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If there’s one area where Lambert can be counted on for consistency, it’s in his contrariness. Therefore, it surprises exactly no one when his daemon, Hanna, takes an extraordinarily long time to settle.
Nor does it surprise anyone that when she does settle, she settles as a cat.
It happens soon after Lambert’s daemon permits someone other than Lambert to touch her for the first time, though it doesn’t happen because of that. Like Hanna, he’s a Cat, and his daemon is a blue heeler.
*
It’s a cold day in early winter when the Cat appears.
Lambert and his daemon are up in one of the cabins adjacent the Kaer Morhen ranger station, which itself is adjacent to the old fortress which gave the station its name. Outside, the world is covered in deep snow, but inside, good insulation and a fire crackling merrily in the fireplace keeps the cabin comfortably warm. Hanna’s curled up comfortably on the threadbare rug in front of the fire in the form of a grey dappled wildcat, which is one of her favorites. Lambert’s in the kitchen, working a round of dough for a nice loaf of crusty bread.
He’s just put the dough away to prove when there comes a tap at the back door. Hanna flicks an ear, but pointedly doesn’t move, which means it’s Lambert’s job to go and see who’s there. One of their brothers, probably — either Geralt and his bluebird daemon, Serafina, just arrived and come to say hello, or Eskel and his highly traditional wolf daemon, Maja, just returned from his patrol. Or Vesemir, their adopted father, with his own wolf daemon, Larysa — in which case, things might be a bit… tense. Their relationship has improved a great deal since Lambert was a kid with a mountain-sized chip on his shoulder, but it’s still… well, it’s a work in progress.
But when Lambert opens the door a crack to glare suspiciously out into the snow, it’s not Vesemir that’s standing there. Nor is it any other member of Lambert’s family.
The visitor is a daemon, in the form of a blue heeler. Its lips are drawn back with pain, and it’s shivering. Snow encrusts its speckled fur, and the red knitted scarf wrapped around its neck, which… doesn’t seem to be doing much to actually protect it from the cold, to be honest. There are odd bald spots on the back of the daemon’s neck, like a dog that’s worn a too-tight collar for a long time. And it’s alone, which is unusual indeed.
Very few people have the power of separation, which permits human and daemon to exist at great distances from each other without the often mortal suffering that comes when two halves of a whole are torn apart. Wolves gain it during the Trial of Dreams. Mages undergo something similar. The process is… not pleasant. Lambert and Hanna still have nightmares. And it’s lonely, being without the other half of one’s soul — particularly since the natural reaction to seeing such a thing is horror, and other humans tend to shy away. Thus, when the Wolverton family’s work doesn’t introduce a need to separate, most of the humans and daemons tend to stay comfortingly close to each other.
Lambert doesn’t recognize this daemon, though. If it’s a mage’s daemon, there’s a part of him that’s inclined to slam the door in its face. Fuck mages. Fine, so his PhD advisor got rid of the old Wolverton mages who got away with strapping boys like him to tables and making them scream away their humanity for years — he’s still pissed about it. Monstrous fuckers.
“Look,” the dog daemon says, “I’m Saoirse. My person’s name is Aiden — Aiden Gatti, but we mean no harm, I swear.”
The Gatti family — colloquially, the Cats — have a bad reputation. Like the Wolverton, Bähr, Shiratori, Griffin, Martichoras, and Drake families, they’re not related by blood, and their children receive the Grasses as part of their coming-of-age. Unlike the others, the Gattis prefer to make their money through various criminal enterprises. It’s more lucrative than running search and rescue stations or administering national parks, to be sure, but Lambert will take the former over the sorts of things the Gattis are known for any day.
Still, if this daemon meant any harm, Lambert doesn’t think she would have given the Gatti name up front. It’d be more logical to pretend to be from literally any one of the other families — there’d be no way to know just by looking at her. And he’s seen enough injured hikers’ daemons to think she’s not faking her pained expression.
“His legs are broken,” Saoirse continues, looking up at Lambert plaintively with her ears back against her skull. “Two of his potion bottles broke and lacerated his thigh, and we’re out of White Honey. If we don’t get help, we will die.”
“We’ll help,” says Hanna, appearing in the doorway next to Lambert’s legs, furry grey ears pricked up toward the other daemon.
That settles it.
*
It takes hours to hike out to the place where Saoirse’s person is, and the dog daemon is not strong enough to make it. Hanna ends up taking the form of a snow leopard in order to carry the other daemon on her back most of the way.
Broken trees and fallen rocks mark the scene of the accident — an avalanche. In the area where the site is, they’re both frequent and dangerous. No one is supposed to travel on this side of the mountain at this time of the year, and even Wolves have to exercise a great deal of caution. On the bright side, the dog daemon’s tracks are still clearly visible — and even better, it’s not difficult to locate Aiden Gatti once they reach the bottom of the slope.
Both he and his daemon are drifting in and out of consciousness by that point. Aiden Gatti isn’t buried in the snow, but he is trapped, legs crushed beneath an enormous tree trunk. By the look of things, the tree fell first on his thighs, shattering bones and potion vials alike, then came to rest in its current position when Aiden tried to lift it off his legs and lost his grip. Ouch. That’s going to be really unpleasant, but the half-frozen puddles of vomit around the Cat’s head and on his chest are the most concerning of them problems he sees. Broken potion vials have killed more rangers and their witcher predecessors than any single species of monster has ever managed to do.
“You damn well better not fucking die after all this,” Lambert grumbles at the man as he gets to work, just on principle.
To his surprise, Aiden Gatti stirs and blinks a little at his words — his eyes are a brilliant green — and mumbles something. Calling the injured Cat ‘barely coherent’ would be charitable, but if Lambert’s not mistaken… it sounded like ‘Saoirse’. His daemon’s name. Then, something else that sounds… disturbingly, an awful lot like please, and don’t.
Which, fuck.
See, here’s the thing. Lambert might be a coarse, prickly asshole, but he’s not a total fucking prick. He’s not going to touch Aiden’s daemon to move her to where she can be in contact with her person, that’s just fucking wrong, but…
Well, look. He and Hanna went through the Trial of Dreams; they should be able to handle the way she pretty much has to brush up against the unconscious man to set Saoirse down in the snow against his side without dropping her. They also ought to be able to handle the extraordinary closeness that comes with Lambert’s daemon settling down in the snow next to Saoirse to keep her warm.
The surprising part isn’t that Lambert and Hanna would do that for someone — though if anyone ever brings it up, they would definitely get stabbed. What are they supposed to do, just fucking ignore the delirious pleas of a man who might very well die despite their best efforts?
Obviously fucking not. This way, at least, even if the Cat dies, he won’t face death without the other half of his soul at his side, and he won’t spend any of his last moments suffering the pain that comes when an unfamiliar person touches one’s daemon without leave. It’ll hurt them, yeah, but they can take, it, and…
Huh.
No, the surprising part is that when it happens, oddly, it doesn’t hurt.
*
Aiden Gatti doesn’t die.
However, if it took hours to make it out to the scene of the avalanche, making it back to Kaer Morhen carrying both Aiden and his daemon takes even longer. They set out in the morning; by the time they make it back, it’s well past dark. Geralt, Eskel, Vesemir, and their daemons are all out to meet them and help them all back inside.
It takes another day for the Cat to actually wake up, and even then, he can barely keep his eyes open. He’s skinny as hell, and there are dark shadows beneath his eyes that can’t just be attributed to his near-death experience. It’s plain that Aiden and his daemon are exhausted, and haven’t slept or eaten well in… months, at least. When they sleep, they’re plagued with nightmares, and in both sleeping and waking, they cling to each other like they’re drowning at sea.
Still, in between bouts of sleep, Lambert and his daemon do hear bits and pieces about where they came from.
As it turns out, Aiden is a young Cat. He’s around Lambert’s age, and after finishing his Trials, he lasted exactly five winters with the Gatti family before he decided to leave. Reading between the lines, Lambert is pretty sure that ‘decided to leave’ is a tactful way of saying ‘escaped’.
The full story comes out after Aiden’s healed enough for Vesemir to decide they need to have a talk.
It’s not pretty. It seems there’s been a… purge, of sorts, occurring in the Gatti family. Aiden, young as he is, wasn’t killed — but he’s the adopted son of another who was, which put him in a precarious position and left him without the protection of an older mentor. Under the new Grandmaster, younger Cats without such protection swiftly became scapegoats, easy targets for the family’s frequent violence. The Gatti family, it seems, is little kinder to its own than it is those outside it.
Aiden and his daemon, fresh out of college and unsure of what else to do, threw themselves on the mercy of one of the senior mentors left standing. In truth, Jad Karadin-Gatti wasn’t much older than them, but he’d become a senior mentor anyway by virtue of being the new Grandmaster’s favorite adopted son. With a friendly smile that didn’t reach his eyes, he’d offered Aiden a glass of wine. Then, as his empty-eyed crocodile daemon looked on, he said he’d be more than willing to extend Aiden his protection — for a price.
What that price was… Aiden looks down at his daemon, shivering in his lap, and refuses to explain.
After that, they were trapped. Jad took their passport, ID, everything they’d need to leave, and since the Gatti family controlled the trade in forgeries, it wasn’t as if they could obtain false papers without him finding out. Worse, he separated Aiden from his daemon, wouldn’t let them see each other, ensuring that neither of them could escape without leaving the other behind — he kept Saoirse locked in a silver cage in his closet, then muzzled her in silver when she started to whimper.
Lambert and Hanna meet each other’s eyes at that moment, a silent understanding passing between them. If the world ever sees fit to put this Jad Karadin-Gatti within their reach, he and his crocodile daemon will die, certain as sunrise.
Even when a person can separate from their daemon, forcibly keeping the two apart is an unimaginable cruelty. It’s something Lambert genuinely can’t imagine — to have the other half of his soul kept from him, both feeling the other’s misery and utterly helpless to hold and touch and comfort. Even trainees going through the Trial of Dreams still get to hold their daemons as the potions stretch the bond between them past all limits of mortal endurance, for fuck’s sake.
Hell, Lambert’s certain that even Varin, the fucking sadist, would never imagine doing such a thing. That’s not a compliment; there’s a reason Varin’s not permitted to train the Wolverton boys anymore. That reason being Lambert himself, whom he beat unconscious for mouthing off in training. But there’s cruelty and then there’s… cruelty, a violation of the soul itself that goes well beyond mere physical violence. Varin is a fucking sadist; he’s not a rapist. Which… isn’t the right word, not exactly, but it is the closest one Lambert can think of to describe someone who would do something as intimately cruel as this. It’s unimaginable enough that there’s no word for it in any language Lambert knows, of which there are many.
Understandably, at that point Aiden and his daemon need to stop for a few moments before continuing.
It seems Jad Karadin-Gatti’s own viciousness got the better of him after a while. Eventually, instead of keeping Saoirse locked in her cage, he started leaving her in the charge of his own crocodile daemon. Bogna, Saoirse clarifies, was her name. She’d carry Aiden’s daemon around in her jaws, the implicit threat being that if he didn’t behave, those jaws could snap shut at any time. But she’d also been complacent, not expecting Saoirse to really try and escape. One day, while Bogna was dangling her tauntingly in front of Aiden’s face, Saoirse bit the crocodile’s tongue. Jad yelped in his daemon’s pain, and Bogna, startled and hurt, let her go.
Aiden and his daemon ran.
They had no money, no passport, no ID, nothing at all but the clothes Aiden wore and the knives strapped to his back, but they ran — and ran, and ran. Because if they didn’t run, they’d be dead. There was a near miss one day, an arrow that barely missed striking Aiden in the face just days before they snuck across the border. Having no papers, they stuck to the back roads to avoid Kaedwen’s notorious border patrols, and then headed to the far side of the mountains as the patrols, spurred by edicts issued by the newly-elected ruler, grew more frequent.
Then, well… winter was approaching. Aiden and Saoirse were trying to find a cave, or an abandoned mine, or somewhere to hole up, but they found nothing. They weren’t planning to ask the Wolvertons for shelter, knowing the Gatti family’s reputation — and Jad, of course, had seen fit to repeatedly remind them both about how pointless it would be to ask for help. When the avalanche hit, they were moving further north, still trying to find something, anything, anywhere.
“You’ve found something now, Cat,” Vesemir tells them gruffly. “We’re not turning you out.”
“Damn fucking right we’re not,” Lambert adds fiercely, for once in total agreement with his foster father.
Aiden looks astounded for a moment. He’s cradling his daemon on his arms like he’ll never have to be apart from her again, and when he smiles, his green eyes shine like emeralds. “Thank you.”
*
It takes about three weeks after Aiden’s legs finish healing for him and Lambert and their daemons to start sleeping together.
Literally, not figuratively. Aiden has fresh nightmares; Lambert has old ones. Like many such arrangements, it starts with Hanna and Saoirse cuddling together at night, which helps both their people sleep better. From there, it’s a logical step for Aiden and Lambert to follow suit.
They’re already spending all their waking hours together, after all; why not their sleeping ones, too?
Luckily, Lambert has a large bed in his appropriated cabin, large enough for him and Aiden to snuggle up comfortably together under the covers. Their daemons either end up sandwiching them on either side, or they cuddle up together in another spot on the bed. It helps, a lot — but Aiden still wakes up in a cold sweat on semi-regular basis all the same, reaching blindly for a daemon that he’s afraid isn’t there.
In hindsight, it’s rather impressive that it takes a full three months for him to accidentally grab the wrong daemon.
It doesn’t hurt, but Lambert and Hanna bolt awake when he does it nonetheless. Aiden, who isn’t even conscious, just settles back down with a rather baffled Andean cat daemon clutched against his chest.
Hanna and Lambert exchange a look.
Then, very deliberately, Hanna settles down in Aiden’s arms and starts to purr. She cuddles up to Aiden’s throat, a warm presence close enough that even in sleep, the Cat would be hard-pressed not to know there’s a daemon there. It seems to work; Lambert and Hanna aren’t woken up by any more bad dreams for the rest of the night, at least.
But in the early hours of the morning, well before dawn breaks over the horizon, Aiden’s daemon stirs. Saoirse lifts her head, blinking sleepily for a few moments. Then, she yawns and carefully pads over to Lambert’s side of the bed. Without further ado or ceremony, Aiden’s daemon cuddles up to Lambert, tucking her nose into the crook of his shoulder before drifting right back off to sleep.