Chapter Text
In the year 1268 Emperor Emhyr Var Emreis signed the Peace of Cintra with the northern monarchs, halting the Nilfgaardian conflict and ending the second war.
A year and six months later, in the Kingdom of Redania, King Radovid led a hunting party through some nearby woodlands, during which the king was separated from his retinue. In the following hours the king’s horse was found riderless. The forest was searched for days but all that was ever recovered were a few scraps of a bloodstained doublet and a pair of buttercup cufflinks.
The king was succeeded by a distant cousin, supported by the existing council, and whilst the first few months were shaky, Redania survived gaining its third king in as many years. The continent moved on.
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Following the war, following the pogrom in Rivia, Jaskier had been a wreck. His whole life had disappeared in front of him, quite literally destroyed and then portalled to an entirely different sphere beyond his reach. It felt a little like having his heart ripped from his chest then burned in front of him whilst he watched, but that would be an understatement. He lost everything and everyone who had ever mattered to him.
Or nearly everyone.
Yarpen, the incredible friend that he was, had taken one look at him and decided that he couldn’t be left alone and so, for lack of any better ideas, had brought him home with him.
He’d stayed with Yarpen and his new bride for three months whilst he patched his broken spirits back together, then, once he could get through two days in a row without crying, he struck a deal with the local innkeep and, in exchange for performing most nights, was able to keep a small apartment above the Red Lion tavern. Of course Yarpen insisted he didn’t have to leave, but whilst Jaskier was stubborn and well known for sticking around long after he had worn out his welcome, it had quickly become clear that Yarpen and Orla were going to need the extra room.
Their daughter Alys had been born on Beltane. Jaskier had cried, Yarpen had cried, Orla had told them both to pull themselves together and do something actually useful. A few hours later he got to hold his niece for the first time, and whilst it didn’t heal the rift in his heart, it made the scar of it ache less.
He began work on a series of new songs, adventure stories about Ciri, Geralt and Yennefer. By the time Alys was old enough to hear them he’d have the entire saga composed for her. Geralt had always wanted to be a white knight, now he would get to be a young girl’s hero, just as he had dreamed.
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Two years after Rivia, Jaskier was walking along the street towards the tavern for his evening set, when he heard something entirely unexpected. Music, not just the typical drunken singing, but a carefully composed melody. Some other musician was playing in his place.
He was torn between righteous fury and utter confusion. There were other bards in Mahakam of course, but they each had their own taverns and schedules. They respected each others’ need to make a living and never encroached on each others’ territory without prior warning. Given he’d had no such warning, if another bard had taken his place that could only mean that someone new was in town.
He snuck in through the front door during a lull between songs, grabbed a pint of ale, and took a seat at a table in the corner. The bard was on the other side of the room, a mandolin held carefully against his chest. He was simply dressed apart from a truly atrocious floppy hat that obscured Jaskier’s view of his face. He was tall, perhaps taller than Jaskier, and probably elven given that such a hat could only exist to hide his ears, there was no other logical excuse for it. At his feet lay a massive mound of white fur that on further examination appeared to be some kind of dog, one with floppy ears and big brown eyes that stared into Jaskier’s soul from across the room.
“How about the fisher king?” A member of the audience requested.
“I don’t-“
“Or the dung-cart knight?” Another asked.
The bard continued to flounder.
“How about that new one of Jaskier’s?” One of the regulars asked. Jaskier buried his smirk in his pint of ale.
“I don’t sing Jaskier’s music.” The bard replied with a sniff.
A grumble of discontent spread through the audience and Jaskier felt his heart swell at their loyalty. The bard clutched his mandolin tighter for a moment and the dog at his feet whined, lifting its head to lick at the bard’s fingers. He gently patted the dog once, then put his fingers to the strings.
He began to sing again and Jaskier felt his heart stop. He hadn’t recognised the voice when he first spoke, the background noise of the tavern had been enough to disguise and obscure it, but now that he was playing his voice was clear and unmistakable.
He took a long drink of his ale and tried to figure out if he’d somehow hit his head and not noticed. This couldn’t be happening. He was imagining things, it was the only explanation. The grief had finally damaged his mind enough that he was seeing ghosts where there were none. This man was an Oxenfurt bard who’d fallen from grace and wound up on the path, that was all. The similarity of tone and accent to a certain someone was nothing but a coincidence. It wasn’t real. He refused to believe it was real.
The song itself was… not great. It was clearly an original composition of some kind, but it was rather simplistic and the lyrics were overly convoluted and flowery. None of which was particularly important to Jaskier in that moment, but it did explain the stale bread roll that one dwarf hurled at the man’s head as the song drew to a close. It was swiftly followed by a second roll, and an apple, and accompanied by a handful of jeers. Jaskier watched as the regulars returned to their games and conversations, drowning out any attempt the man might have made at continuing his set. The man curled in on himself and clutched the mandolin to his chest once more. It was no wonder Jaskier hadn’t recognised him. He looked weary and half starved, roughened by the path in the way only a travelling bard could be. One of his boots was slowly peeling away from its sole, and his thick coat had been patched poorly in half a dozen different places. On one of his fingers was a faint dark red smudge, a remnant of a blister on hands that had never had to do manual labour before.
Jaskier should have turned around and left, then and there. It wouldn’t take much asking around to figure out that Jaskier had been living in Mahakam for the better part of two years, but he didn’t have to give this man any help in obtaining that information. He should have disappeared whilst he still had the chance.
But Jaskier had never been an especially sensible man.
He stood up, pulled a single coin from his purse and crossed the room. The coin made a dull thud as it landed in the empty mandolin case. The bard looked up, grey eyes wide beneath the brim of his hat.
“Some advice,” Jaskier offered, his voice carefully kept steady, “If it’s not rotten, keep the food. Their loss, your gain.”
“What?” Radovid, the former king of Redania, blinked, frozen in place.
Jaskier bent down, picked up a bread roll, and placed it firmly in his hand.
“It’s how I survived the first few years.”
“I don’t- how can you be here?”
“I live here.” He replied bluntly. “And I’m not the one who’s supposed to be dead.”
Radovid flinched.
“You must have me confused with someone else.” He said quietly but firmly.
Jaskier didn’t know how to even begin to address that, and wasn’t sure he wanted to, so instead he asked the one question that had been eating away at him.
“Why don’t you sing songs by Jaskier?” If Radovid wanted to play at pretending they’d never met, he would indulge him, just this once.
“Because I don’t think Jaskier would want me to sing them.” He replied evenly. “I was assured he wants nothing to do with me.”
Jaskier paused, lost for words once more. Radovid looked exhausted. His hair was a tangled mess, tied haphazardly at the back of his neck. His fingernails were caked with dirt. He was not the man Jaskier remembered, in more ways than one. But that didn’t mean Jaskier had any interest in forgiving him. Radovid was a piece of his life he wanted nothing but to forget.
“Sing whatever songs you like.” He told him. “The path is hard. Every man has to do whatever he can to put food on his table.”
Then, without waiting for a response, he turned and fled.
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“Can I stay here tonight?”
Yarpen regarded him from the doorway with an interesting mixture of fondness and deep suspicion.
“Always, what’s mine is yours.” He gestured inside. “Quietly though, we just got the wee lass off to sleep.”
“Thank you.” Jaskier ducked through the doorway and followed him into the main room of his two story townhouse. Orla was reading in a comfortable armchair and looked up as they entered.
“Did something happen?” She asked gently.
This was not the first time Jaskier had shown up on their doorstep since he had unofficially moved out. Some nights the weight of everything was too much for him to handle sleeping alone, and they’d never turned him away yet.
“It’s not like that.” He explained. “I ran into someone at the tavern that I would rather avoid.”
“For fuck’s sake.” Yarpen grumbled under his breath. “I thought you promised you weren’t gonna sleep with any more married ones.”
“Firstly, I’ve never tried to sleep with any married people.” Jaskier protested. “They just keep finding me. I’m like catnip for unsatisfied spouses.” Yarpen rolled his eyes. “Secondly, he’s not married. At least I don’t think he is.”
Radovid was supposed to be dead. He still remembered when the news reached Mahakam five months prior. He’d felt strangely numb upon the discovery. Like some great dark void had opened up inside of him and swallowed every feeling he might have had about the information. Three weeks after he had found out he had gotten unreasonably drunk for reasons he couldn’t remember and wound up crying into Yarpen’s shoulder for about an hour. But he’d never once questioned if it was true. King Radovid’s fate had been sealed from the day Jaskier left him alone in that army camp.
And yet here he was.
“Alright lad, sit down,” Yarpen insisted. “What happened?”
Jaskier collapsed into another armchair and ran a hand through his hair. He barely even knew where to begin or what to say. Geralt had known about Radovid, but no one else had ever heard the full story. With Radovid suddenly alive he couldn’t tell anyone even if he wanted to. The fact that he was alive was enough to destabilise the entire Redanian government in a moment, anyone who knew would be at risk.
“I just want to make it clear,” he started, “that I was not in love with him.”
“Alright.” Yarpen said with a knowing look, “so what were you then?”
“I was… it was… fuck.” He took a deep breath and sunk further into the chair.
“But you were definitely not in love with this man?”
“Shush you.”
“Start at the beginning perhaps?” Orla suggested calmly.
“About three years ago, just before the war began I met a man.” Jaskier explained, trying to break the story down into its bare essentials. “We had a short lived but somewhat intense affair that ended in him betraying me. Geralt and Ciri got caught in the crossfire. He was in a pretty shitty situation, his choices weren’t all his own, but enough of them were. So I swore I’d never see him again.”
“Then he showed up at the tavern.” Yarpen finished.
“Then he showed up at the tavern.” Jaskier agreed. “I don’t know what he wants but he’s probably staying there and I really didn’t want him to realise I live there, so here I am.”
“Do you think he escaped whatever his situation was?” Orla asked tentatively.
“He must have.”
The entire continent believed Radovid dead. No plot or scheme of any kind would be worth sending a king undercover through the Temerian countryside dressed as a bedraggled bard, and the toll the path had taken on Radovid’s body couldn’t be faked. Impossible as it might seem, Radovid was free. For a certain definition of freedom.
“What are you planning to do about it?” Yarpen asked.
“Hide here until he leaves.” Jaskier insisted. “If he escaped, then good for him, but I am not getting involved this time. He’ll move on in a few days and I can go back to forgetting he ever existed.”
Yarpen watched him carefully, clearly looking for something, although Jaskier had no idea what he was searching for. Whatever it was, however, he didn’t seem to find it. He sighed, stood up and went to pull a blanket out of the hamper in the corner of the room. He handed it to Jaskier with a gentle smile.
“Get some sleep, Julek,” he patted Jaskier on the shoulder, and then vanished up stairs, quickly followed by Orla.
Jaskier took his borrowed blanket and pushed the two armchairs together, curling up between them. As he drifted off, golden hair and grey eyes danced before him in his mind.