Archive of Our Own ^beta

The man whose life Guxart has just saved collapses onto the grassy verge beside the road, looking astonished at being alive. Guxart wrenches his sword out of the second manticore’s carcass, panting. He’s a bit astonished himself, really. One manticore is a hard fight - two would be enough to kill a lot of Witchers, and not the least skillful of them, either. This will be worth boasting of when he next returns to Stygga.

Though only if it actually earns him more than the coin he’ll make from selling the useful parts of the manticores to the apothecaries in Daevon. He turns and frowns at the man he’s saved.

“I owe you everything,” the man gasps, and rises to his feet, holding out a hand. Guxart eyes his own ichor-dripping hands and bows a little instead. “I am Oskar of Daevon, and I do not have anything to pay you with me - will you accompany me home, and allow me to reward you there?”

“I will,” Guxart says, and considers the man’s clothing - well-made but nothing special - and the quality of the manticore-slain horse - decent but unimpressive. Probably not worth demanding coin, then. “I’ll take the Law of Surprise. Whatever you have and do not know.”

“Done,” Oskar of Daevon says.

Five years later, Guxart comes to Daevon again, to the keep in the center of the city, and a solemn-faced child hugs his twin brother tightly and then looks up at Guxart and says, “I’m Treyse. Father says I must be a Witcher. I am ready.”

Guxart has to admit he really hopes this one passes the Trials.

*

Mouse always likes watching when the Witchers come to Daevon to speak with her father. Witchers are fascinating, nothing like anyone else in Daevon, not even the soldiers who serve her father or the mercenaries who drink in the taverns she’s really not supposed to know about. They move so quietly, and they usually have very odd accents, and they have such odd eyes, and so many scars.

And great-great-great-grandfather Filip’s brother went off to be a Witcher, and everyone knows that Witchers live for entire centuries, so Mouse always wonders if one of the Witchers might be her many-greats uncle. That would be amazing, to be related to someone more than a century old! The things he’d know! The secrets he would know!

(She asks her father, once, why they’ve never sent word to the Warlord to see if her great-great-great uncle still lives, and her father looks very sad and says that many years ago, great-great grandfather Dominik asked a Witcher about their training, and learned that seven in ten of the trainees die of it, and since that time they have all been agreed that it is better not to ask, not to know if great-great-great grandfather Filip’s brother died too young. Mouse disagrees. She always wants to know, even if it’s bad, because at least then it won’t be a surprise. But she doesn’t tell Father that.)

Mouse loves secrets. Not necessarily her own, though she has a gracious plenty of those, but other people’s. She doesn’t tell anyone other people’s secrets, not unless they’re going to do someone harm, but she likes to know them. Her big brother Dominik calls her a little mouse, always sneaking about and hoarding knowledge like grain for the winter, and the nickname sticks; sometimes even she forgets that her name isn’t Mouse, since everyone calls her that except on formal occasions when she has to be Lady Liliana.

Honestly she likes being Mouse better than being Lady Liliana. Mouse gets to spend time down in the stables with Kamil the stablemaster’s son, learning the hand-signs he uses to speak and also all the interesting curses the grooms and stableboys use, and all the gossip about who is visiting and how they treat their horses and what’s been going on among the merchants in the haymarket, who apparently have as complex a network of feuds and alliances and long-standing unspoken arrangements as the noble houses do. Lady Liliana isn’t even allowed to help tack up her own patient mare, lest she dirty her clothing.

Mouse gets to help out in the kitchens, peeling carrots or chopping turnips and listening intently as the scullions chatter about the footmen and the chambermaids and the price of vegetables and spices and how much they like it when there’s a feast and they get the leftovers from the high table and can have a little feast of their own. Lady Liliana has to sit through the feasts and talk to whichever of her cousins happens to be visiting and usually not get any interesting gossip at all because all of her female cousins want to giggle over which of the young men they’ve met recently is handsomest or would make the best match, and it only gets worse as they get older. Mouse frankly has no interest in any men, handsome or not, and desperately doesn’t want to think about the fact that as her father’s eldest daughter, she’s going to be betrothed before she’s eighteen, even if she doesn’t marry until she’s over twenty.

Mouse gets to go down into the city - well, sneaks out, admittedly, since Mother would throw a fit if she knew - and wander about with Kamil and talk to all the merchants and the tavernkeepers and even sometimes the prostitutes when they’re out shopping for clothing, because she helped one of them find a really well-made bit of satin once and now they all think she’s got the best eye for fabric of anyone in the city, and will ask her for help and pay her in gossip and cheerful, filthy advice. Both Mouse and the prostitutes think they’re getting the better end of the deal, which in Mouse’s experience is the best sort of deal to have. Lady Liliana only gets to visit the nicer portions of the city, the fancy merchants up near the keep, and she has to go with two guards and a footman to carry everything and her maid Nadia to chaperone her, and everyone bows and keeps their eyes lowered and no one really talks to her at all.

So being Mouse is generally a lot more fun, but on the other hand, Lady Liliana can get things done that Mouse - plain brown little Mouse, in her much-patched dresses with her hair done up in the simplest of braids, who everyone assumes is a maid or a scullion or a shopgirl - could never hope to do.

It was Mouse who heard about how one of their visitors’ manservants was planning to do absolutely horrid things to an orphan chambermaid who didn’t have anyone to protect her, but it was Lady Liliana who arranged for him to be caught menacing the poor girl before he could actually do anything, and who claimed little Nadia as her lady’s maid, so now nobody will ever dare threaten Nadia again.

It was Mouse who overheard the grooms grousing about the quality of the hay and sweet feed, and who snuck about in the haymarket and coaxed a young shopworker to tell her all about how his master was making so much more money by selling the baron’s stables year-old feed, but it was Lady Liliana who told her father about the merchant, and helped go through the man’s accounts to find the double-dealing.

It was Mouse who took a shift helping out in a tavern where the serving maid had come down with a nasty flux, and overheard the patrons muttering about something lurking in the sewers, and who put that together with the stories the merchants were telling about street urchins and beggars going missing, and the cellarer’s fretting over the strange sounds he’d been hearing while alone deep in the keep’s bowels, but it was Lady Liliana who went to her father and told him there was a monster in the sewers. It turned out there were several monsters, gruesome insectlike things, and Mouse got to watch with horrified fascination as the Witchers who came in response to her father’s request dragged the things into the main square and lit them on fire.

It’s Lady Liliana who can write to her many, many cousins all over Kaedwen and gather all the gossip from everywhere, and put it together into a glorious intricate map of feuds and obligations and marriages and blood-debts and snubs, and then distill it down into information that her father can use to keep himself in the good graces of the king and most of the other lords. And it’s Lady Liliana who actually gets to meet the Witchers occasionally, when they agree to eat with the family at the high table during a routine patrol, and listen to their stories of battles and monsters and long-gone kings and wars. So being Lady Liliana isn’t so bad, as long as Mouse doesn’t have to play that part all the time.

Which is one of the reasons she panics the day, in the middle of her fourteenth year, she wakes to find that she has gotten her courses.

Courses mean her parents will start looking for a suitable husband.

Father lets her spend most of her time as Mouse, and only be Lady Liliana sometimes. He’d tried to train her into more ladylike obedience when she was small, but she was so stubborn - and the information she discovered so useful - that he’s given up on keeping her to lessons in running a household and embroidery and other such gentle pursuits, and turns a blind eye to her expeditions into the servants’ halls and the stables and the city, only requiring that she be at supper each night, and keep herself safe, and does not let anyone outside the keep know her true identity. But there’s no guarantee that whoever her parents choose for her - no matter how kind, how even-tempered, how gentle he might be - will do the same. Most noblemen wouldn’t put up with a wife who spends half her time running about with stableboys and servants, down in the muck with the common folk.

And no matter who he is, he’ll expect children, which means bedding. Mouse has asked a fair number of questions of the prostitutes and the scullions and the chambermaids and even of her married cousins, and she knows the mechanics of the act as well as anyone can who has never performed it, and it fills her with a profound and inescapable horror. She likes touch well enough - she’ll hug Nadia, or Kamil, or her family, she’ll let Dominik sweep her off her feet with his hugs or tussle gently with little Fabian or let tiny Gabriela practice braiding on her hair - but the idea of - of bedding -

No. Just no.

Nadia finds her weeping, and pats her shoulders awkwardly, and tells her that courses take many women so, that weeping is a common effect and she should not worry about it, and there are herbs for the pain, but it isn’t pain that has left Mouse gasping sobs into her pillow, and she does not know how to tell Nadia that she knows her parents love her, and will express that love by finding her a very good match, and in doing so will make her life a misery she might not be able to bear.

If only she was a Witcher like great-uncle Treyse! Witchers do not marry. And there are female Witchers, she has seen one of them, a tall dark-haired woman with so many knives Mouse could not count them all, who called herself Vesper and smiled like she knew secrets no one else would ever guess. But Mouse is not a Witcher-candidate, she is a noble lady of a long and honorable line, and she gives herself one morning to weep and bewail her fate - no one will blame her on this morning of all mornings, after all - and then she cleans her face and speaks to Nadia about arranging for all the appropriate supplies for dealing with courses to be stocked in her dressing room, and begins to plan.

If she wants to avoid marriage, she’ll need an alternative that will bring as much honor to her family as a marriage would, and that doesn’t leave a lot of options. She certainly can’t run off - that would disgrace her parents terribly. And faking her own death, even if she could manage it, would bring them immense grief. And in any case, she has no idea what she could even do, alone in the world - not and be safe and happy, at least. She could be a laundress or a tavern-maid or a scullion, but she knows far too well how little protection there is, even in the Warlord’s lands, for women without fathers or husbands or brothers or extremely sharp daggers and the will to use them. Running away is therefore right out.

She could conceivably declare that she has suddenly gained a vocation, an irrevocable dedication to Melitele, and retreat into a temple to become a priestess, but if she’s going to do that, she’ll have to do it well before her parents begin lining suitors up, or it will look like she’s rejecting the suitors, which will be taken as an insult, and would cause problems for her parents. And she doesn’t have a vocation, and lying to the gods seems like an unwise choice, all things considered. So that’s an option, but perhaps not the best option.

Or she could arrange to become a lady-in-waiting to some high-ranking noblewoman who would not wish her ladies to marry and leave her, but Mouse doesn’t know a lot of high-ranking noblewomen. The highest-ranking cousin she has is married to a count’s heir, and already has one of her sisters as her lady-in-waiting, and doesn’t need another.

Whichever method she chooses, it will take time to set up - either faking a vocation or finding a noblewoman who might accept her service - so she needs a way to keep her parents from making any plans for a while. And, thank the gods, she has one. Father is currently locked in negotiations for a bride for Dominik, and Mouse can easily argue that she does not wish to distract her parents from that important matter until it is settled and Dominik is safely married - two years and more from now.

Which means she has two years to find a more permanent solution.

*

Almost two years later, Mouse is beginning to panic - just a little, and very quietly. Dominik has been betrothed to a very nice young lady named Helena, the eldest daughter of the viscount of Rakverelin, which reinforces their house’s long-standing friendship with that viscounty - and also means Dominik is actually marrying someone he knows and is fond of, which is rare for a noble son - and their wedding is to be held in the coming spring. Mouse is very happy for her brother, but as soon as he is wed, Mother will begin looking for a match for Mouse - possibly even before he is wed, since a great many people will be visiting for the wedding, and it will be a very good opportunity for matchmaking.

And Mouse is even more certain that she could not make a good acolyte of Melitele - the expectation of silent obedience, when she is used to sneaking out and talking to everyone, would suit her very ill indeed - and has had no luck whatsoever in finding a noble lady who might be willing to take her into her service.

And then the Witchers come. Not a four-person patrol, as is usual, nor yet the seven who came to deal with the kikimoras, but fourteen Witchers, escorting Consort Jaskier and Princess Ciri.

Mouse hadn’t even known there was a princess. There have been no rumors about her at all.

Princess Ciri is twelve, but she carries herself like a trained warrior, and she wears a long knife at her side. The Witchers don’t precisely defer to her, but they do treat her with immense affection and respect. She’s polite and well-spoken, even in her obvious weariness as the evening grows long, and Mouse watches the princess and the Witchers and realizes that while she will never be a Witcher, here is exactly the excuse she has always needed to go to Kaer Morhen. To live among Witchers, to maybe even find great-uncle Treyse if he still lives.

To be at the center of a network of secrets so much larger than Daevon’s - the secrets of entire countries, funneling into Kaer Morhen to be organized and acted upon!

When the princess and her party have gone off south to the elven lands, Mouse goes to her parents and begs - begs as she has never begged for anything before - to be allowed to request a position in the princess’s household, to serve the princess and the Warlord and show their house’s loyalty.

Her father hears her out, and nods, and promises that he will write and ask. He cannot promise that she will be accepted. A baron’s daughter is not usually of appropriate rank to serve a princess. But he will ask, and that is - that must be - enough.

They get a response a month or so after Father sends their request: a polite, noncommittal note allowing that the princess will consider the matter, and will let Lady Liliana know if her service is desired when a decision has been made. Mouse tries very hard not to take that as a rejection. It isn’t. It’s just a placeholder, neither a yes nor a no. Still, she’s on edge for months, jittery enough that Mother starts to worry she’s fallen in love - which she definitely has not - and Nadia makes soothing hot milk-and-honey possets for her almost every evening, and Kamil frowns every time she comes down to the stables and won’t let her help with the horses lest she agitate them too much.

And then the second letter comes, midway through autumn.

The princess would be pleased to accept Lady Liliana into her household - if Father is willing to take in the disgraced and disowned former marchioness Marta de Roggeven and keep her from either escaping or fomenting rebellion or otherwise causing any trouble.

There’s an explanation appended, which Mouse reads over her father’s shoulder, eyes growing wider with every line: the disgraced Lady Marta had arranged the kidnapping of the Consort and two others, and had been working in concert with the former princess of Temeria, who had once tried to murder the Consort. Frankly, Mouse is astonished that Lady Marta hasn’t been executed.

Father frowns over the letter for some time. Daevon is a small city, and the keep isn’t precisely set up to guard a wayward ex-marchioness. But such a mark of trust from the Warlord is not to be easily set aside, and after Father and Mother and Dominik have discussed the matter - for days, while Mouse bites her nails to the quick and paces a rut in the rug in her rooms and worries poor Nadia worse than ever - Father decides that the reward is more than worth the risk, and sends word to the Warlord via the impatient deep-purple spellraven which has been making a nuisance of itself in the main hall since it arrived with the Warlord’s offer.

It is agreed, over the course of several more spellravens, that Mouse will come to Kaer Morhen in the spring, after her brother’s wedding, while Lady Marta will be brought to Daevon as soon as may be, that her fear not permeate the air of Kaer Morhen any longer than it must. Mouse studies that letter with great curiosity: does it mean that Witchers can smell fear? If so, what else can they smell?

She’ll have so much to learn when she reaches Kaer Morhen!

But first she has to help arrange matters to receive Lady Marta. She and Mother spend several days cleaning out a suite of rooms at the top of the mostly-disused eastern tower, while Father and Dominik and several stoneworkers check to make sure there aren’t any secret passages (Mouse could have told them there aren’t, she’s already found all the secret passages in the keep and there certainly aren’t any in the eastern tower, which may be why it fell out of use in the first place), and they all spend several more days interviewing all the servants until they find a pair of maids who have the sort of bone-deep loyalty to Mouse’s family that won’t be shaken by any sort of blandishments or bribery from a disgraced Redanian marchioness, and assign them to serve - and observe - Lady Marta when she arrives.

Lady Marta arrives on a blustery late-autumn day, stepping through a portal in the great hall between four heavily-armed and very irritable-looking Witchers. She’s short - shorter than Liliana, who had a growth spurt recently and is now having to remake all of her gowns, which is mildly irritating - with dark hair pulled back in a braid that looks like it wants to be elegant but hasn’t been made by skilled hands, and dark eyes snapping with impotent fury.

Mouse is really just as glad she won’t have to deal with Lady Marta for more than this coming winter, honestly. She looks haughty and irritable and generally unpleasant, which admittedly probably has something to do with the fact that she’s been disgraced, disowned, and packed off to a minor barony in Kaedwen, but still isn’t going to be any fun to deal with.

Mother bustles forward and says all the right polite things to the Witchers and to Lady Marta, and Lady Marta says all the right polite things back in a voice as cold as midwinter winds, and Mother ushers Lady Marta off to the rooms which have been prepared for her, carefully never mentioning that they’re effectively a prison, while Lady Marta sneers very delicately at everything - a tiny contemptuous expression that Mouse isn’t even sure anyone else sees - and the Witchers watch Lady Marta like they’re worried she’s going to attempt to escape, or stab someone, or worse.

Lady Marta chooses not to join them for supper. The Witchers do, to Mouse’s delight, and seem to be quite pleased to answer the questions Mouse dares to ask about Kaer Morhen and the princess she is to serve - the cub, as she is apparently called. Mouse learns that Kaer Morhen is quite cold and she should bring her heaviest clothing, that there are hot springs to bathe in, that Princess Ciri is fond of playing pranks, especially those which involve geese, and that Lady Milena, who is Lady Marta’s sister and Princess Ciri’s chief lady-in-waiting, is extremely sweet-natured, stabby when kidnapped, and courting - or possibly being courted by, it’s not quite clear - a Wolf Witcher named Lambert.

Kaer Morhen sounds even more fascinating than it did before. Mouse can’t wait to get there. One more winter and Dominik’s wedding, and then she can start finding everything out herself.

*

Lady Marta doesn’t get any friendlier over the course of the winter. Mouse didn’t really expect her to. She also doesn’t try to flirt with Dominik, which Mouse rather cynically did expect. Seducing the next lord of Daevon would be a decent way to loosen the bonds of her captivity, after all, or even start to put a wedge between Daevon and the Warlord. But Lady Marta apparently still considers herself a marchioness, and a marchioness simply doesn’t flirt with so lowly a person as a baron’s eldest son. She also doesn’t pay any attention to such insignificant people as the baron’s younger children, which means that Mouse manages to pretend to be one of Lady Marta’s maids several times over the course of the winter, and learns that Lady Marta spends most of her time writing letters which she then burns, sewing the de Roggeven crest onto every piece of clothing she has, and doing what Mouse can only call sulking.

Which is better than plotting, at least, but awfully boring all the same.

And at least she doesn’t express any desire to attend Dominik’s wedding, which means Mouse doesn’t have to worry about her trying to suborn any of the guests - not that Mouse thinks that would work, but it would be awkward to deal with nonetheless.

Dominik’s wedding is very sweet, Mouse thinks, and well it ought to be, given the work she and Mother put in to make sure it would be so. The Daevon temple is hung with swags of fresh spring greenery and bunting in the green and grey of the Daevon line decorated with little blue-and-yellow flowers to signify Helena’s Rakverelin line, and there is a feast for the common folk at the same time as the one for the noble houses, and every noble family from all the fiefs within riding distance sends a representative, and so - to the astonishment, terror, and delight of almost everyone - does the Warlord: two Griffin Witchers, an older fellow named Orn and his squire. The squire, Roland, is apparently as young as he appears - no more than twenty or so - and is clearly delighted to dance with anyone who asks him to, while his master sits at the head table and makes polite conversation with Father and Mother and Dominik and Helena. Mouse isn’t technically supposed to be close enough to hear - she’s being Lady Liliana tonight, after all, and helping keep everything running smoothly - but he’s a Witcher, and she wants to hear all the gossip.

It’s even better gossip than she had dreamed: the Witcher is freshly come from Temeria, whose king conspired against the Warlord, nearly murdering him by treasonous assault, and has been slain in his turn by Eskel Amber-Eyed, leading the Warlord’s army in his place.

Mouse is horrified at the thought of the Warlord being so grievously injured, of course. She was born two years after he took Ard Carraigh; she has never known a world in which Witchers were anything but the stalwart protectors of Kaedwen, the loyal warriors of the White Wolf. Mother has told her stories of the bad old days, when Witchers were merely wandering monster-hunters, and demanded payment in hard coin or children’s lives for their services, but those were the old days, and it certainly isn’t like that now. But if he dies, then the peace of the northern realms will be shattered, and Mouse has paid attention to Mother’s other stories - the ones Father doesn’t know Mother told her - about the old king and his appetites, and the way the other great nobles used to be allowed to do whatever they pleased without any checks upon them save the king’s whim. It isn’t like that now; now, noble and commoner alike must bow to the Warlord’s laws, and King Szymon is wholly obedient to his overlord, as well he should be. But Mouse shudders to think of what might happen if the Warlord fell, and the bad old days returned.

But he is well, Orn assures them, recovering very swiftly from his injuries, and Temeria is now part of his lands, under a new king - Griffin by name, and Mouse grins at the coincidence - who has vowed fealty to the White Wolf and shown great promise in bringing the remaining nobles of Temeria to heel.

Mouse is immensely relieved, and so are her parents; Dominik, she thinks, is so distracted by his new bride that he barely hears the news, which is sort of adorable. And Helena seems to be delighted by the marriage too, leaning against Dominik and smiling up at him and giggling whenever he makes a ridiculously bad joke, so while Mouse never wants to be married, she’s very happy Helena seems pleased by her fortune. And Dominik is, in Mouse’s admittedly rather biased opinion, a very good man. He never beats his dogs or his horses or his servants or his siblings, he has gotten much better about sticking around for court days to watch Father sit in judgement and learn how to make such decisions instead of sneaking off to go hunting, and he’s very sweet with small children. Helena could have done a lot worse.

Unfortunately, the presence of a Witcher is not enough to keep Mother occupied for the three full days of the wedding celebrations, which means that she has plenty of time to start thinking about which of the many noble sons who have come to see Dominik married might make a good match for Mouse. She knows Mouse is heading for Kaer Morhen, of course, but she apparently can’t help but try to introduce Mouse to every eligible fellow at the party, in the hopes that some connection might develop.

Usually, Mouse would manage to escape to the kitchens or the secret passages or just to her own rooms (and thence to the city streets), but she can’t disgrace Dominik by vanishing in the middle of his wedding, so she has to smile and curtsey and dance with whoever asks, and put up with Mother cooing over various young men as being so handsome and charming and well-connected and pleasant, and the whole time it feels like cold water is running down her spine. Mother can’t make Father take back his agreement to let Mouse go to Kaer Morhen, but what if the princess doesn’t like her? What if Mother finds a really good match, and convinces Father to call her back? A baron’s daughter really isn’t the proper rank to wait upon a princess; it would be easy for Mother to argue that it would be more appropriate for Mouse to come home and marry than serve the Warlord’s daughter.

Mother isn’t trying to hurt her, but Mouse can’t help spending a great deal of Dominik’s wedding celebration feeling rather as if Mother is poking her with pins, over and over and over again.

But then, the morning after the festivities are finally over, once all the various cousins and allies and friendly rivals and neighbors have left, Orn announces that if it suits Father, he has been tasked with escorting Mouse to Kaer Morhen.

Mouse squeaks. She wasn’t expecting it to be so soon! She’s not packed! Well, that’s not entirely true, she’s been halfway packed all winter, but still.

Roland gives her a little wink from behind the older Witcher, which makes her think maybe Orn was meant to leave a little more time between wedding and escort. She’s frankly grateful for his impatience, whatever the reason may be.

Mother protests, of course, and Father is diplomatic, but Mouse is more than ready to be gone, before Mother can start talking to Father about any of the eligible young men who came to the party, and the end of the matter is that Mouse has three days to gather her things and Nadia’s - Nadia refused to stay behind, even when offered a position as Gabriela’s maid, for which Mouse is very grateful - and say her farewells. The hardest one is to Kamil, who cannot come with her, but Mouse promises to write, and Kamil, who learned his letters from her in exchange for teaching her to speak with her hands, promises to write back.

And then they are off to Kaer Morhen, Mouse and Nadia between two Griffin Witchers, and Mouse thinks her heart might beat out of her chest with sheer excitement. Witchers! New secrets! Maybe even great-uncle Treyse!

She can’t wait.

*

Mouse isn’t sure what she expected Lady Milena to be like, but she’s a dainty, elegant woman who looks much like her elder sister - though rather prettier, Mouse decides, if only because she doesn’t constantly look as though she’s just smelled something foul. She makes Mouse welcome and is very kind to poor Nadia, who is rather overwhelmed by actually reaching Kaer Morhen, and leads them to a suite of rooms which has been set aside for them in the princess’s tower - very nice rooms, as it happens, comfortably furnished and with a lovely big fireplace to keep them warm, and windows overlooking the training grounds - and gives them a tour of the more public parts of the keep before dinner. She also warns them that Kaer Morhen is extremely informal, to the point that the princess is most usually referred to either as ‘the cub’ or ‘the little menace.’ Mouse isn’t quite sure how she feels about that. She certainly isn’t comfortably calling her new liege lady ‘little menace’ - for that matter, she’s not entirely comfortable leaving the title off of Lady Milena’s name, though Lady Milena assures her it’s not necessary to include.

Mouse and Nadia make their oaths to the princess in the great hall before dinner, vowing to serve her honorably and well, and the princess accepts their oaths with grave solemnity and immense courtesy, and promises in return to protect them against all dangers, which Mouse would think a rather odd promise for a princess to make except that Princess Ciri wears a long knife at her belt and has the distinct air of someone who knows how to use it. They are also introduced to the Warlord himself - Nadia hides behind Mouse, who really can’t blame her - who is very tall and very imposing and very quiet, but so obviously dotes on his daughter that Mouse can’t quite bring herself to fear him - and re-introduced to Eskel Amber-Eyed and Consort Jaskier, who apparently remember Mouse from last summer, and are both very kind, despite the rather terrifying air that Eskel Amber-Eyed’s scars lend him.

Dinner is much rowdier than any meal at home ever is, but it’s a cheerful sort of rowdiness, and Mouse decides she likes it. Nadia reports, later, that the meal down in the servants’ hall is just as cheerful, though slightly less rowdy, and that the steward, one Jan Kelner, appears to be an even-tempered and terrifyingly competent man. Mouse approves. A steward can make or break a household; the chaos that ensued when her father’s steward died of a brainstorm without having trained a successor, and it took six months to find someone to fill the position who wasn’t going to try to embezzle the keep’s money or molest the chambermaids or just spend all his time in a drunken stupor, was quite memorably unpleasant.

After dinner, though, Mouse is at something of a loose end. The princess is in lessons with Lady Yennefer, which Mouse is staying quite far away from thank you very much, and Lady Milena is apparently at dagger practice with her lover, which, again, Mouse is staying away from - she doesn’t want to find out whether ‘dagger practice’ is a euphemism the hard way, and no one has yet decided what Mouse’s duties are to be when she is not attending upon her liege lady.

But now that she’s sworn to the princess, presumably she’s allowed to wander about without a chaperone, and wandering about is what Mouse has always done when she’s at loose ends, or can contrive to be. She finds her way back to her rooms with only a few mistakes, and Nadia helps her find one of the very plain dresses she uses to go out into the city - and a heavy pair of woollen stockings, because Kaer Morhen is cold - and Mouse goes out to see if she can help the chambermaids in their work and maybe learn a little.

The first thing she learns, once she introduces herself as Liliana and asks if she can help with the laundry the girls are carrying, assuming that they will assume she is a new chambermaid, since Kaer Morhen is large enough that there ought to be more servants than anyone can really keep track of, is that all of Kaer Morhen’s servants wear a silver medallion, and not having one marks her as an outsider instantly and irrevocably. She’s trying to explain that she’s not a spy, she’s just new to the keep, when someone clears his throat and Mouse and the suspicious chambermaids all turn to see a Witcher leaning against a wall with his arms crossed over his chest, watching them with a crooked smile.

“Lady Liliana,” he says. “You look lost.”

Mouse sighs and curtsies. “I was attempting to be helpful, my lord,” she offers, not really expecting it to work; it’s true, but not the whole truth.

“Helpful’s good,” the Witcher says. “Also, except for the Griffins, none of us like being called ‘my lord.’”

“What shall I call you, then?” Mouse asks as the chambermaids go on their way.

“Well, my name is Treyse,” the Witcher drawls, and Mouse’s eyes go wide. It can’t be - surely not. Surely she isn’t so lucky as to have found her long-lost relative on her very first day in Kaer Morhen. It’s got to be a different Treyse - it isn’t that unusual a name, after all -

She’s hesitated long enough that he’s started to frown a little. Mouse bites her lip and decides that nothing ventured, nothing gained - and she has always wanted to know, after all.

“Treyse,” she says. “Brother of Filip Leon?”

Treyse’s eyebrows nearly hit his hairline, and then his eyes narrow, like he suspects that this is some sort of trap and can’t quite figure out where the catch is. “Aye,” he says slowly.

Mouse beams. “Hail and well met, great-uncle!”

“What?” Treyse blurts, and Mouse has the great pleasure of seeing what utter shock looks like on a Witcher’s face. He actually takes a step backwards, and Mouse can’t help thinking he looks a bit like a cat who’s just come across a cucumber by accident, and is not sure whether it’s a snake.

“Filip Leon was my great-great-great grandfather, and our line has passed down the story of Treyse, who went to become a Witcher,” Mouse explains. “That makes you my great-great-great grand-uncle, though that’s a bit of a mouthful for every day.”

“I suppose it does,” Treyse says, looking entertainingly baffled, and eyes her warily for another long moment. “Can’t say as I’ve ever heard of a Witcher having a great-great-great grand-niece before, at least not one who knew about it. So then, great-niece, what are you doing, sneaking about looking like a servant?”

Mouse swallows. Don’t lie to Witchers is a proverb in the Warlord’s lands by now. “I wanted to be helpful,” she says slowly. “But also - Kaer Morhen must be full of secrets, and I want to learn them all.”

“And why would you want to learn that?” Treyse asks, frowning.

“To know,” Mouse says. “And to help the Warlord - or whoever runs his household, at least. Like I did for Father, in Daevon.”

“And how did you help your father, then?”

Mouse shrugs. “I found out all sorts of interesting things, and when they were important, I told Father. Like when the merchants were selling the stables bad grain, or the steward was getting drunk every night after the family went to bed, and so we never saw it but the servants did. Useful things.”

Treyse starts to smile. “Interesting,” he says, drawing the word out into twice as many syllables as it ought to have. “That’s a proper Cat’s hobby, isn’t it.”

“Is it?” Mouse says, startled. “At home they call me Mouse, for sneaking about and hoarding knowledge as a mouse does food for the winter.”

Treyse laughs and shoves away from the wall to drape an arm over her shoulders. “Well then, little Mouse, come and meet the Cats, and we shall see if there are any secrets for you to hoard, shall we?”

“Yes, great-uncle,” Mouse says, delighted beyond all measure.

Treyse shakes his head. “Great-uncle,” he mutters. “Now there’s a thing.” He considers her thoughtfully for a long moment. “Not such a bad thing, I suppose.”

*

So it’s nice to have family - wonderful to have found Great-Uncle Treyse, and Mouse writes a letter to her father that same evening, letting him know that the family mystery has been solved - and it’s good to be welcomed by Lady Milena and Princess Ciri and the Cat Witchers, but that still leaves Mouse rather at loose ends. Princess Ciri doesn’t need help with her wardrobe - Lady Milena has that well in hand - and doesn’t exactly have a wide and thriving correspondence, and spends most of her time with the trainees or Lady Yennefer or Consort Jaskier or Eskel Amber-Eyed, learning to be a witcher-sorceress-queen, so she doesn’t really need Mouse, honestly.

And if she doesn’t need Mouse, then the protection of being the princess’s lady-in-waiting is a flimsy thing. There are many other ways to reward Father for keeping Lady Marta secure, after all, which do not require saddling the princess with an unnecessary extra member of her household. And Mother wants to find Mouse a husband, not out of cruelty but out of kindness; she wants Mouse to be safe and happy, and in her experience, the best way for a baron’s daughter to be protected is to find a good and steady husband. Every letter Mouse gets from her parents includes a question about the possible eligible young men in Kaer Morhen - maybe the Witchers don’t marry, but there must be envoys from other realms, or representatives from within the Warlord’s lands, or even just minor nobles serving in the households of the Warlord or his right hand?

Mouse tries to explain how odd Kaer Morhen is, with mixed success. The Warlord and his right hand don’t have households, so far as Mouse can tell - certainly they don’t have manservants or gentlemen of the chamber, and their clothing and armor is no more well-made or ostentatious than that of all the other Witchers. The Heads of the Schools, who might be something like dukes in a more normal noble hierarchy, also do not have households, or pages, or hopeful noble hangers-on. No one seems to care about rank, really. Everyone piles into the hot springs together, or tussles on the training grounds, or calls requests when Consort Jaskier sings at night, without any thoughts of propriety or noble dignity.

Father seems to understand that Kaer Morhen is nothing like any other court, but Mother doesn’t. To be fair to her, Mouse herself couldn’t imagine it before she came here. And even if Mother did manage to comprehend that Kaer Morhen holds, so far as Mouse can tell, no eligible young men, that would probably only make her more determined to find one from among Mouse’s multitudinous cousins and their allies. Mother wants Mouse married, wants her safely settled, wants grandchildren to dote upon.

And Mouse is not sure that Princess Ciri would stop her, if she came to Kaer Morhen to request her daughter returned.

Mouse just isn’t being useful, not the way she always hoped she could be. Princess Ciri seems to like her well enough - seems pleased to have another girl close in age to talk to - and Lady Milena seems pleased to have a junior lady-in-waiting to help her with keeping Princess Ciri’s clothing mended and teach the princess the arcane arts of makeup and hairstyling, but Mouse knows she isn’t necessary, isn’t indispensable.

So as much as she wants to settle into Kaer Morhen, to grow comfortable within its cold halls and among its cat-eyed inhabitants, she can’t. She’s still not safe, not really, and she won’t be safe until she finds something here that she can do that makes her valuable enough that the princess will want to keep her, no matter what marriage Mother hopes to arrange.

*

She distracts herself from fretting over not really having a place by doing what she always does: sneaking about learning secrets, and getting to know people. The servants aren’t quite so dubious about her once it becomes clear that she’s just another of the deeply odd nobles who inhabit the keep, and allow her to listen to their gossip if she’s also willing to help them in their work, though they’re not as open as the servants in Daevon were - still, it’s early days yet, and Mouse has time to earn their trust. The Griffin squire, Roland, seems to have decided that he ought to look after her a bit, and stops to speak with her every few days, and check that she is doing well. Mouse is a little worried that he might be flirting, up until she sees him look at Julita, one of the bakers: Roland lights up like someone’s lit a fire behind his eyes, and dotes upon Julita like a cat with one kitten. It’s sort of adorable, and very reassuring. The Cat Witchers seem delighted to get to know Mouse, amusing themselves by pouncing on her from unexpected corners and showing her how to do knife tricks with the dagger they insist she has to have, and Mouse has never objected to learning new and useful skills; she finds them thoroughly entertaining, and her letters to Kamil are full of their antics. And Great-Uncle Treyse is even better, because though he’s rather taken aback by discovering that the family has remembered him, he’s more than willing to spend time with her and try to figure out what the slim blood connection between them even means. She is, she thinks, something of a novelty - none of the other Witchers have blood family, as far as she can tell - but as Great-Uncle Treyse points out, Letho of the Vipers has a niece, so why shouldn’t he have one as well?

It turns out Great-Uncle Treyse - like Cats in general - also loves secrets, and is vastly amused by Mouse’s habit of sneaking about and listening to everything, pointing out that Witchers are much, much better at overhearing things than even the sneakiest human girl. Still, they have a great deal of fun together, Great-Uncle Treyse telling Mouse all the gossip of the keep, and laying out the various betting pools on who is going to get together with whom, which are apparently the main form of entertainment in the keep. Lady Triss is the acknowledged master of guessing how long it will take people to stop pining and actually admit their feelings, despite not being able to smell those feelings like the Witchers can.

And then, at supper almost a month after her arrival, Mouse asks about secrets from outside Kaer Morhen, and is met with a sort of baffled incomprehension.

“You...haven’t got a spy network?” she asks at last, in rising horror. Even Father has a few spies, though he doesn’t call them that!

Great-Uncle Treyse shakes his head. “We’re not...suited to spying,” he says, shrugging. “We’re too easy to spot, even if we manage to conceal our eyes. Being a Witcher means we don’t blend in well. Something about the way we walk, I think.”

Mouse puts her head in her hands. “The Warlord rules more than half the North! What do you mean he doesn’t have spies all across his lands?”

“...The lords send him reports?” Treyse says warily. “And we go out on patrol; we spot a lot of problems that way, all the stuff the lords don’t think is important enough to mention.”

“That’s not enough!” Mouse wails. “You need - you need informants in the courts, you need connections among the brothel-workers because they hear everything, you need the traveling merchants to report back to you what they’re seeing, you need - well, you need my entire correspondence with my cousins, actually, but more so -”

“Huh,” Great-Uncle Treyse says, and frowns over his venison, and then Kiyan upends his tankard over a Bear Witcher’s head and Great-Uncle Treyse has to go and deal with the commotion before it becomes a brawl.

Mouse isn’t expecting anything to come of that, so she’s quite startled the next day when Great-Uncle Treyse shows up in the middle of the afternoon, interrupting her very pleasant gossip session with the laundresses, and says, “Come with me.” Five minutes later, Mouse finds herself in front of the Warlord’s Council, explaining to them what she told her great-uncle the day before, and feeling very awkward about the fact that she’s still wearing the plain dress that she uses when she’s helping the servants and has soap-suds drying on her arms and the fact that the Warlord of the North is looking right at her, his golden eyes seeming to see down to her very soul. She’s pretty sure she doesn’t make as good a case as she really wants to, but apparently it’s good enough, since Lady Yennefer smacks a hand on the tabletop and says, “There! I knew I was forgetting something!”

Consort Jaskier puts his head in his hands and mutters, “Dear gods, I can’t believe I forgot about spies. Fuck, we need to recruit every bard in five kingdoms.”

Princess Ciri grins across the table at Mouse. “Well,” she says, “I guess we’ve figured out what your duties are.”

“I can’t be spymaster!” Mouse protests. “I’m sixteen!”

The Warlord chuckles, a shockingly warm sound. “Sixteen and saw what none of us did,” he observes. “Still. Treyse?”

“I’ll do it, sure,” Great-Uncle Treyse says, shrugging. “Long as I can have my little Mouse as my assistant, since she actually knows how to get this endeavor started.”

“Done,” says the Warlord.

“Cat and Mouse, plotting together,” says Consort Jaskier a little dreamily. “Oh, there’s something to that…”

Eskel Amber-Eyed rubs his forehead. “Please don’t make a song about our new spymasters, catmint. I think it rather defeats the purpose of them being spies.”

“Right, right, sorry,” Consort Jaskier says. Lady Yennefer rolls her eyes and stands.

“Come on, you two, let’s go sit down and talk about what sort of things a spy network will need, while the boys amuse themselves,” she drawls. “Ciri, you’re in charge.”

Old Lord Vesemir, who was taking a drink of his ale, snorts and sputters. Lady Yennefer grins and ushers a still-bewildered Mouse and a deeply amused Treyse out of the council room, rolling her eyes.

*

Being assistant spymaster to the Warlord of the North was not what Mouse expected when she came to Kaer Morhen to be the princess’s lady-in-waiting, but she cannot deny that it suits her down to the ground. Oh, it’s terrifying, being partially in charge of setting up an entire spy network, but it’s also fascinating, and now instead of having to put all the little pieces of gossip together in her own mind, she has a whole office just for her and Great-Uncle Treyse, and can hang maps on the walls and fill entire notebooks with rumors and gossip and the scattered little facts that can be pulled together to make much larger pictures. She picks up her correspondence with all her wide-flung family again, and Lady Milena shares her own correspondence with her friends in Redania, and Consort Jaskier promises to recruit all the bards he knows and trusts, and Great-Uncle Treyse takes her down to the brothel in Wolvenburg so she can talk to the prostitutes there about setting up a network of information using that rich source of gossip, and Mouse is…

Is maybe happier than she has ever been.

She’s safe, too. Mother might have been able to convince the princess to release a mostly-useless junior lady-in-waiting, but there’s no way, no way at all, that the Warlord will agree to dismiss his assistant spymaster from her post, not while she is loyal and competent and useful. She’ll never have to marry, never have to worry about Mother finding her a husband she can’t honorably refuse.

She’s come home to Kaer Morhen, to the cold stone keep at the top of the Blue Mountains, at the center of the network along which all the secrets of the North will flow, some day quite soon if she has anything to say about it, and she will never, ever have to leave.