey, are you alright?”

“Can’t I care about our fucking cohort now?”

Coën sighed, and put an arm around his shoulders. “Julek, that’s not what I said.”

“Then what-”

“That it’s disingenuous to only bring them up when you need to prove a point and spend the rest of your time not really giving a shit - and I know what you said to Andras, my accusation’s not...”

“Yeah,” Julian said. “But I don’t- I’m not happy they’re dead, I’m not...”

“I know, Julek, I know.”

“It’s just... They knew that they didn’t know how to do the Trials properly, it literally says in our own bloody books in our own fucking library that it wasn’t their responsibility, and people got hurt, you got hurt, Coën, your eyes...”

Coën chuckled at that, giving Julian’s shoulder a squeeze. “You know, you can stop rubbing it any time now.”

“Fuck,” Julian hissed. “Sorry.”

“Eh, bygones. Anyways, what a wonderful teaching moment this was.”

“What did it teach?”

Shifting into a more comfortable, more relaxed position on the bench, Coën grinned at him. “That baby witchers are shit philosophers.”

“I’m an excellent philosopher.”

“As good a philosopher as you are a lutist,” Coën smirked, nodding sagely, and Julian threw a book at him - a book that the older boy caught with effortless ease.

“You brute!”

It was at this point that Keldar finally decided to make his presence known, clearing his throat and breaking up the conversation, that had once again turned light-hearted.

“Boys, as interesting as your musings on the ethics of witcher Trials are,” Keldar said, in the most disinterested tone that Julian had ever heard come from anyone, “we are not here to engage in idle chatter.”

Julian huffed. “Could have fooled me.”

“I’d recommend that you save that sharp wit for the differences between a fleder and a garkain.”

“You always ask the differences between fleders and garkains, but an interesting conversation is unique.”

Keldar snorted, crossing his arms, glaring down at Julian with narrowed golden eyes. “Haven’t we wasted enough time with your idle prattling, boy? I ask that you be able to list the difference between fleders and garkains in detail because the difference between knowing them and not knowing them can be the difference between life and death - it often is.”

Julian opened his mouth to make an inopportune remark, and closed it again, before glancing at Coën.

“Julek, why do I get the feeling that you’re about to stick your foot in your mouth with the speed of an alp and the force of an enraged alghoul?”

His voice was quiet, barely audible, and Julian only shrugged at him, offering a half-hearted smirk.

“Right, it’s because that’s exactly what you’re about to do, of course. Of course! Julek, I love you, but you’re a fucking idiot.”

Turning his attention back to Keldar, who was regarding him with the kind of wariness that he reserved only for Julian’s specific, usual brand of nonsense and time-wasting, he cleared his throat and spoke.

“Sir?”

“Out with it.”

“Why didn’t you get a mage to perform the Trials?”

Keldar stiffened.

“Only,” Julian continued, because he wanted answers and wasn’t above making any conversation he took part in spectacularly uncomfortable, “what with us only having one cohort, it wasn’t that big of a recruitment pitch.”

“And an inexperienced mage would do better than witchers who have been aiding in the process for centuries?” Keldar scoffed.

“A mage from another school,” Julian clarified, glaring. “I know for a fact that Kaer Seren and Kaer Morhen are on good terms with each other, you could have just-”

“No.”

Keldar’s tone was sure and firm, and more final than anything Julian had ever heard in his life before, and Coën furrowed his brow in the way that he did when he was trying to piece together a puzzle, his mouth pulling up at the right corner as his face scrunched up in concentration.

He’d caught something Julian had, himself, missed.

Naturally, then, he pressed on. “Why not?”

“Imagine, if you will, a tank,” Keldar said, and that struck Julian as so incredibly wrong, because old Keldar was a man of facts and solid knowledge, with little appreciation for metaphor or hyperbole. “Imagine a tank, a tank that contains a great many aquatic specimens of various, peaceful creatures, that all thrive within it.”

Julian bit back a snide remark about the quality of metaphor, the fact that Keldar was mapping the Kaer Seren witchers onto a literal bucket of beasts, that he knew would only curtail the explanation.

“The tank, however, has a problem with disease. At first, the people that owned it decided to remove and treat the diseased fish themselves, individually - they at least managed to do this efficiently and reasonably amongst themselves. But then, at one point, one of those in charge of the tank decides that perhaps bloodletting the specimens would help. And thus, leeches were added to the tank”

If the scorn in Keldar’s voice hadn’t been so evident, then the sentiment would have gotten across either way - assumptions were as far from a science as it got, but having mages-who-helped-in-the-trials demoted to leeches in the tank metaphor, and the fool who introduced them be some kind of idiot that believed in bloodletting fish, spoke clearly enough of contempt.

That was a pretty glaring clue, in Julian’s mind, as to what, exactly, had happened.

“But then the leeches don’t stop at draining the diseased specimens, they instead suck them all dry as leeches are wont to, and they begin to do harm. They overtake the tank, they disrupt the lives of the specimens in their insatiable desire to feast, and this keeps going on and on, the specimens and observers both powerless against the damn infestation - have you ever tried to pry leeches from a tank of specimens?”

“Sorry to interrupt-” a glare- “but what does that correlate to in real life?”

Keldar sighed. “They - the mages, that is, established themselves as superior, commandeered our resources, and thought themselves the authority on the school, did their damndest to get us to obey their orders and fall at their heels like dogs. We didn’t want to let them walk all over us, and they didn’t like that, and conflict arose.”

Julian pointedly didn’t mention how this mapped onto the metaphor somewhat confusingly. He could be tactful at times.

“And so, we fought, the Griffins and the mages, and you can see the aftermath.” A scoff, a laugh with no humour in it. “We were decimated. Of the senior witchers, those who taught at Kaer Seren, only Erland and myself survived. The cohorts we had in training there - that, now that was cruel. We had but a handful of trainees survive, and only from amongst the oldest. They hunted us down on the path for a few years after the fact. And the catalyst for this?”

The old witcher drew a sharp breath, anger evident in his face.

Julian just watched him.

“We wouldn’t hand over access to our damn library - it was, and still is, rather cleverly warded, and that show of apparent disrespect, on our part, they said, was apparently too much for Kaer Seren’s leeches. And so what we wouldn’t give, they tried to force from us. The wards around the library held, at least - we didn’t let the power-hungry tyrants in for a reason.”

“Shit,” Coën said, softly, likely without meaning to.

“Indeed. And given that it took the nigh-destruction of our school to get rid of the damn mages, we are in no hurry to let them back in. Would you put the leeches back in the tank, boy?”

Julian blinked and shook his head.

“How long ago did this happen?” Coën croaked.

And - gods, Julian knew something bad had happened to leave Kaer Seren such a hollow shell, but this... Who slaughtered children in response to being denied?

“Around two decades, give or take,” Keldar said. “But we have our texts, our knowledge, our alchemical formulae. We can rebuild - the more witchers we put out on the Path, the more we can call back to help put our numbers back up. I won’t bore you with the details - that’s between Erland and myself. Many a late night was spent in discussion - it’s enough to go through it once. And, if I find this digression was due to your lack of ability to distinguish between fleders and garkains, then I remind you that the floors are in need of mopping by foolish trainees.”

Julian saluted him smartly, and kept his mouth shut as Keldar busied himself with revisiting material, devising questions out loud.

He shared a look with Coën, an indescribable emotion passing between them - something slightly to the left of sorrow but not exactly mourning.

Keldar’s revelation hung heavy in the air, a kind of belated realisation of something that had, on the subconscious level at least, been know, but the true meaning of which was only now beginning to set in - the Griffin School had been reduced from an entire keep full of men to this - to two impossibly old witchers and two trainees how couldn’t possibly understand what they had lived.

Or something.

But there was knowing something logically, and there was knowing it, and Julian couldn’t help but wonder how many of the abundant notes and amendments in the margins of the books they studied were in the hands of a witcher that had died over such a petty squabble.

And god, was it petty - denying entry to Kaer Seren’s library? When, exactly, had the mages offered their notes to the Griffins? He was fairly certain that they’d rather gut themselves with silver than let Erland step one foot in Aretuza or Ban fucking Ard.

Either way, Julian had little desire left to joke around with the newfound knowledge that countless men had given their lives to protect the room he now sat in.

It wouldn’t do to dwell on it, but dwell on it he would. Gods, this whole thing was a shit-show from start to finish. And, what was more, it had been paid for in lives - some innocent, some less so, but a person was a person, a life was a life.

There were so many better things to die for.

The gods only knew what Julian would die for, but he only hoped it would be better than... this.

In the end, wasn’t that all he could do? Look back at the past, the mistakes and injustices that had preceded him, acknowledge that, even if he did anything perfectly, he could find himself on the wrong side of a sword by sheer circumstance, and hope?

It was depressing.

Fitting, he supposed, for a witcher. They weren’t really made for great things, though they definitely were made for some purpose.

An inglorious one, at that - had those who’d died at Kaer Seren done better than those who had ended up in a no-name ditch, trying to kill some farmer’s beast without enough supplies for a quarter of the coin it was worth?

It wasn’t worth the price, the effort, the training, not to Julian’s mind, but that didn’t much matter to anyone. Julian simply sat, focusing on Coën’s slow, steady heartbeat beside him, silent.

Considering.

Chapter Text

The room smelt of alcohol, poison, and the faint ozone of magic, and Jaskier was gone.

Geralt had not, initially, clocked that anything sinister was afoot - he was perceptive, absolutely, but the way of the world demanded that he ignore information from time to time, if for no other reason than for the sake of his sanity. He was a witcher. If he let himself get overly suspicious of everyone who turned vaguely shifty around him, he’d end up trying to unravel the ulterior motives of the entire continent.

Constant vigilance simply wasn’t sustainable, and nothing short of it would have clued him in on the fact that this specific alderman wasn’t being a contrary bastard on a whim, but because of some sort of conspiracy to come after the bard - and there had been a conspiracy, given how the faint, rust-adjacent smell of strychnine, of all things, hung around the damn innkeeper just faintly enough that Geralt could make it out.

Sparse enough to be entirely harmless, but present enough for him to notice it - she’d not been properly exposed, but she’d definitely handled the poison.

Bloody fuck. Had the entire town been in on this?

That wasn’t important. He could get answers from the innkeep, and the alderman, after he combed through the scene.

The poison... it had been strychnine and something else, the dull, heavy-but-faint stench of what could have been, likely was, curare - a mixture of two drugs with opposing effects. Strychnine caused convulsions, stimulated the nerves, though a witcher would have a certain degree of resistance to its effects... curare, on the other hand, did the opposite. It blocked something in your nerves, caused paralysis.

It was a strange mixture, until it was brought up that strychnine could be absorbed very well through the skin, and curare could not.

Of course, curare couldn’t just slip in after the strychnine, ordinarily, but it was nothing a little bit of magic couldn’t fix.

Geralt really hated alchemists.

Two short swords - Jaskier’s short swords, he’d looted them from an assassin months ago, back when he’d had Geralt cauterise his shoulder wound - lay strewn about the room, the walls and floor and everything in-between battered in the way that your surroundings get battered after a particularly intense scuffle.

Jaskier had put up a fight - a damn good one, too, apparently, what with the state of the room, which wasn’t exactly a surprise. The bard was hiding something, and the ability to hold his own in a fight was not unexpected, given the fact that he’d won at least one fight that Geralt knew of, the mortician way back when in a backwater town that oozed filth and disease.

Less expected was the gleaming medallion that lay so innocuously on the ground.

There was no mistaking what, exactly, it was - and the intricate carving on the little silver disk, hanging from a silver chain far more elaborate than the standard, denoted exactly what school the witcher who owned it came from.

Geralt picked the medallion up, the griffin head that was definitely far more intricate than the standard, and regarded it. Metal was notoriously shit at retaining any kind of scent, but the faint hint of sweat on this one was all Jaskier.

Which left him with two conclusions to draw.

Two ridiculous conclusions, because if Jaskier hadn’t - somehow - managed to get his hands on the medallion of one of the few Griffin witchers walking the Path, then he was a witcher himself, and the fact that someone had apparently gone through his potions was rather damning for the saner of those two options.

That, and then fact that it had been the room key, the fucking room key, that had been coated with enough strychnine to kill any human that held it long enough for their skin to begin to absorb the poison. If this had been Jaskier’s stupid secret, Geralt was going to punch his smug little blue-eyed bastard face the very next time he saw him.

A witcher.

It was ridiculous.

It was such a stupid secret to keep, too, such an idiotic thing to argue with someone who was also a witcher, and so fucking surreal, too, in the first place, that Jaskier, with his silks and his embroidery and Oxenfurt education would have been a trained monster-hunting mutant.

And it all made so much sense in hindsight.

The first time Geralt had felt that there might be something off with the bard was in the town where he’d killed the mortician, a few weeks into their acquaintanceship (Kaer Seren, Geralt thought, as he looked at the medallion, clearly wasn’t too big on subterfuge). The bard’s offhand remark about one of the townsfolk carrying the scent of cadavers on them, completely unacknowledged...

It had been odd.

But once was an accident.

Sometimes, things were just weird, and so Geralt had overlooked it. An awkward turn of phrase on the bard’s part was hardly worth the scrutiny, anyways, and they’d both had far bigger problems at the time.

Then, had come the contract with the nobleman - a contract that he’d taken, despite Jaskier’s protests, because it paid well and he needed the money. Of course there’d been more to the situation than met the eye, but coin was coin, and Geralt had a notoriously harder time accruing it as a witcher than Jaskier as a bard... something the bastard would have fucking known.

He hadn’t expected the assassins - people seldom did, given the nature of their jobs - and for a moment, he feared he’d lost the bard... But he hadn’t. Jaskier had survived, despite the fact that he really shouldn’t have, and if the circumstances were a tad bit off (they were very off, why would the last assassin stumble into the fray like that), it had been forgivable.

Twice was a coincidence.

And then came the griffin, and all of a sudden, Geralt couldn’t keep wilfully ignoring the signs that pointed to there being something very, very wrong with Jaskier’s demeanour, his entire persona of a hapless bard bleeding out from a thousand little cuts.

The already-stitched gash on his stomach, the disappearing scar - something that made so much more sense when one considered that, as a witcher, Jaskier would have many preexisting scars to hide under the glamour that he’d fully admitted to having - it had been the final nail in the coffin, the final big red flag that Geralt couldn’t ignore like he had the other two.

Thrice was a pattern.

And now, Geralt was standing in the middle of a wrecked room, one that he would only be paying for over his dead body, a Griffin medallion in his hand, the cloying scent of strychnine and the ozone of magic tainting the air, with what was most likely White Honey missing from amongst his potions.

Damn it.

Jaskier clearly hadn’t gone willingly - unless he’d staged this entire thing himself, but the likelihood of that was so ridiculously slim that Geralt barely considered it - and thus, he was likely in trouble.

It was nice to know that he hadn’t changed in that regard. Jaskier was a veritable magnet for trouble.

Less nice was the fact that he’d left his medallion behind. It was a sure-fire way to make sure that Geralt caught onto his secret - the secret that he’d been doubling down on protecting even in the fact of overwhelming evidence, not even an hour ago.

Well.

The whole situation had rapidly devolved into a massive shit-show, seemingly with no warning at all. Congratulations were in order, really, to thank Jaskier for keeping any information that could conceivably have been useful here from Geralt on purpose.

The idiot really should have known better.

But what was done was done, and now Geralt supposed it was up to him to pick up the pieces... and he would pick up the pieces, wouldn’t he, because he always ended up trying to fix other people’s messes. Witchers don’t get involved in the affairs of men, and all that... but perhaps he could get involved in the affairs of another bloody witcher, one who was apparently very good at songwriting.

Toss a Coin did seem a little bit more self-serving at the chorus, but that was hardly what Geralt should be focusing on.

It was time to have a discussion with a strychnine-serving innkeep and an especially contrary alderman. There had to have been some communication between parties to arrange the situation, and they were Geralt’s best bet for information.

Casting a last look around the scene, trying to pick up on anything else that might conceivably serve as a clue and landing on nothing beyond what he had already taken note of, Geralt shoved his belongings back into his pack and closed, it, and collected everything that hadn’t been in the room prior to Jaskier’s entering it (forgoing the poisoned key), short swords and all.

The bard would be paying him back for that White Honey, when Geralt found his miserable hide and dragged him out of whatever ridiculous mess he’d gotten himself into this time, though he did take note of the fact that the bard would have to had taken it before the fight, which meant that he’d held his own against his assailant as he waited for the potion to take effect, strychnine coursing through his veins.

It wasn’t anything their training didn’t prepare them for (and how odd it was, to refer to witcher training as their training), but he’d have expected time and circumstance to have dulled Jaskier’s skills more than it evidently had.

Then again, if he made a habit of getting himself into messes like this one, it wasn’t all that surprising.

Geralt gathered up their packs and left the room, walking down the hall with light footsteps, not letting his frustration show in his demeanour.

It wouldn’t do to freak the innkeep out, or to tip his hand. He needed to keep control of the situation.

Damn it all.

He had, at some point, come to care for Jaskier a bit more than he thought - and the man had apparently made a career out of being a dishonest, arrogant little shit.

The innkeep was waiting behind the counter when he returned, and immediately, she stiffened in posture when she saw him.

“Hello,” he said, simply and calmly.

“Melitele save me,” she breathed. “Ain’t it that he were supposed to get rid of you, too?”

Jaskier’s medallion was rapidly warming in his closed fist, and he bared his sharp teeth in something that could vaguely be misconstrued as a smile.

“Tell me about him.”

“Oh gods, oh, gods-”

“Calm down. I won’t hurt you. Not if you tell me who put you up to this.”

The innkeep’s eyes shifted around the room - looking for a way out. Scared.

“Just,” Geralt growled, “tell me who it was.”

“He- He came in, reeking of alcohol... a few hours before you came to town! Told me he’d give me five hundred crown if I slipped a key - a key what I weren’t to touch - to the bard in the green silks what was gonna show up later. I thought ‘im barmy!”

“And yet you did it.”

The innkeep sniffled. “Five hundred crown is five hundred crown!”

“What else? You thought he was after me.”

“I made conversation, it’s only polite! I asked him why he was here, he said he wanted to catch a witcher!”

“And you still went along with it. Knowing you were aiding him in causing harm.”

“I’d already taken the five hundred crown,” she cried, sniffing, her voice edging on a wail. Geralt could smell the salty tang of tears on the air.

“Focus. What did he look like?”

“Like a drunk. Ragged, unshaved, reekin’ of booze. Brown eyes, so dark they was almost black. Tan, messy hair, I don’t know! I don’t keep a picture book of everyone what comes through!”

Geralt filed that away, and considered the implications of her earlier statement.

“You said he wanted to catch a witcher.”

“Right!”

“His words?”

“I dunno, I can’t remember-”

Brow furrowed, Geralt bit back a growl. “But he said that it was a witcher he was after?”

“Aye, he did! That, I know he did.”

Interesting.

And, by interesting, he meant fuck every single aspect of this shitshow. Whoever had been after Jaskier hadn’t been after the bard, they’d been after whoever he was as a witcher, so whatever mess Jaskier had gotten himself into had been with the alter-ego that he had tried so hard - and so poorly - to hide.

By extension, that meant that Geralt wouldn’t be trying to piece together Jaskier’s tracks, but rather those of a Griffin witcher that he had no way of identifying.

Fuck.

This was ridiculous. If Jaskier had to go around getting kidnapped, he should at least have the decency to do so under his own identity. Geralt had nothing to base his investigation off of - just the fact that he was looking for a Griffin witcher who had bad blood with a mage - which was, as far as Geralt knew, fucking all of them.

This was going to be fun.

Time, however, waited for nobody, and so, Geralt gathered his thoughts and gave the innkeeper one last glare.

“The room’s been sent to shit,” Geralt told the innkeep as he turned and walked out of the establishment, to collect two horses from the stables, now, in the dead of night. “Spend your five hundred crowns on fixing that up.”

She cursed his name as he strode out of the door.

He’d make camp somewhere far away from the dingy establishment - he’d hardly give his patronage to an establishment that conspired to harm his barker, and the journey would give him time to consider his next move.

All the clues he had to Jaskier’s identity under that damn glamour of his was the medallion, but that wasn’t as much of a lost cause as it seemed - at least, he hoped it wasn’t. In the Wolf School at least, medallions were unique to each cohort, for whatever reason... It was a tradition, Geralt hadn’t questioned it, but it wasn’t too far-fetched to assume that it wasn’t unique to his school.

Either way, Jaskier had etched enough little flourishes into his medallion that it was definitely unique enough to be recognisable.

Winter had only just let up, too - and Kaer Seren was far further north than Kaer Morhen. It stood to reason that their trail down the mountain took longer to thaw out than his own did; all in all, if he started pushing north, it was likely that he could manage to catch a Griffin before they dispersed.

It was far, yes, but it was his only lead, and he could travel fast enough when he didn’t have a tag-along bard on foot behind him... Though, he supposed, if he did have Jaskier with him, he wouldn’t be pushing north.

Fuck.

This was a significant delay. He only hoped that Jaskier could hold out until he managed to identify him and track him down - or, he could try to see if he could glean any more information about the mage that had attacked them from the alderman that had held him up.

He could only hope that he’d glean something useful, something that would make the journey to Kovir entirely unnecessary.

Sighing, Geralt made his way towards the alderman’s rickety house.

Travelling with two horses and two packs had gotten very old, very fast. He resented Jaskier’s sudden steed-acquiring decisions, even if the man himself had no idea that he was going to be kidnapped so soon after meeting up with Geralt after the snows thawed.

It was still an inconvenience.

He’d made good time across the damn continent, not stopping for contract and making use of nature’s resources to keep himself and the horses looked-after, rather than contributing to the local economy of any one of the shithole towns he didn’t bother to stop in. In a week of far too much travel, taking a route as close to being as-the-crow-flies as he could and pushing the two mounts he’d been saddled with to their limits, he’d managed to get from Kaedwen to Kovir, and now the challenge lay in actually locating one of the Griffins.

He’d ended up asking around - something that had, historically, yielded piss-poor results for witchers - for any mention of, any information on the whereabouts of any members of his brother School as he travelled further and further into Kovir, painfully conscious of the time he was wasting.

And by gods, was he wasting time.

A witcher could take a week of captivity - more, even, they’d been trained to withstand extremes. Jaskier probably wasn’t in any mortal danger, if his captor had possessed any intent to kill him, he likely would have done it back in the inn he’d taken him from.

The bastard had probably already begun to formulate his own escape plan. He’d be fine.

Of course, Geralt couldn’t help but feel on edge. Every moment he spent dawdling, in fucking Kovir, no less, likely leagues away from where Jaskier was being held, was another moment his... his what? Travelling companion? Barker? Highly annoying, surprisingly clingy acquaintance? Either way, it was another moment that the bard - the bloody witcher bard - was at the moment of an individual who bore ill will towards him.

It had taken him days more to finally come up with a lead.

Geralt was a witcher, he wasn’t cut out for this kind of in-depth investigative work - his job was monsters, and he was very much invested in keeping it that way. Identifying a monster based on the evidence it left behind was one thing - something he could do very well, having been trained to do it his whole childhood - but picking one individual out of all the others on the continent was an exercise in futility. At least, it was from where he stood.

He’d finally caught the trail of a Griffin witcher after days dawdling and searching - how fucking easily this could all have been avoided if Jaskier had been just a tiny bit more forthcoming in the hour before he was kidnapped - and had immediately followed him.

Alright. It sounded a bit strange when he put it like that.

One of the towns he stopped in, only for long enough to gather information, had told him that a witcher had, indeed been around, a few days ago, before moving on.

They hadn’t, really, but Geralt had inferred it - from the calls of get out, mutant, and the muttered you’d have thought they’da learnt from the last one, and the fact that the old tracks of a man and a horse were still just barely present in the path - not the main one, the one that was very much off the beaten track. The one used mainly by witchers, bandits and various other types of unsavoury characters.

Getting anything done as a witcher was a pain. No wonder the rule that they weren’t to meddle in the affairs of men was official - Geralt was starting to think it had been put there to save them all a bit of time and frustration, more than anything else.

But, from there on, it was easy work tracking the witcher that Geralt could only hope was from the right fucking school. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry, so catching up with him was no issue, even given the fact that he was, once again, trying to wrangle two horses through the woods.

It was a good thing he liked them so much, horses, otherwise Jaskier’s would have been sold back in Kaedwen.

The tracks the witcher had left weren’t easy to follow.

Of course they weren’t, it wouldn’t do to invite trouble like that - Geralt had been on the receiving end of so many severe lectures on the importance of not making oneself out as a target in Kaer Morhen that he could almost recite them in his sleep.

The Griffins had definitely gone over that one, too.

Geralt still managed it, however - the witcher he was tailing wasn’t actively trying to conceal his path, which meant he had enough to work with by far. They may have been lectured on the importance of being inconspicuous, but they’d been actively trained to track down their quarries.

It had been almost two weeks since Jaskier had been taken from the inn, and Geralt would have cursed himself for wasting time if it wasn’t for the fact that he couldn’t actually make any headway in finding him before ascertaining who, exactly, he was finding.

He could have tried to puzzle out who might have known that Jaskier was a witcher under his glamour instead, taking that angle - but that was far riskier. It risked exposing Jaskier’s identity to people he did not know - damn near guaranteed it, in fact - and it risked drawing the attention of whoever it was that held Jaskier, if word got around (it definitely would have gotten around) that he was interfering in... whatever business they’d had with the bard.

This was safer. Witchers, at least, could be trusted to protect their own - Vipers and Cats not-fucking-withstanding, but they weren’t the focal point here.

Geralt may have been trained to track, but he had not been trained to manoeuvre two horses through the undergrowth, and he’d lost any kind of chance he’d had at stealth the moment they’d followed the other witcher’s route off the beaten path. He only hoped that whoever it was he was tracking would be understanding about his unorthodox approach - it did feel like he was armed with the excuse of a pretty solid set of extenuating circumstances.

Night was falling, and the tracks were getting alarmingly fresh and the whole situation was becoming far more of a problem, very rapidly. He didn’t much want any of his current company to be reflexively skewered by a witcher as he approached - generally, witchers didn’t track each other, so some ill will could usually be presumed in these situations.

Roach was, at the very least, well-behaved and quiet. Jaskier’s idiotically named horse - much like the man himself - seemed incapable of not making some kind of noise.

“Can you shut up,” Geralt hissed. “We’re trying to approach a man, not scare him off.”

The horse that he would pointedly not be referring to as Bollocks nickered in response.

Fucking contrarian.

“Really?” came a new voice. “And here I thought you were trying to sneak up on me, Geralt.”

The witcher that stood behind him, stepping out onto the path as Geralt turned, was one he’d met before. Brown skin marked predominantly by pox-scars, halfway-hidden under a beard, and fierce, yellow irises almost glowing against red sclera - Coën of Poviss was a witcher that Geralt was, just barely, already acquainted with.

“I need a favour.”

Coën laughed, good-natured amiability written all over his face. “It’s always business with you, isn’t it? Go on, then - what’s brought you so far north so early in the year? With two horses, no less... This seems like quite the story.”

“It’s urgent.”

“I gathered that much,” the Griffin witcher snorted. “You, riding up from Kaedwen this early, somewhat gave it away. And why the second horse?”

“Later. I need you to look at a Griffin witcher’s medallion. See if you can identify it.”

“That’s a solid maybe, on that request there, then. We don’t exactly keep logs, you know - how did you come to be in the possession of this medallion, anyways?”

Geralt considered his words, as he followed Coën back towards his campsite for the night. “The horse is his.”

“Oh? At your own pace, Geralt,” Coën said wryly, “given that your little tidbit doesn’t answer the question at all. Maybe you could describe him, then - I’m more likely to know him by face than medallion, you know.”

“I don’t know his face.”

Coën huffed in amusement. “You have his medallion and his horse, and yet you don’t know his face? I hope you know how deeply weird and suspicious that sounds.”

“Glamour.”

“Now, that is odd,” Coën mused, settling down on a log by the fire he’d set - not long ago, by the signs of it - that was merrily crackling away. “You know, for all our magic, no Griffin could sustain a glamour that conceals their appearance fully.”

Geralt grunted. “Could have gotten it from a mage.”

“There’s the thing- I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we have some... ah, bad blood with the Brotherhood, unfortunately, and it’s incredibly hard to find an unaffiliated mage powerful enough to make a proper, full glamour.”

Coën stroked his beard in thought, and Geralt frowned. He had, in fact, heard rumours of the conflict between the Kaer Seren and the mages that had been stationed there, but all that news had been old, from around the time the keep had fallen in the attack - but Coën’s musings weren’t difficult to follow.

“You think it’s not a Griffin, just someone with a medallion that used to belong to one.”

“From where I’m standing, that does seem to be the most likely scenario, Geralt.”

Geralt frowned, making his way over to Roach and pulling Jaskier’s medallion from one of the saddle-bags. “From where I’m standing, it’s not.”

“Right. Well, let me see that medallion, then,” Coën said, following suit and making his way over to where Geralt stood.

With a grunt of acknowledgement, Geralt dropped the medallion into Coën’s outstretched palm, and the Griffin turned it over in his hand, examining it, holding it up and squinting at it - it wasn’t as if he really needed to look any closer, he’d assured Geralt that his odd sclera weren’t indicative of any lack of quality to his eyesight ages ago - something akin to disbelief colouring his expression.

He was staring at it like he’d never seen it before, as if he couldn’t quite believe what was in front of him.

Geralt could at least say that the man had probably recognised it. He looked like he’d seen a ghost, actually - eyes wide, his body frozen.

“Geralt? Where did you get this? Or- no, who did you get it from?”

“Who does it belong to?”

Coën took a deep breath - it seemed that he was well and truly rattled. “Geralt, please.”

“I got it off its owner.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“How sure?”

“Sure enough,” Geralt growled, resisting the urge to do anything more overt to showcase his frustration. “Coën. You recognised it.”

The other witcher met his eyes, brow furrowed. “Yes. It belongs to a friend of mine.”

“That his name?” Geralt queried, sarcasm dripping from every word. “First name A, last name Friend, a national of the land of Mine?”

“Geralt-”

“We’re wasting time that I don’t have. Who’s your friend?”

“He’s been dead for years now,” Coën murmured, almost to himself. “Unless- no.”

“His fucking name, Coën!”

“Julian! Julian, Julian of Kovir, is what he goes by. My cohort. We grew up together.”

Melitele’s fucking tits. Of course he had.

Of fucking course he had.

Geralt supposed that this kind of thing, this kind of astronomical coincidence, would be what the common folk deemed to be Destiny.

He growled to himself. “Let me guess. He never shut up, was stubborn as shit, and may or may not have had an affinity for the fucking lute. Reckless, selfish, a colossal idiot... that him?”

Coën blinked. “Fucking hell.”

Because of course Jaskier would just disappear off the map without a trace. That was so pathetically short-sighted and self-centred that it was honestly a given that the man had bloody done it.

“Julek’s- Julek’s alive? Of course he’s alive.” Coën laughed. “Why wouldn’t he be? He’s probably been just fine all these years, the utter bastard.”

“You’ll never guess what he’s been up to,” Geralt said, the smirk twisting at his lips somewhat unkind.

Coën frowned. “The lute. Only way you’d know about it, really.”

Geralt’s smirk only grew as he whistled a tune - the familiar chorus of Toss a Coin, that had, for better or for worse, spread across the continent like a wildfire...and Coën caught on immediately.

“He fucking didn’t.”

“He did.”

Coën sighed, sinking back down onto his sitting-log. “Great. That’s- brilliant. Julek’s been alive and well all this time, Julek’s your fucking bard.”

Humming, Geralt leant against a tree opposite him.

“So, go on. How did you end up with his medallion?”

“Long story.”

“I have time,” Coën shrugged. “My only plans for the near future are that I will, at some point, hunt down my absolute idiot of a brother and punch him in the gut.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.”

The fire crackled merrily between them, and the two witchers simply sat for a moment, and regarded each other, before Coën sighed, the sound long-suffering, as he leant back, tilting his head so that he was staring up at the sky.

“What kind of trouble has he gotten himself into, this time?”

“No fucking clue,” Geralt said, scowling into the flames, before continuing. “Has to do with mages, probably.”

Coën groaned. “How, in all the nine hells, did he manage that?”

“Don’t know. Sorcerer showed up in town a few hours ahead of us, bribed the alderman into holding me up and the innkeep into slipping him a poisoned key. They fought, Jaskier went through my potions, he lost, and dropped his medallion before the mage portalled him out.”

“Whereabouts was this?”

“Kaedwen.”

“So why didn’t you- oh, no. Don’t tell me. Was that, incidentally, when you found out he was a fucking witcher in the first place?”

Geralt smirked at him, the smile as unpleasant as he could make it.

Coën groaned once again. “He’s an idiot.”

The fire crackled, a twig snapping as it burned.

“He didn’t even tell you his name, Geralt. And he’s been fucking around with mages - when we find that idiot, I’m going to kill him myself.”

A pause, and then Geralt spoke.

“We?”

A snort. “Yes, we. Julek, despite his admirable idiocy and truly awe-inspiring level of self-absorption, is still my brother and my best friend. If some bastardous mage has laid his hands on him, it’s my business, too, isn’t it? Do you have any leads, by the way, on who it might have been?”

“I didn’t even know who I was looking for, until now,” Geralt said, by way of an answer.

“Oh, brilliant.”

It was like the setup to a bad joke.

Two witchers and a back-alley information broker walk into yet another seedy little tavern in Talgar… the punchline to that would be awful.

“Keep your eyes peeled for the man,” Coën murmured, raising his tankard to his lips and pointedly not drinking anything from it. “And don’t, for the love of Melitele, try to spook him. He’s a slippery bastard, and he won’t show up if he deems it too dangerous.”

Geralt grunted, an affirmative, and glared into his ale. You could never trust anything in an establishment like this - he counted at least two different gobs of spit floating in his drink, along with some kind of narcotic, the kind that was just a straight-up poison for the average human. “You don’t seem the type to consort with these sorts.”

“I’m not,” Coën snorted. “I met this particular... character, through Julian, decades back, and he owes me a favour. I don’t think the man ever thought I’d call it in, and, to be fair, I wasn’t planning on it. Especially not given the fact that the favour ended up being him agreeing to meet with two unspecified witchers in the first place.”

That was understandable. It was a bit of a shit payoff to a favour put on hold for so long, by any measure.

“Mm. He get into trouble often, Julian?”

“All the time,” Coën groaned, raising an eyebrow in a look that Geralt supposed was trying to be mirthful. “He’d look at a situation, clock the most reasonable option, and immediately do the opposite.”

“Not much has changed, then.”

A wry grin was sent Geralt’s way, and he merely huffed in response. “Evidently not.”

Coën cleared his throat, pushing his still-full tankard into the centre of the table, and he straightened up in his chair.

“You see him?”

“Smell him,” Coën grumbled, so low under his breath as to be nigh inaudible, even to Geralt’s ears. “Covered in bloody phenol, he’s based in some kind of... repurposed distillery, he fancies himself an alchemist. The man reeks to the high heavens, no matter how much he tries to scrub it off.”

“Seems inconvenient, for someone trying to be covert.”

“Yeah, well, he’s not exactly calibrating his cologne usage for witchers, conveniently enough.”

Now that Geralt knew to look for it, he, too, could pick up the cloying stench of phenol, clinging to a ratty, greying man on the other side of the tavern like an aura, not-quite hidden under the odour of unwashed clothing and cheap soap and poorly-mixed perfumes.

The perks of being a witcher, really.

“That him?”

Coën nodded.

“You think he’s actually going to come over here at any point?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think it’d be so easy to miss the two witchers in the tavern that everyone’s glaring at, but he’s apparently managing.”

Geralt didn’t reply to that, and Coën sighed. “We’re attracting too much attention. All eyes are on us, and that’s spooking him, but what did he expect, asking a pair of witchers to meet him in a crowded tavern? I mean, really. The normal rules don’t apply here. He’s either going to send a messenger over or leave, watch.”

“Seems like your friend’s not the brightest.”

“Nah,” Coën snorted. “But he’s good at what he does - what he really does - and, more importantly, he’s something of our only option.”

“And what does he do, Coën? My impression... seems to have been off.”

“He’s an information broker, I told you. Trust me, he knows everything that goes on this side of Nazair.”

“The man who invited two witchers to meet with him in a bar.”

Coën bit his lip. “In his defence - as much as I hate to defend him - I don’t think he was counting on us being so blatant.”

Geralt huffed, at that. They were, as witchers, far from predisposed to concealing their nature and profession - it was an exercise in futility. Nobody would hire a witcher if they weren’t recognisable as one, and when you’d accumulated a certain amount of scarring, all the nondescript clothing in the world couldn’t save you from the scrutiny of bystanders.

Although, now that he thought about it, Geralt realised what had gone wrong. The witcher that the man was familiar with was Jaskier - and wasn’t that a strange string of words? But, regardless, the point stood - Jaskier’s particular brand of inexplicable behaviour was hardly representative of witchers as a whole.

“Do you think we should try and get his attention?” Coën whispered, and Geralt snorted.

“Didn’t you say you didn’t want to spook him?”

“I could just... I don’t know, smile at him?”

“No.”

Coën huffed a laugh, leaning forward over the table, staring quietly into his undrinkable beverage.

“I don’t much think either of us are all-that cut out for espionage, Geralt,” he said.

A snort. “What gave it away?”

Furrowing a brow, Coën drummed his fingers against the wood of the table. This kind of thing, Geralt supposed, really was more Jaskier’s thing. The average witcher wouldn’t think twice about the logistics of espionage, under the usual circumstances - Cats and Vipers notwithstanding. But, they didn’t generally talk about them. It wasn’t pertinent.

“How about,” Coën said, slowly, “I go and try to meet him out the back, and if he does a runner, you nab him as he tries to leave?”

Geralt opened his mouth, closed it, and settled for a non-committal grunt, that could vaguely be read as an affirmative.

“Grand. I’ll meet you outside, then, Geralt.”

With an amicable clap on his shoulder, Coën stood, and made his way, quite meaningfully, over to the door.

Without missing a beat, the phenol-soaked contact that Coën had boasted of immediately stood and followed him, and Geralt took that as his own cue.

Remaining inconspicuous, be damned, it seemed.

Making his way out of the back entrance of the tavern - the one that regular guests weren’t supposed to know about, that Geralt was most definitely not supposed to use - he circled round to where Coën had either already cornered the man or was about to, right by the stables.

“Hello, my good sir!”

“What the fuck is this, witcher?”

Evidently, Coën had made it there first.

Rounding the last corner and coming to stand opposite Coën, cutting off the broker’s would-be escape route, Geralt cleared his throat, making his presence known. The broker, meanwhile, took the opportunity to swear again.

“You consented to meet with us,” Coën said, mildly. “All we did is come to the agreed-upon place to do so.”

“Fully armed,” the broker spat, “as if planning to ambush me!”

“Ah. Well, that’s just-”

“Witchers usually carry their arms and armour,” Geralt interrupted. “We’re monster hunters, not spies. It was no threat to you.”

The disheveled man glared at both men in turn. “Well, my usual contact-”

“Is not representative of all witchers,” Coën interjected. “Should we take this back inside, or do our dealing here?”

A sneer. “Here will have to do, given that the pair of you mutants have already caused a scene.”

Geralt snorted. “Are you sure that was us?”

“Geralt,” Coën said. “We’re not here to quarrel.”

“It’s hardly a quarrel if we’re just stating facts,” Geralt muttered, mulishly. “He’s the one making a thing of it.”

“I don’t care. State facts at him later, after we have what we need.”

“Hm.”

“Fuck off, Wolf.” Coën cleared his throat, and turned back to the broker. “We are seeking information regarding either Julian of Kovir, a mutual acquaintance of ours, or one Jaskier the Bard, a friend of Geralt’s, here.”

The broker’s face paled, as he took in Geralt properly. “You’re the Butcher of Blaviken?”

“He is,” Coën said, his tone agreeable, but not apologetic. “And he’s looking for the same information as I am.”

“Fine,” the broker spat. “But you’ll be paying for it.”

“We will.”

Coën’s tone was calm and honest, and Geralt raised an eyebrow at him. The fact that Coën could afford the man’s prices was something of an oddity, considering that they were witchers, and witchers were not - generally speaking - the most affluent of the Continent’s demographics.

Huh.

The broker, however, had appeared to come to a similar conclusion himself. “You and what coin, you mutant fuck?”

Coën raised an eyebrow. “Really, finance management isn’t that hard of a concept to grasp-” a bloodshot glance was levelled at Geralt- “well, it is for him, but that’s hardly the point right now.”

“Fuck off, Coën.”

The broker furrowed his brow. “Coën? Coën of Poviss?”

“That’s me.”

Heat rushed to the man’s cheeks, as he visibly took a moment to compose himself, straightening his posture and smoothing his expression back into something calmer, more neutral, and Coën raised an eyebrow.

“Coën of Poviss!” The dishevelled man said, with far more enthusiasm than he’d had a few moments previously. “Why didn’t you just clarify your identity, instead of backing me into a corner? How’s Julian doing? Still presumed dead, is he?”

“We didn’t back you anywhere,” Geralt interrupted, extremely unhelpfully, earning himself a glare from Coën. “You bailed on us.”

“Ignore my friend here,” Coën smiled, with some strain to the gesture. “He never learnt his manners. He means no offence.”

“I see.”

“But, moving on, we’d be interested in information-”

“On your respective friends, yes,” the broker interrupted. “Julian for you, kind Coën, and the bastard’s bard.”

Coën’s presence had emboldened him, evidently, given how he was suddenly so confident at snubbing the Butcher of Blaviken, as he’d so kindly seen fit to call him.

For Jaskier’s sake, though - for that lying, duplicitous bastard’s sake - he would take it.

“Well?” Geralt growled. “Do you know anything?”

“I do, but perhaps it would be better to conduct our business in a-”

“I’m not following you back to your co-opted distillery,” Coën interrupted with a snort. “You can tell us here, or you can tell us here. We’re working on a bit of a tight schedule, unfortunately.”

The man raised an eyebrow, and an unpleasant gleam. “Oh? What kind of schedule? If it’s something interesting, I might be persuaded to lower my prices somewhat, you know.”

“It’s private business,” Geralt scoffed.

From the look of disbelief that crossed the broker’s face, he didn’t quite believe that, and Coën shook his head.

“Is time-wasting a skill they teach you at whatever underground hole they train slippery bastards at? We have your coin, and we seek information regarding Julian of Kovir and the bard formally known as Jaskier.” Impatience was beginning to bleed into Coën’s tone. “Do you have what we need, or is your reputation as a semi-reliable information broker a crock of shit, after all?”

The man’s face soured even further, pinching up unflatteringly. “I can tell you little about Julian,” he sniffed, “other than the fact that before his disappearance, he became extremely interested in sorcerers, especially those pursuing the study of illusion. I pointed him towards Stregobor’s lackeys, Ilona, Lohere, or Ivan, I can’t remember which, but that’s the last I saw of him.”

“The last anyone saw of him, apparently,” Coën huffed. “These mages - who are they?”

“Students, officially. Underlings to do his dirty work, in practice. I wouldn’t have recommended meeting with them, but Stregobor’s the real prominent figure in illusion magics, and if Julian wanted to know who else might have some knowledge on them, I wasn’t going to keep the information from him if he was paying for me.”

Coën’s eyes gleamed at this, and a smirk played at the edges of his lips.

If what the broker had said were true, then it was a hell of a lead. Even if Jaskier acquiring his slapdash, high-brow glamour from an associate of Stregobor, of all people, left a bad taste in his mouth.

Then again, that may have been the reason he was currently missing-in-action, dosed up on who-knew-how-much poison and some of Geralt’s potions... for which he would be demanding reimbursement, once they helped the idiot crawl out of whatever hole he’d gotten himself stuck in.

“Do you happen to know which associate Julian met with?” Coën asked, voice low, interrupting Geralt’s train of thought.

“Haven’t the foggiest - though, if it was Lohere that he was getting all chummy with, you’re shit out of luck. I don’t mind telling you this, given you say you’ve got coin for it, but she turned up dead in a field by the safehouse of some poncey noble, not too long ago. Apparently they’d had a feud, though nobody knows quite how the witch ended up gutted.”

“Interesting,” Coën mused, and Geralt would have heartily disagreed, had they not been searching for potentially invaluable information regarding the situation at hand. “Do we know who this noble was?”

The broker snorted. “Everyone and their mother knows who the noble was, now that the bitch has kicked it. He’s a lackey of someone or other, make no mistake, but nobody knows who exactly it was that sent him to pick a fight with-”

“The point,” Geralt snarled, and Coën elbowed him hard in the ribs.

“His name is Ferrant de Lettenhove,” the broker spat, glaring at them both, “and he ran afoul of one of the most powerful mages on the Continent when his benefactor sent him picking through an excavation site for some book or other. Long story short, they fought over it, ended up getting the red headed one killed - Ilona, which is too bad for you if she was the one Julian met with, too, now that I think about it - and the book destroyed. Stregobor’s wanted him dead ever since.”

“But he wouldn’t dirty his hands dealing with some two-bit noble from the back end of nowhere, himself, so he sends his lackeys,” Geralt surmised, ignoring how Coën’s heart-rate had kicked up dramatically.

“Obviously.”

Coën blinked bloodshot eyes, and stared down the man, eerily still despite his rabbiting heart-rate, all of a sudden. “So there’s three students learning under Stregobor. Two of them are dead, thanks to this Ferrant de Lettenhove...”

One of whom may have had a witcher in their debt, Geralt finished, mentally.

“Where’s the third?”

“Excuse me?” The broker blinked at Geralt.

“The third,” he snarled, civility be damned. “You mentioned three sorcerers. Two are dead. Where do we find the third?”

The dishevelled broker glared at them. “Hell should I know? Ivan, he’s under the radar, and you couldn’t pay me enough to get on a sorcerer’s bad side.”

Coën raised an eyebrow, and shifted his hand to his coin purse - a fairly well-filled one, at that.

“Rumour has it that he’s been holed up in Lohere’s old stronghold. Near a little shithole named Pocegodor.”

“Pocegodor,” Coën said. “That’s, where? Temeria?”

“Redania.”

“Fantastic, thank you.”

Geralt blinked. “Coën?”

Coën, meanwhile, paid him no heed, shoving a generous amount of coin into the broker’s hands and making his way over to the three tethered horses - Roach, Bollocks, and his own mount, Pankratz, which Geralt half-wanted to ask him about - before anyone could react.

The information broker was the first to break the silence. “What about the bard?”

“Fuck the bard!” Coën yelled back, mounting his horse.

“Butcher, don’t you want to-?”

“I’m broke,” Geralt said, flatly, following Coën to their mounts. “Nice meeting you, though.”

He was going to kill Jaskier for making him drag a second horse all the way back to Redania again.

That was, if the weeks of being officially missing didn’t kill him first.

He’d be fine, Geralt thought, mounting Roach and leading both her and Bollocks along behind Coën at a fairly fast pace, leaving the broker gaping at them from behind. Jaskier was a stubborn bastard.

He’d be fine. Probably.

The distinctly non-Redanian-sounding name of Pocegodor was derived from Koviri, a language that had already been well-into the process of dying out when the Griffin was a kid. The running theory that the town originally housed a Koviri immigrant population, but over time, had acclimated to the usual Redanian fair, to the point where, other than a scant few examples of architecture and the name of the place, there was very little left to hint at the local population’s origins.

Coën was fairly unwilling to disclose what Pocegodor actually meant, but judging from his barely-concealed amusement, it wasn’t the most flattering name one could give to a town.

The journey back to Pocegodor had circumvented the problem of timing easily enough, forgoing the journey on foot in favour of using up the last of Coën’s coin to secure a place on board a ship bound for one of the northern ports of Redania.

“You’d better appreciate this,” Coën huffed under his breath. “That was years’ worth of savings, just gone up in smoke.”

“I’ll make it up to you.”

“You and what coin?”

Geralt huffed a laugh. “I’ll manage something.”

“Pay for my travel expenses for a year, and then I’ll consider us even,” Coën shrugged, smiling. “It’s the least you could do, after dragging me off to Redania the first week down from Kaer Seren.”

“As you wish.”

Coën raised his eyebrows at that. “Really?”

“Hm.”

“Geralt.”

“The logistics would be awkward, but I’m willing to do it.”

“I might have to hang around with you this year, then,” Coën mused. “Do you think if I wore fine silks and jewellery, and dark glasses, I could pass myself off as your travelling artist friend, there to immortalise your travels on the Path on canvas?”

Geralt snorted. “Not a chance.”

“Hey! I’ll have you know, I’m quite a dab hand at painting!”

Raising an eyebrow, Geralt gave Coën his best disbelieving look.

“What? It’s healthy to have a hobby, you know. You should try and find something to enjoy, yourself, Geralt. How do you feel about knitting?”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m serious,” Coën said, with a wry grin. “No good ever came from devoting yourself so wholeheartedly to your job. You need a hobby.”

“I have a hobby,” Geralt muttered.

“Talking to your horse isn’t a hobby.”

Geralt glared at him.

Coën, for his part, looked entirely unapologetic, as he turned his gaze out to the choppy ocean waters. Bastard.

The waves, though - they were mesmerising. They rose, crested, and collapsed with an irregular rhythm, pushing and pulling like the ocean was at war with itself, locked in eternal combat that never seemed to abate.

“How long till we’re in Redania?” Geralt asked, by way of a subject change.

“Considering we left two days ago, and the wind’s good?” Coën frowned. “About two, three days. Perhaps more, if luck decides not to be on our side. A vast measure faster than if we’d stuck with the frankly excessive amount of horses between the two of us, all in all.”

“And the town?”

“It’s - as far as I’ve been able to glean - fairly coastal, about three hour’s ride away from the port we’re landing in if we go fast enough.”

Geralt made a noise of affirmation, and nodded his head. “We should make a plan for when we get there.”

Coën chewed his lip, pondering. “We should,” he agreed, “but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We have no idea what we’ll be up against till we get there.”

“Running in blind would be stupid.”

“On that, my friend, we agree.”

Coën stroked his chin, the curls of his short beard springing back into position after his touch, a small frown on his face. Geralt didn’t blame him for his hesitation in laying plans - neither of them knew what awaited them in Pocegodor. Any proposition they laid forth now ran the considerable risk of being rendered useless upon their arrival.

“Say, Geralt,” Coën said suddenly, brightening up. “How’s your education in written signs?”

Geralt frowned. “Poor. The Wolf School emphasised swordwork over magic theory.”

“Right.”

“Yours?”

“The Griffins place a focus on signs and theory, so between the two of us, I’ll be the one most likely to be able to identify any spellwork that’s been set up,” Coën mused. “Which originally makes me think that I should take the stealth approach whilst you run interference and meet them head-on, if needs be?”

“Hm. That should be our first course of action, not a recourse.”

Coën cocked his head. “Wouldn’t that be unwise, tipping our hand immediately?”

“We won’t be tipping our hand, we’ll be distracting them,” Geralt grinned, a note of unpleasantness within the gesture. “They might be expecting me to come after Jaskier. They won’t be expecting you.”

“I see. And what of locating Julek- Jaskier? We don’t know where he’s being held, and this place could be anything from a safehouse to a fortress. A stealth element would come in useful to locate him, but I don’t know if we’ll be able to pull it off for long enough in a mage stronghold.”

“We’ll stake it out,” Geralt grunted. “See how many people they have. Bait them out. Kill them if we have to, but it’s like you said. We don’t know how much we’re up against until we’re there.”

Coën snorted. “Fucking mages.”

“Fucking mages,” Geralt agreed. “I’m going to go check on the horses.”

“Right. I’ll be up here if you need me, then.”

Coën turned back to the ocean, and Geralt left him to it, making his way to go below deck into the hold, to where Roach, Bollocks, and Pankratz were comfortably settled - the benefits of a large ship, he supposed. No wonder the voyage had been so costly - two witchers and three horses tended to be considered more expensive passengers by the general population.

Slipping swiftly into the hold, he hoped fervently that horses did not, in fact, get seasick.

Pocegodor, they’d found out at the docks, did not have the best reputation. Sure, its economy was doing well enough, and it had no particular problems tied to its name, but it was, by and large, a bit of a shithole. The streets were decrepit and dirty, and the stench of rot permeated the streets to a noticeable degree. Merchants lined the main road, selling wares at double their worth, and the children playing in the streets eyed the passers-by with half-hearted wariness.

The fortress on the cliff overlooking the town, that had once been inhabited by the local gentry, now housed an undetermined number of undetermined mages, and the advent of their coming had heralded change for Pocegodor - and it was change that was hardly positive, for the locals.

Shady figures had started passing through, visitors of the kind that were neither needed nor wanted, causing only minor disruptions with their egomania to Pocegodor’s residents, but establishing a steady enough stream of unwanted, impolite outsiders that a culture of faint hostility had festered in the heart of the town.

Of course, the residents were hardly foolish enough to make this known to the mages or their associates, who were as callous and vaguely cruel as they were exasperating to the ordinary residents of the area, but other, miscellaneous outsiders were fair game.

Coën and Geralt had, for this reason, chosen to make camp a fair few miles from the town, leaving the horses away from the hostilities of the locals, before making their way to Pocegodor proper.

Rather, Geralt made his way to Pocegodor proper. Coën, on the other hand, took the long way round to the back of the fortress, through the forest with the three horses that would serve them well in a quick getaway, whilst Geralt made his way through the town in a more roundabout manner. Let them think he’d come alone. Then, whilst he was fighting his way through the personnel of the castle, Coën would slip in through the back.

Geralt didn’t know how to feel about Jaskier. The man was his self-proclaimed friend, who had waxed poetic about fictitious renditions of Geralt’s exploits and demanded Geralt’s affections, offering only what he deemed Geralt deserved, in return.

Then, there was the fact that Jaskier had apparently decided that what Geralt deserved were a few songs he didn’t want and shit-all else, with no outside input altogether.

He would, Geralt though to himself, be justified in leaving Jaskier behind - in hating him, even. If the bastard who’d done nothing but lie to Geralt’s face had deigned to get kidnapped from the inn he’d left him at, well, then good riddance. Jaskier had lied to him, used him, followed him despite repeated requests from Geralt for him to fuck off, thank you very much…

And yet.

Perhaps it was Geralt’s supposed bleeding heart talking, but he couldn’t help but care about the bastard who’d latched onto him like- like a leech, and a leech with abandonment issues, at that. Jaskier was hardly his responsibility, and definitely not his friend, but he was something, someone, to Geralt, and he could hardly leave the man rotting in a mage’s basement.

It was odd, that he felt so inclined to go to such lengths for a man he disliked- and he did dislike Jaskier, especially after how happy the man seemed to be to lie straight to Geralt’s face all the time like it didn’t matter. The man was a bastard.

And yet, somehow, inexplicably, he was a bastard that Geralt cared for.

They weren’t friends, by any stretch of the word, but perhaps - and that perhaps was doing quite a bit of legwork, there - perhaps they could be. An apology, an explanation, and a few months on equal footing later, they could be.

But that was all in the theoretical. In the present, Geralt was marching up to a mage’s stronghold with swords of steel and silver and he was, as Jaskier would no doubt immortalise it in one of his overly eloquent poems, about to fuck shit up.

Coën was in the forest behind the fortress, with three horses, preparing to slip past the mages’ defences and pull Jaskier out of the bowels of the place, and had been in place for a while now, having set off a great deal earlier than Geralt, to make sure that he’d be in position when the distraction arrived.

The wind whispered through the grass by the side of the dirt-laden cobblestone road, nipping at Geralt’s ankles as he strode ahead, brow set in a furrow, yellow eyes glaring ahead. Anticipation thrummed like adrenaline through his muscles, and he clenched his fists.

He was a witcher. He fought monsters, not men, as a general rule, but he hadn’t earnt his nickname by sticking to such a code wholeheartedly. In that way, it wasn’t so surprising he’d break it for Jaskier.

He’d broken it for Renfri, all those years ago, after all.

The faint crunching of stone under his feet echoed in the eerie stillness of the twilight, the town catching the light of the setting sun as it sank below the horizon. It looked so small, from so far up the cliffside road, but Geralt didn’t allow himself to muse on it.

Finding Jaskier had not been particularly difficult, merely time-consuming, and in that time, Geralt had found many a moment to think about the coming confrontation. He would likely be fighting at least one mage - the alchemist who had ambushed Jaskier at the inn - in the absolute best case scenario. However, it was likely that the Ivan the information broker in Kovir had mentioned was also involved, if Jaskier had gotten involved with his group-

If Ivan was the alchemist, this would be fairly easy. If he wasn’t, it would be marginally less easy. If there were others, miscellaneous allies, involved, it would be even more difficult, but Geralt was a witcher. Fighting was what he did.

He would make it through this fine.

He crested the top of the cliffside, and took in the sight before him.

The fortress was grey stone, and loomed above him with the kind of overwhelming presence he would have expected from a great keep, but that was mages for you. Always so overbearing and imperious.

It was guarded by men, he noticed, much to his displeasure - likely locals from the town the fortress overshadowed, conscripted by the residents to play soldier to their secrets in exchange for a marginally better pay than they would have been able to earn by working other professions in the area, but a pittance nonetheless.

Geralt was familiar with the financial habits of the whimsical and powerful.

“Hello there,” he called, to the two unfortunate, poorly-armoured and poorly-armed guards standing by the archway that held the entrance to the fortress.

The men stiffened, one of them visibly tightening his grip on the spear he held.

“State your business,” the taller man snapped.

“Your employer has something that doesn’t belong to him. I’m here to ask him nicely to put it back. Stand down and relay my message, and nobody has to get hurt.”

The shorter guard surveyed Geralt from behind his helmet, bushy brows furrowing.

“Witcher. We know why you’re here.”

Geralt huffed. “I know. I just told you.”

“Sorry, but we’re bound to protect this keep against threats.”

“Like the threat of polite discussion?” Geralt drawled. “I’ll give you a real threat. If you don’t stand down, I will kill you.”

“Yeah, right,” the taller guard scoffed, interjecting. “As if you’d risk earning the ire of a sorcerer.”

“I have the ire of many people,” Geralt shrugged. “Stand down.”

The shorter guard scoffed. “In your dreams, mate.”

It was at this point that Geralt abandoned all pretence of civility and drew steel, advancing on the two unfortunate guardsmen with a deliberate set to his shoulders, and the cool confidence of a killer in his stride.

He didn’t want to kill the guardsmen - he wouldn’t harm them at all, if he could help it - but he needed to kick up enough of a fuss to put everyone’s eyes firmly on him as Coën slipped in the back door.

The taller guardsman’s knuckles were white as he gripped his spear.

Geralt closed the distance between them slowly, slashing at the man’s spear as soon as he came in range and slicing it neatly in two, before reaching out with his free hand and pulling the pointy half of the weapon from his grasp and delivering a swift kick to the guard’s stomach as the man attempted to swing at him with the blunt half of the spear.

He was sent flying down the road before his arm could even close the distance between his side and the side of Geralt’s head.

The shorter guard, to his credit, was slightly more well-prepared, jabbing at Geralt’s from his blind spot, behind him and slightly to the right. It was a good move, and a well-executed one, but unfortunately for him, Geralt was a witcher. He parried the would-be attack easily without turning to face the man. Whatever training he’d been given was clearly minimal, at best.

Geralt yanked on the sword, wrenching the spear from the guardsman’s grip, and drove the blunt end into the poor fucker’s gut, sending him crumpling to the ground with a wheeze, not getting up afterwards.

And that was just the beginning.

Chapter Text

Keldar’s fucking leech-metaphor had been, at the end of the day, a rather ineffective method of communicating what had actually happened, at the nigh-fall of Kaer Seren, when all was said and done. It had been, insofar as metaphors went, rather vague, and not-at-all viable for communicating his meaning.

Weeks after the fact, and it hadn’t stopped gnawing at him - both the heavy-handedness of it, and its utter lack of clarity, along with the ever-intensifying, burning curiosity to know what, exactly, had happened to lead up to the massacre of Kaer Seren.

He hadn’t much cared, before.

Now, however, was hardly before.

It had been Coën, in the end - and of course it had, given that Coën was, perhaps, a good ten times more capable of understanding the nuances of the quasi-human psyche than Julian himself - who’d quietly taken him aside to explain that Keldar’s leech-tank metaphor was less of an explanation aid for his audience, and more likely a technique he himself was using to avoid having to dredge up painful memories and salt his still-stinging wounds.

Julian supposed that he could see where that came from. Twenty years was but the blink of an eye, to a man who had lived for as long as old Keldar had. The mark left on his soul by what he’d endured at the hands of the mages had, he realised, must have barely scabbed over, between then and now. For once, Julian couldn’t bring himself to be flippant about it.

Even so, it was a tad difficult to figure out the diseased fish part of the metaphor. The running theory was that there had begun to be complications with the Trials, problems that took lives beyond what was expected - some kind of difficulty, that the mages had been brought in to purge.

Or something.

He would have to ask one of the returning witchers, when winter rolled around again. Conjecture was all very well and good, but it was hardly the best way to learn history.

Fuck, it didn’t even get him very far in any of his classes, when they moved past the broad descriptions of beasts and potions and the basic witcher survival skill-set, and got at all bogged down in the details. Not without any practical evidence to back him up.

Evidence, then, would have been a game-changer in figuring out the fucking leech-tank metaphor, but Julian doubted that Erland or Keldar would have sat down to document the murder of, oh, most of the Griffin witchers, with an unfortunate amount of necessary emphasis placed on the children.

Judging from what he knew of the ages of the returning witchers, however, he doubted that there had been survivors.

Quiet footsteps - more quiet than anything Julian had thought himself capable of, before - echoed, barely, around the halls of Kaer Seren, so soft that even the air around him seemed only to half-notice his presence as he padded around the keep.

No wonder Erland and Keldar had always seemed to know where he and Coën were, before the Trials. He’d been weaving a thunderous melody in the air with his movements all this time, only his senses hadn’t been keen enough to hear it..

The cold, grey stone was familiar under his feet, and if he were a slightly more empathetic person, Julian would have shivered at the mental image of the corridor in those early days, after the purge, cold, wet, and slick with blood underfoot. He wondered how close that was, really, to what Erland and Keldar had lived, in the days immediately afterwards.

Weighing it up in his mind, Julian decided that he was rather fortunate in not knowing that particular piece of information.

The familiar path to the library - heavily warded and nigh-impossible to get into, even if you knew exactly what you were doing - was not the one that Julian took. One of the senior witchers would have, undoubtedly, re-activated the wards well and properly after the day’s lessons were over. He wouldn’t find his answers there, not if a cohort of mages couldn’t find a way to break through.

Julian may have had a- he would admit it, a rather generous estimation of his own abilities, but he was very much aware that he held no hope of ever managing to sneak into the library after-hours. He wouldn’t insult his teachers’ - or his own - intellect by trying. For once.

No, instead, the path that he took was one that would keep him near the outer wall of the keep, where the corridors were still lit by moonlight, and Julian still had to watch the shadow he cast, lest he unwittingly broadcast his whereabouts and movements to any eagle eyes watching.

He slipped, quietly, expertly, down the uneven spiral staircase by the disused storage cupboard he’d hid from Keldar in when he was seven, once - then, it was further along the corridor, to the trapdoor by the broken pillar, where the ladder would serve as a shortcut down three levels more, before finally taking the rickety wooden staircase down to his destination.

He hadn’t creaked a single stair on it in years.

The basements of Kaer Seren were used for a great many things. The chief one was storage - but, specifically, the storage of the more useless items that one tended to accumulate in the keep, the sort that you wouldn’t care was kept out of the way in one’s day-to-day life. Weapons and armour, damaged beyond repair. Odd knick-knacks gathered via the law of surprise. Personal mementos, of witchers long-passed.

Relics, in a word. The basements held a sizeable collection of relics.

Most pertinently, Julian was searching for old correspondences - he’d stumbled across a fair few, things one wouldn’t store in a library, but wanted to keep nonetheless, when he’d been poking around down here on previous occasions with Coën, for his own amusement. The witchers of Kaer Seren did not burn letters - that was a rule. Parchments were to be kept, always.

Julian didn’t know the reasoning behind that rule, and at the moment, it didn’t bother him if Erland had written it down from an archival perspective, or a deep desire to collect written blackmail on all of the Griffin witchers that made the mistake of writing to the keep. The rule was the rule, and as such, it was nothing more than a parameter he could work with.

Coën, on the other hand, rather suspected that the reasoning behind that was sentimental, rather than anything else, but that was neither here nor there. Witchers died, and they died often, leaving precious little for anyone to remember them by.

It was a whole thing, he reckoned, the easily-forgotten life of a witcher. Julian had just shrugged, and moved on with the conversation.

Documents outlining or detailing plans to work together with the cohort that would become the Kaer Seren mages would be stored in the library, and Erland’s personal records could be reasonably expected to be locked in his study, and even Julian wasn’t daring enough to break in and enact that degree of personal disrespect.

But, information spread through communication, and it was impossible to expect that all that communication was centralised. Witchers would have talked, and, more pertinently, written amongst themselves about current affairs.

Of course, most letters pertaining to current affairs kept down here were likely to be several decades out of date, given the number of Griffin witchers that had existed both before and after the purge.

In fact, Julian was counting on it.

The first mail-room, the one with the most recent letters lining the poorly-constructed shelves spread alongside the walls, was halfway down the corridor, and Julian ducked into the room hastily, lighting the candle left on the small table by the door with a subtle Igni.

Usually, when he came down here, it was to browse through the useless trinkets left behind by witchers long-dead, but the filing system was hardly unfamiliar to him. The letters were stored in chronological order, unless they held particular importance, in which case they were stored elsewhere. It couldn’t have been simpler.

Ever-so-quietly, Julian padded further into the room, reaching out a tentative hand and pulling a letter near the end of the snaking shelf.

Erland-

I found George of Kagen, as you asked- or rather, what was left of him. It had been a while, since he died (I’d put it a good five months after he departed Kaer Seren for the final time, though there is a small margin of error here, of around a month either way) - the prefects of Gors Velen had hired him about some ship casualties near Velen.

The story gets a little muddied here - something about the villagers setting fires to lure in ships, but also a green dragon scorching villages, and so many years later, it’s difficult to get the details of what fire was started by whomst, but suffice to say, George took a contract and slew the dragon. I can’t imagine anyone will be pleased at this revelation.

From what I gathered from the stammering locals, George was severely injured in the fight, and those present decided to rob him and leave him lying there in agony. The diagrams he was carrying were repatriated - though not in entirety - to the Griffin school via myself, and I have verified that George is indeed resting in the Dragonslayer’s Grotto in Velen.

I regret to inform you, however, that George is no longer among our number. For the sake of our School, I hope all goes well with the latest cohort of boys you and Keldar have decided to start training, because as we are, I fear us Griffins are fated for extinction.

- Rook of Tarnhann, and the Griffin School foremost.

Julian grinned to himself. Rook’s handwriting was surprisingly messy, in the letter, arguably worse than Julian’s own chicken scratch had been, before he’d decided to make to conscious effort to rework his penmanship into a more elegant script.

A stark contrast, to the neatly-labelled chord diagrams that Julian still kept on his person. Odd.

Remembering himself, he winced, and placed the letter back in its place. He was wasting time - Rook’s letter was hardly pertinent to what he was trying to find, he’d overshot the time period by a fair amount. He could busy himself with the minutiae of the Griffin School’s correspondences when he didn’t have a clear objective in mind.

The candle, however, had not burnt very much wax at all, so Julian was more than willing to forgive himself that one distraction. One distraction, and no more.

He reached for another letter, instead.

Erland-

Here’s to hoping this letter reaches you, or, god forbid, anyone left alive in that keep of yours.

A promising start to the letter - or note, rather - considering Julian’s objective.

I know little of what happened beyond the rumours, but what they’re saying is that you fought with the mages you brought in at the turn of the century, and you were decimated. Kaer Morhen’s mages talk - their stories paint a grim picture.

If there is anyone left alive amongst you, I beg of you, let me know.

The signature was indecipherable, a scribbled mess that was moreso meant to authenticate than inform - the sender, then, must have been someone familiar to Erland.

More interestingly, below the text of the letter was written, in the familiar, clear script of the head of the Griffin School himself, a hastily-penned note - in capitals, for emphasis - that urged the letter’s reader, do not reply.

A contextual situation, if ever there was one.

Interesting? Yes. Informative? No. Knowledge of the basic premise of the past could only take one so far, and Julian was very much aware of the vague run-down of the situation.

The Griffin School hires mages, the mages and Griffins disagree, and murder occurs. A simple sequence of events.

What Julian was interested in - perhaps a tad bit beyond what he should have been - was why. Why the Griffin school had brought mages on, and why they fell out with each other, and why this was grounds for a massacre.

Julian went to replace the letter, and his fingers brushed against something that he hadn’t previously realised was there.

A small, rectangular piece of torn parchment, long and thin, inserted between the letter Julian had pulled from the shelf and the one beside it.

Pulling it off the shelf, and turning it over in his hand, Julian held the torn parchment - smaller than he’d originally thought it was - up to them light. His eyes narrowed, as he scanned it, turning it over, zeroing in on the smeared charcoal that had once formed words over it.

It hadn’t been deliberately erased, so much as rubbed off so as not to smear anything it came into contact with - but it was still legible, and Julian realised, with a note of anger sparking in his chest, that he recognised the writing on the little placeholder.

was a noble

h regard

he want to

ung bard?

Undoubtedly, he fucking recognised it - it was his bloody song.

“What the fuck?” he hissed, glaring at the paper as though it personally had offended him, as if it were the root cause of his frustration rather than a mere symptom.

“Perhaps I have what you’re looking for?”

Julian spun round on his heel, glaring into the darkness - at the familiar, red-eyed silhouette of his best friend. “Coën, what the fuck-”

“Relax, Julek, it’s an old draft - the one we workshopped before the Trials.”

“Coën. Why are you ripping up my songs and sticking them in between letters? Why are you even here?”

Coën, for his part, looked entirely nonplussed as he sauntered into the room and plucked the parchment from Julian’s mildly trembling fingers, slotting it neatly back between the two letters that Julian had pulled it from.

“Because, Julek,” he said, with the calmness of someone who had been expecting this confrontation, and the confidence of someone whose voice didn’t crack on Julian’s nickname- “I could see you were curious about the massacre, and unlike you, I don’t play patience with absolutely everything until I’ve burnt away any restraint I may have left by the time I actually get around to doing something about it.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Poking a finger at Julian’s chest, Coën grinned, a familiar sparkle in his eyes. “You’re forgetting something, Julek. I know you. Which means, unfortunately, I know your though process.”

“Oh, I hardly think-”

“You asked a question of Keldar, and he answered it, but not completely,” Coën continued, ignoring Julian entirely. “So, you ponder it, and at first, it’s merely curiosity. But then, you realise you’ve invested so much thought into this particular matter that you want to know what happened, but you hold off on it because it would be massively disruptive to just ask, until you decide that your desire to do what you want to outweighs your laziness, and you sneak down here to pick through the only records accessible to you. Am I wrong?”

Julian frowned. “Probably, given that, again, I have no idea what in the nine hells you’re on about.”

Coën sighed, the familiar, fondly-exasperated expression overtaking his face, though in a manner that was a good amount less quietly amused than usual. “Let me put it this way. You get an idea in your head, but you decide that pursuing it would be too much of an inconvenience to you, and yet the idea stays with you, until it seems appealing enough that the benefits acting on it outweigh your desire to not bother with it.”

“That’s unflattering.”

“Don’t look at me, Julek, it’s your modus operandi.”

“Is it?”

Coën shrugged. “I might be wrong, but from what I’ve seen, you thrive on the delayed gratification of impulse-driven nonsense. But what do I know? I haven’t had time to brush up on my psychology, I was too busy reading all of these letters.”

Julian’s eyebrows shot up. “You’ve been reading the letters? Why?”

“Because.”

“Because?”

“I figured you were going to come down here sooner or later, and without me, to boot.”

“What, are you jealous that I wanted to read instead of snuggle with you?” Julian snorted.

“Oh, not at all, you indulging your independent streak is actually the most peace and quiet I ever get,” Coën shot back, in turn, before settling back into a calmer disposition. “I just thought that, considering you were going to sneak down here anyways - and you’re a lot less subtle than you think you are, you know - I might as well get a head start on you.”

Julian frowned, rubbing his cheek. “Was your chief concern really the efficiency of my… research? Come on, Coën.”

“Oh, no,” Coën said, airily, and then smirked. “I just wanted to see the look on your face when you got down here and I’d already pieced together the whole mystery before you.”

“Already pieced together- fuck off!”

“Here, have a look at this,” Coën said, smirk deepening. “It reads, I quote, ‘Esteemed Keldar, I write to you on behalf of the Kaer Seren cohort as well as on behalf of the Brotherhood of Mages as a whole, when I say this paltry refusal of resources has gone on for far too long.’ That’s- end quote, by the way- the most self-righteous way I’ve ever heard someone start a letter in my life.”

Julian’s eyes widened eagerly at that, as he peered over Coën’s shoulder at the neat, flowing script. “Does he actually- ‘Your continued refusal to allow us the bare minimum access to your scant resources wears our patience thin’! This man- who’s it signed by?”

“Irion, he says his name is,” Coën said, tapping the bottom of the letter. “Apparently, the Brotherhood really wanted him to get us- the Griffins- to hand over access to our library, and they put him on this job on the basis that he worked with Wolves at Kaer Morhen for a good while, and knew how witchers worked.”

“Where did you get that from?”

“Another letter, to an old weapons-master - Ilona - from the weapons-master at Kaer Morhen. Apparently, they gossip.”

Julian snorted. “Well, this Irion clearly didn’t know how witchers worked if he thought that his letter would get him anywhere, written like that.”

“Clearly.”

“Let me see the rest of the letter?”

Coën huffed, and held the parchment firmly out of Julian’s reach. “Irion continues, ‘the Brotherhood has been most generous in allowing the witchers of Kaer Seren access to our resources and knowledge to assist with the Trials of the Griffin Witchers, and the fact that the same courtesy is not afforded to our hardworking mages is an affront to basic decency.’ He’s not being very subtle about his intentions, here.”

“Let me see that,” Julian interrupted, leaping up to snatch the letter from Coën’s grasp. He grinned and relented, allowing Julian to pull the parchment from his grasp with no further resistance.

The date in the top left corner was one from a mere sixty years ago.

Esteemed Keldar,

I write to you on behalf of the Kaer Seren cohort as well as on behalf of the Brotherhood of Mages as a whole, when I say this paltry refusal of resources has gone on for far too long. I will be blunt, and to the point: your continued refusal to allow us the bare minimum access to your scant resources wears our patience thin.

The Brotherhood has been most generous in allowing the witchers of Kaer Seren access to our resources and knowledge to assist with the Trials of the Griffin Witchers, and the fact that the same courtesy is not afforded to our hardworking mages is an affront to basic decency. Might I remind you, that you yourself sought us out for assistance, when the recipes for your boorish Trials failed you and became corrupted - assistance that we did not have to lend.

And yet, we lent you our assistance, as a show of goodwill, and presumed that we could count on your honour that we could expect the same. And yet, you continue to deny us our simple request on petty grounds and vitriolic superiority.

This letter is a warning, Witcher Keldar - if the Brotherhood is not granted access to that which we were promised to expect, we will re-evaluate our relationship with the Griffin Witchers in entirety, and I doubt that you will enjoy our new terms. Our patience is running out.

Irion.

The name Irion was signed in a deep, golden ink, that sparkled under the candlelight, and Julian wrinkled his nose at it.

“What an arse.”

“Indeed,” Coën said, lightly. “But, that’s the curious thing. Irion, by all accounts, was a rather nice and easygoing sort of chap.”

“Oh? By whose accounts?”

Coën grinned at Julian’s palpable disbelief, and held up another letter. “His own prior correspondences, mainly. They’re the letters of a man who genuinely did know what he was talking about, and of one who was constantly digging his heels in the ground, as far as the Brotherhood’s wishes went.”

Julian drummed his fingers against his leg, and raised an eyebrow at his friend. “Coën, can you please speak plainly, for a moment? You’re contradicting yourself.”

“And you’re supposed to be the dramatic one, huh? You’re taking all the fun out of this.”

“My sincerest apologies,” Julian allowed, insincerely, and Coën snorted.

“Really, I thought that this kind of presentation would be interesting for you, given that you’ve suddenly decided that you’re very interested in the massacre,” Coën huffed, holding out the letter. “But in all his previous correspondences, Irion was, by all accounts, a nice guy. He was friendly, conversational - they’d actually dragged him out of retirement for this, he mentioned, specifically so that they could have a mage familiar with witchers working with the Brotherhood, for once.”

“Irion wasn’t already with the Brotherhood?”

Coën’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, gods, no, the other witcher schools would never have allowed a Brotherhood mage within ten miles of their keep. A good call, in hindsight.”

“So Irion-”

“As far as I can tell? He was a well-meaning old man, who took a job that had him in over his head, and ended up getting fucked over.”

Julian’s eyes widened, and he snapped his fingers in a swift, graceless motion as he finally caught onto Coën’s implication. “You don’t think Irion wrote that final letter.”

“I don’t,” Coën agreed. “Either it was forged, or he wrote it with a blade to his throat, or he did write it, but meant it as a warning of the Brotherhood’s true intentions - I don’t know. Either way, he ended up vanishing around the time it was sent-”

“Okay, how the fuck do you know that?”

“Witchers write. A lot. And, it was pretty significant news that one of the main contacts we had with the Brotherhood suddenly completely flipped his personality in his correspondence, and immediately vanished.”

“Source?”

Coën laughed. “Here, it’s from Rook to Erland. Apparently, he gets a lot of errands for things Erland wants done properly. It goes, ‘Erland- I was indeed in Hengfors, near Arcsea, and I paid Irion’s tower in Blaviken a visit, or tried to. It was locked and empty, but I gained entrance alone, and there was no sign of Irion, or indeed any writings by him. The place appears to have been ransacked. I do not know what fate awaited him, or indeed what awaits us, but I have no doubt that ill tides are on the horizon.’ And he was right, because this was one of the last letters down here from before the massacre.”

Julian blinked. “Well, shit.”

“Indeed,” Coën huffed. “Now, if you’re quite done chasing ghosts like a dog with a bone, I’d like to actually get some sleep before we run the walls, tomorrow.”

“You didn’t have to be here.”

“I didn’t, if I wanted you to make a mess an a half of the basements.”

“Hey!”

Coën grinned. “Julek, I love you, but you’re not known for either your subtlety or your efficiency, you know. Besides-” a shrug, nonchalant as anything- “it wasn’t like I wasn’t curious, too.”

Julian blinked up at Coën, who smirked back at him.

“You weren’t down here for my sake at all, were you?”

In response, Coën’s smirk simply widened, and he patted Julian’s head. “It was a fun, useful bonus, Julek, don’t worry about it.”

And, he simply replaced the letters in their proper, marked spaces, and started towards the door, as Julian looked on, incredulous.

Chapter Text

First, there was nothing. A void, where a struggle should be; it could only mean that he’d met with failure.

He couldn’t quite think to be bitter about that, not when all there was around him was the emptiness that he was drowning in. Was he drowning? He felt so detached, yet smothered – he didn’t know.

And then, even he faded out of existence.

The next time he realised he was, it was a far more heavy thing than the freeing absence of anything had been.

His head roared with dull confusion, rough wool had been stuffed up his sinuses and padded all around his brain for good measure, and his thoughts had all the roaring indistinctness of holding one’s head underwater.

It ached.

That was all he could realise before he drifted back into nothingness.

The third time he came to, he was aware of cold stone digging into his skin, aggravating old scars.

How uncomfortable.

“-probably hasn’t actually consumed a potion like that in years, at a guess. That, as well as the chimaeric poison he absorbed-”

There were voices, thundering down from the heavens above him as he came to himself. He hoped that this time he’d slip back into his body properly – all these half measures were becoming very irritating.

“- don’t care if he’s just chugged a good three litres of arsenic. I want him alert and responsive-”

Oh, I’m alert, all right, he wanted to say, but his tongue was made of lead, an immovable object inside his mouth. The dull ache was creeping up on him again, and he could feel it pushing him, feel himself falling back into the cold embrace of unconsciousness yet again.

How annoying.

Jaskier came to in the dark, blinking as his eyes adjusted sharply to the dimness.

His head was pounding, though whether that was thanks to the White Honey or the poison, he had no idea. Either way, he was glad for the low light. Small mercies, and all that.

The musty little room was lit by a single torch down the corridor, and, by the absence of both windows and the whistling of the wind, he had to assume that they were underground. Some sort of dungeon, probably. It would fit well with the rough stone and all the iron bars and chains keeping him trapped.

“So,” came a voice, quasi-familiar, from behind him, near the back of his little cell. “You’re finally awake.”

Jaskier jumped, a little, and immediately snapped his attention back to the man.

He was slightly shorter than average, and pale enough that Jaskier felt comfortable in assuming that he hadn’t seen the sun in many, many years. Long, black hair fell down his back in a braid, half-undone, and watery blue eyes gazed back at his new cellmate from above a large, elegant nose.

He was as entirely unremarkable as he was unfortunately and depressingly familiar, goddamn it.

Privately, Jaskier was a little impressed that he managed to look less scruffy after what was probably a sizeable chunk of time in a cell, than he had whilst playing dress-up, hiring a witcher to play bodyguard to him and sacrificing his men to the anger of his foes. He could appreciate a man with good grooming habits.

Even so, he mentally cursed his luck.

Ferrant de Lettenhove was his cellmate. How in the nine hells had that happened?

Jaskier grunted as he heaved himself into a more comfortable sitting position, ignoring the persistent feeling of weakness that seemed to have made itself quite at home in his bones. “Adam,” he said, “wasn’t it? I can’t say I’m thrilled to see you again.”

Ferrant’s eyes widened, watery blue irises encircled by an almost alarming amount of white, and Jaskier simply raised an eyebrow.

“Of course,” the man said softly, some kind of realisation dawning on him as he spoke, “of course. So it was you. And this…”

“What was me? I’m responsible for a great many things, you know – some of the Continent’s greatest songs, for one-”

“Before you attempt your, quite frankly, pathetic attempt to convince me that you are but a humble bard,” Ferrant said, far more pleasantly than Jaskier had thought him capable of, before settling back rapidly into his customary disdainful expression, evidently quite easily cured of his surprise, “I would suggest taking stock of yourself, and realising how, exactly, you’ve just sunk the final nail into your own coffin, here, witcher.”

And-

Oh.

Oh, damn.

It was, perhaps, a sharper confrontation with his own complacency than the thing with Geralt and the scars had been – and he couldn’t even call it a rookie mistake, because when he had been a rookie, he’d been more vigilant than this. Back then, it was the constant fretting and double-checking that he was sure would have given him away.

With hands that were not quite shaky, just yet, he reached down to his right ankle, and-

His heart plummeted, as the situation laid out before him oh-so-kindly informed him what, exactly, it was that he’d just done, and what he’d revealed.

He was barefoot, the vibrant green of his trouser leg sullied with dirt and grime, and the anklet that he’d kept hidden, out of sight and out of mind, the anklet that was perpetually fitted snugly around his ankle – the innocuous point of origin for the glamour that had been his constant companion for so many years – was gone.

The anklet was gone, the glamour was gone.

Of course it was gone.

His secret and his scars were so woefully and pathetically exposed, and to a de Lettenhove, of all things. What a way to fuck it up, Jaskier, Julian! If he were being charitable – which he always was – he could have forgiven himself for the slip up with Geralt and the shoulder. This? Gods. This was unforgivably stupid, and it was exactly what he got for his blasé showmanship. Damn it.

Damn it all to every hell this land had ever known.

Out of the corner of his eyes, he could see Ferrant smirking to himself – naturally – ah. His sinking realisation must have shown on his face. What an arse.

Typical, for his genetic background.

Jaskier exhaled through his nose, long and loud, and he let his demeanour and the way he formed his words in his mouth shift. “What an astute observation it is that you’ve made, Adam, my friend,” he said, resting his arms on his knees. His doublet was gone, too, damn it, and his sweaty chemise clung to his back. Tracing the relief of his scars, no doubt. Showing off far more of his past than he ever had intended to.

“Please, call me by my name,” Ferrant said, oily and patronising. “I saw the swords in your hand on the day that you killed that damn mage in my back garden, Master Witcher, and unfortunately for you, I’m not an idiot.”

He considered pretending that he had no idea what Ferrant was talking about, but- no. The damned bastard was already certain that he was correct in assuming Jaskier had been Lohere’s assassin, a lucky deduction made more depressing only by the fact that he was correct. Jaskier wouldn’t demean himself any further by continuing his futile attempts at denial, as much as it galled him to hand a de Lettenhove a victory.

“Ferrant de Lettenhove,” he conceded, and gritted his teeth against the spark of vindication in the other man’s eyes.

“And you? Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?”

“Absolutely,” Jaskier said. “I’m Lambert of the Wolf School, informally known as Mister Dick, between my friends, and it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“No you’re not,” Ferrant snorted, “and no, you’re not.”

“Oh?”

“If you were indeed one of the last four survivors of the Wolf School, Geralt of Rivia would not have been so unfamiliar with you on our little… business trip.”

Infuriating.

“He was suffering from a short bout of retrograde amnesia,” Jaskier retorted, far more flippantly than he felt.

“Please, don’t let’s insult both of our intellects. I heard your pathetic little attempts at icebreakers when we made camp.”

“Oh, so you were spying on us, too? And, while we’re at it, are you always so well-informed on topics as niche as Wolf School relationship drama, or was I just lucky enough to get dumped in the backyard of a witcher sociologist?”

Ferrant gave him that unpleasant smile, again, and crossed his arms. “Please, Master Witcher, none of what I recounted was privileged information. It’s a wonder what a man can do with a little observation, deduction, and a smattering of background knowledge. None of which, I must add, you really cared for keeping classified, how does the tune go again? Toss a coin to your witcher-”

His singing was horrible. Completely flat. Like trying to coax lyrics out of a dying cat.

“Of course, of course,” Jaskier allowed. “But I won’t deny, it’s hardly a topic of note for a man of your status, given how few of our number are still running around. So, what are you? A spy? An informant? Or just some half-wit bastard that likes causing trouble?”

“Better than some escapee witcher playing the most embarrassing little bit known to man. Tell me, did they beat you so hard in your little keep-upon-the-hill that your good sense of shame was permanently damaged?”

“At least I found success in my chosen profession-” Jaskier sniped back, ruffled, “unless ‘assassination target’ was what you were going for?”

Ferrant scoffed at him, disdain written all over his face. “And if you hadn’t been such a tremendous failure as an assassin, witcher, you wouldn’t be sharing a cell with me now.”

“I’ll grant you that one. I also wish I’d gutted you like a rotten fish.”

“You wouldn’t gut a rotten fish, you’d just throw it out,” said Ferrant. “Why waste the effort on preparing inedible goods?”

“Sorry. Gutted you like a fresh fish, then – specifically, a fresh fish that I decided to personally guide off of the mortal coil with the tender aid of sharp weaponry and excessive violence.”

Jaskier cocked his head, and pretended not to notice the glare aimed squarely at him from across the cell.

“You’re some kind of half-wit, you know that?” Ferrant drawled, tapping his finger irritatedly against his bicep. “Here you are, trapped in a cell with an enemy of your enemy, and instead of even making a cursory query as to what the situation may be from the person perhaps the most likely to give you a straight answer, you start insulting me. Are you trying to lower any chance you may have of gaining my co-operation?”

Well.

“Yes,” Jaskier retorted. “I don’t like you, but more importantly, I don’t trust you, and I can judge damn well for myself what is going on without a smug interloper trying to hold my hand about it.”

“You are juvenile.”

“And you’re a… a rat bastard, is what you are. I mean, come on, do you have anything better to do than try your best to beg me for my help without sacrificing your pride?”

Ferrant’s gaze, if possible, turned even more disparaging and disdainful.

“If you think I’m the one with an ego, witcher, I’m afraid that I have some terrible news for you.”

“Your attempts to get the last word in are as pathetic as they are transparent.”

“Projection,” Ferrant muttered.

“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Jaskier snapped, and turned resolutely away from the man.

It was just his damn luck – were it not for the fact that his arms were shackled and chained to the wall, he would have throttled the insufferable noble. At the very least, he liked to think he would have done so. This whole farce was ridiculous.

If being chained to a wall by some shit-heel sorcerer wasn’t enough, Ferrant de Lettenhove was his cellmate.

Ferrant de fucking Lettenhove was his cellmate.

If Melitele were real, Jaskier was certain she was laughing at him, somewhere.

No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t escape his gods-damned past, could he? He’d gone to all this trouble, too- the glamour, the lies, the deals… and here he was, secrets and forced-upon-him nature laid bare, forced into a cramped cell with a Lettenhove man – which. Gods. He’d sworn to himself that he’d never go back to Lettenhove.

Up and down the halls of Kaer Seren, as a too-young, still-human child, Jaskier – Julian – had whispered it like a promise to himself, that no matter what happened from here on out, he was never going back; he wouldn’t give his father the satisfaction, not after he gave him up for his own agenda. Lettenhove and its nobles were nothing to him. He was never going back.

Being here, with his own flesh and blood, though undoubtedly a later generation, was still skirting far too close breaking that promise, in spirit, even if not in letter. That was all Lettenhove was – stifling little rooms full of stifling little men.

Admittedly, Ferrant didn’t stifle the very air in the room like his father had, but then again, last Jaskier had seen his father, he’d been six and his father had towered over him. Now – and it was a bit of a perspective shift – he was a full-grown adult and he could take any Pankratz with a hand behind his back and his eyes closed. Ferrant probably knew it too, pressed in his little corner as he was – completely happy to spit vitriol at Jaskier, but staying carefully out of arm’s reach of the mutated freak of nature he was joyfully irritating.

He wasn’t afraid of him, Jaskier noted, but part of that was probably the arrogance talking. Adam had had it in spades, to try and pull one over on Geralt like that – and he’d not been too worried in the safe-house, but on the other hand-

He’d fought Jaskier happily enough when he needed to, but cut his losses when he realised he was beaten. He’d recognised he’d been beaten. And now, he’d floated the idea of co-operation.

Either way, Jaskier thought to himself, sniffing a little, it was none of his concern. So what if Ferrant was something of a pragmatist-slash-strategist as well as a self-absorbed, arrogant prick? It was none of his business whether the bastard lived or died, and he most certainly didn’t need to ally with a liar and a man of Lettenhove to escape this place – he’d be out in no time on his own, anyways.

Just as soon as he figured out how to get out of his restraints and the cell, but that was nothing a simple Sign couldn’t fix, unless-

Jaskier let himself look at the shackles around his arms – really look at them. They were shiny and new and tied each of his hands, separately, to the wall, via a medium-length chain just short enough that his wrists wouldn’t be able to touch the floor.

More importantly, the metal, upon closer inspection, wasn’t just shiny – it seemed to glisten with a faint, purple light, running like a pattern throughout the shackle. An intricate, familiar pattern, because Jaskier knew what this was, and what it was was very bad news.

Dimeritium shackles. No wonder he felt so weak.

A witcher was not like a sorcerer – dimeritium didn’t simply cut them off from Signs. There was an unnatural element, some sort of magical enhancement, protection, to a witcher’s own mutated biology. Dimeritium, as it was, sapped at this element; it weakened the magical resistance the Trial of the Dreams had given them. No wonder Jaskier felt like shit. For all intents and purposes, he was weakened – bereft of a sizable percentage of the benefits his second rounds of Trials had bestowed upon him.

Gods damn it. Whoever had wanted him locked up - they really weren’t taking any chances with him.

Ferrant, for his part, coldly surveyed Jaskier’s own surveying, but remained silent.

The cell was about four metres by five, being longer than it was wide, and Jaskier was chained to the opposite corner as Ferrant was – a small mercy, in the grand scheme of things – most likely to prevent him from actually laying a hand on the bastard, whilst still keeping them in close enough quarters to annoy the ever-loving hell out of each other.

There were no windows. The room was lit only by the crackling torches lining the walls outside the cell, past the thick, metal bars that separated the cell from the corridor – but at least Jaskier was the one nearer the door.

It would ensure that he had to do that little bit less walking during his imminent escape.

“Are you done pretending you can pull this off on your own, yet, so that we can co-operate?” Ferrant sniffed, from his own sorry half of the cell, far inferior to Jaskier’s own corner. He privately floated the hypothesis that Ferrant had only adopted the no-‘I’-in-‘team’, pragmatic persona he was currently displaying to feel superior to him, and found it agreeable.

“Who’s pretending?” Jaskier scoffed, with less venom in his tone than he’d wanted, but more than he’d managed against anyone in the past twenty years, murderous morticians and blackmailing sorceresses included.

One thing that Jaskier had not been looking forwards to was the visitation he was no doubt going to be afforded by his gaoler.

He knew it was going to happen; he crossed his fingers that it wouldn’t, but the gaoler showed up anyways, having failed spectacularly to choke on a bite of apple and drop dead at the entrance to the hallway.

The complete and utter bastard from the inn sauntered into view just as Jaskier had calmed down enough to consider trying to fill the silence anyways, having resolutely ignored Ferrant for a number of minutes that he was sure constituted the best part of an hour, and soured his mood all over again.

Damn this shitty cell and its shitty patrons. Was this some sort of karma, for sticking his sword through Lohere’s throat? Whatever made karma decide to do any sort of kindness for such a viscerally unpleasant, scheming mercenary of a sorceress, anyways? Karma needed to get better taste in women, if that was the case.

Either way, the whore’s son of a man who’d had him poisoned strode up to his cell far too soon for Jaskier to be at all pleased with his showing up at all. He was, to all appearances, looking significantly less grimy and, indeed, fairly comely now that he’d decided to dress up fancy-like and styled his hair. That was sorcerers for you, he supposed – vain as anything.

Jaskier’s own glamour, on the other hand, was in a completely different ring. He hadn’t gotten it just to look prettier, that had simply been a… pleasant side-effect. All the benefits of vanity, and none of the effort. Or something.

“You’re awake,” the man said – and he spoke quickly, opening his mouth almost before he’d come to a halt before Jaskier’s cell. It was like he was loathe to waste time pronouncing his syllables, which was a new one – sorcerers, in his experience, liked taking their sweet time with their entrances. Probably to project a sense of power. Sorcerers and power went together like gunpowder and explosions, like royalty and inbreeding, like freshly-minted witchers and getting mauled to death on monster-infested roadsides.

Well, exceptions to every rule, and all that.

“I am,” he said, evenly, and Ferrant scoffed in the corner, and muttered a noise that sounded like ‘unfortunately’.

“Good,” the sorcerer said. “I was beginning to think I’d given you brain damage with that powder. Chimaeric poisons always tend to be more experimental.”

Of course- chimaeric poison. Strychnine, which he’d identified by smell, could be absorbed via skin contact, as he’d done… but it didn’t shut down the nervous system, he recalled now, it stimulated it. Which meant that in order for strychnine to behave the way it had when he’d been exposed to it, instead of as a stimulant, it must have been borrowing the ability of a different drug mixed in with it.

Chemistry, of course, didn’t work like that. But, with a little bit of magic thrown in, reactions could be suppressed, and the properties of substances could be bastardised beyond belief - what was magic for, after all, if not subverting natural law?

“Alchemist,” Jaskier breathed. “You’re an alchemist. Precious few of those running around these days, I’d wager.”

The alchemist pressed his lips together, smiling thinly. “Oh, there’s more of us than you think, witcher. It isn’t as forgotten an art form as people like to tout, you know. I’d wager that most mages worth their salt know a thing or two on the topic.”

“And here I thought that questing for the Philosopher’s Stone had gone out of fashion.”

“Oh, it very much has. Turning base metals into gold is practically a party trick, these days,” the alchemist said, “and look me in the eye and tell me that you were born aging at the rate you age now. How old are you, sixty? Seventy?”

“Wouldn’t you just love to know?”

“I would, that’s why I asked, but I won’t insult your dignity any further. I should have remembered, my mother always told me to respect the elderly.”

Ferrant coughed, in the way one coughs when the noise that they set out to make was not a cough at all.

“Do you always chain people you respect to the walls? I must say, your mother must be very disappointed in you if you do.”

The man grinned, seemingly unperturbed. “I’ve done many things to many people. Mother was always supportive of my passions.”

“And your passions were, what, unlawful imprisonment?” Jaskier asked, brow cocked.

“Master Witcher, come now, please, what kind of host would I be if I continued on and on about myself without ever offering you a chance to speak?”

“Oh, no, nobody ever tells me childhood anecdotes anymore – please, feel free to continue. Take your time, even. Beat around the bush. Provide unnecessary context – I love a good expositional narrative, as do we all.”

Ferrant scoffed from behind them.

“If you two are going to have a candlelit date,” he called, “would you mind taking it to a more appropriate location? Preferably one where I’m not present?”

“Oh, come now, this small talk is hardly a date, de Lettenhove. The gentleman hasn’t even given me his name yet,” Jaskier chided the man out of the corner of his mouth, and Ferrant threw his hands in the air in exasperation.

“You’re insufferable,” he snapped.

“Oh, I aim to be.”

“But you are quite right, witcher,” the alchemist said, tone oily and condescending like all mages tended to sound, but a distinctly amused tilt to his brow. “We haven’t yet had the pleasure of being introduced. My name is Ivan, and yours?”

“Jaskier,” Jaskier said.

“Jaskier,” the man said, agreeably. “You don’t prefer Julian, in any case?”

Judging from the way the alchemist’s – Ivan’s – lips quirked up at the quiet yet sharp inhalation of breath from the back corner of the cell, that had been said entirely for Ferrant’s benefit – or just to piss Jaskier off, with Ferrant’s unfortunate clue-in only being an added bonus to that. Now, that was a hell of a lot more likely.

“I don’t prefer Julian, actually,” Jaskier said. “Which was why I did not introduce myself as such.”

“My apologies for my lack of manners, Jaskier,” Ivan said, sounding about as sincere as one would expect from a mage apologising to someone, “I was simply unsure as to whether or not you wanted your stage name connected to your current… identity.”

That warranted a small groan, because the mage had a point.

“I changed my mind,” Jaskier said. “Julian is my favourite name. Call me by it.”

“As you wish, Julian,” Ivan smiled, pulling a worryingly-overburdened keyring from inside his neat, nondescript waistcoat, and neatly unlocking the entryway inlaid into the bars of the cell’s front with a frustratingly nondescript key.

He strode inside with purpose, and then, standing foolishly close to a witcher for someone who wasn’t immune to the ancient and powerful art of getting kicked in the nads, moved to unchain Jaskier’s shackles from the wall.

Then stopped.

He turned to face the sullen Ferrant, instead, and dipped his head in mock-apology. Bastard.

“You know, I did originally plan to take him elsewhere to do this, but I feel you may appreciate being included in the proceedings.”

Ferrant scoffed. “I doubt it, but do what you will. The witcher is none of my business.”

“Isn’t he?” Ivan purred, and sunk his foot into Jaskier’s chest before the witcher could even think to react, with considerable force behind the blow.

The noise that he made as the air was forced out of his lungs was inelegant and heavy, a sound he hadn’t made since he was greener than the grass that grew on the mountainside Kaer Seren was nestled on- and, alright, he hadn’t been very green at all the last time someone had nailed a hit like that on him, and nor was the grass around Kaer Seren particularly green, but it made him feel better to think about it that way.

And then Ivan drove his heel – his sharp-as-shit heel into his abdomen again, cutting through enough skin to make Jaskier wince, and all of a sudden he wasn’t thinking about anything other than the fact that Ivan was here to deliver him a good, old-fashioned beating.

As Ivan drew away, Jaskier caught a fuzzy glance of the pointed spike that adorned back of the boot. That was definitely made for breaking skin.

If Jaskier wasn’t bound in dimeritium cuffs and still groggy from the chimaeric poison that the man had fed him, he probably would have been able to shake this off like to was nothing, but as it was, he felt the force behind ever blow in his very bones. Ivan slammed his fist into Jaskier’s jaw, and the resulting crack was most likely as much from it dislocating as it was from Ivan’s knuckles sharing the blow.

His nose bore the punch with more of a wet kind of crunch, and Jaskier’s body remembered what pain was as his face exploded into white-hot agony, and it was distracting enough that he didn’t see Ivan’s gods-forsaken boot coming towards the side of his face until it made contact. If the pain before had been an explosion, it became a damn supernova as his face cracked neatly against the floor, chains jerking his arms in the opposite direction and making his shoulders ache.

Really. As if he wasn’t dealing with enough already.

“You’re soft,” Ivan said, impassive. “Is it just the poison, or was it the years under the glamour that mellowed you out? I’m not surprised you didn’t take Lohere in a fair fight. You can’t even take a few punches.”

“Do take into account that you chained him to your wall in dimeritium cuffs before drugging him, Ivan,” Ferrant piped up from his shitty corner, extremely unhelpfully. “He’s off his game.”

“Thank you, Ferrant.”

Jaskier blinked his eyes open just enough to see the sorcerer, through bleary eyes, stride across the stone with eerily silent footsteps to deliver a swift blow to the stupid spy-informant-whatever, which Jaskier took to mean that Ivan actually found Ferrant’s input appropriately useless and annoying. Take that. Team Ferrant, zero.

Sucker.

“I will take my leave,” Ivan announced. “I’ll return for the interrogation, shortly.”

Despite himself, Jaskier spoke up, voice nasal. “This wasn’t the interrogation?”

“Of course it wasn’t. You were asking me questions,” Ivan said, having the gall to quirk an eyebrow, and then he simply… strode away with his silent gait, locking the cell behind him.

Personal payback? Oh, killing his comrade-in-arms – Lohere, it had to be, given Ferrant’s presence in the cell. She’d been a sorcerer, too – it was more likely, Jaskier decided, and then pointedly continued not to much about all the numerous other lives he’d taken over the years. It was a kill-or-be-killed sort of world out there, and the last thing he needed on top of a broken nose and a dislocated jaw was a crisis of morality.

Jaskier blinked his bleary eyes, and sat up, ignoring the pain still spiking in his face and jaw, and the residue throb of his old wound to his abdomen. He could taste the coppery tang of blood in his mouth – oh, that was disgusting. He hated the taste of blood - reminded him too much of choking on all the things that were wrong with the world. It had been a taste conspicuously and thankfully absent from his life since he’d gotten that bloody glamour, for the most part.

Of course, the damn anklet’s absence would be heralded by the return of red-stained teeth and blistering agony. Of course.

There was probably a sort of poetry in that, themes and parallels between lives - but he’d always, demonstrably, sucked at keeping these two facets of himself separated, so whatever ballad he spun from it would most likely fall flat. They always did, if the core of what he was embellishing upon was insubstantial enough that the inspiration rang hollow.

His jaw. He’d never dislocated it before – it hurt like hell.

Once, when Henrik had been brawling with Bruno one winter in Kaer Seren, he’d had his jaw dislocated. Bruno had seemed willing enough to call the match right there, and let Henrik recover, but Henrik had simply grabbed his jaw, clicked it neatly back into place, and continued right on fighting as if nothing had happened. Being that it was Henrik, however, it was entirely possible that this was a very stupid thing to do and not something to be emulated under any circumstances, but-

Ignoring Ferrant’s baleful gaze – which he was, unfortunately, beginning to get used to – Jaskier seized his jaw between the thumb and two fingers of his right hand, chain rustling, and he popped it back, clenching his left hand in a fist against the pain as he did so. He was reasonably certain that this was the correct course of action.

Gods damn it all. Jaskier would live.

“Are you going to set your nose, too?” Ferrant called, his own hand hovering over his own jaw, which was beginning to redden where Ivan had clocked him. Gods, the man bruised fast.

“Obviously,” Jaskier hissed back, jaw aching and the scent of blood almost overpowering in his nose. “I’m not going to be a bard breathing through my mouth for the rest of my life.”

“Do you know how to?” Ferrant asked, smartly not commenting on his bardic career’s likely imminent and untimely, lack-of-glamour-induced death.

“Of course I know how to. This isn’t my first broken nose.”

“I could tell,” the Lettenhove bastard said, dryly, and Jaskier felt the urge to deck him in the other side of his face, to match. “But it may not have been you who set it.”

Jaskier groaned, theatrically, and his jaw decided to remind him exactly why theatrics were a bad idea at the current moment, but he ignored the pain. “Oh, don’t tell me you were going to offer to set my nose for me, Ferrant.”

Ferrant raised an eyebrow – his left – in response to that. “Sooner or later, you’re going to realise you need to work with me to escape, and I’d rather not have you mouth-breathing beside me as we do. It’s louder.”

His nose was a bitch to set, but Ivan hadn’t broken it as badly as he feared – Julian pinched it, hard, to slow the bleeding, and furrowed his brow. The injury was only mild. It shouldn’t have hurt this much.

What thrice-damned poison had that fucking alchemist fed him whilst he was unconscious? And how?

He supposed that he could ask Ferrant about it. If he wanted his dignity to die a slow painful death in front of him, that was.

Jaskier elected to keep wondering.

The cell was made up of three walls, a floor, and a ceiling of neatly-cut, dark grey stone, and thick, iron bars marked the boundary between cell and corridor. The gaps between the bars were small enough that even a child might have had trouble slipping between them, but wide enough that they gave anyone walking past the vicinity of the cell ample view of what was going on inside. This, paired with no windows, nor even a hint of daylight anywhere near Jaskier’s line of sight, meant only one thing:

Escaping was going to be a bitch.

The clacking of polished heels against the stone floor was a sound that Jaskier was quite familiar with. He’d heard it in the halls of the nobility’s estates, around corners at Oxenfurt’s university campus, and up and down the floors of, broadly speaking, anyone with enough money to blow on a pair of fancy shoes. It was a sound he’d always associated with wealth, with luxury and leisure.

Idly, he wondered how many times Ivan would have to come and go for this association to supersede that one.

Timekeeping was difficult when there was no sunlight and no guards to watch the rotation of. Ivan returned for his interrogation an amount of time later, and Jaskier supposed that this meant either it had been a day since he’d broken his nose, or Ivan simply had so little to do with his time that he could afford himself two counts of physical assault against the same person in one day.

Ferrant, for his part, took one look at the man as he arrived, scoffed, and turned to face the wall.

“Hello, Ivan.”

“Julian,” Ivan nodded. “I don’t suppose you are at all willing to be co-operative through this endeavour?”

“Depends on the questions.”

Ivan smiled, a callous, thin-lipped smile that looked more poisonous than that damn key had.

“Julian of Kovir,” he said. “You sought out a glamour from a colleague of mine, who specialised in such things, a good few years ago. A witcher of the Griffin School – and not a very well-known one, either. You sparsely show up in any kind of written record before you made your deal with Ilona.”

“Those aren’t questions,” Jaskier pointed out, because he was stupid and he had some sort of death-wish, and couldn’t hold his tongue to save his life. He remembered Ivan driving his boot into his chest and winced.

“And they’re about the only thing,” Ivan said, his demeanour remaining as agreeable as ever. “Beyond that, and your… alter-ego, we know very little about you, and we’d like to know more.”

“Is that so?”

“I would have told Lohere to be careful with an associate so little is known about, but I doubt she would have listened to me.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Ivan hummed. “It’s difficult, to track down information surrounding someone who was only sporadically active even decades ago, who was never quite noteworthy enough to be memorialised in print. I know where you ended up, of course – but where did you come from? What were you doing before you sought Ilona out? You’re a walking, talking loose end, Julian. I’m sure you can understand why this is an issue for us.”

“You said it yourself, I’m from the Griffin School.” Jaskier waggled his eyebrows, remembering a crumbling keep on a mountainside in Poviss. “May its memory be a blessing unto us all.”

Ivan was a mage. He’d get it.

“Indeed. Do you know the name you were born under?”

“Julian, I do believe it was.”

“No surname, no homeland?”

Jaskier screwed up his face in mock concentration. “I don’t believe so.”

“Shame.”

“Truly. But, just you wait until you get to my age, Ivan. You’ll be forgetting things left and right, too.”

“And how old are you, Julian No-Surname-No-Homeland?”

“Old enough,” Jaskier pouted. “But really, there’s no need for the interview. I’m considering writing a biography. Witcher stories, you know – they’re big with the common folk, these days.”

He somewhat expected Ivan to lose his patience, at that – at his deliberate attempts to irritate him into action – because Jaskier had had quite enough of this farcical small talk. If Ivan was going to beat the shit out of him again, he’d rather have it over and done with.

But Ivan did not lose his temper. He merely nodded, and stroked his chin, thoughtful and calculating.

And then he left.

There was no indication that the conversation was over, no closing remark, no sarcastic adieu. He simply turned on his heel and walked back out the way he’d come, down the little hallway that ran down beside all of the cells.

Jaskier cast a look at Ferrant, who was staring back with wide, confused eyes.

“Loathe as I am to initiate a conversation with you,” he said, meeting his gaze with his own, “that’s unusual for him, right?”

Ferrant scoffed. “What, you mean him keeping you at a comfortable distance and making small talk without then later coming in to clock you in the jaw or feed you some sort of toxin?”

“Well, I wasn’t talking about the fucking foreplay, was I, now?”

“Then yes,” Ferrant said, “that’s unusual for him, but I wouldn’t be too surprised. He can’t get answers out of you if he’s too busy beating you up.”

“Reassuring.” Jaskier considered, and brushed his hair out of his face. It really had gotten almost ridiculously long under the glamour. It was hard to remember to cut it, when you couldn’t actually see it growing – the sacrifices he made, for the further separation of his identities.

It had made perfect sense in theory. Even if there remained a resemblance between him-as-a-witcher, and him-as-a-bard – and there did remain one, because his face, under the scars and the yellow-tinged irises, remained his face – nobody could switch between short and long hair on a whim. So if the glamour gave him the appearance of short hair, which he otherwise never wore…

Well. He’d thought he was being very clever.

“Good talk,” Ferrant snorted, talking into the lull that had fallen over the exchange.

“With you? That’s impossible.”

He was met with only silence from his cellmate, after that.

When Ivan returned, he did so bearding a platter of food – bread and jams and miscellaneous fruits, and a jug of some sort of wine, the familiar musty aroma of the stuff permeating the entire cell with an almost overbearing intensity. It was at times like this that he envied the stunted sense of smell he’d had before the trials.

For all that wine tasted pleasant enough, the smell loved to linger, like some sort of saccharine disease, hearty and sour and cloying in his nostrils in the same way that a corpse was.

“Julian,” he greeted, bowing lightly, food platter still balanced precariously on the fingertips of his left hand, “Ferrant. I hope you don’t mind – I took the liberty of preparing some food for today’s… discussion. Prison meals can be so bland.”

Jaskier, as a matter of fact, hadn’t recalled having eaten since before he was kidnapped – another probable cause for his weakness, now that he thought about it, for all that a witcher could technically fast for far longer than was strictly considered healthy before feeling any ill-effects.

Ferrant, for his part, busied himself with looking vaguely unamused. It was, Jaskier would admit, quite funny, that the man was perpetually third-wheeling a prisoner and a self-imposed warden.

Ivan took the keyring from his belt once more, and lifted one of the keys to the lock. It was, at a squint, hardly different to the many other key hung on the ring – and, with it packed tightly enough that the keys barely made noise as he moved, that was saying something – but Jaskier tried to memorise its features anyways. This was, after all, the clearest he’d ever seen it, now that Ivan had to unlock the cell one-handed.

The key seemed to be iron, with a circular notch at the top of its teeth, two evenly-sized rectangular ones at the side, and a small square at the bottom.

Circle, rectangle, rectangle, square.

And then, Ivan was inside the cell, hooking the keyring back onto his belt under his finely embroidered cloak, and placing the food in the corner furthest away from both Jaskier and Ferrant, nearest the bars. He lowered himself into a cross-legged seated position beside it.

“So,” he said, as if he were opening a casual discussion, and Jaskier forced himself to remember the sensation of Ivan’s heel being stabbed into his chest with careful force. “I don’t think we much got off onto the right foot with the whole interrogation business, yesterday.”

“What,” Jaskier retorted, his mouth finding the words before his good sense could find his restraint, “disappointed that i didn't have a monologue prepared? Because honestly, me too, freeform verse is so under-utilised.”

“You are a very immature man.”

“I said that too,” Ferrant interrupted, raising an eyebrow, and was promptly ignored.

“I don’t have the answers you seem to so desperately want from me,” Jaskier said. “Can I have some bread and jam?” Then, as an afterthought- “Please. If that does anything for you.”

“Perhaps we can compromise,” Ivan said.

“Oh, do tell.”

“I ask a question, and for every answer I receive – every good faith, honest answer – you get your choice of food and drink.”

“Right. Straight out of chapter three of the interrogation handbook, I presume?”

Ivan took the jab in stride. “I find little need for excessive creativity where a straightforward solution will suffice,” he said. “You should try it. You could have avoided a great deal of trouble if you’d put on a mask instead of selling your soul for a glamour.”

“I didn’t sell my soul.”

“At the very least, you wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“Ah, who’s to say? You and I, we get along so well – I might have stopped by anyways, given half the chance.”

“I’m charmed,” Ivan said flatly. “Were you trained at Kaer Seren?”

“Where else?” Jaskier scoffed. “Far as I know, the Griffin School only ever had one keep, and I know you know that, because it was your lot who decided to bury it all in an avalanche.”

“Yes, that was quite ingenious. No matter how good one is with a sword, how resistant a witcher is to magic- but I suppose I shouldn’t reopen old wounds just yet. Do you miss it?”

“Kaer Seren? Like a gangrenous limb.”

“So, no?”

“Of course I miss it, you piece of shit sorcerer,” Jaskier snapped. “It was my home. It was a shit home, and I hated it, but I miss it like- like it was my goddamn home, alright? Keep its name out of your mouth.”

Ivan raised his hands in mock surrender. “Alright,” he said, calm as ever. “Will it be bread and jam, or perhaps an orange? An apple? Wine?”

Furrowing his brow, Jaskier considered. “Anything that’s not spiked, or laced with poison, or mutated into some sort of alchemical nightmare?”

“I’ll give you some bread and jam, then.”

He reached across the tray, and Jaskier half expected him to break the bread and dip it into jam for him, but Ivan simply took a plate of sliced bread, balanced a little cup of jam on the edge, and slid it carefully – too smoothly for it to have been a natural trajectory – across the floor, where it gently came to a rest bumping against Jaskier’s thigh.

“If this is poisoned,” he warned, “I’m going to make sure I aim at your shoes when I vomit.”

“If you believe it to be poisoned, don’t eat it,” Ferrant called, lazily. “Or give it to me. I’ll take alchemically tampered-with jam over another bowl of porridge. I’ve had enough porridge to last me a lifetime.”

“If you are hungry, Ferrant de Lettenhove,” Ivan said, “then say so.”

He slid a plate of bread – sans jam, it had to be noted – across the floor to him, anyways.

Jaskier considered this, and took a bite of the bread. No jam. It was good bread, soft and warm like it was freshly baked, and light and airy besides. Damn sorcerers, he thought, and their damn nice bread.

“Another question,” Ivan said, levelling his gaze and staring squarely at Jaskier. “Who was in your cohort? And what year did you graduate?”

“Gif- Give me a moment here, damn you, I’m eating.”

“My apologies,” Ivan said, smoothly.

Jaskier took his sweet time with the bread – partially to savour the first meal he’d had in an age, partially to piss Ivan off – and out of the corner of his eye, saw Ferrant doing the same. It was a shame these were the circumstances he was dining in – it really was good bread.

“If I co-operate,” he said, idly, “do I get more bread out of it?”

“If you co-operate,” Ivan repeated, “then yes.”

“Alright.”

“Good.”

“Great.”

“So, then,” Ivan said, idly stroking his chin. “You trained at Kaer Seren. Who was in your cohort? What year did you, ah, graduate?”

Jaskier’s blood ran cold, at that, but he kept his face calmly disinterested, his posture relaxed. “That’s your question? Gods, I don’t know. It’s been decades, I’m not a book-keeper. Shortly before you buried the damn castle under a thousand tons of snow. I don’t know.”

The damn sorcerer and his damn questions. Ivan’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know anything at all?”

“Not the dates, surely,” Jaskier said, throwing his hands in the air in an exaggerated gesture of frustration. “Your first question, though – you know a guy named Coën? Coën of Poviss?”

Ivan rubbed his chin, furrowing his brow.

“I’ve heard of him,” Ferrant piped up. “Another Griffin, though he’s known to rub shoulders with the Wolves. Winters at Kaer Morhen, sometimes, and everything.”

“He’d have to,” Jaskier interrupted, sour, “given that the Brotherhood buried Kaer Seren under an avalanche.”

“Coën of Poviss,” Ivan murmured. “He was in your cohort?”

“He was. About the only one still living, last time I checked, the lucky bastard.”

“Friend of yours?”

My best friend. My brother. We grew up together. I haven’t seen him in decades. He probably thinks I’m dead.

“Something like that,” Jaskier said. “We were in the same cohort, like you said. We were-” best friends, we were best friends, we were brothers- “on good terms, at least. Probably wouldn’t be jumping at the chance to buy me a drink after all this, though.” He waved a hand, as if to gesture at the nebulous mess of sorcerers and de Lettenhoves and glamours and bards that he’d found himself in. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen him.”

“You didn’t keep in contact?” Ivan queried, mild demeanour not quite concealing his surprise. “And yet you traipse around after the White Wolf. Why do you make time for him, and not your fellow Griffins?”

“He – Geralt – he didn’t know me. As Julian, I mean. So he wouldn’t know that I wasn’t- well. You know. He wouldn’t know what I was.”

“A witcher.”

“Yeah,” Jaskier said, dimly aware that he was talking too much. He was nervous, he supposed. He talked far too much when he was nervous. “Coën would have clocked it was me from a mile off, scars and heartbeat and yellow eyes or not. But Geralt didn’t know who the fuck I was, and-”

Jaskier bit his tongue. He’d looked so lonely, was the thing. Or maybe- Or maybe. Maybe some part of Jaskier – some deeply fucking unwanted part of Jaskier, had missed the Path, missed the long treks from town to town and the adrenaline of a monster fight and the spinning stories of successful hunts, and it hadn’t been about Geralt of Rivia at all.

He’d spoken far too much. Far too fucking much.

“And you’re sure,” Ivan said, interrupting Jaskier’s thoughts, “that you don’t remember what year you graduated? Or even how many cohorts graduated after you?”

Jaskier shrugged. “I don’t know. A couple, maybe. I didn’t really go back. It’s why I wasn’t caught up in- everything, really.”

“So, to summarise,” Ivan nodded. “You don’t remember when you were born, you don’t remember what your name was, you don’t remember when you trained at Kaer Seren, you don’t remember what year you graduated, but you were in the same cohort as Coën of Poviss, who goes to Kaer Morhen some winters?”

Jaskier’s mouth went dry. “That’s about the size of it.”

Ivan nodded his head, and got to his feet, calm. Then, in an instant, a ferocious scowl overtook his face, and he kicked the platter of untouched fruits, bread, and wine, sending food and cutlery clattering over the floor of the cell, as he let out an angered yell.

“Bloede pest!” he exclaimed, driving his foot into the bread that had fallen near enough to where he stood that its destruction was an expedient outlet for his anger. “You useless fuck! Coën of Poviss? That’s all you’ve got for me? I’ll break your mangled fucking nose, you useless damn maggot of a witcher!”

“You already have,” Jaskier snarled. Ferrant’s gaze – empty, but sharp – flickered between the two of them. “When you came in here just to beat me to shit, remember?”

Damn Ferrant de Lettenhove, for running his mouth like that. If Ivan laid a fucking finger on Coën, if a single damn thing happened to him on the way to Kaer Morhen or elsewhere, Jaskier was going to flay him alive. Curse that vile man for ever opening his stupid mouth. Curse him for ever being born.

Jaskier could curse himself for the same thing later. Ivan couldn’t know – no mage could know – that Julian of Kovir had earned his medallion years after Kaer Seren fell.

Damn mages. Damn Ferrant. Damn witchers.

Ivan, meanwhile, inhaled through his nose, and steeled his nerves. Calmed himself. He ran a hand through his hair, and Jaskier wasn’t fooled at all by the facade of calm that the man- that the sorcerer, rather, was covering his anger with.

It was no surprise to him when Ivan strode forwards, and socked him neatly in his broken fucking nose again.

His fist connected with a sickening crunch, the sort of sound that Jaskier had heard far too often, by now, and blinding pain shot up his nerves, the hasty job he’d done at setting it immediately undone by Ivan’s foul temper.

He hissed in pain, but didn’t let himself double over. Instead, he looked up at Ivan, at his sickeningly neat hair and perfectly symmetrical face, and sneered as best he could without agitating his nose.

“Is that all you’ve got?”

Ivan kicked him in the groin, and Jaskier did double over, at that, before the foul-tempered alchemist abruptly turned tail to make his exit, locking the cell with more vitriol than Jaskier had ever seen directed towards a door, before. He strode off with anger visible in his demeanour, and Jaskier felt, in the pits of his scorched, slow heart, the faint stirrings of pride at having managed to piss the man off like this.

He licked at the familiar warm, coppery blood that ran down his face to his lips. There was, he noted, still bread – dirtied as it was – on the floor.

Ferrant cocked his head as Jaskier set his nose (again), listening to the alchemist’s receding footsteps with those pathetically dull ears of his that Jaskier was sure wouldn’t be able to hear a damn thing unless its origin was right in front of him.

He did not, in an impressive show of restraint, try and rip his chains out of the wall to ensure that he could strangle Ferrant de Lettenhove to death.

“So,” Ferrant said, wryly, “have you reconsidered your stance on working together with me to escape?”

“I hope you manage to hang yourself on your chains,” Jaskier returned, teeth gritted.

“Was it something I said?”

Ferrant de Lettenhove looked so innocent, so gods-damn confused in that moment, that Jaskier felt himself growl at his audacity.

“Was it something you- Damn it, Lettenhove, yes, it was something you said!” he snarled. “What the fuck was that, back there? Oh, I’ve heard of him, he’s another Griffin, he winters at Kaer Morhen, what the hell were you selling him out for?”

Ferrant looked at him like he’d grown a second head. “Are you insane? You were the one who brought him up!”

“I knew what I was saying!”

“I was trying to back you up,” Ferrant hissed. “I don’t know why I bloody well bothered, if this is how you’re going to be. In case it has escaped your notice – and I wouldn’t put it past you – he was fishing for something, and you were deflecting enough that I was sure he was going to call you on it!”

“Oh, my noble saviour,” Jaskier drawled. “Whatever would I have done if you hadn’t spontaneously decided to sell my brother out to a mage?”

“You brought him up first!”

“I mentioned his name as a known associate! I wasn’t rattling off his preferred holiday destinations!”

“You were still the one who- oh, never fucking mind.” Ferrant exhaled deeply into his hands. “I,” he said, through gritted teeth, “am sorry for telling the mage where your brother spends the winters sometimes. Next time, I’ll keep my fucking mouth shut.”

“You better.”

Jaskier closed his eyes.

Never fucking mind the Brotherhood putting its eyes back on Kaer Seren, maybe this was the worst way this conversation could have gone. With a target on his Coën’s back that Jaskier couldn’t even warn him of, because he was here, in a cell, with a de Lettenhove, whilst the damn mage that could ruin everything was waltzing around outside his bars, spitting mad that everything wasn’t enough to ruin.

Gods. He pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead, the warmth uncomfortable, but the pressure a welcome relief. He was out of it- he was really fucking out of it. When was he ever this docile? It galled him to admit it, but Ferrant was right. He should be escaping, not- not stagnating in a cell whilst Coën’s name was being held in the mind of a sorcerous bastard with nice bread and jam that was probably spiked.

But he was – Melitele’s tits, he was tired. He was weak, he was tired, he was- drugged, probably, still drugged from whatever Ivan had been doing to him whilst he slept.

He couldn’t do this. Not – and it galled him to admit it – not alone.

Ferrant de Lettenhove had sold out his brother to the alchemist Ivan of the Brotherhood of Mages, but Ferrant was also his best shot at getting out of here.

He’d make him pay for ever uttering the name Coën of Poviss, but he’d make him pay when they were free of this place. It made something twist inside him to think about it, but Coën was his brother in all but blood, and his best friend in all bar nothing. He hadn’t seen him in decades, and he wasn’t going to let his last gift to the man he regarded above everyone else in the world be his death on a poison-slick platter.

Jaskier exhaled slowly, through his dry lips.

“Lettenhove,” he said, slowly, and his declaration felt more like a pitiful groan, an admission of weakness, than it did any sort of resolve. “I’m going to ask you something.”

“Well? Go on, then,” Ferrant snapped. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“I’m going to ask you something,” he repeated, looking up and meeting the bastard’s gaze, “and you have to promise you don’t gloat, or look at me smugly, or just generally act superior about this.”

“Lord above. Spit it out before I die of old age.”

“How much experience do you have in planning an escape?”

Ferrant groaned, and slammed a hand to his forehead. “I thought you would never fucking ask, Jaskier of Kovir.”

Jaskier flexed his hands. It wasn’t anything to brag about, but he’d been imprisoned more than a few times in his life, and whilst dimeritium shackles were more of a hindrance than steel had been, cutting him off from the Signs, it didn’t mean that he was completely out of options. The cuffs were tight, there was no doubt about it, but they were roomy enough that he could probably wriggle his way out of them if he dislocated both of his thumbs – wasn’t that a cheery thought?

Ferrant, too, would be able to break out of his shackles the same way – or, if Jaskier was feeling merciful, he could break the man out with a sign. Thank Melitele for Old Keldar, and his dogged insistence that Jaskier and Coën memorise, intricately, every single sign that had every been recorded in the annals of witchers past. An Aard would blow Ferrant’s hands to pieces, along with his cuffs, but Jaskier had far more than that up his sleeve.

Then came the question of the lock.

“At that point,” Ferrant said, drily, miming a gesture, “you could just-”

“What was that?”

“What was what?”

Jaskier scowled, and jabbed at the air in an exaggerated mockery of Ferrant’s earlier performance. “That, de Lettenhove. What was that?”

“That- oh, come off it, Julian, you know what I meant.”

“First of all, keep that name out of your fucking mouth, and second of all, that is the most pathetic pantomime of a witcher sign ever postulated, and so I’ll thank you to keep your ridiculous gesturing to yourself.”

Ferrant exhaled deeply through his nose, sallow face a picture of vexed exasperation. “I’m beginning to tire of your bizarre double-standards, you know. First you start blathering about Coën of Poviss, then you rave about my audacity to sell him out when I mention that he is, in fact, a real person; then, you ask Ivan to call you Julian to distance your false self from what you truly are-”

“If you knew what I truly was, Lettenhove, you would understand exactly why I want your filthy, thrice-damned mouth shut on the matter, do you understand me?”

“No,” Ferrant drawled, watery gaze drilling into Jaskier’s very being, “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand why you need to constantly run your mouth and impede yourself in your own plan by taking a- a humongous shit on every little sliver of goodwill that anyone might mistakenly extend towards you! Can you blast the lock to pieces with your witcher magic or fucking not?”

A vein throbbed in Jaskier’s neck. In a way, Ferrant was right, and it galled him to think so – but he really wasn’t accomplishing very much at all by constantly arguing instead of making peace with the man for as long as it took them to escape, but- god. He was tired, he was angry, he was weak; he was probably still poisoned, and being strung up in dimeritium was certainly not helping on that front.

Not to mention, the infernal glamour that had gotten him into this situation in the first fucking place, the glamour that he’d bled and killed for, was gone, probably in a drawer in Ivan’s desk somewhere whilst he rotted, secrets exposed, in a cell.

He exhaled, pressing his fingers to his face, just under his eyes. His left hand pushed stubbornly against smooth flesh and bone; his right, the subtly puckering burn scar that had narrowly missed his eye a few years back. That had been a night to behold – he was sure jaw would never stop feeling like it was blistering, burning, melting right off his face, even in the damp, cool winter night he’d escaped into.

Funny how he almost forgot it was there, these days.

The cells were dusty, sandy grime clinging to his skin and his sweat-stained clothes where he’d brushed against the walls and the floor. In the dimly flickering light of the torches that illuminated the windowless dead end, Jaskier could make out Ferrant sitting, eerily still, in the dark. Watching. Waiting. Looking at him.

Jaskier was – he was tired. He’d been around, and he was tired, he was angry, he was some measure of old now, and he’d never quite manage to shake off his young man’s need to claw the world around him into a shape that pleased him. But he could be pragmatic.

“The witcher Signs,” he offered instead, an olive branch, and Ferrant snapped to attention, pretending that he hadn’t had his arms wrapped around his knees, pressed to his chest, just a moment ago. “If I can get out of the dimeritium, I can probably shoot enough of an Aard at the lock to shatter it. It won’t be quiet, though.”

The faintest suggestion of something approaching a satisfied smile darted its way across Ferrant’s face. “Works for me.”

“Does it, now?”

“Do you remember, when I asked if you’d kill Lohere?”

“You said I’d end up with sorcerers hounding me, I recall. Speaking from experience, I presume?”

Ferrant winced. “We all have our flaws.”

He couldn’t help but bark a laugh, at that – the idea of Ferrant de Lettenhove, snarky agent of the Viscount de Lettenhove, and about as convincingly capable in the pugnatory arena as a damn butterfly, managing to actually pull a victory, however minute, over a cabal of sorcerers.

“Right,” he huffed. “And I said that it’d be a problem to deal with later.”

“Your exact wording was ‘for tomorrow’, but yes,” Ferrant agreed, rapping his fingers against the dusty, sandstone floor. “And your proverbial tomorrow has come. You need to fight.”

“And what are you going to do while I bust us out, stand behind me?”

“You’re the muscle, witcher. I’m the-”

“Gods, please don’t say brains.”

“The significantly physically less capable of the two of us,” Ferrant drawled, raising an eyebrow as if he were daring Jaskier to argue against what was at least nominally a compliment and quite certainly an admission of weakness. “And I’m unarmed. Hardly a threat against a mage and whoever – or whatever – he’s enlisted to guard this place.”

Jaskier frowned. “You don’t know?”

“What, who’s guarding Ivan’s secret prison hideaway? Where his secret prison hideaway is? Unfortunately, I don’t. I’ve been here only a little while longer than you, I’m afraid – and I don’t quite know how long, because there’s no windows.”

“Guess anyways.”

“Wild speculation is crass,” Ferrant sighed. “I’ve been here, what, Four weeks? Five? Perhaps more. Ivan keeps an irregular schedule, I can tell you that much.”

Jaskier twisted a half-matted lock of hair around his fingers, almost absent-mindedly. The walls looked like sandstone, and the dust that coated the cell was brownish-yellow and sickly in colour. This… told him very little. As a matter of fact, it bore not insignificant resemblance to the last castle he’d been in, as well as the overbearing halls of Lettenhove that remained stark in the ever-dimming memories of his childhood.

He kicked at the dirt. “Does the architecture of this place mean anything to you? If speculating isn’t too difficult for you.”

Ferrant raised an eyebrow. “Deductive reasoning, I am fine with. Treating wild guesses as fact is what I find a problem with, so take this with a grain of salt.”

“Well?”

“It’s sandstone,” Ferrant said. “Which makes me think we’re in Kaedwen or Redania, unless someone’s exporting.”

“Why?”

“Sandstone is made by the erosion of bedrock, at a tectonic boundary. The Pontar and the Gwenllech transport it down to, as I said, Kaedwen and Redania, where it’s abundantly used for building materials. However, as I said, it’s not unheard of for materials such as sandstone to be exported to other areas, or even occur naturally there. Please, don’t make me give a geography lecture.”

“I don’t know, I think you’d be good at it. You know, I could pull a few strings and get you tenured at Oxenfurt, if you want.”

Ferrant blanched. “I’d sooner rot in this cell, thank you.”

“Hey, never say I never did- never say I never offered to do anything for you, Lettenhove. So, you think we’re in Kaedwen or Redania?”

Letting out an impressively low groan, Ferrant made a show of dragging his fingers through his long, greasy black hair. “I specifically said not to presume a conclusion.”

“You didn’t say that, you said you hated speculation.”

“Hold your tongue, witcher, before I cut it out. Speculating based on circumstantial evidence is a recipe for jumping to incorrect conclusions.”

“You could never cut my tongue out, you’re too small and puny,” Jaskier retorted, and abruptly realised that he was getting far too comfortable languishing here and trading banter with Ferrant. Damn it all, the man wasn’t half-bad company, once you got used to his complete lack of any redeeming qualities. “But, the escape.”

“The escape,” Ferrant agreed, “that you really shouldn’t be so loud about, lest he hears you.”

Jaskier flicked his ear, ignoring how it echoed in his still-aching head where his nail made contact. “I’m a witcher. I’ll hear him first.”

“Fine. So, you can break down the lock with a- what did you call them, Signs?”

Alright. One last distraction. “I thought you were supposed to be an expert on vedyminaica.”

“Please, your politics and squabbles are a matter of public record. Your unique magical techniques are not.”

Smirking, Jaskier flicked some of the dust by his feet at Ferrant. Being that they were at opposite ends of the cell, the little cloud fell woefully short of actually hitting him, but the gesture itself was presented loud and clear. Ferrant, for his part, levelled a very unimpressed glare in his direction.

“So, I break the door down, then what?”

“We run,” Ferrant said, simply. “Ivan has us in a ridiculous position. We know nothing about where we are, or our surroundings, so any plan we make would need a thousand caveats to counter any unknown.”

“Is that your way of saying we’ll figure it out as we go along?”

Ferrant winced, and cast his gaze at the corridor beyond the bars. “No. We need a broad outline of what the hell we’ll be doing in regards to our specific roles, and possible counter-plans for likely situations, but we are severely disadvantaged to the point where we cannot refine a concrete strategy. To a degree, we play it by ear, but only to the degree that it is necessary. We have no other choice.”

“Noted. So, do you think you can- footsteps.”

The familiar clicking of Ivan’s luxurious heels against the rough sandstone floor began to prickle against Jaskier’s hearing. He couldn’t quite make out what route he was taking but, judging from the direction of his echoing footfalls, he was ascending.

Either way, company was imminent, and Jaskier felt his brow furrow into a scowl. Just when they had finally gotten on track, too – damn it all.

Ferrant tensed, but didn’t miss a beat. He sneered. “Ah, well. If only you’d learnt how to stop running your mouth, Master Witcher, no?”

“Shut up, Lettenhove. You’re as much complicit in this as I am.”

“Pardon me for stooping to schoolyard excuses, but you’re the one of us with a tendency to instigate.”

Jaskier balled his hand into a fist, dust sticking to his palm and digging into the calloused skin of his exposed palm. This was, broadly speaking, why he’d tended towards gloves as a witcher – one tended to, pardon the double meaning, get one’s hands quite dirty on the Path.

Across the cell, Ferrant had shifted into a cross-legged position, looking for all the world like a young schoolboy paying rapt attention to a towering schoolmaster.

The urge to deck him in the chin had not yet dissipated. The infernal tip-tapping of Ivan’s heeled boots drew closer.

It occurred to Jaskier, then, that if the prison were guarded, it was by no guard that he could hear – no heartbeat within the range of his hearing, no quiet shuffling to readjust a position during a long shift, no footsteps indicating a shift change. If he were optimistic, he would have taken this as good news. Unfortunately, the world was rarely so kind – if they came face-to-face with some sort of magical monstrosity when they left the room, Jaskier was going to kill someone.

Ivan strode into view with purpose, his cape – deep purple, this time, embroidered with silver thread – billowing behind him. He wore a crisp, white chemise under a neat black waistcoat, and tight leggings besides. He looked every bit the regal, self-aggrandising mage that he was, with his elegant, expensive outfit and neatly styled hair – cut to his chin – and goatee.

If there hadn’t been such a discrepancy in height between them, Jaskier would have started pondering ways to kill him that left the outfit pristine enough to be looted.

“Julian of Kovir,” Ivan greeted, stretching out his arm in a grand motion before resting it casually on one of the cell bars, “and Ferrant de Lettenhove. Call me an optimist, but I look forwards to your co-operation today.”

“If you’re hoping I’ve materialised new information on a witcher school you avalanched decades ago, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you,” Jaskier shot back, lounging back against the wall in a position that was most certainly not good for the spine. His shoulders were pressed quite firmly against the rough-hewn stone of the wall. This could go very poorly. Erland and Keldar had spent so long hiding the survival of the Griffins from the Brotherhood, and Jaskier was one of the new students – first class back, even.

It could all go to hell, were he to slip up on his dates. Were Ivan to do more than suspect that he was dancing around something. Were he to make the tinest mistake that he didn’t even notice until mages were bearing down on Kaer Seren, again – it was as they said. A miss was as good as a mile.

Luckily, Jaskier was a very good liar.

(Unluckily, Ivan wasn’t so kind as to trust him, but he could work around that.)

“What is this reluctance really about, Julian?” Ivan asked, getting close enough that his towering frame felt overbearing, but not so close that Jaskier could ever hope to reach out and touch him, grab him, slam his face into the ground and put his heel through Ivan’s chest until his foot met stone through gristle. “Julian of no name, no age, no homeland? My questions were not so difficult that a young man such as you. And you are young, yes? For a witcher, anyways.”

“You kept records,” Jaskier spat. “Of the Griffin witchers. The ones with years out on the Path, reputations under their belts, and kills written beside their names. But not the young ones, no? The half-baked trainees and the green witchers not yet fit to go out on the Path proper. That’s how you don’t know where I came from. That’s how you don’t know who I am.”

Perhaps Ferrant would call this speculation. Jaskier called it the pit opening up in his stomach. Realisation, like.

Ivan smiled, sickly-sweet. “Records? Oh, no. Research, my friend. We needed to know who and how many and what we were up against, if there was any ways what we planned could be countered. I am surprised that you’d think us obsessive when your library and annals were so meticulous, but we didn’t much care for any witcher of average skill, in our information-gathering… Well. Until you came along. But, Julian, you have admitted something to me. You say you do not recall when you graduated, but you were one of the last Griffin witchers at the time of your fall, yes?”

Jaskier saw no point in telling the truth. “Yes.”

“That wasn’t so hard, then, was it?”

“You know, I thought this was going to be about Lohere.”

“Lohere, what is there to say?” Ivan sighed. “She will not be missed. Her and Ilona, they entered Stregobor’s employment with me not because they wanted to, but because no-one else would have them. And they were good, off-the-books. Nobody cares what happens to the last dregs of the cream of the crop.”

“And you? Same reason, I presume?”

“Oh, no. I work with him because I wanted to. And I am very good at what I do. But Tissaia de Vries does not send her high-achieving girls to Brotherhood mages.”

Jaskier smiled. “You like the sound of your own voice, don’t you?”

“Something we have in common. But this is not your interrogation. So, tell me – you know when you graduated Kaer Seren. You know where you came from, too. Before you knew your glamour had fallen, you spoke with a unique, but distinctly Redanian accent – muddled, but consistent. This makes sense, for Jaskier of Oxenfurt. But now, as Julian of Kovir, you speak – naturally – with a Koviri accent, but sometimes you trip up on your vowels. You form them too far back in your mouth. It’s an affectation, Julian, isn’t it?”

Jaskier narrowed his eyes. “Go to hell.”

“You are not Koviri, though you trained in Kovir. Where are you from?”

“Repeating the question will not suddenly unlock hidden memories of my infancy. I don’t know where I’m from.”

“You’re Redanian.”

“You want me to give you a nationality? Fine. I’m Koviri,” Jaskier returned, and never had a half-truth ever felt more like the lie that it held within it. “I was raised in Kaer fucking Seren by Koviri men in a Koviri keep, and I spent my first adult years running from the spectre of the Brotherhood in fucking Kovir. I put it as my damn epithet. Is that enough? I’m Julian of Kovir. I’m Koviri.”

“But by blood, you are Redanian, no? You were raised there. You fit in. Is that why you chose Oxenfurt University? You already knew the culture.”

“If you choose to believe that I am Redanian,” Jaskier said, rolling the words around in his mouth like he didn’t want to drive his fist directly through a wall, or a sorcerer’s face, “then that is what you may believe. The truth is that I do not recall my origin, and if you dislike that,” he shrugged. “Tell the vedymin to choose children who are a little older.”

Anger crossed Ivan’s face like so many dark clouds, and Jaskier just felt tired of this whole farcical interrogation. This dance was ridiculous – he wanted to be out of here. He wanted to feel the night air on his face. He wanted to sleep.

“I don’t see why you don’t tie this loose end up now, Ivan. Killing a chained-up witcher and a Lettenhove nobleman should be an easy feat, for you.”

“Your deaths will not help me,” Ivan snarled, “when it is your lives that are causing me issue. Men who kill sorcerers are worrisome, but understandable. They can be dealt with easily. Men with three-line biographies who belong to factions and kill sorcerers are representative of a larger threat. Good day to the both of you. Our next conversation will not be so pleasant should you continue to insist on being such a thorn in my side.”

This time, Ferrant at least waited for Ivan’s footsteps to fade before opening his damn mouth.

“Well,” he said, faux-brightly. “At least he didn’t break your nose again.”

“Go to hell,” Jaskier hissed.

Ferrant shifted in his cuffs. “I think,” he said, lowering his voice, “that we might as well have at this sooner rather than later. Neither of us are drugged, and I don’t want to give him a chance to change that. Do we have a plan, at all, beyond legging it?”

“I despise thinking of us as an us situation.”

“If it’s any consolation, you’re not my first choice for a cellmate, either. Don’t even make the top ten.”

Jaskier exhaled loudly through his nose. “I’m from the Griffin School of Witchers. Do you know what that means?”

Ferrant’s eyes narrowed. “Enlighten me.”

“It means that I’ve got the best knowledge base of witcher signs this side of Mahakam.”

“Ah, yes, the signs. Igni, Aard, Yrden, Axii, and Quen, no?”

Jaskier’s lips twitched in a self-satisfied grin. “And here you were, pretending that you didn’t know that a moment ago, you irritating bastard. Yes. And no. Those are the main four-”

“Five.”

“Go fuck a drowner, Lettenhove, I misspoke. Those are the main five, but there were more, historically. They fell out of use for various reasons – they were niche, they were complex, the mages didn’t like that those uppity witch-men’s approximations of real magic were approximating closer to the real deal than was comfortable… but the Griffin school had the best grounding in theory. Even if we did have to learn it from water-logged books and the memory of a half-senile old man.”

Ferrant’s eyes narrowed, and he raised an eyebrow, and Jaskier – once again, damn it – felt a distinct sense that he’d let far too much slip. It was an unnerving thought – was he talking too much, were Ivan and Ferrant simply more perceptive than the average company he tended to keep, or were they only more reactive, or did they merely have an active interest in what he revealed, whereas others did not? It galled him to think about – he was Jaskier the goddamn bard, and if he’d scattered enough breadcrumbs to blow away that whole smokescreen, then who would the world see standing beneath it?

He pushed that thought away. If the clues existed, Ivan would have already put them together. Geralt – brilliant, idiotic Geralt, who he’d left his medallion to – would have put them together by now, and staged a rescue for him. It had been weeks. Months, maybe.

“I,” he said, interrupting his own thoughts, “possess a wealth of knowledge thought to have been lost to the world, save for the rest of my unfortunate bretheren. A wealth of knowledge that many people may find, broadly speaking, useless. But-”

“The specificity and unexpectedness will be precisely why Ivan won’t see it coming,” Ferrant said, bored. “For fuck’s sake, witcher. I didn’t ask you to wank yourself off right in front of me, I asked if you had a plan. Once we’re out of here, you can recite all the monologues you want, but would it kill your remaining ounce of brain matter to stay focused and to-the-point for a moment!”

“Suck my dick,” Jaskier returned, agreeable. “Fine, a plan.”

“The first hurdle is getting you out of your chains. Mine are simple metal, and so are the bars and lock – they will break easily enough with an Aard. Yours are dimeritium, however, and that is the issue.”

“I can dislocate my thumbs.”

“Do not dislocate your thrice-damned thumbs,” Ferrant hissed. “We are unarmed in a mage’s prison, and your ability to throw Signs is our single greatest asset. Do not compromise your ability to cast because it is the easiest first step.”

The chains jangled as Jaskier raised his hands, a mock-surrender. “Can you pick a lock, then?”

“With the correct tools, I can. Can you not?”

“No, I never learnt. Never really got round to it. Do you have anything you can use to pick the locks on our cuffs?”

“No. You think Ivan is so foolish that he’d let that remain a possibility?”

“And you couldn’t…”

“Dislocate my own thumbs to try and slip out of my restraints first?” Ferrant said, dryly. “No. Look.”

He held up his own cuffed wrist, pulling the loose sleeve of his own chemise down for clarity. Unlike Jaskier’s shimmering, dimeritium-laced shackles, Ferrant’s was a dull, unpolished grey, clinging to his slim wrist snugly, having only fallen down his arm a short way – a centimetre or two below where the end of his ulna made a noticeable lump under his skin, underneath the broader shape of his hand.

Simply put, it wouldn’t fit. Unlike Jaskier, whose arms were broad, Ferrant’s wrist was dramatically skinnier than his hand. Even with his thumb dislocated, Ferrant’s hand wasn’t small enough to fit through the damn cuff.

“You know, that might have been avoided if you’d ever actually lifted a finger for yourself and built up any amount of muscle, instead of letting people jump in front of swords for you.”

“Is this about the assassins on the cart or the guards in the safehouse?” Ferrant asked, bored. “Because they all knew what was expected of them, and the latter, you actively killed, so don’t try and scrabble at the moral high ground in light of the fact that I dared to hire employees.”

“Do you think Ivan would have done that? Hire some muscle?”

“Oh, most certainly. He’s an alchemist, he could spend a day in a lab and walk out with enough gold to buy Redania – but I doubt he’d have gotten anyone too skilled or specialised.”

“Pride?” Jaskier guessed. “Or redundancy?”

“Redundancy. He can deal with us himself – has dealt with us himself before – and any hired muscle will be most likely a mere deterrent to common rogues rather than any necessary security.”

Dimly, Jaskier thought of Geralt. He was Jaskier the bard, the White Wolf’s barker… he was supposed to have a rescue party. He was supposed to have friends, but he’d been in here for… however many weeks with only oblivion and Ferrant for company already.

Maybe Ivan had been too powerful for Geralt. Or maybe he hadn’t found him. Maybe Geralt’s own bleeding-heart nature only stretched so far, maybe he’d given up. Or maybe he hadn’t known what to do with the medallion – maybe he hadn’t wanted to put his neck out for someone he didn’t trust anymore. Or maybe he’d assumed that Jaskier was simply some sort of creature, who’d taken one of his brethren’s medallions as a trophy and wasn’t worth saving in turn.

Maybe Jaskier’s consideration of himself as someone worth saving was not shared by other people.

“So we’ll have some hired mercs on guardposts?”

“Possibly. For a base so well-built, it’s possible he has a stationary guard corps, and in the best-case scenario, this whole place is underground and he didn’t bother with guards at all.”

“Is that how you’d have done it, then? A stationary guard corps or unskilled hired force to act as a minor deterrent or first alarm system, and then deal with anything big personally?”

“Do not compare me and Ivan, witcher, as you would not compare yourself to me. I always have men around,” Ferrant scoffed. “Loyal men. I am human, with all the limitations thereof. We cannot all be more than human, throwing ourselves into battle with demigods.”

“First, I have to point out, you’re the one monologuing us off the topic now, and second, you fought me in the safe-house.”

“You initiated that fight,” Ferrant said, delicately. “I seem to recall surrendering it. But the cuffs.”

Jaskier surveyed his dimeritium shackle under the dim echo of torchlight that seeped into the cell. Unlike Ferrant’s tightly-bound wrist, Jaskier’s cuff was loose on his arm – not too loose, not enough to make anything easy, but enough that it shifted up and down his forearm quite noticeably when he moved. It made sense – Ferrant’s ordinary cuffs were cheaper, simpler. Easier to acquire. Ivan had probably sized them to Ferrant himself.

Dimeritium, on the other hand, was rare and expensive. Jaskier’s shackles were prized goods, sized for the lowest common denominator in holding magic users of a variety of builds. And, whilst Jaskier’s forearm was broad, it was not overly so – many men existed that were more muscular than himself.

This wasn’t exactly wriggle room – but it was a guarantee.

“Hey, Ferrant. Did you know that witchers heal faster than the average human?”

“I did,” Ferrant said, “but clearly not by much, if your face is any indication.”

“Imbecile, that’s the dimeritium. A lot of the biological mutation of witchers is catalysed by our increased magical potential, it’s why we- oh, never mind. It won’t heal properly, especially not without a potion, and strains or stress injuries are slower going than external trauma, but I could still cast signs afterwards, even if it’s painful, and it’s not like you’ve suggested a better alternative.”

“If you can guarantee to me that you’ll have your Signs as our first and last line of defence,” Ferrant retorted, “then I couldn’t give less of a fuck how much self-inflicted pain you have to push through. If we fail this escape attempt, Ivan will not allow for even the possibility of a successful second attempt.”

“And then, we really are screwed,” Jaskier summarised, deciding to ignore the more unkind of Ferrant’s comments, if only because he, too, would not bat an eyelid to seeing the man in pain. In fact, he might even clap. “I understand your point, but I have a condition I must make clear for our escape. You know, since it relies so heavily on my Signs, and all. I have demands.”

Ferrant dipped his head and gestured, motioning for Jaskier to continue.

“We’re going to find my glamour.”

“What? You’ve lost your mind. Absolutely not.”

“I wasn’t asking. I need that glamour.”

“If you decide to waste our one chance poking around in the stronghold of the man from which we are escaping, you won’t need that glamour at all. Or anything else, because you will have doomed yourself to a life in a cell.”

Jaskier grinned, an angered baring of teeth. “And without it, I will be doomed to the life of a poverty-stricken, disdained half-human who’s good for monster-hunting and not much else; an ever-more-redundant relic of a bygone age for whom, culturally, joie de vivre is a dirty word... de Lettenhove. Not that I would understand the- what are you, Viscount? Count? Of an idyllic Keracki province – or is it Redanian again, now?”

“Oh, get a damned grip, Julian. If you lose your glamour, fashion yourself another. Perhaps not one so fancy, but you might familiarise yourself with the concept of settling for less. I don’t tangle with the infernal mechanisms of brotherhood politics and artefact retrieval because I want to, but because that is the role I was given in life and I see no sense in sabotaging the lives of everyone around me in the pursuit of aimless, childish whimsy.”

“Whimsy?” Jaskier laughed. “Whimsy? I was palmed off to a witcher keep by my father, an odious man who believed that only his own happiness mattered. Why should I yield to the decrees of an old bastard who decided he no longer desired a son? Why should I abandon my dreams?”

Ferrant simply stared him, for a moment, and burst into laughter, his sallow face creasing into genuine amusement, his adam’s apple bobbing with the movement under the sparse, dirtied gaol-beard that he sported. “Oh, the entitlement! You might as well write your biography on the cell walls, Julian! Let me tell you something – most people don’t get what they want. Destiny doesn’t owe people what the want, and if your father had been a peasant, you’d have abandoned your dreams of music in favour of good, hard work instead of the witcher’s Path. But now, at least you are powerful, no? If you want something, you can just take it. What a piece of work.”

Jaskier’s throat tightened.

Fuck Ferrant de Lettenhove. Fuck him to the ends of the earth and back again.

“I’m not listening to this,” he said, hands tightening into fists. “I’m not listening to you. You’ve shown your cards too, de Lettenhove – the reason you haven’t escaped yet is because you can’t, without me. You need me. You can escape with me and with my glamour, or you can rot. If you want to crow about entitlement, you can cut out all this nonsense about the terms of this escape being yours to set.”

Ferrant’s face was still pulled into a grotesque mockery of a smile, that smug, self-satisfied bastard. Jaskier considered leaving him to rot anyways – because he was right. Jaskier was a witcher. He was powerful. Ferrant was a human, staring down a powerful sorcerer. He needed Jaskier’s help, but Jaskier didn’t need him.

Except.

Ferrant knew too much about him, now. Knew he was of Redanian origin, noble origin – knew that he was brothers and school-mates with Coën of Poviss.

Damn it all, maybe he had fucked up, because for all that a Redanian school-mate of Coën’s could be anyone, the noble was the lynchpin in the equation. Peasants existed within the span of living memories. The landed gentry? They were immortalised in records.

“Here’s my proposal,” Jaskier said, all teeth and no patience. “I get out of my cuffs and hope to Melitele Ivan hasn’t dosed me with anything that would fuck me over on top of them. I blast your chains, I blast the lock, and we find my glamour. If we meet Ivan, I will engage him and hopefully kill him, and you willl continue to look for my glamour. You try and arm yourself, whilst we’re at it. Then, when we’ve got my glamour, we leave. You are encouraged to apply yourself in aiding the escape, but you are also free to cower behind me and owe me a life debt should you wish to.”

“Counter-proposal,” Ferrant said, because at his core, he was just a deeply irritating man with nothing in his soul but malicious inconvenience. “We get out of here and run, as fast as we bloody well can, out of this god-forsaken place before any jury-rigged magical failsafe can kick in.”

Jaskier tilted his head, matted hair pricking uncomfortably at his neck. He was used to the sensation, but knowing the state of his scalp made him itch to cut it all off, anyways. “I’m considering your counter proposal… it’s the exact thing I told you wasn’t happening, and has been disregarded. We’re going to look for my glamour, and-”

Twin cracks rang out across the cell.

Jaskier had dislocated his thumbs before, for the self-same reasons as presently. It was a familiar sensation of blinding agony – a stark reminder of why his hands twinged with phantom aches some days, and the thrilling harbinger of promised freedom.

The dimeritium cuffs made him hiss and swear to himself as he manoeuvred them, as quickly and deftly as one could with two dislocated thumbs, off of his hands. This was the easy part, he knew.

The metal had just the tiniest bit of texture to its otherwise smooth and polished surface. He’d once had a gauntlet that felt somewhat similar – and the cuffs clattered to the floor. For all that it had been a matter of seconds that freedom had cost him, it felt like the shackles had held him fervently by the hand for a small eternity.

And the final step. Gritting his teeth hard enough that he heard one crack in the back of his mouth – or maybe that was just his joints, who knew? – Jaskier felt his thumbs click back into place, sore and throbbing and wonderfully free.

“-and,” he said, belatedly, continuing his own sentence. “We’re doing it now.”

Jaskier flexed his thumb – one, two, alright, good enough – and curled his hand into the sign for Aard.

Throwing witcher Signs, he thought, was something like writing – you got rusty, after a while of disuse, but you never really forgot. And it was always relatively easy to get back into the swing of things.

Ferrant’s eyes were so wide that they looked, for all the world, that were he not careful they might roll out of his head, but he got to his feet – swiftly, if shakily – and pulled his chain, anchored through a ring on the wall and looping from one cuff to another, taut for Jaskier to aim at.

“Protect your face,” Jaskier said, a suggestion he gave Ferrant the merest of seconds to follow before he cast Aard, releasing enough force at the chain for the damn thing to shatter, a loud bang echoing off the sandstone of the cells, as dust loosened from the walls as the impact had shaken them.

Ferrant looked up and coughed, from where he’d ducked his face between his arms on his split-second notice, meeting Jaskier’s eyes.

So much for the surprise that had jarred him from the initial kick-start of the escape. Jaskier had to hand it to him – the man recovered quickly.

“Go!” Ferrant urged. “That was enough force for him to notice, blast the damn lock!”

And damn the lock, Jaskier thought, the lock with the circle-rectangle-rectangle-square key he wouldn’t even be needing. He felt – brilliant, better than ever. The throbbing pain from is hastily-set broken nose was residing, his aching palms felt blissful, twisted into witcher Signs, his aching body spinning from the sudden change in orientation.

He felt like he could take on the world.

With more power than was strictly necessary, he formed Aard again and blasted the lock, the impact rattling not only the bars of their cell but also the bars around it, with the impact cracking the bars at the epicentre, and bending them wholly out of shape.

Striding meaningfully over to it, Jaskier through open the mangled door.

“Can you run?”

Ferrant laughed. “Like the wind, my friend. Lead the way.”

There was only really one way out of the cell block – the way Ivan came and went, with the rest of the corridor being short, and leading to a small selection of other cells.

“Stay close behind me,” he muttered. “I’m casting Quen.”

His hands twinged as he formed the sign, and he took off running without a moment’s hesitation. He didn’t look back to check if Ferrant had followed – he didn’t need to, the man’s pattering footfalls behind him let him know he was sticking close – and ran, as fast as he could, down the most obvious-seeming direction. The enchanted torches burned ever-merrily in their brackets, undying fires burning merrily, illuminating what Jaskier assumed was Ivan’s beaten path.

The room beyond the corridor of cells was a small entry chamber, with a bench and an exiting corridor and spiral staircase and not much more – Jaskier took the staircase. He’d heard ascending and descending in his footsteps.

There was no guard, no opposition – the strategic benefit of a clockwise spiral staircase evidently having been eschewed by Ivan’s security measures. Ferrant was right so far – no guards.

Jaskier didn’t let himself hesitate, thundering up the stairs ignoring the uncomfortable strain in his calves. It was almost unfortunate that Ivan hadn’t staffed the dungeons – he had nothing to arm Ferrant with.

Though, he thought, as he emerged at the top of a corridor and took a right, in the direction of the gaudier-looking hallway, kitted out with tapestries, maybe that was better. He wouldn’t trust a de Lettenhove at his back for anything.

The sandstone of the walls was more finely cut, here, for all that it was covered by expensive-looking tapestries that hung between the flickering brackets of torches. The carpet that had been laid on the floor, that scrunched itself slightly under Jaskier’s thudding footfalls, was a faded blood-red, scuffed and stained by the marks of frequent travel. He was sure, then, that this should be the right track.

Jaskier knew himself, knew his abilities – he kept his running as silent as he could, allowing his toes and the balls of his feet to take the brunt of the impact of each step, his heels never making contact with the ground. Behind him, Ferrant moved with much the same gait – he was, in a way that one would imagine but not expect the arrogant yes-man to some unknown superior’s more esoteric whims to be, surprisingly suited to stealth.

Good. Perhaps he would prove himself an asset, rather than a liability.

The end of the hallway split the path in two as it connected to another one, perpendicular, and Jaskier raised a hand beside himself to indicate to Ferrant that they should stop.

On the left, the corridor continued only briefly, before coming to match with another spiral staircase. On the right, Jaskier counted seven doors, heavy and well-worn. Perhaps, given the convenience of the location, this was where Ivan did his work. Perhaps, this was where his glamour was stored.

Then again, given the dim light and musty air that hung about the place, maybe not. It didn’t feel like the correct kind of ambiance for an accomplished sorcerer.

He waited for Ferrant to come up behind him, and lowered himself into an almost-crouch, gesturing for the man to approach him. He caught the very faint tang of sweat as Ferrant positioned himself directly at his back, slightly stretching his posture in order to make sure he could, with his shorter stature, still find himself level with Jaskier. He turned slightly, to whisper in Ferrant’s ear.

“We will search the rooms,” he hissed, and he could see Ferrant’s jaw clench in his periphery, “and I will take the rooms on the left side of the hall, whilst you take the rooms on the right. If we find the glamour, we will regroup and make our way out, up the staircase.”

“Absolutely fucking not,” Ferrant hissed.

“Do you know Axii? Yes? Then search the rooms on the right, or I’ll make you.”

And there it was. Something oily and self-satisfied twisted in Jaskier’s gut, because there was – for the first time since he’d woken up – genuine fear was reflected back at him in Ferrant’s watery-blue eyes.

“Fine,” Ferrant hissed, casting his gaze up and down the corridor. “Fine. Go fuck yourself, Julian, I’ll look for your glamour, what does it look like? Quickly.”

“A woven anklet, two leather straps with woven strips of blue fabric braided between them, fastened with a sturdy metal clasp – a buckle – engraved with runes. Looks unlike any other jewellery of the area, you can’t possibly miss it, now go.”

A sallow expression – unreadable, but not difficult to guess the meaning of – crossed Ferrant’s expression, as he aimed the sloppiest, most insultingly casual military salute that Jaskier had ever seen in his direction, and headed towards the first door to the right, pausing to inspect it before nudging it carefully open and disappearing inside.

As he crossed the threshold, the thudding of his heartbeat or the subtle clicking of his right ankle – almost inaudible even to him, a childhood injury, perhaps – didn’t fade from Jaskier’s hearing. Satisfied, he glanced over the first door on the left, and, finding it benign, ducked into the room. They’d wasted enough time.

The room was lined with book-cases, each containing very few books, stuffed almost to the brim with various jars. They contained all sorts of specimens – ingredients, Jaskier supposed, for the alchemist – ranging from powders, to liquids, to crystals, rocks, biological matter, even…

Jaskier’s eyes darted around the room. It was certainly a good enough place to hide something.

If I were a bastard alchemist, where would I keep other people’s ill-gotten property? The desk was Jaskier’s first thought, but that was obvious. Possibly, a sly bastard like Ivan would be expecting that Jaskier would think so, and instead hide a tree in the forest – a trinket in a storeroom.

He let his eyes scan the shelves frantically, quickly checking for enchantments on the drawers before he rifled through them, too. Jaskier worked quickly, methodically – he had no time, he reminded himself, for all that it felt like falling back into the familiar rhythm of his nightly information-gathering exploits with Coën, in the long nights back at Kaer Seren.

The room was a disappointment. There were no hidden gleam of his glamour’s silver buckle, no subtle flash of the band’s colour – damn it all to hell, Jaskier almost hissed, before ducking out of the storeroom and into the next door over.

This one was also un-warded – Ivan’s laboratory. The cloying scent of strychnine poison stuck to the air like a days-old stain, but the tables had been cleared of any experiments. A swirling, blue mass in a jar glowed with an almost-white brightness on a small table in the centre of the room, illuminating the windowless room with a near-blinding intensity, and Jaskier wasted no time with his search. He ducked under tables, rifled through cupboards – and nothing. Nothing!

The third-to-last cupboard door he swung open, however, yielded results. Three corked vials of a familiar white powder, their stench almost leaking through the corks, were stood in a wooden test-tube rack – the alchemical strychnine poison.

Before he could think better of himself, Jaskier pocketed the vials. He would keep them from shattering – it had been a while since he’d fought with witcher potions on his person, and the vials seemed a lot more fragile than what he was used to, but he knew how to be careful with fragile containers on his person.

The third room was another store-room – equipment lay, scattered haphazardly, around the floor, and Jaskier was beginning to severely doubt his decision to take the left-side doors. He recognised the getup Ivan had worn in the inn, folded disconcertingly neatly atop a dresser in the corner, and various other items overflowed onto the floor of the room. Shoes, tacks, instruments, trinkets, a canvas with a half-painted portrait adorning it…

No glamour.

Jaskier tore through the items, his palms sweaty and stress beginning to well up in his gut. No glamour. Cuffs, flower-pots, a chess set, loose Gwent cards… and no glamour.

He resisted the urge to scream.

The musty storeroom loomed around him, filled with the trinkets Ivan no doubt used to accentuate his various disguises, cluttered with useless item after useless item and yet mockingly bereft of the one thing that Jaskier needed, the one thing he lived for – the one thing that was rightfully his. It was downright insulting – he had earnt it fair and square, it was the one thing that allowed him to live… really live, not the mindless, outcasted half-life of a witcher.

A growl rose up in his throat, as he stormed out of the room, coming face-to-face with Ferrant as he did so. The Lettenhove bastard had done well for himself – he held a decorated falchion not unlike the one he’d had in the safe-house. Jaskier would have bet money that it had been his to begin with.

“Any luck?” he asked, either unfazed by Jaskier’s barely-concealed fury, or trying very hard to be.

“Not a bit. You?”

“No sign of it,” Ferrant said, wincing slightly at the deepening of Jaskier’s frown. “Let’s go.”

“No,” Jaskier said.

“No?”

“There’s one more door.”

“There’s one more- it’s warded, you imbecile!”

Ferrant moved to grab at Jaskier’s arm, and he shoved him back, roughly. The bastard didn’t even have the grace to stumble – his recovery was swift and graceful, rebalancing almost before he’d been pushed.

“I think I can kill a sorcerer, one on one,” Jaskier said, lips stretching into a thin grin, ignoring his heartbeat rabbiting away in his chest. What with how worked up he was, it could almost be mistaken for something human. Almost. “Now that I am myself, again.”

No poison. No shackles. No hard-won complacency.

“Are you insane? Cut your losses, let’s get out-”

The warded door shattered and splintered almost easily under the force of the strongest Aard that Jaskier could bring himself to cast.

The force of the impact rent the door into shards of dark, wooden shrapnel, and Ivan – stood inside, behind an ornate desk – seemed surprised in the brief moment that Jaskier saw him, before he threw up a shield in a move that was almost reflexive.

“Julian,” he said. “You really are predictable.”

“Give it back to me.”

“I didn’t even need to stop you,” Ivan smiled, the expression oily and unpleasant on his face. “You came directly to me.”

“And I’m sure you’ll come to regret that in time, I-van,” Jaskier drawled. “Where is my glamour?”

“Come now, you don’t truly think you’ll be getting it back?”

“Give it to me.”

“You are in no position to be making demands,” Ivan said. “You’re unarmed. Weak. Rusty.”

“I said,” Jaskier said, letting his voice build to a roar, “give it to me!”

He leapt at Ivan in a move that was certainly reckless, swinging at him over the desk with a right hook and blasting an Aard from his left. The feint caught the alchemist off-guard, and Ivan angled himself to defend against the blow, the sign catching him in the shoulder and sending him tumbling.

Unlike Ferrant, he stumbled.

Jaskier pressed his advantage, vaulting over the desk and kicking at him with his right leg – and the blow connected, catching Ivan in the ribs and – from the sound of it – winding him. He followed the move up with an upper-cut from his left hand, connecting with Ivan’s chin in a satisfying crunch, but giving the alchemist the momentum to stumble out of his range and recover.

Damn, damn, damn!

Ivan drew in a harsh breath, and readied himself, raising his fists before him.

“Come on, then,” Jaskier grinned, mirroring his position. Fuck a sword, this was more than a fair fight.

“I wouldn’t be so arrogant, if I were you.”

Ivan feinted with a right jab, and kicked at Jaskier’s stomach with his left foot, a move that Jaskier saw coming a split-second too late. The alchemist’s damn metal-toed boot clipped him in the midsection and sent him reeling, barely able to throw a Quen to combat the Aard-like magical blast that Ivan cast from his left hand.

Jaskier could do that too.

Ivan ducked under a blast of Igni that Jaskier’s Quen gave way for, and turned his downwards momentum into a low spin-kick that caught Jaskier in the legs, pulling him off balance. Either Ivan was a lot stronger that Jaskier had assumed, unreliable as his account of their first fight was, or Jaskier was still weaker than he assumed – he tumbled forwards anways, making a grab for Ivan’s wrists as he did so, an catching one of them in his right hand.

His left hand closed around Ivan’s fist as they fell backwards, both catching sign of the bookshelf behind them, lining the walls of Ivan’s study – the Igni. Oh, the Igni had caught. Jaskier’s wide eyes darted down, met Ivan’s-

“No!”

They shouted over each other, and Ivan struggled against Jaskier’s hold.

“Let me move! I can put it out!”

“Where’s my fucking glamour!”

“On the shelf!” Ivan roared. “On the shelf! Let go of me, brute, so I can save both our belongings!”

A manic laugh bubbled out of Jaskier’s throat. “Is it really, or are you just saying that?”

“You’ll burn everything! You’ll burn us alive!”

“Sucks,” Jaskier grinned. “You know, that really, really sucks. But I think I’ll be fine. And as for your study… you should have thought about that before stealing from me. But all’s fair in love and war.”

Ivan let out a roar, and brought his knee up, forcefully.

A blinding pain hit Jaskier, and he reflexively let go of Ivan’s hands. The damn bastard took advantage of the momentary release to push back against Jaskier, biting into his left shoulder and grabbing and shoving away at his right. He let out a roar, and slammed his both his fists down right where he guessed Ivan’s face might be, and was rewarded with a satisfying crunch.

“You break my nose, I break yours.”

The crackling of the flames rose higher and higher, and Jaskier grinned in the orange light. Smoke was beginning to hang thicker in the air, but it wasn’t too overpowering yet. He still had time.

Ivan groaned, and rested himself in a slightly more upright position beneath where Jaskier was straddling over him.

“Has anyone ever told you, Julian of Kovir,” Ivan groaned, “that you should learn to quit whilst you’re ahead?”

Jaskier became dimly aware of the thudding of footsteps coming towards them in his periphery – and Ferrant, he’d lost track of Ferrant’s heartbead, Ferrant was gone. The sharp, swift grating of swords being drawn, the brief clanging of blades catching each other-

And Ivan, Ivan was a sorcerer. With Jaskier’s momentary lapse in concentration, Ivan saw fit to remind him of this, raising a hand that sent him flying across the room, crashing into the bookcase opposite the burning one, as Ivan got up.

He left Jaskier no time to recover. As soon as he’d impacted the case, he lifted him again, pulling him with great force directly into the ground. Jaskier would have cried out, at that, had all the air not been forcefully rent from his body as he made contact with the floor, winded. A twinge of pain ran up his abdomen – he’d landed on some of the wooden shrapnel from the door he’d blown out.

Sucking in a deep breath, he drew himself further up, and grabbed the shrapnel chunk. It hadn’t broken skin, but it was a splintery, dangerous thing – a weapon.

The fire crackled around them as it spread.

Jaskier grinned, and heaved himself up to his legs. Ivan tried once again to cast, but this time, Jaskier threw up a Quen, and then, just to buy himself time, threw the little shrapnel block in the air and twisted his hands into the gesture for a sign that he had thought he’d never have to actually use – a joke from his schooldays at Kaer Seren and an impossible way to gain an edge. Every skill learnt, after all, no matter how seemingly useless, was an advantage gained.

Or something like that.

Ivan let out a confused cry, as his vision clouded, and blindness overtook him. Jaskier closed the difference in three swift paces, and rammed the shrapnel into Ivan’s shoulder – he let out a pained roar, and grabbed Jaskier’s dirty, bloodied chemise. Up close, he could see how Ivan, too, was sweating like a horse – the steadily rising heat in the room wasn’t doing either of them any favours.

Jaskier coughed.

This, as it transpired, was a mistake unlike any other. An oily grin twisted its way onto Ivan’s features, and he flicked a small dagger out of his sleeve – damn him! – and pressed it with startling accuracy to Jaskier’s throat.

His Adam’s apple bobbed against it.

“You won’t kill me,” Jaskier said, hoarse.

“Not until you answer me,” Ivan ground out, unseeing eyes fixed at a point somewhere beyond Jaskier, his gaze desperately forceful all the same. “Do you work for the Griffin School?”

“There is no Griffin School.”

“Liar!” Ivan roared, and his spittle hit Jaskier’s face. “I’m no fool! Your numbers make no sense! You should be a dying breed by now!”

“Maybe,” Jaskier hissed, “Griffins are better at our jobs than you give us credit for.”

“Oh, I’m certain of that.”

The knife dug deeper into his throat.

“Who do you work for, Julian of Kovir?”

“Nobody.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Myself!” Jaskier shouted, and the knife dug ever-deeper into his throat. Blood trickled from the blade. “I told myself I was beholden only to myself when I went out on the Path, that’s what the damn glamour was for! You want my faction? I have no faction! All I wanted – all I ever wanted was to live my own life without having to offer it up for anybody else!”

Ivan chuckled. “Oh, Julian.”

“What!?”

“If you truly believe that, you’re a lot less clever than I thought you were,” Ivan closed his eyes, and, as he opened them, the tell-tale gleam of focus in them, still directed elsewhere as it was, let Jaskier know that the blindness had worn off. “We’re all beholden to someone. There is no such thing as a free man, you know this.”

Jaskier swallowed.

“I’ll ask you again, witcher.”

“I don’t work for the Griffin School, it’s gone. I don’t even work as a witcher.”

“See, there’s parts of that I believe.”

The crackling fire rose ever higher – an inferno surrounding them, and Ivan leant forwards, resting his chin on Jaskier’s shoulder and keeping the knife firmly pressed into his throat. His chin was bony, and it hurt, pressing into the bite wound he’d left there not minutes earlier.

“But you killed Lohere. You spared Ferrant. I thought this may have been an alliance of convenience – the enemy of your enemy is your friend, no?”

“It was.”

“Was it?”

“I have no reason to care if Ferrant de Lettenhove lives or dies,” Jaskier hissed, and he heard the tiny puffs of air signalling a barely-there laugh by his ear.

“I think I can place you. Does the name Leopold Erwin Pankratz mean anything to you?”

Facing away from him as he was, Ivan couldn’t see Jaskier’s eyes widening. But he could definitely feel him tense.

“de Lettenhove?” Jaskier asked, voice cracking.

He could hear Ivan’s widening smile in his voice. “The very same.”

“His date of birth?”

“He’s at least a centenarian, now. Decades over, if we’re not being generous. You know him?”

“He’s alive?”

“That he is,” Ivan grinned. “Julian.”

Jaskier knew he needed to move. He needed to do something – he needed to kill this man – but he was frozen. Rooted to the spot. His blood was ice in his veins, glacious as it wound its way around his body, his arms trembling.

He had to move.

He couldn’t move.

The flames leapt ever higher.

“Good talk,” Ivan said with a grin, stepping back and patting Jaskier’s shoulder as the inferno blazed around them. “I’ll be seeing you, Julian.”

And he walked towards the door, leaving Jaskier staring at the blazing furniture.

He couldn’t be. He couldn’t be alive. He was only human – he was supposed to be dead. What was the point of a witcher’s lifespan if he couldn’t even outlive-

Trembling, Jaskier bit back tears. He wanted to scream, fall to the ground, hit something, he wanted to give chase to Ivan and ram his head into the floor until not even a necromancer would be getting anything out of his remains, but he was rooted to the spot.

Move. Come on now, Jaskier. Move.

A roar of pain drew him back to the present, and with a sharp inhale of smog-laden air, Jaskier snapped his attention back to the flaming doorway. All of a sudden, his senses registered the heartbeats.

Ivan stood in the doorway, clutching his face, a diagonal slash running across his face, the skin of his forehead and under his left eye split open with enough force that his eye itself had clearly taken some of the hit. Behind him stood the returning bastard, Ferrant de Lettenhove, bearing a bloodied falchion in his right hand.

“Witcher! Get the fuck out of the damn blaze before it burns you to death, or the cavalry’s come here for nothing!”

Jaskier swallowed the lump in his throat. “Cavalry?”

“Move!” Ferrant yelled, and Jaskier came to his senses.

He coughed, registering for the first time how the thick, heavy smoke in the air was stinging his eyes, and how the heat of the inferno was unbearable to the point where he feared his skin may have started to blister. He staggered into a more stable position, and broke into a sprint, vaulting over the smoldering desk to the door and hoping he didn’t catch fire on the way.

Ferrant, for his part, made his way out of the door, pulling Ivan with him as Jaskier broke through the door, and skidded to a halt in the corridor.

“Kill him,” he panted, meeting Ferrant’s eyes.

“Who, the sorcerer? Not a chance. Let’s grab the dimeritium cuffs, we need information out of him.”

“What about the guard?”

“Oh, you finally noticed?” Ferrant’s grin was sallow and twisted, but not mailcious as he pinned Ivan’s hands behind his back. “That’s what the cavalry’s for.”

“Cavalry? What cavalry?”

“Well, it’s more a turn of phrase, here, they’re not literal cavalry, but- the cuffs, witcher, do you think you can get them for me?”

“Kill him,” Jaskier reiterated.

“After we get what we need out of him, I will, but until then- hah! No use wasting a potential resource.”

Jaskier was about to argue, but, as he looked from Ivan’s bloodied face to the falchion that Ferrant had now hooked around his belt, he was struck with the sinking feeling that he owed him.

“Damnit, fine, I’ll go get them.”

“Not from the cell!” Ferrant shouted. “There’s a shorter-chained set in the second right-hand storeroom, right across from the door, you can’t miss them.”

“Fine!”

Jaskier ducked into the storeroom with a renewed sense of purpose. Ferrant was right, the cuffs – the cousins of the ones that Jaskier had escaped, sporting a very short restraining chain rather than the long one that had anchored him to the wall – were in a class cabinet, indeed opposite the door and impossible to miss. Without hesitation, Jaskier put his fist through the glass and grabbed the chains, and the ornate key that lay beside them, unlocking the cuffs there to be able to more swiftly affix them to Ivan’s wrists.

When he returned to the outside of the store-room, Ivan was prone on the floor. Jaskier bent down to cuff the sorcerer, levelling a very unimpressed glare at Ferrant.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that, witcher. I think he passed out from the pain.”

“Right. I’ll take him, then?”

“All yours,” Ferrant nodded, which Jaskier assumed was bastard-speak for I am indeed far too weak to lift a whole human man, and would surely have failed in this endeavour alone.

He hefted Ivan onto his shoulders, and made his way towards the spiral staircase, but Ferrant ducked in front of him.

“Wait, follow me. I’ve already been up a ways.”

Jaskier didn’t argue – he could worry about the uppity Lettenhove bastard later. Lethargy was beginning to tug at his limbs and his consciousness, and they needed to get out before it could overtake him.

Ferrant led him up the spiral staircase, through corridors, weaving through the layout of what was surely a castle, and Jaskier couldn’t shake the sense of familiarity that was beginning to stick to the back of his mind. The clanging of swords grew ever louder, and Ferrant broke into a run the moment they rounded the exit of a stairwell and saw the corridor broken up by a beam of glaring sunlight.

Bodies littered the ground – some wounded, some dead – and Jaskier inhaled sharply, surprise hitting him.

“Did you do this?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Ferrant groused, too quiet for anyone but a witcher to hear over the pounding footfalls and clamour of swords that they were drawing ever-closer to. “That would be the rescue operation. They said they’d fall back to the gates when I told them I’d-” he sucked in a breath “-go and get you.”

“What rescue operation, what cavalry!” Jaskier cried, but his questions died in his throat as they rounded the final corner just in time to see the last guard fall – just in time for the great sheathing of swords that make Jaskier’s heart leap into his throat as he registered who, exactly, had come for him.

“Hey, Julek.”

Chapter Text

The sword cut through the sharp, morning air with a swift and fluid, and Julian crouched as he finished the swing and then leapt, flipping and half-spinning in the air to face in the opposite direction before landing, light as a cat, on another stone of Kaer Seren's outer western wall. He came to a solid standstill, impeccably balanced on the balls on his feet with his sword held forward, as though pressed to the neck of an invisible enemy.

And he grinned.

He was so, so close. The Trial of the Mountains was rapidly approaching, becoming something he was actively preparing for rather than some faraway, unattainable endpoint of the witcher's childhood he could scarcely have fathomed he'd ever experience, let alone survive.

But none of that mattered.

He was going to pass his final Trial and walk down that mountain, a fully realised witcher, and finally, finally live.

The morning winds caught his ratty hair - halfway down his back, now, tied with a slip of fabric a good palm's-length above its ends to at least make it look somewhat free-flowing - and Julian let himself be carefree, for a moment. He held his sword easily, his movements were fluid and his footwork balanced and precise. Freedom was so tantalisingly close.

There was something liberating, about realising that he’d soon be able to get out of here – get gone, go wherever the nine hells he wanted to go – not rotting in the Viscount de Lettenhove’s country estate, not running circles in nigh-abandoned halls of Kaer Seren, not anywhere where anyone above him had some pre-ordained use for him. He would go wherever he wanted to go, do whatever he wanted to do, and if anyone tried to stop him…

Well.

Julian was strong, now. If somebody tried to use him now, tried to stop him… now, he could stop them first.

His life was his own, and he only had one. He intended to live it to the fullest, and no Viscount, no Griffin, no anyone could get in the way of him. Julian smiled into the wind, and it was a vicious, determined kind of smile that he had grown into, he felt.

Julek, Julek, if you make it out, you must come back. No matter what you think of your father. No matter how far you wish to run. You must come back.

His life was his own.

The Viscount de Lettenhove could kindly go and screw himself. Julian would make a place for himself on his own terms, by force if he had to. He was hardly going to content himself with the life of a sword-swinging mutant, on the Path or standing guard over the man who had dragged him across the continent to sell him to a witcher in Kovir.

The gods only knew that they owed him that much, at least.

“Julek!”

Julian straightened, slightly, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he had been stood frozen in his finishing pose for a disconcerting while. He sheathed his sword, and crouched down to peer over the lip of the wall, down to where Coën was staring up at him, shielding his red-and-yellow eyes against the sun.

“Coën! Fancy seeing you here!” he grinned, making an effort to soften the vicious smile from earlier into something softer, to direct at his brother. “Fancy a spar?”

“Keldar wants us in the library.”

“The Bestiary, again?”

“Alchemical theory.”

Julian scrunched up his nose. “Why?

“I suppose he supposes that a witcher can never be too well-prepared. It’s something, at least, for when you need to brew potions in a pinch. Knowing what you can substitute in.”

Julian shrugged. “I’m not going to turn down any tricks, but do you think he’ll ever tell us where he gets this stuff? I don’t think it’s traditional.”

“Get down from the wall, Julek, I’m not going to lose my voice yelling up at you,” Coën said, with no added volume, perfectly aware that he did not need to raise his voice in the slightest to be heard by a witcher up the wall. “Kaer Seren had a library to kill for. Keldar would be a fool not to utilise it.”

Julian shrugged, and dropped down the wall, quickly catching handholds and footholds as he went. After all these years, climbing down the keep perimeter had become as much of a second-nature thing as climbing up them had been, even with the paradoxical enemity of gravity on the way down. Coën stood waiting for him, as he always did, even as he held his arms crossed and an exasperated furrow crossed his brow, almost hidden under his curls as they fell in his face.

His feet hit the floor, the impact kicking up the powdery dirt of the courtyard. Koviri summers were always so dry.

“Your hair’s getting long, Coën. You should cut it. Don’t want my favourite brother going out like a bitch ‘cause he didn’t see a kikimora coming through his luscious, luscious locks.”

“I’m your only brother. And I’m growing it out.”

“To match me?”

“I thought it’d be nice to try something new before we set out onto the Path.” Coën shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’ll probably crop it all off before the Trials, so I don’t die the world’s stupidest death ‘cause I was too vain to let it go. I’ll leave that to you.”

“Aww,” Julian grinned. “You want to match with me.”

“That’s not why.”

“Sure it’s not. It’s not like you saw my magnificent locks and got jealous, or anything, the great Coën of Poviss is naturally above that kind of thing-”

“Shut up, Julek,” Coën retorted, faux-offence written all over his demeanour as he pulled his hand out of his pocket to give Julian a playful shove. He flailed at the contact, doubling over as though reeling from the force of a real blow, and it was then that his eyes caught the yellow parchment in Coën’s pocket. A letter, it had to be, folded over neatly in those dimensions.

He almost opened his mouth to ask Coën who the hell was writing him, a lowly cadet in a thought-dead keep in a mountain who’d not seen civilisation in well over a decade, but then his mind caught up with his mouth and he stopped himself. That parchment was crinkled at the edges and slightly water-logged, he could tell – it was a familiar sort of damage that he was ever-so familiar with, the kind of pattern that clung to the edges of the priceless tomes in the library and the letters… the letters in the mail-room archive.

Coën had stolen a letter.

No. Julian frowned. Coën had stolen a letter and kept it from him. It had been months since they’d stopped sneaking down into the mail-room together, with Julian certain that they’d exhausted every drop of information the backlog could give them. But Coën had gotten there first, hadn’t he? He’d ripped up one of the earlier drafts of Julian’s song and stuck the precious scraps of parchment in-between letters as placeholders for ones he’d taken with him.

A wave of anger crested in Julian’s chest. God, he’d been so stupid, so trusting. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that Coën would take a letter and not mark its place – hadn’t considered that Coën would hide things from him. It had been so, so easy for him to steal letters he didn’t want Julian to see out of the mail-room – fuck, he might have had them lying around their room and Julian wouldn’t have questioned it; merely assumed that it was part of their shared research and left it be, trusting Coën to clean up his own mess.

Julian didn’t think twice before swiftly recovering, launching at Coën in a playful tackle and laughing like hot anger wasn’t at that very moment desperately trying to claw its way up his through.

Turnabout was fair play.

Coën didn’t even notice when feather-light fingers swiped the stolen letter - letters, he realised, it was multiple pages folded in on each other – from inside his pocket.

Their laughter died down, Julian let go of where he was clinging, one-armed, to Coën’s neck, and gave him a friendly punch in the shoulder just for good measure. He was nice about it, too – for all that he wanted to throttle him and ask him why he would hide a letter from him, didn’t he trust him- he didn’t want to tip his hand. Not until he knew what Coën felt that he needed to hide from Julian in the first place.

“Do me a favour, Coën?”

“Yeah?” Coën quirked his brow, good-natured and friendly as always, like he wasn’t hiding secrets from Julian in his pockets.

“Tell Keldar I’m going to be late.”

His brother’s face drew into a judgemental concern, yellow-red eyes narrowing as he looked down at him.

“Julek, again?”

“I have to take a shit,” Julian said, blithely, and sprinted off down the hall, right back in the direction they’d come.

To the esteemed Witcher Keldar-

This correspondence must be somewhat unexpected, I know. You and I have not had contact in many years, not since the last winter we both spent at Kaer Morhen decades ago; were I to seek you out as an old friend, you would surely think that I had gone mad - that the mage Irion has lost his mind, at last! I'm sure you'd have said it was only a matter of time.

I do not seek you out as an old friend, but as a friend to the Witcher School of the Griffin nonetheless - I bring ill tidings indeed. Not long ago (midwinter, if my memory serves correctly), I was contacted by the mages of the Brotherhood of Sorcerers. They sent to me three messengers - Ilona, a mage of Aretuza (we have spoken of her before; I believe you then commented that she shares a name with the weapons-master of Kaer Morhen?), Jakobin of Alfort, a master alchemist and scholar, and Elian de Varenthorne. Elian, you will not know of, being that he pertains to a unique political squabble that I shall now explain. Trust me, Keldar - all that I am about to say is of the utmost relevance. I know you are rolling your eyes, but I would not waste your time with petty conflict.

The first two of the three messengers did not cause me much worry. Jakobin is no friend of mine, but we have worked together before - he has taught me much of the alchemy that I know, and I have taught him arithmancy and various illusory techniques. Ilona of Aretuza I was also unsurprised to see - she is an illusion specialist who was unable to gain a court posting and began to work with the Brotherhood in lieu of this, and so it was not outside of the realm of possibility that she might seek me out for matters theoretical or educational. It was the presence of Elian de Varenthorne that was worrisome.

Originally the scion of the Duchy of Varenthorne in lower east Redania, he announced at twenty his abdication from his place as their heir to the Dukedom and left Varenthorne shortly thereafter. He has since made a name for himself as an information broker (and, though it cannot be confirmed, a spymaster) in the contested Viscounty Lettenhove. There are rumours that he bolstered the Keracki garrison there; some say he spied for Redania, but it's all unsubstantiated - you'll forgive an old man the indignity of speculating, however. Whatever he did, Varenthorne eventually amassed a private equity through his brokerage that would make the Duke de Varenthorne openly weep.

It was about ten years into his independent work that the Brotherhood sought him out for his services, and thereafter offered to hire him as the spymaster and political correspondant of the Brotherhood itself - a posting which he, to the surprise of all of his associates, accepted, breaking the independence he was so renowned for. He has now been working for the Brotherhood for six and a quarter years as of midwinter.

Thus, you can imagine my trepidation when the three of them showed up at my doorstep. It was immediately clear that the Brotherhood wanted something - and what the Brotherhood wants, it soon shall acquire. I found myself in Varenthorne's situation soon enough indeed! Not to invoke their ire, I invited them in and had tea with them, and made small talk.

Jakobin and I spoke of alchemy - he has made a breakthrough in the sub-field of chemokinesis that I suspect may be of interest to you and your witchers, Keldar - I will send you the copy of his publication on the matter once I am done with it. Kaer Seren's library will surely be a better home for such a rare volume than my tower, and Jakobin will shit his breeches to know that I gave such a thing away. Ilona asked me of illusion, which I had expected - and really, without Varenthorne looming over us we could have had a perfectly pleasant discussion on the applications of chemokinetic principles to the subfields of illusionary loci and illusory selectivity, but here Varenthorne was - and he surely had a purpose.

I am sure, given what transpired next, that Varenthorne brought me Jakobin and Ilona to trick me into divulging any of the alchemy of the trials that I had learnt during my time at Kaer Morhen. You will be relieved to hear that I did not divulge a drop of information, for I am not the doddering, naïve fool that the Brotherhood seems to think me. Perhaps I should feel insulted, but this presumptiveness has served me well in the past. I fear, however, that the times that I could use such a thing to my advantage are coming to a close.

After the discussion concluded, Varenthorne decided to ask me forthright about my time working with the Witcher School of the Wolf. I answered him politely, keeping away from sensitive topics, and I felt sure that this would draw his ire - but it did not. Keldar, I greatly fear that Varenthorne was not there to gain information regarding the Witchers, but rather, regarding me.

I fear the worst - that the Brotherhood wishes to move against the Witchers, and that my evaluation as a key player in this arena of mages and Witchers signifies that they are readying to make their move. I believe that the elongated squabble over the library access may be a key point - if there are others I do not know, forgive me. I am not of the Brotherhood and no longer with Kaer Morhen, so it is more than likely that I am uninformed of the nuances of the current situation.

Going forwards, I will do what I can to mitigate events from amongst the mages. If you wish to reply to this letter, ensure that you take measures, as I did, to prevent the Brotherhood from laying eyes on the correspondence, as they shall surely be keeping an eye out for it. Heed my warning, friend - you have long been playing a dangerous game with a powerful enemy. Exercise your best judgement in the era of war that is no doubt forthcoming.

In faith,
Irion

Julian’s hand trembled as he lowered the letter – letters. Coën hadn’t been so foolish as to take only the letter that mentioned Lettenhove – how dare he hide the mention of Lettenhove? - and not the ones that responded to it. No, he’d scrubbed any and all trace of this vein Irion’s correspondence with Keldar from the archive at all, to hide the fact that there was a gap in the letter at all.

Something sharp and angry shot up Julian’s spine. He’d read Irion’s final letter, the one where he and they’d suspected it hasn’t been written by Irion and all, and he cursed his complacency in assuming that was all there was to it. Gods, he’d been so… so naïve.

He’d trusted Coën to trust him, and this was what he got? It made him wonder what else his brother had hidden away from him, with that dumb, condescending I-know-you-better-than-anyone-Julek smile of his, that Julian had been too stupid to catch.

This was stupid. This was so stupid.

This was a betrayal.

Part of him, an irrational, stupid part of him, wanted to go storm after Coën and demand an explanation, every inch the noble ponce he was. The other part of him didn’t trust himself to stay calm when faced with Coën’s condescending explanation.

It was so frustrating it made him want to scream, Coën’s silver tongue – the way he could make Julian feel so disappointed in himself, the way he worded everything so gently like he was afraid that if Julian came into contact with any unfortunate truth of the world, he’d cut himself on it and die.

He didn’t need to be coddled. He didn’t need some half-arsed boy barely a few years his senior to shield his eyes from anything – he was a fucking witcher, he could handle it.

He exhaled. He’d ask Coën about the letter later, when he’d cooled off. This was fine. It was… a misunderstanding, that was all. Coën didn’t mean to betray him – he wanted to protect Julian, he was just… a little misguided. Yes. It wouldn’t do to get mad at him. He was only trying to help. He didn’t have a malicious bone in his body, really, he was just… really, it was Coën who was the naïve one.

It was an unfortunate misunderstanding. Coën had thought he was helping, probably. Maybe he didn’t realise Julian was also growing up. He’d heard – and it was stupid to think about this, because Julian hadn’t met anyone younger than him in a decade, because they still had yet to onboard any second cohort – but he’d heard that when you were older than someone, you couldn’t help but percieve them as smaller and younger the older you grew.

It was all a silly misunderstanding. Come morning, he’d cool off and talk to Coën. Come morning, he’d set things right.

Julian’s eyes burned. He continued to read.

Irion-

Melitele's tits, do you like the sound of your own voice. Not to say I don't appreciate the warning - I got the personal and the sanctioned letters both, and I don't want to cede a point to a wizard, but I do put more stock in your warnings than Erland tells me I should. For all that he's got a tactical head on his shoulders, that man, he's far too much a cynic to trust a Kaer Morhen mage. I don't trust you either, on that note, but I agree with you - that's the same difference to some, and it's all the same to me. Send us Jakobin's Chemokinesis, though, and the betrayal would be worth it through and through.

Keldar.

"Hey, Keldar?"

"Julian."

"Can I ask a question?"

Keldar glanced up from the book he was shelving, eyes furrowing as he took in Julian's laid-back posture and angelic expression. He was, he knew, the picture of teenage lankiness - 'childlike innocence' becoming an ever-more unattainable part for him to play, but thay wasn't going to stop him from trying.

Keldar's eyes swept across the cavernous, empty library. Coën had gone off to do his own thing, which was all well and bloody good, and Erland was out on the mountains - Julian had well and truly cornered him.

"I don't suppose anyone can stop you," he said, gruffly, before turning back to his books.

"Great," Julian chirped. "What's the difference between illusory and illusionary?"

A subtle, unsuspucious-seeming query. It was a brilliant opener - leading naturally into his topic of interest with only the barest implication of his having used Keldar's decades-old correspondances with his dead mage pen-pal as night-time reading material. Illusionary loci and illusory selectivity - something about that had stuck with him. If it meant what he thought it did… it could be very useful, indeed.

Julian grinned, cocking his head.

Keldar glared back up at him, eyes narrowed.

"Why do want to know?”

“Curious.”

“For what purpose?”

“I hunger for knowledge, for knowledge’s sake.”

Keldar raised a white brow, scraggly and grown out, and looked at Julian with the customary unimpressed look he seemed to have reserved for him. “I have known you for many years, boy, for better, or for worse. You have the intellectual curiosity of a fruit fly.”

“Ouch,” Julian said, “For worse, then, I presume?”

Keldar fixed him with a glare. Julian didn’t much mind his glare – it was something novel, at least, the way his witcher pupils narrowed into slits. Nothing like the watery green stare that still pinned him down in his nightmares. This was, ironically, something he liked about Keldar – no matter how much grousing the elder witcher did, it was all pretty much posturing. He couldn’t make the very room go cold the way Julian’s f-

The way. The way that he remembered it being outside the keep, at times, despite it having been a far more opulent room at a far more reasonable elevation above sea level.

“See, I don’t know how I’m supposed to learn anything when you seem so reticent to teach, Keldar,” Julian said, and Keldar broke his gaze and snorted.

“You do whatever you want, whenever you want, and if we’ve not beat that out of you yet, I’m afraid you're a lost cause.”

“Well, I want to read,” Julian scowled. “It’s hard to do that when authors assume I’m familiar with the jargon of the field.”

“What book?”

“I don’t know, I put it back, I didn’t bother with the title.”

Keldar’s gaze turned sardonic. “Truly, such intellectual curiosity on display.”

“It’s not a difficult question!”

Julian was beginning to think Keldar just plain didn’t like him. He’d have to ask Coën to confirm or deny.

"Illusory refers to something which is an illusion," Keldar said, finally. "If I conjure an illusion of an apple, it is an illusory apple. Illusionary, on the other hand, means something that is related to illusion but not of it - an illusionary manuscript is a manuscript speaking on the topic of illusion rather than an illusion of a manuscript. All of which you would have known had you paid me the slightest bit of attention these past ten years. What research is so important that you would skive off of your lessons for it so soon before your final Trial?"

“Oh, you wouldn’t care,” Julian sniffed. “Probably not intellectually stimulating enough.”

“Answer me or I’ll tan your hide, boy,” Keldar snarled, the remnants of his patience quite visibly dissipating.

“You’ll have to catch me first!” Julian smiled, and skipped off. Keldar didn’t chase; he didn’t tend to bother. Coën’s hypothesis was to assume that after burying so many boys, he could no longer bring himself to raise a hand against one; Julian figured he was plain getting old and didn’t want to put his bones through it.

Illusionary loci and illusory selectivity, huh? If he was interpreting this right, and illusionary locus was a centre around which an illusion was cast. If he was casting an illusionary sign (big on the if, there – he knew a couple, not to mastery, useless as they were for anything that wanted more than a few seconds of the trick), the locus, he assumed, was himself. He acted as the origin for the spell – inasfar as one could call a Sign a spell – and his casting hands the locus for the burst of energy that would create the weak, temporary illusion that was all even the best witchers were good for.

Really, he understood why most schools only bothered to teach the main five or so.

But what could a real mage do? Julian understood why Kaer Seren didn’t staff them anymore – truly, he did. Still, if someone were able to, per se, apply a selective illuion – one that masked eyes, hair, battle scars – to a locus outside of the caster, and have it run in perpetuity?

Ilona. Ilona of Aretuza, contemporary with Jakobin of Alfort and Elian de Varenthorne. Given that she shared a name with a witcher, Julian would assume it was a common woman’s name – from where, he didn’t know; most names he could place were those of men. It wasn’t Redanian, could be Koviri, most likely Kaedweni if there was one at Kaer Morhen – or something else northerly, probably, because it was always useless trying to guesstimate origin by proximity to something so esoteric as Aretuza, which was staffed exclusively by people who had the ability to teleport. Portal. Whatever.

Still, it was a jumping off point. Illusionary loci and illusory selectivity, Ilona of somewhere-or-other who dealt in it…

The Trial of the Mountain was ever so soon.

The barest outlines of a plan began to form in the back of Julian’s mind.

Chapter Text

“Hey, Julek.”

The bottom dropped out of Jaskier’s stomach. This was unexpected.

“Coën,” he returned, and blamed the smoke from the fire for the fact that it sounded like all of the air had been punched out of his lungs.

“Jaskier,” Geralt said, eyes piercing- and it was almost a question with the way his eyes flicked curiously about his figure. Jaskier figured he was taking note of the blood, the bruising, and the very ratty remains of what had once been his green silken finery, and the hair and the eyes and the scars that weren’t supposed to belong on his face at all. The sorcerer was slung easily about his shoulder, too.

“Yeah.” He floundered a little. “Hi.”

“I have something of yours.”

The ground became very interesting, all of a sudden.

“My medallion?”

“That’s right,” Coën interrupted. “Julian, are you alright?”

“Peachy.”

“Good. Great. Glad to hear it,” he said, and raised a hand. For a moment, Jaskier thought he was going to slap him – so did Geralt, if the aborted movement to grab the other witcher’s hand was any indication – but Coën merely clenched his hand, seemingly thinking better of whatever he was about to do, himself. “The sorcerer.”

“This would be Ivan,” Ferrant drawled, because he was determined to condescend to everyone on the planet at least once in his life. “One of Stregobor’s lackeys.”

“And you? Adam?” Geralt asked, the growl in his voice more of an undertone.

“Ferrant de Lettenhove, actually. Somewhat incidental thorn in the side of the Brotherhood of Mages and something of an unpleasant slime of a man, myself,” Ferrant said, shifting. “You can leave me to see myself out.”

“Oh, absolutely not,” Coën interjected, eyes darting between Jaskier, Geralt, and Ferrant. “In such harrowing times, shouldn’t we seek strength in numbers?”

“I don’t think-” Jaskier began, and was swiftly cut off.

“No, you don’t, Julek, do you?”

“Coën-”

“I don’t think you’ve thought a day in your life,” Coën said, pleasantly. “Put down the sorcerer, I’m sure you’ll throw your back out hulking him around like that. And we’ll talk about this. Geralt, get the horses, will you?”

“Trouble in paradise?” Ferrant muttered, sounding for all the world as if he were actually sympathetic.

“Nothing that isn’t your fault, de Lettenhove,” Jaskier shot back. “Adam.”

“I disagree,” Coën said, lazily, as Geralt gave Jaskier one more beady stare and went off to deal with, presumably, his task. “Whilst I can’t speak for any of what you’ve dragged Geralt into, I don’t think that this man, who can scarcely be older than thirty-five, is the reason you vanished without trace a good fifty years ago, Jaskier, is he? Or perhaps I am missing something? Did he kidnap you fifteen years before he was born?”

Anger flickered in Jaskier’s chest, but there was nothing he could say to defend himself to Coën without saying something dangerous in front of Ferrant, and they all knew it.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he spat instead, “is that what this is about?”

Coën’s face contorted in anguish for a single half-second, before he adopted a stony expression Jaskier hadn’t thought his brother would be capable of wearing.

“Yes,” he said, and when he spoke, his voice was quiet and distant. “I wonder what else it could possibly have been.”

Jaskier faltered, and took a moment to remember that Ivan was still about his shoulders. Ferrant gave him an extremely unamused look.

“I’ll be outside with Geralt,” Coën said, softly. “We’ll talk later.”

And with that, Jaskier was alone with a sorcerer and a de Lettenhove once more.

“Colour me impressed,” Ferrant drawled. “The rescue operation that risked a great deal of time and lost money to save your hide hates you. How do you manage these things?”

“Shut up,” Jaskier said, and he could feel his heart hammering in his chest – witcher-fast, so still slow enough as to be bradycardic, but faster than it really should have been. Then:

“Are you thirty-five?”

“No.”

“Older? Younger? It’s older, isn’t it? You look like you’d be one to have terminal baby-face in your forties. Not that I’d know what that’s like, I mean-”

“Younger,” Ferrant said, and Jaskier squinted.

“You’re not in your twenties, are you?”

“I am not.”

“Thirty?”

“Flat? No.”

“Thirty-one?”

“Can we leave?” Ferrant asked, flicking his eyes through the wide open castle doors, littered with the corpses of Ivan’s hired guard.

“You’re thirty-one, then?”

“If you give me the sorcerer,” Ferrant tried, “I’ll leave you alone to sabotage your meaningful relationships unhindered, forever.”

“Absolutely not,” Jaskier grinned, “you thirty-one-year-old bastard.”

Ferrant inhaled, deeply, fixed Jaskier with the most unimpressed look he could, and made his way towards the door.

“Wait.”

“Little gods,” Ferrant said, stiffening. “What.”

“My glamour,” Jaskier said. “Did you-”

“No.”

“We need to find it.”

At this, Ferrant turned fully back around, face tight with genuine disbelief. “Julian-” Jaskier flinched- “did something come loose in your brain? You set his office on fire. If that glamour was present, it’s nothing more than ash and dust.”

Jaskier’s head swam, and he stumbled, Ivan shifting on his shoulders. “But-”

“We need to leave, before this wretched place collapses. Your friends are outside.”

“Don’t presume to give me orders, Lettenhove. I’m the only reason you’re alive right now.”

Ferrant’s bony fingers dug into Jaskier’s upper arm, seemingly quite done with the entire conversation, and pulled him forwards. It was only a light tug, but Jaskier stumbled towards him anyways.

“We can debate the semantics of that astoundingly presumptive statement when we’re not standing in a sea of bodies, waiting for the smog to catch up with us. Move, you wretched fool.”

“Piss off, Lettenhove.”

Ferrant’s glare turned steely, and he pressed his lips together. It was almost like, Jaskier thought (deliriously), he was physically stopping whatever comment he wanted to make from slipping out.

He shrugged the man’s grasp off and made for the door, unconscious sorcerer heaving about his shoulders and sad little Keracki rat trailing miserably behind him.

They had brought his horse down along with them, from – if the story was to be believed - Kovir. No wonder the rescue party had taken a moment. Jaskier had to admit that he was impressed. Between the swift identification of his medallion, to the speed it took them to narrow down who had taken him and likely where, to the breakneck pace at which they’d traversed the entire continent from Kovir to Redania, Jaskier had to admit that Geralt and Coën were a cut above the rest.

Geralt especially. Jaskier was beginning to think that he had misjudged the man’s intelligence, and that was an uncomfortable thought. Back with the mortician in Beled, had he really been stood there like a sack of bricks whilst Jaskier did all the thinking? Had the surprise, Jaskier realised with a sinking jolt, at the declaration that it was the mortician who’d been doing the killing, really been at the twist that it had been she who was the killer… or – mortifyingly – had he merely been surprised that Jaskier had figured it out?

Was this why Geralt was so reticent with him, all the time? Did he find Jaskier to be, what, unbearably condescending, regaling him with facts and figures that Geralt had already figured?

Jaskier bristled at the notion. If so, it was the man’s own fault for playing ‘dumb, hulking brute’ all the time with such… such gleeful abandon.

If only people would talk to him, right?

Oh, well. Whatever. Who cared? He was a free man now; it was best to focus on that. After the captivity in Ivan’s dungeon – in Lohere’s castle, because that bitch would not stop screwing him over even after he’d cut her throat out – Jaskier would enjoy the feeling of the sun on his neck as he got his horse ready to start moving.

His horse. The horse. The one he had named, drunkenly, back before his entire, hard-won life had fallen apart. It felt so… childish, really, to continue calling her Bollocks, of all things – a lackadaisical, stupid joke crafted to fit a persona that had languished in the knowledge that all was well and nothing was serious a mere few weeks – months? – ago.

The creature itself looked as nonplussed as ever, nuzzling into his hand and placidly accepting the sorcerer that Jaskier had fastened into the saddle. The eye that Ferrant had split with his falchion was looking worse for wear.

“Do we have any bandages?” Jaskier called, looking over his shoulder.

A silence fell over the campsite, as Geralt and Coën’s quiet conversation fell off into nothingness and Ferrant’s head jerked up from where he’d been picking through the witchers’ spare belongings for some unknown, arcane purpose.

“Bandages,” Jaskier repeated, wrong-footed, “for his eye. Face. If that gets infected, it’ll be…”

Jaskier floundered. What did he care if Ivan lived or died? If Ferrant got to interrogate the bastard back or not? If Coën got to needle him about what he knew of the Griffins? Jaskier had wanted to kill him anyways.

“...gross.”

Yeah. Gross was something he wanted to avoid.

“I have some,” Coën piped up, after a long silence. “Ferrant, they should be in the outer pocket of that bag you’re picking through. I don’t have any disinfectant, but it should stop anything worse from getting into the wound.”

“I’ll get on that. Left or right outer pocket?”

“Left, if you’re looking from the front.”

Jaskier looked away, down at his hands, and realised that he was still in his ruined, green former finery – or what was left of it. The silks had been expensive, and they were all so much worse for wear considering his imprisonment. His doublet was gone – Ivan had taken it off of him before he’d awoken, and he pale green undershirt that he had so loved despite how it clashed with the blue of his eyes – not, he realised, that this was a problem anymore – was stained with blood and sweat and who knew what else. His breeched had been discoloured by the grime and blood in the cell. He looked terrible.

“Coën?”

“Yes?”

“Can I borrow some clothes?”

Coën’s face twisted. “You have your own.”

“Yeah, but it’s all… finery. I’d look like a twat.”

“I suppose you’ll have to live with that, hmm, Julek?”

“Coën. Please.”

Coën raised an eyebrow. “It’s always ‘I want, I want, I want’ with you, isn’t it, Julek?”

“I’d be laughed out of town like this,” Jaskier tried, desperately. “A fancy-dressed witcher. It would be humiliating.”

“Tragic,” Coën murmured. “We’re sticking to the forest routes, though, so I can’t forsee it being much of an issue. Geralt, are you good to get going?”

“Hmf.”

“Good to hear. Ferrant, are you going to bandage the mage’s eye, or shall I?”

“I’ll do it.”

Jaskier turned back to face his horse. He resigned himself to journeying in his bloodied captivity clothing, and considered whether it would sound marginally less stupid to name her Codfish.

Most of the journey passed in silence. Jaskier no longer posessed a lute to fiddle on – and damn, he really hadn’t seen much of any of his belongings in the storerooms he’d checked, had he? He spared a thought to Filavandrel, the priceless instrument he’d grudgingly handed to who he’d thought was a hapless young bard up in smoke, much like the charade itself. He kicked the ground, bitter as all hell. Perhaps he’d have to come up with a new alias, until he could figure some kind of stop-gap glamour to spare Jaskier the indignity of being found out.

Ivan shifted fitfully in his horse’s saddle (Codfish? Agata? Saddle-Mary?), bleeding through the tightly wound bandages that Ferrant had tied around his face. The man himself was stoically bringing up the rear, but Jaskier could tell from his pinched expression and heavy breathing through his nostrils that Ferrant was edging on exhaustion. It figured that an extended captivity session paired with only the stamina of a baseline human would have its consequences. Out of the corner of his eye, Jaskier could make out his white-knuckled grip on his falchion, tucked into a belt he’d borrowed from Coën.

Coën and Geralt had taken the front, and they kept exchanging meaningful looks. With a pang of jealousy, Jaskier realised that the pair of them had managed to strike up a deeper friendship than what Jaskier himself and Geralt had managed in all the time they’d known each other, and Coën…

Well. Coën was mad at him right now. It would pass. It always did.

It was just a tad irritating to have the only person happy to talk to him be Ferrant.

Jaskier focused on his footsteps, and tried to ignore the persistent feeling of wrongness that had lodged itself in his gut.

It was Geralt who broke the silence first.

“The sorcerer’s awake.”

Ferrant stiffened, and Jaskier tried not to twitch.

“Alright,” Coën said. “Let’s make camp here, then.”

“Off the horse,” Ferrant nudged Ivan, as Geralt led the way into a little sheltered clearing by the stream that had been running alongside the forest path.

“de Lettenhove,” Ivan mumbled, and winced, seemingly remembering the fresh wound that had bisected his face. “You…”

“Me,” Ferrant sniffed. “You’ll forgive us for returning your hospitality, Ivan.”

“Not at all,” the mage sniffed.

“How’s the eye?”

“Cleft in twain, thank you.”

“Are you feeling feverish? Weak?”

Ivan huffed. “Quite. If you unbind me, I can heal this.”

Ferrant snorted. “And portal away? I’d rather risk the rot.”

“I’m glad you feel comfortable.” Ivan groused, his voice reedy, weak, and altogether lacking the gravitas it had held back in the cell.

“It’s nothing personal,” Ferrant sniffed. “You have your job to do, and I have mine.”

“Bloede pest. Do you ever,” Ivan groaned, with the echo of a past conversation, “grow tired of risking life and limb on the orders of a man who demonstrably doesn’t much care for his kin in return? It feels a tad…”

He gestured.

“...self-effacing.”

A ghost of a smile twitched at Ferrant’s lips. “Oh, it keeps me busy enough that I don’t do anything egregiously stupid.”

His eyes darted, very very quickly, to Jaskier.

Ivan looked like a man who very, very dearly would have liked to roll his eyes.

“Bloede pest.”

“You’re doing better than Ilona,” Ferrant smiled, encouragingly, and visibly tried not to wince. Jaskier snorted. He’d almost forgotten that this whole thing had been set in motion by the cold-blooded murder the man had committed.

“Not interested in finishing the job?”

“Not anymore,” Ferrant allowed. “There are bigger things at stake than a… personal feud.”

“Ah, Leopold’s pet project. You’re a fool if you think he’ll share in his spoils.”

Ferrant looked inordinately smug, at that. “Oh, our present arrangement benefits me perfectly. I’m not an ambitious man.”

“So you say,” Ivan coughed. “It is difficult to believe.”

Something inside Jaskier’s gut twisted at that – sure, he’d suspected that Ferrant ran in all kinds of unpleasant circles, but to hear it confirmed so casually, in front of an audience, no less, that the man worked for Jaskier’s still-living father…

He swallowed the hint of bile that had begun to rise in his throat at the thought, and let his eyes dart around the clearing. Coën looked pensive and far too alert, whilst Geralt had that blank look on his face that Jaskier had thought was indicative of being miles away, but now wasn’t sure how to place. Ferrant seemed all too happy to entertain this charade; Ivan to have sourly caught onto why.

Jaskier wondered, abruptly, what – if any – his relation was to Ferrant de Lettenhove.

“If you aren’t to let me heal my wound, de Lettenhove, at least clean it,” Ivan snapped.

“Would that I could,” Ferrant said, primly. “You’d have to ask my friends here for the privilege. I don’t have any equipment.”

“de Lettenhove,” Ivan sniffed. “You are not funny.”

Ferrant shrugged. “Witchers,” he called over his shoulder, “might I borrow a bowl and a rag to boil water and clean his wounds?

“Saddle-bag,” Coën said, “main compartment. I don’t carry any firestarting equipment, but let me know when you’ve set the fire and I can Igni it.”

“Your hospitality is graciously appreciated,” Ferrant murmured.

“Appreciated enough that you won’t be hiring him as a meat-shield against assassins?” Geralt snorted, semi-amused, and Ferrant stiffened.

“Desperate times,” he allowed, not turning around. “Desperate measures.”

What remained visible of Ivan’s face under the bandages contorted itself in gleeful schadenfreude. “Prevents you from doing anything stupid, you said?” he taunted, and Ferrant forced a grin.

“Let’s see you clean that gash yourself, Ivan, hmm?”

Coën stood, and laid a hand on Jaskier’s shoulder. “We should go collect some firewood.”

“And leave Ferrant alone with the sorcerer?” Jaskier snorted, and Coën stiffened.

“Geralt will be with them. We need to talk.”

“Right,” Jaskier said. That, he could understand – he and Coën hadn’t seen each other in decades; there was catching-up to be done. Tales to regale, all that kind of thing.

He let Coën take the lead, and his brother wasted no time in leading them off the beaten path. The quiet, murmuring voices of Ferrant and Ivan remained within earshot; dulled and muted, far enough to be indistinct, but not so far that they’d lost them completely. This far out, only Geralt would be able to hear them – which Jaskier actually felt quite good about. If he heard him chatting with Coën, like old pals, that would provide some sort of common ground, wouldn’t it?

Geralt would realise that Jaskier wasn’t some kind of malicious actor – the burn scar where he’d gotten Geralt to cauterise it twinged. The glamour was – had been – a clever thing, letting wounds stay visible during their healing, but smoothing over the appearance of scars once it had finished with the scabbing. It had cost a pretty penny, and this was among one of the reasons for it – and now it was gone. Forever.

Well, fifty years of humanity was better than nothing, wasn’t it? It was his fault, anyways, for tempting Destiny by tagging along with a Witcher.

“Julek,” Coën said, interrupting Jaskier’s musings, and Jaskier jolted. “Can I ask what all this was about?”

“All what?”

Coën’s face twisted.

“Sorry, I just-” Jaskier cleared his throat. “Like the thing with Ferrant, or the glamour, or Geralt, or the sorcerer?”

“I…” Coën seemed at a loss for words, for a second. “Why don’t you start with the glamour.”

Jaskier shrugged. “I don’t know, I… I was never one for witchery I read about a witch who worked with illusory selectivity in one of the Kaer Seren letters, way back when-”

“What?”

“-and I figured that and adaptive glamour that could select for what traits it masked and how could cover up the mutations well enough for me to, you know,” Jaskier gestured, helplessly. “Pass. For a human. Took me two decades to save up enough the coin to pay her to actually make one, mind, but once I did, I could enrol at Oxenfurt, and-”

“This was planned?” Coën inerjected, and there was some kind of unidentifiable panic in his voice. “You planned this?”

“I- yes?” Jaskier said, helplessly.

“All that time? This was the goal? Since you were out on the Path, you were biding your time and saving up your coin to scamper off to Oxenfurt University with a glamour and nary a word to anyone?”

“Well, it was an expensive undertaking!”

“I don’t care about your expenses, Julian!”

“I’m sorry, then? I-”

“I mourned you,” Coën spat, more vehemently than Jaskier would have thought was possible. “Fifty years, no sign of life or, or anything from you. I mourned you, brother, and all the while you were, what, play-acting at bardic inspiration?”

“Coën,” Jaskier said, desperate. “Please. It’s not like that.”

“We wrote you off after the fifth year with no sign of any kind of life, you know. I know I screamed at Erland for about half an hour, after that, in front one of the younger cohorts. I didn’t care, I was so, so certain you’d show up and it would be fine...”

“Listen-”

“He let me off for undermining his authority, you know, and we declared you dead in absentia that day. And it turns out I was right all along, anyways. You were fine.” Coën sucked in a breath. “And the first time, in half a century, that I hear from you, it’s because you needed bailing out – and fuck, Julek, you couldn’t even ask me. I just happened to be the first Griffin Geralt knew to bump into to ask about your medallion. And now we’re here, and you didn’t even… fuck, Julek. No ‘it’s good to see you, I’ve missed you, thank you for coming for me, I’m sorry I left you, brother’ - just… more demands.”

He blinked, and looked away. Jaskier could have sworn he saw teats glistening in his brother’s eyes, but when Coën looked back, he was as stoic as ever.

“Coën…”

“You know, I really did love you like a brother, Julek,” Coën said, voice wooden, and the past tense was enough of a gut-punch to send Jaskier reeling as if he’d really been struck.

“Coën, I’m sorry.”

“You’re not.”

“I am,” Julian swore. “You’re my brother. You’ve always been my brother. I love you. Now and always and forever.”

“Would you have said any of this,” Coën breathed, looking for all the world as if he was staring at something very ugly and very horrible that had just been laid before him, “if you weren’t at risk of losing me?”

And there it was.

Jask- Julian swallowed, and all of a sudden the world around him felt very big and very quiet and entirely poised to collapse in on him.

“Losing you?”

His voice was small, reedy, childlike. It hurt to swallow. His fingers felt weak.

“Coën, I… you’re my brother. You’re the only family I have.”

“Julian, I’m going to be honest with you.”

“Please. Please, Coën, I can’t lose you.”

“I’ve already lost you. I lost you fifty years ago. I mourned you. We built-” Coën shuddered, and when he spoke, he sounded as uncertain and lost and devastated as Jaskier felt. “I built you a grave. And every winter, I’d… sit with it, reminisce, miss you, and all that time…”

“Coën, I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I really- I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“All that fucking time,” Coën roared, and he slammed its fist into his open palm; Jaskier flinched like it had hit him all the same. “All that time, you were living your perfect little dream life, and I simply wasn’t worth enough to be anywhere near your periphery anymore! And then, it turned out that you were fine! Everything was fine! This was a choice!”

“Coën, you don’t understand!”

“Tell me something, huh, Julek? Why are you the only person allowed to choose?”

“I’m not!” Jaskier snapped, patience running out. “All I wanted was to be happy!”

“And you could only be happy without me?” Coën raised his eyebrow. “You’re pathetic, Julian. You’ve already made your choice, you know? You decided you couldn’t be happy in a life with me in it. Did you think that I wouldn’t care about that? Do you think that doesn’t hurt?”

“I-”

“And if you say destiny, I swear to every god that’s ever been prayed to that I’ll rip out your tongue and smother you with it. I’m sorry being mutated into a monster lost you your opportunity to go to a liberal arts university with a silver spoon in your mouth and a stick up your arse, okay? But do you want to know something? I was a farmer before I came to Kaer Seren. Most of us were.”

“Please! It was a mistake! I made a horrible, horrible mistake and I’m so truly, deeply sorry-”

Coën closed his eyes. “All of his,” he said, “has been a mistake. I shouldn’t have coddled you. The noble blood in your veins doesn’t entitle you to anything. You had a stroke of luck at birth and you lost it, Julek, people have lived and died on farms and battlefields and ship’s decks and none of them ever got to live their dreams either. None of it… None of this is justifiable.”

“If there’s anything I can do,” Julian said, desperately, “to prove to you. That I didn’t mean to hurt you. Please, Coën.”

“If you didn’t mean it, that almost makes it worse, you know?” Coën shrugged, and smiled – tinged with pain and twisted anguish. “Do whatever you want, Jaskier. What do I care? My brother is dead. He’s been dead for fifty years. I doubt there’s anything you can do to bring him back.”

Jaskier could barely make out Coën’s soft footfalls as he left the clearing, over the sound of his own panicked sobs that came bursting, unbidden, from his chest.

“Coën! Coën, please!”

There was no answer.

Growing up, Julian Alfred Pankratz had been distinctly aware that his father did not love him. He had made the acquaintance of love and its absence both in those fragile first years of life, whilst his mother held him close to her bosom and sung to him under her breath, and his father kept him at arm’s length with the implicit promise that to Julian, he was not a confidante but a superior, and any praise was to be earnt and not taken.

He remembered feeling very small, smaller than he should have, whenever he spoke with his father. In those harrowed conversations where he had snapped at Julian for progressing too slowly in his lessons, for being too fanciful and undedicated, and his mother only offered token protests that he was progressing quite normally for a boy his age. That when she wasn’t pressing her lips so tightly together that her cheeks furrowed like those of someone several decades her senior, and her chin becoming pockmarked with the clenching of the muscle within it.

Sometimes, he recalled, his father would tell his mother to stop pulling that face. That it would age her. Sometimes, thinking back, Jul- Jaskier liked to think that, if Karolina Pankratz were not also the subordinate of Leopold Erwin, she would have retorted with something sharp and snappy and nihilistic. From the sad, sallow expression she wore in all of his memories, she had certainly looked ready to wither into the grave.

Jaskier was beginning to remember what that was like. To look into the eyes of someone who was supposed to be your family and see only scorn.

They had set up around the campfire, and Jaskier had volunteered for first watch and been quite merrily shot down by Geralt, who had stared at him with the sallow, pinched expression of someone who was very disappointed in him. Coën had glared at him once, and refused to look at him after that, but they’d decided to divide the watch up between the pair of them. It rankled, a little, to class with Ferrant and Ivan on the list of untrustworthy untermenschen that the real witchers had so gracefully allowed into their company.

It was Geralt who was stoking the campfire, now. Ivan tossed and turned fitfully on Jaskier’s spare bedroll; Coën had given his to Ferrant, who was either asleep or convincingly selling the illusion. Coën was lain atop own bedroll, chest rising and falling softly, turned steadfastly away from the fire and, by extension, the rest of them. Jaskier simply lay under his covers, eyes boring a hole in Coën’s back, unable even to enjoy the respite of being able to sleep fully on the floor.

He truly hadn’t meant to hurt Coën; bully for him if it had pissed him off, Jaskier was pissed off, too! It was too bad, really – but it wasn’t like Coën was the reason Jaskier had been miserable. No, that honour went to Leopold, for selling him off to the Griffins in the first place and stripping him both of his humanity and his future for… what? A slightly younger heir?

Leopold Pankratz. An inscrutable man with inscrutable motives, whose agent seemed more welcome than Jaskier himself at his own rescue party. Ferrant de Lettenhove, who’d gotten his falchion and the sorcerer and a rescue and Jaskier was left holding the bag.

It was almost enough to make him wish for the cell.

“Geralt,” he muttered into the darkness.

“Hm?”

“Can I have my medallion back.”

Geralt shifted, but didn’t turn to face him.

“Coën has it.”

Oh. Jaskier resigned himself to never seeing it again.

My brother is dead. I doubt there’s anything you can do to bring him back.

“Are you…” he trailed off.

“Am I?”

“Are we… good?”

At this, Geralt did turn – not fully, but he looked back over his shoulders for long enough to let his eyes meet Jaskier’s. It wasn’t a good sign, to be sure; Jaskier was resigned to this. He should have expected this. And, a corner of his brain told him, it was probably this that had sparked whatever friendship had blossomed between Geralt and Coën in the first place. Bonding over what a shit person Jaskier was, and how terribly tiring it was for them to have to go so far out of their way to rescue him.

The fire crackled onwards, merrily.

“We’re not friends,” Geralt said, finally. “I’m sorry, Jaskier.”

Well. Ouch.

“Then…” he hesitated. “Then why did you come to rescue me?”

Geralt stiffened, and turned resolutely away, leaving Jaskier staring at the way his white hair fell over the nape of his neck once more.

“I don’t help people because I like them,” he muttered, quietly enough that were Jaskier not a witcher, he would likely not have heard, “or because I deem them worthy of being saved. I came to get you because you needed help, and I was in a place to give it. That’s all.”

Jaskier pushed himself up onto his elbows. “Are you seriously it’s not you, it’s me-ing rescuing me from- from a Brotherhood lackey?”

Geralt snorted. “If that’s how you want to see it. Sure.”

“Seriously?”

“I’m a witcher. A job’s a job. It’s not up to me who gets to be saved.”

“Sure,” Jaskier snorted. “Noble dick.”

Geralt didn’t react, and Jaskier abruptly realised that he was talking to someone who didn’t much like him to begin with. Ah, well. If Coën – his brother, the person who knew him best – was of the opinion that there wasn’t much to like, there was probably something to that.

“Sorry,” he finished, lamely.

They lapsed back into silence, save for the crackling of the fire and the fitful turning of Ivan in his sleep.

“Hey, Geralt?”

“Hm?”

“Do you think we could be friends? At some point?”

Geralt did not reply, focusing instead on poking the fire. Jaskier had almost given up on getting a reply, turning onto his other side, looking towards the forest, when Geralt finally huffed and replied.

“Depends,” he rumbled.

“On what?”

“On you. From here on out.”

“What is this, like, a chance?”

“If you want to see it that way.”

“I-” Jaskier hesitated. “Thank you, Geralt. For the chance. And for coming to break me out, even though I lied.”

“Hmm.”

He let himself lie back on his bedroll, against the familiar texture of rough-woven linen and forest underbrush poking at his back.

Sleep took a long time in coming.

Chapter Text

The version of Julian Alfred Pankratz who would have been a justiciar would probably have had the political chops to handle this better.

The version of himself, Julian thought, that had actually grown up as the missing young lord of Lettenhove, and lived his childhood growing up in that enclave of Redania (nestled, he recalled from his tutors, in the Keracki countryside near to the coast – but, much to the consternation of his six-year-old self, not possessing a coastline of its own), would probably be better than… whatever this was that he was doing at present. Julian Alfred Pankratz, eldest son of the Viscount de Lettenhove and groomed to become Viscount at eighteen, would have been more capable of playing interpersonal games, like Coën had apparently decided he quite wanted to. More ruthless when it came to playing them, too.

Julian Alfred probably-disinherited-if-he-ever-hinted-to-his-father-that-he-was-alive sort-of-Pankratz, witcher trainee and tacit coward, on the other hand, had balled Irion’s letter up in his fist, shoved his hands in his pockets, and gone about his day steadfastly avoiding Coën, whilst daydreaming about the kinds of things he could get done with a glamour. Any personal convictions that he should probably have a discussion about this had been healthily disregarded.

When in stormy seas, Julian considered, it may be better not to rock the boat.

Coën was probably beginning to catch on to this. He’d probably noticed the letter missing, but whether he’d assumed he’d dropped it somewhere in the keep or he’d figured Julian had pickpocketed him was anyone’s guess. Julian liked to think that he was in the clear, and Coën wouldn’t have worked himself up into a state to be mad at him by the time he got round to asking what the hell was up with Coën taking the letter in the first place, but it wasn’t something he was happy to stake any bets on.

Ah, well. He could hope.

Julian had taken a remarkably mature stance on dealing with this particular problem – that was, he had avoided Coën like the pox, and skipped out on at least three lessons, which had prompted Erland to make a pointed comment about preparedness being the crux of the Trial of the Mountain whilst making direct eye contact, but Julian had ignored both that and Coën’s worried look as easily as breathing.

He wasn’t being avoidant. He was… avoiding making a scene, so, yes, being a little avoidant, but this was… good avoidant. Mature avoidant, even. Was it cowardice, he asked, to invite fights he didn’t want to have?

It seemed more like common sense, to him.

Julian should have realised that this was untenable.

Erland and Keldar had a tendency to be lenient with their sad little two-boy cohort, in comparison to the tales the wintering witchers liked to spread. Just last winter, Henrik had regaled them with tales of the frightful corporal punishments Keldar used to oversee, and Coën and Julian had exchanged looks – Coën with all the grimness and tight-pressed lips of someone who was thinking about all the little graves that marked the bodies of trainees the brotherhood had ensured would never grow old enough to venture onto the path, and Julian with surprise at the realisation that this – getting away with bunking off and talking back and going wherever he wanted to – was the epitome of privilege in this sad little keep of horrors.

It was just as well, for Julian’s continued survival… maybe. Probably. He had been sleeping in one of the old dorms for two nights, which was perhaps a little embarrassing, but he was sixteen-going-on-seventeen now. Moving out of the childhood dormitory was practically expected of him at that age, inasfar as the the little room he and Coën had been sharing was a dormitory.

He politedly refrained from punching a wall.

“Julek.”

Julian sighed.

Kaer Seren was huge, but empty, and when that fact didn’t make it feel even bigger then it made the damn keep feel very small indeed. No amount of careful timing and taking his meals at odd times of the day could hide him forever, it seemed – not when he alone was twenty-five per-cent of the castle’s long-term occupancy.

This was why he had climbed into an alcove – meant for overhead lighting, two metres off the floor – in one of the keep’s lesser-traversed corridors, to stay out of the way. Coën was such a damn busybody, sometimes.

He stayed very still, hyper-aware of his knees – more broad than bony, these days – being a precarious perch for the bowl of gruel he’d liberated from the dining hall.

Coën huffed beneath him. Impatient, like. An unfamiliar affectation for his brother, but, Julian supposed, he had been sulking.

“Julian Pankratz, I am a witcher. Do you think so little of me that you assume I can’t track down one errant brother in an empty castle? Are you expecting me to drop dead spontaneously the moment I first step outside, too?”

“I thought you’d give me my privacy,” Julian bit back sullenly, because he was every bit as wretched a creature as the father who’d made him and the mother who’d let him take him away.

“I have,” Coën said, and he didn’t have to voice a perjorative for Julian to hear it anyways. “I’m curious. What mortal offence have I committed that has you sequestered on the ceiling?”

Julian snorted, and shoved a spoonful of gruel into his mouth.

“I’m not kidding, Pankratz. Spit it out.”

“What, the gruel?” he said, through a mouthful.

Coën crossed his arms. “You’re not as cute as you think you are when you wind people up like that, you dick.”

Julian grimaced. Coën was, evidently, a lot more peeved than he’d given him credit for.

“Get down, Julek. Let’s talk face-to-face.”

Oh, good, he was being holier-than-thou again. Julian could handle this.

“I don’t think I will.”

“Fine, stay up there. I don’t care, as long as you clue me in on what’s set off your teenage angst this time.”

Julian snorted. “Heed my warning, friend - you have long been playing a dangerous game with a powerful enemy.”

A moment passed in complete silence. He swore he could even hear the howling of a wolf outside the grounds, even sequestered in the belly of the keep as they were.

“Sorry, should I elaborate?” Julian said, blithely. “Do you remember Elian Varenthorne?”

Coën made a choked sound.

“Originally the scion of the Duchy of Varenthorne in lower east Redania ... made a name for himself as an information broker (and, though it cannot be confirmed, a spymaster) in the contested Visounty Lettenhove.” Julian recited. “There are rumours that he bolstered the Keracki garrison there; some say he spied for Redania, but it's all unsubstantiated - you'll forgive an old man the indignity of speculating, however.”

“Julian-”

“Is this ringing any bells? Coën?”

“Can you grow the fuck up?”

The righteous indignation died in Julian’s throat.

“What?”

He chanced a glance down at his brother. Coën stood, looking up at the alcove, with the most unamused look that Julian had ever seen on a man’s face. His hands rested on his hips, and like this, he almost looked grown, like the man – witcher – he was becoming, and not the gangly youth Julian knew.

“Did you fucking memorise that?”

“I have a good memory,” Julian sniped back, “and you’re the one who kept it in his back pocket! For years! Just to make sure I, what, wasn’t too mentally fragile to read the word Lettenhove!”

Coën dragged a hand down is face. “Julian, I left it in my chest. I forgot about it, alright? I found it clearing it out, and I realised that I probably should return it to the mail-room, considering how long it had been, and I put it in my pocket to do so. Do you honestly think that I’d have the fucking energy to safe-guard a piece of parchment, day in, day out, for multiple years?”

A lick of anger coursed up Julian’s spine. What was a year to a witcher? He’d seen Keldar guard secrets far more jealously.

“Not denying the reason you took it, though, are you?”

Coën exhaled. “No. I’m not. I didn’t think it would be good for you to find… reminders everywhere, Julek. Not with how much Lettenhove clearly still haunts your-”

“Oh, so I am too infirm, then?”

Coën’s eyes flashed with anger. “I didn’t want you to fall into a bad mood because of an offhanded mention of the Lettenhove border skirmish. You’ve read the fucking letters, brother. You know there was nothing critically important in there.”

Not to you, maybe. Julian wasn’t stupid enough to actually debate that point. Instead, he shoved his last spoonful of gruel into his mouth, and hopped down from the alcove. Pain shot up his ankles, but he was a witcher, he could deal. He stalked over to Coën, and arced his neck to glare properly into his eyes – a show of faux-intimidation that Julian was not going to let up on just because Coën was a head and a bit taller than him.

“So you were doing me a favour, brother? Is that it?”

“Yes,” Coën snapped. “For all you want Lettenhove far away from you, you’re never going to admit that it’s not going to happen, are you? That it lives here more than anywhere?”

Coën jabbed him in the chest, and Julian saw red.

“What, so you thought you’d skulk around behind my back just so that I don’t accidentally remember where I was born? Did you think I’d immediately hallucinate a grand conspiracy where Lettenhove was somehow deeply embroiled in witcher politics, and have a breakdown thinking that everyone was out to get me? Because you think that you’re so big and strong, and you need to protect poor, infirm little Julek, who can’t possibly handle the cruelties of real life, like mentions of a decades-old border skirmish, or people moving to Kerack?”

“To Redania,” Coën corrected.

“Not like I’d know,” Julian spat, “what with the Kaer Seren Secret Service taking such judicious care to hide such information from me!”

“Fine,” Coën retorted, equally cold. “Be like that. Because everything that isn’t directly appeasing you is an act of harm, and everything that is appeasing you, but not in the specific way you want it to, is harming you also, isn’t that right?”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”

“You are a child,” Coën spat. “You’re fifteen.”

Julian pressed a hand to his chest, mock-affronted. “Going on sixteen, and almost a full damn witcher, too. Melitele save me from a man five years my fucking senior, Coën!”

“Melitele save you from your own inability to ascertain the difference between being victimised and feeling sad, you insufferable, blue-blooded ponce.”

Jaskier grinned, all teeth. It was so rare for Coën to lose his composure like this.

“Already deciding you’re too good for us adolescents, oh mighty witcher Coën?”

Coën flinched a little at that. “No, Julek, I’m saying that you’ve got a wildly disproportionate response to a man forgetting a letter in a chest for a few years.”

“You weren’t to have hidden it at all.” Julian puffed himself up as much as he could.

“Well, you’ve seen it now.”

“That I have.”

“And,” Coën stressed, visibly glad for the situation to have diffused somewhat, “it’s not relevant. No matter what kind of politicking Elian de Varenthorne was up to, it’s spheres away from anything you need to concern yourself with. Witchers are neutral. We don’t ally ourselves.”

Julian snorted. “Make plenty of enemies, though, hey? Makes you wonder the wisdom of cutting yourself off from potential comrades.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Sure, brother,” Julian rolled his sholders back, stretched his arms. Still holding the gruel bowl.

“I understand why you’re upset that I hid the letter,” Coën allowed him. “Your reaction was disproportionate.”

“You’ll forgive me for calibrating my actions to my emotional state. I’ve heard it’s a character flaw in mortal men.”

“One of which you are not, any longer, according to some classifications.”

Julian span around, suddenly vehement. “Well, hang your politicised academic technicalities, Coën. Witchers die just like mortal men. Maybe even better. We’ve got monuments to how our kind drop like flies.”

Coën stared at him.

“You have all the tact of a roadside bandit, Julek,” he said, sounding far more put-out than angry, now.

Julian flipped him the bird as he walked away, not looking back.

That night, as the moon crept ever-higher into the sky, Julian took it upon himself to creep back to the little side-room that had been Julian-and-Coën’s room for nigh-on a decade, at this point. Coën was already fast asleep, on his cot across the room, as Julian made his way in.

Laden with the blankets he’d hauled back out of the empty dormitory, he made himself once again at home on the pallet he’d become accustomed to. The room was much the same – lived in, Julian’s belongings untouched, all the way he’d left them. It didn’t feel like coming home – it was like he’d never left. It was as easy as breathing to slot himself back into the space, like nothing had ever happened.

When he and Coën rose in the morning, all was much as it had ever been – letter or no letter. Water under the bridge. Coën ruffled his hair absent-mindedly as they left the room to break their fast. Julian was struck with the overpowering sense, in that moment, that everything was going to be alright.

Much like any semblance of joy that darkened the halls of Kaer Seren, it slipped away far too quickly, caught in the rays of sunlight that shone through the window – ephemeral and fleeting.

Ah, well. Julian shook himself out of his reverie, and hurried off down the corridor.

Chapter Text

Jaskier rose early, and took inventory of his saddle-bag’s contents. The clothes he’d worn to infiltrate Ferrant’s safe house, it transpired, were still stowed merrily underneath all his doublets and finery, and he’d spared a quick thanks to the uncharacteristic bout of forethought his younger self had demonstrated, before picking them and his most inoffensively chamomile-scented fine soap and taking himself to the banks of a nearby lake, to wash in. This close to the coast, the river ran through settlements rather than woodlands, making it inconvenient to bathe in. A shame. Jaskier preferred running water.

It felt good, he admitted to himself as he submerged his aching, sweaty body in the water, to bathe. He’d set his ruined green set of clothes he’d been sporting for the past gods-knew-how-long to burn with some finality, destroying more of the remaining evidence that tied Jaskier the Bard to Julian of Kovir, at least for now.

He let himself slide under the surface of the water, only emerging once he felt even his enhanced lungs begin to burn.

His hair, he realised, was terribly tangled and knotted. Not that he’d been much in the habit of maintaining it, under the glamour. Jaskier shrugged. He’d wash as much of the hair closest to his head, and cut it as short as he dared later. Maybe just past his shoulders, just to make sure he wasn’t sporting Jaskier’s preferred style. The worst of the matting was at the horrid, broken ends of his hair, anyways.

It wasn’t terribly clean to bathe in a natural lake, Jaskier knew, but nonetheless, he felt refreshed beyond measure as he rejoined the camp, with a far more diminished measuring of soap. He only hoped that a fine-smelling witcher would be put down to carrying herbs for potions, now – inasmuch as he cared. Scrubbing himself to within an inch of his life had been… necessary, he felt. A reset.

Geralt still slept, no doubt as a consequence of having taken the longest watch, but Coën was up, keen eyes on the sorcerer, and Ferrant was poking at a bowl of what seemed to be watery oats, hanging over the fire. Jaskier pressed down his first, baser instinct to sneer at him, and instead called out in what he hoped was a jovial manner.

“de Lettenhove.”

Ferrant swallowed whatever he was about to say, and settled on a far more neutral, “Julian. I see you mended your shirt.”

“I did. You reek to high heavens.”

“Thank you, I hadn’t noticed.”

Coën rolled his eyes. The mage – being, Jaskier realised, still slumped unconscious rather than just laid low by his wound – did not, though he expected Ivan might have, had he heard him.

“How’s your catching?” Jaskier asked, instead, eyes still trained on Ferrant.

“Much worse than I suspect your throwing to be.”

Good enough. Jaskier lobbed the still-wet bar of soap at him, and to his credit, Ferrant did manage a catch, only for it to slip neatly out of his fingers and into his lap.

“Soap,” the de Lettenhove muttered.

“You can take your pick of the finery in my bags, it’s not like I’ve got much use for any of it. But try for something understated.”

“Were it that I wanted to dress like a dandy, your warning may even have been merited,” Ferrant said, dryly, picking up the soap and plying it between his fingers. “Thank you, Julian. I… appreciate the offer.”

Coën chanced a glance at him, as Ferrant selected his garments and took his leave – a plain pair of mahogany breeches, Jaskier’s plainest white undershirt, and the most understated of the blue doublets, that matched Jaskier’s glamoured-cornflower eyes much better than Ferrant’s pale, watery ones. He’d look well-to-do, Jaskier mused, but not ignobly rich enough people would question why his clothes were slightly ill-fitting in a way that they wouldn’t be had they truly been tailored. Nicely played.

“That was a nice thing to offer,” he said, quietly, once Ferrant was out of earshot.

Jaskier shifted, uncomfortably. “I didn’t do it to earn good person brownie points with you, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

Or had he? No, no. He hadn’t wanted Ferrant stinking up the place. Hadn’t wanted their one chance at dealing subtly with humans to look like he was being tortured and used by a gang of rogue witchers.

Nothing to do with proving his niceness at all. He was still the same person. The same, selfish Jaskier. He was just being a pragmatist now that his glamour was gone.

“Even if you did,” Coën said, “I wouldn’t care. A good turn’s a good turn.”

Jaskier resisted the urge to chew his lip. “You’d rather be treated kindly but manipulatively, than bluntly and honestly?”

“Relatively speaking, I would rather know someone who is dishonestly kind,” Coën corrected, gently, “than dishonestly hurtful.”

Jaskier flinched.

“Point taken.”

“I’m not here to lecture you,” Coën said, mildly. “Other than to mention you might wish to stir the oats now that you’ve sent my cook away.”

“To practice better hygiene.”

“Which I appreciate,” Coën hastened to say, and there was about as much forthrightness in his tone as there always was. “But I’m busy keeping guard of our biggest liability, and I consider it unwise to split my attention.”

“Right,” Jaskier said, and took up de Lettenhove’s place stirring the pot. “Got the lecture out of your system yesterday, then?”

“I did. You’ll either learn from it, or you won’t.”

“Not interested in holding my hand anymore?”

This came out with perhaps a tad more bitterness than Jaskier had meant, as he poked at the oats with Coën’s well-stained wooden spoon.

“I consider any obligation I once had to my little brother well and thoroughly expired,” Coën said, steely. “Considering he made his opinion regarding such a thing abundantly clear to me.”

“Right,” Jaskier exhaled. “I suppose old habits just… die hard, then.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

Coën exhaled. “You’re my brother. Hearing that you were alive was… a gift, though I suppose not in the straightforward fashion I had hoped for.”

“If I really had been kidnapped and held against my will for fifty years,” Jaskier said, “I suppose that really would have been a twisted gift indeed.”

A cloud crossed Coën’s face. “You know, Julian, for all that I don’t like you very much at present, I hope you don’t think so lowly of me that you believe I’d prefer the happy memory of a dead brother to the wretched plotting of a living one.”

“No,” Jaskier said, honestly. It was him, he supposed, that would ultimately benefit if his absence had been outside of his own control, in any case – a complete victim of circumstance, to be fussed over and tended to and who held the power implicit in pending forgiveness in his own hands. Coën wasn’t wretched or holy enough to desire the spectre of his own guilt.

“Geralt is stirring. Let’s not speak of this,” Coën said, and Jaskier was struck with the realisation that this entire conversation had been for his benefit, even as Coën had struck it up himself. An olive branch, perhaps? An unwillingness to stomach silence? Or perhaps Jaskier had simply twisted the discussion to go his way, again.

No. No, Jaskier wasn’t some… sickness, that soured everything he touched. He had made a mistake, that was all. Several mistakes. It was nothing he couldn’t remedy.

Geralt woke like a witcher was wont to, sliding from unconsciousness through lethargy into alertness in all of three seconds. He sat quickly, and appraised the scene before him.

“Ferrant is bathing,” Coën called. “Ivan’s still out. Oats are almost done. Julian?”

“Oats are done,” Jaskier dutifully confirmed, and Geralt stretched, briefly, before making his way over to his own saddle-bag and retrieving some extraneous spoons.

“Oh, good thinking,” Coën said, mildly. “I was considering that we’d share.

Geralt’s presence was quiet as it always was, but something felt less… tense. Jaskier busied himself removing the pot from above the meagre little fire-pit and dousing the fire with a quick gesture – still second nature, after all those careful years going without.

He had to wonder, if the shift in atmosphere was more to do with Coën’s presence, and the easy friendship he’d struck up with the White Wolf, or perhaps Jaskier’s own conversation with Geralt the previous night.

“You eat first,” Geralt nudged Jaskier’s shoulder, roughly enough that he wasn’t being delicate but gently enough to qualify as some measure of kindness. “Escapees get first portions.”

He did.

Jaskier made sure to keep his portioning religiously fair – Ferrant took his sweet time in returning, but looked irritatingly well put-together for it. His hair had been neatly washed and re-braided – how he’d managed that without a comb, Jaskier didn’t know – and the clothes he’d borrowed hung awkwardly, on his lither frame, but not enough to be noticeable, which was better than Jaskier had frankly expected.

He’d shaved, too, but it was patchy, leading Jaskier to think-

“Did you do that with your falchion?”

Ferrant snorted. “No. What do you take me for? A knife, Julian.”

“Whose?”

“Mine,” Ferrant said, coolly. “Formerly his. I did get some things done on your fool’s retrieval quest.”

“I apologise for my implications,” Jaskier returned. “I was only curious.”

“You could stand to be a tad more savvy, witcher,” Ferrant said, and Jaskier dipped his head. He had just implicitly accused the man of thievery.

Well. Of thieving from him. The thievery itself was not the insult in the equation.

“Your turn to eat,” Jaskier offered the bowl, and Ferrant accepted it, graciously.

“I thought we’d consider business, before Ivan joins us,” he said, imperious. “Does anyone have any objection towards setting our course for the Viscountcy of Lettenhove?”

Jaskier stiffened, and so – imperceptibly – did his brother.

“Absolutely not,” he said, at the same time as Coën said, “I don’t think it would be wise.”

Ferrant’s thin lips pressed into a smile. “You don’t consider my gratitude genuine? I have resources there that I could requisition to your aid. As a token of my alleigance.”

“Flimsy alleigance,” Geralt pointed out. “You’ve thrown away lives casually enough before.”

Jaskier pointedly didn’t react to that.

“My men were well aware of the threat they faced,” Ferrant scowled. “The idea behind hiring a witcher was to bolster our security to prevent our annihilation. They died knowing that they might do so, and accepted that the risk in favour of the payment I offered them. I swear on my mother, if one more of you wyvern-wrestling mutants imply that my hiring employees was an immoral act again, I’m setting the sorcerer free to bring the Brotherhood down on all of us.”

“You hired them legitimately?” Geralt snorted, clearly disbelieving, and Ferrant huffed.

“Obviously. The payroll cost me an arm and a leg, too. Why do you think I was trying to pull a fast one on you?”

Jaskier barked a laugh at that, too. Ferrant was a consummate liar by trade, so it was a toss-up as to whether any of that was true, or just a calculated lie to further a specific impression of himself, but it had Coën of all people rolling his eyes with good-natured jealousy.

He didn’t try very hard not to feel jealous at that, to be frank. Coën exchanging one Pankratz for another? Already?

Actually, Jaskier frowned, he didn’t know if Ferrant was a Pankratz at all. Considering his relative youth, he was likely at least two generations removed from Jaskier himself – if not more. It was not out of the question that he was related to the Pankratz family by marriage.

“Eat your portion,” Jaskier said. “Coën and Geralt haven’t had any yet.”

Ferrant looked a little put out, at that, but acquiesced.

No sooner had he raised the spoon to his mouth, had Coën siezed the opportunity to take control of the conversation. Jaskier felt a tad nettled, at that – he’d meant the opening for himself, and it seemed that the slight obfuscation of intention (as was only polite) in the brief pause he’d allowed after his statement had cost him the opportunity. Still, it was no big issue. Even if the way Coën had glanced at Julian seemed… pointed.

Glanced at Jaskier. The way he’d glanced at Jaskier.

“I think,” Coën said, quickly enough to get the words out and yet slowly enough to still seem measured, “that it may be worth considering taking advantage of the young Lord de Lettenhove’s offer.”

“Absolutely not,” Jaskier snapped, glaring at Coën, who – to his minimal credit – at least had the decency to look uncomfortable.

“Think he’s untitled, actually,” Geralt put in, quietly.

“Listen,” Coën said, trying for ‘voice of reason’ and falling short, if only because his stance was so patently ridiculous. “It makes the most sense. Dragging the man to the Blue Mountains from Redania would be an expenditure of resources that we can’t justify after all it cost to get here, and no witcher’s safe-stash or bard’s apartment is going to meet our security needs.”

Jaskier’s nails pressed into his palms so harshly that he could feel the weakened keratin bend. He’d have to thank the weeks in the dungeon, for that. Not that anybody seemed to care what had happened to him, come to think of it. Perhaps, he thought wryly, he should cry.

“So you want to drag us out of the lair of one enemy and into the jaws of another?”

Ferrant waved the spoon lazily. “Do recall that you involved yourself in the Brotherhood’s squabbles, Julian of Kovir. I’d suspect that waltzing into an enemy’s lair is an everyday occurrence for you, if only because you make them so readily.”

Geralt was polite enough to turn his laugh, at that, into a cough. Jaskier magnanimously decided not to be irritated at him for it.

“Perhaps I’ve learnt from my mistakes,” Jaskier said, sweetly.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Ferrant returned. “Coën sees the merits of my argument. Lettenhove can hold a sorcerer with ease. Geralt?”

“I’m open to hearing an alternative.”

Sweet Melitele. Jaskier retracted every negative thing he’d ever said or thought about Geralt of Rivia, provided that this wasn’t a roundabout way to force him to admit he had nothing to offer in return.

As it stood, he worried at the inside of his lips.

“You don’t have any safehouses, de Lettenhove?”

Ferrant arched a brow. “None that pass muster. As I am sure you’re aware.”

Coën and Geralt both turned to affix him with a judgemental look at the same time. Jaskier helplessly looked around, but his eyes alighted only on the bound body of the sorcerer that rounded out their little circle.

“I understand you’re apprehensive about walking into an unknown man’s unknown stronghold, Julek,” Coën said, soothingly, instead of prying into the tidbit that Ferrant had let slip. Then again, they’d tracked him here. Perhaps they’d already known.

“Apprehensive is right.”

“But you’ve taken greater risks for lesser reasons.”

Jaskier could see the shape of this argument, now. “Is this how you want me to prove my sincerity as a changed man, Coën? I’d thought better of you.”

“I am asking,” Coën corrected gently, “for you to trust my judgement, Julian.”

Jaskier faltered. He didn’t know if the lapse in Coën’s nicknaming was meant as an appeal to him as an equal, or a reminder of what he abruptly stood to lose, but the weight of his stance stood with Jaskier. What use was a brother to Coën, who had deliberately misled him for fifty years and then had the audacity to mistrust him?

“If my brothers are in agreement, I capitulate,” he said, in his best impression of Ferrant, who quirked his lips in mild amusement.

“Lettenhove, then,” Geralt affirmed out loud. “Coën, eat before me. Gonna wake the sorcerer.”

“Right on,” Coën said, and then, in the general direction of both Geralt and Jul- Jaskier, “thank you.”

Ferrant huffed, and handed him the bowl.

Ivan woke fitfully, after both Coën and Geralt had taken their turn to eat. The campsite was all but packed up, and the bowl with its meagre remaining portion had been left out to await this.

“Pox upon all of you, bloede pest,” Ivan muttered, hoarsely. “I should have known you would be neck-deep in this mess, Butcher.”

“Maybe only knee-deep,” Geralt corrected, mild amusement tempered by the worry for their prisoner’s state. “Open to wading further, if needs must.”

“The Butcher of Blaviken has found a friend,” Ivan ground out, remaining eye darting to Coën. “Your brother tells me you winter with his lot.”

“By necessity,” Coën said, politely. “Kaer Seren has been little more than rubble for nigh on three-quarters of a century.”

“And yet there’s more of your lot running around than one might think,” Ivan retorted.

“I believe we are the interrogators here,” Coën retorted, colder than Jaskier had ever known him. “How is your health?”

“That’s your question?”

“It’s pertinent. I need to know if you’re going to survive the journey to Lettenhove, or if we need to take drastic measures.”

“Lettenhove?” Ivan blanched. “Leopold is growing… bold in his choice of allies.”

“You call it that,” Coën said, smiling – though there was an edge to it. “I call it extorting his family.”

Ivan coughed. “It is infected. I will not last.”

“Then we shall move quickly,” Ferrant interjected, in a tone that brooked no argument. You will be fed. Coën will examine your wound. And we will leave.”

Ivan smirked, far too self-satsified. “Taking orders, Griffin?”

Coën blinked, unfazed. “We’re collaborating on a long-term project to secure a mutually beneficial outcome.”

Ferrant – Jaskier only noticed because he was watching him – pressed his lips together at that. Not like a man who was upset, or stressed, or thinking, or irritated, either… his face was more akin to someone who was suppressing a smile. Jaskier would put it down to watching someone else run rings around Ivan, but… that wasn’t what Coën was doing, was it? It was almost like Ferrant was amused by what Coën was saying.

Jaskier frowned at him. Ferrant caught that, and smiled back – sunny, cocksure, and utterly frustrating, to boot.

“Whose horse are we putting the dead-weight on, Geralt?” Jaskier said aloud, instead, directing his question towards his least-strained relation among the group.

“Mine,” Coën said, quickly. “I’m the most proficient at Signs.”

Loudly spoken… for Ivan’s benefit, as a threat? Or to cut down any argument one might make against his claim to the sorcerer before it could begin? Ferrant might have wanted to take him, on the grounds that he had been the one to be held prisoner by him, to ensure he could peel off from them and abscond with the sorcerer… Jaskier himself might have leveraged a claim at the man on the same grouds. Geralt was ancillary to this mess – involved only because Jaskier himself had involved him, and Coën’s own involvement was a function of Geralt’s investigation.

On paper, one couldn’t have allotted it better.

Jaskier would leave it be. He trusted Coën, even if Coën distrusted him as he did Ferrant… perhaps even moreso, considering the recency of Jaskier’s percieved betrayal.

Ivan ate, and the packing away was finalised not long thereafter. The sun had climbed higher in the sky than was opportune, but it was not yet mid-morning by the time they’d started to move.

Ferrant, much to Jaskier’s chagrin, had been assigned to ride with Jaskier. Coën had offered a half-hearted excuse about Geralt’s armour making it more difficult for Roach to bear the load of a second rider, but Ferrant had not been above sniping at Jaskier about it, regardless - forgive your brother if he doesn’t feel confident that you won’t disappear the next moment you’re left unsupervised.

One of these days, Jaskier was going to strangle him. The Pankratz bloodline could certainly use the thinning… if Ferrant truly was a Pankratz, which Jaskier was beginning to doubt. His conspicuous use of the appellation de Lettenhove in place of an actual surname implied that whatever it was, it wouldn’t immediately identify him as belonging to the Viscount de Lettenhove’s unfortunately extended brood.

Jaskier snorted. It would be just like a man descended through a maternal line to resort to the kind of petty trickery that Ferrant seemed to consider his bread and butter.

The ride through the ever-thickening forest, as they peeled off of the beaten trail, was quick to turn monotonous. Jaskier, by necessity, took the front, with Ferrant’s surety of the easiest route to Lettenhove combined with his own witcher-senses and apparent need to be held to accountability making it the most rational choice. Coën and his irritating prisoner took the middle, with Geralt bringing up the rear, both the most able to turn in his saddle and deal with an attack from behind and the one most suited to keeping a quiet eye on the procession in front of him to ensure nothing was deviating from the plan.

For his own part, Jaskier had not taken the risk of chancing too many glances backwards. Ivan, he knew, was still tightly bound in Dimeritium, and reeking to high heaven of every non-lethal disinfecting salve Coën and Geralt had deemed both safe and appropriate to spend on him. He was clearly not in as bad a state as he had intimated that morning, considering he’d had the wherewithal to smile toothily and lazily wave at Jaskier whenever he’d caught him looking.

Belatedly, he realised, the sorcerer must have put together that whatever Jaskier’s connection to Leopold Erwin Pankratz was, it wasn’t common knowledge. They really should have killed him for that, just in case-

Jaskier’s blood ran cold, and at Ferrant’s low, alert hum, he knew he’d made the mistake of letting it show.

He had, quite explicitly, claimed to have been a year-mate of Coën of Poviss when he’d graduated from Kaer Seren. In front of Ferrant, no less… who had demonstrated a knowledge of Coën’s existence already, nevermind the almost teeth-grindingly amiable camaraderie they’d demonstrated back at the camp, even knowing what Coën did about the de Lettenhove line.

Julian had not had the foresight to distance himself-as-a-witcher from himself-as-a-scorned-noble-scion the way he had himself-as-a-bard. He hadn’t thought he’d needed to – Julian of Kovir was already such a nobody, and a nobody whose skin Jaskier had not been intending to wear for long. Just another witcher, lost to the path – it was as Jaskier that he’d borne the brunt of trying to separate his two identities.

If Ferrant had not already guessed who Julian was – and that was doubtful, considering that their births had been separated by sixty-four years precisely, if Jaskier had been correct in both intuiting Ferrant’s own age, and keeping track of his own. However, if Ferrant and Ivan both provided their accounts to the Viscount de Lettenhove...

It was fine. It was fine. Jaskier could poison the sorcerer and plant the implication that either the severity of his wound was greater than expected, or that Coën and Geralt had been remiss in their handling of his potions and accidentally exposed him to a witcher toxin.

(They would smell it. They would realise. Coën would piece together his motives in two seconds flat. Fooling a witcher was nothing like running rings around a hapless academic who had no reason to suspect the magnitude of his ruse in the first place. It had all fallen apart so quickly. They would know. They would know what a petty murderer Julian Alfred Pankratz had grown up to be. They would all know.)

He could… he didn’t know what he could do.

He could kill his father. If no one else, the man who’d sold his firstborn to a witcher undoubtedly had it coming.

Or, he could disappear. Find a sorcerer who’d made an enemy of the Brotherhood – he doubted that there were none – and craft another glamour, and disappear entirely. He’d have to change his face, but like this… Jaskier grimaced at the careless scars that pockmarked his usually carefully-groomed face.

He wouldn’t miss that.

He gripped his horse’s reins far more tightly.

They stuck to the edges of the forest – staying off of the beaten path enough that they would not meet many legitimate travellers, but not so far as to lengthen the journey unnecessarily. Lettenhove was nestled on the coast; really, a boat would have been the quickest way to get back, but heavens forbid they succumbed to the perusal of convenience over the negative optics three witchers, a nobleman, and a prisoner would bring.

Coën had mentioned that he’d expect the journey to take a leisurely four days by horse considering the added passengers; perhaps only three when he considered that both Roach and his own horse (Jaskier was yet to be introduced) were well-bred and fit enough to serve as witcher’s mounts, and Bollocks… Locks. Jaskier was going with Locks – was no slouch, either.

By the third day, Ivan had well and truly proven he was full of shit when he’d implied that he was on death’s door, and the awkward air that had settled over the group had not yet dissipated. According to Ferrant, they’d made good heading; Lettenhove’s border was only a five-hour ride from their final campsite.

And, he’d added with a smirk, they weren’t even under garrison at this moment. The territory was tentatively Redanian, for the moment – which benefitted them, because Kerack and Redania both were known to make trouble with border crossings in the area. Anything to make Ferrant de Lettenhove’s life easier, Jaskier supposed – though not having to explain who he was and why he wanted to cross a border with a posse and a blatantly injured prisoner was, he supposed, a boon.

Apparently, Jaskier’s father was no slouch with patrols, either. The first patrol they bumped into wearing the Lettenhove crest were in the thinning patch of woods they were riding through – an older swordsman, grizzled and muscular, and a lithe, twenty-something spearman.

“Halt! State your business!”

The older swordsman was the one to speak, hand on his weapon, and Ferrant sighed so quietly that even Jaskier would not have caught it, had the man not been sitting pressed against his back.

“My business is the Viscount’s business, thank you, Roland,” Ferrant drawled.

The swordsman’s – Roland’s eyes widened. “Ferrant?”

“We’re on first name terms, now?”

“Cor, boy. We’d heard you were dead. Finally got caught up in trouble you couldn’t worm your way out of. Got yourself a new entourage?”

“Quite,” Ferrant sniffed. “Witchers amongst them, and I’m sure they can start menacing you appropriately if you don’t hold your tongue and learn respect.”

Roland rolled his eyes, good-naturedly. “I’m impressed you’re back alive, boy. Me and the lads were taking bets on whether you’d last, weren’t we, Archie?”

He nudged the spearman, who mumbled something unintelligible.

“Maybe I’ll ask you to accompany me, next time,” Ferrant drawled.

“Go right on ahead, my Lord. Sirs.”

Roland stepped out of the way, gesturing, and Jaskier smiled his sunniest smile at the man. He could only hope it didn’t come off as menacing with his unglamoured face; anyone who took Ferrant de Lettenhove down a much-needed peg or two was good in his book.

They moved past swiftly, Ferrant waving off three more perimeter patrols before coming up to the outer wall of Castle Lettenhove. Jaskier had to admit that the Viscount was nothing if not thorough in his security… then again, the border skirmishes between Kerack and Redania were common knowledge. Perhaps it was only wise.

Ferrant’s quick conversation, shouted between the guardsman at the gate and seemingly, the rest of the garrison, was barely audible over the pounding of witcher-slow blood in Jaskier’s ears. He only knew to start moving because Ferrant nudged him, and even so, he hardly knew what he was doing. His hands moved only by muscle memory, and he would have been reliant on Ferrant’s signal to stop moving if he wasn’t so intimately familiar with the scene rising up before him.

Castle Lettenhove loomed over him, and Julian didn’t know who it was, exactly, that was looking up at it.