Chapter Text
Ciri thinks about that moment, as she follows Eskel down another set of stairs. The way he was gentle with Geralt, even if he wasn’t awake to see it. The care inherent in all of it feels suddenly stifling. (Maybe, maybe, if Eskel cares so gently for someone good like Geralt, he can be considered trustworthy. It’s something to think about.)
“He’ll wake in a while,” Eskel tells her, turning his head just a bit to let his voice carry over his shoulder but not actually… looking at her. Ciri gets the sense, again, that he feels awkward with her. It’s strange. Something about the strained way he’d called her a child of surprise, she thinks. “Shouldn’t be much past breakfast. Never learned to take care of himself when he needed it, Geralt. Always pushing himself past where he should’ve gone.”
He’s talking to fill the space, Ciri thinks. He doesn’t know what to do with her.
If she were a kinder girl, a more diplomatic princess, she would say something casual; agree, subtly let him know that he had nothing to be awkward about. Ciri is not kind nor diplomatic. She stays silent. She takes no pleasure in watching the man squirm—it’s awkward for her, too, this strained silence with a full-grown man she’s just met—but she has no intention to make herself softer just to smooth things over. She doesn’t want to engage with these people. Not so easily.
Eskel falls silent, then, and it’s just the sound of their boots on the stairs.
Kaer Morhen looks kinder in the morning, Ciri thinks. Or… not kinder. The stone walls are still unflinching, and the light streams in through grated windows in harsh lines to land against the cold grey of the walls and floor, but there is light. Sunlight. It’s not kind. But it looks less haunted.
It’s not quite so cold as it had been the night before, and Ciri has boots with less holes now and clothing better suited for the cold weather, and she’s feeling stronger than she had the night before. She’s going to eat, she thinks. And then she’ll be ready to face the day. Geralt will wake soon.
Eskel leads her down empty hallways, lit by measly sunlight. Ciri can tell they’re the hallways that the witchers actually use, in this large keep, because the dust and cobwebs have been mostly cleared away. It’s certainly nothing like the halls down into that storeroom. Still, they’re large and empty, and long, and the whole walk almost makes Ciri feel as if they’re the only two people in the castle. It’s simultaneously a shock and a relief for Eskel to open a door and reveal Coën, sitting neatly at a little table.
“Morning, your highness,” he says, with an easy smile. It’s nice enough that Ciri gives him a grudging half-smile in return. Coën pushes a loaf of bread and some cheese toward them, and Eskel turns away to open one of the cupboards. “You can sit down, if you’d like,” Coën continues, gesturing to one of the other chairs around the table. Ciri takes his invitation.
The kitchen is oddly sized, she thinks. Eskel goes for a cupboard filled with wrapped foodstuffs, probably things preserved for the winter, but there’s rows of cupboards beyond it, and there’s two ovens—one that’s unreasonably large, for the small number of people living here, and a smaller one beside it. The little table that Coën sits at is positioned just under the stream of morning sun into the kitchen, but it looks out of place in the open space of the kitchen. It’s sized like this castle, Ciri thinks, and the number of cleaned hallways. It’s a space meant for many more people. The witchers are only carving out the small space that they need.
Were there more, she wonders? More witchers? There must have been, to warrant a space this size, but she’s never heard of witchers being prolific. Witchers are a rare find, to be avoided when one comes across them (is what she’d been taught, at least). They’ll show up when you need one, but you’d hardly come across one while casually traveling. Maybe some old king, so old his kingdom has been forgotten to the annals of history and therefore to Ciri’s tutor, had built his fortress here, at the top of the mountain. Maybe the witchers had just moved in.
Speaking of witchers. She shifts her gaze from Eskel’s back to Coën, who she finds looking out the window. A moment later, as if he feels her gaze, he turns to her with a questioning look.
Ciri stalls, but gathers her courage for a rather rude question. “Is Lambert going to be down here?” she asks, and doesn’t bother to hide her unfavorable opinion of the man. She thinks Coën is probably alright, given how he’d teased Lambert the night before.
Reassuringly, Coën laughs heartily. “Don’t know, your highness. He’s been sleeping late. I think he thinks it’ll get him out of chores, if Vesemir has to go and drag him out of bed himself.” His tone is fond. Odd, Ciri thinks. She can’t imagine feeling fond about that abrasive man. “If you’re really worried,” he says, pitching his voice just a bit lower, “I’ll let you know when I hear him coming.”
Ciri’s figured out by now that his lower tones of voice are only for her benefit. His own words prove their futility; if he’s going to listen for Lambert’s footsteps in the hall, and if he acknowledges that he’ll hear them before Ciri can, the other witchers can surely hear what he says, even if he whispers.
But he does acknowledge it. And Ciri feels a little better that he’s not treating her as stupid. He’s being courteous, she thinks. Once more, she doesn’t know if she appreciates the lowered voice, but she notes it as a point in his favor. She nods to him. She takes the bread.
Eskel appears to find what he’s looking for, and he appears at the table to place an apple in front of Ciri, and returns to the cupboard to close it. She sees him pause, and then he asks, “You said Lambert hadn’t eaten yet?”
Coën makes an affirmative sound.
“Lass,” Eskel calls, and Ciri registers that he’s calling to her in time to catch the apple that’s been tossed to her. It’s a near miss, but she feels daringly victorious that she’s managed to catch it all the same. She looks back up at Eskel, ready to glare at him for obviously teasing her by throwing apples at her, but he says, “Keep an eye on that for Geralt, will you?” and it makes a bit more sense.
Ciri eyes him mistrustingly, but nods, and puts the apple on the table close to her before crunches into her own. She can certainly do that much for Geralt’s sake. Eskel could have done it himself, she’s sure, but… he’s trying to include her, maybe. Treat her casually. Toss her an apple. Besides, Geralt is the only thing that really connects them, and it is a small relief to have Geralt as a tether, if only the mention of him.
“Lucky you got here in time,” Eskel comments, once she acquiesces. “These run out fast, once winter starts.”
It’s kind, she thinks, to make sure that there’s an apple left for your friend, when you know they’ll run out soon. Startlingly so.
Eskel doesn’t sit at the table with them; he leans against the cupboard to eat his own apple, while Ciri eats hers and tears at the bread that Coën had offered her. It’s good to sit somewhere not-freezing, protected from the elements, while she eats. It’s almost enough to make up for how unsettled she feels in the walls of this cold, ancient keep. She fills her belly with apple and bread (too much, maybe—she’s eaten voraciously when given the chance, since she’s been on her own, and even with Geralt, she hadn’t quite had enough to feel full— and something in her mind tells her that she needs to take what she can, that good, filling food isn’t promised again. It’s not until she finds herself feeling sick to her stomach that she realizes she may have overcompensated).
She wonders what’s going to happen, as the day goes on. Chores, Coën had mentioned? What will Ciri be expected to do? Is she going to be expected to earn her keep? How much will being Geralt’s ward earn her, in this place?
Coën looks up, then, and Ciri thinks, he’s listening. He must hear footsteps, or voices, or something of the sort. For a moment of rising apprehension, she thinks he’s going to say that Lambert is coming, but instead he catches her eye and grins. “S’ not Lambs, your highness.”
“That’s Geralt,” Eskel agrees, through a mouthful of apple. Ciri feels a little knot of tension unravel in her heart at the knowledge that she’s going to be reunited with Geralt. Things are easier, at least, if he’s here with her. She’ll know what to do.
Also—do the witchers know each other so well, to identify each other by the sound of their footsteps?
She slumps back in her chair. Her gaze catches on the last of the bread, then, and something like guilt and panic swirls together in her gut. Her stomach’s starting to ache, a little bit, just enough past full to be uncomfortable. The guilty panicked feeling tugs at her, and she reaches out to take another bite.
She starts to hear the footsteps, a few moments later, after she’s properly torn through the crust of the bread. They’re quick, decisive; Ciri tries to identify something familiar about them, something that would set them apart as Geralt’s, but she comes up empty. Geralt pushes open the door to the kitchen looking… a little panicked, Ciri thinks? But his eyes catch hers, and the aberration in his expression fades before she can fairly identify it.
“You let me sleep,” he says to Eskel, with a frown. It sounds almost accusing. Strange—why should he be accusing about an act of kindness? Eskel only shrugs, arms crossed, turning his scarred face away.
Coën leans back in his seat and goes back to contemplating the sunlight.
“This is for you,” Ciri says, in lieu of an awkward silence in the too-big kitchen, and holds out the extra apple toward Geralt. This time, she sees something soften, distinctly, in his expression. He makes his way over to take the apple from Ciri.
A moment later, he lets out a breath and puts a hand on Ciri’s head. She looks up at him, a little startled, her mouth still full of bread, but she doesn’t protest.
“How’s your leg?” Eskel asks, from across the kitchen. Ciri remembers the strange injury. She remembers Eskel’s comment from earlier, as well, that Geralt pushes himself past where he should go. How bad had the wound really been, then?
“Fine,” Geralt responds; the challenge that was in his voice earlier is gone now. He only sounds tired. There’s a moment more of familiar, grounding pressure of his hand against Ciri’s hair, and then it’s gone.
“Uh huh,” Eskel says, and under his sarcasm, Ciri hears a hint of something playful. “So should I tell Vesemir to give you something easy, or should I tell him to sentence you to bedrest for the rest of the month?”
Geralt rolls his eyes, but Ciri thinks it’s actually in good humor. Joking. “I’m fine, Eskel. I’ve been walking on it for weeks, now. I could patch the roof if I need to.”
“I’m doing the roof,” Coën pipes up, as Eskel narrows his eyes at Geralt. “Was supposed to be me and Lambs, but he does a shit job of it.”
Geralt drops the pretend-aggravation and drops into the chair next to Ciri, taking a bite of an apple. “You’re encouraging him, you know,” he says, and Ciri wrinkles her nose at the way he speaks through a mouthful of half-chewed fruit. He swallows before he speaks again, and puts an elbow onto the table to gesture at Coën with his apple. “He only pretends to be shit at simple tasks ‘cause he knows it’ll get him out of the work. You’re playing into his hands.”
It’s interesting, watching Geralt talk so casually about someone; he speaks with familiarity, a little bit of disdain, but not hostility. Ciri thinks again that he seems almost like a new man in Kaer Morhen.
Coën pulls a face. “I’d rather do the work myself than get dripped on all winter, thanks. He might be doing it to get out of work, but he’s not shy about leaving it done badly. Smelled like mold and rot all winter last year.”
“I’ll help you,” Eskel says, and tosses his apple core into a bin. Ciri notes its location for later. She can’t quite figure out an intuitive system to the kitchen organization, yet; it’s too much empty space.
Eskel pushes away from the counter, then, and heads for the door. “Gonna get the lazy bastard out of bed,” he says, and pauses to lay a familiar hand on Geralt’s shoulder as he passes. He also takes a moment to nod to Ciri, and while it’s an awkward sort of motion, it feels striking. She stares after him as he leaves.
“Melitele preserve you,” Coën calls after him, a hint of laughter in his dry tone.
The morning goes a little faster, after that. Geralt eats (Ciri hands him the rest of the bread, and tries not to feel nauseous), Coën sits and enjoys the winter sunlight, and after a bit, the three of them return to that large hall. Eskel is already there, with a rumpled and disgruntled-looking Lambert next to him, and the old witcher sits at the head of the table again.
It’s still large and empty, the hall. The cold sits heavy in the corners of the room, more severe than it had been in the kitchen, where it at least allowed for some warm light.
Ciri accidentally catches Vesemir’s eye. He looks at her unflinchingly, and Ciri steels herself, holds her ground. He considers her for a moment longer, and then looks away. She’s left awfully unsure of how to proceed.
The world around her hasn’t stopped, though. Geralt keeps walking, beside her, to take a seat at the table across from Eskel. Coën tosses Lambert a chunk of bread that Ciri hadn’t noticed him take from the kitchen, and Lambert looks up from under his disheveled hair to catch it with a wild grin. He pulls a knife from his belt and carves out a chunk of the bread to eat. Somehow it feels more vulgar than just tearing it.
Ciri sits between Geralt and Coën and ignores Lambert when he grins at her and says, mockingly, “Good morning, princess.” She has more dignity than to engage with him, she decides. A haughty toss of her hair usually gives off the desired nonchalance; she grits her teeth when he laughs at her for it, loud and ugly.
“Alright,” Vesemir says, the next moment, and the imperious sound of his voice carries through the hall. Ciri remembers her odd dream. The command in Vesemir’s voice is rather like her grandmother’s in an odd way. “Eskel says he and Coën are going to fix the roof?”
Coën nods. Lambert sticks his tongue out at him from across the table.
“You’re on stable duty, then, Lambert,” Vesemir continues. “That means clean. I don’t want you coming back for lunch until you’ve done a job that’s actually satisfactory.”
Lambert sighs, long and laborious, but he doesn’t protest. It’s interesting. Ciri takes note of it.
Everyone else has been assigned a task for the day, which must mean it’s Geralt’s turn (and hopefully Ciri’s, alongside him). Vesemir turns his golden eyes on them, and Ciri finds herself defaulting to what she’d done when her grandmother was angry with her. Meet her eyes (she’ll be angrier if you look away). Try not to look defiant. She cannot tell if Vesemir is angry or not, but it’s safer to err on the side of caution.
“You’ll come with me to look at that monster bit you brought back, Geralt,” Vesemir says, and Ciri shudders without meaning to as she remembers the shadowy thing with luminous, intelligent eyes. “After midday. You might as well show the princess around; it wouldn’t do to have her get lost.”
Geralt raises an eyebrow. “Don’t we train after midday?”
Vesemir levels him with a narrow-eyed look. “Don’t think I’m stupid, boy. I won’t have you training on a ghoul bite. I’m aware you’re stubborn, but I don’t care to entertain it.” He plants his hands on the table and stands, leaving no room for dispute. “You’ll let someone look at the wound today, and you won’t train.”
Ciri has yet to understand all of the intricacies of Geralt’s micro-expressions, but this one is very clearly displeasure.
“And so the White Wolf gets put out to pasture,” Lambert croons, gleefully. “Good thing you’ve got a little cub to keep you company in your infirmity.”
Geralt glares at Lambert across the table. “I’m still well enough to thrash the likes of you.”
Lambert only laughs and stands as well. When Vesemir looks at him sharply, he rolls his eyes and starts off down the hallway that Ciri knows leads back to the grand front doors. Eskel and Coën stand next. Eskel gives Geralt a strange look that’s like compassion and mockery in one and glances over to Ciri with a discomfited expression, and then he and Coën go back the way they’d come from, up toward the stairs that theoretically reach the roof.
“Keep an eye on your girl, hm?” Vesemir says, once the room is empty, with an eyebrow raised at Geralt. Ciri bristles first at being labeled as Geralt’s and not as her own person, and then at the implication that she’s some unruly child that needs to be watched over.
Geralt answers evenly and easily, though. “Ciri will be fine.”
Vesemir goes off through yet another passageway.
Geralt stands and gestures for Ciri to do the same. “We’ll get your cloak first.”
“A ghoul bite?” Ciri asks, as she stands. She doesn’t ask Geralt questions very often, but she thinks maybe she ought to start. Especially if she’s going to be staying in this drafty, mysterious place. At least Geralt should be accessible to her. “Is that what’s been wrong with your leg?”
Geralt makes a displeased noise to the affirmative. Evidently, he does not want to talk about it. He starts off toward the stairs, after Eskel and Coën.
“Eskel and Vesemir seem to think it’s serious,” Ciri presses, following after him, ducking around him to look at his face.
His expression is noticeably pinched. “Eskel and Vesemir are overprotective. My leg is fine.”
“You have been limping.”
“Ciri—”
“Aren’t ghouls supposed to be nasty, decaying things?” She doesn’t know where she gets the courage to push like this, when Geralt is obviously trying to draw a line. “The soldiers would tell stories about seeing them on old battlefields, and they said a single bite was toxic.”
“Not toxic,” Geralt corrects, drily, wearily. “They don’t have poison or venom. Ghoul bites start necrosis. Decay.” He starts up the stairs. Ciri puzzles, disgusted, over the implications of that information.
“Do you mean to say that your leg is rotting away under those bandages?” she calls after him, and then realizes that he moves very quickly for someone with a leg undergoing necrosis and starts up the stairs after him.
“My wound was treated by a druid, luckily,” he calls back, now drier and with a hint of sarcasm. “It’s not rotting. It’s just a wound. It’s almost healed, anyway.”
A druid. Ciri remembers Mousesack, with a pang, remembers what the doppler had told her. Dead. Captured in his attempt to protect her. Killed by the Black Knight, most likely. The overabundance of food in her stomach turns threateningly with guilt and nausea, and she puts a hand over her mouth to keep both inside.
Geralt must have noticed that she’s stopped prying, because he’s looking at her, concerned, when she comes back to herself. She pulls her hand from her mouth, struggles with where to put it. Remembers that she has pockets now.
“I only ate too much,” she says, trying to look appropriately unconcerned. “I don’t think all the cheese is agreeing with me.”
Geralt does not look entirely convinced—or else he’s worried about something else—but he nods and beckons her on.
They fetch her cloak. (“This hall is all bedrooms,” he tells her. “You’ve probably figured that out.”) She follows Geralt back down the stairs in queasy silence. They retrace their steps back through the main hall, and out toward the main doors. She gives Geralt a questioning look.
“I thought we’d go to the stables, first,” he says, reaching out to push against the huge doors. “Be good to see Roach.”
“Isn’t Lambert out there?” Ciri asks, disdainful. She hasn’t quite decided that Lambert isn’t her enemy, and he’s certainly annoying enough to be avoided. He’d cemented that much this morning.
Geralt sighs in a way that tells Ciri he understands her hesitance. “He’ll get easier to deal with in time. He’s always worse with something new to harp on.” He opens one of the doors in a smooth swing, and after he and Ciri pass through, pushes it closed after them.
Lambert is, indeed, in the stables. Or, rather, in a stall: Geralt and Ciri find him lounging behind his mouse-grey horse, laying out cards in the scattered hay.
“Didn’t know gwent could be single-player,” Geralt says, and surprises Ciri with the levity in his voice. It’s almost apologetic. “Must be the only way you can win.”
Lambert glances up with a grin. “We’ll see, won’t we. We might even have a chance at a proper game tonight, if Vesemir stops mother henning over your sorry ass.”
“It’s your ass that’ll be sorry if Vesemir finds you slacking off,” Geralt hits back. “I’m going to show Ciri around.”
Lambert waves his hand dismissively, and places another card on the ground. He looks up again, though, peering inquisitively at Ciri. That shit-eating grin of his spreads across his face. “Did you know, Geralt, she looks an awful lot like you, bundled in all that trainee gear. Could almost pass for your own kid. If I didn’t know better, I’d ask if you fooled around with that lost Cintran princess.”
“Leave it,” Geralt growls, abandoning his levity, but Ciri isn’t paying the slightest attention. She is feeling angry, and grieving, and such a disgusting and disrespectful comment about her dead mother is the last fucking thing she’ll let this red-headed rat of a man say to her. She snatches a metal horseshoe from the wall and hurls it full-force at him, narrowly missing the horse.
Lambert bats it out of the air with the back of his hand before it manages to hit him, and then winces and makes a loud noise of complaint, shaking his hand out. His horse whinnies, distressed, and kicks up hay from the stable floor. Ciri stands, seething, and wishes it’d hit him right in the ugly face.
“Do not speak of my mother,” she hisses, cutting off Lambert’s indignant stream of complaints. “Never again. I am not a soft target for your mockery.”
Lambert falls quiet, and looks at her appraisingly. (It’s Geralt’s expression, fleetingly, the same look in different eyes.) “Message received,” he says, after a moment, with an air of performative nonchalance. “Spitfire, you are.” He pushes himself to his feet with the hand that hadn’t hit the horseshoe, and lays a hand on his horse to calm it. “Watch the horse next time. Princess.”
He doesn’t say the title tauntingly. He considers her for a moment more, and then stalks past her toward the stable doors. He stops just beside Geralt, a hand on his shoulder, mouth by his ear, and says, lowly, “You’ve got a lot of nerve, bringing a human up here. Much less a princess. Royal child surprise. Must make things easy, being the Old Wolf’s favorite.” He pushes himself off of Geralt’s shoulder with force enough that Geralt rocks slightly from it.
Ciri exhales one more time, hot enough to steam the cold air outside the warm stable, and is suddenly aware of Geralt’s attention on her. She looks over and finds his expression unreadable.
“I’m not going to apologize,” she tells him, defiant, turning her chin up and straightening out her shoulders. She feels like a child under his gaze, self-conscious, like she should be ashamed of herself. She’s not. She has a right to strike out in anger if she wants to. She has a right to move without thinking, she has a right to defend her mother’s name. She doesn’t feel ashamed. “I’m not.”
Geralt reaches out and places a hand on the top of her head. Ciri finds herself deflating quickly, losing the rigid structure of her shoulders until she’s looking up at him from a pout rather than resistance.
“He shouldn’t have said that.” Geralt looks at her for a moment longer, still unreadable, and then adds, “Watch the horse next time.”
He moves his hand from her head. Ciri follows the motion to stand just a bit closer to him, her anchor in the moors of Kaer Morhen. “What did he mean by that? The bit about bringing a human up here.”
Geralt gives her another of his silent, piercing looks. She’s getting rather sick of that.
“You’re the first human in Kaer Morhen for decades now,” he rumbles. “There’s no problem with you. He’s looking for things to complain about.”
That doesn’t answer Ciri’s question, and she’s sure he knows it. Saying that she’s an outlier for being here and being human does not explain why she’s other to all these men. She frowns at him. He turns to start explaining the ins and outs of the stable to her. (The highlight, at least, is that Geralt becomes near animated, brushing Roach and feeding her a near-frozen carrot. It’s a relief from the heavy air that’s hung around them all morning.)
After the stables (which really are multiple stables, she finds, it’s just that the witchers currently here only use one of the lot), Geralt takes her for her tour through the keep. The hall she’s seen; the kitchen she’s seen; he points to the door of the laboratory and says that she’ll see it later, when they go to examine the monster part. In the meantime, he takes her to their library.
Ciri is really expecting much more than what the library turns out to be, which is two sets of table and chairs and a few rough-hewn bookshelves that are mostly empty and cobwebbed, save for a few leather-bound tomes and a small collection of colorful books. There’s a fireplace, but it looks as if it hasn’t been used in a long time. She sees a spider crawling up into the chimney and shudders.
“Not many books.”
Geralt hums, and looks around as if he’s seeing the room for the first time as well. “Had to restart the collection.”
Ciri looks up to question him, but he’s got that haunted look on his face again, so she disgruntledly jams a hand in her pocket and resigns herself to not knowing, for now.
Maybe, an idea springs to her mind, small and secretive, you could ask the others. Coën. Maybe Eskel.
She tucks that away for later consideration.
In the meantime, she sighs. “What’re you collecting, then?”
Geralt points toward the colorful books. “Coën likes romances. He brings them for the winter and leaves them here for the rest of us.”
“Do you all read romances?” Ciri asks, surprised.
He shrugs. “Lambert reads them, but he won’t admit it. Eskel keeps his books in his room when he has ‘em.”
“And you?”
“I’m not a reader. I stick to the bestiaries.” He gestures to the tomes (which, Ciri notices, are also cobwebbed along several volumes). After a few seconds of silently considering her, he takes a step toward the shelves. “Come look.”
That, Ciri thinks, is his way of appeasing her. Offering her information so she doesn’t have to ask questions. She goes to see.
Geralt lays one of the leather-bound books onto a dusty table, and flips through the pages. Ciri comes up beside him to watch him leaf through sheet after sheet of writing and drawings of creatures, some grotesque, some beautiful. The writing and the art changes from page to page. Most of it is more of a scrawl than anything, but she sees a few entries (because they must be entries, individual people’s contributions to the bestiary) with perfectly lovely writing. Maybe it’s Coën’s, she thinks. He might be civilized enough to have nice handwriting.
“Who wrote that one?” she asks, stopping Geralt’s hand on a page with nice writing that features a kikimora, spidery and spindly against the lovely looping script.
He looks surprised by the question, but the melancholy tinges that surprise. “I don’t know. These bestiaries are ones that survived. Their writers are long forgotten, by now.”
Haunted, indeed. Dead witchers everywhere you look. Ciri shivers. Geralt continues flipping through the bestiary pages.
“Here.” He stops at a page and puts a finger on the illustration. Werewolf, the entry reads. “That’s almost what the creature that attacked us looked like. Not quite though. Few key details; not human enough, and werewolves don’t have eyes that glow. They’re reflective, but that wasn’t reflection.”
Ciri examines the picture and agrees with his assessment.
“I suppose we’ll see,” Geralt says, still examining the artwork of a long-dead man, and then he closes the book and replaces it on the shelf.
The library is still strange, empty, and shadowed when they leave it. Ciri thinks she sees something move behind a bookshelf when she glances behind her on a whim, and her heartbeat picks up. Probably just a spider. Probably just a spider.
He takes her through a maze of hallways, next, and Ciri has no earthly idea where they could be going until they reach a window and he points out of it. Ciri pushes the glass panes open further and leans out. Outside, behind the keep, there is a field with a number of wood-and-metal contraptions.
“That’s the training grounds,” Geralt explains. “That’s where we’ll train. Keep strong for the winter. Get stronger for the Path, if we’re lucky.”
Ciri lingers out of the window, wind whipping her hair, to stare at the machines out on the training grounds. She thinks of her dagger. Then, with a particularly impressive gust of wind, she thinks of Eskel and Coën on the roof. She tilts her head up, but doesn’t see them. Not surprising. She’s a few floors up from the ground, but there are still levels between her and the roof.
Gigantic, this keep. It must have belonged to someone else, she decides. It’s far too large to ever have been occupied entirely by witchers.
It’s time for lunch, then. Geralt leads her back through the halls.
“Is the tour over?” she asks, and Geralt raises an eyebrow at her, but nods to the affirmative. “What about the rooms that you took me to before? Where we got these clothes?”
Geralt’s expression darkens. He’s not upset with her, but he very much does not want to talk about it, it seems. “It’s no matter. It’s a storeroom. We don’t use it anyway.”
It’s very much not a satisfactory answer. Ciri frowns and decides, privately, that once she has a better idea of how to navigate the keep and its inhabitants, she will go back to those rooms herself. She will see what the side-door leads to. It feels strange, thinking of going back through those rooms, psat chests full of clothing abandoned by children her age, but they’re only clothes. She will not be intimidated by a haunting that has yet to produce any ghosts.
In the hall, Eskel and Coën are wind-blown and red-cheeked at the grand table, a pot of the previous night’s dinner between them, and Vesemir sits stoic with a hunk of dried meat at the head of the table. Lambert is conspicuously absent. His stew is even less appetizing now that it is not warm and Ciri is not freezing and hunger-driven. She glances around the room, but it doesn’t appear that anyone intends to say anything. Her stomach is still slightly over-full from breakfast. She takes a bowl of stew anyway
“Is Lambs actually cleaning the stables, you think?” Coën asks, a few minutes into everyone eating, long enough that the silence has turned almost comfortable. Eskel makes an unflattering amused sound at his question, mouth still full of food.
“It’s possible.” Geralt pushes his spoon into his bowl of stew again. “He got into a fight with Ciri. He might just be chastened enough to put in some honest work for the day.”
“A fight?” Coën asks, eyes wide, and his gaze goes quickly to Ciri. “Surely you don’t mean a physical one.” He looks more curious than worried, which Ciri sort of likes. She entertains the idea for a moment that she could get into a physical fight with a witcher and still arrive, unscathed, for lunch, while he went to lick his wounds.
“Of a sort. Ciri threw a horseshoe at him,” Geralt tells him, and while he’s not looking up from his food, he’s got a dry, ironic sort of tone to his voice that Ciri thinks means he’s amused.
“A horseshoe?” Eskel exclaims, half-laughing, sending a rivulet of stew down his chin. He chokes on his food in the next second, and has to take a moment to double over to cough.
“You are an unprecedented young lady, your highness,” Coën tells her, looking a little exasperated.
Ciri tilts her chin up. Geralt has no qualms with her actions. She is not a scolded child. “It’s nothing he didn’t deserve.” Eskel is still laugh-wheezing under his breath as he straightens up and wipes his chin with his sleeve. When she follows her instincts to a gaze at the head of the table, though, Vesemir looks very much displeased. Ciri pulls herself back into Geralt’s shadow.
Going to the laboratory to figure out what the monster is turns out to be… boring. The laboratory itself looks impressive, glass tubes and jars of things up on shelves and several more books and loose pages with interesting alchemical recipes, but it turns out the process is both boring and grotesque.
Geralt unwraps from oil cloth the remains of the monster that he’d brought, which turns out to be the head of the thing. Ciri turns away, nauseous (and still slightly fearful, though she won’t admit it) from the sight of it. The only comfort she finds, though, is in a jar of what looks like pickled eyeballs directly in her line of sight. It’s awful. It’s only slightly better than looking back into that thing’s terrible milky eyes.
She doesn’t have anything to contribute to the process, either, especially when Vesemir seems less than pleased with her assaulting one of his witchers and probably would not take well to her interrupting. In the end, she situates herself on a stool a little ways away from Geralt and his strange old (mentor? father?) and wraps her new cloak around herself to wait. The fabric smells musty. She thinks she can smell the remnants of salt-sweat, the same kind that builds (built. Built. Past tense, always past tense, don’t cry Cirilla—) around her grandmother after battle or exercise. It reminds her starkly that this cloak used to be someone else’s, a lifetime ago. Same with all the rest of her clothes.
As Geralt and Vesemir pore over the creature’s head, performing experiments in the glass tubes and consulting old tomes, Ciri examines her cloak more closely. The jagged stitches she’d noticed the night before, done in an earthy brown color that clashes just slightly with the dark green of the fabric, are further proof that this garment had been lived in. Cared for. Repaired. She runs a finger over the clumsy stitching, over the old rip that they’re holding together, and over the puckered space where a button should be.
I’d meant to fix that, Eskel had said. Maybe it was his cloak, long ago.
Geralt and Vesemir adjourn from their conference with a sigh and a displeased frown, respectively.
“Magnet for strange things, you are,” Vesemir says, under his breath, and then louder, “We’ll figure it out. No point slaving after a problem that’s not going to be solved today.” He turns a calculating look on Geralt. “If you’re going to be picky about me looking at your leg, go tell Eskel to look it over. You won’t train seriously until he tells me you’re fit again.”
“Vesemir,” Geralt grits out.
“Wolf. Go find Eskel.”
Geralt makes a face of displeasure that Ciri finds startlingly childish on his stoic features, but he beckons to her a moment after. “Come on, Ciri.”
“Oh,” Vesemir says, stopping both of them as they start to move for the door. “And I’ll talk with Lambert. In the meantime, girl—” Ciri braces herself, expecting to be admonished, but he only looks tired. Fatigued. “Don’t go getting into fights you can’t finish. That’s the first rule of combat, understand? Good fighters know when to turn the other cheek. I’ve got enough problems in this keep.” He gestures for them to leave, then.
Ciri takes his advice into fair consideration. The heat of the moment has not been her ally, except that it has sometimes saved her life. The heat of the moment is what has her scream. It’s what keeps her alive. It also kills four men, though. It makes her a monster.
She has to learn to control herself, she decides. She has to learn how not to scream: she doesn’t even let herself consider learning how to control her unsettling power, not now, not when there’s no space for experimentation in a keep full of witchers that would certainly find issue with her suddenly presenting awful, destructive abilities. Realistically, she has to find some other way to defend herself, so that screaming will not be her only resort.
She thinks of the training grounds.