Chapter Text
News of Cintra’s fall reaches him in early autumn.
The urging of that fickle mistress restlessness had long since brought Jaskiers feet to rest on more rustic soil than he ever before would have dared so close to the seasons first snow: he’s in Brugge, and further from the coast than he’d like, as the inland woods give him shivers with their pools of stagnant shadow.
He’d scorned himself for recklessness, when he first left the keep in Vidort, with its high walls and fire-warmed stone. It didn’t help him to turn around and go back or be any less of a fool than he was, but for old times sake, he’d done it.
Now more than ever he considered the strange turnings of fortune as he listened to the town crier detail the path of the Nilfgaardian troops northwards from Nazair, the bloody siege of Cintra, and the suicide of the Queen.
They’d all known of Nilfgaard’s movements. It was just another one of those things. Nobody thinks the plague will land on their house until it does.
So, he was fucked, desperately fucked. Not even in a special way or fun way, no. There was no whimsical curse, or noble misunderstood hero. Just the vast, all consuming wave of violence that threatens every man, woman and child with a pulse and something to beg for.
War.
Where are fate's hands in a civilian death ? he thought, completely hysterical, as he packed his meager belongings into a waxed canvas bag. It seemed everyone thought they had gathered a lot of maturity until war came calling and you realized how you were completely fucking alone.
Once he was walking he gathered back some sense.
The trees were turning the majority of red and yellow, taking the dry august and making dust of any old green still holding on. The main roads were flooded with soon to be refugees, rocking carts and silent children, oxen and goats and chickens all somehow cowed by the black shadow of death hanging over everything. Even those fleeing early, a hopeful act, had no expectations of survival.
Some people weren’t leaving, which was how it always was. Either they couldn’t or they wouldn’t and in the end it made no difference, which Jaskier didn’t think about, and he didn’t think about it so hard that the song he'd been noodling about Elenor and her hair of barley was now almost 15 minutes long. In that amount of time she both gained a husband and lost him to the bloody vagaries of war.
So it went. After two days traveling with the caravan from his part of Brugge, Jaskier split off, heading east skirting Sodden, following the Ina, a dangerous and stupid thing to do alone. He passed through Armeria on the banks, slept the night in a real bed and shared news and a bit of playing, exhausted as he was. People expected big bad news from a courier type and this time they really got it, so pay was so-so. Unable to pay it much attention, he left after resting one full day.
There was a black inkling of a notion hiding behind his brain, invisible to him, which warded him towards some things and away from others. When he got into something like this, the best thing to do was listen, and the only way to listen was to shut it all off and very carefully pay it absolutely no attention. When he tried, invariably, he tried too hard. The key was to never try at all.
For a long time, or maybe an inexorably short one, he goes alone. Long enough that the ground grows hard with frost. Long enough that the trees lose their august foliage. Long enough that his breathing grows thin with every gale force wind of pure winter, the pure winter he faces head on and trudges straight into, against all facets of common sense.
It’s like this that he finds Geralt within a mile of the Pontar.
_
“You fucking bastard,” is the first thing he says, not sure even as the words leave his mouth if he means Geralt or himself. “Oh, my language,” is the second, because peeking from behind the Witcher’s comically large form is… a child. A girl, if her hair and clothing is to be believed. Her ashen hair.
Jaskier stares.
He looks at the girl. Then he looks at Geralt, whose face doesn’t matter, who cares what his face is doing, except it does and Jaskier cares and it’s so awfully open . Eyes like a raw wound. Please , he thinks, put that away.
He looks at the girl again, who looks right back with a bit of fear and a lot of disdainful nose wrinkling and that pale, pale hair.
She looks just like her mother.
“Oh, Geralt,” he murmurs. It might’ve been true that his pace had gotten ahead of itself. He hasn’t slept in two days.
Jaskier sinks to the ground, covers his face in his hands, and starts laughing. He’s been alone a long time. Two months, maybe. It’s a good laugh. Hearty. When he’s done with that he rubs his cheeks and eyes vigorously and very firmly decides not to cry. Hands still over his face, he says,
“I’m waiting.”
There’s an emphasis on waiting.
He’s earned, he thinks, the right to be petulant.
There’s a lengthy pause, and then “...For what?” Bless him, he actually sounds confused.
Jaskier takes his hands off his eyes and blinks up at him.
“My apology,” he says primly. “I’m afraid that’s going to have to come first.”
An even longer pause.
Very consternated, Geralt says “Jaskier,” and Jaskier all but shouts “I can sit here all day!”
He’s very embarrassed to be doing this in front of a little girl who is definitely old enough to decide he is insane, but some things can’t be helped. “Just watch me! I’m crazy now, you’ve ruined me and now I’m crazy like you and all your friends and you’re just going to have to say it.”
Perhaps it's a poor move, shouting at a man who, last seen, accused him of being the sole shoveler of shit upon his wretched life. There’s really no reason for Geralt to stand here and make his child watch a full grown adult break down on the forest floor, or really any reason for him to stay and deal with Jaskier at all.
But Jaskier knows he can’t stand seeing people cry. It’s actually incredible. Big hulking thing of a man and he just gives up the second anyone pulls out the water works. Jaskier’s
just never quite had the guts to use it to his advantage before.
It’s freeing.
“Oh, for the love of-“ The forest floor rustles as Geralt walks to him on the ground, and it looks like Jaskier wasn’t firm enough with himself because he’s really crying now.
Geralt puts a hand on his shoulder and brings himself to his knees beside him. Jaskier gulps in a big breath of air and clutches at the impermanent ground of scattered leaves. I thought you were dead , he’s saying between breaths. I was going to die. I was going to die in a crowd of people who didn’t know my name. I was going to die after you .
Geralt wraps his arms around his shoulders and clutches him like he’s the only thing keeping Jaskier from clawing his own eyes out and says, over and over again, I’m sorry.
_
There’s a moment of reflection while being cradled in those… absurdly deft arms, where Jaskier really considers how lucky he is to be surrounded by emotionally demented freaks his whole life.
You know, he’s got it pretty good.
_
So, now the princess of Cintra knows he’s not cool.
This was probably unavoidable, but first impressions can lead you to discard hard evidence of character traits for a long long time. Usually Jaskier relies on this in order to keep his friends. Now he’s got nothing.
As a kind of bribe, he’s offered to let her play the lute. This is actually suitable for her, probably because Jaskier spent at least twenty minutes bemoaning it’s absolutely precious nature and how now that Geralt, that oaf, is around again, it’ll probably see it’s third scratch in two decades. What would Filandrel the Golden Hair’d, Prince of Elves, messiah of his people, Gifter of Lutes, say to him if he knew? She’s endearingly stumbling her way through a set of scales, brow stony as if it were a matter of life and death, when he feels Geralt's look on him again.
There's a fire between them and it still gets hotter.
“You’re taking her to the witcher fortress,” he says into the thickness. Geralt nods. Jaskier dips his head up and down a few times, shuffling away his flint and steel for no reason except to not look up. “Well,” he says, “It’s not too out of the way. I may as well walk you awhile.”
No more sounds from either of them but Cirilla's hesitant plucking. There's no refusal, no It's too dangerous, no furrowed irritation. Geralt gives him a small nod, and they go back to not speaking.
That night the three of them go to sleep without food, distant from each other like solitary stars.
_
“Red looks terrible on you.”
Jaskier choked on his mouthful of bread.
With shaky hands, he put the heel back on its plate, chuckling a bit. “I suppose I should take warning rather than offense. What in hell are you doing here, Aoife?”
The Queen's captain was jammed, beleaguered by armor as she was, in the slim opening of the oaken carved door that bore the servants exit from the Libraries. She had a jaunty grin that spelled lots of trouble for Jaskier, as when she was feeling jaunty she was most delighted in making him very embarrassed.
He felt a ping of dull excitement at her appearance. It was quickly washed over with a retroactive wave of guilt. Closing his current book, he stacked it atop the others with his gaze averted. The scholar's smock he wore dragged its pontiferous sleeves and sent dust flying everywhere as he dragged the tomes from one end of the table to the other.
Having freed herself from the door, Aoife clanged her armor clad arse onto some terrible hard backed chair and sighed expansively, hair tittering like wind chimes in the gust. “Well, I ran out of children to murder. Got bored. Wanted to see if you’d let me beat you at wrestling three times in a row again.”
Grabblenach casts her an arch glance for that, a book so large over his tiny bony knees it could probably kill him just from tilting the wrong way. Aoife just slumped even more severely and gave Grabble a saucy wink. Jaskier laughed at her helplessly, heart leaping.
Clearing his throat, he said “I’m afraid I haven't time to lose to you today. I’m busy.” he punctuated that statement by letting four tons of book slam open right in the middle, which in turn let loose a cloud of dust so prolific it made Aoife sputter and choke. Jaskier pretended he wasn't holding his breath.
Coughing, Aoife leaned forward and said “busy? What could possibly be more important than wrestling?” Her posh accent making this line of enquiry particularly prattish. Jaskier glanced at Grabblenach, but the old imp was busy chewing hemp stems and spitting them out into buckets already filled with pasty fibers, ready to be spread on screens by the pixies that hover just to either side, eagerly awaiting more gunk.
“Research,” he said, eyes still on the paper pixies. Let Aoife think he’s flirting. It won’t hurt.
“Research?” she replied, aghast. “Sounds terribly dangerous. And I can’t possibly tempt you away?”
“Afraid not,” Jaskier told her, meeting eyes again at last. She looked back at him, all molten curiosity. A jolt of regret goes up his belly. He tilts up his chin. “This stuff is classified.”
_
The three of them were moving again before dawn. The girl rode, half asleep, while they both walked alongside her. Together they’d spent a sunless half hour trying to make her rouse, to the point where she nearly cried tears of frustration, which had flustered Geralt and made him rough with her, at which point Jaskier had furiously whispered you’re too hard on her and lifted her from the armpits onto Roaches saddle, deadweight.
It was an utterly grey morning. The air was so heavy with mist that the sound of their footsteps didn’t make it to their own ears. The wetness had seeped into their clothes and packs and, it seemed, their very bones. Jaskier felt heavy, sedentary. It was a sweet feeling, entangled with his soreness, a reminder that he was alive enough to be tired on such a wild morning. Some weren’t. Many, even.
Geralt held Roaches' reins in his left fist, his shoulders curved by some invisible force. He was an angular shadow in the pre-dawn light. When Jaskier looked over, the low familiarity of him made his chest ache, a deep and unrelenting cut. He pictured the wound as though a part of the earth beneath his feet. Then he pictured himself walking over it.
As the sun burned its first weak and tender rays through the wet dark, Jaskier began to sing.
“On the way to your brother's house, in the valley deep
by the river bridge a cradle floating beside me
In the whitest water on the bank against the stone
you will lift his body from the shore and bring him home.”
“Oliver James, washed in the rain, no longer…”
_
The Libraries were empty as Jaskier opened the very last tome. Inside, in a meticulously illuminated script, it said The Epic of Niamh the Golden. When Jaskier read the title, he nearly leapt from his seat. Underneath, it read:
One of the few mortal men to be invited to Tir Na Lia was Oisin, son of Finn, chief of the legendary Temerian warriors of Aen Seidhe. The Temians were out hunting one day when a lady of great beauty approached them. She was Niamh of the Golden Hair, daughter of Manannan and Queen of the Higher Court of Aen Elle. From amongst the Temians she chose Oisin to be her lover. She bade him mount up behind her on her faerie steed and they rode over the land to the sea and then across the tops of the waves to the enchanted land or Tir Na Lia, the most delightful county to be found of greatest repute under the sun. They saw wondrous sights as they journeyed. Faerie palaces appeared on the surface of the sea. At one of these Niamh asked Oisin to set free a Tuathe de Danan woman who was a prisoner of Fomor, one of the Demons of the deep sea. Oisin fought the Fomor and set the lady free. They ferried her back to Aen Elle where she was knighted as leader of the Wild Hunt.
Soon they reached the Land of the Young and Oisin remained there with his love for three hundred years. Together they ruled Tir Na Lia with iron fist over iron fist. Under Oisin’s rule, the Siege of Tylwyth Teg decimated the Human-Unicorn alliance and assured Faerie Sovereignty of the Aen Elle for years to come.
Jaskiers hands shook on the page.
After 300 years had passed, Oisin suddenly remembered his home and the Temians and had a yearning to see them again. He asked leave to visit his homeland. Niamh furnished him with a faerie steed, but warned Oisin at all costs not to let his feet touch earthly soil. Oisin gave his word to take care and swiftly reached Temeria. However he found all had changed from the land he remembered. Finn and the Temians had become a legend of the past. The new Church had converted the land. Even the men seemed different, smaller, compared to the men he remembered. Oisin noticed three of them trying vainly to lift a great stone. He stooped to lift it for them with one hand but as he did so his golden saddle-girth snapped and he fell to the ground. Immediately the Faerie horse vanished and Oisin was left trapped in Aen Seidhe for the rest of his days.
_
They cross the Pontar at Flotsam (terrible name) into Redania mostly still all in one piece.
The map in his mind points at him and says okay, this is it, this is where you head west and go home. As they move through the too-cool midday Jaskier runs it over and over in his head, counts his provisions without looking at them, stares at Geralt’s precious back and says it over and over and over again. Time to go. Time to go. TIme to go.
That night he dreams so violently of fire that he wakes Cirilla with his screaming. Gasping for air, he holds a hand out to Geralt who has startled into a fully upright defensive stance, and the burning barely leaves him.
It's an omen if he ever gets one.
So, he does what he does best. Let the inexorable tide carry him to where he is to go.
In the morning after the dream they ride for a few hours but begin to slow early in the day, Cirilla complaining of stomach pain. They make camp just as the dark is beginning to settle, far too early in the day. Their slow creep northwards only spurs the winter season and there is a bitter chill.
Geralt sets up the tent, silent, and Jaskier takes it upon himself to pause in his ever present monologue and inform him that he’s taking Cirilla with him to find kindling. Jaskier watches his shoulders stop, acknowledging that he’s heard him, but there’s nothing else. He doesn’t even get a grunt.
The dusk of the day has darkened the already grey woods into a muted, dreamlike twilight. Cirilla keeps pace beside him, picking up twigs as she goes, fists clenching and unclenching, discomfort radiant as a beam of light.
Jaskier sighs, looks behind them: Geralt is still in sight, and in shouting distance. He plops to the ground. Cirilla stops.
Face empty and carefully still, she looks at him. Again Jaskier realizes how damn small she is. How young. Gods, did he ever look like that? Did people really see a kid this small and then do what they did to him anyway? Who fucking does that?
“Sit with me,” he says, well aware that if she has any sense then he’s being weird as hell. Sense or no, she sits without too much hesitation.
“Okay,” he says, fairly relieved. The air is noticeably lighter, away from the strange tension he and Geralt are carrying. “Okay.” Really lighter, oh wow. He drops his head and rubs his temples.
“Let’s just take a deep breath for a moment,” he says to his lap. “Just really fill our lungs. Shoulders down, too.” Taking his own advice as he is talking mostly to himself, he peers up into the canopy, letting the air settle inside him, gusting out all the cacophonous sound that doesn’t get said.
Cirilla, the little marvel, must be well and truly trained up by her various private music tutors, because she just sullenly drops all the tension out of her little body with a sigh that could knock over a small bird.
“Good,” Jaskier says, “Very good.” Using the fortification gathered from this little exercise, he begins. “Alright. Now I’m going to ask a gross hygienic question. Is that okay?”
Cirilla nods, sour face suggesting she’s far too old for such coddling. Teenager. Regardless, he lowers his voice and tries his best not to make either of them look a fool.
“Have you had a monthly bleed yet?” He asks. She hesitates, then nods.
“Are you having it now?” More hesitation, this time embarrassed, and then a nod again.
“Okay, okay, that’s fine, normal for your age. Do you… know what you need?”
Cirilla wrinkles her nose. “Clean rags, boiled in water. I… took some from Roaches saddle bags, they're the ones Geralt uses for bandages.” She looks off to the left as she says this, clearly un-torn, but aware that maybe she should be. Jaskier laughs.
“No, that’s excellent. You should come to me if you need anything. The most important thing is cleanliness. Nothing is too embarrassing, all right? Even if it’s just for pain. I have things for that.”
Cirilla wrinkles her nose. “Why?”
Jaskier laughs at her and glances back to where Geralt is, counting out potions. “Well. Lets just say there's lots more than the indecent to be learned in the company of women. But, ah, tit for tat…” he sighs.
“Have you heard the ballad of Aenadon, my dear?” Slowly, Cirilla nods. Of course she’s heard it. It’s a massive classic, everyone’s heard it.
Jaskier thinks, passingly, on what he’s about to disclose to this child he really doesn’t know. He finds himself a bit surprised to realize how little he cares. He’s always known a child’s safety comes far beyond any adult's comfort. Even if it’s just hygienic safety. Even if it means that kid can’t keep their damn mouth shut. And anyways, Cirilla deserves to know she has a contender.
“You remember, in the fourth verse of the ballad, when the King removes Aenadons helm?”
Cirilla looks blank for a few moments more before gasping lightly. In an accusing tone, she says “But- You can’t be a woman!” and Jaskier chuckles, cutting her off before she can get much louder. He rubs his stubble self consciously. “And I’m not. But when I was born, it was a different story. And although I am now myself, and wouldn’t take any of it back, I know… well. Quite a bit more than Geralt, if nothing else.”
“So…” Cirilla says. “You aren’t a woman?”
Jaskier laughs, sweating a bit. She’s just a kid, he tells himself. “No. Not really.”
“But you have-”
“Yes! um, yes. Rather impolite line of questioning. But yes.”
Far from the relief he imagined, Cirilla now appears more tense, and in fact, more present. “You and Geralt aren’t sleeping together, are you?” She asks, acerbic. Jaskier startles.
What? “What? No! No, why on-“
“Is Geralt sleeping with Yennefer?”
Melitele’s left tit, she is Calanthe’s grandchild.
“Um… I can’t really…Yennefer? Well,” He coughs. “Not anymore?”
Cirilla makes a truly disgusted ugh noise and crosses her arms. “He won’t tell me anything about her. He said she’s a sorceress, and then I asked when we were going to see her, and then he stopped talking about it at all.”
Oh, Geralt, he thinks. “Yes, he would.”
Cirilla looks up at him with those huge, adorable, unnerving eyes.
Sighing expansively, Jaskier begins to pull himself up. “Well, for what it’s worth, I think Yennefer would love to meet you.”
Cirilla perks up at that, scrambling to her feet after him. “You know her?”
Jaskier chuckles, absentmindedly palming his chest, where a locket lay body-warm under his layers. “Yes, I suppose I do. Don’t tell Geralt, though. We want to scare him.”
By the time the two of them were back with kindling, it was completely dark, and Geralt made Jaskier look everywhere for his flint and steel even though he had night vision, I know you have night vision Geralt, you can’t lie to me.
They fall asleep, warm if not well fed, and closer than last night if not as close as they could be. So far, so good.
_
Jaskier discovered the next morning that Cirilla had at some point become virtually irremovable from his side.
She came with him to the stream when he went to collect water to boil, which was whatever. She had business to do. Normal. A bit of how much she chattered surprised him, but pleasantly, as she was a wickedly smart little girl and a kind person regardless so plenty nice to talk back and forth with. Certainly she was smart enough to run him right out of the room some day, and Melitele bless him if he didn’t help her get there.
Although she was past the age of asking incessant and belligerent questions, it seemed she’d just either come up the cusp or just gathered enough courage to enter into that magnificent stage of just being absolutely ready to share everything you knew about everything you knew. With random violent prejudice against being corrected.
Geralt watched this with what he was sure was a deeply tired eye. Jaskier wasn’t good enough not to take some sadistic pleasure from that.
That night, after Geralt checked his traps and was working through a few conies, Jaskier rubbed his hands close to the fire and looked around them at the state of the trees. “We’re close to Hollantide, now,” he said absently. A thought occurred to him. “Oh, Cirilla,” ignoring her grumbled Ciri, “I’ll need to find you some rowan berries… We're far north enough, I'm sure. And maybe something with cast iron, aside your silver, do you have silver? Anything, even a coin?” She nodded, looking solemn. “Good. That’s important. And it’s best you start wearing something inside out. Your underclothes, most likely, that’s what I do around this time of year…” He went on like this, checking off lists inside his head. Geralt and Cirilla looked at eachother, Ciri with confusion, Geralt with a wry amusement. “Jaskier is prone to old wives tales,” he told her in a low register. “There are charms said to keep the fair folk away. You’ve probably never heard of it because you’re from so far south, but around here, they believe in it. They say they come out of their barrows at Samhain and Lughnasadh to ferry children away to the underworld. A load of superstition and leftover bad feelings for elves, if you ask me.”
“Nobody did,” Jaskier interjected with a carefully calculated lack of heat in mind of Ciri’s presence.
“Don’t listen to him, dear,” he told her. “Witcher’s think they know everything and it rots their brain. That’s why you should be like me and know very little, so you always have room for more.”
“More old wives tales?”
“Shut up.”
_
Geralt was cleaning Roaches feet while Jaskier distracted her by taking off her tack and smoothly avoiding her teeth when it occurred to him to ask. The time between the occurrence and when he actually gathered the nerve to look at Geralt and say something to him was a bit of a lag, but who could blame him, Roaches feet were a truly thankless fucking task. Even Geralt couldn’t be discredited if his replies were somewhat muddled by the stagnant fury of dealing with her legs.
Once he’d finally nutted up, he gave a glance to Ciri, but she was steadfastly stumbling through setting up her tarp and he doubted she’d be done anytime soon, or really at all. She needed help. Regardless, he looked at Geralt. “Are we really going to the Witcher hold?”
Geralt looked at him, plain shock on his face, which on him looked mostly like alarmed irritation. Roach took that opportunity to yank her foot out of his hand and take a snap at Jaskiers fingers on her girth. He pulled away without breaking his gaze from Geralt, feeling similarly alarmed by the full weight of those eyes on him. There was a moment where he opened his mouth, thinking like he ought to dissemble, but just as quick Geralt was looking away and picking up Roaches hoof again, movements jerky and so unlike him. It hadn’t passed Jaskiers notice that he’d been badly injured, and recently. Sometimes the only way you could tell he really brushed death was the way he moved not right after, but in the following weeks: like someone had shaken up his internal metronome and he couldn’t find the beat.
Jaskier went back to Roaches girth and undid the fastening, catching the saddle as it slid toward him. It was heavy as shit, like always, and while he huffed it to the ground, Geralt said “It’s called Kaer Morhen,” in a voice loud enough that Ciri stopped her frustrated efforts and looked over at him to listen. Jaskier laid the saddle and bags to rest on the ground and placed his hand on Roach’s hot flank.
“It’s in the Blue Mountains. I went to school there. My sword master, Vesemir, Eskel, who I trained with, and Lambert, who I didn’t really, they’ll all be there to winter. They usually are.”
Jaskier knew of Vesemir, but nothing more than a name and a couple of too-apt assumptions, if Geralt's reactions to his prodding had any merit. Eskel and Lambert he’d heard mentioned before too, other witcher’s, some of the only ones left.
“There’s a school,” he said, chest filling up with some strange-creature feeling.
“Not a school anymore,” Geralt said, and then moved to Roach’s back feet, and that was the end of it.
_
They’d been following Kaedwen’s side of the Pontar for a fortnight before they were actually forced to be alone with each other.
In an incredible feat of cravenness, Jaskier had managed up till now to keep Geralt's Child Surprise wedged firmly between them as the world's most traumatized conversational crutch. Obviously, it wasn’t fair to make her shoulder the burden of that particular unhappiness. But, again, Jaskier was a coward and a dick, when he wanted to be.
They were stopped in Ban Gleán for the night, and shit hole that it was, it was isolated and relatively untouched by the influx of the refugee crisis.
Cirilla had just gone off for a bath, sorely needed.
“Go ahead,” Geralt said as she wandered past hearing range.
“Hm?” Jaskier replied, not looking at him. He was working on whittling a small… creature, out of wood. Geralt, taken off guard at his indifference, just sat like a log for a good gratifying moment.
“Tear me a new one,” he said eventually, making an abortive gesture. “Cuss me out. Call me names.”
Jaskier made sure to really relish his obvious discomfort, picking out a nick in the wood to be the nose. “Whatever. It’s all within your rights.”
Giving a snort, he flipped the wood over and tried to look like he was deciding what detail to put in next and not like he was trying to burn a hole into it out of sheer fury. Of course he gets to pick whether Jaskier can be angry, whether- Melitele, but he sounds like Yennefer. He sighs.
Geralt sounded so tired that what usually would be the scrumptious thought of doing any of that at all was instead just bleak and depressing, like kicking a dead dog.
Didn’t mean he wouldn’t do it, though.
“Alright,” He said, putting the little piece of wood down to the audible sound of Geralt bracing himself. “You’re a gormless festering worm and I hate your stupid guts.”
Geralt released a long, tired breath, like a sad deflated laugh. Jaskier wasn’t done. “You’re a fucking dick. You’re an asshole. And no,” he said, stopping Geralt as he had opened his mouth, “You don’t get to say I know , because you really don’t.” There's a lot he has to bite back, there, because it’s not something he ever wanted to say in anger, and anyways is nearly impossible to communicate to another human person let alone this one. “And you know the worst part, Geralt? I just- I just can’t hold up the anger,” he said, looking to his friend at last. “I can’t fucking be angry at you becuase I’m so tired.”
Silence.
He laughed in a way that really sucked. “Most of the time when I think about it- thought about it- you- I just felt dead. In that area.” He picked his awful little chunk of wood back up, thoroughly upset in a way that didn’t feel like it would ever come out of him.
Then he took a deep breath and said “but it’s been so long. I missed you- I always miss you.” When he inhaled it was ragged. “Don’t go thinking this is easy for me to say, because it's not. I- Just because I can’t make myself an impenetrable fortress doesn’t mean I’m not vulnerable when I’m vulnerable.”
Jaskier looked at Geralt while Geralt looked at him, feeling his eyes burn with- something. Geralt looked stricken. “If I’m going to stay,” Jaskier said, “I need you to tell me you want me here.”
Basically immediately he regretted saying it. It was what he meant, maybe, but not what he needed Geralt to hear. And anyways he didn’t think… maybe there was something wrong with him, but getting what he wanted because he’d asked for it did not really sit well with him here.
Brow twisted, in displeasure or anger; Geralt looked at the ground between them. “It’s not that I- Hm,” he started, turning his jaw further away. In the faint light his face still had a devastated quality, further twisted by his grasping for words. “It’s not about. What I want. I- first of all,” he started over, actually holding up a finger at him. “I shouldn’t have said those things to you. Obviously. Everything I have ever- I have regretted every cruel word I did not spare you.” The liquid amber of those stupid witcher eyes, shot through with remorse, seemed to stab Jaskier right in the tender bits as Geralt turned his face back on him. “And I never tell you. I’m sorry. You’ve done more for me than I could ever repay and that. Is not a comfortable feeling, to me. What I said to you on the mountain was just… I wanted to lash out at myself and you were the closest thing I could ruin.”
Jaskier felt a bit like he’d just been hollowed out with a spoon.
“As for what I want… I don’t even know what I deserve, Jaskier. I don’t…” Geralt sighed, looking like a crumpled ball of awful feelings and like some of the awful feelings were fighting the other awful feelings because they hated each other so fucking much.
Jaskier laughed wetly. “Fatherhood has made you soft.” He wipes his nose. “Well. How about this. If I could… come with you to Kaer Morhen. And. This is a ‘perfect world’ scenario where no one stabs us in our beds, and I came with you and nothing bad happened and I taught Ciri chord progression and you killed rabbits for us and we all go to your terrible sad broken Witcher keep in the mountains and nobody dies, is that… Would you want that? Is that what you want to happen?” Geralt looked at him, all of him, from his feet to his head, and as though he was afraid of the word itself said “Yes.”
Jaskier smiled at him, just a little. “Then I’m coming.” More fool for him.
_
That night, they slept under an actual roof, clean and relatively well fed. Ciri slept on a pallet of all the blankets from the bed at the foot of it on the floor and Jaskier slept on the side of the mattress near the wall while Geralt slept next to him, defensive position, closest to the door.
Although nothing really kept him from sleep and he was comfortable enough, Jaskier found himself sitting up awake late enough into the night that both his companions had fallen into a deep slumber. For Geralt at least, this was rare, and it brought a strangely unbreakable tranquility upon him to see it.
From where the moon shone in high through the window, he watched as moving silhouettes of northern trees played shadows across the room. Cirilla slept peacefully silent, without even any shifting to disturb the blue night. She looked like she could be anyone’s child. Geralt's face was nothing but a mass of shadows, but he watched it with an aching fondness as though it were wrought with detail.
Within a far away place he thinks of the distance between them, all the ways he never really came back into this world. All the ways that, although he was born in Aen Seidhe, he was created in Aen Elle. What that made him. Who he’d been there, as opposed to what he was now- it was such a different arrangement of things than what he knew Geralt must suppose, and sometimes he forgot, just trying to bend himself to understand Geralt, how much stranger things really were. He had no clue where to begin reconciling the differences in the person he’d shown this man and the person he was. Sometimes, they were the same, but so often somehow polarizing! And he was never sure what the right answer was, or who. Or if there was one.
He was shocked and a bit nauseated to realize that never before had complete and total honesty been his goal, and now that it was… It'd been so long since the truth was the right answer. At this point he was terrified to look for it and find it missing.
How would he ever repay Geralt for his own transparency then?
_
The next morning Geralt goes out alone to buy Cirilla her cold weather gear. She and Jaskier stay in their room, rented for another night even though they’ll be moving before dusk. Ciri, the darling, had found some rowan berries and toted them along in complete secrecy until the night just before, during which she had revealed them with a smug flourish and collected many accolades from Jaskier as she had surely meant to.
Having collected a thread and needle from Geralt, he went about the process of educating her in the esoteric art form of base level bodily protection. The needle is a bit thick, but he takes some of his own silk mending thread and shows Cirilla how to link the berries, and she thinks he’s very trite and annoying because obviously it’s so simple and I know how to sew . They both get their hands stained with crushed red juice and he even gets her to laugh a bit.
When it’s all done they have a bracelet for each member of their company, (Yennefer somehow included in this number) and necklaces would be better, but it’s not the season and Jaskiers amazed Ciri was able to find any at all.
When that’s all done, she asks him to play a song. “Something true,” she says, when he asks her what. “Something that really happened.”
He plays her the ballad of Tam Lin. That’s a nice, rollicking reel, and it lulls him into an almost trance like state, enough that he does all the verses instead of just the pertinent ones. It seems to have had a similar effect on the princess, whose otherworldly eyes are half lidded with her head rested on her weary hands. “But that’s not real,” she protests. “It couldn’t be. I don’t think it could.”
Jaskier chuckles and looks out the window at their neighboring evergreens. “There is much more to what is real than what you can see or what has happened in this world, your highness.” The trees make something singular inside him lurch and ache. “But you’re right that I don’t know if it’s true. I think it could be.” He looks at her conspiratorially. “If I sing you a very secret song, which I know to be true, will you swear not to tell a soul what it says?”
This wakes her up. She nods her head fast, sitting up straight on the bed with her legs crossed. He smiles. “Good.”
Readjusting Filandrils lute, he sings.
“ Oh but the farrow know,”
“Her hungry eye, her ancient soul
It's carried by the sneering menagerie.”
Cirilla's brow is twisted, like she thinks Jaskier is fooling her again with fake stories. He carries on, somber, for once thinking that it is up to her judgement, to believe it, rather than his delivery.
“Know what it is to grow
Beneath her sky, her punishing cold
To slowly learn of her ancient misery,”
“To be twisted by something
A shame without a sin
Like how she twisted the bog man
After she married him,”
The strings twang and a shadow darkens the room.
“Rare is this love, keep it covered
I need you to run to me, run to me, lover
Run until you feel your lungs bleeding.”
“But in all the world
There is one lover worthy of her
With as many souls claimed as she
But for all he's worth
He still shatters always on her earth
The cause of every tear she'd ever weep
Rushing to shore to meet her
Foaming with loneliness
White hands to fondle and beat her
Give her his onliness
Rare is this love, keep it covered
I need you to run to me, run to me, lover
Run until you feel your lungs bleeding
Rare is this love, keep it covered
I need you to run to me, run to me, lover…”
Cirilla takes a great breath in. He pulls off the strings, tongue lost for speech.
“That was beautiful,” she said, sounding almost as moved as Jaskier felt by the song, so untouched it was to him, reaching through the distance of years to pull it back. He tried to make a noise, an Ah, but it came out a clear rasp and he laughed. “And now, princess,” he said, “you must never tell anyone.”
“Why?” she whispered. “Who is the song about?”
“Oh, Ciri,” he said. “It’s a terrible life to be incurious, but I hope you never find out.”
_
That night, Jaskier leaves Cirilla to play pan pipes in the common room and gets no money but a few more tender boons: bolt of wool, sprig of edelweiss; a wrapped cloth that reveals two buns which are still hot. There's few folk at the inn. Mostly quiet locals getting their ale or travel hardened young men making the passes for harvest time, letting out work at farms seeking extra hands. A few pockets of murmuring refugees, and Jaskier doesn’t know where he fits in the crowd or how he appears. There's plenty of unsavory assumptions to be made of two men travelling with a young girl alone. The sense of danger he carries makes him feel as though they shimmer like gems on a streambed of stones, bright with intrigue.
After a while he puts the pan pipes away and takes out the lute, warming up for a few minutes before opening into a low dirge to fit the somber mood of the night. He begins to sing, low and smokey, absentminded, and a few more people come up to place things in his basket. While sparing a nod to a white whiskered old man who gives him a bundle of cinnamon, Jaskier catches Geralt coming in the doorway with Cirilla’s parcels. The sight of him sends a bout of sparks through Jaskier from navel to throat, leaving a feeling as though if he were to cough, you might see the light come out.
There's not a hitch in the song, but suddenly it feels just that much sweeter. Geralt catches his eye, and everything stretches. The song, the words, the sound, the fire crackling, the shadows. There's something on the edge of his mind like danger, like the flip in your stomach before a long fall into water.
The moment snaps, and Geralt goes up the stairs to their room, but it feels as though something of it is still in him as he continues to play without pause for breath.
It isn’t even a minute later that Geralt is coming back down the stairs again. That’s unlike him, Jaskier is thinking, imagining that perhaps Cirilla is asleep, that he came down to eat, that he came down for ale, but then there is that gaze on him again from the back of the room and something is terribly, terribly wrong in his face. Cirilla, he thinks, ending his song five verses early with a cough and a thank you, a good night, a bow. Then he's bundling his gifts, he’s heading towards Geralt, but it’s like he can’t move fast enough; as though he’s trying to move backwards into the place where whatever has happened hasn’t yet. Bruising grip on his arm, darkened nestled corner, Geralt's frame hiding him from the room.
“Ciri is gone.”
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