Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

*

The trouble with mind manipulation spells, or so Mousesack had always believed, is their lack of creativity.

Grown as he was among the isles of Skellige, he had been weaned on tales of unhappy princesses bespelled into unhappier marriages; of lords of all banners and temperaments under thrall for decades, for gain or suffering of their serfs; even of sorceresses, twisted to war for the whims of another. The bread and butter of bards, most of the tales followed that familiar scheme. The waking sleeper should break free at the last possible moment before destruction. Or, if the skald were more melancholy, only moments after, to find a lover killed, a kingdom ravaged, or a marriage made. Depending on which Jarl the bard played for, the story could swing either way.

Mousesack had always scorned both. Mind magic only ever proved as strong as the caster, and as creative. And Fringilla of Nilfgaard, it would seem, while strong and cold as steel, was as brittle as ice and as characterless, too. Inflexible, even. In feeling the shape of the spell draped over him like muffling snow, it became clearer to him the longer he pressed that she had intended its success rely on her overpowering her victim. An arrogant gamble, one which believed completely in her greater strength and in his dominated will.

And, indeed, after the death of his Queen (Gods rest her, restless She, the great Calanthe gone before her time), his will had been shaken to its foundation. The days of travel trapped within dimeritum, the physical discomfort of bondage and captivity, even the fear of what they would do with him, that nation of which he had heard the whispers-- rumors of disappeared mages, lost generations. The sight of Ciri disappearing down the thoroughfare towards freedom had shored up his heart. Over the days of travel, he tried his best to purge that last glimpse from his mind. If they took him and they wanted her, there could be only one fate awaiting him. A fate he could never allow.

When they finally flung him from the mage prison where he had starved and perished of thirst for seemingly endless nights, Fringilla smiled down at him as beautiful and frigid as her name would suggest. Mousesack had not struggled, not yet. It had been almost with relief that he let the numbing blanket of her will wash over him. From within its folds he listened. He watched. He waited. He learned.

They sent him after her like a bloodhound to Brokilon Forest. His body moved and it ate, drank, rested without him, and still he waited. Even now, as his torn and leaking boots crunched through the snow and old bones at its edges (think, Ciri! You know I would never travel in such unfit boots. Did I not sew every fallen tongue onto every boot you ever ruined, so that you might avoid your grandmother’s displeasure?) it was as if he watched from afar.

“But where have you been, Mousesack?" Ciri asked him. "How could you have found me?”

“I had to see to your escape, Highness. I would never have left you otherwise,” said his liar’s mouth.

“And this place we’re going, is it safe? Where-”

“Ciri,” the young boy said, Ciri’s companion, and drew her close for a whispered conversation. The spell pressed him forward even as he thrilled beneath its yoke, yes! The boy was incredulous. A good friend for the Princess if she was to survive. She would need more, however, than a canny ragamuffin with fast eyes. She would need her mentor.

It was time. Mousesack, having found every edge and corner and crack of the spell over his days of captivity, drew together his willpower like the trailing edges of a cloak. The spell pressed down on him, a disdainful hand. Pain unfurled through him as a warning and, when he did not yield, a punishment that grew with every moment. Even his body stopped with a choked sound he listened to as a stranger. Unmindful, he fought on, savaging at the boundaries of his imprisonment.

“Mousesack?” Ciri asked, voice tremulous. He pressed harder, and it was with his own lips he snarled. Unimaginative, he thought with cold fury and victory, unraveling, willing.

Such spells were hammers, one size fits every nail. Never accounting for the superior will of a victim to break free. He, Mousesack, court mage of Skellige and then of the great nation of Cintra (imperfect, bloody, stubborn headed Cintra, now in flames)-- and she thought to corral him like a broken horse to the bit! Nilfgaardian slag! As if his own venom fueled him, he felt the indomitable compulsion of the spell crack, just a hair. He gasped in breath with his own lungs, the first taste of victory.

The gasp turned into a scream. The might of the thrall slammed down on him like the door of the dimeritum cell that first night when the air still smelt of ozone and blood and shit. The next he knew, he had turned, hand gone to his hip for the knife he always kept there for herbs and alchemy ingredients and trimming uncouth fingernails. What had seemed the dullest, most unclever of traps squeezed and changed shape around him, like-- like--

A secondary spell beneath the first, should I try to escape.

“Children. Ciri,” he gasped, feeling and seeing all at once what was before him. Ciri’s eyes, round and wide open, brightening with dawning fear. The boy, dark eyes dagger-bright on Mousesack's hand even as he reached out to take Ciri’s elbow. Mousesack choked as a final wave of pain washed over him, straining to the last. “Run.”

“Mousesack-” Ciri began. The knife slipped from the sheathe. The boy grabbed her.

“Run, Ciri!” he cried.

They ran, thin legged like fawns, and he started forward, one step, two steps. Within the unbearable nothing of the spell, Mousesack reached for his last well of strength and in desperation threw all he had against the unbearable, the all encompassing, the pain.

Calanthe, blue and unmoving in the snow. Once wild, powerful, and terrible with love. Broken.

Eist, who had smiled as he left for war with his hands tight around the hilt of his sword, and who from the killing field never returned.

Cirilla, impatient and scared, brave brilliant like the North star.

He could not break the spell, not yet. But his feet stilled in the dead tussocks and the crisp, undisturbed snow, and if he could not break and run with them now, then he could keep himself here where he was tool to no one.

Breathing heavily, the sweat rising on his brow even in the winter freeze, Mousesack watched them disappear into the distance and grinned through the pain, though it punctuated every breath and heart beat like the punishment it was. Only once he was sure she was safe did he turn his gaze inward.

Alone, Mousesack stood in the field. A blade gleamed in his fist, and the wind drove by merciless, but still he stood.

*

Ciri runs so fast and hard that time loses her. All there is, is fleeing.

It is Dara who finally stops her with a hand on her arm. He drags her to rest behind a toppled giant of a tree half-buried in snow. Together, they crouch in the cold and wet panting fast, painful breaths as quietly as they can. Though they listen for a long time, even until their breathing quiets again, there is no sound of pursuit.

“Why,” she chokes, throat closing up with emotion. She hadn’t wanted to see that there had been something wrong. How could she have been so stupid? “His face,” she whimpers when she is able to speak, and brings her hands up to press over her face before Dara could see her cry.

His hand had been on his dagger. She had never seen his face so twisted, or the way every line of his body tightened, screaming of violence-- but his eyes. She had never seen him so afraid. Never heard him scream before.

Run!

When a hand touches her shoulder she nearly jumps out from behind their hiding place and runs again. Of course, it is only Dara, his eyes so understanding she could barely stand it.

(How could he be her friend if what he had said about her grandmother was true? How could he look at her? How could he live with his parents’ and clans’ deaths in his head?)

“Ciri,” he says, seeing she was far off and pulling her back. “He was under a thrall. I’ve seen it before,” he explains at her surprised glance. “They…” He hesitates for a long, long time. Long enough that she begins to think up what to say next, what question to ask. Breathing in deeply, he squares his shoulders in order to say, “Sometimes, raiding parties would use them to get into our hidden compounds and crawl spaces. Take one of our clans and send them back, spelled to act like they had escaped but then have them let the soldiers in.”

Tears do find their way down her face this time. Horrified, she can only stare, mouth opened. Closed. Opened. Pragmatic as ever, he tugs her cloak forward where it had begun to fall off and leave her cold and then takes her by the shoulders.

“We have to go. He was fighting it, don’t you see? He must be strong.” She shakes her head, slowly. He gives her a shake, once. “He’s given us time, we have to take it.”

“We have to split up,” she hears herself say, distantly. Dara rears back as if she had slapped him.

“What?”

“He’s after me, Dara, he,” she hiccups in a breath, fighting against the shudder in her shoulders until it is still. “If he’s under a thrall, then it must be the man with the bird helm. He wants me, not you. We, we have to split up, yes!” she cries when he shakes his head, as stubborn as always. Stubborn, and clever, and good. Oh, Dara, she thinks, and feels she could cry again. With great effort, she pushes down on the urge until it passes too.

“Meet me in Novriston,” she says all at once overtop his protests. “I passed through there once as part of a caravan to visit Temeria. There are lots of woods to hide in, and you might be able to find work as a stable hand. I’ll meet you there within the week, alright? Maybe by then… maybe I’ll have lost them, or he will have broken the spell.” Even trying as she is to sound more confident than she feels, it sounds weak. She can see Dara thinks so, too, though he visibly bites his tongue rather than say anything. After a long moment, he sighs.

“One week. You promise.”

“I promise. There’s even a little creek off of the Yaruga, if I remember. We’ll fish for trout to cook over a fire.”

Dara gives her a watery smile, which she returns weakly, before they crash together in a quick hug. Ciri lands a kiss in front of his ear before she pulls back and watches him take a final searching look over her face. Just as quickly, he turns and lopes over the quiet snow, leaving barely a footprint behind. As with the first time, she feels wonder (the myth is true, that elves leave no trails even in snow) and immediately shame. Shame for what, she can’t place, and so tries to forget it. Good, she thinks firmly as she watches him vanish into the trees, trying for pragmatism. Less of a trail for anyone to follow. There will only be her footprints.

Run, she hears in a distant echo, pressed into her back the shape of Mousesack’s wide-eyed, terrified gaze. She doesn’t look back the way they had come.

Ciri runs.

Chapter Text

*

Jaskier could remember the last time he had seen the inside of this particular Cintran tavern like it was yesterday. If he wasn’t mistaken (and he rarely was) the cobbler’s daughter had been dark skinned and dark eyed like a glowing night, and the people had had surprisingly many teeth in their smiles when he played the Fishmonger’s Jig, and his belly and his purse had been full after an evening.

The juxtaposition was all the more shocking when he wandered into town, intent on a profitable night, only to find it… well. The people in the market eyed him mistrustfully as he passed, what few of them there were. Half of the stalls sat empty of merchants all together, completely unheard of on Market Day. The other half hawked pitiful wares for thrice the price he remembered and had received in other similarly sized townships recently. He looked about and saw more guard and militia men than citizens, and no one smiled to see a bard in shot silk wander through. He instantly knew something was wrong.

“Haven’t you heard? The city of Cintra and the castle have fallen. The Queen and Consort are dead, and Nilfgaard pushes further past our borders every day.” Somehow, with very few teeth to guide the stream, the tavern owner managed to spit at his feet. “Now are you going to book a room or what?”

Or what indeed. “Indeed!” Jaskier declared with far more confidence than he felt and handed over the requisite bits. “Only for the one night,” he added hastily, skin crawling with a road hunger that was more than wanderlust. The owner eyed him critically, resigned, before grunting as he pocketed the coin. “With breakfast included, if you please,” he added, but the owner seemed not to be listening and, equally resigned, he turned away to seek better company. A single glance at the gloomy, brooding air of the common, where many a working man and woman seemed incongruously keen to nurse an ale in daylight hours, drove him just as quickly out the entrance again. For a man who had frequented armed conflict and tragedies alike, he couldn’t stand the gloom and doom which accompanied each. Better to translate them into a ballad, dramatic and distant, bold and fleeting, and then be done with it. Grief made his stomach twinge.

Unfortunately for his humor, the market proved no better, even as midday approached. With no hustle and barely a single bustle to keep him interested, Jaskier found himself drifting between stalls, idly considering a new pair of gloves or a new traveling cloak for the coming spring rains but finding himself not terribly serious about any of it. It was this lack of focus that had him watching the crowd, sparse though it was, and thus he had the wherewithal to spot someone who simply did not belong.

Jaskier had seen many an urchin in his time, and had seen nearly as many turning their trade on Market Day, pocketing anything from apples to gold baubles, depending on the town or city. This one, however, stood out in his memory against all the rest.

At first, it was merely a glimpse of the Cintran royal blue. Odd, he thought; the local guard was not assigned by the crown but paid for by the common folk in such a small, unnoteworthy backwater. The only royal colors here should be worn by criers, and they had nothing to cry with no mouthpiece to offer orders (rest Queen Calanthe the Lioness, may she sleep easily and without taking any more elves with her, thanks.)

No, Jaskier had spent too many days at court and then, after his… voluntary expulsion, entertaining at court to mistake that particular shade. Almost without questioning, he followed the cloak on unmistakably young shoulders as its wearer approached a fruit stall. With an air of indifference, the youth floated closer, examined, and floated away. The ruse was not terribly smooth. Jaskier even saw a flash of winter apple into one of the sleeves. Risky, he thought, considering the sparseness of the crowd. But the proprietor was busy with another customer, and the cloak moved away, looking here, looking there, and then turning--

A pale, triangular face. A snub nose, just slightly turned up at the end. He could even make out ashen blond roots which, with a shock, he realized were only obscured by a thin veneer of mud and grime. He took it all in, curiosity piqued, and as they passed each other he looked closely for surely-- something familiar... but what?

But a bard has a memory like no other. It came to him breathlessly. A princess. A cursed knight. A wedding. A Child Surprise. It all lingered there in the eyebrows, the starlight hair, the button nose and the impertinent gaze. They were unmistakable. For a moment he felt thirteen, fourteen years in the past, a cocky twenty-four overconfident and smug and self-pleased with the Witcher at his elbow at such a fortuitous occasion. Gods, but had he ever been so young and stupid?

And speaking of young and stupid.

Jaskier nearly tripped over his feet in his haste to turn as she passed and reached out an impetuous hand to grab her elbow; for yes, it was a young girl, and she was undoubtedly who he believed.

“Princess?” He gasped in undertone. As she turned her face it was just horrified enough to be confirmation.

“Let go,” she commanded, tightly, in a voice trembling with so much fear that instinctively he did so. Immediately she made as if to run.

“Wait!” He whispered, hands coming up and eyes widening into look I’m harmless, a familiar gesture. It gave her enough pause for him to continue, “Apologies, Your Highness--”

“Don’t call me that!” she hissed, crowding closer so as to keep her voice down from passersby. And indeed, their small collision had drawn a couple of looks from nearby shoppers. Almost without thinking, Jaskier hooked his arm gallantly through hers and, with his best projecting mummer’s voice, he exclaimed, “Daphne! But I hadn’t expected to see you here before the second bell!” When she looked askance, he muttered on the underside of a strained smile, “Look pleased to see me, Your Highness, and walk.” Gently, implacably, he tugged her forward and thankfully she followed. The thankfulness lasted only a moment before she leaned in, glaring daggers.

“What are you doing?”

“What are you,” he began, decided it was too juvenile, and pulled in a calming breath. Since the moment he had taken her arm, his heart had thundered in a way it hadn’t since, since, fuck, no don’t think of it. Pushing down on the rush of awareness, he smiled pleasantly at the fishwife as she wandered past before leading his young companion into a small alleyway, where none but a drunk and an unfortunate cur lingered. Given a moment to compose himself, he continued in a different strain, “Forgive me the impertinence, Highness, but I couldn’t help but notice you relieving that fruitmonger of one of his apples.”

The hand that had landed inside his elbow with all the rote of a lifetime's training immediately tightened to the point of pain. When he looked, her face was hard beneath the dirt and pale. She did not answer. She did not look at him. After a long moment of walking as slowly as possible through the privacy offered, he sighed.

“I recognize you. I was at your mother’s betrothal. And wedding, incidentally,” he added as an afterthought, reconsidering again the events of that night with its eternal sense of what the fuck. From his careful peripheral, he caught her surprised glance and turned to meet it. “You’re the image of your fair mother, Princess.”

Something softened in her face. “Thank you-”

“Which is why,” he continued in furious half-tone, leading her into another back alley rather than back onto the main street, “you should be more careful about shoplifting from fruit-mongers in broad daylight. Really! You’re not even that good at it! And the Nilfgaardian army is barely a day and a half away! What could you possibly be doing here, stealing apples?” he demanded, flabbergasted, and finding a secluded niche finally stopped and turned to face her.

Any softness brought about by mention of her royal mother had left her. Princess Cirilla, the Lion Cub of Cintra, stared back at him with all the imperious disdain which was her birthright and station. It might even have cowed him had she not been barely thirteen, and dirty, and scared down to her very bones.

“What do you want? I have nothing I can give you,” she said, firm and imperious and tremulous in a way that made her chin tremble. He balked.

“What do I-- oh no, no, no, wrong question, Your Highness. What I’m asking is what do you--”

“I want you to let me go!” She snapped, and pulled from his grasp. He let her go easily. “It’s, it’s no business of yours what I am doing,” she declared, every inch royalty in her moment. It fled her the next, leaving a scared little girl in its wake. She gazed at him anxiously beneath the resentment. “Please, let me be.”

“I can’t,” Jaskier replied instantly, and he found he meant it. Not just because she was a Princess, meant for fine halls and grand parties and something better than a shit-stinking alley in Kminekplac where its townsfolk saw fit to dispose of their refuse and chamber pots in overflowing gutters. Not even just because she was young, and vulnerable, and alone. No; he remembered, well he remembered that night, and Princess Pavetta’s despair and joy, the power of her voice. And, unforgettably, Geralt of Rivia in his fine silk jacket (and it was fine, thank you very much, nothing like a sad silk merchant) whose face had just momentarily gone blank and terrified under the threat of a Child Surprise. Who had saved him from a jealous husband and, at his glance, softened bold and untempered words in the face of two lords who could end them both. Stood as they were in a stinking pit, the memory seemed too distant and yet so close at once, as all remembrances are; hurting like a wound, so distant and so close at once.

A kind of boldness overcame him.

“Let me help you,” he said.

After a long, squint-eyed moment of suspicion, her chin thrust up defiantly.

“I won’t lay on my back for you.”

“Lie on your-- no,” he retched, horrified, but her face remained as it had, cagey, untrusting, and jaded. Between one moment and the next, he swallowed down bile and pity and fought to show neither whilst he scraped up something to say. “Princess, no. I want nothing so vile from you, I promise you.” He held out a beseeching hand, and while she did not take it she also did not flee and that held promise. “You must leave this place, immediately. You need accompaniment,” he pressed, and saw her eyes shutter, suspicion forming a void there which he did not know how to defeat. Desperation clawed out of his throat as he realized he was losing her. “You- you need to find Geralt of Rivia!”

(His mouth was open for a long moment after, dumbfounded at himself, before he closed it again. Funny, how unintended words may leap out of us.)

The change that came over her was immediate. She took his hand into a vice-like grip and crowded closer, close enough that he could smell her unwashed hair. He winced and tried not to show it.

“Do you know him?” She demanded. Speechless, he took in the hungry, piercing directness of her gaze and nodded dumbly. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know. But!” he added quickly when her face fell, “We have been friends- good friends-- the best of friends, even!-- for nearly 15 years. I can help you find him.”

Liar. Ooh, gods smite him where he stands.

“Really?” The desperation in her small, pallid face gnawed at his heart. He swallowed down his discomfort.

“Really. Let me help you, Your Highness.” Carefully, he looked left and right and, assured that they were alone, dropped to one knee in the filth of the gutter (though it really was fine silk, damn). Her eyes immediately filled with tears. He kissed her hand. “I, Julian Alfred Pankratz, offer myself into your service. On my honor, I will help you find Geralt of Rivia.”

His years at court had taught him the words, the motions. It had not prepared him to have stick-thin arms thrown about his shoulders in a vice.

“Thank you,” Princess Cirilla whispered into his shoulder, trembling. Stunned silent, he returned the embrace. “Thank you, Julian.”

He tightened his arms around her, heart aching unbearably for a moment too long for his comfort. He cleared his throat and gave her back a hesitant pat.

“Call me Jaskier, Your Highness.”

Chapter Text

Jaskier took her back to his room at the tavern, ordered (asked her nicely) to stay put, and promptly left to freak out. He ended up in the very same back alley they had been in before. His knee was still damp from genuflecting.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he chanted, dragging both hands up through his hair, only to roughly smooth it back down when he realized the mess he was making of it. He was still to perform tonight, after all. It seemed a distant and somewhat hysteric thought. He hopped the gutter, paced to the other side, turned, paced. “What have you done,” he demanded of himself, turned, paced, hopped, and had no answer, because he is an idiot. Typical. Par for the course. “What do I do with a princess?”

A man passing by him in the tight space glanced at him oddly. The blood drained from his face.

“Good ‘noon, sir!” He greeted merrily, bearing all his teeth in what he hoped passed as a smile of some fashion. “Don’t forget to come by the tavern this evening to hear the Ballad of The Princess Fair!”

“Fuck off.”

“Right you are,” he said, and watched frozen in his loon's grin until the man’s back disappeared out through the alleyway mouth. Only then did he slump groaning to the wall. His jacket was nearly sweated through with nerves, even in the cold, and he plucked at it uncomfortably with hands that just barely tremored.

When it was he all on his lonesome, well-known and beloved bard Jaskier, it had all been simple. The Nilfgaardian front, the fleeing masses, they had all seemed quite doable. Well, as far as a war can be considered doable. A bard on his own travels fast through uncertain lands. Even refugees and the fearful have a coin to offer for news and tales. Invading armies, too, though a soldier’s camp will always be the more dangerous. But a bard with a royal ward? The last surviving heir to the Cintran throne, which, surprise, happened to be the kingdom he was in, being invaded at this very moment oh gods forfend.

“Oooooh shit, why me,” he entreated no one-- not even the gods, literally no one, because he was the only acting character in this tragicomedy at the moment and he had no answers. He was Jaskier! Always in the wrong (right) (no, bloody wrong) place at the wrong time. Only this time, rather than a married woman or man, a jilted lover, a jealous admirer, oh-ho no, this time it was a princess. The urge to protect did not a protector make! He was soft! A fool with a lute and a winning smile! Why, why had he thought it a good idea to take her in?

Oh, but he knew. She was so small. Skittish. She was… mercy. Stop right there, he thought but couldn’t.

She was Geralt’s. Somehow, by hiccup of fate, he had been there the very night their destinies had been linked, and he couldn't help but think that perhaps, just perhaps, it linked him as well. To meet now, of all times, in a market like any other in a town like any other. The only man left to see a princess in place of another faceless war orphan. He could be the only man connected to her, to Geralt, to that night for a hundred miles.

He could be, he realized with a jolt, one of the only men for a hundred miles capable of recognizing her from more than description alone. The landed gentry were gone, and the staff of their castles and holdings fled with them. Who was left but he and the outlying serfs, abandoned to their fates? They had certainly never seen the late Princess Pavetta up close. Certainly not this princess; everyone knew the Queen kept her close in cotton wool.

Everyone who might have truly been able to recognize and help her, the powerful, their knights, all long gone. By some twisted, cantankerous prank of fate, Jaskier was the one who had found her instead.

She needs a knight, not a bard, he despaired with growing dread. And as it had for the past year with uncomfortable frequency, all his looming and all-encompassing sense of self-pity managed was to spark an old familiar anger in his gut.

“Geralt of bloody Rivia, great, witless stonepated oaf of a Witcher,” he fumed, aimed a kick at a half-rotten turnip in the lane and missed. “Where the fuck are you when your, your Child bloody Surprise,” he threw an arm out to motion broadly towards the road and inn, “fucking needs you? Nowhere, that’s where, you,” and where his first kick missed, his second landed. Unfortunately for him, the turnip was not nearly so solid as it had seemed. In an arc of mush, it burst and spattered stinking juice up the front of that boot and pantleg.

“Ugh!” he cried, swatting at the offended stretch of fabric with very little effect. It spotted the green-blue of the silk a dark greasespot. He threw his hands up in defeat, eyes turned skyward. “Great! Just great.” The sky, predictably, had no response and did not make him feel in any way appreciated or sympathized with in his misfortune. This is why I perform tragedies and don’t star in them, he thought bitterly. At least with an audience misfortunes feel satisfying. He sighed heavily, not the big affected things done for a viewer but the kind of breath that made his shoulders sag, and allowed himself just a moment with his face in his hands.

“Where the fuck could he be?” he muttered to himself. For all his straining, he couldn't remember a single word breathed with the name of the White Wolf on it in the last fortnight. Not a rumor, not a sighting. Nothing. It was, frankly, unusual.

For Jaskier had tried, really he had, not to pay undue attention to rumors about the Witcher since they last parted ways. But a wandering bard wears a dozen hats, one of them being messenger cap. He always indelibly ends up installed as a focal point of gossip in whatever village for however short or long his stay. Almost as much as they wanted to hear what he had to say, people wanted to feel powerful. For peasants, that meant feeling heard. Each of them wanted to be the first to tell him some news of the Lord’s son’s elopement, of the white deer seen on the rural byways, and yes, of course, of Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf. Who was now, by greatest universal irony, nowhere to be kenned the one time Jaskier actually wanted the news. So where the hell could he be?

Slaying monsters, bedding sorceresses, and having absolutely no friends, a practical yet unfriendly part of him posited. Pithy, yet useless. Like me, he thought less practically.

For a long moment, Jaskier stood brooding. It was an act most unlikely and, some would even say, unheard of for a man of his temperament. Geralt of Rivia did that to him, damn him. Or rather his memory, as it was all he had left these days.

The brooding lasted just long enough for him to become disgusted with himself, and that was that. Jaskier gave himself a brisk shake, clapped sharp hands to his cheeks, and turned back from the alley.

He had declared that chapter of his life done, and so it was. This was just a... a footnote. An epilogue, even! The last entangling strings of destiny cut and tied into a neat little bow. He would get the princess to Geralt, perhaps glory in his sour-puss outrage at being forced to face the very destiny he had run from for over a decade (ha!), and then Jaskier would return to his lucrative and successful career. No more binds between them.

He might even get to give Geralt a piece of his mind, just to put a finer point on it. Oh, but he had scrolls' worth of grievances to air.

The village bell struck the hour, startling him from his thoughts. It was only the hour after noon. The market would still be open, he thought, and struck with inspiration he strode from the alley with a purpose.

It was only an hour later Jaskier found himself clambering up the narrow stairs to his-- their-- room, parcel in hand and an inkling of a plan in tow.

He swung the door wide without thinking. It was only when Cirilla, previously curled up in bed, sat bolt upright and wild-eyed that he realized his error. He winced.

“Apologies! Apologies, uh, Your Highness.” He nudged the door closed behind him with his heel, intensely aware of her posture and how it hadn’t relaxed even a hair. Instead and in heightened silence, she half-hovered by the bed, one leg off and poised still as if to run. Awkwardly, he cleared his throat and held out the parcel like an apology. “I’ve got you some new clothes from the market. I had to guess your size but, well, a man at court for so many years begins to pick up such things. I'm afraid I didn’t get you any shoes-- those are a bit harder to size by eye, of course, but we could fetch you a pair if need be,” and if my purse can afford it, but he couldn't say that. When she continued to stare, he cleared his throat again and moved away from the door, keeping distance between them but no longer blocking the only exit from the room. Incredibly, it made her shoulders loosen down from around her ears. As if just remembering, she finally finished rising from the bed.

“From the market, you said?” she asked, a touch sharply. He blinked.

“...Yes?”

If anything, that finished what his unblocking the exit had started. By no means relaxed, she at least approached him to take the package off his hands. The slow way she did so suggested a girl with a lot on her mind. What's more, she seemed unable to meet his eye for more than a moment. No matter; he was patient. He waited, keeping his freed hands loose and relaxed at his sides.

When she spoke, she seemed to have to force the words out. “A… a noble woman and her family who were helping me at the refugee camp,” she began, stopped. Her eyes flicked up, over his shoulder and back as she ran a soothing and most likely subconscious hand across the brown bundle. “She forced her footman, a gnome, to give me his boots to replace my torn slippers,” she said at last, tight with shame. The rest practically tumbled out of her. “I, I didn’t know what to do. They were being so nice to me, I just. I kept them. They were so awful to him and he needed them as much as I did but he- and that night, h-he--” She pressed her lips so hard together they whitened. It didn't stop the one from trembling.

Alarmed, Jaskier reached careful hands out to cup over her shoulders. He didn’t miss for a moment the way the first sign of movement had her eyes up and watching them move closer. She tracked them until they moved out of her sight unless she turned her head. For this, he was extra gentle as he squeezed, and paused hard. Her shoulders were so thin; they pressed like two daggers into his palms. Why hadn’t he thought to feed her before leaving her up here?

“Hey, it’s alright.” When she looked up at him she fairly thrummed with tension and a tangle of emotions held back so tightly she seemed wound to pop. He swallowed. “You don’t have to tell me while it’s still raw, Princess Cirilla.” After a long moment examining his face, she gave a tiny nod. He squeezed again, voice softening. “I do think I understand. I promise you that these clothes were paid for with coin alone. Well,” he added, cheek dimpling just a tad, “and my dashing good looks. You know, I believe the tailor was flirting with me? I’m almost positive she lowered the prices because she fancied my hair.”

A half-hearted twitch of her lips was all he got, but it was better than what he started with. Satisfied she was well for the moment, he stepped back to give her space. The last thing he wanted was to make her feel trapped. She seemed unaffected, however, wiping her eyes with the back of a hand before looking down at the little parcel to untie its closing twine. He held back on the urge to fill the quiet by babbling, just. He found himself fidgeting instead.

Wrapped inside were woolen hose, breaches, and a tunic, along with a pair of leather gloves. He had been somewhat unsure of buying them, but the market had been wrapping up and he had only seen the one on her. They had the smallest trim around the wrist in rabbit. She glanced up at him, eyes startled wide.

“This must have cost you far too much!”

“Not at all, Princess,” he said, and tried not to let it show on his face that, yes, it had greatly deplenished his saved coin. He was being quite heroic and gallant, he felt. "They are only basic garments I'm afraid, but they'll be warm in the cold."

“I can’t possibly accept--”

“Please, Your Highness, it’s really-“

She huffed out an annoyed breath.

“Ciri,” she snapped.

Jaskier blinked. “Pardon?”

“Call me Ciri. You don’t have to call me by title all the time. It’s not like there’s a court anymore,” she said bitterly, eyes turned down. “And my clothes are already warm enough. Please, take them back.” He scrambled to catch the package that she pressed back into his arms as if she couldn't wait to let them go. She looked steadfastly away from his open-mouthed confusion, hands clasped together over her stomach. He thought, just for a moment, something about her brows before they smoothed out-

“Ah,” Jaskier sighed in realization, running a hand over his face. He had thought… “Ciri.” He tried not to smile when her head jerked up. “Do you want to know how I recognized you in the market today?”

“You said I look like my mother,” she replied, but even now she sounded unsure, as if the question had wrongfooted her out of her simmering stubbornness. He hummed.

“And you do. It was your cloak that first caught my eye, however. Not a lot of people out here wearing Cintran blue,” he said pointedly, and was immediately gratified when her eyes widened. “Or fine court clothes for that matter. It makes you a target. If we are going to get you to Geralt of Rivia safely, that is the last thing we can afford.”

She didn’t respond, at first. In the uneasy silence of the small room, voices from the common rose up like the voices of unsettled spirits in the underworld beneath their feet. The image would have been more fitting if the place hadn’t stunk of stale beer, old onion, and pipesmoke, and if someone hadn’t been steadfastly slurring their way through a shouted rendition of the Fishmonger’s Daughter. Still.

He held the clothing out to her again. "Go on. I promise my purse will recover."

Unmindful of his observation, Ciri ran a small, white hand over the wool of the hose stacked on top, dyed a pale buttercup gold against the warm brown wool folded underneath. It was, he felt, a handsome pairing for having been pieced together in a flea-bitten half-abandoned market. When she took it back, carefulness so at odds with her dismissal before, it looked well against her skin. He held his breath.

“I understand," she said, softly. "Thank you." He thought he saw something sad about her eyes before she tucked the little vulnerability away again, a bird behind a low passing cloud. He deliberated a moment but decided not to say anything of it. “You are most welcome,” he chose to intone gallantly instead. Leaving her to look the pieces over, he bustled about the room. His lute he removed to the far corner and his travel cloak as well before he wandered over to the dressing screen folded against the wall near the tiny hearth of their room. There was one thing he could think of which would definitely please her.

“How about we get you changed and we can head down for a late lunch, then?” He struggled with the panel for a long few moments, cursing softly when it resisted and caught as it unfolded. Once he had it in place, her silence began to prick him. He turned. “Ciri?”

She stood where he had left her, the pair of breeches and tunic unfolded in her hands. They were all passable condition, though none nearly so fine in color or material as her own clothes, of course. Perhaps the least luxurious of her life, but they would have to do. After he had waited long enough that he considered calling her name again, she looked up at him as if having just heard him.

“Jaskier?” she asked, voice hesitant. It clicked. Ah, right.

“Ah, right,” he said. “Just, um. One teeny-weeny little thing.”

*

After explaining his grand plan to his unconvinced royal ward, she at least agreed to try the clothing on. The worked in grime under her nails had Jaskier calling for a bath to be brought up first. For caution’s sake he had Ciri stand behind the changing screen as the tub was brought up and filled by two maids with iron banded arms. After a thought he also had a late lunch brought up as well and was immediately proven right when Ciri fell upon it with all the decorum of a street urchin. He couldn’t fault her. He had been so hungry, once or twice.

The bath she refused immediately.

“I said no,” she retorted, the exact same tone she had used on the last two denials as well. No matter how he dipped and flailed she refused to meet his eye, glaring sullenly out the window instead as if he weren't there. He wanted to pull his hair out and had for a while now. He just might have given it another yank if he hadn't recalled his evening performance. He was already looking frazzled as it is.

“And I say you need it, desperately. Fragrantly, even." She didn’t deign to respond. He had hoped to at least provoke a disagreement. He tried a different route. “Be reasonable. Where is the sense in putting on clean clothing when you’re still dirty?”

“I’ll be fine,” she muttered. His answering strangled groan came out before he could stop it.

"Why?"

Stony silence. Slowly, she turned to look at him.

"Please, help me understand, I beg, nay, I implore you. What could possibly be so bad about a nice, hot bath when you're positively caked in mud? Most consider it a revitalizing luxury! Even a necessity, something I cannot help but agree with, so please-"

“You’ll look." She spoke in an undertone so low he barely caught it. Quiet it may have been, it still cut him to immediate silence. He stared. She stared back. It was the old caution returned, her unwavering gaze even as she continued to slowly but surely devour their entire loaf of bread like it might disappear. Dawning realization became horror.

I won’t lay on my back for you.

“Gods damn me,” he blurted, startling both of them. Breathing deeply in abject disgust, with himself, with the world, he took a moment to regain his composure. Kneading furiously at the bridge of his nose didn't help, per se, but it gave him time to squeeze his eyes shut and call himself names. The blaring failure on his part to clarify that he would not be present while she bathed became so staggeringly apparent that he nearly couldn't believe it.

“Jaskier?” Definitely a hint of panic there. As if he hadn’t already felt abominable.

“No. I apologize. I am, in fact, an idiot,” he proclaimed when she seemed about to continue. Ever aware of her eyes following him, he crossed to his lute, pulled it from its case, and turned smartly on his heel.

“A proposal, to set your mind at ease,” he said, as if they were at a gala or ball and not in a dirty, somewhat drafty room above a tavern. "I will play for you while you bathe. I will sit for as long as you say with my back to the changing screen. You’ll hear where I am at all times. Like so,” and with great showmanship he flicked a nail across all of the strings. "Would this be amenable?"

Chewing slowly, she looked from his hands on the lute, to his face, to the screen. Her gaze flitted back around when he took a few steps closer to better see her eyes-- and so she might better see his. He was a man of the court; he could press his sincerity with the best of them. “I give you my word as a gentleman that I would not break your trust by impinging upon your privacy, now or at any time in the future,” he said lowly, face utterly serious for once. He only just resisted the urge to add despairingly and also you are a child and should not even have to think of this and I’m so, so sorry. “I know, however, that that might be a difficult trust to extend to a stranger, so allow me instead to offer you certainty.” He raised his lute by the neck, giving it a small wiggle and twang. “Can you agree with that?”

Her eyelashes flickered against her cheek when she looked down, as if her fingers slowly pulling apart the heel of her bread held all the answers. No matter how closely he looked, her face was utterly inscrutable. Something about the quality of the long pause made Jaskier more anxious than any king or lord ever had. Considering he was a man with a long list of indiscretions under his belt, this was no small feat.

When it became apparent it would continue to stretch on, he decided words were not enough. Crossing to the screen drew him closer to her. When she looked up to watch him, he made sure to hold her eye as he paused his route and inclined his head in a small bow.

“My humblest apologies,” he sighed. “I should have made it clear first and foremost that I would not be present when you bathed. As I said, I am an idiot. I can admit that I don’t have much experience with…” Calling her a child would just as likely put her back up again. He knew enough about teenagers to know that.

“Women?” she suggested helpfully. Her nearly puckish tone made his jaw drop. He stood straight up.

“Wom-- excuse you! I was going to say girls, thank you! Young girls! As in children, one of which you are!” he exclaimed, a single outraged hand fluttering and stabbing an accusing pointing finger through the air. Her little hiccup of a laugh froze it midair. Quickly, she hid her smile under a hand, turning away again.

Short though it may have lived, it did lift some of his shame. Quick to hide his smugness at her bright little face, he turned and huffed his way behind the screen, all the while exclaiming to the ceiling, “Women she says! Pah! Hah! I’ll have you know I have quite a lot of experience, thank you ever so kindly,” he called back over his shoulder. “I am actually quite a sought after man when it comes to courtly love.”

After a moment, once her little snickers had faded and he had settled as comfortably as he could, he realized he hadn’t heard her move.

“...You’ll play the whole time, right?”

He played a simple series of notes.

“Until you tell me to stop,” he affirmed. Patience, he reminded himself. Patience.

He heard the unfortunate singer downstairs, butchering a ballad. He heard people in the streets, a cart passing with a crooked wheel, a donkey bray. He heard his own breath, and quickly held it as if it might offend. Then, he heard her stand and cross to the tub on light feet and in the privacy behind the screen he smiled to himself.

“Tell me,” he called back over the partition, picking thoughtfully at a familiar tune, “have you ever heard the Tale of the Ivy Tree?”

*

Once she had finished bathing and dressing, Ciri called him out from his self-proposed exile. It couldn’t come soon enough. Jaskier had overestimated his body’s ability to sit on hard wood for extended periods. It acted a very unwelcome reminder that he was no longer nineteen, running after adventure and danger. Just the thought made him sigh wistfully. How unlucky was man. Was it that they were each afforded only a limited number of hours spent happily on hard floors in their life? Only so many times one could hop up as if the hour had been spent on the lushest of ladies’ couches? If so, he had spent through his hours fast and early. Completely worth it, but still. Such a shame.

Creaking like an old house in a hard wind, he managed to unwind himself enough to turn out back into the room proper almost at full height. Stood in the middle of the room, Ciri hesitantly lifted her arms, more like a princess showing off her new gown than a, uh, well, a princess showing off her new ill-fitting tunic.

And it was ill-fitting, that he could see immediately. A little too large in the shoulders, too broad in the chest and hips. The way it draped her made her appear even smaller and thinner, younger as well. He smiled.

“It’s perfect.” She squinted at him, but he really did mean it. It would do the part splendidly. “How do you feel?”

She shrugged, an unprincessly little jerk that startled him to smile. Perhaps realizing he would wait for an answer, she finally suggested,

“Like a bard’s apprentice?”

He clapped his hands together, pleased and grinning and only slightly penitent when it made her jump.

“Exactly!”

Somehow, getting the princess to let him dress her as a boy and now to let him cut her hair was less painful than getting her into the bath. He had barely suggested it before she agreed. Perhaps seeing his look, she frowned up at him-- or rather, down her nose, unimpressively small and buttonish though it may be, and placed both fists on her hips.

“What? Am I meant to cry about it because I’m a girl?”

“Wh- no, not at all, why- why would you think, I, it’s,” Jaskier held up warding hands, utter innocence in a doublet. He reached for his old fall back. “You just have such lovely hair! If I had such hair I would hesitate, myself, is, is what I thought. You, uh, please,” he gestured absurdly broadly to the one chair in the room, dragged to sit in the weak light puddling in from the one window. “Have a seat.”

Still somewhat ruffled and most definitely unimpressed, she sat and let him wrap a hand towel from the wash basin about her shoulders.

“Have you ever cut hair before?” Ah, there was the hesitance. He smothered a smile, pulled a lock to just beneath her ear, and snip! She jumped and glared over her shoulder. He turned her head back with gentle hands, murmuring dryly,

“I promise I won’t disfigure you too permanently, but yes, I have, actually.”

Later that evening, as she touched the curling licks of hair around her earlobes with a little self-conscious newness, Jaskier couldn’t help but feel it a job done well. In the flickering rush-lamp lighting of the commons, in her new wools and with her hair and eyebrows darkened with a good portion of the expensive dye he kept in his pack (“For your grey hairs?” “Excuse you, I have none!”) she looked, well…

“Dinner for you and your wee apprentice, bard, and the ale and watered wine, too.” As it would so happen, the mistress of the tavern boasted a far more personable attitude to her husband. It would also happen that she was soft hand for children, as became apparent when she added alongside Ciri’s sleeve a glossy, fruit-studded roll. “And a sweet bun for you, there's a good lad.”

“Th-Thank you,” Ciri stuttered, eyes flickering nervously to Jaskier and away. He wondered, briefly, how many interactions she had had in her life with anyone outside of the nobility. Seeing how she stared when the good woman leaned closer, figured low.

“What’s your name, misiu?”

“Fion.”

“Fion. Well,” she said, as if Ciri had said something truly endearing and, reaching out, laid a gentle hand just momentarily on the little wool cap she had over her now dark hair. It fluttered away a moment later. Ciri stared. “Tell me, how does your master treat you? Well I hope?”

Ciri glanced at him again, a clear call for help this time. He set down his ale and hurriedly wiped the foam from his top lip.

“Madam,” he said, and only smiled beatifically at her less-than enthusiastic glance. “Your concern does you credit. You’ll have to forgive my nephew for, you see, he is still quite shy. He is only at the beginning stages of his apprenticeship, and the war has been difficult on him.” He leaned conspiratorially closer and sotto voce disclosed with appropriate chagrin, “You see, our family hails from the capitol and his parents…” All it took was lowering his eyelashes in mimed tragedy as he trailed off suggestively.

Predictably, she melted into the utmost agonies of sympathy. Jaskier kept the act up just long enough to gently prod her from their table, where Ciri sat most unconvincingly stiff and still. (He really would need to work with her on that.) With many a promise of more sweet buns if only he should want, sweet little thing, and another ale for you, bless you, the good woman floated back to the tavern bar in a prodigious swirl of skirts. Sighing with satisfaction, Jaskier sat back and, when he couldn’t help it, hid a grin into his ale. She was bringing another, after all.

“How did you do that?”

“Hmn?” he mumbled, half-turning. A frustrated little face greeted him.

“How did you lie like that?” For a moment he was afraid the question came from a place of castigation, which wouldn’t do at all if they were to be traveling companions. But no, her face read only curiosity. It was, in fact, perhaps the most open he had ever seen her. “So easily, like it was real?”

He floundered a moment. A deep drink from the tankard only gave him so long to think.

“Well…” He hedged. "Um."

For a moment, he watched the people of the common. It was the first time in some years that he could remember being baffled for words. Most of his travel companions were, well, fellow professional liars (bards) and those who lived long in the world of politics (everyone else). Accomplished liars, each and every one of them.

In contrast, he couldn’t remember the last time he had actually traveled with, or sat within five chairs of, a child. Could that excuse her apparent guileless query, he wondered? After all, to weave a story was second nature to him and had always been his talent even as a youth, before he had landed on his calling like a bird to its tree. Even when his father had demanded he learn swordplay and wrestling with the other boys and squires; even when faced with another beating from his old tormentors at temple school, his first and most powerful fallback had always been words, not brute force. Better to turn a tide than fight it. He had never needed to be taught. He simply… did.

For another moment, he allowed himself to sit and observe the room. Beside him, perhaps sensing his contemplation or simply doing as she would, Ciri watched as well. The common had filled with all that was left of the town or so it seemed in the din. He had seen it before. People faced with war yet too stubborn to leave tend to extremes. If they are not the quiet dread of murmured conversations before the fire, awaiting fate to come upon them like a hunting hound upon a wounded rabbit, then they are a cacophony of fierce, wild abandon. He always preferred the latter. Better to live life to its ends with fervor and joie de vivre. Even more so in the face of imminent death, destruction, and/or maiming. Regardless, they would be a good crowd for whom to play, and already he found himself subconsciously composing a list of songs to match their mood. That, at least, came easily.

Their corner, quiet and still in comparison, seemed a small slice of another world. From the corner of his eye, he watched his young charge, curious as well. She was all eyes, that one. Blunt in the way she looked at you, like someone usually allowed it even outside decorum. She watched the people, she watched the door, and she watched Jaskier. It reminded him, yes, he realized with growing dread; it reminded him of Geralt. Silent yet vigilant. Waiting for the fist and not the open palm.

Could destiny have connected them so, even across all the realms? It felt like an omen, an ill one. Even in the relative warmth and humidity of the room, a chill made its way down his spine. He couldn’t help but think it felt like the trailing finger, the subtle nudge of destiny. Brusquely he shook it away and said to his silly bard’s heart, stop right there. It was all well and good to make up a heart-wrenching story for a romantic tavern ma’am. He drew the line at doing as much to himself.

“Well,” he began again, voice low. Ciri jumped as if she had forgotten the question. He didn’t stop the grin this time and leant in close like two thieves scheming, aware of the busy tavern around them filled with ears. “A lie is just a story, right? Luckily for me, being a talented and well-traveled bard of great renown, I can find a story in anything. As a prospective liar, you need only come up with a story, believe it with everything you can, and tell it. It’s quite easy, actually, don’t know what that says about me.”

“But…” She poked at the sour dumplings in her soup. “But isn’t it harder than that?”

Absolutely fascinating. “How so?”

“How did you know she would believe you?”

He scoffed. “Easy. I knew it was something she expected or wanted to hear.” When that didn’t seem sufficient judging from the frustrated little mou of discontent, he motioned briefly for her to continue eating. Surprisingly obedient, she scooped another bite into her mouth. “Well, she showed an obvious interest in your well-being, for a start. She looked at you and saw a small, quiet, doll-eyed little boy in the middle of her rowdy, chaotic tavern. Who wouldn’t want to protect you? Who wouldn’t, already invested, feel their heartstrings further plucked by the tellings of tragedy? And look at the soup!”

She looked, perplexed. Mushrooms, leeks, onion, and little sour dumplings speckled through with herbs. He took the following shrug in good humor.

“I know you’ve not frequented quite so many peasant establishments in your time, dear nephew, but dumplings? Fresh chives and flour, eggs, soured cream? A bit rich for this crowd, yet served with no mark-up, and aplenty, likely from her own personal larder. No, the war has come too close, and she and her husband are going to abandon the tavern and try to flee. But as I've well come to know, there’s only so much any man or horse can carry. Flour is heavy and requires preparation to be eaten. Ergo, no one takes the flour when fleeing an invading army. Ergo, she’s trying to get rid of it rather than let the Nilfgaardians have it. Ergo, the dumplings when usually at best we would be served pottage.

"Then there’s the bun, of course. Most peasant inns bake their breads once a week in the large communal ovens at the end of the lane. Never on Market Day; too busy. That, however, couldn't have been baked earlier than this morning. Quick way to use up one's dry goods and have a little something to pass around and take on the road. Now. What does all of this say about our dreamy-hearted tavern lady? Well. Give her a tragedy where she expects one, some heartstring plucking at its finest by yours truly, and she gets the satisfaction of offering what comfort she can to a sad-eyed little boy in her last night here. We, meanwhile, get the satisfaction of not being questioned too closely. Most effective, I do think.” He leant back with arms opened wide, and there you are, nearly giddy with his own cleverness. Of course, then he glanced over and could have whined to find she paid him not a single mind.

Instead, as if mention of it had snapped her from the spell of his voice, she had turned to observe the little bun at her elbow like a horse does a snake. Gone completely was the impenetrable gaze she so often wore. Pale and too delicately, Ciri carefully picked up the sweetbun and gazed across the tavern at their hostess with something new and bruised that he hadn’t seen before. She frowned. As he watched, her grip tightened and began to crush it.

“Fion,” he said. Broken from her thoughts, she pulled in a sharp breath and drew back. He thought her breathing might be a bit too fast. Concern dowsed over whatever pleasure he had left in his speech. He tried to catch her eye, only to find it nearly passed through him. In the end, he gave up on it for a bad job. “Are you listening?” he tried again.

She cleared her throat. “Yes.”

“Then listen,” he said, seriously enough that her eyes darted to his. “She saw you, and she didn’t know who you were or where you had come from. All she saw was a child, and all she knew was that the Nilfgaardians are close and you look scared.” By the glance she cut at him, she didn't like him saying so. Better that glare, he thought, than the absence of before. “It was obvious she wanted to care for you, so I gave her a story she would believe and which would keep her from prying. Yes, it may also gain us both some sympathy. Yes, it kept you safe. But it didn’t only help us. I think it may have helped her as well.”

“How?” she asked, eyebrows pinched and unhappy. Slowly, broadcasting his movements, he reached across her to pluck the little bun from her crushing grip. She blinked at her hands and then at him as if she hadn't noticed.

“Helping others, even when we are most afraid, most weak-- it gives us hope. It gives the weak strength, the cowardly courage, and the low power. Power over something as big as war or as small as the happiness found in an unexpected treat. Take it.”

She shook her head mutely. When he took her hand, however, she didn’t fight. He pressed the little gift into her palm.

“To accept a kindness is a kindness itself,” he scolded gently. “She will be happy to see you enjoy it. Alright?” Silence. He glanced around the tavern and had a thought. “Would you like to hear what I think will happen?”

Just as silent, she nodded. Watching, always watching, with those strange, striking eyes. He rested his chin in his hand, watching her back with something painful sitting just behind the hollow of his throat.

“Tomorrow, she and her husband will likely pack a wagon. They’ll leave town and be long gone before the first soldier arrives. With any luck, they’ll start a new and even more successful tavern in some town that isn’t a gods-forsaken blot on a map where no man nor beast has ever done more than shit and die. Life will move on.” He nudged her shoulder with his, shook off the prickling melancholy, and took a long drink of ale. “With any luck, we’ll do the same. Well, pack up and move on, that is. I think I speak for both of us when I say neither of us has any designs on opening a tavern?”

He had hoped to get a smile-- any smile, really, even the weak little thing he had seen before. Instead, he was rewarded with a wide-eyed look of panic. It disappeared in an instance, so quickly he wasn’t sure what he had seen. Careful, carefully as hands picking through broken glass, she turned her eyes down to her lap and the little bun and she nodded. That was all the response he got. Underwhelming, to put it mildly, and off-putting. What could he do to get her to talk?

Patience, his own thoughts echoed back at him again. He sighed. His hand nearly spanned her back when it settled between her shoulder blades.

“Eat and go upstairs to sleep, little misiu,” he teased. When she flushed and glared, he grinned cheekily. “I’ll be up late performing for this rowdy lot and I imagine you’re feeling tired. We'll leave tomorrow, you and I. Go somewhere safe.”

Later, when he returned upstairs with a purse somewhat heavier for the effort and found her curled up on the bed breathing soft puppy-breaths beneath the quilt and her cloak, he could only smile through a sigh. Taking the extra sheepskin from the foot of the bed, he stoked up the fire with the last log, lay his doublet and boots nearby, and stretched out for a long night on the hearth.

*

Perhaps he slept lightly because his mind still ran heavy with thoughts of responsibility and destiny, and he dreamt of anxious things. Or it could be that he was no longer twenty-one. Even he, old hand at sleeping in strange places, could not get comfortable enough to drift deeply on the hearth.

No matter the reason, Jaskier came immediately awake at the sound of the door creaking shut. For a long moment he laid still on the old sheepskin, barely breathing as he strained his ears. The room was quiet. Distantly, he heard a cat getting lucky and a sound like someone on the floor below snoring. When no other closer sounds joined in, he breathed out long, assured he at least wasn’t being robbed. In staggered increments he felt himself relaxing as he pillowed his head back on his arm. Perhaps another tenant had come upon the wrong room only to find him sleeping within. A simple mistake, but surely they had seen he was but a bard alone and returned to their own-

He shot to his feet. His limbs went from dead asleep to buzzing in an instance. In the dark he stumbled on the rumpled sheepskin, yelped, and staggered about face to take in the ragged, empty quilts of the bed just barely visible in the grey moonlight. His heart plummeted then promptly leapt into his throat.

Without bothering with his boots, he paused only long enough to grab up the sheathed dagger he had removed with his doublet and ran for the door.

The corridor beyond was even darker than the room. He remembered the stairs were to his left, however, and that was good enough to set him running. He barely made it down the first couple steps and swore when one shoulder crashed into the stairwell wall when his stockinged heel slipped.

“Fuck,” he grunted, and took the next dozen at a resounding gallop. He hit the ground floor like a landslide but couldn’t bring himself to care if he woke the whole place. “Ciri,” he hissed into the ember-lit tavern, eyes darting shadow to shadow.

Where could she be? How had they been found so quickly? Could they have taken her right out from under him without him waking? Surely she would have called out, struggled! For a moment his mind flashed to the tavern ma’am, but he just as quickly dismissed the possibility. Even had Ciri trusted her, she wouldn’t have left with her.

“Ciri,” he called again, just a hair louder. He thought he saw a flash of movement at the open shutters and bolted for the door. He yanked at the handle and found it latched. It took him precious seconds to fumble the unfamiliar mechanism, his hands shaking all the while as his heart pounded. He imagined all the possibilities he might find on the other side in an instance — Nilfgaardian scouts, bandits, ransomers and kidnappers, even vampires (What! He was grasping!) — and yet he still barged out the door ready for a fight.

After the murky, dim interior, the moonlit street fairly dazzled him. He glanced up and down the deserted main street. The vague, tingling grip of panic took him by the neck. It did not stop him from spying the back of a figure darting down the nearest alley. He bolted.

“Stop!” He cried. The figure did not stop.

Within half a dozen strides he regretted not pausing to pull on his boots. Icy mud suffused the nice wool of his stockings instantly; he lost one altogether to the sucking muck before he even rounded the alleyway corner, but he found he couldn’t spare a moment to repulsion. Whoever he was chasing was fast; the alley was still and silent. He sped down the empty lane, dodging rubbish and the center gutter, and on a gut feeling turned down the next alley.

It paid off. He heard as much saw the figure just as they turned the far corner and apparently tripped over some unseen obstacle. They went down with a yelp and a wooden clatter. He was on them in what seemed like a heartbeat, unable to rightly recall the short sprint to get there. It was only as he rounded the corner that he registered that the voice had been rather high and the figure rather slight for a kidnapper.

He rounded the corner, half-untucked chemise trailing behind him and absolutely freezing winter breeze carving curlicues on his bare chest, his toes numb in half frozen sewage, and thought yes, quite enough of this. Impatient and high strung as he was, he barely hesitated to reach down and yank the assassin up by the arm. The weight of the dagger in his hand emboldened him.

“Enough!” he barked. “Tell me what you’ve done with-“

“Let me go, Jaskier!” Ciri demanded and twisted in his grip. In his shock he almost did. Thankfully, he regained his head in time and caught her again just as she managed to skip free.

“You,” he gasped dumbly, grasped her arm tighter, and found he didn’t know what he was saying. Ciri wriggled again. It gave her just the right angle to jam a pointy little elbow into his solar plexus. Old hand as he was at taking a punch, all she got for it was a startled grunt. He held fast. “Ciri! Stop!” He shoved the dagger into his back waistband and used his freed hand to take her other arm and turn her to face him. She squirmed fruitlessly. He found the boundary line of his patience.

“Stand still,” he ordered sharply. It was the first time he had used that tone on her. Hell, it was the first time he had used that tone on anyone in years. It could have been gratifying, how quickly she froze. Could have.

The moment of still gave him enough time to take in her state. She wore the clothes he had given her and her boots, the little cap, all kitted out for travel. He also saw what he thought might be her old cloak, knotted and folded into something like a pack slung from one shoulder to the opposite hip. It bulged with he knew not what.

She had obviously taken a tumble by the mud smeared on her right knee and her palms. She showed no other signs of having been harried, kidnapped, or otherwise endangered. When he glanced down, he saw they were standing amongst the scattered remains of what might have been a chair at some point. It was the only reason he had caught her, he realized. If she hadn’t tripped...

“Ciri,” he said slowly, trying for calm and authority and perhaps falling a bit short into exasperation. She glared sullenly back, breathing hard. He could feel her shivering. “What are you doing out here?”

“Why did you follow me?” She demanded mulishly rather than answer. He squawked.

“Why? Why?,” he sputtered, and against all odds felt a strange and hysteric laugh climbing up the back of his throat. “I thought you had been taken by- by Nilfgaardian scouts! Or vampires, even! Highwaymen! Do you know how afraid I was?” He hadn’t meant to say that last bit, really, but it jumped out nonetheless.

She shifted uncomfortably. It was the only concession he got. Her face had smoothed out, so unspeakingly still he reared back just an inch.

“You didn’t have to come after me,” she finally grumbled to his collar area.

“Of course I did," he gaped. "I absolutely did.” He felt as if he had left his brain and all his patience behind on the hearth. This, here, under the moonlight in the strange stillness of the nighttime village, felt like nothing so much as a dream from strong ale. What could have possibly compelled her?

“I promised to accompany you to find Geralt, isn’t that what you wanted?” he asked somewhat desperately. She remained utterly silent, gaze dropping down to her shoes. Frustration flared in his chest. “I was, I am trying to protect you!”

“Well, maybe I’m trying to protect you!” she snapped. His mouth clicked shut, outrage doused.

With a twist, she wrenched her arms from his grip. He yelped her name. Rather than run like he feared, however, she stood, fists clenched at her sides. She couldn’t mask the hopelessness in her expression with anger, no matter how she glared. It felt exactly like the elbow to his diaphragm had. “I- I’m so grateful for your help and e-everything you’ve tried to do, but it’s better if I’m alone. The man who’s after me… He’d kill you,” she said, and tears stood out in her eyes now so blatantly that she stopped trying to hide them. “All you’ve done is help me and he’d kill you for it. Do you understand? I can go alone, now! No one will recognize me, you made sure and- and now I can go.” She pressed closer for a moment, fierce and desperate and he had just awakened some bare minutes ago yet here they were. When he didn’t speak, her voice broke in the closest to a sob she had ever sounded. “Please understand. I have to.”

Jaskier has always been weak to pleading. Moving slowly, since she looked like the wrong blink would send her skittering off into the night, he crouched and held out his hands. When at first she didn’t move he simply lifted a brow. In truth, he wanted to grab her and not let go until she had promised not to run again. The longer their stalemate stretched, the more he felt it itching under his skin. However, just like before, his patience won out. She carefully slipped her hands into his. He dropped his head in relief and sighed out into his knees. He felt infinitely more tired when afterwards he tilted his head up to look up at her through his lashes. She flinched, eyes shunting to the side.

“You ran away because you're trying to protect me,” he said. She nodded furiously, shaking even harder in his grasp. At that, the last of his indignation evaporated, as did the scolding half dreamed up in the interim. “Hey, ssh, hey,” he murmured without thinking and reaching up to wipe a spot of mud off her cheek frowned to find she stuttered back as if he were going to strike her.

“I’m not mad at you,” he tried to reassure her, fully expecting the disbelief that made her glance up at him under raised brows. “I’m frustrated, but I’m not mad. I’m just trying to understand.”

“I… I don’t want you to get hurt,” she hiccuped in the tiniest voice, like she was ashamed. “You’ve been so nice, and I know you said you’d take me to Geralt, but it’s too dangerous. Everyone who tries to help me gets hurt or killed.”

“That’s not your fault,” he said.

“It is!” It seemed to be the final hoorah of her enormous self-control, that which had kept her shoulders so tight and her face so inscrutable throughout the day. Ciri bowed her head and silently began to cry, little miserable sniffles into the collar of her tunic as the fight went out of her frame. His heart crumpled like a sweetroll in her fist.

She didn’t flinch and she didn’t pull away when Jaskier tugged her forward against his shoulder. She just stood, so quiet and still, and snuffled wetly there. They stayed like that, her slumped against him and he shushing nonsense comfort against her hair, for what seemed a thousand years. When the time came, it was almost more strength than he had to lean back and catch her eye, but he knew he had to.

“Ciri, look at me.” Her red-rimmed eyes wanted to turn away. He waited until she could look at him before he said gently, “I don’t know who chases you or what they intend, but I do know this. Whatever they have done, none of it has been your fault. You have been astoundingly brave to survive so long, and I know you could be again and go off on your own. And I’m grateful that you want to protect me, really I am.

“But you are a child, Ciri, and I am an adult. It’s not for you to protect me, do you understand?” He lifted a quelling hand when, as he predicted, her mouth shot open to argue. “Please, let me finish?”

She nodded, reluctance in every line. He nodded back in thanks.

“I know you want to, and I know you have the courage to try. I also know you’re afraid I’ll be hurt accompanying you. I’ll be honest with you. If we’re caught, I very likely will be hurt.” He couldn’t lighten that blow, but how dearly he wanted. She shook her head so faintly and made a soft sound that gutted him. He squeezed her shoulders like a fragile thing he was both afraid to break and afraid had already broken, held together by his clumsy hands. Gods, he wasn't made for this. “Do you know why?” he pressed.

“B-Because I’m with you.”

He shook his head vehemently. “No. No, not because of you. If I’m hurt, it will be because I will fight, and it will be because I have chosen to fight. I have sworn to accompany you because I want to see you safe. I swore it. That makes it my job to protect you, not yours. Do you understand? I want to protect you." All at once she squeezed his hands as if he held her over a precipice and her breath shuddered out.

“I don’t want you to die,” she whispered, as if it were a secret he had dragged out of her. The secret she had been ready to run off carrying into the night.

Damn this world. Damn whoever has chased her, whoever drove her to this place. Damn Geralt for not protecting her, the selfish bastard.

“I won’t,” he whispered back, just this side of choked. He cleared his throat and smoothed his thumbs across her knuckles. They were colder than ice. “You don’t have to be alone. I’ll keep us both safe, I promise you. I promise.”

Ever so slowly, she breathed in a deep breath and nodded. As if the spell were broken, she released his hands to wipe her face, looking wan and shrunk even smaller. He looked away to give her privacy as she composed herself.

Instead, he stood with a loud crack from his knees and groaned. All at once he became aware that it was fucking freezing and his feet were wet with muck to the knees. The dagger dug into his lower back unpleasantly. He groaned again, theatrically this time.

“Where exactly were you planning to go at this time of night, anyway?” He wrapped a guiding hand around her shoulder and smiled to show he was only teasing. She nudged his hip in halfhearted retaliation.

“I told my friend I would meet him in the next few days. We were traveling together before.” She glanced sidelong up at him. “He saved my life after the capitol fell,” she said, so quietly he would have missed it had a breeze come through to carry it off. He patted her arm.

“Ah,” he said knowingly, “a boy,” and proceeded chuckle the whole way back to the tavern at her disgusted noise. He pointedly did not notice when she wiped her eyes a few more times during their return. Nor did he give too much thought to the way that little piece of knowledge settled into his gut with something like dread. He would ask her about her friend in the morning when they were both a little better rested and less fraught, he decided. With that in mind, he pushed the lot of it aside and played his part, dug the dagger out of his trousers and removed his ruined stocking with a great gale of gusty sighs. Perhaps he would find the other one? “Let’s get some sleep. We can talk about this in the morning. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” she mumbled. It seemed the entire debacle had drained her of all her energy. She slumped in when he held the door open for her.

Inside, the common was thankfully still empty. He could have cried for relief. Even he would have struggled to charm the owners at this time of night. And how to explain his nephew’s midnight excursion, anyway?

Ciri bumped his elbow as they climbed the stairs. “Do you really know how to use that dagger?” She asked incredulously, in a final pick at him. As if it covered up the way she shuffled nearly on his heels, close enough to trip him should he pause. He groaned goodnaturedly.

“Sleep, you. Talk in the morning when we’ve both rested.”

He didn’t find his other stocking.

Chapter Text

*

Night came to the ancient killing fields outside Brokilon Forest, then day. The rushes fluted from within the forest’s green shade. Wind hissed in the dry grasses, and still Mousesack stood. He stood. He stood. He stood.

More quiet than the snowy field, than the barren branches through which he had last seen Ciri’s fleeing back. How it pressed and cajoled. How it smothered.

Forward. Spells have no voice save that of their victims, yet he could hear Fringilla Vigo’s inflection crisping over every fricative. Forward to the princess. Forward to the White Flame. It pressed. It cajoled. It smothered.

Mousesack was not so constant. He was Skelligen. The ocean was his patron and had been worked into every pore of his being like the scent of brine into sealskin leathers. It did not matter how the miles and years had separated. His strength willed and waned as tides do, and did so now. He rode each crest and swell as he could and gritted his teeth with the strain. No, the spell was unnaturally constant in such a way that made him dizzy with unease. No matter how he looked, how he waited, it remained. He pushed and found only smooth, expressionless disdain.

And he waned. One step, took his body. Two steps.

They were all he allowed. He had pulled back only to swell forward, crashing thunderous and patient and indefatigable in his stubbornness. And as a hundred times before, he felt the unwavering press give just the tiniest fraction. The endless ice of the mind spell lost just a single layer. He tasted the salt of his blood and of the sea and that small victory kept him fighting past exhaustion.

Mousesack had never been a sharp striking tool. He was not a spear, not a hammer, had never had the concentrated malice and vigor of a fatal strike or its quickening nature. He was broad and deep. He had patience in the very core of his person.

Not a single bandy-legged one of these landed folk, with their warm winters and soft-soiled fertile fields. Not a one of them knows the patience of the northern seamen of Skellige. Winters are long in the Isles. Dark and ice, winter storms, glaciers drifting their giants’ heads past, sunless months had been his tutors. In the face of something greater than all else, instilled in them by the greatest of forces; uncaring Nature taught them patience or to die for want of it. He knows why the southerners worship and fear their dark-eyed winter goddess (and all those who live south of the Mahakam Mountains are indeed southerners to them of the Isles, no matter how they protest); he knows why they drown her in effigy for hope of an early and mild spring. But he had never felt the need to pretend a human face onto the Forces of the universe, onto Nature and Destiny. Had he, she could only be so terrific. So inscrutable. A figure made of the pain of cold. A figure not unlike the one who crafted this trap.

Mousesack hates the cold, but he has never been bested by it.

He surged. Slow but unstoppable, he flooded against the spell and grunted through his teeth that tasted of ice. In response, the pain swelled as well. It filled his lungs, burned in through his eyes and nose, squeezed in like water over the head of a deep diver. It pressed, how it pressed! A cold so deep in made his bones ache.

It is nothing to a single Skellige winter’s night, he scorned.

Mousesack rose and fell like the tide. The spell pressed and pained. The sun fell. It rose.

Mousesack stood.

Mousesack stood, still.

Mousesack stood, still, with frost in his beard and gilding the fine silk of his tunic and cracking the skin of his lips.

There in the frozen morning, as the moon had just faded from its baleful glower over the field, the spell chanted in his voice forward and Mousesack in his jaw-clenched perseverance did as he had a hundred times before and rolled against it, unwilling to give a single inch. Every part and piece of him hummed out an opposition as the tide came in and crashed and roared.

He would not be used against the girl he had helped to raise.

He would not be a tool. He would not become a hammer or spear or sword or dagger in the long night, and no clumsy hand would wield him because Mousesack had never been a sharp tool and never would be. He stood. He stood. He stood. He stood. He

Mousesack's legs folded beneath him and he dropped into the snow.

He laughed, or thought he did. The voice that crackled out of his throat broke across the driftwood of his consciousness piecemeal, unrecognizable. The sky that swam above him blazed the scoured blue of a merciless cold day. It was so comfortingly familiar he could have fallen into it. The breath he gasped in ached. Snow soaked the back of his tunic. Unable to move, he reveled in both.

After a monumental battle of a few seconds, he turned his head and caught sight of one hand. The fingertips were, he thought, dusky and wrong. When he twitched a finger, the effort left him dizzy.

His vision became dark around the edges for a long time. This time, it was his raw consciousness that pulled back, far and further, farther, until he barely knew if he would ever come the long way back.

He couldn’t know how long he laid there. He drifted in strange places. No tides. Only the blue of the sky. Only the snow.

In his slow, uneven return, Mousesack became aware of voices above him. His lips moved. No sound left him but his breath wisped and the voices quieted.

Hands curled around his arms and shoulders. He was lifted. Icy air scoured his back. The dry, sharp air warmed and suddenly clung with great humidity and the sky disappeared behind the green looming of the forest.

Faces peered and passed. He couldn’t speak as he was lifted bodily and carried into the alien green of Brokilon.

A voice pressed closer, warm by his ear.

“Rest, Druid. You have defeated your enemy. Let the forest heal you, for there is work for you yet.”

Mousesack could not speak, but as his head lolled back on his neck and dark waters began to swallow him down, he bared his salt-tasting teeth in a grin.

Chapter Text

After the tension of the night, the morning brought great relief in that everything progressed surprisingly smoothly.

Jaskier woke first. It was quite understandable, given the absolutely murderous crick in his neck from his night on the floor. After checking, with only a moment’s panic, that Ciri was still abed, he took the time to wash at the basin and change into his travel gear consisting of a fine yet far more practical doublet of new wool. Afterwards, he woke Ciri and left her blearily washing her face in the post-dawn light as he stepped downstairs with his coin purse in hand.

His good fortune continued: their adoring tavern marm took his request of breakfast and provisions and provided them free of charge. He tried not to be smug as he made all the right gratitudes and token protests. She settled it with, “Nay, not another word. We leave with the noon bell, and I’d rather the bread go to your boy than to the Nilfs.” His coin purse rejoiced. Still, as his slung his refilled bag across his back, he took a moment to pretend to lean on the counter as he made small talk and slid a few coins beneath the rag she had been using to wipe it down.

When he did climb back to their room with a tray loaded with small beer, horse bread, hard boiled eggs, and good spicy mustard, it was to find Ciri awake. Well, nominally. He took a few amused minutes just to watch her totter blearily about the room as she made her morning ablutions.

“Good morning my darling apprentice,” he said at last when it seemed her eyes were no longer so firmly crusted together. “Come on, let’s to our breakfast. We’ve got a lot of travel before us and it’s already dawn.” He paused in pulling his bread apart. “Gods, is this who I’ve become? ‘Already dawn’, my mother would have overjoyed to hear the words.“

“Where are we going?” Ciri cut in, already teeth deep into an egg at his elbow.

“Right, well. I was thinking we might be best served by following the forest west a day towards Bodrog. It should put us back towards the main road and, with any luck, we might join a caravan of others moving north towards the Verden coast. Safety in numbers and all that, besides which Verdenians have always been great lovers of Cintran sonnets and Temerian ballads. We shouldn’t want for coin to see us through. Mustard?”

She ignored the outstretched hand, having gone completely still save a nervous thumb which tore divots into her breadcrust. Unfazed, he placed it down and returned to his breakfast with only a glance. If there was one thing he was beginning to learn about his young companion, it was that the willingness to wait out the silence was often rewarded. Shut up tight as a royal jewelry box. Better not to prod than to let the princess herself open-

“What about Dara?”

-up.

“Dara is your friend?” he asked. She nodded. “Well, it should be fine. Where is he, exactly? We can certainly pick him up on our way west, and the smaller byways shouldn’t slow us down too much if he has taken up in one of the outstanding hamlets.”

Ciri stirred a finger through the mustard pot for the longest moment before bringing it to her mouth, not meeting his eyes.

“He’s not west,” she said quietly, a dot of brown on her lip. “We said we would meet at Novriston. To the east.”

“To the-“ Jaskier put his bread down, picked it up again, stuttered, and said with utmost finality, “no, absolutely not.”

Something in her seemed to firm up even as he looked. She sat up straight until her shoulders rolled back into severe points beneath her lofty head. It was, exactly, the pose he had seen Calanthe strike many a time at court when she prepared to crush a squabble with her superior will. The bread in his gut became dread (which rhymed, funnily enough.) She took in a bracing breath and looked up to hold his gaze.

“We have to. He saved my life. I won’t go without him.”

“But you can’t go east,” Jaskier burst out. She scowled. “No, not you specifically-- but also yes— but I mean the narrative ‘you’, as in anyone, as in it's impossible. I heard the news last night. The bulk of the Nilfgaardian horde has broken off from sacking Cintra,” and, yeah, good, he immediately regretted the words, wincing when her face shuttered, but he babbled on regardless, “and has been seen heading east towards the Sodden Hills. We have no guarantee that they haven’t ventured north of the river! They go east; we do not go east.”

“Using the highways,” she said. When he blinked, she frowned severely. “I was listening last night, too. They’re using the Cintran highway. It’s the only road able to handle their numbers, and the Hills themselves are impossible to cross otherwise. If their forces made it to this side of the river, they’ll have the same problem. They’ll have to stay on the main road. We don’t.”

“You, ah.” He stared. “How do you know that?”

She sniffed, rolling her eyes pointedly up and away. “My grandmother saw to my tutoring since I was eight.”

“In war?”

She turned to give him a look so speakingful that she needn’t say anything more. He fought the unlikely urge to blush. Calanthe the Lioness. Of course she had her heir tutored in war at twelve. At eight, even, gods.

“Regardless, that doesn’t exactly improve our odds. Even with a river between us, going towards the invading army doesn’t seem like the smartest idea. If even a portion of the army manages to cross, we'll be right in their path."

“Not if we take one of the smaller byways,” she countered hotly. “Novriston is half a day by foot. I’ve been there before, it’s not on the highway! The Owl Hills are between it and the main road, and they are impassable to anyone but the shepherds. We could take the rural road, walk in and even back out this afternoon if you want!”

“If I want,” he parroted, aghast on so many levels. “What I want is to get us as far from this war as possible. I can’t with good conscience— no, no, stop that face.”

She did not stop that face. It, in fact, worsened by degrees as, having emptied her hands, she reached out to take one of his between her own.

“Please.”

“Oh, bollocks. Ciri, see reason,” he pleaded. She squeezed. He figured she must be able to feel his heart pounding there in his palm. It seemed to be pounding everywhere, from between his ears down to his toes. His palm was sweating. She pressed it between her own anyway.

“Please,” she said again. “We have to go for him. We’ll be safe on the lane, I promise. Please, just trust me.”

Jaskier dropped his face into his other hand with a sound he would never admit to in a thousand years. Oh, that’s unfair.

"...Are you absolutely positive?"

Ciri beamed.

*

When they made it out of the tavern for the final time, it became immediately clear that the rest of the town had decided that enough was enough. The sun had barely risen. Yet the tides of carts, mules, and various beasts of labor swaying under the burdens of cobbled together lives dug out from their homes all trod for the west. He heard it on every tongue-- Bodrog, Hamm, the coast. What few children there were cried; chickens cackled in wicker baskets; cows and oxen lowed; voices yelled and jostled together in the air. Where the town had seemed half abandoned the day before, the streets now crowded to the point of claustrophobia. Yet Ciri and Jaskier turned their boots east and quickly left the crowds behind.

They took to a rural lane which ran more at an angle to the Yaruga than did the parallel highway. From what he had gleaned asking around, the lane was an old shepherds’ and then merchants’ track to the northern foot of what the locals call the Owl Hills. The settlement of Novriston sat nestled amongst the rolling hills where they were not yet so steep and impassable and where the gentle waters of the tributary came down off the Tikaj Mountains. The waters of the tributary, the overly helpful trapper had informed him, were said to bring the townspeople there enviable good health and vigor. Something about how it sifted through the sands and roots of the Brokilon, said the rumors.

In the first hour or so of travel east, they passed a handful of carts going the other way. Before long, they passed none. The lane emptied. The quiet of the snow-blanketed fields and then the rolling scattered grasslands and wooded copses started an itch between his shoulders he couldn’t shake.

Jaskier fretted. Though north of the Yaruga, which acted as the official border between Cintra, Verden, and Brugge, the area was historically only vaguely claimed by any kingdom. It shifted with each ruler, or with the whims of local lords. Like a bad card in a game of gwent, no one kept it in hand long. In the past decade, every one of the players seemed intent on returning it to the deck for whatever unfortunate should draw next. Or, if political tensions ran high, someone offered it up as a token gift. Something to be seen giving but which really troubles the giver naught.

There was something about the land. Fertile, green, mild. But the lands around the waters and Brokilon had always been strange, and recent rumor told of even stranger things. Dark things. Ill fates and failed harvests and missing villagers. Babes born with a sickness to them. Animals with too many joints, or the wrong eyes.

Perhaps it was just the unsettledness of a people tired of being passed from kingdom to kingdom, a people who never knew which side of the royal border they lived on and who would prefer not to care. What effect could it really have on their lives, he wondered? But then again... The stories with their wide-flung subject matter all rankled of unsurety, of fear, and the vague sort of unease that he was sure the people here could relate to. When nothing is sure, everything is suspect.

Normally, he would fall over himself in eagerness to listen to these tales and consider what they could mean for the area. What did the people mean to say when they wove these yarns in the public houses and markets? How did they reflect the fears and world beliefs of the people? What power did they bring the teller?

It was curiosity for these likely fictitious creatures that had him peering across the fields at every rise, however, not into the distant woods that unevenly blotted the land. Last he had heard-- and, admittedly, he had not been paying as much attention to the border land squabbles as of late-- last he had heard, Cintra had reached its hand over the Yaruga. Cintra had always been the most shameless of neighbors, not that he would say anything of it in present company. Before the invasion, Calanthe did need the additional taxes and tithes. There had been ill-luck in Cintra for the decade previous, though she remained a strong presence in the north. Any extra coin in the royal coffers would be viewed most positively nonetheless, making the riverside quite enticing indeed.

With Cintran soil still under their boots, Jaskier didn't like their odds in this bet. If the Nilfgaardian army marched for Sodden, it could only be for the crossing there. No other major bridges existed east of it, and certainly none large enough for the thousands he had heard tales of. Surely, he thought. Surely it was to gain access north of the Yaruga-- to continue their razing of Cintra? Or to continue yet further into more of the northern kingdoms? It was a sobering thought.

He had heard news around town that morning as they left confirming some minor presence. Here above the waters, everyone he had asked had given the impression of smaller scouting parties, perhaps a squadron at most. To ferry any more than that would be impossible, or foolish. And just what, he wondered, could they be looking to do up here in the boonies anyway? Sodden is a bloody hike and a jig off, and so far they’d not touched Verden or Brugge. Will they bring war even here? How far will they press, these southern armies?

Watching Ciri’s narrow back as she trotted gamely ahead, he shuddered. Briskly shaking the thoughts off as, he noted grimly, it was too late to worry, he tucked down his chin and lengthened his strides.

Between the dogged two of them, they made good time. (Even if the lane was sorely in need of leveling, in his opinion.) He felt their pace was almost too grueling, given how much shorter Ciri’s legs were to his own. Jaskier caught himself multiple times opening his mouth to admonish her to take it a bit slower. He could guess how she would react, however. Even a one-eyed hatter would be hard-pressed not the see the determination that burred her forward. Besides which... if they were going towards an arm or even a pinkie finger of the army, he wanted to do so quickly. The sooner they could turn around, the better.

He only just managed to get her to stop for a bare half hour late in the morning. They ate hard cheese and rye bread atop his travel cloak beside the lane, splitting a winter apple and his skin of small ale. They had spoken very little as they traveled. As he dug our their travel rations, they spoke not at all. Her face was gone quiet and distant. Somehow, he hesitated to break it by asking for her thoughts. He scoffed to think it might be courtly decorum. Jaskier had never been quite as… decorous… as perhaps was expected him. Or, even, as he really, really should, even when faced with outrage and contempt from the more powerful of the landed gentry. So, scratching that…

Part way into their meal, Ciri broke the silence herself before he could study the compunction too closely.

“Jaskier?” He made a listening noise around his bite of cheese. “Who is Geralt of Rivia?” The cheese choked him immediately.

“You don’t know?” He gasped after having, somehow, managed to swallow. He added quickly, “I mean, that is- no one ever told you?”

She shook her head, eating diligently for a few moments more.

“...Queen Calanthe told me to find him. When Cintra fell.”

His thoughts of the morning rushed back at once, of a locked box opening up. Seeing his chance, Jaskier opened his mouth... and completely blanked. She gazed out at the distant horizon, eyes like strange agate in a face pale with emotion, and he could not find a single word or gallant gesture to comfort her. Him! He had been the shoulder for dozens of fine ladies of the court to cry on! A princess he could console, a duchess, or marquess. But a child who had lost everything? In torturous silence, Jaskier sat tongue tied, and Ciri did not give him long to scramble for it, for she turned suddenly to mark him intensely.

“How do you know him?”

The question landed not unlike being punched.

“Well,” Jaskier began, the way a man dips a toe into a stream he knows will be painfully cold. He thought of what he would say for barely a handful of seconds before that particular stream proved too icy and he took the coward’s way out. “It’s a long story. Too long for our lunch, I’m afraid.” Her face fell. He delicately nibbled at a piece of bread, watching how she tried and failed to hide her disappointment, before clearing his throat around a new topic. “Do you know of the Witchers?” he offered up as consolation.

She shook her head and he could see her inattention.

“They’re warriors trained from childhood to fight monsters. They are said to be some of the strongest of fighters on the Continent.” She perked.

“Could anyone be trained to be a Witcher?”

“No, I don’t think so. Besides the training, I have heard that there are trials of some kind. Witchers are very secretive, always have been. But rumors and what few books I have found have spoken of fasting, or eating certain mosses and mushrooms, and of taking alchemical potions that mutate the body.” Jaskier considered it, but with how dark her days have been, he thought it best not to go into too much detail over how painful and deadly Geralt had described them one rare night around the fire. Just the facts, bard. No storytelling. Even without the added flare, she hung on the words. “That is where much of a Witcher’s strength comes from. His body is faster and stronger, heals more quickly, and is able to withstand poisonous potions for greater strength in combat."

Ciri squirmed around in her tailor's seat to face him more totally, bright eyed and leaving a small trail of crumbs behind.

"What heraldry do they wear? Do they have colors?"

Jaskier laughed. "Asked like a royal. No, most Witchers only wear the symbol of their schools, and two swords; one of steel and one of silver. The thing to look for is the eyes." He tapped his own cheek. "The potions turn them golden and fey, like a cat’s, so they can see in the dark.”

“And Geralt of Rivia is a Witcher?”

“The Witcher, if you ask around the northern lands. One of the most notable. Some call him The White Wolf.” Jaskier had called him that first, of course. Some of his finest work, the turnaround from Butcher to Wolf. If he had done any good by Geralt, he had at least done that. “His white hair, and the wolf pendant he wears,” he added somewhat belatedly, shaking from his thoughts to find her scrunching her nose up at him.

They passed the rest of their short meal similarly, with tales of Witchers, a hold in the most northern mountains, magical Signs and broken curses. Jaskier thought he had never seen the princess so lively. That only warmed him. The way she hung on every word like the best of audiences, interrupting multiple times to ask questions and blushing pink when he reminded her he needed to finish answering the last, made the time pass more quickly still. He allowed only a small moment of guilt as they packed up, then, for having avoided her question. It was more important she learn of what and who Geralt of Rivia was, he rationalized, and stuffed the feeling in an imaginary cesspit.

Still, it was to see her so animated and involved that really underlined his unquiet thoughts of before. The unease he had felt as he kept her in the corner of his eye the whole silent morning returned, as did her mood. She trudged silently forward as if they had never stopped. The silence became all the more galling for the comparison.

It came to him as they neared the town.

Ah, he realized. In his mind, he saw Ciri as she had been last night. Ready to disappear into the snow to save Jaskier from the fate she had imagined. To find this boy who saved her. She had been willing to search for him, yes, and to be alone in the meantime. Even if it meant she would lose her escort to Geralt of Rivia. Considering the desperation with which she had reacted to his name, and the way she had broken down when Jaskier swore to help her, to protect her-- as if to be no longer alone and so burdened by survival had cut the strings of her stoicism completely-- it would have been a great personal sacrifice. He glanced at Ciri where she strode along at his elbow and felt a surge of admiration for the strength that had helped her survive and the loyalty that drove her, then and now.

If only she weren’t so stubborn. He snorted at the thought, and waved away her questioning glance in silence.

Towards late morning, the sound and smell of water grew stronger. It wasn't until Jaskier could swear that he tasted it that, like a faery in a myth, the tributary flashed its back from between winter-browned reeds in the snow. Meanwhile, the steady bow and hump of the horizon slowly became the distant gentle backs of sloping hills. And to their left, a distant smudge grew and spread like stonemoss ink, a deep green that he felt in his bones and knew to be one far-flung arm of Brokilon Forest where it pincered in to meet the hills. The closeness of their destination buoyed his mood immediately and he couldn’t help a moment of optimism. Perhaps their good luck that morning had not completely abandoned them!

If anything, their pace only increased. Just after midday, having puffed up one slow rise of a hill, they crested together and Jaskier let out an inadvertent cheer.

“Novriston,” he announced redundantly, and then somewhat less redundantly and more emphatically, “thank all the gods, named and not.”

He had half feared to find a war-scoured ruin over the top of the rise, and had for the past half dozen of them. Yet it was against his worser imaginings that Novriston clung tenaciously to its hills and banks and, even as they looked, signs of life could be seen in the streets. At a glance, he would even guess that the market was still open for the day. Hands on his hips as he caught his breath, he shook his head. Would the tenacity of peasant life ever cease to amaze? He said as much out loud.

At his elbow, Ciri gave a closed-lip little smile.

“See? I was right.” She looked too pleased for him to argue. “No soldiers. I told you there wouldn’t be.” He nudged her with his elbow, grinning crookedly.

“I stand humbled, bamboozled, perplexed, perhaps a little relieved-” he broke off with a chuckle when she made annoyed eyes at him. He lengthened his strides. “Onward, then. There might still be time to buy a hot lunch from the market, and better to search with a full belly than not.”

“We just ate!” she protested with no real heat. He noticed she didn’t resist his guidance as they started down the little dirt path. He harrumphed.

“Yes, dry bread and a mealy apple. A man needs more to keep the mysterious and many-faceted engines of life within his body functioning, especially after such exertions.” Her only response was a judgmental sideways glance. He took offense like priests take sacrament. “Why! You knobby-kneed rascal, are you suggesting something?”

She kept her impertinent silence, though he could see she bit her lips to keep from smiling. Well enough; he was happy to fill any silence, and so gladly he did all the way down the hill. As suddenly as they had seen it, just as suddenly did they find Novriston rising up around them.

Well, rise might be too lofty a term. The village was humble, to be mild. Its dirt streets had turned to mud where morning traffic to the markets, boots and vehicles, had churned the snow with it, turning the walk in into a slog. At least the homes they passed on the outskirt were pretty enough, in a provincial way. They were made of clay cob and pine and plastered with natural earths in various shades of ocher and brown, with lintels painted with flowers and leaved garlands. Their stooping straw roofs gave the impression of weary workers crouched down from the wet cold off the water.

It would have been a pretty comparison to draw between the homes and the people, had they not been built tall and broad and robust as oxen to a one. Jaskier found his eyes glued to the biceps of one fisherman hawking his catch as they entered the market and whistled.

“They weren’t exaggerating their tales of the vigorous people of Novriston, good lord,” he breathed, more to himself than anything. Ciri heard anyway, stuck so close to his side.

“That’s why the royal retinue stopped here two years ago,” she informed him, looking around with familiar eyes. “Even in the capitol we had heard about the waters and how it made the people strong here." Her voice shrank abruptly. "Eist wanted to see it for himself.”

Dragging his eyes away, he glanced over sharply. She had her lip caught between her teeth, apparently lost to the world. Shoppers and peasants parted around them where they had stopped.

“I can see why," he said, placing a soft hand on her shoulder just for a moment. Then, "Come along, dear apprentice.” He didn’t even hesitate to throw an arm over her shoulder. She returned to the present with a jolt. He pretended not to notice the sudden redness ringing her eyes. He chafed her arm as if against the chill and not for his own peace of mind. “Let’s find something to warm us. Keep an eye out for hot cider, if you please?” She nodded faintly.

Hoping that that would keep her mind present, he steered them both into the market. For all the vitality of its people, there was no hiding what he had suspected: the market was, like the one in Kmenikplac, half empty. A frisson of anxiety found him again, the same as had accompanied him on the road. When he glanced at his ward, she fared no better. Whether memories or a similar realization, Ciri seemed to shrink in on herself. Her shoulders hunched up. Her gaze flattened back to what he remembered when he had first seen her. An orphan alone with a stolen apple up her sleeve.

Not alone now, he thought firmly. Strolling between middle aged women with huge baskets tucked in their elbows, Jaskier towed her along.

“Where did you and your friend- Dara, was it?” She nodded. “Where did you and Dara agree to meet?” he asked. Ciri visibly shook herself.

“I-- um. We didn’t.” When it became clear she was following, he let her go. She drifted at his elbow, dipping farther and then closer like a buoy at the end of its tether. “We just said to meet at Novriston. I remembered from when I was here last that there was the river, and a smaller stream. I thought we could catch trout.”

“Smart,” he hummed absentmindedly, distracted somewhat by the smell of roasting nuts. He didn’t notice the small, pleased look she sent his way.

He did in a moment shake himself, however, something catching his attention.

“Why did you two split up, anyway? You never said and I didn’t ask,” he admitted, a shade more than curious. The many-layered look she leveled him with made him feel as if he had made a misstep in three different directions, not unlike a jig at a Toussaint ball. It was a courtly look if he ever saw one. Gods save him had it been delivered from a dais. Lucky him, it was instead delivered with all the misgivings of a street rat from elbow height. After the ease of their day together, it was enough to surprise him. He stumbled.

“...I don’t want to talk about it,” she bit out, looking away to scan the market. After a beat, she added, a touch less forbiddingly, “not here.”

A breath in. Held. Sighed out. The market clattered on around them. He remembered the reserved set of her shoulders in juxtaposition of her lively conversation over cheese and bread, how quickly one became the other.

“Right. Well!” Jaskier made a shooing motion with his hand. She blinked up at him. “Go have a look around, then, see if he’s crouched behind any barrels, hm, while you search for the cider? I’m going to charm this merchant into giving us your weight in roasted honey hazelnuts, if it pleases.”

Ciri’s cheek creased in a smile, just for a second. He watched just long enough to see her trot off to examine a stall of local dried fish before turning his attentions to the nuts merchant.

By the time he had haggled, cajoled, and charmed the rosy cheeked woman down to a half of the price, he had gathered enough local news and hearsay to lift his spirits. According to the carver’s son, a fisherman who plied his trade further upstream, the only Nilfgaardian forces spotted this side of the river were a full day and a half away and numbering less than two dozen. If they found Dara, even if not until the evening, they should be able to take their leave well afront of the roving company.

Thanking the woman with a wink and a short bow that made her laugh and wave him away, Jaskier turned and searched the crowd for Ciri’s little cap and tunic to share the good news. For a moment when he couldn’t find her, his heart plummeted. He scanned again for warm brown wool and golden stockings.

He found Ciri, fatefully, at the fruitmonger's stall. He spotted her just in time to see her outstretched hand slipping carefully over a selection of pears. Apparently, it was not carefully enough. As he watched, the mountainous man behind the stall reached out with a speed belying his size and closed a huge hand quite nearly around her entire forearm.

Jaskier was moving before his legs knew it.

“-if ye think I can’t spot a sneakthief a league off!” the huge man was saying when Jaskier got within earshot. Jaskier seemed to be the only one listening. Ciri twisted and yowled like stray cat, but nothing she did pulled her arm from his hold.

“I said I’m sorry! Let go!” she demanded. Her next twist nearly yanked her from her feet and did toss the hat from her head, but it did very little to her captor. The merchant looked down on her with unamused eyes.

“Nay, I don’t think I will,” he rumbled with great finality. Jaskier drew up beside the two so suddenly that he nearly dropped the still warm pouch of hazelnuts cradled against his front. He considered his options in a heartbeat, drew in a breath, and snapped,

“Fion!” Ciri froze like she had been bespelled. Very aware of the absolutely towering man’s unruffled gaze on him, Jaskier dug deep for inspired ire and scowled. “This is where you’ve been? I look away for one moment and you debase my, my magnanimity by returning to your thieving ways? After I took you in, clothed you?” Oh, he was getting into it now. He clenched his jaw and strained until he felt color begin to creep up his neck.

Ciri, meanwhile, had gone white as a sheet. “Jaskier,” she began.

“That’s Master Jaskier, you impertinent rascal! My good man,” he lowered his tone just a hair, turning to meet eyes with their captive audience- rather, their captivating audience. “I apologize profusely for my idiot apprentice. He has sticky fingers and naught between the ears.”

The man grunted dispassionately. “Not the first time ye’ve caught him stealing, I take it.”

“No,” he fumed and cut an overblown glare down. With finely tuned malice, he seethed, “but it will be the last, I promise you that.” Ciri flinched.

“Aye,” the fruitmonger agreed, just a hair too pleasantly. A zing of anxiety went up Jaskier’s spine a moment before he glanced up, up, up at the look leveled Ciri’s way. Seeing Jaskier’s confusion, he snorted. “Not a ragamuffin alive what’s taken a lashing from me and returned for a second. I’ll tan his hide good, fear not, master bard.” He began to reel his meaty hand in and Ciri with it. She fought with renewed vigor.

Jaskier watched in horror. The man’s arms were tree trunks, as big around as Ciri’s waist, and that wasn’t to mention his torso. He’d strip the flesh off her back with a sneeze!

“Stop!” The word leapt out before he could hold his tongue. Heart pounding, he ignored the look thrown his way and played it off as if he had meant it for Ciri. She froze, one hand still clawing at her captor, to stare up at him. Only her chest moved as it heaved. The tableau-- towering merchant, captured thief, indignant master-- stretched on in horrible frozen stillness for a moment so lengthy Jaskier swore he felt a hair grey at his temple. Conversely, his thoughts raced.

“I don’t doubt you would set him right like no other, serah,” Jaskier said and pretended that sweat wasn’t tickling down his back. “But I won’t let him trouble you a moment longer. I’ve the ill luck of sharing blood with this little imp and so he’s my burden to bear.”

And before the man could argue, Jaskier stepped closer, snapped an acid, “You! Come along,” jerked forward, and snatched out a hand that looked far more threatening than the lightness with which it settled, finger backs just behind Ciri’s ear and a thumb pressed to the shell. Regardless, she flinched heavily at its speed near her face. Seeing his chance, Jaskier staggered a moment as if the shoulder that had brushed his ribs had thrown him. Swearing, red faced, Jaskier did the only thing he could think of. He dumped the packet of hazelnuts from his hand with dramatic flourish.

They clicked and clattered off the stand, off his trousers, off the pears. The cascade of beautiful, glossy little morsels was truly impressive and, shining against the mud of the market where they fell, absolutely devastating to see. The general hubbub of the crowd around them dimmed for a long moment. For a second, he feared he had played it too well. Indeed, one or two bounced off of the fruit seller’s leather jerkin where he scowling hunched with such fine comedic timing that it was a shame he couldn’t laugh.

However, it did the job. While the brute was distracted by the deluge, Jaskier leaned closer to Ciri just long enough to hiss, “Grab my wrist and fight back,” before he stood to his full height. His next breath was deep in the stomach.

“UNBELIEVABLE,” he shouted, voice projecting with nearly two decades of training behind it. He felt every eye turn to them. “Do you know how much those cost me, you weasel?” Moving wide in the elbow and shoulder, as if hauling a weight, he tugged her ear gently towards his side. One moment, two moments, shit, Ciri, come on, before finally she wrapped one thin hand around his wrist, yelped, and staggered heavily against him. The monger let her go, eyebrows high on his forehead.

Relief could have washed the act right out of him. But Jaskier was an old hand and knew when it was most crucial to sell it. Cursing up a blue streak, Jaskier dug a coin from his purse with his free hand, slammed it on the fruit stall, and turned sharply to drag his naughty apprentice away with great feeling. Now with both hands wrapped around his wrist next to her cocked ear, Ciri stumbled after.

“I’m sorry!” she whined, wriggling quite believably now that she put her heart into it. “I won’t do it again!”

“You’re damned right you won’t,” he snarled, spotting the nearest alleyway and striding for it with a purpose. Shoppers parted around them. “I’m going to stripe you with my belt, and don’t think that I’ll go easy because you’re my sister’s welp! This is what I get for taking you in! Oh, no, don’t you try to wriggle away!” Another tug that came more from her hands on his wrist than anywhere else, another stumble, and the two of them crossed into the relative quiet of a side street.

For safety’s sake, Jaskier kept up his loud and pointed tirade until he had marched them a relative sort of privacy out of the way behind a baker’s shop. Only when he was sure no one was watching did he allow himself to finish with a somewhat unimaginative, “-and you’ll not sit for a fortnight!” before stopping there in the shadows.

If a silence had ever been ringing, that which he found there did. When he released what little hold he had on her ear, Ciri peeled her fingers from his wrist and shuffled a step away to rub her ear. He took the chance to breathe as well and became suddenly aware of his pounding heart. Weakness flushed through him. Had he a chair, he would have sat and not risen for an hour. Watching him, Ciri glanced past to check their escape and sighed.

“He didn’t follow,” she exhaled. After a moment, glancing between him and the street, she slid forward.

“Oh, no you don't!” Jaskier stepped quickly into her path when she made as if to sidle back out of the little alley. Too innocently, she flashed wide surprised eyes at him. He gawped. It-- he had pulled that when he was her age! If he weren’t so angry (scared? Angry-scared?), he might have snorted. He found himself so overcome that he could barely put the words together to demand, “What was that?”

Her mouth twisted.

“Nothing.” She scuffed a boot in the dirt and observed what she dug up with utmost fascination. “I thought you were just pretending to be mad,” Ciri pointedly said and did not ask. The diversion; another classic. If he weren’t simmering, he might have commended her for the attempt.

“I was pretending to be fire-spittingly furious,” he corrected lowly, if not hotly, “to save you from a brutal punishment. And then I dropped the act and realized that, yes, I am actually quite mad underneath! Because that was an unbelievably stupid thing to do, and for no reason! I was buying us food!”

Her head snapped up. “It wasn’t for no reason!” she protested. She thrust her chin out mulishly. “And it wasn’t stupid!”

Jaskier’s hands leapt to his hips.

“Then what do you call it? Because I can’t think of anything else to call it, and I’m a bard! Words are my profession and I am speechless!”

She scowled. “I was trying to help! And it’s not like anyone could recognize me."

“That,” he snapped, “wasn’t helping. We’re not thieves, you most certainly are not a thief, as you have proven very soundly by nearly getting yourself caned or, worse, whipped. If I hadn’t stopped him- Ciri!” Frustrated, he grabbed her arm as she tried to push back out onto the street. She whipped around spitting and hissing.

“I would have been fine!”

“I beg to differ!”

“I was doing fine before you found me! I just had bad luck this time!”

He opened his mouth then closed it because, as he looked, he realized that there was something suspiciously wet about her eyes. The realization had only a moment to prick him down from his anger. Then there was a flicker of movement in his peripheral. Suddenly sure that the fruitmonger had followed to see punishment meted out, Jaskier turned, mouth already opening with an excuse.

He never got to voice it. Instead, he turned very neatly into the fist aimed directly for the back of his head.

Pain erupted from his temple down through his cheek. Ciri gasped. Someone cried out. The words garbled in his ears as Jaskier saw stars. That was all he knew before he fell against the alley wall with a groan.

Chapter Text

Ciri’s grandmother had offered her two lessons.

They followed her on the underside of every moment since Cintra fell; since Mousesack’s spell broke; since she had held her grandmother’s hands and as Lazlo pulled her away looked down to find blood in the creases of her palms. Queen Calanthe, the Lioness of Cintra, her final words a whisper that Ciri would never forget.

Ciri knew they weren’t really her last. She remembered the first lesson in the fires and torch light of the ball. In a voice at odds with the beautiful seal-grey velvet of Calanthe’s dress and the smell of roast pheasant and pig and apples, annoyed by Ciri's pestering. That was days before the battle. A week before her grandmother would return without Eist. There were different words, then, ones Ciri wasn’t sure she would be able to meet. Mercy. Bravery and destiny. Find Geralt of Rivia.

Queen Calanthe’s lessons might not have been her last words, but they would be the last Ciri would ever hear her voice, for she had heard them every day since. She thinks she probably will every day after this one, too, until the world comes undone.

First lesson, Calanthe breathed into the winter frost, forever bathed in banquet torchlight, forever bathed in blood. The two images would not come apart of each other. She was beautiful, like always; she was dying, like you only do once. She would always be both to Ciri. Keep your blade close, and keep moving.

Ciri does not have a blade. She wishes she did.

She keeps moving.

Through the fields and badlands, to Dara. Through the woods to the refugee camp and the family who were both so kind and so cruel. Ciri had always wanted so badly to range outside the castle walls. It is not as lovely a thing as she thought. She sees battlefields, starving and scared people, passes hungry and cold through the forest, through villages and towns and hamlets where no one knows her name and never will. Not connected to her as she is now, at least, dirty and tired. She barely sleeps, even the one night on a feather bed when she lay smelling incense and the beautiful lady’s perfume. Lillies and sandalwood. Every time she lays her head down, Ciri hears it. Keep moving.

When Jaskier first grabbed her in the market, she thought maybe her grandmother stood over her shoulder like a ghost, whispering the words. Ciri doesn’t have a blade, never had for all she had fought to be trained. But when she had complained and begged and pleaded, hadn’t her grandmother said it? A well-trained, clever mind is the best of blades, cub. That is the first one you shall learn.

So when Jaskier grabs her, Ciri doesn’t have a blade. She has her mind and words, and she is a princess of Cintra, so she uses them loftily. But the man in the silk doublet, hand shocking on her arm like an unexpected touch in a dark room, he has that same blade, too. He turns the eyes on them away like a magic trick. He is kind when he speaks of her mother, and acidic in a way that surprises her even as it makes homesickness ache in her stomach. It is exactly the kind of admonishment she could expect from Mousesack. Or even Eist, who could turn even a scolding funny.

Keep moving, Calanthe whispers. Ciri hears her. But she also has not rested in what seems a year. She grabs on to that name so desperately that she feels like she did before, holding her grandmother's hand. Geralt of Rivia. It is the first time she has felt it even possible to do as her grandmother had asked.

So when the man goes down on one knee and says his name in pledge to her service, when she sees the kindness in his eyes when he looks up at her, it breaks open the walls she had imagined around herself to turn him away. Cintra’s walls, walls she could recognize in silhouette or in the dark. The ones that had always made her feel safe and at home. She had seen them burning, but they stood in her now... up until they didn’t. “Call me Jaskier,” he said, and returned her hug her like he didn’t quite know how. He smelled of fleabane and bergamot and spruce sprigs, and he offered her something she had forgotten.

When he left her in the tavern room, sense rushed back into her. She had reacted as Princess Cirilla, who was used to being protected and coddled. That girl had no place anymore, not out here. Things changed too quickly. People could not be trusted. She saw that only walls and guards and the strict decorum of court had protected her before, and those had fallen so easily. To try to find any of it again was foolish and would only hurt worse in the end. I’ll leave, she had thought. I’ll keep moving after a meal. I'll take his coin purse and go.

But then the bath. And clothes, paid for from his own purse, the one she planned to steal. He fluttered and cleared his throat when he didn’t know what to say. He cursed when he realized she was scared, and never once seemed to be still. For all he clung to her title in the beginning, he seemed to forget who she was immediately and addressed her with so much familiarity it surprised her. Then he bowed-- as if he would to any girl, anyone too afraid to get in the bath. He was… strange. His humor and fast smile reminded her so much of Eist that it hurt its way into a distance where she could ignore it again. A distance from which she could watch him, awake in the terrible way she had been for weeks. She watched his hands, his face. She waited for the inevitable.

He was different, of course. She had never spent time with a bard, a common troubadour. They were always there to play in the background of banquets and balls, but she couldn’t remember the name of a single one. Not a face, either. Music had never held much interest for her in the same way it did for some of the noble girls of court. If anything, Ciri just wanted to hear songs of battles and knights for the tales themselves. A pretty sound or song didn't matter. Like all the other girls at court, she had obediently learned to play the lap harp to please Eist and Mousesack, who actually cared about music and who swayed Grandmother from her own indifference. But she always put it down at the end of the hour. She had never really done more than listen to their entertainers with half an ear and ignored all the gossip completely. It hadn't particularly endeared her to some of the other girls, but Ciri had thought some of the girls were silly, anyway.

Jaskier was not what she expected. Well, not completely. He wore the fine clothes like she expected, spoke cleverly and floridly, like a storyteller should. But the way he lied, the way he spoke to the tavernkeep’s wife and then to her, talking of war and soup (and Ciri had learned war, hadn’t she, but never this). That surprised her. He is strange, is all. He lies, but he doesn’t hurt anyone. He smiled as he talked about it. Like a lie is just another tool. And then talked about kindness as if it existed, still, since the world had ended. Since Eist hadn’t come back, and since Calanthe had.

Despite herself, she began to feel something other than the urge to run. The little feeling frightens her.

Keep moving, Calanthe whispers, and Ciri knows she's right. The soldiers and war are so close. She isn't safe, no matter what this strange man’s softness tries to make her feel. So that night Ciri lays awake until she hears Jaskier return to the room. She waits and waits. When he has laid still long enough, she creeps about packing whatever she can take into her knotted up old cloak, the Cintran blue he had pointed out to her. She feels stupid again even as she remembers and, not for the first time, scolds herself for not having thought of it.

She takes what she thinks she might need. His coin purse at least gains a wince of guilt; the bread, not so much. A bard can always sing for more. She slides out of the room and down the stairs and convinces herself, this is how it should be. She thinks of Eist and doesn’t think of Eist. She feels blood in the creases of her hands and hears Lazlo’s last breath shot through behind her, and runs. But.

But.

First lesson. Keep your sword close, and keep moving, grandmother whispers.

“I want to protect you,” Jaskier whispers.

I want to be protected. Ciri thinks it but can’t say it through a tight throat. His fear, his anger, they mean nothing in the face of his uncomfortable honesty. She feels like she really sees him for the first time. He had been so well put together in the day. Here, all he looks is tired and wild but determined with his bare feet in the muck, ready to fight soldiers and vampires and brigands with only a pretty little dagger that grandmother would have scoffed at. He doesn't grab her. He lets her take his hands, and tells her the truth. That's what does it in the end, that he says what hurts her most if only because it's true.

She goes back with him to the tavern. She thought she heard the Queen sigh behind her.

Lesson two. Know when to stop moving.

Once he had seen her back to bed and laid back down on the hearth, she cries, a little. Maybe because of the uncomfortable feeling in her chest. Relief and fear twine together, the urge to run and the bone-deep tired that says stay. In the morning, the world still bleeds as it has since, but only at the edges. She feels it shift when they eat together, plan together, walk the road together. Not alone-ness. She hadn't been alone with Dara, but they had been alone together, which is different. They had chosen where to go, when to run, what to steal or eat. She knows it will change with Jaskier and can't help the anxiety that twists in her stomach when she thinks of how Dara might react. In the end, all she could do was push it down and focus on what came next. Finding Dara was most important.

Jaskier wants to protect her. She wants to let him as much as it fills her with fear. As much as it catches in her breath like the greasy black smoke of Cintra burning. But she had taken his outstretched hands, and it was the first time she had felt safe since before the banquet. It has only been a little over two weeks. It feels like eternity.

“Let go of her!”

Which is why when Dara comes hurtling around the corner of their alleyway and strikes Jaskier across the face, she cries out as if she has been struck. Jaskier pitches up against the alley wall and Dara charges past him.

“Dara!” she shouts. A moment and he is on her.

“Ciri, let’s go!” He shoves something into her hands which she nearly drops and without pause grabs her. He is taller and heavier than her and able to drag her along easily.

“No, wait! Dara, wait!” she gasps. He shoots her a baffled look.

“For what? Come on!” She digs her heels in and tugs with all her might. It falters him a step, which is just enough.

“No, you don’t understand! He’s okay, he’s good!”

Somehow, this is what gets Dara to stop. His thick, dark brows snap together so that he almost looks angry.

“Good?" She has never seen him so spitting mad. "He was threatening to whip you! I saw him drag you from the marketplace-”

“I know but, please,” she grabs his elbow to stop him turning, trying to beseech him with her eyes. “It was just acting, he- he was saving me. From the merchant.” Admitting it is like swallowing medicine. She flushes, but pushes on. “He’s not bad, I promise. He’s been helping me.”

Unconvinced by the set of his brows, Dara still lets her drag him back down the alley to where Jaskier has just managed to push himself away from the cob. He hunches forward like a man too deep in his ale, head held in one hand and the other propping on his knee. Ciri doesn’t know how to help him. She bites her lip, very aware of the tension in Dara’s arm under her hand, and calls softly, “Jaskier?”

He shakes his head as if to clear it before groaning regretfully. It sounds a bit like a chuckle at the end.

“Dara, I presume?”

If anything, Dara tenses further. She squeezes.

“It’s okay.” She says to Jaskier, “Are you alright?”

Jaskier tries to lift his head, groans, and goes back to holding his head up with his hand. He gulps for breath.

“I will be, once the world stops spinning."

“How do you know we can trust him?” Dara hisses, almost accusing. She glares at him just briefly. He glares right back.

“He’s been helping me. He recognized me in the market of a nearby village-”

“That’s even less reason to trust him,” Dara interrupts, looking ready to run again. Ciri thinks he’s being very unreasonable. If he will just let her talk! “Ciri, you’re the princess! He could be planning to sell you out.”

“Dara, please,” she snaps a little more harshly than she had meant. He scowls. She softens her tone instead, afraid for a moment he really will run off-- with or without her. “Please, just trust me, okay? He knows Geralt of Rivia.” They had talked of him, briefly, in Brokilon. Dara squints between the two of them mistrustfully.

“Just because he pretended to know him when you mentioned him-” Dara begins, with all the great condescension of an older boy. It’s so familiar she scoffs and lands an elbow in his ribs.

“I didn’t! He did." Dara rubs his side balefully with a grunt. She doesn’t feel terribly bad for it. "Jaskier recognized me and told me that I need to find him. They’re friends. He offered to help me.” And protect me, but she doesn’t say that, embarrassed it might sound childish. Dara seems to hear it anyway and looks Jaskier over critically where he hunches, curve backed as an old man. Ciri frowns at him as severely as she can, feeling defensive on his behalf. If only Dara had seen him spring out to protect her the night before, or heard what the merchant was going to do to her! “He didn’t even want to come this way when he heard the army was headed east,” she tells him shortly. “He only came because I told him how you had saved me.” And when she had convinced him the roads would be clear, but she doesn’t mention that. “We came for you, Dara. Please, just trust me.”

Ciri knows it is a lot to ask. She feels barely able, herself. There is still a part of her caught alone in that strange space where she has felt trapped since she had to run, alone. It seems to exist inside her like a red room. She sees it in Dara now, how he looks over Jaskier for any hint of a threat, then down the alley, no doubt calculating how quickly he might run down it, turn a corner, and disappear into the crowd.

She notices other things as well for the first time. He has silver scales clinging to his tunic’s elbow under her hand. They flash and flake off in the sun. He must have found the stream like they had planned and fished for trout. Even though she doesn’t mean to be, she is surprised. He seems so able to survive, in ways still new to her. Would she have been able to find the stream, she wonders, with nothing more than a passing mention? Would she know how to start a fire, how to clean and gut the fish? She doesn’t think so. He had been out in the lonely world long before she had. She knows, somehow, how much harder it is for him to come towards the outstretched hand. He might not be able to.

Jaskier looks up again at the two of them, significantly less hazy eyed but still half-crouched as he is. She thinks he might not stand because he is afraid to scare Dara off. She also thinks he might be right.

Ciri laces their fingers together firmly. She will just have to be the outstretched hand, then.

“Come with me. We’ll be okay if we’re together.” She tries to sound sure when she says it. Dara frowns, but he doesn’t pull away and he doesn’t run. That’s good enough.

“Well,” Jaskier wheezes, hand going unconsciously to rest on his waist as he finally straightens. “I think it’s time we--” He gropes across his empty belt, floundering. “Where did-?” He squints suddenly at Dara, an unhappy middle between incredulous and impressed. “Did you hit me and pickpocket me at the same time?” he asks.

Unblinking, Dara pulls his hand from where it has hidden at the base of his spine and tosses the dagger back to him. Jaskier just barely manages to catch it. Ciri is afraid that he’ll be angry for just a moment. He glances it over with a whistle, however, eyebrows raising sardonically if not with the same good humor she has come to know as his default state. “Sheathe and all,” he muses, quickly afixing the small buckle back to its customary place. “That is quite a skill you have there.” He looks at Dara expectantly, lips quirked up.

Dara says nothing. She glances uncertainly over at his face, but he doesn’t look… He doesn’t look scared, she realizes. He looks as he did when they first met before he would speak to her, waiting-like.

Before she knew he was an elf. A frisson of dread goes through her. She glances at Jaskier through her lashes, but there’s no way to see on a man’s face what he might think. Whether he would take in an elven orphan or chase him away.

Whether she had led a slaughter against them or had their clans infiltrated by their own; whether she killed their babies and then kissed her granddaughter’s forehead each night. She thinks it and then cuts the thought off fiercely.

Jaskier will protect me, she thinks at the overwhelming hurt as she presses it down. And I’ll protect Dara. That has to be good enough for now.

*

“Well! We’ve at least accomplished what we came here to do. Perhaps it is time that we recuse ourselves from the public eye and look at our options, hm?” the bard says.

Dara doesn't say anything. It seems to make the human twitch. Silent, he follows Ciri-- he must, she has his hand in a death grip-- but he watches the man who leads them.

He leads them from the alley only once he gets his feet steady back under him. It takes a moment. Dara knows how bad a hit to the temple scrambles a head up. It is why he had aimed there in the first place. It was to give them enough time to get away, after all.

Ysgwynt, he thinks vehemently. Dara doesn’t know which of them is the greater numb-head; Ciri for being duped, or Dara for not dragging her away despite her pretty pleading.

The human’s back leads them around the edge of the market. Entering another little road, they have to dodge a huge plow horse and its cart taking up most of the lane. Ciri flinches heavily against his side. Absently, he nudges her behind him and out of the way of any stray hooves or cart wheels. It’s only after the horse has half passed that he remembers something she had told him, one night around the fire. I don’t like horses, whispered like an embarrassing secret. They’re too big. Dara had once fallen off one of the caravan’s wagons as a child and hit his head on a flat-topped rock. Hearing that had felt exactly the same. The world, spinning like a wooden top.

Westerners, he had thought, and resisted the urge to spit. Though his family had drifted from east of the Fiery Mountains generations before him, they had kept to their ways. Dara had grown from a babe on horseback. In the clan’s caravan, the horses were their lives. There was no other way to live, not for them. He used to dream that the world swayed on the back of a white-speckled black mare. It had been his mother’s favorite sunset story, The Mare Who Carries the World who kept the moon in one eye and the sun in the other. On the best nights, he still dreams he is sleeping tucked against his older cousin or his sister in the saddle, swaying with the easy steps of one of their horses. Nur, maybe, with the speckled flank. Or old Enid, who had acted a better nursemaid than any of the older kids ever had. He can’t imagine how anyone could feel afraid of such a steady friend as a horse.

Even without thinking, when the big, solid-hearted thing passes him by, Dara can’t help but reach out a hand to smoothe down its side. The horse flicks a curious ear back at him, like to ask, where come you from? Horses always think in that fashion, coming and going. Dara knows he can’t pause like he normally would if he had snuck to the stable or a picket, running fingers over its velvet nose and listening with that piece of him for horse gossip. Instead he pats its haunch with a friendly hand, just to say hello, and continues past.

Ciri relaxes against his arm only once it disappears down the lane. It brings him back to the present and reminds Dara of where he is and what he should be watching.

Or rather, who.

Across the market, he had just been another Purse, the kind of mark to go after for a good haul. His fine wool trousers and jacket said comfort and money. His pretty, flicky dagger said he wasn’t much for a fight, for all he bellowed like it when he had pulled Ciri’s ear. Snatching it had only confirmed it. The leather on the sheath was like new around the mouth, even though the buckle and loop had been worn soft from swinging on his belt. It didn’t see much use. Even the way he fumbled to catch it screamed soft-hand noble.

Which made it odd to notice the instrument case on his back. Traveling singer, then. Those can go either way, Dara knows. Some are the easiest marks, especially when in the cups. Others, he thinks grimly, a body would do well to stay clear of. There’s no saying what someone who sees many cities and leaves quickly gets up to. Some leave behind the hard things they do in dark alleys. Or take with them kids too unclever to see a trap when it offers to feed you. It’s not only the travelers who get up to no good, of course. No one in the big cities or towns ever notices one less urchin. But it doesn't make them any less dangerous. Just means you got to be fast.

Dara doesn’t know what kind of man the bard is, but he will find out. And then he’ll take Ciri and leave before he can do whatever it is he plans.

The Purse leads them to the tavern. Dara knows the area, enough. He had spent one night in the hayloft, curled up warm in the straw. He hadn’t been able to last night, however; merchants coming to town meant a lot of horses in the stable, horses what needed to be fed and brushed by stablehands who would chase him off if they found him.

Once inside, he half-expects for them to sit at a table and for the bard to try and buy him with food. It’s a familiar dance. Dara is figuring how much he can stuff down his throat and into his wrap and how fast he might be able to dart behind the counter, into the kitchen, and out the back exit the owners always have to get to their house courtyards-- is calculating each path from the different empty tables, how much Ciri might fight, when he is pulled up short when the bard says to the keeper, “A room with two beds, if you please.”

He stops dead.

“What’s wrong?” Ciri whispers. Dara shakes his head, hard.

“We have to go.” He tugs. Stubbornly, she remains planted, pressing her weight in the opposite direction like an angry nag. “What are you doing?” he hisses, low enough that only she should hear. “We can’t go to a room with him.”

“It’s okay,” she whispers back, tugging his hand. “It’s alright, really. We’re safe.”

Dara doesn’t know how to explain to her that she’s learned the world wrong. Of course a princess thinks nice clothes and soft words and perfumed hands means safe. She has only been on the streets for a couple weeks. She doesn’t know how to think like a rat yet. She doesn’t know that those things are pretty lies stretched over a hard truth.

He doesn’t know how, and doesn’t have time. The bard gets the room and goes for the stairs. When he glances back to see if they follow, Ciri tugs him forward. Dara looks around the room with its merchants’ wives and fishermen and farmers taking their midday and runs a swift calculation. He might pull Ciri back using his greater height and run for the door, but he couldn’t force her to run with him. For some no-brained reason, she doesn’t want to.

For that, all his alone years tell him to leave her. For a moment, he really thinks about it. Empty forests and quiet trees and him alone, safe with his smokeless fire and days with only rats and hares to speak to. And they’re not good company. Not like a horse, or a friend.

He only thinks of it for a moment, in the end. I must be going daft, he thinks and, with a scowl, lets her tug him up the stairs. It’s only to protect her, the girl who is afraid of horses but not men. Who didn’t know a poison berry from a sweet one until he told her. I’ll keep her safe until we can get out. Then I’ll swat her bottom like a dumb brat for getting me into this. She’s bigger than his brother ever got, but he thinks he could still do it. He imagines it with mean satisfaction as he follows her up the cramped stairway.

The room has two straw-stuffed beds and clean rushes on the floor; more than he had expected. Not that he had been in an inn or tavern since he was half his current height. The man sees them in and then says, “Wait here a moment,” and heads back down stairs. Dara takes the chance to drag Ciri to the side and turn on her.

“Why are we here? Are you stupid?” he hisses. It’s a question he has asked her before on multiple occasions, and one that usually gets Ciri puffing up at him like a stubborn little frog. He had asked the same when she had tried to grab a loaf of bread in broad daylight the first time. Then when she had tossed green branches onto their little fire one morning, as if she wanted every brigand on the riviere to find their camp. So many little things that proved that she knew nothing.

She might be a baby, he thinks begrudgingly, but even when they argued she always learned from him what he was saying. How to be sneaky, go under notice. How to draw attention with one hand so the other could take. How to find dry wood that won’t smoke, the berries that won’t choke your air, and the right way to skin a rat. If only she had had a good family like his clan. All the children of the caravan had known how to do those things, and also not to trust a strange human Purse. If only she weren’t so empty-headed! he mourns. Then he wouldn't have to bully her with lessons.

For all he had insulted her, though, Ciri just looks at him, steady and a little sad, and puts a hand on his arm.

“He’s not one of those men, Dara.” He looks at her sharply, disbelieving. It’s like she reads his fear too easily, when he hadn’t expected her to know it at all. Being recognized makes him crawl like he has got ants under his skin. He doesn’t like it a bit, especially when her voice goes soothing. “He won’t do anything. He gave me his bed last night and slept on the floor. He’s probably grabbing us something to drink, and then we’ll decide where to go next.”

He listens, but doesn’t feel any safer, any less hunted. She brings him down to sit on one of the two beds with her. He eyes the door over her shoulder.

“One night doesn’t mean every night,” Dara says. “People don’t just help rats that aren’t their blood.” She is shaking her head even as he speaks. Frustration chokes his voice up. “He’s a stranger!”

“I know. But he, he’s helped me so far. He has treated me-”

“Like a princess?” he sneers.

“-like a person,” she shoots back, indignantly puffing up to her full unimpressive height. Dara snorts derisively.

“Said like a human. Ciri, I’ve seen this before. People with something who think they can buy brats who’ve got nothing. He can’t want anything good.”

“Dara, please. All he has done is try to help me. I think he’s a good man!”

Like arguing with stone! Dara feels his patience snap.

“Because you’re such a good judge of character? You didn’t even notice your Druid was spelled.”

That lands someplace soft like he knew it would. He might have felt bad for the way her face fell, if he didn’t know he was right. If he didn’t know that sometimes to survive you have to be mean.

Ciri looks down at her lap a long moment, chin trembling, before it firms up.

“...I know. I didn’t want to notice, then. I know you think I’m sheltered, and you’re right.” She rubs at one ankle with her booted foot, frowning at the wool in her lap as if it offends her. Dara thinks he has seen splinters pulled less painfully than seeing Ciri admit he is right. It doesn’t feel as good as he had imagined. “I know you know more than me about surviving, but-”

“Then listen to me,” he says, and if he grabs her hand it’s only to convince her, the way she had with him before. “We need to leave. We can’t trust him.” This is it, he thinks.

It is a short-lived smugness. She frowns and meets his gaze mulishly.

“Would you let me tell you what happened first?” she huffs. “You haven’t-”

The door opens behind her. She immediately quiets, though the look on her face says she’s not forgiven him for the jab nor given up on her argument.

The human sails in with what turns out to be a pitcher of apple cider, which he places with mugs on the one sideboard in the room. Dara watches critically as he then busies himself removing the worn but high quality travel pack slung over his shoulders. The instrument case he places beside it like it holds fine crystal.

When he pauses to dig through the pack, Dara feels a thrill of apprehension up his spine. It is only to retrieve a bundle of waxed linen, however. He turns like to bring it over. Dara shifts to get his feet on the floor and tenses. He waits-- he waits-- for the words, the reassurances, the questions, for a hand to try and touch his shoulder. He knows this ploy well.

The bard moves loosely and unwraps the little bundle between the two of them with down-turned eyes, utterly at ease. Once what is revealed to be travel rations has been laid out, he leaves their space easily to settle on the other bed. He doesn’t keep his boots on the ground like Dara, ready to jump up. He crosses one ankle over the other knee and laces his hands over top.

“Well,” he says. He glances between them. A nudge shifts Dara's knee. He looks over to see Ciri rip a chunk of pea bread and offer him the rest. It’s easier to take from her. He immediately rips a hunk off and shoves it in his mouth.

“What are we going to do now?” Ciri asks around her own nibble. Dara does not slow in his frantic chewing, but he does look up, listening closely. “If you don’t want to stay here, we could walk back to Kmenikplac today?” she suggests.

“I’m afraid,” the bard says slowly, “that we might have to spend the night here and leave in the morning.” Ciri seems anxious at his side for some reason. He tenses too, ready to bolt if she says so. She doesn’t. The man, what did she call him? Jaskier smiles weakly at her. “Give me an hour back at the market and I’ll gather all the news I can. We’ll know then if we have to leave tonight. I would rather,” he pauses, apparently thinks better. “Well. We’ll see. It may do us well to have a night’s wages to take us on. You two stay in here while I step out, alright?”

“Alright,” Ciri agrees for the both of them. Dara shoves another chunk of bread and some soft, creamy cheese into his cheek. He doesn’t look away once as the man stands, nodding to them both.

Once Jaskier leaves the room, Dara takes up their whispered argument as if it had never paused, talking over Ciri when she opens her mouth.

“I don’t want to hear it,” he says shortly, swallows and tries his teeth on a dried plum. It doesn’t stop him talking for a moment. “I know what this is, and we need to go.”

“You don’t know everything!” She argues hotly. She had at some point shoved the little cap back on her head, the one he had grabbed up from the ground when he chased them. It sit crooked now and threatens to fall off with her angry movements. “You aren’t letting me speak!”

The way she points it out stings because he knows she is right. He doesn’t know why she trusts the man. He doesn't know what happened. And I don’t want to, he thinks in a tone that, if he said it aloud, would probably make him flush. If his older sister had heard him, she would have called him a baby.

She isn’t here now. Dara is. She didn’t survive. He did, and Dara wants them to go, now. Before whatever the human is planning happens. The crawling under his skin feels suddenly unbearable.

Moving is the only thing that has ever made it stop, so he does. Dara jumps up, crosses the room, then back again. When Ciri opens her mouth to continue, he holds up a hand, walks away, back again. He is breathing hard. He thinks she must see the itch in him, because she clams up. A flash of warmth goes through him, for all it is short-lived.

When he saw Ciri for the first time, going to eat the choke berries, he hadn’t been able to stop himself stopping her. It had been unthinkable to him that she didn’t know they were poisonous; everyone knows. Their parents teach them!

Except, looking at her, he could see she mustn’t have ever been taught anything, not even how to dress for the winter. Her clothes were fine just from looking-- but fine doesn’t keep a body warm. He saw silks that get caught on everything, fine material that tears or wraps up running legs. Dara had traveled with cousins and his brother smaller than her. He had been in charge of steering them away from trouble and teaching them while their parents were busy. It's what an older one does. He had groaned and moaned about it, then. Now, it’s too easy to fall into the old habit and do the same for her. She had flinched when he tried to hand her his knife, had shook her head at the rat. She ate it anyway, of course, and saw that it was as good a meat as any.

He could almost have forgiven her for being stupid and human when she spoke to him softly after. Dara hadn’t spoken with anyone in a long time, not really. That first day, she had reminded him of his brother. He hadn’t spoken back to her at first-- can’t trust her, can’t risk it, can’t get attached; but there’s no harm in listening, ell’ea?-- but he had traveled with her, for a time. Just to have another set of eyes and ears to watch for soldiers. Just until he could show her the right way of doing things.

Then they found the refugee camp and he ran. Things were how they should be, he had thought. The human with the humans, and he alone. It just made sense to hang around the camp, nicking what he could and watching, listening for news. The Nilf soldiers had chased him off as well, after all, from the town where he had made himself a den and a few friends that ran as soon as the killing started. They’d kill Dara as fast as a Cintran if they caught him.

When the soldiers came again, he hesitated. He had learned his hard lesson years before, that a rat can’t look out for anyone but himself and expect to live. Sometimes the humans ganged up, and sometimes they would let a long ear in. But it never lasted. Everyone scatters in the end.

Something had sent him back before he could think too hard on it. Dara ran to where he saw her last, heard her breaths panting out with fear over the familiar sound of someone taking a knife to someone’s life. He had pulled her away with him without looking to see who, and they ran. After, it was like he lost all his sense and forgot she was human, because he took his cap off without thinking as they drank from the stream. But her reaction-- not hate or scorn, just curiosity.

He spoke to her after that.

Dara decided then he would protect her. It is good not to be completely alone. She needs him, that much is obvious; she’s too coddled to survive alone. She doesn’t know how to do anything. They survived together, traveled. She crossed the Yaruga with him-- a smugglers path her Eist had taken her once, she said, on a secret outing to fish in the river. They moved. They ate, and hid.

Brokilon called Ciri in. He could feel the magic in the trees and knew the stories-- girls go in, boys are killed outside. But he couldn’t leave her, and followed until the arrow had zipped in like a wasp to bite as his shoulder.

Inside, Dara forgot for a time beneath the trees. He didn't know why they took him in. Story goes, one of his ancestors was a Druid with dryad blood. Had they known? The waters and their guardians, the ones who the humans call the eerie wives and who he knows are actually Aen Woedbeanna, they felt familiar. As familiar as horse voices and the magic his mother had always promised to school him on but never got the chance.

It is in the trees that Ciri tells him who she is, and he wants to shake her until she cries. Or just until she understands. But it’s like he knew, before. She doesn’t know anything, and didn’t he decide to look after her and teach her?

It hurt. He wanted to hate her, the way he hates the humans who spit at him or kick him away or just look through him, with pity. He wanted to hate her the way he hates her grandmother.

He doesn’t, no matter how mad he got. She also has no one, just like him, but without having had a family as good as his, what taught him how to live when hers probably only taught her how to be a pretty bauble in a court. And she gave him her glove, before. He thinks it is silly, like to have one warm hand was better than none. She was right, of course. Childish, but right. She should have kept them for herself, should have. She hadn’t figured it out yet, just gave it to him, as easy as anything. Kind and silly.

After the compulsion on the Druid chased them off, splitting up was harder than he thought it would be. As he had ranged east alone, he found himself wondering if she was well, if she remembered the late berries and mushrooms he had shown her to eat, if she was warm enough, if she was lost. It seemed he arrived at Novriston too soon, for she wasn't there. He always had something to do, of course. He made fishing hooks from twigs and horsehair, wove a fish trap out of reeds when his line snapped, scaled and cooked trout over the fire. He wandered the town, looked at the people and who they spoke to, who they fed, who they kicked, who slept out in the cold. He looked for what would keep him alive: unlocked gates, or empty or abandoned stables, barns, hay lofts. He learned the alleys and picked through refuse where he felt the most rats whispering their hunger, a sure sign of food.

Days passed. He watched for her hair and itched deep under his skin.

In the end, he didn’t see her so much as hear her. Her piping little voice over the market crowd found him. Elves have sharper senses than humans, and better hearing for the higher sounds. Her voice drew him like a lodestone regardless of her shortened, darkened hair and her new boy’s tunic. He had watched, heart pounding and ready to spring, as the merchant harried her. As the man-- the Purse-- called her by a strange name and dragged her away, furious and red-faced. His head spun. In the end, he didn’t need to know why she called the man by name, why she looked the way she did, didn’t need to know any of it. He would save her, and they would leave together. They could always leave together and no one would stop him.

It was with righteous fury that he burst around the corner, landed a punch that hurt his knuckles on the man’s temple, and grabbed her. He expected her to run and to thank him. He had already known where he would take her, to the abandoned hovel where he had spent the night. There she would tell him where she had been, and then they would leave. He never expected her to resist.

“He’s good!”

Pacing in their little tavern room, Dara allows himself to look at the thoughts he wants to shy away from.

The human irks him. Dara had taken his dagger and he hadn’t even been mad. He had been impressed, or said he was. He had fed him without any of the prattle and honey.

And Ciri. Even ignoring her words, he can see that she has bathed. She wears new clothes, clothes so much more practical than that all that royal swish she had worn before. She looks like a boy. Like the kind of apprentice that might travel with a money-bag troubadour. She even has new gloves, the kind with a bit of fur at the cuff which cost more than the more basic leather for common blood. Ciri wouldn’t have been able to steal them; shopkeeps pin a good eye on the furs, and Ciri isn’t that good yet. Which means the human man had bought them for her.

Everything points to Ciri, maybe, possibly, being right. It makes him scared. Being scared makes him angry.

Dara had been young and stupid once and he hadn’t run when he should have. He hadn’t taken his brother and his cousins by hand and run. He can’t make that mistake again, he can’t. Mistakes, trust, they make you dead.

He shakes the unease off like road dusts. They can still run. I’ll listen so she’ll stop being so stubborn, Dara thinks, and so I can tell her where she’s wrong. If he thinks it with a little too much swagger, then only he’s to know.

Under Ciri’s pleading silence, he frowns himself into patience. He takes a moment to check and re-check that the cheese and jerky he had ferreted away wouldn’t slip out of his wrap should he need to run. Then, without anything else to distract, he returns to his place on the bed.

“Tell me what happened, then,” he demands, picking angrily at what was left of the bread.

Ciri beams, as if he has given her something. Maybe he has; he doesn’t want to think about it.

She tells him.

The more she speaks, the more his unease grows. Purses that want you for no good, they don’t scold you for nicking an apple wrong or about how the world is dangerous for a kid alone, especially a princess on the run. They know that, and they want to use it instead. They go all sweet and honey, to bait kids desperate for it.

It doesn’t sound like that, really. Sure, he had done nice things for Ciri, but she makes it sound like he had been just as uncomfortable with it as she was, and if it were all a ploy then that would never work. And the way he talked to her about lying? Knowing what people want to hear? It’s almost something Dara himself might have tried to teach her. It makes him scoff a laugh. What can a Purse, even a bard, know about lying outside of a pretty bit of words? The ones who learn it do it to survive. He can’t imagine the man with his fancy brushed green-blue wool and tooled knee-high boots ever living out on the street learning the way Dara had. He doesn’t even consider the possibility. No streetrat ever makes it out of the gutter. Not unless they’re the Rat King himself, and everyone knows that even the king of thieves is still a thief. Having coin doesn’t change that.

“I don’t like it,” Dara says afterwards. It bursts out of him like he had held his breath too long. He had, really, after Ciri had gotten fed up with his interrupting questions and dragged his hat down over his face. He had held his tongue after that, just barely. It all pours out of him now. “It doesn’t make sense. Things like that don’t just happen.”

“Why not?” Ciri sounds genuinely puzzled.

He stares openly. After all the rats they had caught and eaten together, all the logs and abandoned barns they had curled up in together, her softness still somehow manages to catch him by surprise. He sees the huge distance between their lives. He had almost forgotten- how? He wants to smack her ear, make her just a dumb kid again and not a dumb princess. At least when she’s a dumb kid she can be made to see sense.

“They just don’t! I’ve been on the streets for years and no one has ever scooped me up out of the gutter and kissed my hand,” he says acidly. She colors.

“You don’t have to be nasty just because you’re scared,” she hisses. He jerks around to glare at her.

“I’m not scared,” he says, even though his heart is hammering and has been for a while.

“Are, too,” she counters. She stands, nearly trembling with how sure she is. “You’re scared Jaskier is going to turn out to be like all the awful people you’ve seen. Someone pretended they were going to help you, right? In the past?” He flinches, really glaring now, not just a look to quiet her. She never stops.

She doesn’t glare back. Just like a noble kid, she softens like the world is soft because she says so. “You wouldn’t be so sure he was awful if you hadn’t seen it happen before,” she says quietly.

He doesn’t meet her soppy, wavery gaze. He curls his hands into fists and squeezes until they hurt and tries to be like a stone. Immovable. Unfeeling.

“If I’ve seen it before, then you should listen to me,” he says to the wall, not her. “You follow me on everything else. Why can’t you just follow me on this?” he snaps, and he isn’t a stone. His frustration bleeds out in a rush. She takes one of his fists and looks down at it. It’s the one wearing her glove.

“...do you really think he is like that? Really.” She worms a pointy little finger between his and then another, working at them until he has to release his fist. She wraps his stiff fingers in hers and glances up at him for half a second, like she wants and doesn’t want to at the same time. “After what I’ve told you, and after what you saw, tell me. Honest.”

Dara wants to say yes. But when has wanting ever gotten anyone anything? He feels like a curing skin pulled too tight on the dry rack, stretching and tearing and about to snap.

He thinks of other street rats he had run with in the past who fell for pretty words and promises. There had been another elven scrap a little younger than him. They’d met up early on, in some little spit of dirt where the humans had built one of their dirty, ugly towns. They had stolen bread and cheese together, and turned their hands at picking purses. Disappeared, one day. Dara would find him again, years later, in one of the little rat holes where orphans gathered to sleep in a city big enough to have packs of urchins. An abandoned house in the slums. The man and woman had promised him so softly and sweetly that they had always wanted a son. Fed him, washed him, just long enough to slip him sleepy potion. He woke up in another town and was forced to work with two other orphans in the back of their dye shop, stirring vats that made his lungs and eyes burn from sun up to sun down. It was a story Dara would hear a dozen times over, all different sorts. The lucky ones were forced to work for dyers, cobblers, cess pits, washers, as servants.

Then there were the unlucky ones. Dara hated to hear their stories most.

Dara thinks of how he had followed a man, once, when he was younger and didn’t know anything. The promise of food had been nice. The warmth of having an adult smile and coddle him had been nicer, unbearably nice. Like he had starved in his chest and been unable to feed it until then. He got away, but it had been a close thing. After that, he had stayed away from anyone and everyone bigger than him, no matter how kind they could make their eyes.

He thinks about Ciri’s story, about how she had been scared and smart just like she should have, and still she decided to stay with the human man, Jaskier. About how he had run after her, not angry but scared for her, promising things like protection. Words don’t mean anything, not from anyone with coin in their purse.

Dara cares more about how Ciri looks now after only a couple of days with him, so different from what Dara has come to know of her. Clean, fed, dressed warmly enough for the weather for the first time. Jaskier had dyed her hair to keep her safe from the bird-helm man she was so afraid of. Like Dara, he had realized she could be recognized by people who would sell her for a silver coin to the Nilfgaardians. Maybe he had had the same fear Dara feels at the mere thought. That they could have shared the same thought stings unpleasantly.

He thinks of a man who runs out after her not because he is angry at her, but who runs out ready to fight the soldiers himself. He hadn’t even cuffed her for the trouble. Dara’s parents and aunts and uncles had never hit a one of their kids. But life bouncing between slums and poor hamlets had shown him that nearly every other adult would hit anyone smaller than them, especially if they were blood. Dara tries to imagine the scene-- Ciri running off only to be caught-- and it ending with a hug, and laughter, jokes… and finds he can’t.

Do you really think he’s like that?

He wants to say yes, or even I don’t know. He is afraid of what he really thinks.

“Promise me,” he says instead of answering her. “If I agree to stay, you’ve got to promise that you’ll go with me if I say so. No arguing.”

“We won’t need to-” she begins. Dara shakes his head.

“No arguing. Just promise. Swear it on something important. Your soul, or,” he digs through memories of past conversations, “or your Eist. Swear.”

It sobers her like he had intended. Normally, Dara would spit in his palm to seal the deal in the way he and his other street friends had. He doesn’t think that would make Ciri any more or less likely to keep her swear, however. Instead, he lets her arrange their hands so they grasp each other’s forearms and squeeze. If he thinks it’s a silly way to seal a bond, he doesn’t say anything.

“I swear. I swear on Eist,” she says solemnly. Dara finds himself secretly glad that she had chosen him instead of the Queen; he doesn’t want her involved in any way, not for all the world, even dead. “If you say we need to go, that I’ll go with you. I’ll leave Jaskier. Alright?”

He takes a moment to look her over, her funny little brown-stained eyebrows scrunched up seriously over her pale face, and nods.

“Yeah.” She yanks his hand back when he begins to let her go.

“And you’ll swear to give him a chance,” she delivers royally, locking her cold hand around his arm until he has no choice but to grab back. “We’re going to go with Jaskier tomorrow and you’ll give him a fair chance. You swear it, too.”

He squirms. She holds him tight like one of those little dogs, the yappy, wiry ones farmers keep to catch rats and, sometimes, egg thieves. In the end, he sighs and clasps back. He may not like it, but at least he got her to swear to listen to him when things go bad. Not a bad trade, since they might get another meal or two out of the bard in the meantime.

“I swear,” he says. “On my clan, I swear.”

And when it goes wrong, I’ll keep us safe, he pledges just as true. I’ll swear that on them, too.

Chapter Text

With the door closed behind him, Jaskier found himself standing alone in the hall. He collapsed against the wall as the tension drained out of him. Melitele's tits, but being watched by that slip of a boy was harrowing.

As if thinking of the boy were its cue, the spreading bruise on his temple gave a sickly throb. Jaskier touched it with timid fingers and winced. He felt acutely his good luck that Dara was no bigger than he was, or he might have been knocked out then and there.

Immediately, however, the thoughtlessness of the relief struck him. Jaskier winced; the boy was startlingly thin. The long line of his arms in that ragged wrap he wore, which might have been green once and was now the nameless color of dirt, made Jaskier's throat tight like he would be sick. He had the spidery look of a hungry boy who had grown faster than his stomach could support and who had still yet more growing to do. Couldn’t be more than fifteen, Jaskier had figured still hunched in that alley with his head in his hand. Having been given the chance to look at him closer, he felt sure he was right.

The canny look in his eyes had confirmed something else Jaskier had guessed before, when Ciri had mentioned him: he had been on the streets a long while. He had the stony-faced quickness which Ciri hadn’t, not even in the beginning. The calculation with which he watched and took in every shifting muscle and every word and expression wasn't simple caution. It nearly bordered on prophecy. As if he waited to be proved right. Jaskier felt... He felt... something unformed and terrible and which could not be addressed now and so would be better pushed away.

His dark eyes and skin, the long blade of his nose, suggested heritage from beyond the Fiery Mountains. As close as they were to Cidaris, this wasn’t unusual. The warm ocean-side kingdom had centuries worth of heavy olive oil and horse trade with Zerrikania as well as the various horse peoples and nomads of the Korath Desert and Hakland.

Regardless, he wore the look of every street kid Jaskier had ever seen in his travels. Jaskier was a well-traveled man with varied and sundry acquaintances. He had seen his fair share of the world, and of those consigned to the streets early in life. He had made many such friends.

Most of his more light-fingered friends would laugh if they could hear him refer to that flat-eyed whip of a boy as something so sweet as a kid. In particular was Cercis, his closest rat friend, whom Jaskier met when he was hardly Dara's age. To someone like Cercis, Jaskier knew Dara was and always would be a street rat, or rat, as was their way. It was a hard title. Rats as a rule were quick, vicious, clever, and always ready to steal. Always ready to scatter. No loyalty amongst thieves, as it were. Jaskier found that he couldn’t bring himself to use it. Not even in his own mind. Dara is just a kid.

And a baby goat is more noble than a rat, is it? Shall I take offense on behalf of all rats? he could almost imagine his good friend asking him. He was equally successful in imagining the gap toothed grin he would stretch as he did. Cercis was a lifelong thief and proud rat, after all, like most of them that Jaskier knew.

Jaskier scoffed and pushed shakily away from the wall. The moment his own mind started providing teasing advice in the voice of friends-- or simply teasing sans advice-- he knew it was time to stop thinking and start doing. His loitering wouldn’t gather the news or pay for food, after all. Neither would thinking of friends he hadn't seen in years.

Going out once more, Jaskier plied his trade from one end of the market to the other. He did so in record time just as the merchants were beginning to pack up for the day. After having gathered all the news he could in Kmenickplac, he parceled it out now in a dance as old as time. News from down river closer to Cintra was sought after, as were names of those who remained in Novriston’s closest sister village. Jaskier had planned just for such. After his last performance he had learned as many as names as he could and it paid off now. He met everyone who came looking for news-- which families had left, who remained, who would go that morning. He recalled what he had seen at dawn, the veritable exodus to the west, and reported faithfully every half-remembered face and name. The list was, admittedly, not short. Life as a bard meant one became very good at remembering names and faces very quickly, and Jaskier prided himself in being better than most.

Just as every person came to him with their requests, so did he turn to them.

“What word is there of the forces seen this side of the Yaruga?”

“Is it true there is a squadron this side of the river seen east of the Owl Hills?”

“What of Sodden Hill? Has any word come to you here as to whether it has been reached yet?”

The responses were encouraging.

“Forces? Ach, whoever’s sold you that line should be flogged,” one of many fish merchants told him. (The one with the impressive arms, in fact, though his beard was silver and hung down his broad chest. His pack of redheaded grandchildren picked around them as they talked, packing up fish and river crabs for customers.) “What word I’ve heard, maybe two dozen seen this side. Scouts, I’d reckon, or rogues fleeing the army. Nilfgaard presses service of anyone who can march, I’ve heard.”

“They don’t seem to have a set destination, then?” Jaskier pressed. “No predilection for razing and pillaging in this general direction?”

“Nay, not that I’ve heard.”

Another merchant laughed at his questions as well.

“Squadron? Sir bard, no squadron will be crossing that river until Sodden Hill is smoldering and fallen beneath their boots. A few Nilfs this side of the river have been seen in a small company, but nothing like a squadron. Probably took one of the old smugglers’ climbs over. Half of Cintra has, by this point.”

“Did you last hear in which direction they ride?”

“Aye. West. Heard this morning from a Merchant from Riverdell that they were yet a day and a half, two days out. With luck they’ll pass us by.”

“With luck,” Jaskier agreed and, looking around at the villagers around him, thought, luck on the soldiers' behalf. He half bet the milkmaids in Novriston had stronger arms than any Nilfgaardian soldier.

His final question found him once again enveloped in the utterly unbearable scent of roasting nuts, mouth awash with longing. He tried not to focus on the memory of the little morsels as they fell into the mud but, well…

“I live further out to the east, serah, and I’ve heard nothing of Sodden Hill falling,” said the significantly less rosy-cheeked lady at the stall. She had laughed and dimpled at his flirting before. Now she seemed disinclined to even meet his eye. She briskly brushed stray nuts and honey crystals from the wood, requiring Jaskier to jerk his hands back with a yelp in the process, and turned her nose up at him. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Only a final question, madame, if I may,” he began. She whipped around in a cascade of curls not unlike honey themselves and pinned him in place with a glare.

“You may not.”

He opened beseeching hands.

“I only ask for news, my good lady. I don’t know what I’ve done to offend you.” And he really did mean it. He hadn’t even been in town long enough to find mischief! She sniffed.

“I’m sure you don’t.” She barely glanced at him, so radiating disapproval that even after his years of travel and many mixed welcomes, it chafed. “The way you treated that little apprentice of yours was utterly beastly.” His jaw dropped. Having turned her back, she did not see, delivering her damning disapproval to the goods she prepped for travel. “One would hope that the men we entrust with our children would be kind and just, but alas-”

“Wh, I beg your pardon!” he sputtered, only for him to clap a hand over his mouth. The market was nearly empty even of merchants, but he looked around all the same. When he turned back, she regarded him poisonously, unmoved. Having been treated to a far warmer countenance before, the change pricked him more powerfully than he might have predicted. Before he could think better of it, Jaskier leant over the stall counter with his most imploring eyes and tried to keep his tone low.

“Madame, I assure you that whatever you thought you saw-”

“Thought?" she gasped, indignant. "You dragged the poor thing out by the ear! The whole market heard you swearing up and down what you would do about it, too. For what? Stealing a pear?”

Despite himself, Jaskier felt his countenance crack, just a bit. He had played many parts in his time; the fool, the drunk, the soft heart. Even once borrowed a friend’s mien to convince some very drunk bandits that he was the Rat King himself. But to play the part of child beater he found he couldn’t stomach. He frowned and placed his hand solemnly over his heart.

“I would never,” he pledged. He saw her pause at his tone. He lowered his voice further. “You can’t be unaware of the stature of the people here. I had no choice. The fruit seller would have maimed he- him,” he stumbled, heart staggering a sudden half beat. He swallowed and rushed out, “I acted only as I knew would distract long enough for our… hasty retreat. My apprentice is well. I left him hidden in our room for the evening.”

She cast a mistrustful eye over her shoulder. “Mighty fine acting,” she drawled with just enough disbelief. He smirked in a way that he knew made his eyes brighten boyishly and tilted his chin up.

“I am a bard, madame.” He winked.

She turned away to her work, but he saw from the twitch of her mouth that, against her misgivings, she smiled. When she finally turned to face him, he saw returned to her face some portion of the good humor of before. She lifted a brow at him and wiped her hands in her apron.

“As you say, serah, if I can take your word on it.” She paused to resettle her skirts and apron to her liking before she sighed and cocked an ear his way. “What news was it you hoped for?” He fought and lost against the urge to grin and leaned on her stall once more.

“Only of Sodden Hill,” he said, “and whatever you have heard of Nilfgaardian movement in the area, or across the river. I need to know it is safe for my apprentices and I for our final night before we move west again.”

She propped one hip against the counter and hummed. The way she looked him over, from hair to boots, did not seem to him the usual pass over of an interested party. Her eyes seemed to be weighing him, instead, methodical almost. He purposefully remained relaxed rather than straightening to attention as he felt immediately compelled to. At length, she pursed her lips wryly around a smile.

“Well, alright. If you’ll lend me your hands and help pack, I could spare what news I’ve heard.”

Which is how Jaskier ended up hefting empty crates and sacks of nuts onto a hand cart and gruntingly pushing it for the smugly beaming lady to her two horses. She did as promised, however, and gave a detailed report of the land which any general would be jealous of. The bulk of the army three days from Sodden Hill; a single company of scouts and, some said, a dozen knights, having ridden ahead of the horde only to cross the Yaruga at a smuggler’s crossing and make west. People fleeing in all directions. Rumor of a razed homestead and two such hamlets three days east and closer to the fringes of the Brokilon Forest. Jaskier listened raptly even as he sweated under her gimlet eye. As thanks for the news, rather than clear out when they reached her stabled horses, he helped load the two up, though he ended up undoing half of the buttons of his jacket to steam off some of the sweat in the frozen air.

As he bowed her off and turned to leave, however, she paused him with a little burlap sack pressed into his hands.

“Since you lost the other. For your… apprentices, was it? Not just the one?” She asked, cunning eyes gleaming.

He cleared his throat weakly. He had not meant to let that slip.

“I, uh, seem to be picking up strays wherever I go these days.” For some reason, that made her warm like nothing else had. She nodded and patted a hand to his shoulder.

“I don’t doubt. You’ve a soft hand, ser bard. You keep your stray and that little sticky fingered apprentice of yours safe. She seems a naughty thing.” With that, she left him gaping in the slush. He watched her walk her two mares out in gobsmacked silence, stood between alarm, admiration, and stone-cold terror.

Fear, dear Julian, only the intuitive eye of a woman. Perhaps his mother had been right all along.

*

He returned to their room with the nuts and good news.

When he entered, he found Ciri and Dara playing some kind of hand slapping game with a competitive intensity that made him smile. Of course, the moment he stepped in through the door, Dara had eyes only for him. When it resulted in Ciri slapping his hand with a hollow-palmed SMACK, however, his attention quickly shifted back with a hiss. Ciri preened under his outrage. The game was soundly finished after that; Dara got up to move back onto the bed from the floor. Sighing, Ciri stood and brushed herself off of dust.

“Did you learn anything?” she asked. Jaskier shook the bag of nuts at her with a grin.

“Only that I am absolutely irresistible to apple-cheeked hazelnut merchants with hair like honey and, probably, very large husbands.” She rolled her eyes at him, barely quashing a smile.

“I meant about the soldiers.”

“Oh, did you?”

Seeing her displeased little nose wrinkle, Jaskier finally settled in with their treat and told them of what he had heard. He had the presence of mind to retreat across the room with his palmful as he did. He had chosen right; Dara only drifted to Ciri’s side for his own share once he was propped on the far wall, unblinkingly watching for Jaskier's reaction as he did. They agreed together-- well, Jaskier and Ciri agreed-- to spend the night. While Dara didn't speak, Jaskier got the distinct impression that he wasn't happy with the decision. Unsure of what to do, however, Jaskier let it be. If it meant another night of coin into his purse, it could only be worth it.

They spent a short, quiet few minutes finishing the nuts. It was nearly peaceful.

To pass the afternoon he took his time up consulting the tightly rolled, waxed map he kept. Then, when the time came, whilst Dara sat by the window and Ciri watched he went through the old familiar routine, warming his voice (and pretending with all his might not to notice how Ciri snickered when he baa’d and mi’d and goo-goo-goo’d). After, he tuned his lute in preparation for the evening’s performance. That work seemed to hold very little interest for either of his supposed apprentices. Even Ciri drifted away once his comedic value waned. She picked up a brief whispered conversation with Dara at the window. Jaskier did his best not to eavesdrop.

The room fell into a strange sort of-- he wouldn’t call it a truce, per se. As they shared the space, rather, there came a half-ease as the afternoon crossed to evening. When silence fell and then began to wear on him, he rambled on, as he was wont: of the rumored beasts of the area; which ones he knew were fake and which he simply assumed; their plans for tomorrow, what rations they would buy and what time he thought they would make; what songs he planned to sing, and which he hoped would be well received.

He had never minded filling a silence before, and didn’t now. Even so, Ciri seemed quiet. He felt eyes burning into his shoulders from time to time from across the room. They would need to talk, he knew. If they had time now... but no. He had better prepare for the performance, he told himself. He didn't look forward to breaching the subject of the market with Ciri. What would he even say? Was he meant to scold her? They traveled together, he and this strange, stubborn child, but the connection there was uneasy at best. He wasn't her parent, not her guardian, not her knight. He was the adult, but she was a princess and he a lesser nobility who promised his service. She was a princess, but he was her adult companion and furious, confused, and terrified besides in equal measures. There seemed to be no stable ground to stand upon, no vantage to decide his track and path. Just thinking on it made him feel dizzy with frustration and indecision.

His tense fingers plucked a discordant, too-tight string. It cut through his turmoil painfully. He sighed. No, definitely better to put it out of mind and prepare. They could speak later.

When the sun went down, Jaskier left down to the common with the promise of dinner and a heartfelt request to, please, not find trouble while he was gone. Ciri nodded. And Dara, well. He simply looked at him. Jaskier found it enough of a victory that he had stayed and so left with that in his belt, whistling a tune as his spirits lifted. The excitement of the performance found him as it always did, no matter the coin in his purse or the troubles dogging him.

In the common, he found his welcome as warm as one could expect in a hamlet tucked between the fingers of the hand of war. The beer flowed freely. Jaskier answered the expected questions, gave the news again of Kmenickplac, who had stayed and who fled. He took the names of those with kin further west and gave his solemn promise to deliver them in his own journey.

As the sun set the common filled. When he had a name for nearly every face, he bought another ale (because no tavern trusts a dry bard) and picked the familiar opening measures to an old fisherman’s ballad. He saw the fruit monger part way through the intro. Giddy as a schoolboy who got away with it, he nodded gravely to him before he began to sing.

The crowd took to the staggered jigs and ballads to a soul. It wasn’t just the bodies of the villagers around the tributary made strong by its waters, he quickly learned, but their voices as well. The room rang. He thought he felt the beams themselves tremble when he managed to get the entire room roaring along to a raunchy Redanian shanty.

Around the eighth hour of evening, his greatest fans pitched in and bought him a dinner of sausages and fresh trout, boiled crawdads and boiled turnip, bitter greens in butter and vinegar, and an entire loaf of brown peasant bread. He thanked the room as a whole kindly and took just long enough to take a few bites and then carry the offering upstairs to his apprentices-- “From the lovely people of Novriston!” he announced, then took a great gulping drink from the water pitcher and returned downstairs.

He played on. The fire was kept high and roaring so that sweat beaded at his hairline and collar. After the long walk of the morning, it proved a welcome change from the frost outside.

By the hour before midnight, the people of Novriston had gone through every shade of jolly and melancholy that music could provide, and returned for a final rollicking verse. The song was a favorite-- clever with gallow’s humor, a mariner’s revenge song on a dastardly villain but so joyfully composed that everyone stomped along in the end and cheered. His fingertips burned as he plucked faster and faster the final whirling melody and grinned rosy-cheeked at the fishwife with her little pennywhistle and the prickly-chinned ginger youth who played the spoons, both sweating to keep up. Together they rambled the tavern into early morning, and so in highest spirits did he finally bow out, begging an early start. He counted his coin and winked at any friendly face that so gamely tried to catch his eye.

It is with no surprise that he found Dara and Ciri dead asleep, even through the noise below. That it was curled together on the same bed gave him pause. The possibility of a night not on the floor, however, moved him as little else could. And, standing quietly over them, he found nothing amiss. They curled together with easy comfort, like a brother and sister. It set an unfamiliar ache behind his breath for a moment.

Zofia, he thought with ringing clarity, and paused mid-step. How long had it been since he had thought of his sister? Not as a grown woman as she was now, but as she had been when they were children? Not for the first time, he wished that memory of her didn’t carry with it the taint of their family. Looking at the two, he felt that perhaps, like this, it needn’t. The years when they would curl up together in the same bed to sleep were far behind. But not gone, he thought. As he set about undressing for bed, he tried to push the unexpected remembrance away without much success.

We had never curled together for warmth on a straw mattress, he reminded himself, annoyed. Rather than settle his mind, it seemed simply to sharpen the memory to a point. That’s right, it seemed to tell him. And neither should they. Grimly, he threw himself into undoing his doublet and folding it neatly away. The blanket over the two of them could have been read through. He draped the quilt from his own bed over top and tried not to feel the little grain of discontent grit against his fickle fool’s heart.

I can’t do this, he thought anyway. It soured the high of his evening immediately. He scowled as he picked at what little remained of their dinner, as he cleaned at the basin. After, he found himself still too distracted to sleep. He settled in instead to count the coin from his purse again, head turning with fears.

What of the days between towns? What if there is a night not so well received as tonight? What if Ciri needs new boots, or Dara? Or both? What-

“Jaskier?” The bard jumped, sending silver scattering across the tabletop. Ciri climbed out of bed and drifted over. When he caught the flicker of light catching Dara’s eyes, he realized they were both awake with a flash of guilt. “Sorry, did I wake you? I tried to be quiet,” he said.

Ciri shook her head but said nothing else. She looked past him to the coins spread across the little table.

“Are you worried about money?”

In a moment he had the coins swept back into his purse. He set it slowly down before turning to inspect her. Bed head but not nearly bleary eyed enough to have been just awakened. She must have lain there for some time, then. Watching?

Seeing as the room didn’t have chairs, Jaskier waved her with him as he crossed to his bed. She perched nervously on the end but never dropped his gaze. A glance told him Dara was sat up in bed as well, listening. Jaskier ran a stalling hand over his face. He felt more than saw Ciri begin to fidget beside him.

“Are you trying to think of a lie?” she asked plainly. He gasped a laugh.

“No. I’m sorry,” he said to her tightening face, “I’m not laughing at you, I swear. You just startled me is all. You’re terribly direct, aren’t you?”

“I’m a girl,” she delivered with finely tuned disgust. “I have to be or people will think they can order me around, or ignore me. And you haven’t answered my question.”

For all she tried to say it primly, he felt as much as saw the hint of hurt lingering there. Immediately, all urge to tease her slipped away. All at once, the exhaustion of the night and weight of the decisions before him leaned in. He rubbed ungentle fingers into his eyes.

“Ciri,” he began, and stopped. After a long day of travel, of duping fruit mongers and being struck by hard-fingered waifs (and then tactfully fielding the questions of the tavern below about the resulting bruise and jokes of bards who sing songs no one likes), was it too much to ask to just be able to sleep? Except he looked at her and sensed that this was why she had been so quiet all afternoon, whatever this conversation was. It firmed up his resolve. He turned to face her fully.

“I am worried about money, a bit,” he admitted. She sat up straight as a bolt. It made him smile. “What? Have I surprised you? Did you expect me to lie, say 'no, darling, I just enjoy counting coin by moonlight when I could be getting my beauty sleep'?”

“...a little,” she shrugged. “You said before that a good lie is what you know someone expects to hear. And you told me you didn’t want me to worry about money…”

“I don't want to lie to you,” he said. "And I won't. Even if I don't want you to worry about money."

“Or steal,” she added pointedly, more than a little unhappy. He groaned.

“Why are you so intent on-“

She crossed her arms. “I could help!” Frustration colored her voice.

“Or you could be whipped by a man with arms that are bigger around than you are,” Jaskier returned pointedly. “Ciri, that wouldn’t help anyone! You’ve got to think,” he pleaded. He saw instantly by the turn of her face that it was the wrong choice of words. She jumped up.

“I do think!” When she whirled around to glare at him, her fists went white at her sides. “I’m not stupid, Jaskier!”

“I didn’t-“ he denied. She stared at him hard.

He remembered, suddenly, the sound of his own voice. "That was an unbelievably stupid thing to do!" They had not been kind words, but frustrated ones. Jaskier always chose his traveling companions wisely, knowing himself; lovers of life and travel and mischief. Any equal who could give as good as they got. He had said it without thinking, like he would to any of his sharp-tongued fellows.

But she is not a fellow bard or adventurer. Gods, she’s just a child. He deflated like a pricked blister, voice dropping in shame. “...I did use that word before, didn’t I?”

Tight lipped, she didn't need to nod.

Jaskier had thought before that he was too tired for this conversation, and that he couldn’t get any more exhausted. He found that he was breathtakingly wrong. He suddenly felt immensely, bone-crushingly worse. He moved to massage his temples only to wince when he rediscovered the bruise. His hands dropped limply into his lap.

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Ciri,” he said with all the sincerity he could muster even as the skin between his shoulder blades burned and itched. In the best of times such a conversation would strain his nerves. Given his druthers, he would most likely run from it, or joke and charm his way out of it. He couldn't do so now. What's more, Ciri deserved better than his usual.

That they had an audience did not in any way make him more comfortable. He sensed more than felt Dara’s wire-taut attention and felt even more clearly that he needed choose his words carefully. “But after what happened, you’ve got to see that that was a terrible decision,” he tried.

“You must have stolen before to survive,” she countered, only slightly mollified.

“I have. To survive,” he said plaintively. “What you did today wasn’t for survival.”

“It would have been okay if I hadn’t been caught,” she complained in a tone that was all thirteen and whine. He held her eye in silence for a long moment, until she began to shift unhappily. She tried to look away; he caught her attention back.

“But you were caught,” he said seriously. “You were caught and we drew the attention of the whole market getting you away. And if I hadn’t managed it? You would have been thrashed.” He felt as much as heard his throat going tight as frustration and remembered fear crept back in. “Do you know how scared I was when I saw him grab you? All that over a pear?”

He thought he saw something flash across her face. Before he could be sure, however, she crossed her arms and turned to stare hard across the room in pugnacious silence. When it became clear she wouldn’t be breaking it, Jaskier figured another route was in order.

“How about this? Since you really want to help, and since we’ve already got you dressed the part, why don’t you act as my apprentice?”

She gaped at him, silence forgotten.

“What? But I can’t sing!”

“You don’t need to,” he chuckled. “And we don’t have time to train you besides. Apprentices have many other jobs. How are you at dancing?” Her expression, like someone smelling an open gutter, made him laugh again. He felt some of the heaviness leaving his shoulders. “Perhaps not. No matter what, you can carry your cap around to collect coin and charm the audience with your little button nose," he offered.

Her hand flew to her nose. “It is not!”

Jaskier thought he heard a snort from the other bed. He grinned and patted the mattress. She sank down on it with wounded dignity, outraged but no longer thrumming with anger. Relief made him feel light for a moment.

“I think having you there would bring more coin." He diplomatically avoided further mention of noses. "People like to give to children.”

“Like the tavern lady in Kmenikplac,” she recalled. He smiled, unexpectedly pleased.

“Exactly. So what do you think? Would you help me perform? I'd quite appreciate it. Being a bard alone can get old fast, and I've felt that my performances could use something more.”

She fiddled with her tunic edge with anxious fingers and bit her lip, looking torn. He thought she had the look of someone trying her best not to be pleased. The suspense of her response stretched in silence.

“If things get bad,” she finally said. His smile dimmed. “If we run out of coin and we have to steal to survive-”

"We won't-" he began.

Her gaze stopped his tongue like lead. He felt a chill pass through him.

"If things get bad again and we have to steal to survive," she said roughly, "then I will."

No, he wanted to say. I won’t have you in danger. He knew how that would go over, of course, and winced. Did he want to ignite her stubbornness and pride again?

And wasn’t she already in danger? Weren’t they all? There had never been a war like this. Usually, kings and kingdoms quibbled until they reached agreements. Usually. Nilfgaard asked for nothing, only destroyed and left scorched earth behind. In the face of such a slaughter, they would need to be ready to do everything necessary to survive.

It was a lesson Ciri had obviously learned well. One that Dara had learned well, perhaps even taught her. A lesson the two knew perhaps better than Jaskier himself. Jaskier looked between the two of them and their eyes glittering in the powerful moonlight streaming in and frowned so deeply he felt unused muscles pull with disuse. He felt himself a man with few options and none of them simple.

“If we need to steal to survive,” he said, "then... we will." Ciri perked immediately. He leveled her with a quelling look. “But only then,” he warned, not at all amused by the little glance she sent back at Dara, their silent conference of victory. He pointed between them both. "And as the adult with the coin purse, I'll be the one to decide when that is. Fair?”

“Fair,” she agreed begrudgingly, as if he couldn't see how pleased she really was.

It was the best he was going to get for the night. He nodded.

“Of course, I don’t know how you feel about any of that, Dara,” he called lightly across the room. He pointedly kept his gaze brief and casual when he looked across at the boy. Dara stared at him hard. Jaskier just managed a wry smile. “That will have to be something we talk about at another time, if you don’t mind. I think I’m about to pass out where I sit.”

No response came, but he hadn't expected one. Taking the hint, Ciri rose and paused. Jaskier felt his heart drop. But she only sent him a small, guilty look. Hesitant fingers touched his shoulder and were gone.

“...is that why you were so angry?” she mumbled.

“Mm?”

“Before. After the market. It was because you were scared?”

Jaskier fiddled with his rings, mouth opening and closing. He was unsure what uncomfortable feeling went through him. All he knew was that he felt exposed. He had to clear his throat before he could speak.

“Of course. I thought my heart might stop when he grabbed you,” he admitted, with a raw feeling he wasn't sure he liked. He wanted very badly to look away. He was rewarded for fighting the urge with a hesitant, new-growth-pale smile.

“Mine, too,” she admitted in a shy whisper. She ducked her head. “Thank you for saving me, Jaskier,” and with that left him there as she fled to her bed.

He sat perhaps a minute longer after that. It was almost in a dazed state from the long evening and emotional whiplash that Jaskier finished preparing for bed and sat again on his bed.

He couldn't bring himself to lay down. He thought of his worries, and their conversation. They chased themselves in circles around his throbbing skull. He thought of his sister and their brothers and sighed at himself.

It was simple proximity. He knew what lands they would approach as they fled west and then north. He knew where they would need pass. The plains and forests and coasts of Kerack. He could nearly smell them on the air. It was as if the years since he had last passed close simply made him that much keener to it. He thought of he and Zofia, of the hungry look around Dara’s eyes, of his honesty earlier with silver on the table, of his promise to Ciri. You need to find Geralt of Rivia. Let me protect you. He thought with something like dread of the title he had not affixed to his name when he swore to do so. His own words came back to haunt him.

The common had gone quiet down below. Roughly, Jaskier shucked off his boots and belts and told himself resolutely that these were thoughts for another day. Besides which, he wasn't lying to Ciri, he told himself firmly. He simply hadn't mentioned his title, is all. And no need! He wouldn’t go begging for money from his family just because he might have to wear the same doublet two seasons in a row. He would tighten his belt. They would be fine, the three of them. He would bring the little princess to Geralt of Rivia. If Jaskier knew anything about Dara in their short, taciturn time together, then he would go with her without hesitation.

At dawn, they would travel west. All else could come after.

He turned over on the palliase so that he could see the huge, silver waning moon through the window. If he tossed a bit before sleep took him, it was only because straw poked him through the mattress and his stomach still panged for a missed supper. He had been used to the feeling in his earlier years. Not so much in his more recent success. He would simply have to get used to it again.

Jaskier's last thought as he began to drift was uncommonly fierce. I'll keep them both safe, and warm, and fed. If I must trick and lie to a hundred fruitmongers or starve at dinnertime, I'll do it without Pankratz coin.

Jaskier slept, and did not worry.

Chapter Text

Ciri shook Jaskier awake in the dark.

He knew her right away by the acrid smell of the herbal dye still clinging to her hair. When his blurry eyes cleared it was to see her chalk white face leant over him. He sat bolt upright.

“What is it?”

“They’re here,” she whispered.

It was then he heard what must have woken her; riders and horses outside. Somewhere in the distance, a horse screamed high and piercing. For a bleary moment he thought it was the sound of the market being set up pre-dawn. Perhaps a horse had spooked or a wagon overturned.

Then he remembered that yesterday was market day. And over the distant grumble of hooves he heard them-- shouted orders and the unmistakable clash of blades.

Jaskier was out of bed in an instant. “Boots and gloves on, both of you!” He rushed for his own.

“They’re not supposed to be here.” Ciri was wild eyed. She fumbled at the buttons of her tunic. “Everyone said they were a day away!” Suddenly at her side, Dara screwed her cap down onto her head without a word. His eyes met Jaskier's over her head, just for a moment. Neither of them could say anything; it was true.

“Downstairs, let’s go!” Jaskier urged instead, and struggled into his pack.

When they clambered down, the small commons was packed with more bodies than it was made to hold and far more than the tavern’s number of rooms. Jaskier thought of what could have driven so many to the inn and grit his teeth against a dizzy plunge of fear.

Without the fire and reed lights lit to cut the dim, chaos reigned in semi-darkness. Tenants all milled about preparing the inn for siege without care for gender or class or age. At the barked orders of a grizzled mercenary, Jaskier watched as two teenage girls in hastily tied dresses and maid’s aprons struggled with a trio of merchants to overturn the long, heavy oak common tables against the door and windows. A sellsword with a round craggy face like a battered shield in soft-spoken counterpoint herded a shivering knot of children back into the far corner where, already, a young woman crouched with a babe in each arm. As if arming a platoon, a greyed woman with hands like woodblocks passed wooden rods and broom handles out to a cadre of half-dressed, pale civilians near the back closet. Many more simply milled and chattered, senseless with fear.

Amidst the din of shouting, someone wailed. A child tried to take up the cry, only to be hushed.

At the front with an earth-shattering bang, the doors shrieked and bowed and leapt on their hinges. The room let out a shout. The girls at the tables threw themselves against the makeshift blockade, crying out to Melitele. Ciri flinched into his elbow.

“Will they hold?” she asked with hesitant hope. Jaskier shook his head, mouth unspeakably dry. The sight of the two maids with their rosy elbows and soft arms trembling against the blockade struck him like a knife blow. For a moment, he had no breath. The doors-

“No door holds forever,” his numb mouth said for him. He dragged a rough hand across it. “At this rate we’ll be trapped in here when they break through. We’ve got to go.” Bodies pressed and jostled around them. Someone knocked Ciri into his side, where she tread on his foot. She grabbed at him for balance.

“But we can’t get out,” she cried, “Jaskier, they’ve blocked the door!”

He turned a full circle, mind whirling with as much chaos as the room. Upstairs, out through one of the windows-- perhaps to a neighboring roof? No, not when they couldn't know if there were archers. Out a window? Even as he looked, he saw all of them blockaded.

Movement behind the bar. A brown man in a farmer’s frock sweated and struggled to block the narrow doorway with a heavy upturned bench. Another crash at the front door had him nearly dropping it in fright. Jaskier seized Ciri and pushed her ahead of him.

“Behind the counter,” he shouted over the buffeting voices, “out the back tavernkeep’s door!” Unmoving, she stared at him as if he had spoken a different language, the whites visible all the way around her eyes.

He remembered suddenly, ludicrously, who she was. What princess had ever had the freedom to wander taverns as a small child and find the small side doors meant for the staff?

The main door bent and jigged on its hinges. There was no time.

“This way!” Quick as anything, Dara elbowed and slithered his way through the crush to grab Ciri around the wrist. “Follow me, come on!” He found an opening in the churn of bodies around them as easily as a hare between brambles and bolted. With them darting through the spaces between legs and hips, Jaskier struggled with his greater height and broader shoulders to keep up, shoving with shoulders and elbows when needed. Behind the bar, the man nearly dropped the bench at their arrival.

“My good man, we must get through,” Jaskier gasped, like an apology, and gave the bench a shove. It slid a foot to the side. The man swore at him and grabbed for it.

“Are you daft? There’s Nilfs out there!” His eyes landed on Ciri and Dara. “You can’t risk the wee ones-”

No time.

Jaskier kicked the end of the bench out of the threshold and pressed his entire body across to hold it. He waved frantically. “Through, both of you, go, go,” he said, then darted out on their heels. The man still shouted behind them, but the confusion of the room ate his words.

Outside, an unforgiving wall of heat met them as solid and stopping as stone. Having expected the cold, it confused his senses long enough that it took his stinging, blinking eyes precious seconds to realize why.

The tavernkeep’s home might have been one of the nicer houses in Novriston, once. Now, the thick flames gnawing through its precious wood obscured the first floor entirely, nearly too bright to gaze into. Tongues of it crawled up the steaming, hissing thatch of its steep roof. From the second floor window a figure cried and screamed at the heart of a pillar of black smoke. In the next moment, she leapt-- Jaskier cried out, stomach swooping with horror-- leapt onto the stone not a half-dozen yards before him and lay unmoving, chemise aflame.

“Gods, gods,” he gasped as he scrambled back, and found he had nothing more to say to them. He dragged himself away from the sight of her fire-blackening hair and sought out the two figures standing stationary in the little alley, frozen by the sight. Even as he turned, he caught Ciri’s outstretched hand as if he had expected to find it there. He could barely hear her over the roar.

“Where are we going? Where can we go?” Her eyes hung captive on the sight behind him, reflecting firelight. They sat huge in her face. The play of firelight on her cheeks washed all of the color from her and made her appear as a wraith. He had never seen the look she wore now. He shifted as if his body could block the whole of it from her, from both of them, her and silent Dara at her side, and willed himself steady. There was no one else to lead them out, only him. He had faced worse situations, and seen worse things, he told himself firmly, and projected all the confidence he could as he spoke.

“Out of the village,” he called over the roar of the fire. He caught her gaze and pressed her hand tightly. She gazed back, lost. “We can’t be caught here, so we've got to move fast and quiet. Our best chance is not to be seen. I need you to follow me, both of you. Can you do that?”

Ciri nodded.

Down the alleyway they fled with the firelight fading behind them. Without its cracking and cackling, the village lay dark and silent to their right. Yet Jaskier could hear fighting over the roofs on the other side, past the buildings along the main streets. His mind turned and turned. How had they come so quickly? How could the reports have been wrong? They had come from those who had seen the scouts first hand! His questions had no answers.

Even without the great torch of the tavernkeep’s house, as they ran the night was light enough to see that the killing had not yet spilled into the alleys. A nearly full moon lingered low in the clear sky, as cool and sterile as a polished tin lamp. Looking at it, an awful understanding seized him.

“The reports were right.” Keeping pace at his side, Ciri gasped a question that he didn't hear. He remembered laying in bed not a handful of hours before, awake in the glow. He remembered moonlight strong enough to see Ciri and Dara by when they had woken. He clenched his fists until his nails dug painfully into his palms. “It was a clear night, clear enough to see by. They forced a night march. For some reason, they kept going.”

“They’re looking for me, aren’t they?” Jaskier looked at Ciri and didn’t reply. He could see she knew.

Instead he paused long enough to look at them each. Two scared kids, even if Dara tried not to let it show, relying on him to get them out alive. He clenched his jaw against a shudder and tried to project a calm he did not feel. “You both stay behind me,” he said with as much assurance as he could, “always right behind me, do you understand? You run when I say run, hide when I say hide, and I'll get us out.” Waxen-faced, Ciri nodded. At her side, Dara nudged her forward between them and kept close, and did not look at Jaskier at all. Jaskier almost called him on it, but knew there was no time. It had to be enough.

They moved solely through the back alleys off the main road. At the next cross, screams ahead sent them down another branching path. Jaskier checked each crossways before he led them through, and each time gripped the hilt of his dagger so hard his palm ached. His eyes still stung from the fire and smoke where he turned them on every shadow and empty window. But they saw no soldiers. The only hint that anything was wrong was the smell and still, the distant piping of blades, children’s voices, calls. Every sound lit the nerves of his body alight with a tension worse than fear.

What had Novriston been in the day? Quaint, cob and straw roofs? He remembered how it felt to come over the hill and see it spread fat and warm on the hillside like good butter on brown bread. The friendly faces of their homes charming him, the closeness with which they pressed near each other quaint and idyllic. He had imagined how they might look in summer, like playmates clustered about the river sunning themselves amid grass and wild strawberries, and thought how it might be to visit then. He had planned it. How different now in this night.

A combined sense of longing and horror gagged him with a sweetness he couldn't stand. The air no longer smelled of the river. It stank of greasy, acrid smoke and choked their lungs as they ran, plunging through the smog and taste of it like into murky waters. The houses hunched about them in watchful closeness were not friendly. Their unfriendly shadows smothered. He swore they pressed the breath right from his lungs at every cross when he breathless went ahead to check for the black banner.

Alleys, lanes, courtyards. He saw no knights. They ran. They passed a little cobbled close with a gutter deep enough they had to leap. Their path reached a dead end and forced them to scrabble back and down the other way. In the next they startled a stray dog, and it startled them, and Jaskier ran, and ran, and his hand never left his knife, he ran with his eyes always moving and he ran with the two at his back.

Experience kept him checking ahead of them; fear kept him checking behind. Always his eyes fought to turn back the moment he looked forward again. He expected to see mounted soldiers or knights on warhorses. He waited to hear the cry that would bring the whole of the company down upon them. What could he do against a company, he wondered for a brief, mad-dash moment. What could he do against a knight? A soldier? His heart tripped over the obvious answer even as they slipped through the empty lanes with Ciri and Dara close at his side just as he had asked. Their breaths rang more loudly in his ears than his own. The night stuttered. It swung. Jaskier had been asleep ten minutes earlier.

At the next corner he found no soldiers, only a column of smoke rising thickly in the distance towards the eastern edge of town. It was far enough down the lane that he couldn’t see the orange glow. It offered no comfort.

“Another house?” he wondered out loud to himself, just to speak. Could they mean to burn the village down? House by house, building by building, until they found the princess? And why?

Ciri whimpered at his hip where she had come forward. Down the other way, a boy lay on his back in the road in a dark pool, staining his gingery hair. He had been cut from collarbone to groin. A woman with similarly fair hair lay a few paces further up the way.

Shock had a strange way of finding time between breaths and pulling it out slow and sticky, thin, thinner. In between one copper-tasting inhale and the next, Jaskier took in the elaborate embroidery of crocuses on her apron, half engulfed by the blood staining it. Her face might have been slack with sleep, were her eyes not wide open. Her arm lay another pace down the lane. It had been shorn from the elbow.

His meager dinner made its way up his chest even as he pressed Ciri around and away. Jaskier had seen many terrible things in his time traveling the Continent, especially with the company he had once kept. Bodies rent nearly to pieces by werewolves, by bruxae. Men, women, and children drowned, mutilated, burnt. Corpses left to wind and rain for weeks undisturbed before their final, unlikely carter found and returned them home in a display of humanity that had ceased to amaze decades before.

A sound scoured its way out of his throat. Be it the work of monsters, the cursed, spirits or sentient beings, Jaskier had grown a brusque, almost flippant acceptance to such sights. But they were not this. This, the callow work of men was more monstrous than anything done by a beast, because a man, all men, are at their base the same as him. He saw for a moment himself wielding the sword that had killed them and had to turn his back, weak with revulsion and burning with anger that was like pain it overcame him so completely. What crime had they committed but trying to flee?

Dara lingered a bare step away. The boy gazed on the scene with such an unmovable, austere face. Jaskier thought of veterans who held as much stone in their look. The juxtaposition with his still sharp, young face shocked him from the depth of his feelings. He settled his stomach by force of will and swallowed.

“Both of you-”

There came a tumult of pounding hooves from the direction of the fire. It broke open the pause which had seized them. Careful distance be damned, Jaskier grabbed Dara and shoved both him and Ciri on before him.

“Across, down the alley, quickly!” he hissed.

They ran.

Jaskier tried to take their bearing as they did. He cursed that he hadn’t had time to explore the town more properly. If he just knew where the streets opened up, where they let out! If he just knew the back ways! Passing the next lane onto the main drag, he caught a glimpse of a half remembered junction and the line of a temple roof some streets past. It took what felt an eternity to place it in his memory.

Hazelnuts in the muck, and a temple line in the distance. “We’re on the eastern side of the market. West,” Jaskier said. “If they’ve come from the east, we need to go west.”

“That’s towards the tributary,” Ciri panted, clutching at a stitch in her side. “If we reach it, we could use it to hide our tracks!”

Gods all bless Calanthe who trained her princess in war, Jaskier thought with a fervency otherwise reserved for hot baths, fresh pastries, and soft bodies. He caught her hand to give it a quick squeeze.

“Clever girl,” he whispered, a great upwelling of emotion barely breathed out with it. “Oh, you tiny hellion, that’s exactly what we’ll do. We just need to keep moving fast and quiet. We will get out of this yet.”

They caught their first sight of the knights three streets later, as if to extinguish any sense of hope their plan had instilled. With the two waved back to wait for his all-clear, Jaskier peeked his head down the way. There they stood with the suddenness of a nightmare. The sight of them in their armor, expected up until the moment they arrived, broke him into a cold sweat. Black helms, he saw; they towered against a backdrop of a burning store, their backs aloof and unfeeling even as one cut down a fleeing farmer. His wife cried out for mercy, and fell. A gasp at his side; Ciri had come up, impatient at his pause. Now she shuddered at the sight. Jaskier pressed a finger to his lips and waved both of them to his side.

They passed the quieting lane with bitten tongue silence, shadows amidst shadows.

They passed no more bodies, and no more villagers. The air echoed with distant screams and calls and crying, but amidst the tangling sprawl of crooked, thin-pressed alleys and lanes, there came a sense of being strangely alone. Only fleeting hints of others flashed past, so brief that sometimes Jaskier wondered if he had seen them at all. The flash of color or sound. The barest signs of others running just as they were flickered and leapt and disappeared in the maze around them; sometimes in the same direction, often just for a heartbeat before the figure disappeared. Once or twice, they saw small groups in the distance, fleeing with baskets and friends on their backs. At times there was only the trailing edge of a cloak around a corner ahead, or a skirt, that set Jaskier’s nerves shivering with suspense. The night opened up abandoned about them, filled to overflowing only with the voices of those fleeing and dying.

Jaskier had seen nights not unlike this one. He had seen once Lyrian hamlet razed by a neighboring Lord over some petty squabble involving grain tariffs. He had fled with the apothecary's family taking him in for the night, carrying baskets of squalling chickens on his back and a piglet under each arm. More times than he could count on one hand, he had seen mobs raised to chase out neighbors, or witch doctors, or, too often, a witcher. He had seen; watched; been part of; fled from. Even on his own or as part of wandering troupes, Jaskier had found trouble that ended with him taking to his heels ahead of soldiers and guardsmen and even the odd knight or noble kinsman.

He remembered those times as being made of breathless excitement, almost; at least at first, before he saw the swords. As a young man more used to trouble than to peace, he had fled sometimes laughing, sometimes sweating, often grinning. With companions such as he kept-- with a white haired witcher at his side, he recalled with sharp, smarting nostalgia that was more bitterness than he ever wanted-- what then did youth fear from that which had never before caught it?

For a sensualist keen to live every shade of life, fear had simply been another morsel on the gilded plate. Jaskier was careful when he needed, uncareful when he could, and always clever, because the best stories know that the cleverest always slip through the crack in the witch’s oven. No giants may catch them or sphinxes best them or sirens drown them.

But Jaskier was not running with a witcher or a knight or a troupe of actors and thieves. Jaskier was not clever. He had not thought of the moon and what he knew of Nilfgaard. He had been useless. Hadn’t he thought it a dozen times, how strange that they seem only to wish destruction? Did Ciri not mention how they sought her?

They ran, and Jaskier's regrets savaged him until a scream too close snapped him from the self-flagellation. He hissed something foul under his breath that made the two whip about to look at him, startled, expecting a threat. He shook his head and said nothing, merely waving them back. He had nearly run them into a crossroads without looking, caught in the mindless turn of panic and blame. He could reflect on his failures if they lived, he decided grimly. Determined, he cleared the rest out of his mind and ducked ahead to scout.

They found no more bodies as they fled. The knights or soldiers must follow the main streets-- like a poison through arteries. Disgust gripped him to his core. They had to keep enough room for their mounts and swords to maneuver, the better to cut down the innocent. It had its advantage for them, however. If they just kept to the little alleyways- if they just stayed off the main roads-

At the next crossing that the massacre bled over into their path.

The ragged edge of peasant and private homes had just begun to bleed into the neighboring merchant district, small as it was. Jaskier came around the trailing arm of the cob-faced public house and stopped so hard that his young companions ran into his back. "Jaskier?" Ciri whispered.

Jaskier saw the old man first, and that was what stopped him. His body lay as if discarded. Jaskier knew him immediately by the silver beard laying across his red chest.

The family lay outside what must have been their home. The youngest was still small enough to be in a sibling’s arms and lay clutched there. Jaskier counted easily a half dozen of them in total, half of them children. He remembered some of them, their round arms and small hands moving about the fisherman’s stall with practiced ease. One, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years of age, had blushed upon meeting his eye, red under a port wine birthmark on one cheek. He saw that cheek crumpled in the mud where they lay like a dropped sack.

His ears rang. Jaskier turned, searching, to find Ciri and Dara almost stood on his heels. Probably he had made some noise and they had come to see. His hands acted without his orders, lifting as if he could press them around the scene and shield them from it at once.

No man is fast enough or has arms broad enough. They stepped into the lane, and Ciri turned and chucked over to be sick. He grabbed her about the waist before she could fall into it and propped her up as she finished, shuddering so powerfully she seemed ready to fly apart. He murmured nonsense as she did, his own face clammy with nausea.

“My dream,” she gasped. He could barely hear her, but he thought she said, “It’s just like my dream. It’s just like my dream.” He drew her up and away, too aware of the voices coming from the other side of the house.

“I know. I know,” he hushed, barely aware of what he was saying. As he did, he found his eyes drawn by an aborted movement.

For a moment, he was sure he had imagined it. Looking now, Dara stood still as a statue. But then Jaskier saw he stared at the smallest bodies with startled horse eyes that rolled with panic. Ciri saw, too. When she righted, Ciri called his name softly. He did not twitch. Jaskier helped Ciri steady herself.

“We have to keep going," he said, and if his voice shook beneath the soothing tone then hopefully neither heard. "If we pass anymore— like this, don’t look, alright? Both of you, keep your eyes up. Dara-”

It was almost too late that he heard the boots coming up the cross road. Then he saw them in the distance, their black armor seeming to deaden the light that touched it. Ciri seized him, stricken silent with fear.

Jaskier turned them hard.

“Come! Dara!” he barked. The boy shook himself like a waking dreamer and whipped about. A small silver knife flashed in his hand, it flashed like the whites of his eyes.

Every instinct blared, brassy and strident, but there was no other way to go. Jaskier herded them down the only way available, towards the market two blocks away. The striding of armored boots rang behind them.

Onto the market they stumbled. Incomprehensible sound broke over them.

“Oh, no,” Jaskier moaned.

Mayhem shouted and churned in the mud of the square. The war had raked its teeth over a space that hours before had been tidy, welcoming, warm. Jaskier saw that someone had tried to pass their wagon through, but the horses had spooked and now it lay on its side at the southern end of the market like a beached ship. One horse also lay still in its tack, screaming half beneath the hooves of its partner. Like a kicked hive, townsfolk scattered over and around it, calling and crying in their sleep clothes. A few still lingered trying to right it. He could see immediately that it was no use and fought the urge to call out to them, anger and something worse crowding their way up his throat. Couldn’t they see that it was useless, that they should flee with their lives? Go, he pleaded, heart hammering for how he hoped they would hear. He bit his lip hard.

The other end of the market was a bloodbath. From a main street further to the north, a half dozen mounted knights cut down those fleeing from both directions; those making for the market and those trying to cross it. Arrows whistled through the air from three scouts flanking them on foot in practiced formation. They wore more of that strange armor in an eerie matte black metal. In fact, they wore all black without even a banner to show their colors. And why should they have colors? he thought wildly. Only Nilfgaard left a swathe of destruction behind them and killed every one that ran before their swords. That would be everyone in the market, he knew. There was no way. He heard the horses behind them. The blades in the square flashed and fell. It was no use; they were pinched like a bug between two fingers. What would stop the archers from picking them off if they ran out now? An icy moment of despair overtook him.

He became suddenly aware of the presence at each of his elblows. Even Dara stood close enough to touch. He twitched near constantly, eyes darting this way and that. Still looking for a route. The hopelessness paralyzing him shattered with the sight. Jaskier shook himself briskly. If they were to survive, he had to be useful. He had to think.

He took in the market again and found that most of the other streets looked clear of knights and scouts. They seemed to have arced around and came now from the north (and please, let it only be there, he prayed. Let the streets be clear.) If they could circle around the southern side and use the wagon for cover, then maybe another lane could lead them to the west.

Ciri grabbed his elbow and pointed across the square. “Look!”

He wasn’t sure at first what she meant him to see, whether the survivors fleeing or the knight who followed. Then he saw the smoke rising from behind the marketside buildings.

The entire western side of town was burning.

“I thought they were coming from the east! How?” Ciri cried. Jaskier’s knees threatened to go out from under him.

“They must have sent scouts to circle around to the west." He heard it as if someone else were speaking, but no, it was his voice. Jaskier struck out at the wall to their back to hide that he really leant his weight on it, and spat, “Pus-sucking whoresons, why?”

“They want to catch us in the middle.” Jaskier turned and stared. Dara had no eyes for him, though, only for the flames now becoming visible as they leapt over roofs and gnawed on the overhangs. “Between the fire and their swords,” he clarified dully. A flash. The small knife shivered in his hand. Jaskier swallowed. He thought… well, he thought-

Dara said it like he had seen it before.

There came screams closer. A man’s voice boomed from mere meters away, “To the north-east! Archers, don’t let them flee.” The calmness in his tone froze them all. Jaskier recognized his nasal, sharp accent for Nilfgaardian.

"Slowly," Jaskier whispered. "Follow me slowly."

To the sound of bow strings chirping and singing, they turned and half crawled along the building fronts to the south. The empty stalls gave them a nearly unbroken line of cover, for all the protection they offered was weaker than an illusion. They scurried behind them anyway, quick as rats.

Behind one, they had to step over three bodies in the muck. Jaskier recognized their faces. He had taken them to memory earlier in the evening. One gave him real pause, even as they moved.

It was the tavernkeep. Implications pummeled Jaskier like the arrows her could still hear flying. He had abandoned his patrons to flee. Crouched hiding for his life, he wanted to yell and shout. Had the man seen his house aflame? Jaskier remembered the keep’s wife, who had told him she had three daughters, all grown, and thought of the woman who jumped from the window. Had he left them in their beds? Had they been there in the common? He thought of the girls at the doors, their soft arms, the woman with the babes that weren’t hers in the corner. Had any of them possessed the man's dark hair? His nose?

Shouts came from down the market, reminding him that anger at a dead man meant nothing, especially coming from a man who could so easily be dead himself. Unlike the keep, Jaskier was trying to protect-- Jaskier would protect his own.

As they crept, so slow, so quick, clouds began to move in and muffle the moonlight that had allowed this carnage in the first place. With their low bellies they caught the orange-red light off of burning Novriston until the sky glowed the hellish orange of the inside of a furnace. Drifting smoke from the fires fogged the air so densely that they nearly missed the alleyway. Dara spotted it before either Jaskier or Ciri and pointed them silently forward.

It snaked to the southwest. There came no sense of relief. Even leaving the killing behind, the fog meant they could no longer see quite as far down the lanes before they continued. Sound muffled deceivingly until there was no telling how close or far a thing was. With each noise, Jaskier felt sure his heart would burst, or stop.

Through ragged breaths, Jaskier whispered to Dara as they paused to listen for movement, “You’ve been here a few days at least. Are there any tracks out of town? A small one, not leading to one of the larger roads?”

The sound of hooves rang out before the boy could answer, whether he would or not. Jaskier moved without thinking to crowd them away from the open.

“Back!” As one they ducked into the deep shadows of a low overhang on a nearby house. Jaskier threw his lute and pack from his back at its base and crouched tensed to spring. Where he pressed his spine against the wall, his heart pounded its fist against the limewash. As the sound of horse and rider neared, he threw an arm over Ciri and Dara and felt their hearts pounding in their chests-- both of their chests, so easy to throw his arm across, thin as they both were. He gripped his dagger tight with his other hand. A judder loosened it in the sheathe. He tried not to imagine how a fight with a fully armed and armored knight might look.

A horseman rode out of the smoke. His helm scanned the night with a machine's precision.

"Report!" he snapped.

The sight of the second soldier trotting beside him jolted all three of them back. His footsteps hadn't been audible over the horse's hooves.

"No sighting of the girl yet, Commander. But one of the scouts found this in a tavern room." In his fist he lifted a bundle of fabric. Ciri jerked against his side. It took Jaskier a long moment to recognize the Cintran blue of her cloak in the sickly light. His heart thundered. He saw again the young women throwing themselves at the barricade and heard their cries. "It's hers, we think."

The two drew up-- and past. They were close enough that Jaskier could see the stubble on the knight's face beneath his helm. "Good work. Return to your men and keep searching. Follow the grid pattern. Dismissed." The soldier on foot curled a fist over his heart in a salute. They parted at the next turn some yards down the lane and disappeared into the smoke. Still the knight scanned the lanes until he too faded from sight. Even with his thighs cramping, Jaskier remain crouched for a long minute until he was sure they’d gone. The sounds of the knight's mount faded.

After a few shuddering breaths, every fiber of his body straining to hear, Jaskier shuffled forward to check for any others who might have followed. When he returned, neither Ciri nor Dara had twitched so much as a finger.

"They know I'm here." The terror in Ciri's voice dropped Jaskier to one knee in front of her. She didn't seem to see him at all. She stared at the wall of mist as if it would spit the knight back out any moment. "I shouldn't have left the cloak, why did I leave it? Stupid," she spat.

"Ciri-"

Her eyes pinned him. "They were in the tavern. They killed everyone in the tavern and it's my fault. They wouldn't be here if it weren't for me."

"No." Surprisingly, it is Dara who said it, not Jaskier. He glared into her startled face. "They would have come here anyway. You heard before; the army's been razing places everywhere. They've been cutting down people for their god-king for too long. They'd do anything for more blood on their swords."

"But-" she began.

"Dara is right." Now his turn to be startled, the boy met his eye. He looked away just as quickly. Jaskier let him, turning instead to pull Ciri to her feet. "But right now, I need you to focus. We're not out yet. We need to move again, and you need to do exactly as I say. Can you do that a while longer?"

The fragile set to Ciri's jaw firmed, stubborn even still. Regardless, she nodded, and took Jaskier's lute case from Dara, who he now saw wore Jaskier's pack across his back. Jaskier couldn’t protest. The near-miss had shaken him to the bones of his calm. If he had to fight, a pack and a lute would only hinder him.

And if we are separated, the pack will keep them until we meet again, he thought, and pulled a blind over his eyes to anything worse than separated. He found himself calculating how much a fine Elven lute might fetch a pair of ragamuffin orphans in war time and immediately pretended he had not. He resettled the hilt in his slick grip.

Dara caught his attention and nodded down the way. “There’s a path down to the stream. Only marms and kids use it. Too narrow for a horse.”

No knights or soldiers on horseback. Jaskier nodded.

“Can we get there using only alleys and side streets?” Dara thought for a moment before nodding. Jaskier’s own thoughts raced ahead on running feet. If they could get out through a lesser used path, then they might stand a chance. Into the byways, the hills, with the water to cover their tracks, like Ciri had said. “Both of you, behind me again. Dara, let me know when we need to turn.”

They ran. Dara’s short, half-whispered directions took them out of Novriston proper. The sounds of the massacre faded into the distance behind them. Jaskier did not relax a muscle.

Slowly, the houses began to pull away from each other. The opening space brought with it a sensation like the relief of pinching lungs finally being filled. The open space had another benefit; Jaskier saw the smoke begin to clear They passed a cow shed, an old abandoned hut, a wood yard.

Running as they were, the only warning Jaskier had in the split second before they burst out of the lane was the shadow pooling around the corner, cast by the nearby fish smokery half-consumed by fire. Between one step and the next, his eyes fell on it. A tickling of prophecy overcame him.

Jaskier ducked just in time to miss the swing that would have beheaded him. The breeze drawn behind it raked across his scalp. Behind him, Dara yelled.

Jaskier tumbled into the space past the alley and pivoted in a blur. The kids broke around him. Ciri darted forward while Dara scrambled back. He had just enough time to see the startled scout looking back at him before Jaskier threw himself on him.

With desperate hands Jaskier grabbed for the sword. It was only because the man was so surprised that he managed to get his fingers around its crossguard. They struggled artlessly; the soldier had not expected a fight, and Jaskier gave him one with everything he had. He tried to press his advantage, but it was fading quickly. The scout in his leather armor was stronger and better trained. He gave a wrench that nearly pulled the weapon from Jaskier's hands. He yelled. Desperation gave him new strength. He shoved forward with all his might, clawing and grasping. Their legs tangled as they jigged and heaved against each other.

The scout got his free arm up and landed his elbow across Jaskier’s chin. The pain of it lit him up to the eyeballs, but still he held on even as blood flooded into his mouth. He couldn’t afford to waver. His entire focus closed in on the hilt juddering between them. If he let it go for even an instance, the soldier would bring it around without pause and gut him. He thought of the two watching the fight and snarled.

With gritted teeth Jaskier threw all his weight into a shoulder that staggered the soldier back. A brief breath of space opened between them. Jaskier shoved his free hand inside it and the scout’s guard and seized him by the top of his gorget.

The wall at the scout’s back gave him no room to counter. As Jaskier pressed, one of his boots clipped off of it. Jaskier used the moment of unbalance and his leverage to pivot them, hooked a leg behind the scout’s knee and, grunting, pulled his legs out from under him in one move.

With the sword still between them, they fell.

Ciri screamed.

"No!"

*

Chapter Text

*

They fall together.

“No!” The scream rips out of Ciri before she can stop it. The pebbles around the lot jump and scatter.

Jaskier lands overtop the soldier with a punched-out sound. For a moment, Ciri fears to look and see a blade stuck from his back, or blood soaking through the blue of his jacket. Her hands cover her mouth over a scream. She can’t, not again. Not the red of blood on fine blue cloth, not again.

But the fight isn’t over, and there is no blood. The scout scrabbles at Jaskier’s eyes with his off hand. Frantic, she looks and finds the sword pinned with the scout’s hand under one of Jaskier’s knees. With a jerk Jaskier bats the hand away and grabs for something at his belt. His dagger flashes in his hand.

He doesn’t hesitate a second. He plunges it deep into the opening at the soldier’s underarm. The man lets out a breath and then lies still.

When Jaskier staggers to his feet, shoulders heaving, it is with the shortsword in his hand. Barely an arm’s length away, Dara watches him, frozen in a way she has never seen him.

Ciri chokes out a breath she had been holding. “You-”

Ringing clearer than a bell, a blade hisses from its sheath in the alley. Jaskier jerks about and gets his sword up just in time to stop the strike aimed to come down on Dara’s back. “Go!” he shouts, but Dara hadn’t needed to be told. He darts away under Jaskier’s arm.

Where the first scout had not expected a fight, this soldier strides forward already swinging. He is not bigger than Jaskier, but his armor makes him bulky, monstrous with its pattern almost like veins, and he is the more prepared. He forces Jaskier back in front of his sword, striking out once, then twice. Jaskier staggers under the onslaught. His boots scrabble loudly across scree. He manages to just catch himself and jump hastily back out of range of the next swipe.

Dara tumbles into her side, eyes huge in his face. For a moment she tenses, sure he is going to try to pull her away, or convince her to leave Jaskier behind. But he just grips tight at her sleeve, tongue tied. His fear, somehow, makes her own grow bigger still, two storm clouds that meet on the horizon to become one.

She sees it in her mind in a split second: Jaskier with his clumsy footing and unsure grip will try to match the soldier, but he will stumble again. Or the soldier will be faster, stronger, trained to kill. Even as she looks, she can see that Jaskier’s balance is all wrong. He has his weight shifted too far forward. Anyone, even an untested page could knock him over like that. Everything about the set of his shoulders and the curl of his spine says afraid and untrained.

The soldier sees it, too. His teeth flash beneath the lip of his helm.

“Give it up, bard. You hold that sword like a carpet beater.” He barely finishes his taunt before he lunges forward a step, boot smacking the dust, just to see Jaskier flinch back before his feint. Anger sparks beneath her fear as his voice cracks out in a laugh. “How many of my strikes can you parry, do you think? Three?” Another lunge, this one with real follow through. Jaskier leaps back with a yelp, not even trying to turn it aside. “Four, if you keep dancing?”

“I might be the bard, but it seems you’re the one who loves the sound of his own voice,” Jaskier quips. It’s no use. Even had she not spent the past few days with him, Ciri would have heard the quiver under his false bravado.

The Nilfgaardian grunts a laugh and points at him with his sword. “I’m going to halve you like a pig,” he rumbles, then brings the sword around to level at at her and Dara, “and toss your boys on the fire like sucklings.”

Jaskier half-falls in his hurry to get between them, blade raised. “No, you won’t!” His voice cracks down the middle.

Proof of his fear is worse even than Dara’s. It wraps itself around her like to smother her so she’ll never breathe again. A thin, nail-bitten dread creeps into her. Why did he promise to help her? Why would he promise it if he couldn’t fight? I should have left, she realizes with horror, watching as he strikes out wildly for the soldier’s side only to have his blade slapped disdainfully away. He's going to die because of me. She thinks she hears Lazlo’s last breath behind her, that she feels it on her neck, and stifles a sob. The way it sits in her throat makes her think she could scream it out.

Radiating smugness, the soldier shifts, lunges, and thrusts forward at Jaskier’s unprotected flank. Jaskier gets his blade up in time to clip the strike away and brings it around in a shaky counterstrike at the opening left behind. Ciri’s heart leaps into her throat. She recognizes the move even as it is blocked. He’s been trained!

The soldier scoffs as she thinks it, stepping back to look him over with a cold eye. “Your final minutes have been wasted,” he says. Jaskier matches him in his orbit, stepping slowly to keep their distance before he freezes. If he goes farther, he won’t be between them anymore. His opponent grins; that was the point. “Give up, or every moment I have to waste on you I will take out on them." The cut of his eyes in their direction makes her shudder.

Dara tenses like a pointed hound. She digs her fingers into his elbow frantically, unsure if she is holding him there or begging him to move. She knows what comes next. They have to run if they want to escape before Jaskier falls, but she can't leave him. She can't move at all, not even to look away.

Jaskier mutely raises the sword shaking in front of him, his unblinking eyes a challenge in his bloodless face. The soldier nods. "The White Flame demands your death,” is all he says, and then he is on him. Jaskier manages to block his first cut, and glance the next off. It is immediately apparent that the strikes were just to get him open. As his blade swings away from the second blow’s momentum, the soldier leans back and kicks Jaskier's knee out from under him. Jaskier goes down on it hard, one hand in the dust.

She recognizes what comes next as the soldier brings his sword up above his head. She has no breath to scream. He swings, a powerful two-handed vertical slice, the kind that could split a man open neck to hip like the boy in the road.

Jaskier braces in his crouch, turns, and as readily as an actor to his cue lifts the stolen sword into a perfect high cross block that stops the blow above his head. Ciri gasps.

She watches dumbfounded as his entire demeanor changes in that instance. All the hesitance and fear drop away-- the same way his anger had after the market! When he shifts his weight and rises into a popular duelist’s form, the strike still caught on his block, he flashes his teeth at the stunned soldier. With shocking speed, he slides his blade down along his opponent's, locks their crossguards, and twists sharply. The move sends the soldier’s sword flying.

It was a trick!

There is just enough time for the soldier’s face to register the same surprise Ciri feels before Jaskier brings the blade around and plunges it into the opening at his neck. The length of it disappears through and comes out his back red.

The soldier falls, alone. Ciri’s heart pounds. After a moment, Jaskier yanks the blade back with a sucking noise that she never wants to hear again.

A disquiet still falls over the yard. Jaskier stares down at the fallen scout as if mesmerized, breathing hard little puffs of birch-white steam.

Dara holds her back easily when she moves to step forward with his fingers curled in the neck of her tunic. For once, she doesn’t complain being scruffed. She stands and watches with him as Jaskier unsteadily stoops to slide his dagger from the first soldier’s lungs, wipes it on his black trousers, and sheathing it rises again, sword in hand.

She wants to say something to him. She feels a crowding of thoughts fighting to spill out, just to ease the pressure in her head. He had promised to fight, and he had. Part of her wants to say he shouldn’t have. He had said he might be hurt, he might have been hurt! (But he wasn’t, she tells her racing heart, he wasn’t.)

How does he know how to use a sword?

How can she feel so relieved and so scared at the same time?

How can she be so glad that he hadn’t died like Lazlo, because it meant she would get to keep his over-abundance of words and his fidgety hands and even his scolding? Guilt nips into her side at the thought. Lazlo had sworn to protect her life because she was a princess. He had called it his greatest honor. Yet here she is thinking only that she is glad that at least where he had died Jaskier had not. That she had rather he died than Jaskier, if she had had to trade. That she is relieved.

A frantic call comes up a street over and Ciri knows they don’t have time for any of it.

“Are you alright?” she asks, with a tiny voice nothing like her own. “How did you do that?”

Jaskier shakes an arc of blood from the sword and in three long strides is there. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything, just looks at her. His silence is wrong. Her throat tightens.

“Jaskier?”

It’s like he remembers his lost tongue. He clears his throat and tries for a dashing grin. “Well! That was more than a little embarrassing for them, wouldn’t you say?" She stares. He continues on in a rush, "These big brutish types always underestimate a bard, as if we don’t travel the very same dangerous roads they do, and in brightly colored silk no less.” Despite his flippancy, Ciri can see his face pours sweat, and beneath it his cheeks have gone pale. The flutter of his hands as he speaks isn’t flourish, but nerves. The hand he presses just for a moment to her shoulder trembles where it lands. “Don’t worry. Not a scratch on me.”

That’s not exactly true, she notes frowningly. His eyes are almost feverishly bright where they move between her and Dara. Checking for injuries-- the same way she does for him.

One of his fine sleeves is torn, and there is blood around his mouth where the first scout had struck him. The new bruise forming there matches the one Dara gave him across his temple. She thinks that at any other time it should make him look absurd, and the sword, too, juxtaposed with his soft face and dandy clothes. Bards are all songs and pretty words and things she has never cared about, not nearly what a knight or a warrior was and what she so craved to be. Or, so she has always thought. That bards are soft silly love songs when all she wanted was to hear of battles and protectors and bravery.

He does not look soft or silly, even with his doublet. Ciri looks at him and in that moment thinks even the blood on his chin and the shake in his hands looks brave. All she feels looking at him is safe. Dara squeezes her hand and the feeling only grows.

Novriston smells just like Cintra had burning, but this time she is not fleeing alone.

His face goes serious again so quickly as he takes in their clutching arms. They still haven't let go of their hold, not her on Dara or Dara on her. “We can’t stop here long. Are either of you hurt?” Mutely lest she let some of the words swarm out, she shakes her head. A suggestion of his usual smile comes and then disappears again. Mindless of the fine fabric, he wipes his chin on his shoulder with a wince and nods in the direction they were traveling before. “Let’s move. Can you take us the way?” he asks Dara.

Dara doesn’t use words to answer; he just does. If his eyes linger a moment longer on the bard, however, Ciri can’t blame him. She doesn’t let go of his hand for a moment as they trot from the little lot with its two silent shapes in armor.

Still clutching the stolen sword, Jaskier keeps close and alert as Dara leads them through smaller and smaller paths, until what they follow is only a strip of ground amidst the grass made bare by the villagers’ feet. The trail leads out of the village, past a field and then a wooded lot. The air grows wet and still with the nearby stream. She cannot hear it under their boots crunching in the frost, but she tastes it.

They come upon a fork in the path when the feeling finds her.

It is like an arrow zips in to plant itself in her gut. At first, she thinks she really has been shot. Then, as the feeling grows, not pain but something else, she thinks it is fear, so familiar that she might live inside it. The red room, the never ending place where war lives. The fire is growing behind them towards town, and other figures dart past at the farthest boundaries of her sight as the twisting paths give way to hazel coppices and homesteads and gardens amongst the small hills; and voices ring, and horses scream, people scream, children scream so distant they could be a child’s whistle played a note too long. And Ciri is afraid. Yes, she is afraid.

It is because she is afraid and has been afraid all this time to the very bottoms of her feet that this new feeling gives her pause. What finds her can’t be what she already has. Fear makes her run; this makes her pause. So when Dara points them down a little path between two storehouses and the little arrow zips in, Ciri stops dead on her feet.

Immediately, Dara and Jaskier circle her with their heads turning to find the threat they can’t see. She swallows a whimper. She holds herself hard, nearly out of her mind with fright and the something.

“Not that way,” Ciri whispers. Jaskier pivots, sword at the ready, looking for what she has seen. Ciri shakes her head. “No,” she gulps, “no, it’s not-”

She might be sick. She staggers back a step so she won’t get any on Dara. It takes her away from the direction they had been going. As if she has swallowed medicine, a draught of relief overcomes her. It reminds her of the cool cloth Mousesack had placed on her head when she had had the fever last winter. She feels now as she felt then; too hot and too big for her achey, tight skin. She gasps in a breath of cold air and realizes then how small her ribs had squeezed, as if she were already screaming.

That’s what the feeling is. So soon after the fight, when she had watched with the scream caught in her throat, she would recognize it anywhere. The feeling comes from the same raw, ragged place as the screams. But why? What is it, and how does it know? How does she know?

“Ciri? Ciri, look at me.” The Jaskier that crouches in front of her is not smiling at all, but buzzing with concern. She misses his lightness. “What did you see?”

“I didn’t.” He stares, uncomprehending. She gulps for air and takes another step back; the awful, festering sensation lessens even more. Conviction immediately settles into her gut. “We can’t go that way,” she blurts. She lifts her chin the way she would when speaking at court, like she knew everything and there was no point in anyone arguing, just the way grandmother taught her. “We can’t. I just know it. We have to find another way.”

But she is no Calanthe. Jaskier hesitates.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. Sometimes, running with Dara, Ciri had felt something in her gut that bellowed not to take that path or go to that town, and she had listened. Something like it had tied her stomach up with dread when she had first seen the refugee camp. She had been too excited then to see the Cintran flag and hear other people and smell food. She hadn’t listened. But after, with Dara, when next the feeling had come she had paused. When she had explained it to him, stopped in her tracks, she had half expected him to scoff, impatient as he had been with the delay. Maybe because he was an older boy and they always take impressing.

But Dara had listened. She looks to him now, eyes pleading. “We can’t,” she says as much to him as to Jaskier, and hopes he will understand. She doesn't have any words to explain it, and no time to try.

Maybe he can hear the thing in her howling, the way he sometimes seems to hear and sense things she cannot. Or maybe he remembers, too, and knows something of gut-rending feelings himself. He backs to her side and adds his gaze to her own.

“Ciri knows,” he says firmly. Jaskier glances down the path. It is empty, and quiet. He shifts on his haunches. He is so obviously impatient to keep moving and putting distance between them and the town that she almost feels bad for it, for a moment. I’m sure about this, she thinks with everything she has, and stills her hands at her sides. We cannot go that way. Feeling how even thinking it chases the sensation even further off, she knows it to be true.

“Are you sure?” Jaskier asks, answering her thoughts. “If this is the path to escape…”

“It’s not. It can’t be.” Not feeling like it does. She knows it the way she knows not to jump from the tower window. Giddy terror in her stomach. “Please trust me. You trusted me about the roads before,” she reminds him desperately. She can almost feel it like lightning building in the air. How can’t he feel what it is she feels? It dances over her, prickling her hair on her scalp. She imagines she can feel it burning in her eyes.

Except, he looks at her and he seems to not be looking at her at all. Under the soot and blood, his eyes go distant as if he looks through her like she is clear glass; like he is looking at someone else entirely. Some of the worry lines between his brows smooth out like with surprise.

There weren’t that many to begin with. The observation lands strangely enough that she looks closer.

Jaskier is young, she thinks. It’s like someone else said it inside her skull. It shocks her in the way it’s true. Jaskier is younger than she can remember Mousesack or Eist or her grandmother ever being. He is even younger than many of the knights who had protected them in the castle halls or when they needed to leave to the city, the coast, the country.

She hadn’t realized. All this time she had looked to him as just another adult. At first that had meant someone she couldn’t trust. Then it had meant he was the same as all them who had cared for her. Always sure they were right, always with their own cares and concerns so different from her own, always with so much more knowledge and experience than her that it made her prickle with embarrassment to be caught lacking. To be caught young.

He is young, even if he is older than she is, and as he looks at her he seems to become younger still. The years that have settled there take flight, butterflies from a bush, petals in a storm. He gazes at her lit by phantom candlelight. She can even smell them. The beeswax and herb candles that have always been used in the castle halls and their private chambers. For a moment, she is back in Cintra. The castle has not burned.

What had he first said to her, about her mother being fair at her betrothal feast? He must have seen it, too, smelled the candles, too, before she was ever born. He must have seen her mother at Calanthe's side.Is this what he looked like when he saw her? Ciri wonders. His pale eyes, set in a soft, flushed face, open wide and staring back at her. She hears the murmur of voices, staggered and reflected back by stone. She smells roasted apples and pheasant with sage-- her mother’s favorites. Calanthe could not bear to smell them after her parents died and forbade them being served in the castle.

If she sees him as he was then... who is it, then, Jaskier sees as he looks at her now?

The vision lasts only a moment. Then, settled back into here and now, Jaskier seems to recover from whatever he saw through her. He shakes his head as if he had been dreaming elsewhere and licks his lips.

“We’ll, ah… we’ll go another way,” he says faintly. He gives her one last lingering, searching look before he turns away. “Dara? Lead on. If Ciri says no, we’ll find another path.”

His trust warms her.

Then they are running and she leaves the soft feeling behind.

This time, she and Dara both lead. When she calls out a few turns later that they can’t go down that one, Jaskier swerves without pausing and follows her direction.

The silence has grown so at odds to the noise they’ve left behind that when Dara shouts and peels off from the path, she fears the worst. Then she sees what he has spotted and freezes with an overwhelming sense of vertigo.

This one does not come from that something waiting in her gut, but a much more mundane source. The dappled warhorse towers with its back a full half-dozen hands high over Dara’s head, yet he approaches it as fearlessly as if it were a little dog, with his hand outstretched. It flicks its ears for a moment, deciding whether to be unhappy or not with his approach. Her stomach swoops. Its head is bigger than Dara’s torso. Even as she thinks this, it curves its massive neck down towards his palm.

“No, wait!” Jaskier yelps, then watches open-mouthed as the beast breathes curiously over the boy’s hand and, sweet as a kitten, lips at his palm. Dara snorts a laugh and presses closer to stroke its forehead and blow into its nose. When the stallion nudges its forehead into his chest, it nearly pitches him over. Dara just smiles again, murmuring.

“Dara?” Jaskier calls, voice pitched high. He seems as hesitant to approach as she is and stands a healthy few strides away. Dara glances back at them both as if they are the ones being ridiculous.

“They’ll carry us onward,” is all he says. They? Ciri squeaks when another massive head peeks over the back end of the warhorse.

The second horse is smaller than its friend, a brown white-socked mare attached to the warhorse’s saddle by a lead line. When Dara leads it around, she sees it has no tack, only a saddle blanket tossed over its back to keep it warm. Even unadorned, it looms humongous in the pre-dawn darkness.

Dara greets the mare the same way he had the warhorse, petting at her face. It is the softest Ciri has ever seen him, and so outside what she might have expected that she gapes. The two nudge and lip at him as mild and frisky as ponies. Just seeing him between them with their pawing and prancing hooves makes her want to cover her eyes.

“Gods,” Jaskier murmurs, more to himself than her. “That’s a Nilfgaardian knight’s mounts he’s got begging for scratches like a hound dog.”

The sound of voices seeping up the paths behind them divests him of his last hesitance. He strides forward to cautiously pat a hand to the stallion’s neck. When it doesn’t immediately rear back to stamp on him, he quickly goes about checking its tack between scanning the surrounding trees. Meanwhile, Dara takes up the picket with practiced ease, looping the rope neatly around his elbow and then into the saddlebags.

Ciri watches them from where she stands barely breathing. It takes a few moments before Jaskier looks back, clearly surprised she hadn’t followed. Dara turns as well. She can’t meet either of their eyes; she can’t look away from the horses. Her legs shake.

“We’ve got to go,” Jaskier tells her urgently. She cannot move. Not even to shake her head.

Suddenly, Dara is there. “Ciri,” he snaps.

“I can’t,” she says. He tugs her hand. Her feet won’t move.

The sound of frantic voices down the path. Dara grabs her arms. “Yes, you can.” He does something: an arm around her back, another on her arm. With a twist around he pops her off her feet like an oyster from its shell. She has no choice but to stagger after him as he dashes forward with her.

Already in the saddle of the warhorse, Jaskier reaches down as Dara hoiks her up by her armpits and pulls her up in front of him. She just manages to direct her leg, which no longer seems really attached to her body or brain, to swing over. The horse’s back is so broad she almost cannot make it. She lands on her rump like a sack of grain. Immediately, her head begins to spin.

There’s no time for her to do more than grasp white-knuckled to the horn. Jaskier’s arms come up around her as he takes up the rein and calls, “Lead us!”

A brown blur passes them. Dara, astride the now untied mare without more than a blanket between them, gallops past. Jaskier tugs the reins and with a massive shift the entire world begins to rollick beneath her. The warhorse rolls into a gallop the way a cliff face falls down a mountainside-- joyous, thunderous, and, she’s positive, sure to have a body count.

What follows is the worst two hours of her life. The height and fear make her head spin. The confusion of trees and branches and fields blurring past in the dark and the motions of the horse under her leave her nauseated. Even when they slow to a walk to pick carefully down paths really too narrow for the horses, pressing hanging boughs away from their faces, the rocking and swaying is so great that she is sure that she will fall at any moment. She clings to its back and the horn until the muscles of her legs and arms tremble.

They find the stream and run the horses in its shallows. It leads them to the tributary, a broad, rushing band of silver in the moonlight. It chuckles to itself in its way, thick with rocks and singing with rushes in the bare breeze. The cool smell of mud and muck wraps wet and heavy about their faces.

Even the quiet cannot soothe, not with the stench of smoke still clinging to them. The sky glows red behind them; Novriston burning, mixing with the growing light of dawn until they are one and the same. They ride hard in silence through the last dark hour and through another grey hour of morning until the horses are frothing.

The lute stuck between her back and Jaskier’s front begins to bruise her. The cold air stings her face until her eyes stream. Multiple times when the roiling of her stomach and the jostling become too much, Ciri has to lean forward to puke over the horse’s withers. Jaskier holds her in the saddle as she does. She can only be glad she can’t see his face.

Deep into the rolling lands that they had walked what felt a week before but was only the morning before, they are finally forced to stop and water the horses. Dara dismounts immediately and, as if he had not just ridden hard without a saddle, lopes silently towards the nearby woods.

“Dara! Stop!” Jaskier calls, voice just this edge of frantic. His running back does not pause. Dara disappears into the trees a dozen yards away, quiet as a falling leaf. She can feel the tension ripple through Jaskier’s shoulders behind her. She doesn’t say anything. She isn’t sure she is feeling anything at all, or that she still has her body. She thinks she should be anxious and wonder if Dara is alright. Is he leaving them? But she doesn’t wonder; she doesn’t worry.

They get down together, Ciri mostly with Jaskier's help. Her legs and bum, she finds, still exist and have gone numb. She thinks that is all that has, until she finds herself standing dwarfed besides the warhorse. A great flood of things from the past hours comes rushing in.

She hardly hits the ground before she is shaking and crying. Her legs go out from under her. She wants to get away from the giant thing but she all she can do is cry.

Jaskier is at her side in an instant.

“Ciri?” One of his hands lands tentatively on the back of her neck. Somehow, that only makes her cry harder, big sobs raking wet breaths into her chest. After a moment, he cups his palm there under her hair. “Hey,” he murmurs, “we’re alright. We made it out. That was- that was pretty terrifying. But we made it, we’re safe. They can’t have followed us-”

He falls silent when she shakes her head. With him crouched so close, the movement brings her face to his shoulder. Without thinking she presses it there like she could hide. Under all the smoke and sweat, she notices he smells like cedar and rosemary, before her nose clogs up with tears and snot. She chokes.

“It’s not-” she can’t breathe, “it’s-” She can’t stop sobbing. Humiliation shrivels her insides down small. Jaskier doesn’t say anything about her tears, however, just rubs his thumb across the skin behind her ear and combs her hair back from where it tries to cling to her sticky cheeks.

“Ssh,” he hushes and pulls her face from his shoulder to wipe at her cheek with his other hand. “You’re alright, darling. You’re alright. We made it.”

She sniffles and hiccups for a few more minutes before the vice that had pinched itself hatefully around her chest begins to loosen. In the meantime, Jaskier somehow finds a handkerchief in his traveling suit. She uses it to mop her puffy, snotty face, feeling shivery and sick. Only when her breaths have come back into her control does she whisper shamefully, “It’s the horses.”

She isn’t watching him. She can’t stand to. If he looks at her with disbelief, or annoyance, or disgust, anger-- she doesn’t know what she’ll do. She can’t, even if she has to tell him because he deserves the truth. He had fought two soldiers for her. He had stolen the horses to get them away. He does deserve it, even if he… even if it makes him…

So she only feels him looking at her. She sniffs her runny nose in a way that would have made Mousesack wince and stares hard at the kerchief crumpled in her hand.

“It’s n-not the town. It… it’s the horses. I’m afraid of them,” Ciri whispers, and grips her sides as hard as she can, as if it will stop her shaking. Stop being such a baby, she thinks, but it’s no use. She is as trembly as a fancy gelatin dessert.

The shame comes back tenfold. What kind of knight is afraid of horses? She isn’t sure if she thinks it, or if she remembers one of them asking it-- Eist, Mousesack, Calanthe. All of them have voiced it at some point or other. She knows they were only worried for her future. Regardless, it is her who is scornful and sharp and mean now, and she deserves it. She remembers how Eist had berated her so quietly during the ceremony mere days before he died. She had let the horses scare her off winning at knucklebones. How would she ever lead or fight in battle if just the proximity of another knight’s steed could make her shudder? Why aren’t I better than this?

Of course, Jaskier hears her no matter how quiet she whispers. His thumb pauses on her neck a moment. This is it, she thinks. Now is when he will see what’s wrong with her. Novriston burned; they were running for their lives, and had she put them in danger by freezing because of a stupid horse. Who wouldn’t be mad? She deserves all his scolding and scorn, she deserves it all for putting him in danger. But she can’t stand it right yet. Not yet.

“Just being on them makes me sick. I have to force myself to get close, but mostly I just freeze up.” The words puke out of her. “When- when I was little and learning to ride at the villa outside the city, the pony I was riding spooked. I think one of the stableboys dropped something and it made a loud noise. The sound made it bolt.” She remembers it with her body like it is happening. The roll and sway of its back beneath her, so fast, so strong, and her helplessness. Her head turns. The only way to stop it is to put it down on her knees. It has the added benefit that she can’t possibly see Jaskier’s face there.

“My boots were caught in the stirrups,” she tells his elbow. “I couldn’t stop it. It galloped for three miles through the countryside before one of the knights managed to catch up. And the entire time I felt like I would fall off and break my neck, and I would lay there scared and hurt and dying and no one would find me. Or maybe it would just run forever. I didn’t know which would be worse.” She doesn’t want to tell him that she was so scared she had lost control of her bowels, and how the entire court watching them return had seen the mess, so she doesn’t. Even so, her face feels hot against the wool of her trousers. “I can’t bear to ride since. I can’t even go near them. I begged Eist and my grandmother to let me train with the pages, even knowing I wouldn’t be able to learn horsecraft. I asked that they let me train... just not that. I, I could just do everything else.”

Remembering their faces whenever it had come up and the way disappointment and impatience had warred there every time is too much. Somehow, now that they're gone... A new wave of tears claws their way out of her.

Jaskier rubs her back and murmurs until the new sobs settle and her head aches with it. He keeps at it, petting her as she scrubs at her cheeks again, because better her whole face be red than just her eyes and nose to show she’s been crying. It has been long enough that she knows she can’t avoid it anymore. Dara might be back anytime now. Just the thought of him finding her like this makes her move.

When she chances a glance up at him, Jaskier just gazes back patiently. That surprises her, in the dull way everything feels right now. His expressive eyebrows all crinkled up like he is sad. It is not at all the judgment she had expected. His hand presses and rubs down her back without pause, little circles like he could shine the hurt out of her the way one buffs scratches from polished armor. It plants a little ache in her chest. Eist had used to do the same, when it was just he and her. Mousesack, too, once or twice, but he had always acted embarrassed afterwards, like the softness was too much for him. The familiarity gives her a small sliver of hope.

The breeze shuffling the trees behind him in the distance destroys it instantly. She looks, heart leaping, but it is only breeze. Dara has not returned.

“Please don’t tell him,” she whispers. Her face is definitely red now. Jaskier’s gaze flashes up, confused. “Dara. Please don’t tell him I cried. He already thinks I’m a baby as it is.” She stares hard at her toes. “He’s not afraid of horses at all. He loves them,” she grumbles.

“I won’t,” he murmurs, and winks when she looks close to find some kind of trick. “Promise, on my honor.”

He digs the waterskin out of his pack to offer her to rinse out her mouth. After, he uses it to wet another kerchief and helps her clean her face. She finds herself embarrassed by the attention and his quiet, patient words as he directs her-- coddling her.

Worse is the lack of reaction. She almost wants to ask and demand something. But exhaustion drags her so heavily that she can’t turn away the help. Even as the dawn begins to shift toward color and light, the world seems to go more and more grey around her until it seeps into her limbs and makes them heavy.

With the horses picketed nearby (but far enough away that, if she sits with her back to them, she can pretend they’re not there) and his cloak spread beneath them to sit on, in the still of a cruelly beautiful dawn Jaskier says without prompting, “I’m afraid of water, you know. Anything deeper than a stream gives me the horrors.”

She can’t help it. Even numb as she feels, she turns to goggle at him.

“Why?” It jumps out of her before she can stop it. Ciri loves to swim. The capitol borders the Yaruga, and the castle grounds have a fantastic constructed swimming hole where the bank curls into a calm, deep pool. It is where Ciri had learned to swim almost before she walked. Eist was Skelligen and born for the water. She can’t imagine not living half in the river come summer, or in the sea when they visited.

Of course, she realizes almost immediately that many people feel the same way about horses. Jaskier wry smile says he knows exactly why she flushes. Too quickly, the expression slides away. In the growing light he looks exhausted, too.

“I nearly drowned as a boy, probably around the same age you were when the pony bolted. There was a little pond near- where I lived. All the boys would swim in it come summer." He ruffles his hair back off of his forehead. "I wasn’t a strong swimmer. One of the older boys thought it would be funny to push me in.”

“Arsehole,” she sniffles glumly. A fit of coughing overtakes him. He has to drop his head between his knees until they begin to subside. It sounds like it’s so she won’t know that, even tired as he looks, he is laughing. She decides to let him think he’s tricked her and instead pats his back hesitantly until his shoulders have stopped shaking. He wipes his eyes with a thumb when he straightens.

“Oh, don’t say that, or I’ll never convince anyone I’m a good master to my young apprentice,” he chuckles but sobers immediately after. He rubs at his swollen jaw for a moment. “Well. Ever since, I’ve tried to stay away, and to hide my reactions. I found ways around when the road meant fording a river. Gave some very good excuses when lovely lasses and lads wanted to take me for a dip in the lake.” He stands and claps his trousers off. “I suppose that might make me a bit of a baby myself,” he confides.

He holds a hand out to pull her to her feet. She claps her trousers off, too, and frowns.

“I don’t think it makes you a baby,” she tells him. “I think it makes sense that you would be scared.” He looks down at her. Even with the deep bags under his eyes, the dark bruises and the dirt, his eyes twinkle for a moment.

“Thank you. But if that's the case, then I don’t think it makes you a baby, either,” he replies, and as if it were that simple leaves it at that. He goes off to check the stallion’s saddle bags and keep an eye out for Dara’s return. Tongue tied, she watches him go.

*

When Dara still has not returned and the horses have rested enough to continue, Ciri takes one look at Jaskier anxiously eyeing the tree line and says she should be the one to go look for Dara. It is only after she has convinced him it isn’t just because she doesn't want to stay alone with the horses but that she thinks Dara might hide if Jaskier comes alone that he sighs and agrees to let her fetch him. He follows with the horses and re-pickets them near the trees where Dara had disappeared. With him watching her so closely, she pointedly doesn't heave a sigh of relief at getting away from their steeds until she is sure she has passed out of sight.

Ciri finds Dara a few hundred yards into the trees. She had seen the fallen log leaning against another tree and somehow known he would be in the hollow beneath it. She isn't even surprised when she crouches and sees him curled up beneath with his arms around his knees. They may have known each other only a few weeks, but she has learned quickly how to look for safety the way he had taught her.

“Dara?”

He flinches at her voice and looks at her for only a moment before his eyes slide off. It wasn't a look of recognition. When the silence stretches, she looks around before dropping down into the hollow next to him so they are pressed side to side. He doesn't run, at least, which is good. Against her own, his side shakes.

She sits with him in the quiet for a few minutes until the shaking begins to shudder off. She wants to ask, but maybe she doesn’t need to. Dara has been alone a long time, that much she knows. She had noticed early on how he always tensed up when they were in or near towns, and only spoke in more than clipped words when they were in the trees. She thinks of what she saw of his face when he had seen the babe in its sister’s arms, and her own reaction to seeing them. She can’t imagine how much worse it might be for him, if it had reminded him of his family the way the smell of the burning buildings reminded her of Cintra. Maybe some time in the quiet of the woods is what he needs to make the sickness go away. A few minutes, she thinks. She can give him that. Jaskier will wait.

They sit together like that for a while without time. Ciri cannot close her eyes, not when anyone might be out there. But she can sit back against the tree and rest her legs, and let the cold and the quiet not cut with shouts sink into her. The chaos of burning Novriston slides into a distance from where it has been buzzing all this time behind her eyes. After a while, she finds Dara has been holding her hand, or she has been holding his.

They sit. When Dara eventually breathes deep and shifts to climb out of their hiding place, Ciri follows him without a word.

Jaskier seems to sense the quietness on them when they come out of the trees together. Or, at least, he senses that he shouldn’t ask any questions. She is grateful that he lets it be.

It doesn’t stop him coddling, however. Once he has pressed his emptying skin of watered wine and some spiced jerky on both of them, he checks the horses over a final time. Dara, who eats faster than anyone Ciri has ever known, joins him whilst she is still chewing her second bite.

They ride throughout the rest of the day. Ciri has to be lifted into the saddle again. Even Dara looks sorry as he helps boost it.

It is just as miserable the second time. Perhaps out of kindness for her stomach, Jaskier doesn’t often push the horses faster than a trot. Even that pace makes Ciri feel sick-headed with fear, but at least she doesn’t feel the need to vomit anymore. He cuts the time up with slower walks, obviously to help steady her. Even so, he always returns to the faster pace.

Ciri doesn't complain, not about the long hours or the pace. Neither does Dara. By the way he shifts and has the mare pacing constantly ahead only to drop back, he would even press them faster if he could. They both keep looking back the way they've come as the smudge of smoke that was Novriston grows more and more distant. The sword ever present and ready in Jaskier’s hand as they ride tells her they are not alone in hearing pounding boots and hooves under every stark breeze.

They ride through the day in silence. Occasionally, Dara darts off to scout through the thinning trees, sometimes on horseback, sometimes on foot when it is too dense. Jaskier doesn’t try to stop him again, though Ciri sees him watching even after Dara’s back disappears in the trees. He remains tense each time until Dara returns. Does he think Dara will get lost? That he’ll leave?

They travel the rest of the day through. Ciri has the strangest sense throughout that neither they nor time are moving forward. The land stretches out its long, thin limbs as if sleeping (or dead, like boys and women and families in the road)- stretches out brown and white and grey around them, unchanging for all the hours on horseback. It is only the sun going down, slow and sudden in turns, that pulls the day forward from the long in-held breath of now, always now, always and never.

They might have pressed on into the night as well, had the horses not been exhausted. Ciri is exhausted, too, so much that even the fear of the soldiers can’t stop her slinking willingly towards rest. Jaskier stops them at sunset, displeasure obvious in his frowns and his split attention, one half of it always on the road behind them. In the end, they pick through the rocky, uneven ground between the path and a distant stand of pines and bed down there for a night, tucked behind a boulder on Jaskier’s cloak.

The horses, at least, have a good dinner of oats in their nose bags. The three of them chew on the last of Jaskier’s jerky and bread. After their sparse meal, Jaskier sets up on a nearby hillock with his short sword as they curl up on a patch of ground scraped clear of snow and frost. It is still icy through the wool of the cloak.

“I’ll keep watch. Get some sleep, both of you. We’ll be riding hard again tomorrow, I’m afraid,” Jaskier says with an apologetic glance. She tries not to think of it as she wraps the corner of Jaskier’s cloak over her belly. Even so, with her eyes closed, she can still feel the swaying of the warhorse under her. It only stops when her eyes are open. She opens them.

With Jaskier’s quiet sounds nearby, she lays and stares up at the pine needles and stars for hours, until she finds her eyes opening to dawn.

*

Jaskier keeps to his promise. They ride hard from dawn until noon. The gaunt hilly lands off the river smooth around them, opening the horizon up until it seems the perfect edge of a blade, with only the distant dark spill of Brokilon to soften it to the north. They ride. They leave off following the tributary north and turn west instead to find its distant sister, flowing down from Brokilon’s heart. They cross the Vda where it is shallow and only rocky, not rapid with foamy waters and boulders. The time it takes to find the crossing seems infinite and dangerous. The world is a sword at their back. They ride on.

That second day, they pass no other travelers or villagers. Their only companion is the tributary, which they leave early to move into the backroads far off the Yaruga the wind that whistles and sprints up the lowlands around the river. The sound of its waters are replaced by the hissing of the dried grain stalks in the fields that quickly come to surround them. Seeing them with their unbroken snow makes her anxious. She doesn’t know why until Jaskier comments lowly,

“The farmers for these fields are from Kminekplac. They should have harvested the stalks by now for their roofs and beds.” She half-twists to look at him, though the precariousness of her seat on the saddle has not improved enough for her to do it for more than a half-second. She has to see his face, for all the worry in his eyes drops her stomach into her boots. He isn’t looking at her, however. He watches the fields like the funeral procession of a friend.

“Does this mean Kminekplac has been attacked too?”

“Not unless another company crossed the river,” he reassures her. “After that night march, they would need to rest. And if they’re searching the town thoroughly, they will be another day more behind us at least.” He swallows and tries a smile. “Let’s just hope it’s because they’ve all left to flee west, like we saw the morning we left.”

For all his hopes for Kminekplac being untouched, Jaskier doesn’t take the crossroads south to return. He doesn’t mention it, or the lightness of their bags. He simply watches the horizon with clear eyes, and says, “We’ll stop in the next village. They might not have left if they think they are far enough west to be safe.”

“If they think it, they’re wrong,” Ciri says, remembering what it was to wake in the dark to the sounds of knights’ horses and screams. Jaskier doesn’t correct her.

Dara rides close and catches her eye. He doesn’t say anything, not with Jaskier listening, and hasn’t since Novriston. But he doesn’t need to when she knows that look. He had whispered it to her many times the first few times they had gone into town together, whispered it and looked at her like this. Be ready to run.

She hopes he is thinking of including Jaskier in that warning. If Dara decides to run now without him, Ciri isn’t sure what she will do. With nothing else to do but think, it is a struggle not to turn it over and over in her mind, this little stone of worry. In the end, it settles just as heavily, unknown and unwanted.

That evening, in the thicket where they will be spending the night, Jaskier builds a small fire to melt and boil their drinking water for the next day.

They find soldier’s rations in the saddlebags on the warhorse. There isn’t much to be had. The company had marched and ridden hard to get to Novriston. The very real reminder of what they had done, combined with the dashed hopes for a solid meal, puts them all in a black mood so that they barely speak to each other as they assemble a bare camp.

For the dozenth time, Ciri curses the knights and curses Nilfgaard. She wonders if the horses had belonged to one of the soldiers Jaskier had killed, and hopes with all her heart that it is so. They deserve to have their horses stolen. They deserve to lay in some back lot in ruined Novriston and rot. While gathering what dry sticks she can for the fire, she imagines one a sword in her hand, and that she had been the one to drive it through the mocking soldier's neck. She imagines that she had been trained and that she can protect herself, and Dara, and Jaskier. That she hadn’t stood scared and frozen by, waiting to see Jaskier die.

It isn't enough. It isn't a sword in her hand, just a stick. She ends up throwing it into the fire first, scowling.

Their only dinner is the hardtack left in the soldier’s packs. Passing the rations out as Jaskier works at their water, Ciri draws up short when he waves it off.

“Both of you split my share.” Dara stills across the fire where he is braiding leather strips.

Ciri argues. “But you must be hungry.” She is, she knows, and she needs less than him. Her stomach hasn't stopped growling in days!

Jaskier flicks his dirty hair off of his forehead and smiles as easily as a man seated in a warm tavern and not a windy clearing. “I can say with absolute honesty that I have traveled on less. A bard on the move is used to an empty stomach.”

“But-”

“Besides,” he adds with a playful turn of his head and a tap of his finger at his lip, “I chipped a canine not too long ago on a jealous husband’s fist and I fear gnawing on one of those will do for the rest of it. How will I charm patrons and admirers out of their coins and kisses with a gap in my smile?" He clutches for his collar with a shudder. "It doesn’t bear thinking! In fact, it would be a kindness if you ate it for me and saved me from this dire fate.” Behind him, Ciri can see Dara looking at him as if he has lost his mind. Jaskier can't, however. Seeing still that she hesitates, he claps his hands of soot from the fire and takes up his sword for his evening watch, still smiling. “I said I wouldn't lie to you, didn't I?” She nods. “Then that’s that. I'll be fine for the night. Eat and get some rest. It is still two days to Bodrog, if my map is right.” With that, he paces a few strides off and settles in with his back to the fire, not even looking back once.

Ciri and Dara split the little biscuit. If she lays awake that night, it is because she watches Jaskier at the guard and remembers how grey his skin has gone beneath all the smiles and jokes and reassurances.

Shame chews on her stomach more than hunger. If he tries to offer her his food again, she won't take it. She swears it to herself.

*

The next day, Jaskier falls asleep in the saddle. It is the sword dropping from his hand that wakes him. He comes to afraid, and then embarrassed. Ciri shakes her head at his apologies when he returns to the saddle with the sword unsteady in his hand.

“It’s okay,” she tells him. “You can sleep. You haven’t been at night.” She frowns back at him as she says it, daring him to say he is alright.

“But-” Jaskier starts to say, and stops. She knows what it is he was going to argue. The horse. He doesn’t want to leave her alone in guiding it, knowing that she is afraid.

Ciri takes a moment to firm up her posture before she plucks the reins out of his hands with trembling fingers, knocking his wrist aside. He breathes in sharply. Because he is surprised? Or afraid she will steer them wrong? Determination sets her shoulders back.

“We’re just walking,” she says crisply to the horizon, aware her knuckles would show white if her gloves didn’t hide them. She stares ahead loftily and tries to move with the horse the way she knows riders are meant to. Tries to forget the fear that still ties her stomach up in knots even after days riding. “I can do it. Rest your weight on my back or you’ll fall off,” she admonishes.

He must hear she is serious, for he doesn’t argue more. Or, she thinks when his head drops almost immediately to her shoulder, he is just that tired. Regardless, after a bit of finangling of his seat and fumbling the sword so it lay balanced across his thighs, he drops away almost immediately.

He sleeps all the way through to late afternoon. The little victory fuels her, for all Ciri nearly sweats her tunic through having to guide the giant creature carrying them. But she does it, and with Dara's murmured pointers keeps them moving steady and smooth, and doesn’t make a sound when her back begins to hurt and her hands cramp up. She has had saddle sores for days; she is hungry, thirsty, and tired. But she sits up straight so Jaskier can rest his head, and keeps an eye on the horizon for him. She looks for smoke. She waits for soldiers.

That night, as they settle down around their tiny fire, barely more than embers, Dara reaches into the front of his tunic and pulls out a single hank of dried meat and a hunk of hard cheese. Ciri cries out when she sees.

“Where did you get that!” she shouts, all decorum forgotten. She is so hungry she can smell it from ten paces-- smoke, honey, paprika, and black pepper. Dara looks at her for a moment, unreadable as those first few days.

It is the smell that joggles the memory loose. She had eaten some of it with Jaskier whilst she listened to him talk of Witchers on the road. She remembers Jaskier laying it out for them both in the tavern room, and Dara stuffing some into his shirt, as if someone would take it from him. She gapes. “You’ve had it all this time?” He shrugs. “Why didn’t you say anything before now?” She isn’t sure what she is: furious, or grateful.

Dara shrugs again. “Didn’t need it until now.” After two days without his voice, that he finally speaks startles her enough that her fury scurries off. Jaskier chuckling at her elbow does the rest.

“I should have suspected.” Dara tenses, but there is no reproach in Jaskier’s voice. In fact, he smiles, and it is so bright and different to the ones of the past couple days that Ciri realizes it is the first real rendition of the bunch. “You know, you remind me of my friend Cercis. A better thief you’ll never find, and not one rat half so charming. He always says that if you can't put it in your belly, then put it in your pocket for later when there's naught in your belly." He chuckles to himself as he settles onto a log to poke at the fire. "I've seen him fit entire feasts into his tunic, when need be.”

“You know a rat?” Dara blurts, voice incredulous and unexpected. His face says he is as surprised by the exclamation as Ciri is. Jaskier meanwhile, with what Ciri figures must be all his acting abilities, goes about his work at the fire with such practiced ease, as if Dara speaking to him were not unusual in the least.

“Would it surprise you if I said I know many?” Jaskier asks, and grins at Dara for just a moment like he can’t help it. Dara squints back suspiciously. “I can see that it would." He chuckles. "I'm afraid I'll have to shock you, dear Dara. No, despite my charming and disarming appearance and the innocent boyishness of my, yes, extremely handsome face-" Dara snorts, "I am in fact rather well-known and regarded amongst the rats and warrens of Cidaris and the surrounding kingdoms. It is all thanks to my early friendship with Cercis, who taught me all there was to know. Ah, but there are no others like him, not in all the Continent,” he continues easily enough, unperturbed. “He was the first rat I ever made friends with- oh, 26 years ago.”

Ciri doesn’t want to interrupt, not something so tenuous as this when otherwise Dara wouldn’t so much as look at Jaskier too long, but she has to ask. “Why do you call him a rat?”

“Street rats,” Jaskier replies promptly, "are any combination of orphan, pick-pocket, thief, burglar, swindler; any trade, really, that one can turn on the underside of the law." If they weren’t huddled around a fire with all the grime and dirt of days on the rough, he would almost have the air of a teacher holding class, with how he continues in a lilting drawl, “Most of the adults I know who grew up on the streets and still turn their trade just go by rat. Wear it like a badge of pride, and," he leans over, lowering his voice, "get very prickly when you suggest it is not the most flattering of sobriquets." With the way he winces, Ciri figures prickly is an understatement. He winks at her as he straightens again. "In the end, it's mostly the young ones that get called the full, like our friend Dara here."

She looks to Dara for confirmation, but he just presses his lips hard together, staring down at the meal in his lap, which means the conversation is likely at its end. Jaskier doesn't give any sign that he minds; he hums as he works, demeanor much brightened.

She tries not to fidget waiting for Dara to offer her some of the rations. He takes much longer than her stomach should like. Finally, Dara takes his little silver-handled knife out and cuts the jerky into three pieces. She takes hers and shoves it immediately into her cheek and doesn't even blush when he snorts at her. It tastes of woodsmoke and salt and spices and honey, and is the best thing to happen all day. She could almost sing with how it lifts her spirits.

Chewing on his own, Dara watches Jaskier from the corner of his eye for a long moment before he holds a piece out for him. The man pauses, meeting his look squarely, mildly. Very slowly, Jaskier takes it as delicately as a porcelain cup and with murmured thanks that Dara ignores. Ciri pretends to be fascinated by the fire, even when she sees Dara glare at her accusingly in her peripheral. She is smiling, she realizes. The first since Novriston.

*

A mouthful of dinner is not enough, no matter how good. The brightness fades. They move as the barest impressions of people the next day.

They ride without breakfast, only water to hold them over. Low, grey clouds pursue them as they go. Snow to come soon.

There is naught to do but to look to the horizon, and remember, and think, and find one has nothing left to say because speaking takes too much energy and, with days of hunger and ill sleep, she has no energy at all. None of them do. Not even, she feels, to be afraid in more than fits and starts. The fire of it has snuffed out. The hollow where it had been sits cold and empty and lifeless, just the shape of terror remembered and carried around with her, leaving no room for anything else to grow. They move as automatons, or golems, and the land doesn't change. A long dream lasting days in which nothing happens. She tries to imagine what it will be like to find town again. To be clean, to have food. She finds she can't. The soldiers destroyed that, too.

The only thing of note to happen that day comes around midday, after they’ve stopped to rest the horses and to sit wishing they, too, could eat the grass underneath the crust of snow. Returning to the saddle is always as awful as the first, but Ciri does it with gritted teeth, and is able to swing herself up with Jaskier’s knee to stand on.

A few minutes into riding, during which Jaskier had shifted incessantly, passing the reins and sword from hand to hand, she is very close to snapping at him. Every time he moves, she is afraid she will tip and fall from the saddle. The fourth or fifth time leaves her glaring at the horn where she hunches clinging. She stays there until Jaskier settles further back off the saddle and rests the sword across his thighs. Finally, she thinks. Maybe he will hold still for at least a few miles.

The position is not an easy one to rein from, however. When his fidgeting begins again, Ciri bristles. Before she can open her mouth to snap at him, however, Dara beats her to it.

“Here,” he huffs, nudging the mare closer with his knees so he can shove something at Jaskier. The bard barely manages to catch it before it slithers down off the warhorse’s back. She catches just a glimpse of it when she turns to look back. Familiar braided leather. The thing Dara had been working on by the fire last night.

Jaskier is just as confused as she is.

“I… uh, not that I don’t feel- that is, I am very grateful for this, uh, what you’ve given me,” Jaskier stutters. He sounds so ridiculous trying valiantly to be grateful that Ciri actually snickers into her hand, shocking herself. He clears his throat and nudges her reproachfully with one knee. After a pause, he asks, “But… what is it?”

Dara rolls his eyes hard and looks accusingly at Ciri, as if blaming her for finding someone so stupid. She can practically hear him thinking it. She rolls her eyes back, unimpressed. Finally, he sighs mightily and turns to look at Jaskier fully, pointing as he does.

“You use it to hook the sword to your belt. The loop goes under the guard, where the blade won’t cut.” Jaskier freezes behind her where he had been turning the leather over in his hands. After a moment, he does so again, slower with something like reverence this time. Dara scowls and glares at whatever face he makes, and his hands go uncomfortably to his thighs, rubbing nervously at the rough wool there. Ciri really wishes she could turn and see. “You can’t carry a sword like that when you’re in the saddle,” he remarks rudely, eyes on the road again. “You’ll just end up cutting the girl, or the horse.” Restlessly, he leans forward to pat at the mare’s neck. The move says he is far too busy to look their way. Jaskier must be smiling at him. Ciri glances back to confirm it and shakes her head. Sometimes Dara can be so immature, she thinks, and it’s not fond. Not even a little, she tells herself.

Behind her, Jaskier has shifted, this time to take the sword and begin tying it to his side.

“Thank you, Dara,” he says. “This will certainly make my life easier.” Dara waves away his earnestness like it is a horsefly.

“It’s not for you. It’s for them,” he says brusquely. He frowns severely. “Your mistake, your cut. You would deserve it. They don’t.” With a nudge, he guides the mare a little faster so he can leave them behind.

“Well,” Jaskier hums after a moment. “Thank you all the same.”

That day, Jaskier gives them each a mouthful of the expensive citron honey he keeps for his throat, dug up from the depths of his pack. She won’t take it until he takes some as well. After he relents, Ciri holds it in her mouth for a long as she can, savoring the sweetness as it slowly slides down her throat. It doesn’t makes her less hungry, but she feels a little better after. Less dizzy.

After another day of the same lands, the same trees, the same blade of a horizon, empty of even birds, they settle in the bones of an abandoned coppice. Whoever it was planted it had left decades before; the hazels are big around as her waist, those that still live. Most are dry and brittle, the faint ghosts of trees. After discovering that, Jaskier had to hunt around for a place where they would not be in danger of one falling on them in the night. Looking about at them, without even the memory of a house standing nearby to keep the place company, Ciri cannot help but feel glad. As glad as a starving, running girl can be.

No one had fled this place. No homes have been left empty for her to see and know stand in the hearts of her family as a curse. Though, perhaps it is just her now to hold them. The noble lady in the tent had spoken the curse and had so surprised Ciri with her hate, her grief. She had wondered how anyone could think and feel that way about the good, noble, proud people she so loved.

Ciri cannot wonder it now. She has seen it. She knows, and knows it best when the air burns around her, and she sees little boys cut down outside their houses and ladies in flaming night dresses, and when even the houses stare back with an accusation. At least when she sleeps tonight it will be a place that hasn't tasted the war yet, only loneliness.

All the same, Ciri wakes up in the dark shuddering. Jaskier hears. His footsteps crunch and crackle on the bare earth beneath the trees when he comes to comfort her.

Tentative fingers on her sleeve. “The horses still?” he asks in a voice that is barely more than air.

She shakes her head and has to work her throat a moment before she can so much as whisper. “Novriston. Cintra.” Him, run through in a little lot and left to rot. There is a sigh of movement, the sound of metal scraping frozen earth. He sits next to her. The bare branches above them twitch in the wind. There are no other sounds but the wind and their breaths; the fire doesn’t even snap, so far down to embers it is.

“Do you think you could fall asleep?” She shakes her head again. He doesn’t say anything, just settles in, sword across his knee. Hsss say the branches in the wind. Her breaths are not so soft. They rasp loudly. The night is too wide around them, too big.

In the stillness, Jaskier breathes in deeply and begins to hum a simple, tuneful melody. Not the kind of thing for a banquet or a tavern common. Listening to its repeating pattern, her muscles begin to unlatch from around her bones. She breathes with him. Then he begins to sing; barely more than a murmur, in a voice sweeter and lower than she might have expected had she expected anything at all. He burrs,

"Of princesses we bards may sing-
With faces fair and button nose;
And oft about this princess goes
From leaf to leaf and crystal spring,
Hunting for some faerie thing
Among the downy boughs."

"Those don’t exist," Ciri interrupts, and then wishes she hadn't. She hadn't wanted him to stop singing, and so feels a pang when he does to blink at her. It's just that she couldn't stop herself. She adds when he doesn't respond, "Faeries. They can't exist."

He lets the quiet creep back in to the camp like a kicked dog. Then, he asks her softly, "Why not?"

Because they're good, and nothing in the world is good anymore. She doesn't say that, just tugs on a loose thread from her sleeve. Jaskier shifts. She can't see in the dark, but she thinks she sees that he smiles. She doesn't know how he can, even as it warms her, and she takes it back. Maybe not all the good things can be gone, if he can sing her silly songs and smile when she is rude.

"I've seen them," he whispers with an undercurrent in his voice that makes her sit up. It sounds exactly like a secret. "Tiny humanoids with wings like dragonflies and flower petal faces. Or many-limbed, twig-like beings with black beetle eyes, wearing gowns and cloaks made of birch bark and moss."

"Where?" she breathes, because she had been sure they couldn't be real until she believed him, and she believed him from the smile onward. Maybe because he sounds like awe and wonder, and does still when he says,

"Everywhere. The fields and forests at Dol Blathanna. The edge of Brokilon in Verden, and in Redania, and Lyria. They are shy, but they love milk and honey, and magnolia blossoms set in bowls of spring water, and a pair of skilled hands on a lute." His voice barely stirs in the still night. Ciri can see over Jaskier's shoulder Dara shifting within his cloak, listening, but thinks he would not like Jaskier to know. She looks away.

A little thorn of pain burns in her throat. "It's too beautiful to be real," she whispers, and the burn is in her eyes now. She turns her back on the fire so that the cold dark curls up around her face. But she and Dara both listen when Jaskier's voice unfurls around them as delicate and green as a fern, just as soft.

There is a lady in a lake, the hair of her head the tangled green of lake grass. He remembers for them little hands dusted yellow by dandelions as he lay for hours in a field of flowers and watched the tiny beings pick off the flowers' heads to paint themselves the color of spring sunshine. Water sprites whistling their songs in wells and brownies in abandoned houses wishing for a new home, that had settled warm and soft as a kitten in his hands when he carried them to a cottage that would welcome them. The night is still too large and barren, but the trees seem to lean in close to hear him, and form a little room that is only the three of them, the fire, and their fat, round trunks.

"How could you see them?” Ciri asks, curious in the place where just before there had only been hurting. “If they're out there, why doesn't everyone see them? Why could you watch them, or help them?"

He falls silent. She can just make out his profile when she peeks, his head turned up to hazel branches and the few patches of stars. He makes a thoughtful sound in the back of his throat.

"When I was a child, some suggested that I was a changeling child, left to replace the stolen human babe. And why not? I was slight, and bright, and pure trouble. Even my mother would agree and smiling say there was something not quite mundane in me. Not like the other boys." It is only the shift of his lips, his profile against the fire that lets her know Jaskier smiles again. The line of his shoulders tells her the secret he lets the dark hide: that it is tight and painful. She can't help but wonder. What had he been like at her age? Slight, and bright, and trouble. Had he been hurt then as he is now? And why?

He shakes the mood off before she can wonder more and turns with the barest white crescent of his grin against the firelight. "So watch what you say," he teases her, and pinches her. He's not very good at it; it's so light it doesn't even sting. "You might be speaking to a prince of the Court, and you never know which one. There are many tales of them, and not all of them nice."

"Can you believe in them?"

"Mm?"

"The tales. Aren't they just myths?"

"Well... there are countless tales from every place I've ever traveled, and many myths hold a grain of truth. Some of the oldest come from the elves," he says, "and they were here long before we humans, and know much of this continent which humans cannot. Perhaps never will. Especially if we continue to kill everything older than we are." He clears his throat to brush the unexpected grimness away. Dara's eyes reflect the firelight, unblinking. "...So, yes. I can believe. Enough for the both of us, if I must." His fingers brush over her forehead and are gone. He asks, "Do you want me to let you try to sleep?"

Ciri bites her lip. She wiggles down so she can curl up in a ball and rests her head on her arm.

"...Sing me the song again?"

She thinks about his stories for a long time after he has sung her his silly song and, thinking she is asleep, returns to his watch. She thinks about old things that die, and Dara, and elves, and wars that leave nothing but corpses, and faeries with flower faces. Does knowledge die if its people do? Ciri wonders. Can faeries? Can wonder?

Inside a hazel giant's rib cage, Ciri falls asleep alone with the fire; and the moon; and a rat boy; and a man who believes in faeries and holds a sword; and the ghosts of her grandparents and her parents and every person of Cintra who has died. But none of them touch her dreams, for her sleep is dreamless the rest of the night.

*