Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Ciri first arrives at Kaer Morhen, Geralt is not father to her. He is destiny, protector—but he is new, and unpredictable. Ciri still dreams at night of running into Eist’s arms, letting him whisper her Skelliger lullabies until her heartbeat calms and she knows she is safe from the dark shapes that haunt her. She still dreams of riding on the saddle behind her grandmother, holding tight to her as she rides past the ominous form of the knight with the black-winged helmet and takes off his plumed head in one swing. In the dream, she can tell that her grandmother takes a savage delight in the act, in destroying what has caused Ciri fear. Ciri holds onto her, braces her hands against the solidity of her grandmother’s breastplate, lays her face against the blood and woodsmoke scent of her Cintran-blue cloak, and feels safe in the savagery.

Geralt is not that for her. Still, he lets her go without speaking about it, does not prod, when she awakes sobbing from her dreams of long-dead comforts. 

It’s odd, those first few weeks. Ciri wants simultaneously to throw herself into Geralt’s arms with every passing moment and to give him nothing at all. She barely knows the man, after all—logically, she should be afraid of him, big, hulking, and armed as he is. Still, the part of her that pushes her even now, that had sent her back through the forest to Geralt when she’d been intent on running away, tells her that she can trust him. That if nothing else, he will keep her safe. 

Besides, he’d saved her father’s life. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?

Either way, when the white-haired Geralt of Rivia tells her that they’re going somewhere secure, somewhere that even witchers trust as a stronghold, Ciri follows him. Through forest campsites and dimly-lit inns and dreams of a family that she can never have back, now.

First, they go to Sodden: the mysterious source of Ciri’s visions. Geralt asks after Yennefer, the mystery woman, and a strange, beautiful woman delivers him devastating news.

Ciri, if nothing else, is more observant than she was when she first ran from Cintra. She’s grown extra eyes, it feels, to be circumspect, to see things in minute detail, to watch for threats. She sees Geralt in the next hours, watches his guarded expressions from her designated place atop the horse (“Better that way, Cirilla. Roach won’t mind your weight, and you’re not fit to walk the whole way—”), and she remembers a prime belief about witchers. They are one and all emotionless creatures, if the masses are to be believed. Ciri wonders if perhaps that’s not true. 

She thinks she might feel safer, if it weren’t true. If Geralt could feel. If she were to be truly in his care, not just bound to him by the strange force of a promise.

She asks him, later, while they sit by a campfire; “Who was Yennefer to you?” 

Geralt’s expression darkens, moreso than it has for the past few hours, and Ciri wonders if she’s angered him. She certainly doesn’t expect him to speak, but then he does, low and halting.

“Yennefer—Yen—we were. Close once. Not anymore. Not for a long time, now, but… not anymore.” He looks up at her, then, from across the campfire, and actually smiles. Bitterly. Ruefully. “She might’ve been glad that I found you. She certainly wasn’t happy when she learnt I’d claimed a Child of Surprise, but she might’ve been glad to meet you.” He huffs out a breath, and whatever sympathy Ciri hasn’t dulled with survival instincts pangs at the sight of his pain. “Doesn’t matter much anymore.” 

He goes quiet, then. He ducks his head, the strange man, and the dance of the firelight dims from his yellow eyes. Ciri gets the feeling that she’s been presented with something important. Trusted, maybe.

She awakes shivering from a nightmare, later, with the image of the black-winged knight running a hazy, raven-haired figure through with a sword. Her dream-brain tells her innately that the figure is Yennefer. When her eyes snap open from sleep, she meets a piercing, yellow-eyed gaze in the dark. Geralt was either woken by the sounds of her dream or he hadn’t slept at all—Ciri’s noticed that he doesn’t do much sleeping. (Nightmares, he says, and offers as little information about his dreams as she does hers.) Either way, he has the grace to allow her to roll back over, closer to the dying embers fo the fire, and try to sleep again. Ciri curls in on herself and tries to imagine her grandmother placing a blanket over her, urging her gently but firmly to sleep. The thought of Grandmother only leaves her sobbing silently, under the meager protection of her bedroll.

As they travel, winter creeps up on them. Geralt looks dubiously at the grey sky and seems displeased. “We’re late,” he says. “Snow’s gonna catch us before we get to Kaer Morhen. The killer’ll be hell in this weather.”

Ciri looks dubiously at him, in return. He can’t see her; she’s perched atop Roach (which is a curious name for a horse, but she’s only known this man a few weeks, and she thinks she might offend him if she says something about it). She really wants to ask about what he means by the killer, but she should probably establish something more basic first. “What exactly is Kaer Morhen?”

“It’s where witchers go in the winter,” he tells her, without skipping a beat, and then pauses. “It’s… like a home. You’ll be safe there.”

Both of those added statements were important. Ciri thinks that over: it could sort of be his priorities, couldn’t it? Return home. Keep Ciri safe. 

They really haven’t known each other long, but they’ve sort of fallen headlong into each other’s lives. It’s easier, probably, with the relief that came from having looked for the other for so long. Geralt is not what she’d expected, but he’s… he’ll protect her. She knows that much.

“And the killer?” she asks, not acknowledging what he’d said. She trusts him, but they’re not quite to the point where Ciri will really… engage with him. Maybe if she were a daintier kind of princess, she’d be hanging off his arm, saying how grateful she is, how glad she is that he’s taking her somewhere safe, but Grandmother had never raised her to be dainty. Ciri can hold her own with the boys. She can hold her own with Eist. She can hold her own with Grandmother. She’s not a dainty kind of princess. 

“The trail up the mountain,” Geralt tells her, and looks over her with an appraising eye. She draws herself back without meaning to (being appraised has never been a positive thing, not when she was a candidate for political marriage and not when she was being hunted by Nilfgaard); he notices, frowns, and turns away quickly. “You’ll have to do some of it yourself—Roach can’t do some of it with someone on her back—but you’re fit enough.”

That doesn’t bode well. Rough terrain? Ciri’s still in a dress, she’s not thrilled about the prospect of climbing a mountain on her own. Still. She’s learned that there are things one can and must do, for safety. 

Geralt’s right, as it turns out. The snow catches up with them. Ciri starts to shiver, and Geralt notices quickly—unnervingly quickly, his attention feels unnatural—and she’s equipped with a fur around her shoulders soon enough. 

She feels a little sick, thinking about the dead fox Geralt had gotten it from, but she’s warm now. Survival. To get to safety. The pelt is soft, and she can force her mind past the easy efficiency of the knife in Geralt’s hand if she thinks very hard about how he went out of his way to do a kind thing for her.

Things will be easier, she thinks, if they reach a point at which she believes that Geralt’s on her side. It’s hard to wrap her mind around, right now. He is so much of a threat, huge and strong and armed, and she has spent months being small and fragile. She is not going to throw herself entirely into his protection. (She’s not dainty. She’s a survivor. She’s her grandmother’s child.) 

Geralt looks mistrustingly at the snow and tells Ciri that they’ll stop, soon. He knows a town up ahead. Awfully convenient, it must be, to know the continent so well; Ciri feels as if she’s been wandering the land half-blind since Cintra burned, just trying to reach the next sign of civilization.

Ah. And that’s a lot of what it comes down to, isn’t it? Geralt is awfully convenient. He’s a protector, ready-made, everything she could want or need, and Ciri doesn’t trust him to be infallible. She can’t just throw herself into his arms (despite doing exactly that the first time they’d met, but that was a moment of weakness). It’s all still a matter of survival, and Ciri still has to rely on herself. She can’t ever let herself be dependent on the whims of others. 

Not ever again, she decides. She won’t rely entirely on another person ever again. She’d relied on her grandmother, and Eist, and Sir Lazlo, and Dara, and even when they’d done their best, the lot of them, they’d… failed. They’d left Ciri on her own. Geralt is strong, but he can still die, or decide that he doesn’t want to protect Ciri anymore. She has to be able to depend on herself.

“This… should be it,” Geralt says, and Ciri follows his gaze to the gate of a town. Inside, the dusk and the snow throw a greyish cast over everything. It’s dead silent. It looks haunted. She pulls her fur closer around her.

She watches Geralt carefully, to see what he’ll decide. Ciri wants to rest, but Geralt looks uncharacteristically tense. She’d like to rest in an inn, in an actual bed, of course she would; but if he doesn’t trust it, she wouldn’t want to risk it. One night in a soft bed after so long sleeping out in the woods is a small sacrifice in return for her wellbeing. 

Geralt gives the swinging gate of the town a long look. “There should be people. Dogs barking,” he tells her, and Ciri shivers, not quite from the cold. “I have a friend very near here. We’ll go there.”

Nivellen’s house, once they get past the whole him-being-a-monster and Geralt almost killing him thing, is rather nice. Ciri’s glad they didn’t stop for the inn, haunted or not. Whatever cold, paltry room they would’ve had is nothing in comparison to fine food, a nice dress, and a room with furs and a real fire. She feels warmer than she’s been in months. 

Maybe it’s the warmth and the full stomach that make her think that Vereena might not be all that bad, when she appears from the ceiling and wipes away Ciri’s tears. She’s been living in the house with Nivellen, after all, and he’s still alive and well; and it’s such a lovely place…

And she’d been right. Ciri’s different. Ciri’s not like other people, much as she might pretend. Maybe… maybe Vereena’s just different. Like she is. There’s no reason to persecute a creature that’s only different. Vereena is lovely, and kind, even if she’s odd.

She goes back to sleep pondering it. The warmth lulls her off quickly.

The rest of the night passes in a blur: Geralt rushing into her room, telling her to get to Roach, fighting Vereena, hurting Vereena. Ciri screams for him to stop, but he doesn’t listen to her, and her blood runs cold.

Vereena dies, in the end. Geralt takes her head off in one clean sweep, and it rolls toward Ciri, and the horror builds up in her chest until she feels like wanting to vomit—

And it looks at her. Ciri chokes back a scream. She hears Vereena’s voice in her head, her strange melodic voice, and she says, he’ll come for you, too. Ciri fights back a sob.

The blur, again. Vereena’s body bursting into flames. Nivellen, human again. Geralt’s eyes are shot black like a demon, and all Ciri can think to ask, behind the sob she’s holding back, is, “Why?”

“She killed the villagers,” Geralt says, voice hoarse and rough. He doesn’t turn back to face her. “She was a monster.”

Ciri does not stagger back, but she takes a hard swallow. Retreats from the space. From Geralt’s space. She gets onto Roach when she’s told, and as they leave Nivellen’s estate, Vereena’s words echo in her head.

Ciri is different. She’s not normal, maybe not… not human. Her grandmother… her grandmother had said something about it, the first time she’d screamed, something about her mother’s power, and she’d looked awed, but her grandmother can’t have known about this. Not about a power that lets Ciri kill men and topple monoliths. 

Geralt is a witcher. He kills monsters. Ciri is different, Ciri has killed; how many deaths before a person is a monster?

She sits mutely on Roach’s back as they ride onward, on toward Kaer Morhen. Toward more witchers. Somewhere Ciri is supposed to be safe.

Ciri’s quiet, the next day, and it seems to worry Geralt. He keeps his inhuman yellow gaze on her far more than usual, which is its own share of unsettling. He doesn’t say anything, though. He leaves Ciri to her devices. 

They camp for the night in a part of the forest much like every other part they’ve slept in, and Geralt builds them a fire. Ciri eats the dried meat he offers her, and watches him tend to Roach for a while (it’s oddly comforting, watching him go about his routine, careful as he is with the animal) before she drifts soundlessly off into sleep.

She wakes again breathing heavy, with the last vestiges of a nightmare playing behind her eyes. Snow is falling lightly around them, filtering through the empty branches of the trees. Geralt watches her wordlessly for a moment before he speaks, in that low, rumbly voice of his.

“Cintra?”

It’s sort of surprise to hear him speak. Usually, he lets her drift back off after her nightmares, if she can sleep at all. It was Cintra, as it happens, but Geralt has asked this kind of question before; not in this situation, exactly, but he’s asked about her escape, how she got away with the city burning and an army chasing her down. It’s obvious that he’s curious. 

Ciri hadn’t answered him then. She certainly doesn’t answer him now. 

He’ll come for you, too, Vereena says, in her head, and she remembers the way she’d screamed when the monolith topples. She draws her knees up close to her chest and tucks her head into her furs. She doesn’t say a word. 

The crackle of the embers and the soft sound of falling snow fill the silence for a moment, but then the wind blows strange, and some strange instinct has Ciri lifting her head. Her heartbeat quickens. She looks to Geralt— protector, her heart says, though her mind doesn’t know what to think of him—and he’s completely still, eyes searching the air. 

He’s waiting. Watching. Like a predator.

There’s an odd keening sound that comes from the trees, and Ciri draws a sharp breath in. The sound catches Geralt’s attention, and he turns his attention sharply toward her. A moment later, he’s standing, drawing his sword over the remnants of the fire. The last glowing embers reflect in the silver.

“Get behind me,” he says, low and rough, and Ciri scrambles to her feet. She’s nowhere near so graceful as the witcher, and she curses herself for the noise she makes, but she does as she’s told. Behind Geralt is safe. She faces her back to his, and watches the trees. Wary. Circumspect. As she’s learned to be.

The next sound echoes, strange and mournful, off the snow, and Ciri’s head spins as she tries to parse out where it’s come from. Her heartbeat’s kicked up, and she hears it pounding in her ears, and she thinks whatever is out there must be able to hear it too. She nearly jumps out of her skin when Geralt speaks, when he’d been a silent wall behind her.

“Stay quiet,” he intones, just loud enough for her to hear. “Stay still.”

Ciri follows his orders as best she can. Breathes slow. Tries to calm her heartbeat. Freezes, metaphorically, in the snow-covered clearing. And then there’s just the silence. And the dark. 

She doesn’t know how much time passes, but it’s awful, standing back-to-back with Geralt and waiting for something to attack. Every slight sound from the brush has her choking back a scream, and she grips the fabric of her skirt so hard that her knuckles have gone white. She scans the trees again, and again, and nothing is revealed. They’re being hunted, she thinks. They’re prey.

She is paying close attention to the trees, such close attention, but when the creature leaps out of the trees to her right, it is Geralt that reacts first. He spins so that she is pushed behind him again, and Ciri whirls to see the beast in the woods as Geralt raises his sword in the moonlight.

She can’t make out the details of the creature, but she sees the teeth when they glint in the moonlight, silver as Geralt’s sword and numerous, like a great shining army on a field. She thinks it almost looks shaggy, like a dog, but the limbs are spindly, and the noises it makes are not wolf-like. It keens, high and unsettling, at Geralt, as he stabs and slashes and the beast attempts to tear at him in return. 

The eyes are luminous, as well, milky like pearls, and when Geralt pulls his sword back for another strike, they focus on her over his shoulder. Ciri feels the scream bubble up in her throat, but can’t bring herself to let it loose. Terror-stricken, she backs away; she has to get farther, has to escape, it’s how she’ll survive—

The beast makes a nerve-wracking crackling noise, then, like some awful chittering laughter, and dodges to Geralt’s right. To get to her. Geralt follows its movement with a brutal slash toward its head, and the creature dodges, but the sword still manages to hit something. Fluid, black in the moonlight, sluices down into the snow to stain it dark. “Close to me!” Geralt roars. Ciri chokes back a sob and scrambles back behind him as the creature rears back and screams.

At its full height, it’s taller than Geralt, and more than doubles Ciri. She’d be dead in a moment, she knows, with an awful certainty, if this thing had attacked her without Geralt. The thing throws itself at Geralt, and he hits it blunt-force in the head with the hilt of his sword, which sends it careening back. It stumbles back, and back again, and then collapses into the snow with a distressed, weary sound.

Geralt takes a wary step forward. Then another. His footsteps make a crunching noise, in the snow, and it echoes terribly in the strenuous silence. Ciri tries to keep her breathing steady, and stays where she is.

Geralt still has his sword at the ready. He’s going to, Ciri thinks, ascertain how wounded the thing is, and dispatch it while it’s debilitated or perhaps unconscious. There’s an awful tension. She’s half sure that it’s going to jump at him the moment he’s close enough, though she hopes and hopes and hopes it won’t.

Geralt moves steadily closer, always wary, always prepared. Ciri continues to school her breathing. He reaches within two arms-lengths of the creature, then an arm’s length, then—

Then the thing rolls deftly to his side and with its awful crackling laughter, rolls deftly to its feet to lunge at Ciri. She screams, pure and childish, and it does nothing to defend her.

She hears Geralt cursing, but the creature is already upon her within a few bounds. It knocks her to the ground, pins her shoulders under its spindly front limbs, and it’s just weighty enough that she’s not strong enough to knock it away, no matter how she struggles. She makes a noise like a strangled sob, and catches the creature’s eyes again, and there’s an awful sense of dread when she recognizes intelligence in them. It’s crafty. It’d thought to play injured to deceive Geralt. Cirilla’s going to die. She’s going to die. She’s going to die—

There’s a flash of silver. The weight is off Ciri’s left shoulder, and the creature is falling sideways, and Ciri scrambles away to see that Geralt has stabbed it through the neck to pin it sideways into the snow. She gets out from underfoot, and then he’s standing over it, and she watches him twist and then tear the sword through the thing’s neck in one savage motion. The snow turns black under it again, and the color spreads slowly outward, in a spreading pool and then spidery veins in the white of the snowfall.

Ciri realizes how hard she’s been breathing as her body starts to come under her own control again. Geralt pulls his sword from the creature’s neck, and in one fell swoop, raises it over his head and brings it down to sever the thing’s head entirely.

“What… what is it?” she asks, when she regains enough control over her voice to speak. She still sounds shaky.

Geralt looks back at her, and there’s definitely some sort of concern in his eyes. Fuck, right now, Ciri wants to run to him like she had when they’d found each other, hug him until she’s sure there’s no more monsters in the blackness of the woods. It’s silly, and frivolous, and it’s the only comfort she can think of. She holds herself back. 

Geralt looks at her for another long second, and then turns back to the beast, crouching beside it. He rolls the head over with the tip of his blade. “Not sure. Nothing I’ve seen before. Similar features to a werewolf, but this… this is no werewolf.”

Ciri creeps closer. Slowly. She wants to see the thing (she wants to be near Geralt), but she’s having a hard time telling herself that it’s not still a danger. “You’re sure it’s dead?”

“Not many things that can survive a beheading,” Geralt says, dryly. “Nothing that bleeds, anyway, and this thing doesn’t look magical. Just… wrong. Mutation, maybe.” He pokes at it again. Ciri gets close enough to look over his shoulder.

The thing loses some terror, when it’s not moving, but the dark still obscures its features and leaves its form hazy. Ciri can’t make out much more than the fact that it’s twisted.

“Geralt,” Ciri starts, unsure if she’ll offend him, “is it—isn’t it dangerous, for you to be leaving, all the witchers, in the winter? Surely people must be in need of protection in the late months, with this sort of creature prowling—”

Geralt shakes his head. “Not many monsters in the winter. Shouldn’t be, anyway. It’s why we go to Kaer Morhen in the late months.” He pauses, and the wind blows again, ruffling his hair. “World’s changing, though, of late.” He uncurls, and Ciri moves back to leave him room to stand. “I’ve never seen a beast quite like this. We’ll take a sample of it with us to Kaer Morhen.” He turns, then, to look her over—his appraising look, the one that Ciri thinks he does when he’s unsure of how to proceed with her—and lets out a breath. “No point in redoing camp if neither of us will sleep, is there? There’s a few hours ‘til sunrise. We’ll start the day early.” And he moves past her to pack up their camp.

Ciri stands, dumbly, over the body of the shaggy, twisted creature. Its eyes are still open, milky where there’d been clear intelligence. For a second, she imagines those eyes shifting to look at her, as Vereena’s had. She shivers and turns away. 

Geralt, she’s found, is a creature of efficiency, and he has the camp packed up in very little time. Roach whinnies, when he directs her past the corpse of the creature, but he murmurs to her and strokes a hand over her mane to calm her. It’s a gentle gesture. A kind man, Ciri thinks, not for the first time. 

When they’re about to leave the clearing, Geralt stops, and beckons Ciri closer. She goes, still shaken.

He hands her a knife, then, a dagger, with a leather scabbard. It’s heavier than her eating knives, and more unwieldy, but Ciri is armed, now. She has a weapon. Granted, it’s not going to do much damage if she means to attack someone, but it sends a clear message in its utility. She draws it from the scabbard, and the blade gleams in the moonlight. Geralt’s given her a way to defend herself. A way to lash out if someone gets too close. Ciri breathes out and tightens her grip around the hilt.

“If you’re in danger again, it should offer some protection,” Geralt says, and Ciri hears a sardonic hint to his voice. “Pointy end goes in the dangerous thing. Easy enough.” He pauses, and she looks up at him from her new dagger, and sees his expression shift into a frown. “I’ll protect you as long as I’m here, Cirilla. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Ciri considers him a long moment, the way that he considers her, and makes a decision. “Ciri,” she corrects him. “And I know.”

They reach the bottom of the mountain a few days later, an hour or two after daybreak. It’d be better if they had a whole day to brave the trail, Geralt’d said. Even without complications, it’ll be more pleasant to arrive nearer midday, to have a nice meal and time for Ciri to find a room before they finally rest. Ciri feels a strange twist of appreciation, at his consideration. Her own apprehension has settled, somewhat, since Vereena, but it’s still enough to have her wary.

“Not much longer left,” Geralt says, as they start up the incline toward Kaer Morhen. Then, with a small glance that almost seems compassionate, he adds, “Pace yourself.” 

It seems almost like care, from someone as closed off as Geralt. Ciri considers it cautiously, but takes the advice all the same. 

The trail, the killer, is aptly named. The slight incline quickly turns steep, and the snow catches her feet so that every step is an added struggle. She can feel Geralt’s eyes on her, more often than not, but he must think that she’s doing alright, because he says nothing. Just keeps moving.

Unstoppable force, witchers. Or—Geralt, at least. Ciri’s never met another witcher. It occurs to her in a sudden rush of uneasiness that she’s probably going to meet more, if she’s headed to the witcher stronghold, the place they go to for safety in the winter. She curses under her breath (one of the good Skelliger curses she learned from Eist; oh, and it hurts to think of him). That’s a liability that she should’ve thought of. What if the rest of the witchers aren’t amicable to her and Geralt’s cause? What if something happens?

Geralt turns sharply toward her, and she freezes under his yellow eyes. “Are you alright?” he rumbles.

“Yes,” she says, cautiously. She hadn’t tripped or anything, doesn’t think her sleeve has caught on anything, she’s just the same as she was a few moments prior. There’s no reason for him to be alarmed, unless… unless he heard her cursing under her breath, which is frankly a little scary. He shouldn’t have been able to hear that.

Witcher senses. And she’s about to be in a stronghold full of them.

She wonders if they’re able to smell out magic, smell out people that are different. Like her. If the other witchers think the same way as Geralt, the definition of a monster that Ciri fits. She shivers at the thought. Geralt narrows his eyes, and she supplies, “Just cold.”

He holds her gaze a moment longer, but then says, “Try and move a little faster, if you’re able.” She nearly prickles at that, at the insinuation that she’s not moving fast enough, but then he adds, “You’ll warm up more, that way.”

The implication of care in his comment startles her again. She moves a little faster, and Geralt keeps pace easily beside her. She hadn’t been worryingly cold when she’d shivered—no more than the rest of the journey—but she finds that the exertion does keep her warmer.

Geralt calls it a trail, but it’s really hardly a trail at all. Ciri wonders how he knows where he’s going, with the snow covering everything; he must be moving on pure instinct, without proper landmarks to keep him oriented. She sticks close behind him, on the side where he’s not leading Roach. She sort of hates to admit it, but she does feel safer, closer to him. 

He’d been right to tell her to pace herself. Once she warms up a bit more, she thinks she might start sweating; it takes real exertion to get up the hardest parts of it, and even if the mountain weren’t so covered in snow that she can’t tell the top of it from the sky, she doesn’t know if she’d be able to see the top from their current vantage point.

“How much longer?” she asks Geralt, pausing to brace a hand against a tree and let her heavy breaths even out. 

He turns to look at her, and there’s something strange in his eyes. “You’ve made it halfway,” he tells her. He sounds almost regretful, but there’s still that steel to his voice. 

Ciri indulges herself with her longest, most childish sigh for months.

The trail evens out near the end, which Ciri is grateful for, because it means she’s not panting when they reach Kaer Morhen. She doesn’t know exactly what she’s getting into, but she thinks it’s probably better not to seem weak. 

She collects herself as best she can, as they make the final march up to their destination. 

The castle towers over her—Ciri’s home had been intimidating, of course, but Kaer Morhen towers in a different sort of way. Castle’s not even the right word. Cintra’s seat of government had been a castle, meant for defense rather than opulence. In contrast, Kaer Morhen is a fortress.

(The keep, she thinks she remembers Geralt calling it.)

She stalls in the entrance to the courtyard, and Geralt notices, after a moment. “Come on,” he tells her—it’s not a reassurance, not really, but it’s not condescending or commanding, either. Nothing’s going to happen to her. Nothing worth warning of. Steadying, maybe, is the word for his tone. Ciri steels herself and continues in. 

There’s stables off to the side of the courtyard, and Geralt heads there first. He frowns when he sees Ciri following him, and makes an aborted gesture toward the grand wooden doors that lead into the keep, before he seems to think better of it. Ciri’s trying not to look scared, but she certainly does not want to go in alone. It’s embarrassing to see Geralt apprise her expression and decide that she’s allowed to stick near him, but she’s sort of glad for it anyway.

There’s several other horses in the stable. There really are other witchers, then. It feels foreboding. A strikingly black stallion huffs and noses at Roach, who… tolerates it, which is strange, considering that Ciri knows that Roach is a temperamental horse. She’d nipped at Ciri more than once before Geralt had intervened.

One thing that she notices in the stable is the ease with which Geralt seems to move through space now. A good deal of the tension to his shoulders, the caution that borders on paranoia (which Ciri has learned as well and cannot begrudge him) seems to have melted away. He’s comfortable here. It’s striking.

“Alright,” Geralt says, once Roach is safely stowed away, warm and supplied with hay. “Come on.” And Ciri follows him to the big doors.

She expects him to throw open the doors without a second glance, and she’s working out how she’s going to stick to his shadow without seeming weak and intimidated, easy prey, but he… stops. Just before the doors.

He gives her that considering look again, and she pushes down any remnant fear in her face to present a look of brave indignance—chin up, eyes hard, everything she did to imitate her grandmother in the mirror. She will not be coddled like a child. She can’t afford it. 

She doesn’t know what she expects from him in that moment, but she’s caught off-guard when he reaches out and puts a hand on her shoulder. Her expression falters. 

“I promised you’d be safe,” he tells her, voice low and rumbly. “And you will be. No harm will come to you here.”

Cirilla feels comforted, for a moment. And then the door scrapes open.

“What are you stalling out here for?” a voice booms, from inside, echoing off stone and wood, and the door swings open fully to reveal a broad-shouldered man, clad in brown leather and belts and buckles the way that Geralt is, and scarred horribly across his face. Ciri bites back a fearful noise.

Luckily, his attention isn't on her.

In the space of a moment, Geralt and the scarred man fall into each other’s arms. They don’t cling to each other, the way Ciri clung to her grandmother, or melt into each other like Grandmother and Eist. The motion looks… grounding. There’s more emotion behind it than Ciri can parse through, at the moment, with her own fears still raising alarms in her unconscious. 

Still, she notes that the wives’ tale of witchers without emotion loses credibility with every moment.

“You’re alive,” the scarred man says. His voice sounds a little strangled. 

From her vantage point, Ciri sees the corner of Geralt’s mouth quirk up into a smile. Just slightly. “I am,” he says, with his face pressed to the scarred man’s shoulder. Ciri turns away. It feels too private to watch.

They’re parted a moment later, though. And Ciri can’t escape the strange, piercing eyes of the scarred man. (They look rather like Geralt’s. But she’s gotten used to Geralt’s.)

“And who’s this?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. 

Ciri gets the sense that he’s talking to Geralt, though his eyes never leave hers. Still, she reminds herself with a violent bit of determination that she cannot depend on Geralt, especially for small things like this, and she cannot appear afraid. She summons back her grandmother’s posture. Lifts her chin. “Princess Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon. Of Cintra.” 

The scarred man looks alarmed, which is not what Ciri expected of him, and she’s left faltering as he turns to Geralt. “The child surprise?” he asks, and Geralt’s expression does a slight twist.

“Ciri,” he says, and her eyes track over his face; the way the scarred man had said child surprise, she feels suddenly like a bad omen. If his friend acts this way, musn’t Geralt feel similar apprehension? Has he not wanted her this entire time? 

His face goes neutral, stoic, and offers her no answers. “This is Eskel,” he says, instead, clapping a hand around the scarred man’s shoulder. Seeing him act familiar with someone is strange. “Come inside, now. Let’s see the others.”

And the two men turn to go into the keep, leaving Ciri to follow. 

“I saw horses in the stable,” she hears Geralt say, lowly, to Eskel. Though they’re no longer touching, they walk shoulder-to-shoulder. “Lambert’s here, I take it?”

Eskel nods. Watching from behind, with his head turned so that Ciri only sees the side without scars, he seems fleetingly almost handsome. “And Coën.”

Geralt hums contemplatively. Ciri walks into Kaer Morhen. The door closes with a solid, ominous thud behind her.

Chapter Text

It’s dark, is the first think Ciri can think to say about the inside of the keep. Dark, and cold, and even Nivellen’s house was more inviting, snow-capped and cut from stone, with a monster leaping from the front doors.

No monsters here, Ciri supposes. Not in a castle full of witchers.

No. If there’s a monster here… it’s Ciri herself. Her blood runs cold at the thought (colder, even, than it had been in the snow). Ciri, strange, with abilities she can’t explain and deaths on her hands that she can’t account for, in a keep full of witchers. She shivers.

She looks up, then, and finds Geralt’s golden eyes on her. She startles. She hadn’t thought he’d been paying attention, walking ahead, exchanging words with the other witcher—now, though, she finds that she recognizes the vestiges of what much be Geralt’s expression of concern. It’s always a little unsettling to realize that Geralt’s senses must be far better than her own, for him to be so finely attuned to her state of being.

“Still cold?” he rumbles, and frowns. “We’ll get you a cloak. Someone’s bound to have left something behind, if there’s nothing left for the trainees—” he lets his sentence end there, and Ciri wonders what he means by trainees. The boys who are taken by witchers to be mutated themselves, surely. But does that mean there are children her own age in Kaer Morhen, training to become like Geralt?

Eskel turns as Geralt does, keeping his eyes on his face. With the way his expression changes at the mention of the trainees, Ciri doesn’t think that it’s quite that simple. “I’ll ask Vesemir,” he offers, despite the twist of something in his expression.

And Geralt actually smiles at him, looking grateful. Just the smallest corner of a smile, but it’s a smile all the same. Strange.

Ciri’s not prone to exaggeration (not like Eist, always laughing, telling old folk tales, saying that Grandmother’s going to hang Ciri out the window by her ankle if she doesn’t make it to the feast in time–) and so she does not say that Geralt seems like a different person, in Kaer Morhen. He’s been… recontextualized, though. The easy slope of his shoulders, the way he smiles at a friend. He and Eskel are the same height, but Eskel’s shoulders are broader and he’s burlier, and it makes Geralt look slimmer by comparison. It’s not what Ciri would have expected of him when she first met him in the woods.

The darkness is alleviated, bit by bit, as they walk through the entrance hallway, and then they emerge into a well-lit hall. 

It’s not unlike the great hall in Ciri’s home. More rustic, certainly; the stained, gouged state of the large wooden table down the center of the hall is nothing that her grandmother would allow in her court, but the sheer stature of it all feels almost familiar.

Ciri’s seen her fair share of rugged, coarse men, too, but Eist’s Skelliger men are nothing like the armored witchers who sit at the table.

They all look up at the sound of footsteps, and Ciri sees at least one face light up at the sight of Geralt. She’s almost taken aback. She hadn’t expected… camaraderie, from witchers. But she’s learning new things about them every day that she travels with Geralt, she supposes.

“There you are, you motherfucker,” crows a broad-shouldered, ruddy-looking man, and he vaults himself over the table in one movement. He meets Geralt with a fair bit of velocity to his steps, and wraps an arm around his shoulders, slaps him cheerfully on the back. “Thought you got caught in a snow drift, froze over for the winter.”

“Nothing that drastic,” Geralt jibes back. “Only a ghoul bite.” 

Ciri’d almost forgotten. Geralt recovered from his strange leg wound fairly quickly, after they’d first met, enough to be able to walk; it hardly registers that the wrapping around his thigh isn’t just a part of how the witcher looks. From the look on Eskel’s face, she thinks it might be more serious of a wound than Geralt had chosen to let on.

She doesn’t have much time to think about it, though, because the ruddy-faced, reddish-haired witcher has shifted his attention to her. “And a child,” he says, and Ciri sets her jaw and tries not to look cowed into silence.

Eskel’s marred features had been enough to startle her, but this witcher’s eyes look fiercer, meaner. Ciri’s subconscious marks him immediately as a threat. 

The two other witchers, she realizes, are looking at her as well. She’s the center of attention, again, in a grand hall, just like home (except for all the important ways). 

So she raises her chin again. “Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon,” she says, and where she’d been haughty with Eskel, she puts vitriol into her tone. She will not be intimidated. “Heir apparent to the throne of Cintra. And you are?” 

The ruddy-faced witcher looks taken aback, but then he laughs. “Lambert,” he says, with a sweeping, mocking bow. “Of Kaedwen. At your service, highness.” And then he turns to Geralt and says, grinning, “You’ve stepped in a crock full of shit, haven’t you?”

Geralt sighs, long and arduous. “I’ll explain later,” he says to him, and then steps to Ciri’s side and puts a hand on her shoulder. Ciri is suddenly, fiercely glad of the gesture. “That’s Coën,” he says, gesturing to a witcher who waves pleasantly. Ciri grounds herself in the comforting weight of Geralt’s hand and his presence at her side (between her and Lambert, thankfully). “And that’s Vesemir.” He points to a witcher who looks twice his age; his hair is as white as Geralt’s, but it looks to be the product of age, not whatever mutation left Geralt as he is. 

Vesemir looks her over with a raised eyebrow and an air that Ciri can only describe as doubtful. She doesn’t exactly feel welcomed. He speaks a moment later, though, and his voice carries no indignation. “It’s good to see you back, wolf.”

Geralt nods to him. It looks respectful. 

For a moment, things stall. Eskel looks questioningly at Geralt. He looks briefly at Ciri, as well, but Ciri thinks there’s something uncertain in his eyes. The same trepidation as when he’d recognized her as a child of surprise. “We should talk,” he says, finally. Lambert raises a mocking eyebrow at Geralt, who sighs again.

“Sit by the fire, Ciri,” Geralt says, not unkindly. It’s still more of an order than he’s given her since get behind me, that night with the thing in the woods, and Ciri frowns rebelliously at him for it, even as she goes to sit on the hearth (and immediately feels better for it, with warmth seeping into her bones again). The witchers convene at one end of their long table. The end furthest from her, she notices. She hears Geralt’s hushed tones as he begins to speak, but can’t make out the words.

They all sit to listen to him, but for the nicer looking witcher (Coën, her mind supplies) who approaches her with a bowl and a kind smile. “Here,” he says, and hands her the stew; the chunks of potato and vegetable are rougher than need be, but it’s still food, which is more than Ciri’s been promised, in these last few months. Coën kneels next to her once it’s safely in her hands, and mutters in a conspiratorial tone, “Lambert’s made it, so there’s no accounting for taste.” He quirks a smile at her. “Still, any meal by a fire after going up the Killer should be pleasant, hm?”

He talks to her gently. Ciri… it’s not that she doesn’t like gentleness, but it feels wrong. She’s not someone to be treated gently anymore, is she? How can she be a creature that subsides in gentleness after all she’s been through, all she’s done? 

Still. Coën approaches her with decency and a kind of camaraderie, and Ciri appreciates that. She tentatively smiles back at him. 

“Oi, Coën,” Lambert calls from across the hall, “Watch it, priss. I’ll piss in your bowl next time, see how that holds up to your fuckin’ standards.” 

They all have Geralt’s uncanny hearing, then. That’s unsettling. Ciri drops her smile. 

Coën’s expression, though, only shifts to apologetic. “He’s a rough one, but it’s easier once you get to know him,” he promises. “Maybe one day he’ll even learn not to eavesdrop,” he adds, in a slightly louder tone, as he places a hand under him to steady himself and shifts to sit on the hearth a little ways from Ciri. He sits rather properly, Ciri thinks, especially in comparison to his counterparts, hunched (or slouched, in Lambert’s case) over the table.

“Can’t help being able to fuckin’ hear,” she thinks she hears Lambert grumble, across the hall. 

Coën lowers his voice to speak to her again. This time, Ciri knows that it’s rather pointless. He’s only affording her the illusion of privacy. She doesn’t know whether she appreciates that or not, but she listens cautiously regardless.

“Kaer Morhen might be… difficult,” he says, somewhat hesitantly. “It certainly won’t be what you’re used to.” The fire crackles loudly behind them. “Better than the wilds, though. Geralt is—” he pauses, with his eyes on the group of witchers at the table, and Ciri belatedly realizes that he must be listening to their conversation. “He’s trying. And he’ll do what he can for you. He’s a good man.” The corner of his mouth quirks up plaintively.

Ciri doesn’t much want to speak to the witchers. Not more than she already has. Even beyond the obvious threat that they present, as large, armed men, there’s the anxious ever-present undercurrent of Ciri knowing that she’s not the way she should be. That she might be something that witchers think warrants their intervention.

“I know,” she says, to the testament of Geralt’s character. She notes the position of the dagger, tucked carefully into a pocket (in Vereena’s dress, Vereena who was kind and pretty but still a killer, still killed by Geralt). She takes a spoonful of stew from her bowl.

True to Coën’s word, the stew tastes like shit.

They talk for a long time, the witchers. Coën seems content to sit with her, for a while. He talks to her, at first, but when he notices her reticence to speak to him, he doesn’t press further with helpful tidbits, just turns his face to the fire and seems to bask in the warmth. It wouldn’t matter much, Ciri supposes, because he can probably hear the conversation just fine from where he is. He gets up, once, to retrieve some bread, and adds exactly one low-toned comment to their discussion. He brings a hunk of bread back for Ciri.

Ciri takes this time to examine the witchers, so long as they’re not offering her any other pertinent information. Geralt… Ciri’s not quite sure how to interpret it, but he’s got his hackles up, the way he looks when he’s stressed or frustrated. She doesn’t think it bodes well for her. 

Eskel, to his side, listens nearly as quietly as Coën. Geralt and Vesemir are doing most of the talking, granted, but it seems that Lambert interjects fairly often. He gestures emphatically at Eskel, once, and Ciri sees the man’s expression twist, and he says a few words in a voice so low that Ciri’s ears barely register the sound. Mostly, she thinks, he’s there to support Geralt. It seems logical. He’s seated at Geralt’s side, where Vesemir sits at the makeshift head of the table and Lambert sits across from them. 

When they’ve finished their discussion, Eskel follows Geralt over to the hearth. Ciri stands to meet them; at her side, Coën gets to his feet at a more sedate pace. (She won’t admit it, not now, but she’s glad of his company. She thinks she would have been much angrier if she’d had to sit by herself like a child while the adults talked; she’s still angry, but even if Coën had been able to listen to the conversation the whole time, he still made sure that she wouldn’t be alone. It’s a little better.)

“Come along,” Geralt says, and Ciri frowns at him for telling her what to do again. It’s probably well-intentioned, sure, whatever, but she’s not too fond of being pushed around after being purposefully left out of a conversation that obviously had to do with her and—well, she can’t think of another grievous injury right off the bat, but she’s stressed and tired and isn’t that enough? 

Geralt’s expression shifts, almost imperceptibly, but he continues on. “We’ll find you something warmer, find you somewhere to sleep. You must be tired.” 

Ciri is, but she’s feeling belligerent, and doesn’t want to admit it. She crosses her arms and says, “Fine,” as haughtily as she can manage it.

She hears soft laughter and a moment later, Coën’s hand is on her shoulder, light and warm. She manages not to jump at the touch. She doesn’t think she’s actually been touched since… since she hugged Geralt, at their first meeting? Since Vereena wiped a tear from her cheek? “Sleep well, your highness,” he says. His use of the title feels genuine, respectful, where Lambert’s had been mocking. 

Ciri swallows down her brattiness for a moment to duck her head and say, softly, “Thank you.” Coën smiles at her and leaves the hall.

Ciri follows Geralt and Eskel down a different passageway, then, down stairs and into depths of the keep that she would really rather not have to go through. It only gets colder as they descend into the dark. Geralt carries a torch, and while Ciri would prefer to keep her distance from Eskel, the threat of the cold and the dark is enough for her to sacrifice some of her dignity and stay close to the two of them. 

She quickly steps around to Geralt’s side, the side that Eskel’s not on, and walks close enough that her arm brushes his sometimes. It’s a small comfort that she’s allowing herself, just this once, when she’s been separated from her protector this long in such an unwelcoming environment. Geralt looks down at her, surprised, and she glares back at him, daring him to say anything. He doesn’t. He only hesitantly reaches an arm around her and puts his hand on her shoulder. It’s not an overtly familiar gesture, not particularly warm, but it’s a shocking comfort all the same. Ciri swallows her pride to press herself slightly against the solid planes of his armor. Geralt’s hand tenses slightly on her shoulder, but it stays, warm and heavy, all the same. 

“There should be clothes that are more your size down here,” Geralt says, after a few more moments of silence, save for the sound of boots on stone and the crackle of the torch. Ciri thinks her footsteps might actually be the loudest; the witchers are surprisingly light on their feet. “Vesemir wasn’t sure what survived, and I haven’t—” he cuts off (emotional, Ciri wonders?) and Ciri registers the movement of his head toward Eskel.

There’s a sound that she thinks might be Eskel shaking his head, but she can’t see him from her place against Geralt’s side. “I haven’t either. No reason to check, was there? It’d be no use to us but for scrap fabric.”

The clothes for the witcher trainees, Ciri thinks. The ones that neither of them had wanted to talk about. 

It seems that the witchers are perfectly content to spend the remainder of their journey in silence, but Ciri’s head is still spinning from the events of the night. She wants to know what they were saying about her. “Is everything alright?” she asks, with a tone that’s more challenging than it probably needs be, but this is her well-being at stake. She doesn’t intend to sit idly by.

Geralt considers her for a moment. She frowns, but doesn’t move out from under the comfort of his arm. She’s beginning to be very annoyed at being treated carefully. “Vesemir’s feelings on the matter are complicated, but he will stand behind me,” he tells her. “There are no issues with you, Ciri. The rest will figure out their own, but you and I are staying here. You’re safe.”

Ciri huffs, but she’s mollified for the moment. At least he’d had the decency not to tell her that there were no issues at all. Ciri will figure out the situation herself, if she has to.

They reach their destination soon after that: a neglected set of rooms below the castle, with hinges that creak like the wailing of ghosts and cobwebs strung about every corner. The tension that had gone from Geralt’s shoulders in Kaer Morhen’s stables reappears now, for reasons that Ciri can’t pin down. They come to the end of a hallway, where two doors await them.

“Storeroom’s on the left,” Geralt says, soft and low, and Eskel steps forward to open the door for them. Geralt takes his hand off Ciri’s shoulder so that she can go through the doorway, and she frowns, but goes through.

The room looks as if it’s been thoroughly ransacked, but there are spiderwebs across the scattered piles of clothing, old boots, wooden swords. Smashed glass dots the floor, the remains of jars and vials of some sort, but whatever liquids might have been inside are long since evaporated. Something terrible happened, Ciri knows, suddenly, surely, but it was long ago. 

“More of a mess than I’d thought it would be,” Eskel says, softly. Ciri turns to look at him, and he catches her eye, but breaks eye contact a moment later. 

Geralt stands and looks at the wreckage for a long moment, but then he hands the torch to Eskel and steps forward and kneels in front of one of the piles. Starts rooting through it. He comes up with nothing, and shifts to the next, avoiding broken glass as he goes. Eskel makes a motion to join him, but seems to decide against it, and leans back against the wall, holding the torch out for Geralt as close as he can without singing anything. Ciri is left standing rather awkwardly between them.

Geralt uncovers a chest. It’s in rather better shape than most Ciri sees across the room; when he opens it, the contents are a mess, tangled piles of cloth, but they’re less covered in dust and spiderwebs than the rest of the room’s contents. Maybe whoever had been going through this chest in particular had been more patient. Geralt parses through the contents of the chest for a moment, and retrieves a cloak from what must be a pile of them. It’s a rich, dark green, thick cloth and a sturdy clasp. He holds it up, appraisingly; it’s shorter, even, than would be necessary for someone of Ciri’s size. Geralt’s expression does something complicated, and he lets it drop to the floor.

There were children here, Ciri thinks, with belated horror.

A few moments later, Geralt pulls another cloak from the chest, and it’s almost perfectly Ciri’s height, if a little long. To Ciri’s surprise and concern, he looks a little nauseous when he holds it up to her. The expression is gone a moment later, though, and he stands to put it around her shoulders in one clean motion. “There,” he says, and Ciri thinks his tone almost sounds choked, if she listens close enough. “It’ll do.”

Ciri goes to clasp it. It’s a bit more complicated, this one; there’s multiple hooks, and in the dim torchlight, she can see some messily-done stitches along them. “There’s a button missing,” she comments, only blithely, as she does up the remaining button to fasten it around her neck. 

“I’d meant to fix that,” Eskel murmurs, and Ciri looks up to find him staring at the clasp of her cloak with a strange expression of his own. Geralt frowns at his friend, and then turns back to the piles of discarded items.

With time, Geralt finds her a pair of boots that fit her feet, and pants that look about the right size, and a set of shirts. “They’ll be big, but Coën can take them in,” Eskel comments. “He knows how to do that kind of thing, doesn’t he?” 

They split their spoils between Ciri and Geralt; she puts on the new boots, tall and made of leather, and Geralt carries her old boots (the ones pulled from the feet of the woman’s servant, in that refugee camp, that always make Ciri sick to look at even if she needs them to live). Ciri takes the bundles of cloth, hugging them to her chest as they walk.

“I’ll come back and clean up,” Eskel says, before they leave the storeroom, looking around appraisingly. He’s got some similar expressions to Geralt, Ciri thinks. “It’s a shame to leave it this way.”

Geralt closes the door after the three of them. He casts a wary glance toward the other, unopened door, but says nothing about it. (Ciri thinks, maybe, if she’s feeling very brave, she’ll come back and see what’s there. Someday.)

Eskel takes the lead with the torch, which means that Ciri can walk easily next to Geralt as they wind their way back up to the higher levels of the keep. The cold cloth of the cloak quickly warms against her own body heat. She’s grateful for it. 

“Any idea of the state of the rooms?” Geralt calls up to Eskel, who glances over his shoulder. 

The scars are even more gruesome when set in relief by the torchlight. “Yours is fine,” he says, easily. “Nothing broken. Cleared the cobwebs for you. I’m not sure about the others. I’d ask Coën—he had to find a new one, this year—but he’s been sleeping early, of late.”

Geralt hums his acknowledgement, and they start on another set of stairs.

They reach a hall that Ciri realizes houses a number of rooms, when Eskel starts to duck into doorways and wave the torch about a few times. Geralt does the same on the other side of the hallway, where moonlight comes through the windows and illuminates the rooms enough for a decent appraisal. 

“This one might do,” Eskel says, dubiously, and Geralt moves from across the hallway to look in. 

Geralt also makes a dubious sound. “For tonight,” he eventually agrees, and Ciri ducks around him to look for herself. It’s a simplistic looking room, but it’s very cold and dark, and the remains of a moth-eaten tapestry on the wall are falling apart. There are certainly a lot of spiderwebs in the corners.

There’s a chest at the foot of the bed, like the one in the storeroom. Ciri presumes it’s where she’s supposed to keep her things. Her arms are rather full, and so Geralt opens it for her.

There’s still clothes, in there. Ciri sees pieces of armor, even. Geralt’s expression falls, upon seeing it, but he schools himself back to neutral within moments. He places her shoes on top of the abandoned armor and retreats to the doorway as she places her small pile of clothes in as well.

“I’ll come to get you in the morning,” Geralt tells her, setting his hand on her shoulder again. “If you need me, I’m—” he leans back to look down the hallway—“five doors, that way.” He gestures down the hall. He considers Ciri, for a moment, and he looks awfully mournful. He turns away the next moment. “Sleep well.”

Ciri balks at the thought of being left alone, after all of this. She’s barely spent a night apart from Geralt since they met. In fact, the one time they had, it’d been at Nivellen’s house, and that had turned out to be awful, horrible, in fact, and she barely wants to think of it (except to remind herself to be careful, always careful, not to reveal whatever it is she can do, whatever she is). She briefly considers asking if she could sleep in the same room as Geralt, if just for that first night, but it feels too much like crawling into her grandmother’s bed as a young girl. Too childish. She sets her jaw and turns to sleep by herself, surrounded by cold stone. 

(She keeps a hand around her dagger, under her pillow.)

Grandmother sits in her throne, at her proper place in the hall, and across the wooden table, deep-pitted with scratches and scars, the fire roars. Dark and unfriendly is her grandmother’s hall, but it’s her grandmother’s hall all the same. 

Eist sweeps in from some unknown entrance, still dressed in his traveling clothes. He passes Ciri, seated at her grandmother’s side, and drops a hand onto her head in greeting. It messes up her hair, and she squawks at him for it. He grins at her, playfully, and drops a kiss onto her grandmother’s cheek before sitting at her other side.

“You’re late,” Grandmother says, but it’s not without humor, not the way she would really reprimand someone. She’s always gentler like that with Eist.

Eist, in turn, is braver than anyone else around Grandmother, save perhaps Ciri herself. He only grins unrepentantly. “Gathering more troops for my darling love,” he says, and Ciri knows that the pet names are in jest. Grandmother never encouraged that sort of thing. Eist only plays at being the doting, over-fond suitor.

And Grandmother sighs, long and irritated. There’s a war impending, Ciri remembers. Someone’s going to attack. 

“At least,” Grandmother starts, “they’ll have a difficult time getting up the mountain. This place stinks like shit, but it’s defensible, I’ll give it that.”

Ciri falters for a moment—she doesn’t know when Grandmother started to talk like that about her own castle—but she knows, logically, that this is the sort of place Grandmother would hate and yet find sensible. It makes sense.

The Cintran banners on the walls are faded. They’re starting to go a bit green, actually, mildewing in the cold and the dark, and they look closer to the dark forest color of Ciri’s cloak than Cintran blue. 

“Grandmother,” Ciri says, “who is going to attack us? Not Temeria, certainly?” She wouldn’t be very upset if they had to cut ties with Temeria, though. Grandmother’s been encouraging her to spend time with the Temerian prince a little too often for her taste. She’s starting to be worried.

“No,” Grandmother tells her. “Someone worse.”

There’s an awful silence in the air, then. It hangs over the three of them, in their large, empty hall. 

Mousesack appears, then, and Ciri is inexplicably happy to see him. She nearly jumps to her feet to greet him, to run to hug him like she did as a child, but she finds her legs peculiarly immobile. “Your majesty,” Mousesack greets, deferential to her grandmother as is due.

“Mousesack,” Grandmother greets in turn. “Are they here?”

Ciri’s blood runs cold at the thought of the unknown attackers. They spell doom, she knows, with a certainty that she can’t quite place. Still, shouldn’t they be safe? Shouldn’t they be impenetrable, her grandmother’s defenses? They’re in Kaer Morhen, after all, and the keep’s walls are so high, it should be impossible for them to be overcome.

And still, she knows, they are not. The attackers will get through. She knows this like she knows the feel of her grandmother’s cloak beneath her hand.

Ciri wakes from her dream with a heavy-sick feeling. Awake, freed from the hazy logic of a dream, she doesn’t know what to do with the image of her grandmother holding court in Kaer Morhen. 

She doesn’t know what to do with herself in Kaer Morhen.

It wasn’t quite a nightmare that she’d had, but she still wakes in an uneasy sweat before dawn. The sun should come up soon, she thinks—she’s become more attuned to the workings of the world since she’s been abandoned to the wilds—but she doesn’t know what to do with herself in the meantime. Get dressed, maybe. She could probably sleep again, but she’s unnerved by her dream. 

Getting dressed would be good. Ciri navigates the world just fine in a skirt—it’d been necessary, up until recently—but she gets the sense that walking around Kaer Morhen in a gown would be… inconvenient. She’d certainly feel more vulnerable.

She pulls on the pants, and then hesitantly takes off Vereena’s dress. Her shift is obviously too long to be convenient, but she wants the extra layer, so after a moment of deliberation she takes her dagger and cuts it to a manageable length. It’s a rough, jagged cut, but once she tucks it into the pants it’s out of sight anyway. She pulls on one of the slightly-oversized boys shirts over it, and quickly refastens her cloak around her neck before the chill can truly seep into her bones. 

She has no mirror, but she pulls on the new boots, and looks down at herself, and… sort of likes how she looks. Rugged, maybe. Not dirty, like the disguise she’d used to play knucklebones with the boys on the streets (and doesn’t that feel a thousand years away, her afternoons of reprieve, using Eist’s knucklebones tricks). She thinks she must look capable, if the shirt doesn’t make her look like she’s drowning. 

She wants to tie her hair up, she decides. Maybe like Geralt’s. That would fit, right? 

The sun’s just coming up as she finds a place at her waist for her dagger. She should tie it there, she thinks; she doesn’t have any string for that, though, so she tucks it into her waistband and drapes the fabric of the shirt over it. Logically, she’s not sure hiding it will do her any good, but she likes the feel of having a weapon that only she knows about. The idea that she can be dangerous, even as she is. 

She stalls, then. It’s morning now, isn’t it? Now that the sun is up? She’s never seen Geralt asleep past sunrise (and seeing him asleep is a rare sight all its own). She sort of wants to go find him, rather than waiting for him to seek her out. Would he wait to come retrieve her from this strange, empty room, thinking that it’d be better to let her sleep?

She’ll try and kill a little more time, she thinks. She’s had to be very brave the past few months, and just now, while she has the choice not to be, she doesn’t think she’s quite brave enough to go out into the hallway all by herself when the other witchers could be out there.

Instead, she remembers the other clothes in the chest. The armor. 

She kneels in front of the chest, opens it, removes the clothes that belong to her now; under it is a shabby set of armor and some underclothes. There’s dust in the folds of the clothing, and as Ciri pulls fabric from the chest, a moth flies out and almost makes her shriek. She feels profoundly silly for being scared by it.

She pulls the armor from the chest with some difficulty; it’s heavier than she would’ve expected, with all the metal studs in the leather. A few of the fastenings are broken, she notices (they’re the ones that her grandmother would always complain about, the ones that carry too much weight or get damaged during battle). It’s not a prime set of armor. Geralt had said that witchers only come here in the winter; this is the sort of thing, maybe, that someone would leave here.

Whoever left it, though, hasn’t come back for it for what must be years. There’s moths in their clothes and dust on their broken armor. 

Dead, probably, Ciri realizes, with a sudden chill. She’s holding a dead man’s armor.

She puts it back in the chest. It feels wrong to move it. Still, she piles her clothes back on top of the chestplate, because Ciri has to live: she can’t be caught up entirely by the things haunting this space.

With the way Geralt had looked the night before, in the storeroom full of small clothes, Ciri thinks there must be an awful lot of things haunting Kaer Morhen.

She sits back on the bed, and watches the early morning light streaming through the window. Dust particles swim in the sunlight. She’d be safe, Geralt had said. Does she feel safe? Yes. With Geralt beside her. Which is more reliant than she’d like to be, but she reluctantly accepts that for the moment it’s the smart move to stick by him. 

Does she feel safe in Kaer Morhen? Well. She’s certainly more protected from the elements than she had been, out and alone in the woods. She doesn’t know how to feel about the other witchers, though. Coën had seemed nice enough, but plenty of people seem nice. She’d rather be around him than Lambert, certainly, but Lambert is near openly threatening, to someone who is small and easily offended like Ciri, and Ciri just plain dislikes him. Coën could be secretly awful all along. He could bring her a bowl of poisoned broth and tell her that it’s just Lambert’s awful cooking.

Eskel she’s not sure about. He’s scary by virtue of his looks, which really aren’t his fault, she realizes. Still, she’s… skittish. Wary. Even putting together the obvious fact that Geralt trusts him and the fact that he hadn’t done anything threatening besides look at her and seem somewhat uncomfortable with her presence, Ciri absolutely refuses to trust. At most, she thinks, she’ll resign herself to his presence. She gets the feeling that Geralt and Eskel might continue to exist side-by-side, shoulders just brushing, the way they had all of last night. It had seemed normal for them. 

The old witcher, she thinks, might be the problem. Vesemir, Geralt had called him—and he’d said that Vesemir had issues with Ciri’s presence, which doesn’t bode well. Geralt had seemed confident that it wouldn’t present any serious problems, and Ciri trusts his judgment, but he doesn’t think from her perspective. He would have no reason to consider her discomfort, in a place where he seems to exist so comfortably. There’s a whole host of issues that could present a lot of trouble for Ciri during her time here.

She wonders, blithely, how long they’re going to stay here. The winter, certainly. But will Geralt want to go out witchering again? If Ciri starts to feel safe here, will they have to leave?

It’s too early to think about that. There are more pressing issues. The sunlight gets brighter, and Ciri starts to feel antsy enough that her feet propel her out of the door and into the hallway. 

For a moment, she can’t remember which door Geralt had said was his. Five doors down, he’d said; was that five including his door, or five between their doors? Ciri frowns, but she goes in the general direction, counts five, and after a moment of hesitation, knocks gently on the door. If Geralt’s awake, which she thinks he probably will be, he’ll hear. 

There’s rustling that she can hear from inside the room, and a few moments later, the door opens. Ciri freezes when she sees Eskel.

“This isn’t Geralt’s room,” is all she can think to say.

“No.” Eskel frowns, but there’s no irritation behind it, only something like confusion. “His room is to the right.” 

Ciri curses herself for counting wrong.

“If you want to get him, go ahead,” Eskel says, running a hand through his hair. It’s not long like Geralt’s, but it still has length enough for him to get his fingers deep into it. “He might still be asleep. He sleeps hard, usually, first night he gets back.”

Ciri frowns her own confusion. “I didn’t think he slept at all.”

Something suddenly sad comes over Eskel’s face, then. It’s almost startling in its sincerity. Ciri doesn’t think she’s ever seen Geralt show an unfiltered emotion like that. “Been having nightmares, has he?”

Like me, Ciri thinks, but she doesn’t say it. “Yes.”

Eskel lets out a breath, and his gaze drops to the floor. The sadness doesn’t dissipate, but it shifts toward melancholy. A moment later, he collects himself, and looks toward Ciri. “Ready to start the day, are you? We’ll see if Geralt’s awake, and get you some food.” He starts to move, but then pauses, looks back to Ciri. “Are you hungry?”

Ciri considers it for a moment, and nods.

Really, she thinks, if Geralt were awake, he should’ve been able to hear the two of them talking. Still, Eskel opens the door next to his quietly and looks inside. Ciri catches a glimpse of white hair across a pillow, and Eskel closes the door.

“We’ll let him sleep,” he says. Ciri thinks he sounds gentle. “Melitele knows he needs it.”

Chapter Text

Ciri thinks about that moment, as she follows Eskel down another set of stairs. The way he was gentle with Geralt, even if he wasn’t awake to see it. The care inherent in all of it feels suddenly stifling. (Maybe, maybe, if Eskel cares so gently for someone good like Geralt, he can be considered trustworthy. It’s something to think about.)

“He’ll wake in a while,” Eskel tells her, turning his head just a bit to let his voice carry over his shoulder but not actually… looking at her. Ciri gets the sense, again, that he feels awkward with her. It’s strange. Something about the strained way he’d called her a child of surprise, she thinks. “Shouldn’t be much past breakfast. Never learned to take care of himself when he needed it, Geralt. Always pushing himself past where he should’ve gone.” 

He’s talking to fill the space, Ciri thinks. He doesn’t know what to do with her.

If she were a kinder girl, a more diplomatic princess, she would say something casual; agree, subtly let him know that he had nothing to be awkward about. Ciri is not kind nor diplomatic. She stays silent. She takes no pleasure in watching the man squirm—it’s awkward for her, too, this strained silence with a full-grown man she’s just met—but she has no intention to make herself softer just to smooth things over. She doesn’t want to engage with these people. Not so easily.

Eskel falls silent, then, and it’s just the sound of their boots on the stairs. 

Kaer Morhen looks kinder in the morning, Ciri thinks. Or… not kinder. The stone walls are still unflinching, and the light streams in through grated windows in harsh lines to land against the cold grey of the walls and floor, but there is light. Sunlight. It’s not kind. But it looks less haunted.

It’s not quite so cold as it had been the night before, and Ciri has boots with less holes now and clothing better suited for the cold weather, and she’s feeling stronger than she had the night before. She’s going to eat, she thinks. And then she’ll be ready to face the day. Geralt will wake soon.

Eskel leads her down empty hallways, lit by measly sunlight. Ciri can tell they’re the hallways that the witchers actually use, in this large keep, because the dust and cobwebs have been mostly cleared away. It’s certainly nothing like the halls down into that storeroom. Still, they’re large and empty, and long, and the whole walk almost makes Ciri feel as if they’re the only two people in the castle. It’s simultaneously a shock and a relief for Eskel to open a door and reveal Coën, sitting neatly at a little table.

“Morning, your highness,” he says, with an easy smile. It’s nice enough that Ciri gives him a grudging half-smile in return. Coën pushes a loaf of bread and some cheese toward them, and Eskel turns away to open one of the cupboards. “You can sit down, if you’d like,” Coën continues, gesturing to one of the other chairs around the table. Ciri takes his invitation. 

The kitchen is oddly sized, she thinks. Eskel goes for a cupboard filled with wrapped foodstuffs, probably things preserved for the winter, but there’s rows of cupboards beyond it, and there’s two ovens—one that’s unreasonably large, for the small number of people living here, and a smaller one beside it. The little table that Coën sits at is positioned just under the stream of morning sun into the kitchen, but it looks out of place in the open space of the kitchen. It’s sized like this castle, Ciri thinks, and the number of cleaned hallways. It’s a space meant for many more people. The witchers are only carving out the small space that they need.

Were there more, she wonders? More witchers? There must have been, to warrant a space this size, but she’s never heard of witchers being prolific. Witchers are a rare find, to be avoided when one comes across them (is what she’d been taught, at least). They’ll show up when you need one, but you’d hardly come across one while casually traveling. Maybe some old king, so old his kingdom has been forgotten to the annals of history and therefore to Ciri’s tutor, had built his fortress here, at the top of the mountain. Maybe the witchers had just moved in. 

Speaking of witchers. She shifts her gaze from Eskel’s back to Coën, who she finds looking out the window. A moment later, as if he feels her gaze, he turns to her with a questioning look. 

Ciri stalls, but gathers her courage for a rather rude question. “Is Lambert going to be down here?” she asks, and doesn’t bother to hide her unfavorable opinion of the man. She thinks Coën is probably alright, given how he’d teased Lambert the night before. 

Reassuringly, Coën laughs heartily. “Don’t know, your highness. He’s been sleeping late. I think he thinks it’ll get him out of chores, if Vesemir has to go and drag him out of bed himself.” His tone is fond. Odd, Ciri thinks. She can’t imagine feeling fond about that abrasive man. “If you’re really worried,” he says, pitching his voice just a bit lower, “I’ll let you know when I hear him coming.”

Ciri’s figured out by now that his lower tones of voice are only for her benefit. His own words prove their futility; if he’s going to listen for Lambert’s footsteps in the hall, and if he acknowledges that he’ll hear them before Ciri can, the other witchers can surely hear what he says, even if he whispers. 

But he does acknowledge it. And Ciri feels a little better that he’s not treating her as stupid. He’s being courteous, she thinks. Once more, she doesn’t know if she appreciates the lowered voice, but she notes it as a point in his favor. She nods to him. She takes the bread.

Eskel appears to find what he’s looking for, and he appears at the table to place an apple in front of Ciri, and returns to the cupboard to close it. She sees him pause, and then he asks, “You said Lambert hadn’t eaten yet?” 

Coën makes an affirmative sound.

“Lass,” Eskel calls, and Ciri registers that he’s calling to her in time to catch the apple that’s been tossed to her. It’s a near miss, but she feels daringly victorious that she’s managed to catch it all the same. She looks back up at Eskel, ready to glare at him for obviously teasing her by throwing apples at her, but he says, “Keep an eye on that for Geralt, will you?” and it makes a bit more sense.

Ciri eyes him mistrustingly, but nods, and puts the apple on the table close to her before crunches into her own. She can certainly do that much for Geralt’s sake. Eskel could have done it himself, she’s sure, but… he’s trying to include her, maybe. Treat her casually. Toss her an apple. Besides, Geralt is the only thing that really connects them, and it is a small relief to have Geralt as a tether, if only the mention of him.

“Lucky you got here in time,” Eskel comments, once she acquiesces. “These run out fast, once winter starts.” 

It’s kind, she thinks, to make sure that there’s an apple left for your friend, when you know they’ll run out soon. Startlingly so.

Eskel doesn’t sit at the table with them; he leans against the cupboard to eat his own apple, while Ciri eats hers and tears at the bread that Coën had offered her. It’s good to sit somewhere not-freezing, protected from the elements, while she eats. It’s almost enough to make up for how unsettled she feels in the walls of this cold, ancient keep. She fills her belly with apple and bread (too much, maybe—she’s eaten voraciously when given the chance, since she’s been on her own, and even with Geralt, she hadn’t quite had enough to feel full— and something in her mind tells her that she needs to take what she can, that good, filling food isn’t promised again. It’s not until she finds herself feeling sick to her stomach that she realizes she may have overcompensated). 

She wonders what’s going to happen, as the day goes on. Chores, Coën had mentioned? What will Ciri be expected to do? Is she going to be expected to earn her keep? How much will being Geralt’s ward earn her, in this place? 

Coën looks up, then, and Ciri thinks, he’s listening. He must hear footsteps, or voices, or something of the sort. For a moment of rising apprehension, she thinks he’s going to say that Lambert is coming, but instead he catches her eye and grins. “S’ not Lambs, your highness.”

“That’s Geralt,” Eskel agrees, through a mouthful of apple. Ciri feels a little knot of tension unravel in her heart at the knowledge that she’s going to be reunited with Geralt. Things are easier, at least, if he’s here with her. She’ll know what to do. 

Also—do the witchers know each other so well, to identify each other by the sound of their footsteps?

She slumps back in her chair. Her gaze catches on the last of the bread, then, and something like guilt and panic swirls together in her gut. Her stomach’s starting to ache, a little bit, just enough past full to be uncomfortable. The guilty panicked feeling tugs at her, and she reaches out to take another bite. 

She starts to hear the footsteps, a few moments later, after she’s properly torn through the crust of the bread. They’re quick, decisive; Ciri tries to identify something familiar about them, something that would set them apart as Geralt’s, but she comes up empty. Geralt pushes open the door to the kitchen looking… a little panicked, Ciri thinks? But his eyes catch hers, and the aberration in his expression fades before she can fairly identify it. 

“You let me sleep,” he says to Eskel, with a frown. It sounds almost accusing. Strange—why should he be accusing about an act of kindness? Eskel only shrugs, arms crossed, turning his scarred face away. 

Coën leans back in his seat and goes back to contemplating the sunlight.

“This is for you,” Ciri says, in lieu of an awkward silence in the too-big kitchen, and holds out the extra apple toward Geralt. This time, she sees something soften, distinctly, in his expression. He makes his way over to take the apple from Ciri.

A moment later, he lets out a breath and puts a hand on Ciri’s head. She looks up at him, a little startled, her mouth still full of bread, but she doesn’t protest. 

“How’s your leg?” Eskel asks, from across the kitchen. Ciri remembers the strange injury. She remembers Eskel’s comment from earlier, as well, that Geralt pushes himself past where he should go. How bad had the wound really been, then?

“Fine,” Geralt responds; the challenge that was in his voice earlier is gone now. He only sounds tired. There’s a moment more of familiar, grounding pressure of his hand against Ciri’s hair, and then it’s gone. 

“Uh huh,” Eskel says, and under his sarcasm, Ciri hears a hint of something playful. “So should I tell Vesemir to give you something easy, or should I tell him to sentence you to bedrest for the rest of the month?”

Geralt rolls his eyes, but Ciri thinks it’s actually in good humor. Joking. “I’m fine, Eskel. I’ve been walking on it for weeks, now. I could patch the roof if I need to.”

“I’m doing the roof,” Coën pipes up, as Eskel narrows his eyes at Geralt. “Was supposed to be me and Lambs, but he does a shit job of it.” 

Geralt drops the pretend-aggravation and drops into the chair next to Ciri, taking a bite of an apple. “You’re encouraging him, you know,” he says, and Ciri wrinkles her nose at the way he speaks through a mouthful of half-chewed fruit. He swallows before he speaks again, and puts an elbow onto the table to gesture at Coën with his apple. “He only pretends to be shit at simple tasks ‘cause he knows it’ll get him out of the work. You’re playing into his hands.”

It’s interesting, watching Geralt talk so casually about someone; he speaks with familiarity, a little bit of disdain, but not hostility. Ciri thinks again that he seems almost like a new man in Kaer Morhen. 

Coën pulls a face. “I’d rather do the work myself than get dripped on all winter, thanks. He might be doing it to get out of work, but he’s not shy about leaving it done badly. Smelled like mold and rot all winter last year.” 

“I’ll help you,” Eskel says, and tosses his apple core into a bin. Ciri notes its location for later. She can’t quite figure out an intuitive system to the kitchen organization, yet; it’s too much empty space. 

Eskel pushes away from the counter, then, and heads for the door. “Gonna get the lazy bastard out of bed,” he says, and pauses to lay a familiar hand on Geralt’s shoulder as he passes. He also takes a moment to nod to Ciri, and while it’s an awkward sort of motion, it feels striking. She stares after him as he leaves. 

“Melitele preserve you,” Coën calls after him, a hint of laughter in his dry tone. 

The morning goes a little faster, after that. Geralt eats (Ciri hands him the rest of the bread, and tries not to feel nauseous), Coën sits and enjoys the winter sunlight, and after a bit, the three of them return to that large hall. Eskel is already there, with a rumpled and disgruntled-looking Lambert next to him, and the old witcher sits at the head of the table again. 

It’s still large and empty, the hall. The cold sits heavy in the corners of the room, more severe than it had been in the kitchen, where it at least allowed for some warm light. 

Ciri accidentally catches Vesemir’s eye. He looks at her unflinchingly, and Ciri steels herself, holds her ground. He considers her for a moment longer, and then looks away. She’s left awfully unsure of how to proceed.

The world around her hasn’t stopped, though. Geralt keeps walking, beside her, to take a seat at the table across from Eskel. Coën tosses Lambert a chunk of bread that Ciri hadn’t noticed him take from the kitchen, and Lambert looks up from under his disheveled hair to catch it with a wild grin. He pulls a knife from his belt and carves out a chunk of the bread to eat. Somehow it feels more vulgar than just tearing it. 

Ciri sits between Geralt and Coën and ignores Lambert when he grins at her and says, mockingly, “Good morning, princess.” She has more dignity than to engage with him, she decides. A haughty toss of her hair usually gives off the desired nonchalance; she grits her teeth when he laughs at her for it, loud and ugly.

“Alright,” Vesemir says, the next moment, and the imperious sound of his voice carries through the hall. Ciri remembers her odd dream. The command in Vesemir’s voice is rather like her grandmother’s in an odd way. “Eskel says he and Coën are going to fix the roof?”

Coën nods. Lambert sticks his tongue out at him from across the table. 

“You’re on stable duty, then, Lambert,” Vesemir continues. “That means clean. I don’t want you coming back for lunch until you’ve done a job that’s actually satisfactory.”

Lambert sighs, long and laborious, but he doesn’t protest. It’s interesting. Ciri takes note of it.

Everyone else has been assigned a task for the day, which must mean it’s Geralt’s turn (and hopefully Ciri’s, alongside him). Vesemir turns his golden eyes on them, and Ciri finds herself defaulting to what she’d done when her grandmother was angry with her. Meet her eyes (she’ll be angrier if you look away). Try not to look defiant. She cannot tell if Vesemir is angry or not, but it’s safer to err on the side of caution.

“You’ll come with me to look at that monster bit you brought back, Geralt,” Vesemir says, and Ciri shudders without meaning to as she remembers the shadowy thing with luminous, intelligent eyes. “After midday. You might as well show the princess around; it wouldn’t do to have her get lost.”

Geralt raises an eyebrow. “Don’t we train after midday?”

Vesemir levels him with a narrow-eyed look. “Don’t think I’m stupid, boy. I won’t have you training on a ghoul bite. I’m aware you’re stubborn, but I don’t care to entertain it.” He plants his hands on the table and stands, leaving no room for dispute. “You’ll let someone look at the wound today, and you won’t train.” 

Ciri has yet to understand all of the intricacies of Geralt’s micro-expressions, but this one is very clearly displeasure.

“And so the White Wolf gets put out to pasture,” Lambert croons, gleefully. “Good thing you’ve got a little cub to keep you company in your infirmity.”

Geralt glares at Lambert across the table. “I’m still well enough to thrash the likes of you.” 

Lambert only laughs and stands as well. When Vesemir looks at him sharply, he rolls his eyes and starts off down the hallway that Ciri knows leads back to the grand front doors. Eskel and Coën stand next. Eskel gives Geralt a strange look that’s like compassion and mockery in one and glances over to Ciri with a discomfited expression, and then he and Coën go back the way they’d come from, up toward the stairs that theoretically reach the roof.

“Keep an eye on your girl, hm?” Vesemir says, once the room is empty, with an eyebrow raised at Geralt. Ciri bristles first at being labeled as Geralt’s and not as her own person, and then at the implication that she’s some unruly child that needs to be watched over. 

Geralt answers evenly and easily, though. “Ciri will be fine.”

Vesemir goes off through yet another passageway.

Geralt stands and gestures for Ciri to do the same. “We’ll get your cloak first.”

“A ghoul bite?” Ciri asks, as she stands. She doesn’t ask Geralt questions very often, but she thinks maybe she ought to start. Especially if she’s going to be staying in this drafty, mysterious place. At least Geralt should be accessible to her. “Is that what’s been wrong with your leg?”

Geralt makes a displeased noise to the affirmative. Evidently, he does not want to talk about it. He starts off toward the stairs, after Eskel and Coën. 

“Eskel and Vesemir seem to think it’s serious,” Ciri presses, following after him, ducking around him to look at his face.

His expression is noticeably pinched. “Eskel and Vesemir are overprotective. My leg is fine.”

“You have been limping.”

“Ciri—”

“Aren’t ghouls supposed to be nasty, decaying things?” She doesn’t know where she gets the courage to push like this, when Geralt is obviously trying to draw a line. “The soldiers would tell stories about seeing them on old battlefields, and they said a single bite was toxic.”

“Not toxic,” Geralt corrects, drily, wearily. “They don’t have poison or venom. Ghoul bites start necrosis. Decay.” He starts up the stairs. Ciri puzzles, disgusted, over the implications of that information.

“Do you mean to say that your leg is rotting away under those bandages?” she calls after him, and then realizes that he moves very quickly for someone with a leg undergoing necrosis and starts up the stairs after him.

“My wound was treated by a druid, luckily,” he calls back, now drier and with a hint of sarcasm. “It’s not rotting. It’s just a wound. It’s almost healed, anyway.”

A druid. Ciri remembers Mousesack, with a pang, remembers what the doppler had told her. Dead. Captured in his attempt to protect her. Killed by the Black Knight, most likely. The overabundance of food in her stomach turns threateningly with guilt and nausea, and she puts a hand over her mouth to keep both inside. 

Geralt must have noticed that she’s stopped prying, because he’s looking at her, concerned, when she comes back to herself. She pulls her hand from her mouth, struggles with where to put it. Remembers that she has pockets now. 

“I only ate too much,” she says, trying to look appropriately unconcerned. “I don’t think all the cheese is agreeing with me.”

Geralt does not look entirely convinced—or else he’s worried about something else—but he nods and beckons her on. 

They fetch her cloak. (“This hall is all bedrooms,” he tells her. “You’ve probably figured that out.”) She follows Geralt back down the stairs in queasy silence. They retrace their steps back through the main hall, and out toward the main doors. She gives Geralt a questioning look. 

“I thought we’d go to the stables, first,” he says, reaching out to push against the huge doors. “Be good to see Roach.”

“Isn’t Lambert out there?” Ciri asks, disdainful. She hasn’t quite decided that Lambert isn’t her enemy, and he’s certainly annoying enough to be avoided. He’d cemented that much this morning. 

Geralt sighs in a way that tells Ciri he understands her hesitance. “He’ll get easier to deal with in time. He’s always worse with something new to harp on.” He opens one of the doors in a smooth swing, and after he and Ciri pass through, pushes it closed after them. 

Lambert is, indeed, in the stables. Or, rather, in a stall: Geralt and Ciri find him lounging behind his mouse-grey horse, laying out cards in the scattered hay.

“Didn’t know gwent could be single-player,” Geralt says, and surprises Ciri with the levity in his voice. It’s almost apologetic. “Must be the only way you can win.” 

Lambert glances up with a grin. “We’ll see, won’t we. We might even have a chance at a proper game tonight, if Vesemir stops mother henning over your sorry ass.”

“It’s your ass that’ll be sorry if Vesemir finds you slacking off,” Geralt hits back. “I’m going to show Ciri around.” 

Lambert waves his hand dismissively, and places another card on the ground. He looks up again, though, peering inquisitively at Ciri. That shit-eating grin of his spreads across his face. “Did you know, Geralt, she looks an awful lot like you, bundled in all that trainee gear. Could almost pass for your own kid. If I didn’t know better, I’d ask if you fooled around with that lost Cintran princess.”

“Leave it,” Geralt growls, abandoning his levity, but Ciri isn’t paying the slightest attention. She is feeling angry, and grieving, and such a disgusting and disrespectful comment about her dead mother is the last fucking thing she’ll let this red-headed rat of a man say to her. She snatches a metal horseshoe from the wall and hurls it full-force at him, narrowly missing the horse.

Lambert bats it out of the air with the back of his hand before it manages to hit him, and then winces and makes a loud noise of complaint, shaking his hand out. His horse whinnies, distressed, and kicks up hay from the stable floor. Ciri stands, seething, and wishes it’d hit him right in the ugly face.

“Do not speak of my mother,” she hisses, cutting off Lambert’s indignant stream of complaints. “Never again. I am not a soft target for your mockery.”

Lambert falls quiet, and looks at her appraisingly. (It’s Geralt’s expression, fleetingly, the same look in different eyes.) “Message received,” he says, after a moment, with an air of performative nonchalance. “Spitfire, you are.” He pushes himself to his feet with the hand that hadn’t hit the horseshoe, and lays a hand on his horse to calm it. “Watch the horse next time. Princess.”

He doesn’t say the title tauntingly. He considers her for a moment more, and then stalks past her toward the stable doors. He stops just beside Geralt, a hand on his shoulder, mouth by his ear, and says, lowly, “You’ve got a lot of nerve, bringing a human up here. Much less a princess. Royal child surprise. Must make things easy, being the Old Wolf’s favorite.” He pushes himself off of Geralt’s shoulder with force enough that Geralt rocks slightly from it.

Ciri exhales one more time, hot enough to steam the cold air outside the warm stable, and is suddenly aware of Geralt’s attention on her. She looks over and finds his expression unreadable. 

“I’m not going to apologize,” she tells him, defiant, turning her chin up and straightening out her shoulders. She feels like a child under his gaze, self-conscious, like she should be ashamed of herself. She’s not. She has a right to strike out in anger if she wants to. She has a right to move without thinking, she has a right to defend her mother’s name. She doesn’t feel ashamed. “I’m not.”

Geralt reaches out and places a hand on the top of her head. Ciri finds herself deflating quickly, losing the rigid structure of her shoulders until she’s looking up at him from a pout rather than resistance. 

“He shouldn’t have said that.” Geralt looks at her for a moment longer, still unreadable, and then adds, “Watch the horse next time.” 

He moves his hand from her head. Ciri follows the motion to stand just a bit closer to him, her anchor in the moors of Kaer Morhen. “What did he mean by that? The bit about bringing a human up here.” 

Geralt gives her another of his silent, piercing looks. She’s getting rather sick of that.

“You’re the first human in Kaer Morhen for decades now,” he rumbles. “There’s no problem with you. He’s looking for things to complain about.”

That doesn’t answer Ciri’s question, and she’s sure he knows it. Saying that she’s an outlier for being here and being human does not explain why she’s other to all these men. She frowns at him. He turns to start explaining the ins and outs of the stable to her. (The highlight, at least, is that Geralt becomes near animated, brushing Roach and feeding her a near-frozen carrot. It’s a relief from the heavy air that’s hung around them all morning.)

After the stables (which really are multiple stables, she finds, it’s just that the witchers currently here only use one of the lot), Geralt takes her for her tour through the keep. The hall she’s seen; the kitchen she’s seen; he points to the door of the laboratory and says that she’ll see it later, when they go to examine the monster part. In the meantime, he takes her to their library.

Ciri is really expecting much more than what the library turns out to be, which is two sets of table and chairs and a few rough-hewn bookshelves that are mostly empty and cobwebbed, save for a few leather-bound tomes and a small collection of colorful books. There’s a fireplace, but it looks as if it hasn’t been used in a long time. She sees a spider crawling up into the chimney and shudders. 

“Not many books.”

Geralt hums, and looks around as if he’s seeing the room for the first time as well. “Had to restart the collection.”

Ciri looks up to question him, but he’s got that haunted look on his face again, so she disgruntledly jams a hand in her pocket and resigns herself to not knowing, for now. 

Maybe, an idea springs to her mind, small and secretive, you could ask the others. Coën. Maybe Eskel.

She tucks that away for later consideration.

In the meantime, she sighs. “What’re you collecting, then?”

Geralt points toward the colorful books. “Coën likes romances. He brings them for the winter and leaves them here for the rest of us.” 

“Do you all read romances?” Ciri asks, surprised.

He shrugs. “Lambert reads them, but he won’t admit it. Eskel keeps his books in his room when he has ‘em.” 

“And you?”

“I’m not a reader. I stick to the bestiaries.” He gestures to the tomes (which, Ciri notices, are also cobwebbed along several volumes). After a few seconds of silently considering her, he takes a step toward the shelves. “Come look.” 

That, Ciri thinks, is his way of appeasing her. Offering her information so she doesn’t have to ask questions. She goes to see.

Geralt lays one of the leather-bound books onto a dusty table, and flips through the pages. Ciri comes up beside him to watch him leaf through sheet after sheet of writing and drawings of creatures, some grotesque, some beautiful. The writing and the art changes from page to page. Most of it is more of a scrawl than anything, but she sees a few entries (because they must be entries, individual people’s contributions to the bestiary) with perfectly lovely writing. Maybe it’s Coën’s, she thinks. He might be civilized enough to have nice handwriting.

“Who wrote that one?” she asks, stopping Geralt’s hand on a page with nice writing that features a kikimora, spidery and spindly against the lovely looping script. 

He looks surprised by the question, but the melancholy tinges that surprise. “I don’t know. These bestiaries are ones that survived. Their writers are long forgotten, by now.”

Haunted, indeed. Dead witchers everywhere you look. Ciri shivers. Geralt continues flipping through the bestiary pages.

“Here.” He stops at a page and puts a finger on the illustration. Werewolf, the entry reads. “That’s almost what the creature that attacked us looked like. Not quite though. Few key details; not human enough, and werewolves don’t have eyes that glow. They’re reflective, but that wasn’t reflection.” 

Ciri examines the picture and agrees with his assessment.

“I suppose we’ll see,” Geralt says, still examining the artwork of a long-dead man, and then he closes the book and replaces it on the shelf.

The library is still strange, empty, and shadowed when they leave it. Ciri thinks she sees something move behind a bookshelf when she glances behind her on a whim, and her heartbeat picks up. Probably just a spider. Probably just a spider. 

He takes her through a maze of hallways, next, and Ciri has no earthly idea where they could be going until they reach a window and he points out of it. Ciri pushes the glass panes open further and leans out. Outside, behind the keep, there is a field with a number of wood-and-metal contraptions.

“That’s the training grounds,” Geralt explains. “That’s where we’ll train. Keep strong for the winter. Get stronger for the Path, if we’re lucky.”

Ciri lingers out of the window, wind whipping her hair, to stare at the machines out on the training grounds. She thinks of her dagger. Then, with a particularly impressive gust of wind, she thinks of Eskel and Coën on the roof. She tilts her head up, but doesn’t see them. Not surprising. She’s a few floors up from the ground, but there are still levels between her and the roof.

Gigantic, this keep. It must have belonged to someone else, she decides. It’s far too large to ever have been occupied entirely by witchers. 

It’s time for lunch, then. Geralt leads her back through the halls.

“Is the tour over?” she asks, and Geralt raises an eyebrow at her, but nods to the affirmative. “What about the rooms that you took me to before? Where we got these clothes?”

Geralt’s expression darkens. He’s not upset with her, but he very much does not want to talk about it, it seems. “It’s no matter. It’s a storeroom. We don’t use it anyway.”

It’s very much not a satisfactory answer. Ciri frowns and decides, privately, that once she has a better idea of how to navigate the keep and its inhabitants, she will go back to those rooms herself. She will see what the side-door leads to. It feels strange, thinking of going back through those rooms, psat chests full of clothing abandoned by children her age, but they’re only clothes. She will not be intimidated by a haunting that has yet to produce any ghosts.

In the hall, Eskel and Coën are wind-blown and red-cheeked at the grand table, a pot of the previous night’s dinner between them, and Vesemir sits stoic with a hunk of dried meat at the head of the table. Lambert is conspicuously absent. His stew is even less appetizing now that it is not warm and Ciri is not freezing and hunger-driven. She glances around the room, but it doesn’t appear that anyone intends to say anything. Her stomach is still slightly over-full from breakfast. She takes a bowl of stew anyway

“Is Lambs actually cleaning the stables, you think?” Coën asks, a few minutes into everyone eating, long enough that the silence has turned almost comfortable. Eskel makes an unflattering amused sound at his question, mouth still full of food.

“It’s possible.” Geralt pushes his spoon into his bowl of stew again. “He got into a fight with Ciri. He might just be chastened enough to put in some honest work for the day.”

“A fight?” Coën asks, eyes wide, and his gaze goes quickly to Ciri. “Surely you don’t mean a physical one.” He looks more curious than worried, which Ciri sort of likes. She entertains the idea for a moment that she could get into a physical fight with a witcher and still arrive, unscathed, for lunch, while he went to lick his wounds.

“Of a sort. Ciri threw a horseshoe at him,” Geralt tells him, and while he’s not looking up from his food, he’s got a dry, ironic sort of tone to his voice that Ciri thinks means he’s amused.

“A horseshoe?” Eskel exclaims, half-laughing, sending a rivulet of stew down his chin. He chokes on his food in the next second, and has to take a moment to double over to cough.

“You are an unprecedented young lady, your highness,” Coën tells her, looking a little exasperated.

Ciri tilts her chin up. Geralt has no qualms with her actions. She is not a scolded child. “It’s nothing he didn’t deserve.” Eskel is still laugh-wheezing under his breath as he straightens up and wipes his chin with his sleeve. When she follows her instincts to a gaze at the head of the table, though, Vesemir looks very much displeased. Ciri pulls herself back into Geralt’s shadow. 

Going to the laboratory to figure out what the monster is turns out to be… boring. The laboratory itself looks impressive, glass tubes and jars of things up on shelves and several more books and loose pages with interesting alchemical recipes, but it turns out the process is both boring and grotesque. 

Geralt unwraps from oil cloth the remains of the monster that he’d brought, which turns out to be the head of the thing. Ciri turns away, nauseous (and still slightly fearful, though she won’t admit it) from the sight of it. The only comfort she finds, though, is in a jar of what looks like pickled eyeballs directly in her line of sight. It’s awful. It’s only slightly better than looking back into that thing’s terrible milky eyes. 

She doesn’t have anything to contribute to the process, either, especially when Vesemir seems less than pleased with her assaulting one of his witchers and probably would not take well to her interrupting. In the end, she situates herself on a stool a little ways away from Geralt and his strange old (mentor? father?) and wraps her new cloak around herself to wait. The fabric smells musty. She thinks she can smell the remnants of salt-sweat, the same kind that builds (built. Built. Past tense, always past tense, don’t cry Cirilla—) around her grandmother after battle or exercise. It reminds her starkly that this cloak used to be someone else’s, a lifetime ago. Same with all the rest of her clothes.

As Geralt and Vesemir pore over the creature’s head, performing experiments in the glass tubes and consulting old tomes, Ciri examines her cloak more closely. The jagged stitches she’d noticed the night before, done in an earthy brown color that clashes just slightly with the dark green of the fabric, are further proof that this garment had been lived in. Cared for. Repaired. She runs a finger over the clumsy stitching, over the old rip that they’re holding together, and over the puckered space where a button should be. 

I’d meant to fix that, Eskel had said. Maybe it was his cloak, long ago. 

Geralt and Vesemir adjourn from their conference with a sigh and a displeased frown, respectively. 

“Magnet for strange things, you are,” Vesemir says, under his breath, and then louder, “We’ll figure it out. No point slaving after a problem that’s not going to be solved today.” He turns a calculating look on Geralt. “If you’re going to be picky about me looking at your leg, go tell Eskel to look it over. You won’t train seriously until he tells me you’re fit again.”

“Vesemir,” Geralt grits out.

“Wolf. Go find Eskel.”

Geralt makes a face of displeasure that Ciri finds startlingly childish on his stoic features, but he beckons to her a moment after. “Come on, Ciri.” 

“Oh,” Vesemir says, stopping both of them as they start to move for the door. “And I’ll talk with Lambert. In the meantime, girl—” Ciri braces herself, expecting to be admonished, but he only looks tired. Fatigued. “Don’t go getting into fights you can’t finish. That’s the first rule of combat, understand? Good fighters know when to turn the other cheek. I’ve got enough problems in this keep.” He gestures for them to leave, then. 

Ciri takes his advice into fair consideration. The heat of the moment has not been her ally, except that it has sometimes saved her life. The heat of the moment is what has her scream. It’s what keeps her alive. It also kills four men, though. It makes her a monster. 

She has to learn to control herself, she decides. She has to learn how not to scream: she doesn’t even let herself consider learning how to control her unsettling power, not now, not when there’s no space for experimentation in a keep full of witchers that would certainly find issue with her suddenly presenting awful, destructive abilities. Realistically, she has to find some other way to defend herself, so that screaming will not be her only resort. 

She thinks of the training grounds.

Chapter Text

Geralt finds Eskel so quickly that Ciri thinks he must be able to smell the man. He is, in Ciri’s limited experience, one of the better-smelling witchers; Geralt smells distinctly like Roach (which is to say horse-y), and Lambert like a particularly strong alcohol, when she’s close enough to catch a whiff of his breath. Eskel’s got a bit of Geralt’s animal-smell to him, but also something earthy. Dirt and basil, maybe, though she’s no idea how he would keep basil around enough to smell like it (and she hasn’t spent very much time as a cook or a naturalist, and isn’t sure if basil is the smell she’s trying to identify at all). 

Coën is the nicest smelling, though. He’s got a warm scent, like spiced cider. Ciri thinks that it’s probably the result of bathing regularly with a nicely-scented soap. Coën appears better kempt than the others by an order of magnitude.

If it’s not Eskel’s scent that Geralt follows, she surmises that it could be the cadence of his footsteps, echoing through the halls so that only a witcher could hear; or knowledge of routines, where it would be no challenge to find Eskel if he knew that he’d finished with training and knew his next location; or, perhaps, whatever magnetism exists between them, keeping them together at dinner tables and as they walk, simply pulls them back together whenever they’re apart. 

(And maybe the keep is simply not that big, when you know its halls. Maybe it’s simple to walk the few halls that they use until they find their targets. It’s a disappointing, grounding reality, though. Ciri goes back to the nicer ideals. There has to be some real connection, some warmth in this place. To keep the shadows away.)

They find Eskel down a hallway that Ciri hasn’t been in before, she doesn’t think. He sees Geralt and smiles, easy and affectionate. It twists his scars unflatteringly. 

It’s like a soldier, Ciri decides. Fighters who come back from battle with missing limbs or eyes. She’s seen her fair share of those; Eskel is no exception. Witchers, she thinks, are soldiers in their own way, a small, scattered army facing off against the monsters all across the continent. Surely he was injured in battle. Something with claws, something vicious. Battle scars are only a sign of honor. She’d been rude to recoil when they first met. 

She apologizes in her head. She doesn’t like to admit fault aloud. Besides, when Eskel glances down from Geralt to her, his expression shifts, and in his way, he recoils from her as well. So they’re basically even. 

“What is it?” Eskel asks, at an easy neutral, besides the slight tension to him that Ciri knows is because of her. She still can’t figure out what it is that gets under his skin. She thinks she would trust him far more if he treated her like a person, like Coën does. “Not dinnertime already, I’m sure.”

Geralt smiles back—so strange, to see him smile—but Ciri narrows her eyes when she sees his face closing off, the way it does when he doesn’t want to talk about something. He’s going to give Eskel some bullshit excuse, she’s suddenly sure. She looks back at Eskel, who seems to have some issue with her but obviously cares for Geralt, and decides in a moment to rat out her protector.

“Vesemir says you’re supposed to look at his leg,” she says, bluntly, and feels a little proud of herself when Geralt hisses “Ciri—” at her. He’d planned on bluffing. She knew it. “He still hasn’t let anyone near it.”

When Eskel looks at her, there is definitely a hint more warmth in his eyes. “Is that so?” His expression, when his gaze tracks back to Geralt, seems at once exhausted and amused. “You’d think you’d grow out of being a stubborn bastard.” 

“I grew out of a lot of things,” Geralt says, and Ciri catches Eskel’s gaze as it lands on her again. He looks away a moment later, discomfited. “Stubbornness isn’t one of them.” 

Eskel sighs, and steps past Geralt, catching him by the elbow to pull him along with far more force than strictly necessary. “Alright, you dumb brute. Let’s get you looked at.”  

Geralt stumbles, nearly falls, and then—Ciri nearly has to pinch herself, she thinks she really might be dreaming—he laughs, low and rough, and twists to throw himself full-bodied into Eskel’s back. When his friend staggers under his weight, he crows, “Who’re you calling a brute?” His voice is still thick with laughter.

Ciri feels dreadfully, terribly lonely for a moment. Geralt looks back at her, still smiling, and beckons expectantly; it lessens the sting, but now that she’s noticed it, she has an awful feeling that it’s a worm that’s already burrowed into her heart, and it won’t be alleviated anytime soon.

She follows, and Geralt blocks a playful blow from Eskel to smooth a hand over her hair. “Alright,” he says, “don’t bowl over the girl.” Still amused, almost joyful.

Eskel’s eyes fall on Ciri once again, and she spots disappointment in his eyes. Just for a millisecond. But it’s there. He manages to smile awkwardly at her in the next second. “Right. Pardon me, princess.” 

Does he think she’s stealing Geralt away? Ciri is briefly, furiously angry at the thought. He has no right to her protector. They may have been friends, but she and Geralt are destined: that much she has come to be sure of, after all the shit she went through to find him. If this is the silly, childish issue that Eskel has been tiptoeing around with her for the last day… well. She can be childish. She’s practically a fucking expert at it. She goes to walk next to Geralt, and takes a fistful of his shirt as she does, like a child with their mother’s skirts. Geralt looks down, mildly surprised, but she turns her nose up to head off questions.

Eskel looks uncomfortable. Perfect. He manages to get himself together in a timely manner, though, and continues to walk on Geralt’s other side. “Lambert’s been using it as a distillery since Vesemir kicked him out of the alchemy lab, but the infirmary still has our medical supplies. We can at least switch out the bandage.” 

What it comes down to, Ciri finds, is that Eskel doesn’t think she should be in the room when they unwrap the wound, and Geralt agrees. It is infuriating.

“Why not?” she demands. “I’ve seen blood.” In a moment of spite that’s definitely unfair, she turns on Geralt, narrows her eyes at him. “You know I’ve seen blood.” 

She doesn’t know what he’s thinking of, but he looks briefly guilty. She’s thinking of Vereena, the way her empty neck spilt blood onto frosted cobblestones like rich wine. She’s thinking of people running, screaming, in the refugee camp, as Nilfgaard’s soldiers closed in. She’s thinking of the slaughter of her citizens in Cintra. She’s thinking of her grandmother, bleeding out, the last time that Ciri had seen her face. The last time she’d held her hand.

It all seems suddenly silly. She doesn’t really want to see Geralt’s stupid rotted leg. It was just… the point of the matter.

“You don’t need to see any more,” Geralt tells her.

“Besides, it’s not really about blood,” Eskel puts in. “I wouldn’t make a fuss if it was. If he’s still got necrosis under there—” ( “I don’t,” Geralt mutters, “I told you a druid cleansed it—” ) “Or even a trace of it, it could be toxic for a human to breathe in.” 

“I knew it was toxic,” Ciri exclaims, turning on Geralt again.

“It isn’t,” Geralt grits out. His patience, apparently, has been tested by all the people around him being reasonable. “Not in a bite. It’s the rotted stuff getting in the air that’s toxic.” 

Ciri wrinkles her nose. “Ew.” 

When she glances over, Eskel looks thoughtful. Sympathetic. And he’s looking back at her. “Tell you what,” he says, “you like Coën, don’t you? He’s cooking tonight. Might be easier to keep him company.” The sympathetic expression gets a little deeper. Ciri looks past the scars to see it. “Geralt’ll be right back when we know he’s not killing himself by pure pride.” 

Geralt rolls his eyes at Eskel, but he does take the time to exchange a glance with Ciri, talking without talking in the way that he does. This subtle expression asks Ciri if she’ll be alright. Ciri purses her lips momentarily—she has to remember that she’s been with the other witchers without Geralt already, and she’d been fine—before she nods her head. 

So they drop her in the kitchen with Coën, who she does feel comfortable around, and who is creating some very appealing smells in the kitchen. Probably for the best. Better to be comfortable with the food than to sit with Geralt’s undoubtedly fucked up zombie leg. It’s much warmer in the kitchen, with the fire burning to heat the oven, so Ciri puts her cloak carefully over the back of a chair before she sits down.

“I trust Geralt gave you a suitable tour,” Coën says, checking on whatever he has cooking (some kind of meat, by the smell) before closing the oven door and coming to sit with her. The light of the oven’s fire glints off the skin of his cheeks and the shaved crown of his head. “Do you feel a bit more comfortable, now you know your surroundings?”

Ciri thinks about it. She does, a bit. “Yes,” she admits, “but it still feels too large to really know. I’ve seen the places, but I couldn’t find my way through those hallways.”

Coën laughs, gently, courteously. “I understand, your highness. When Lambert first brought me up here, I felt the same way. I got lost the first time I tried to find my way to the training grounds alone. That’s just the nature of the witcher keeps, I suppose.”

Ciri’s curiosity picks a few things out of that statement, but the largest point of surprise is immediately regurgitated. “You weren’t always here? I thought it was a tradition. Don’t witchers always come here in the winter?”

Coën’s confusion shows in the slight furrow of his brow. “Wolf witchers, yes.” When Ciri mirrors his confusion straight back at him, he seems to have a moment of epiphany. “Ah! Come look, highness.” He lifts his medallion, same as Geralt and Eskel and Lambert’s, and leans over the table so that she can see it better.

Upon closer inspection, it is not the same as Geralt’s at all. Geralt’s medallion is clearly emblazoned with a wolf, and so is Vesemir’s (she’d had plenty of time to notice it, sitting and watching their experiments), but Coën’s is emblazoned with something beaked and feathered. Ciri draws back from her examination and frowns at him for an explanation.

“There are different schools of witchers,” Coën explains. “The rest here are of the School of the Wolf, and this is their keep—they’ve all practically grown up here.” Something must occur to him, because he pauses, brows furrowed again, and repeats, “Practically. Either way, they know it backward and forward. My school is that of the Griffin. Our keep laid in Kovir; it wasn’t until it was destroyed that Lambert offered me a place here for the winter.”

“Destroyed?”

“About a decade ago.” Coën smiles, but he doesn’t guard his emotions so closely as Geralt, and Ciri can see the pain seeping through. Something about his eyes. “It was mages, I hear. We had a beautiful library, you know, your highness. The studies of ages, thousands of books. I imagine that’s what they were after.”

“I’m sorry.” Ciri grasps for words, holding Coën’s melancholy, dignified gaze. “That’s awful.” 

Coën smiles again. This attempt is even less successful at hiding the hurt. “It is a witcher’s lot. They could not take our honor, could they?”

Ciri bites her lip. The oven still emanates heat; she is warm and comfortable, and feels dreadful for the sake of this lovely, sad man. “I saw your books in the library,” she tells him, by way of comfort. “It’s a lovely collection.” 

Coën’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “You’re welcome to them, your highness. I leave them here to be read, little value as they may have.”

“You’re a sap, Coën,” someone says behind Ciri.

Ciri startles as the voice sounds behind her. She whirls, heartbeat racing, to see Lambert, leaned comfortably against the doorway as if he’d been there all along. “Downright sentimental, if you catch him on a bad day,” he continues. “All the griffins are.”

Ciri bristles at the sight of him, but Coën seems cheered by his presence. “It’s only the way we were brought up,” he says, and then, with a hint of a real smile, “just as the wolves were apparently brought up to be cynics and skeptics, down to the last man.”

“Yeah, well.” Lambert pushes up off the doorframe and walks around the table as if he hadn’t seen Ciri at all, even though he had to have been talking to her earlier. She aims her most vicious glare at him. She doubts it’ll scare him off, but he’d backed down when she resorted to force earlier. (She still has a dagger tucked under her shirt.) “That’s just sensible. World’s a cynical place.” He dumps himself in the chair next to Coën, and meets Ciri’s glare head on. “Look, Princess—”

“What?” Ciri snaps. “Come with another low-brow, idiotic insult?”

Lambert guffaws. It’s not a particularly nice sound, but she doesn’t think he intended it to be. “You and Geralt, two peas in a pod.” Ciri bristles again, hackles raised, but then he says, “I’m trying to apologize, your royal petulance. Not the time for throwing glares. Or horseshoes.”

“... what?”

“Look,” Lambert says again, this time with a sigh, “I didn’t know my mam very long, but she was a good woman. I don’t like people talkin’ about her.” Coën smiles encouragingly beside him. Lambert brings a hand up to scratch the back of his head, increasingly awkward. “Didn’t mean to say nothin’ bout your mum. Specially as she’s not here to throw a horseshoe herself.” With the words out of his mouth, he begins to recollect himself. “You held your own, though, girl. Good on you.” 

Ciri frowns at him. Coën looks beseechingly at her—she has a creeping feeling that he had something to do with this spontaneous apology. She’s still angry, and it’s a dogshit apology besides, but… she doesn’t really need enemies so early on in her stay, does she? 

“I didn’t know my mother,” she says, finally, “but my grandmother didn’t raise me to be bullied by a rat with red hair.”

She doesn’t know exactly what does it, but that makes Lambert laugh, loud and rough. It doesn’t seem so mean-spirited as times before. “Spitfire, didn’t I say? Competition for the dragon that nearly took a chunk out of Geralt’s ass. You’ll get along fine here, Princess.”

Coën’s expression indicates that he thinks there’s been some kind of breakthrough. Ciri gets the same kind of sense, but she’s hardly grateful for the resolving of a fight that a grown man had started in the first place. She rolls her eyes. (Still, she feels a bit lighter, with Lambert no longer so much of an enemy.)

“What’s dinner?” Lambert asks next, propping his elbow on the back of his chair as he turns to Coën. “Smells fuckin’ delicious.” 

“Venison roast with potatoes.” Coën looks considerably brightened by the whole ordeal, and rather pleased about his choice of dish. “I brought a recipe back from the Path; a grandmother insisted I take it as thanks for breaking a curse on her grandchild, and I thought I’d save it for when everyone had arrived.” 

“A right sap,” Lambert says, but he looks pleased by the promise of dinner as well. The smell is enticing enough to draw Ciri in, as well. “So,” he continues, turning back to Ciri, “what brings you here without the White Wolf? He didn’t suddenly decide he had some other damsel to go save, did he?”

Ciri glowers defensively. “No. Geralt’s supposed to get his leg looked at, and Eskel says I shouldn’t be there in case I breathe in the… the necro rot-whatever.”

“She’s helping me,” Coën offers, helpfully, as he stands and goes to stoke the fire without any help from Ciri whatsoever. 

Lambert raises an eyebrow at her. Ciri tilts her chin up defiantly. If Coën offers her utility, she’ll take it. The fuck does Lambert know?

By the time that the roast is finished cooking, and Geralt and Eskel appear to join them, and they all go for dinner, Ciri has survived a whole conversation with Lambert. It’s… promising. He seems to have no default besides mocking comments and amusement at the former. It’s not an attractive quality. In fact, Ciri still finds it quite unpleasant. It is, however, easier to accept once she knows that it’s not directed at her. He teases as much with Coën, and she knows that they’re friends; must be, for Lambert to offer that Coën spend a whole winter with him and the others.

Geralt’s leg is wrapped with a new bandage; it’s hardly the pristine white cloth that Ciri has seen from infirmaries before, rough-woven and slightly yellowed as it is, but she supposes that it’s hard to acquire lovely white bandages in a crumbling old castle, and it’s probably difficult enough to carry supplies up the mountain. Either way, it looks better than any of Geralt’s bandages had looked when he’d swapped them out during their travels. Ciri’s no expert, but looking at the job that Eskel must have done (it really does look very different), she thinks that Geralt might be a bit shit at medical work. 

“Not rotted,” Geralt announces, with a roll of his eyes, as they escort Coën and his steaming pot of venison to the hall. “Believe it or not.”

“Not fit to be heavily exercising on, either,” Eskel follows, a bit of a smug look on his face. Geralt rolls his eyes again. Ciri tries to hide a smile.

Coën proves to be a much better cook than Lambert. He’s no gourmet—Ciri finds that he’s overcooked the meat just a bit, so that the juices have dried up and the venison has gone just this side of tough, and that it’s lacking in the kind of spices that royal chefs would typically use to compensate for the filling, rather bland taste of simple meat and potatoes (good for peasant ware and soldier staples, but rather unsuitable for a banquet)—but. It’s good. She can’t afford to have such standards, especially as she can’t cook for herself; and she’s eaten much worse since the fall of her kingdom. The potatoes are lovely and soft, with salt and some fat from the meat. She thinks they would have improved the taste of the rat she’d shared with Dara immensely.

She hopes he’s doing alright. She hopes his ears haven’t found their way around the neck of another aspiring young soldier. 

Vesemir says nothing at dinner, but Ciri notices him watching her and Lambert, and he seems pleased enough that they’re not at each other’s throats. Well. That Ciri’s not at the witcher’s throat, at least, because she doesn’t think he’d bother being upset with her. She doesn’t think he really sees her as a threat. As worth the bother. It sort of makes her want to throw another horseshoe at him. Or maybe her dagger.

Still, though, that considering look he’d given her after she’d thrown the thing seems significant. Significant, at least, in that he hasn’t looked at her quite so dismissively as this morning, as the night before. He’d said that she held her own. Maybe… it’s a leap. And she has no wish for it, she doesn’t need it. But maybe it’s a sign of some respect. 

She’s still peeved that Coën had orchestrated that apology. She’s not sure how, but she’s confident he’d had some part in it, with how pleased he’d looked at the whole ordeal. Lambert had looked somewhat sorry, though. He’d talked about his mother. It’s strange to think about a witcher with a mother, somehow, even though they’d hardly have been born without one. It’s strange to think about a witcher being born.

Oh. Except, of course it is, because witchers aren’t born. The folk tales are before Ciri’s time, she thinks: she’s never heard them first-hand, but she remembers some of the older generals, men come from the peasantry who rose through the ranks, talking about stories that their parents told to scare them into behaving. Being taken by a witcher, apparently, ranked high on a list of childhood fears. Witchers, apparently, are not born, but made.

She’s not sure what to do with that recollection. She has a sudden image of Lambert as a child her age, not a witcher but a boy. She thinks about Dara. She thinks about the boys she’d been friends with back at the castle. She thinks about Eist’s rough-and-tumble Skelliger nephews, the ones who always greeted Ciri warmly and called her cousin, who hugged her without the least bit of respect for royal propriety. She feels suddenly overwhelmed by a melancholy, the source of which she cannot identify. She shakes the first image of a hypothetical Lambert out of her head. It serves her no good to be fantasizing about things she has no knowledge of in the first place.

It still brings her to wonder. What kind of boy had Geralt been, before he was a witcher?

Dinner fills her stomach in a comforting way. The weight of it settles so that she knows she’s not hungry; still, she considers following Coën back to the kitchen and spiriting away a loaf of bread to keep with her in the room she’s occupying, in case she should need it, in case she should want it. The logistics of it spin over in her mind. How hard would it be not to be caught, with a witcher’s senses on her; how would she explain another trip to the kitchen; how she should lie if asked about a missing loaf of bread. Do they count their bread? Ciri would. If she was atop a mountain, far from anything. She would want to know how much she had. They’re running out of apples, she remembers. The thought makes her feel sick to her stomach again.

She’s still thinking about it all when a fire has been lit in the great fireplace and the witchers are playing cards with decks pulled from nowhere. Vesemir leaves them to their entertainments. She’s sitting by Geralt as he faces off against Lambert. She dimly registers that there’s tension between them, but she’s not paying attention. Lambert’s got some stupid thing against Geralt. She’d already known that. She’s thinking about how Dara had to learn to catch and cook rats. She’s thinking about bread.

“Are you tired?” 

Geralt’s voice, directed at her, pulls her briefly from her thoughts, though the anxious feeling still churns in her stomach, turning up the venison and the soft potatoes. She only looks at him for a moment, trying to recall what he’d said and then find an answer. He looks gentle, with the yellow of his eyes warmed by the tint of the fire. The shadows only sharpen his already-strong features, but the firelight warms his skin, so he’s not so pale, and reflects yellow-gold against the white of his hair. 

She is tired, she finds, the moment she stops to think about it. She’s exhausted. She still hasn’t slept off the exertion of the Killer, or the worries of all this past day, and the food settling in her stomach leaves her warm and sleepy. The spot between Geralt’s brow pinches, as it does when he’s concerned. She wishes briefly that he were the sort of figure to carry her to bed when she was tired like this, as Eist used to do. She wishes that she trusted him enough to allow that if he were. 

“No,” she says, and feels very suddenly sad that she cannot lean her head against Geralt’s shoulder and simply watch him play cards by the warmth and soft light of the fire. “‘M fine.”

Geralt still has the concerned pinch in his brow.

“I do find myself tired,” Eskel announces, from his place watching Geralt and Lambert’s match (the end of the table closest to the fire, opposite of Vesemir’s seat, like his own head of the table). “So I hope nobody’s going to be upset if I call the night to a close. Coën and I have the rest of the roof to finish tomorrow, and I don’t feel like falling off it for lack of sleep.” Ciri gradually brings her gaze over to him and finds him very carefully not looking at her.

Oh, she realizes, as the others agree and start about cleaning and darkening the hall. That was for her, wasn’t it? To let her save face. 

She does not want to be the tired little girl. She puts this act of consideration on a newly constructed list of things in Eskel’s favor. She goes up to bed, sleeps in Vereena’s dress, keeps her hand under her pillow near her dagger. She thinks that she wants a loaf of bread under her pillow as well. For nearly the same reasons.

She dreams of Eist holding her and the smell of her Grandmother’s soap, under the metal tang of armor, and wakes silently sobbing. She clutches at Vereena’s dress. Geralt is no longer a presence across the guttered fire, standing watch without judgment. She cries alone. She goes back to sleep.

In the morning, she successfully identifies Geralt’s room, and they go down to breakfast. She eats an apple, she does not get a peek at the cupboard holding them, and they go about their day doing menial chores assigned by Vesemir. She sees a great many spiders, clearing the hallways of cobwebs. She and Geralt sit and watch the witchers train, later; she thinks they fight like he does, but she hasn’t seen him fight very much. They go to dinner, Eskel’s turn to cook, and then the younger witchers turn to talking while the oldest retires. Ciri manages not to nod off before the witchers retire.

The same happens the next day, more or less, and the day after, and she starts to find routine. The hallways become easier to navigate. Geralt gradually walks easier: she hadn’t noticed that he’d still been limping, in his own way. She hasn’t known him without a ghoul’s teeth in his leg. Theoretically. She still doesn’t know what the wound actually looks like. Maybe there are actual teeth in there. Maybe they’re toxic. 

Eskel still shies away from her, though she sees his moments of kindness. She can’t decide whether he’s doing these things for her sake or Geralt’s. He seems a kind man—not in the way that Geralt is a kind man, covered in roughness, kind like a blade purposefully dulled before a strike, but properly kind. Sweet-tempered. He’s no delicate flower, certainly. Ciri learns quickly that he laughs louder than he should and gets drunker than the others, when Lambert deems his home-brewed alcohol ready for consumption. Coën is measured in his kindness. Polite, like a knight. Ciri has never dwelt in a village, but she imagines that Eskel’s kindness is the kind you see in a small community like that. Not quite kind like the woman who had tried to help her just before Geralt, even after Ciri had stolen her horses. She doesn’t think he’s quite forgiving like that. It’s the small, quiet actions, though. The common decency. Ciri doesn’t think you learn that in a city.

Lambert, she finds, is easier to tolerate when he’s not around Geralt. Still annoying, too rough at the edges, but he’s not so mean-spirited. Ciri has to work very hard not to laugh at one of his remarks, a couple of times.

Vesemir is still a fair-sized question mark in her mind. She can’t quite get a handle on what he wants from her. She thinks it might be an aversion of the same kind as Eskel’s, except that Vesemir is too old and too practiced to be skittish around a girl. 

Ciri begins to put a list of things together. Things she wants to do, things she wants to know. The room beside the storage room full of trainee clothes is high on the list. The way Geralt had looked at it makes her think that it must hold some significance; it also gives her pause. If Geralt had been unsettled by the thought of a room, what must it hold? Later in the winter. She’ll see it later in the winter. 

She wants some more questions answered, as well. What happened to Kaer Morhen. Why there were so many clothes for trainees, and why they have been left untouched for so long. What Lambert has against Geralt. Coën still seems her best bet for answers: she splits off from Geralt, one late afternoon, to go find him. 

When Geralt starts to train again, she thinks, she’d also like to learn to fight. 

Coën is not in the kitchen, nor with Lambert in his infirmary-distillery (who offers Ciri a glass of whatever he concocts in those barrels with a grin that raises danger warnings in her mind. She does not take it). Maybe the library, then, with his bright-colored romances. Ciri goes up the stairs and takes a few very confident turns before she manages to get herself properly lost in hallways of unused rooms in her search for the library. It makes her glad of her cloak, even inside—the chill of dark hallways, far from lit sconces or even the light of the sun, has her pulling the forest-green fabric closer around her shoulders.

The feel of unknown hallways sends a different kind of chill through her bones. She’s gotten accustomed to knowing where she’s going, the last few days; and even when she hadn’t known, she’d had Geralt with her to lead the way. Being lost is very unsettling. 

When she’s sure she doesn’t know where she’s ended up, Ciri stops against a wall to slow the accelerating beating of her heart and to decide on her next moves. The logical part of her brain says that Geralt will come to find her soon enough. The witchers have heightened senses, and the sound of her, maybe even the smell of her, if not knowledge of the corridors, will bring them to her once she’s been gone long enough to warrant looking for her. 

The animal part of her brain, the part that remembers her time lost and panicked in the woods, in the dark, whispers that these hallways must be infinite. That there are only more halls out in the shadows. That no matter how far she runs, she will never find a landmark she knows. She will only get farther from Geralt.

She could swear that she hears the sound of spider legs moving in the dark. She presses her eyes closed against the shadowy, spiderwebbed dark of the hall and breathes deep. It’s silly. No matter how lost she might get, the keep is only so large. It’s only disorienting.

This castle is haunted, don’t you remember? her panic tells her. You’ve known it all this time. You’re only just now seeing it. This is how hauntings happen, Cirilla. You get lost. You can’t find your way back to the path. And then the monsters come.  

Panic gets its clawed hand around her heart.

In her mind’s eye, she is in a forest. Not a forest that she knows. A forest that looms dark and foreboding, with trees whose branches hang like gnarled fingers from the sky. She is lost. Alone. Defenseless. And a tree moves. 

Her eyes snap open, and in the dark, she sees something move, slithering, in the dark. She screams. In the next moments, before she consciously tells her body to move, she is scrambling back, away, turning to run. When she gains control again, she pushes her body into a sprint. Get away. Anything to get away. She can’t die in these halls, these strange, haunted halls, they’re supposed to be safe for her—she’s supposed to have Geralt with her—she’s supposed to be alright—

She runs. Her legs burn. Her breath comes heavy. She turns corridor after corridor, and barely registers that it’s getting lighter and lighter until she comes out into a sunlit hallway and fails to pull herself up in time to avoid running into Eskel. She collides with him, and hears the remaining air rush out of her lungs with a small oomph.

Strong hands on her shoulders are steadying her a moment later. She heaves for air, eyes still wide, words choked in her throat.

Eskel leans closer, watching her face closely. His own expression betrays a hint of worry; brows pressed together, and a tinge of wildness in his eyes, the same as Ciri sees in Geralt’s eyes when he fears for something. “Are you alright, lass?”

Ciri tries to speak. Her words don’t work. She swallows once, heavily, and feels her body come back to itself, with her hands shaking and the warmth of Eskel’s hands against her shoulders. “I got lost,” she finally manages, barely registering what a fool she must be making of herself, little girl terrified by getting herself turned around. “And there—there was something out there, something moving, and—and—” 

No more words come willingly to her mouth. She only shivers. The foolhardiness of her situation creeps back slowly into her mind, like a drip of molasses. She has nothing else to say but that she saw something move. 

“Ah,” Eskel says, expression softening, voice tinged with compassion. Compassion. Ciri hasn’t heard that one from a witcher before. “Alright. Where were you trying to go?”

“The library,” she answers, shakily. He isn’t listening to her, she realizes; he’s pacifying her, pulling her out of her panic. “But I saw something, Eskel. Something moved.” 

“I’m sure you did,” he says, and Ciri’s heart drops. He doesn’t believe her. He thinks she’s foolish, frivolous, that she’s only scared of the dark— when he continues, though, his tone is not patronizing, and she can only hold his steady gaze and try to keep her lip from quivering. “The hallways are no easy matter, and the keep is old. I’ve seen spiders the size of dinner plates moved in to keep out of the cold, and when you’ve been through much at a young age…” he considers her another moment, and sighs. “I don’t mean to tell you you’re hysterical. Just that you’re safe, Ciri. All matter of things move in the dark, and it’s only sensible to be frightened of them. But you are safe. Alright?”

Ciri breathes in deep, and pulls herself together to nod. He’s right. “It was dark,” she admits. “I just… I just panicked.”

“That’s alright,” Eskel assures. “Happens to the best of us, ‘specially when you know what’s out there. You better now?”

She nods again. “Yes. Yeah. I probably just— probably just imagined it. Saw a spiderweb move in the wind. Or something.” 

She says it as much to assure herself as to agree with him. It allows her heartbeat to calm, though. 

“Alright. Let’s get you to the library, then.”

Eskel pats her shoulder, then releases her to stand on her own, and steps aside for her to walk with him. Ciri takes one last long look at the shadowed hallways behind her, and for a moment wants to ask Eskel to go look through them, just to be sure, like a child with an imaginary monster under their bed. She shakes the idea away quickly. The further she gets from her panic, the more logical she becomes, and despite the shame, she’s sure that her mind had concocted some mixture of all the things she’d been terrified of in the woods before coming here. It can’t be anything dangerous, anyway. Not in a keep full of witchers. Maybe a garden snake had found its way in. She lets Eskel escort her to the library. 

Better that he doesn’t go back into the shadowy halls, anyway. Ciri tries not to think about it, but some instinct sits heavy over her heart and tells her that it’s dangerous, back in the dark. That she’d be sending him to his doom. Better that they both walk away.

Chapter Text

Eskel escorts her to the library with a dignified tenacity. His air of discomfort, however, starts to build up around him like a miasma after a few moments, and Ciri registers the weight of disappointment in her chest when she notices it. Nice of him to be concerned about her, and to interact with her like a normal person for that short time, but she supposes nothing lasts. She pulls herself from scared to sullen. It’s a good way to distract herself from the seeping, heavy sense of dread she’d carried out of the labyrinth of halls. 

Coën is waiting for them at the open library door, one hand against the doorframe. His expression of mild concern resolves into a practiced relief when he sees them. “Everything’s alright, then? I heard the scream, but your voices sounded alright after that.”

“Just a scare in the halls,” Eskel explains, easy as anything. Ciri tries not to look too embarrassed. Coën, at least, is the witcher she’d least expect to judge her. Eskel puts a hand on her shoulder, after a moment of hesitation that she marks with another drop of disappointment, and ushers her toward the door. “Enjoy your library time. I’m going to go assure the others. I’m sure you don’t want them fussing over you.” And with that, he turns to leave. Ciri frowns after him.

Coën pulls her back to the present by shifting to hold the door open for her. “You wanted to spend some time in the library?”

Ciri nods, and then nods again in respectful acknowledgement when she ducks past him into the room. He asks once again if she’s alright, and she sighs. “Fine,” she drags out, and drops herself into one of the more comfortable chairs. “Only I seem to be seeing things.”

“In all fairness, your highness, tricks of the light affect us all. You can hardly be blamed for that.”

Ciri purses her lips. She can be blamed if she’s allowing her experiences to make her paranoid, make her delusional, but she doesn’t think that’s something Coën wants to hear. He seems to be an idealist. She’s sure he’d only have something positive, sentimental, to counter that, and fear and discomfort have not currently disposed her to sentimentality. She sees one of his novels placed pages-down on the table, open, to keep his page momentarily. He’s got the fireplace going. 

Redirecting herself, she remembers what had occurred to her earlier. Geralt being absent (and probably a little concerned, after hearing her scream, which she feels slightly guilty for) means that she can ask the questions he doesn’t want to hear. Coën had been her most preferable option for answers, anyway: he’s her very best option, right now, because she’s becoming very irritated with Eskel for whatever grudge he has against her.

“Coën,” she starts, tempering back her irritation to something sweeter, “could I ask you something?”

“Of course, Princess. What is it?” He closes the door to keep the heat of the fire in, and turns to give her his attention.

Ciri hesitates, considering how to phrase it, and decides to go for an easier question than the one Geralt has been steadfastly avoiding. “You and Lambert are friends, aren’t you?”

Coën gives her a questioning look. “Of course we are. We’ve been friends for many years. What makes you ask?” He sits back in what must have been his previous spot, near where the book had been left.

“I don’t know how you stand him,” Ciri confesses. “He’s surly, and—and crude, and his jokes aren’t nearly funny. He’s nothing like you at all.”

He smiles sympathetically. “I do understand, your highness. He can be difficult to live with—I can only imagine how disastrous he would be as a diplomat—but there really is more to him than you see. More than his brothers see, either, I think. He is a strong, honest, and kind man, at his heart, but few manage to reach that far.”

Ciri sniffs and tries not to pout. She scootches her chair closer to the fire. The warmth of it is really quite nice. Still, it’s a rather unsatisfying answer, isn’t it? Just to tell her that Lambert is a good man when her whole issue is that he isn’t? Sure, he’s been slightly less of an asshole to her (not to Geralt in the least bit), but after an initial precedent of mockery and insinuating that Geralt had fucked her mother, that is hardly a difficult bar to overcome. “Don’t see why anyone would want to bother. He’s only a trouble to be around.”

Coën makes another sympathetic expression. “It’s nothing to do with you, your highness. You’ve not seen him at his best: he’s angry with Geralt, and you only happen to be around him when Geralt is.” 

Well, that’s— it rather makes sense, actually, but it’s also ridiculous. “What’s he angry with Geralt for?” Ciri demands. “Aren’t you lot supposed to be some happy family up here? Geralt said this place was like a home.” 

“For him, it is,” Coën admits. “It’s not my right to tell Lambert’s business. Apologies, highness.”

The sudden end to her line of questioning brings her up short, annoyed and unsure of how to proceed. Ciri huffs, scrapes a nail across the grain of the rough wooden arm of the chair. “And I suppose Eskel has some secret anger that you also can’t tell me about.”

Coën’s expression turns thoughtful. “If you want the truth, I’m not sure what is bothering him. Besides the obvious, I mean. You’re here under the word of Geralt, and I should think that would be enough for him.”

“The obvious?” Ciri seizes on the opportunity. “It’s to do with there being no humans here, isn’t it? It can’t be all that steadfast a rule. People are unkind to witchers, but it’s not as if…” she can’t think of an alternative, so she continues, “anyway, there was that troubadour writing all those songs about witchers, wasn’t there? Those even made it into court, though Grandmother hated it, and I’d hear it in the streets—”

Her reasoning is not met with agreement. Instead, Coën looks at her, with the warmth of the firelight reflecting in his deep brown eyes and off his deep brown skin, and he looks pitying.  

She stops short again. It’s so unexpected a reaction that she doesn’t know what to do with it. “Toss a coin to your witcher,” she tries, weakly. “You’re heroes, aren’t you?”

“Apologies, your highness, but I think you haven’t spent much time with the common people. The general opinion of witchers is not so favorable. That bard did us a great deal of good, but much as a song holds the power to change hearts, it cannot change them all.” His mouth quirks up into a smile, but it does not hold much joy or mirth. She thinks it’s meant to placate her.

“Well—” Ciri struggles for words. She wants answers , but it’s difficult when all of her assumptions are being torn down and all her lines of questioning cut off. “It can’t have been that bad, to ban all humans. What could they even have done?” She remembers the tumultuous hike up the Killer, and shudders from the sheer memory of the cold. “Why would humans even want to come up to Kaer Morhen, to warrant a ban?”

Coën looks pitying again, but his expression closes off a moment later. “Sorry, highness. This is not my home, my keep. It is not mine to talk about.”

Ciri has no idea what that could even mean. Something to do with the everything that surrounds Kaer Morhen, certainly. The trunks full of children’s clothes, the way the ramparts crumble, the sheer size of it with the small company that it houses. Something to do with humans happened here. Something awful enough to cross one of Coën’s knightly moral lines. Something awful. 

So he won’t tell her. Ciri twists her lips this way and that, frustrated, but comes up with no contradiction that would possibly entice him to talk about what he clearly considers someone else’s business. Annoying. She exchanges a few more polite, meaningless bits of conversation for his benefit: all that courtly training did amount to something, it seems. For a while, she considers finding some excuse to leave without actually reading any books, before she remembers the hallways that await her when she chooses to leave. She does not wish to face that alone. She begrudgingly decides to wait until Coën is amenable to leaving, so that he can escort her back to the land of the living, out of the dead air of the halls. 

She sits next to Geralt at dinner that night (keeping him between her and Vesemir, which allows her to hide behind some of his bulk) and wonders if he would answer her questions. He did not want to tell her about strange, pretty, dead Yennefer: he did not answer her question about the storeroom of clothes, either. No. Geralt, she decides, is too haunted by whatever has happened to be honest with her. She isn’t sure if he’s trying to protect her or protect himself, by refusing to talk about things, but either way, it’ll stop her from getting what she wants.

Which leaves only a few options. Two of those options are Lambert and Vesemir, which are really no options at all (she doesn’t think the old man hates her, but he’s a bit too much like her grandmother, and she’s scared to engage with him), and so she’s only left with… Eskel. Who sits on Geralt’s other side.

He can’t hate her. He’s kind to her, in his ways. He’s just… uncomfortable, in a manner that Ciri finds utterly pathetic and embarrassing for a grown man. 

She’ll confront him about it, she decides, choking down another bite of Lambert’s awful stew (it tastes horrid, but she has to eat, she has to eat—). There’s no way around it, unless the two of them want to continue tiptoeing around Geralt, avoiding each other, like the Continent’s most pointless game of hide-and-seek. 

In the meantime, she and Geralt excuse themselves from the hall, so Geralt can guide her up to bed. She’s learned the way well enough, except that it’s harder in the dark. There’s also her scare from earlier, which makes her reticent to go alone, which she will certainly not tell Geralt. Eskel looked at her sort of knowingly when she whispered to Geralt for an escort, but she doesn’t think he judges. 

As she tries not to press too close to Geralt in the dark of the halls, tries not to look too scared, she attempts to broach a different subject. Not one of the dark secrets hiding in Kaer Morhen’s dusty, spider-webbed corners, but one of practicality. “I’d like to learn to fight,” she says.

Geralt looks at her, yellow eyes sharp in the shadows, all the lines of his face hardened by the slivers of moonlight that manage to reach them. He only squints at her for a moment, but then he says, “Alright.”

“Alright?” she exclaims, almost on instinct. She hadn’t expected so easy an acquiescence. 

Geralt hums and turns to keep walking. “Only sensible. You’re not exactly going to face daisies and roses everywhere you go, from now on.” Which is a rather crushing reminder that the only thing Ciri can expect outside of these walls is vitriol and squalor and the feeling of being hunted. “We’re witchers. We can’t teach you much else, but we can teach you to fight. Teach you to protect yourself.”

Ciri’s heart soars at that promise. She can be strong. She can learn to defend herself. Keep herself safe. She allows herself a private moment of excitement before she haltingly decides to speak again.

“Grandmother wouldn’t allow me to learn to fight.”

Geralt’s eyes find her again in the dark. “Really? That’s a surprise.”

And it would be, wouldn’t it, to an outside force? The Lioness of Cintra, raising a defenseless cub. “She said I was to be a lady,” Ciri says, allowing the sardonic tone to creep into her voice. It’s the first time she’s spoken aloud about her grandmother since her death. Since Cintra. “Said that she slaughtered enemies so I wouldn’t have to, that it wasn’t my lot in life.” 

“She never taught your mother, either,” Geralt says, like an offering. “From what I’ve heard and seen, at least. Pavetta was the picture of a well-bred lady.” He pauses with what Ciri thinks is unsurety, then continues, “You look very much like her, you know.”

Ciri hadn’t known that Geralt had seen her mother. It makes a sort of sense, considering that Ciri is a child of surprise, and so he must have claimed her when her mother was pregnant. “You knew my mother?” she asks. Her throat starts to close with tears, choking her words, without her permission.

They’re almost to her room. She’s worried, for a moment, that Geralt will give another of his half-answers and leave her to sit, alone, to consider it. 

“I was at her betrothal banquet,” he answers, after a moment. “Well. I suppose it was a birthday celebration, but everyone knew it was really for her betrothal. Your grandmother was never one to shy from an opportunity.”

They reach the door of her room, and Geralt opens it for her: the stone inside is cool grey and moonlit. When she steps inside, he pauses, and says, “There were many people there. Eist Tuirseach, your—grandfather, I suppose, he was there.” And then, instead of leaving her to her devices, he also steps inside and moves to sit with her on the moth-eaten bed. He’s going to tell her the story, Ciri realizes. She feels a sudden surge of emotion. She crosses her legs under her to listen (she’s got her shoes on the bed, but she’s not quite so well behaved enough anymore to care).

“Like I said, your grandmother was very clear with her intentions, and so there were suitors from all over the Continent for your mother’s hand.” For Cintra’s throne, really, Ciri knows. Geralt does not say it because he’s trying to gentle the blow, paint this as a romance instead of a political move, but Ciri knows. Everything is a political move in court. Very likely, nobody was actually there for love of her mother. “Your grandmother’s intention was to have her marry a boy from Skellige—Crach an Craite, I think—and she pulled no punches with the others. She sent a suitor from Nilfgaard straight packing.” They both pause for a silent moment. Some things become clearer in retrospect. Some lines can be traced back longer than one expects.

Still, though, Ciri is both warmed and saddened by the thought of her cousin-uncle, one of the rough and tumble men who greeted her warmly when she went to the Skelliger Isles with Eist. He has his own set of rough and tumble boys that Geralt doesn’t know about, and an even rougher set of girls, who taught her to cheat at dice when Eist was still teaching her to play marbles. She doesn’t remember all of their tricks now. She misses them.

Maybe she could go to Skellige, a thought sounds in her brain, awed with possibility and crowing with the remembrance that she has people who know her, love her. They should still be allies of Cintra. There was never any breaking of any treaty, not when Ciri is still alive to uphold it, and the Skelliger people don’t care much for formalities and clauses. Grandmother had liked that about them. Getting there had been an impossible task, before, but with Geralt on her side— 

After winter. She can only hope that her dear detached family in Skellige will know her and want her.

Geralt is still telling a story.

“Your grandmother had invited me there as a sort of security. She took me for the wrong kind of witcher: the School of the Wolf never takes contracts on human lives, Ciri.” She wonders which school does. “Had me dressed as a noble, if you can imagine that. My friend and I—” Geralt halts, pauses. “Well. Nevermind. Point is that a knight walked in, before the betrothal with Crach could be announced.”

Wonders about Geralt’s mysterious, not-to-be-talked-about friend vanish from Ciri’s mind. For a moment, a vision of a black-plumed helmet flashes in her mind’s eye. No, though, this knight must be her father, Lord Urcheon of Erlenwald. Duny, to her mother, if Eist is to be believed. 

“He walked straight up to the Lioness of Cintra and demanded your mother’s hand in marriage by the Law of Surprise,” Geralt continues, and he seems amused by his own mental image. “Your grandmother wasn’t happy, you can imagine.” Ciri can. Her grandmother never seemed to like her father very much, even when he was long dead. “It was your grandfather who knocked off his helmet and revealed his face. Don’t think people were expecting a hedgehog man.”

It is a rather funny thought, isn’t it? Ciri manages a weak smile. She knows this much, that her father was cursed. Eist had told her as much when she demanded the information that her grandmother wouldn’t give her, still mourning Ciri’s mother and blaming her father. It’s always been a strange idea. She can’t imagine her father, the man scattered across so few paintings, in the form of something so silly as a hedgehog. The paintings are barely enough to give her an image of him, anyway: there is one commemorating their engagement, and one from their wedding day, and one from when Ciri was born, wherein she is only a small bundle under her parents’ serene faces. Though, she supposes, those paintings might not exist at all anymore. Not since Nilfgaard got hold of the castle. Her smile falls.

“Anyway, your grandmother ordered him killed,” Geralt continues, and that’s something Ciri certainly hadn’t heard before. She’d known that Grandmother hadn’t liked Duny, but to order his death the moment she saw him— “Tried to order me to kill him, actually, but she still took me for the wrong kind of witcher. I wasn’t going to kill a cursed human just for looking like a monster. Your father and I fought off royal guards back-to-back until the guests joined in, and then Calanthe called it off.”

Geralt’s way of storytelling is rather disjointed, Ciri thinks. Too much of his own perspective and not enough details. Jumping around. It’s funny, finding something he’s sort of bad at. 

“Was a mess, the whole ordeal. Your father and mother revealed that they’d been having an affair, and your grandmother tried to kill him—well. Wasn’t exactly how it happened. But she did eventually try to kill him herself, and then…” As Ciri is processing her grandmother’s direct attempted murder of her father, Geralt drifts off into some image in his head. 

“Your mother… screamed. That was the first thing.”

Ciri freezes. “What?”

“She screamed like a banshee. Could’ve shaken the castle walls. She must’ve had some sort of latent powers, and that was a tipping point: really went to shit after that. Her screaming, and wind blowing through the hall, and her floating in the air with your father in her arms. Had to knock them down to snap them out of it.” He must notice her astonished face, because he stops, and presses his eyebrows together. “You didn’t know that your mother had magic?”

Ciri can only shake her head dumbly. Her mind is a litany of like me, like me, this must be the same that’s happening to me—

“I don’t know that she ever used it, after that. Though I wasn’t around to see,” Geralt admits. “She had some power, though, your mother. Surprised Aretuza never found her—though they’d have a hell of a time getting her out of your grandmother’s hands.”

Her grandmother. Words stream through Ciri’s mind, dying words, clutching at her grandmother’s clothes and screaming out her desperation. Her mother had done the same. Her mother had done the same.

“You know the rest of the story, I’m sure. Your parents got engaged. Eist Tuirseach proposed to your grandmother and she finally accepted. And then—” Geralt hesitates again. Ciri is too caught up with controlling her breathing to wonder why. “Then your father thanked me for saving his life. Tried to offer me something. So I—I couldn’t think of anything else. I asked for the Law of Surprise. Whatever he had but did not know.” Geralt looks at her, meaningfully. Ciri becomes suddenly aware of the way the bed dips under his weight, compared to hers. “That’s near the exact moment everyone found out your mother was pregnant.”

Ciri feels like she must be reeling, but she knows she’s sitting still. It’s all too much to take in. “And so you got me,” she says, finishing the story for him. Her voice sounds so light and delicate. She doesn’t know how to feel about that.

“Yeah.” Geralt braces his forearms on his knees and focuses his attention onto the ground. “Anyway. That’s the only time I knew your mother. You’re growing to look like her.”

“You never saw her again?” Ciri asks, softly. “Not even when you knew I was your child of surprise? Did you not come to see me when I was born?”

Geralt laughs, low and rough. “No. Your grandmother made it very clear that she didn’t want to see me again, and I wasn’t ready for or wanting a child anyways. I had no intention of taking you from your parents. Melitele knows I didn’t want to take you from them.” His thumb runs over an old, bone-white scar on the back of his hand. “Pavetta had already died long before I came back.” He glances over again, his eyes piercing in the shadows. “I did come back for you. Just before Nillfgaard’s attack.” He laughs again, low and lacking in humor. His eyes fall away from her again. “Your grandmother locked me in the gatekeep. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get to you.”

Ciri reels again from the knowledge that he was there. That day, even. Destiny had been the one to bring them back together, but not for Geralt’s lack of trying. He’d been forbidden, but he’d come back for her anyway. Before Nilfgaard’s attack? To try and protect her? She says nothing about any of it. “Do you want me now?” she asks instead.

The question doesn’t seem to surprise Geralt. When he’s surprised, he gets a tension to his shoulders. His uncertainty shows in the way his body goes rigid. Ready to fight, maybe. Maybe Ciri will adopt that approach to uncertainty someday. Ready to face it down, kill it, rather than run. 

Geralt’s not surprised, though. Not uncertain. When he meets Ciri’s eyes, his gaze is soft. “I do.”

She has nothing else to say after that. She wants, desperately, to try and establish a timeline of that day: if Geralt was there, locked in the gate, how long had he been there? How close had he been without her knowing? She doesn’t ask about it. She leans forward to hug him in the shadowy cold of her room. It’s an awkward angle, sideways, but she leans her head on his shoulder and he reaches around with the arm that she’s not pinning to his side to hug her back. It’s nice. It’s more contact than Ciri’s had with anyone since she finally found Geralt, in that forest, by that woman’s house. Geralt is her protector. She knows this. They are bound by destiny. But Geralt wants her around regardless.

They stay like that for a while. When Ciri lets out a deep, tired breath, exhaling all the emotions of the night, Geralt shifts, squeezes her shoulder and then runs his hand over her hair. 

“Get some sleep,” he tells her, and gently pries her off of him to let her lay back in bed. “I’ll show you how to use that knife in the morning.” Ciri still has it on her, tucked under her too-loose shirt. Geralt smooths her hair down once more before he leaves, closing the door behind him. She doesn’t put her dagger under her pillow or remove her boots before she sleeps. She dreams peacefully.  When her grandmother appears in sleep, as she so often does, she only places a kiss onto Ciri’s forehead.

I protected you as long as I could, her dream-grandmother says, still rough but lacking her viciousness. He will protect you now. And soon you will protect yourself. I love you, Lion Cub.

The next morning dawns, and Ciri finds herself awash with emotion. There are several things to think about: Geralt, there as Cintra burned; her mother, aloft and screaming with her same strange power; Geralt saying nothing about her mother’s power but that she had it. No comments marking her a monster. With his refusal to kill her cursed father, disfigured or not, Ciri is wondering… 

No. No, better not tell him. Safer not to tell him. Geralt cares for her, and keeps her safe, and might not care that she has inexplicable powers (less inexplicable now, though, aren’t they? Apparently it runs in the family), but Ciri is different. She might look like her mother, but they are not alike. Ciri has killed with this power. She is no longer just a girl with magic. She’s sure Geralt would have let Vereena live, had she just been a strange girl in a pretty dress, but she was more.

No. Keep the secret. Keep yourself safe.

There’s one other thing, though. She awakes with a dent in her side where the hilt of the dagger had dug into the softening surface of her stomach, and she’s reminded of Geralt’s promise. She’ll learn to fight. 

It buoys her mood enough to float her down to breakfast, and through the assignment of chores: it’s getting colder, and it had snowed the night before, and so her and Geralt’s task is to clear the training grounds.

It seems easy enough. Once Ciri steps out into the cold, though, she’s dragged back to the times it had snowed, while she was on the run. Memories of being frozen to the bone and wet, drenched, so that the cold only dug further into her. She doesn’t like snow, she decides. It had been a fanciful thing in the palace, when it was a plaything to enjoy for a short while before retreating to a fire and she did not have to walk through the slushed streets—they didn’t get much snow in Cintra anyway, too far south—but it is nothing joyful to her now. She shivers. Geralt gives her a concerned look and hands her a shovel.

“You’ll warm up faster if you move,” he advises. “Start at that corner.”

Ciri gives him a dubious look—she doesn’t believe that she’s all that fit for physical labor—but Geralt only smiles warmly and gestures for her to move. Despite Ciri’s own conflicted emotions that morning, he’s seemed to be in a very good mood, especially after being assigned to the training grounds.

“Come on, now.” He hefts his own shovel into the air and spins it, a flashy move that Ciri thinks is meant to impress her. His mood is, apparently, even better than she’d thought, if he’s in the spirits to show off. He actually grins at her. “If we clear it before lunch, I’ll show you some knife tricks, and I’ll get a chance to train without being hounded to sit and watch.”

Ah. So that’s his motivation. Ciri can understand it. She knows he’s been frustrated by standing off to the side while the others train, as they ensure that his leg is fully healed. That doesn’t matter much, though. She’s willing to help him execute his plan to train without permission for the promise of her own training. She’s not the least bit ashamed to accept his light-handed bribery. 

It becomes clear very quickly that Geralt is a creature built for endurance, and that Ciri is a human child. She certainly warms up quickly, but she begins to heave for air soon after that. Geralt sends her to the retaining wall around the training grounds to sit and catch her breath, but sitting on the cold half-cleared ground leaves her chilled and wet before long. When she says something about it, Geralt looks both amused and affectionate, and sends her to get some food for the both of them. A picker-upper. Ciri takes her chance and flees the snow with gusto.

She’s absentminded as she winds her way through the halls, shaking snow from her hood as she goes. She’s thinking about what kinds of things Geralt will show her, what she’ll look like with a dagger in her hand and the knowledge to use it. Dangerous, she thinks she’ll look. In her fantasy of the moment, she is a threat.

The image rejuvenates her: the faster the snow is gone, the more Geralt will show her. The more she’ll be able to learn. She reaches the kitchen and shoves bits of food into her pants pockets. With some food in her, she’ll be able to do more than before, she’s sure: it inspires her enough that she starts to jog back through the halls, making her way faster to her ultimate competency with a dagger.

She’s not quite so alert as she should be, however, because she turns a particularly sharp corner and nearly collides with Eskel, who looks surprised and then pensive as she backpedals and forms an apology.

“Sorry! Didn’t mean to.”

“Best be careful. Might run into a less friendly witcher next time,” he jokes, and he smiles, but he’s got that—no. It’s not actually the same hesitance he usually has around her. It’s different, somehow. It’s strange. He seems… disconnected.

“Are you alright?” Ciri asks. She doesn’t bother to mask her judgemental tone: Eskel’s been weird enough that he deserves it, by now. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.” 

Eskel snaps out of his strange contemplation, and there’s a strange sort of sadness in his eyes, his smile. “Just odd, lass. A pale haired child running about in that cloak… it pulls me back to childhood, myself, if I’m not careful.” He’s looking at the missing button on her cloak. His expression looks fond, almost. Ciri’s not sure if that’s the right word. “Where are you off to, in such a rush?”

“Getting a snack,” Ciri tells him, and then bites her tongue before letting it slip that they’re trying to clear the training grounds quickly. Eskel is Geralt’s biggest opponent on the matter of training, moreso than even Vesemir, who has far more reason to be concerned for his student. Ciri has ratted out Geralt’s injury to him before, but that was for his own good. She won’t snitch now that Geralt’s goals are aligned with her own. “Got hungry.”

“Ah.” Some of the warmth comes back to Eskel’s smile. Ciri detects that hesitance again, but it’s far less than usual. Something’s changed. “Far be it from me to stand between the two of you and a mid-morning snack. Do you… mind, if I walk back with you?”

Ciri considers him for a moment, and then shakes her head. She continues on toward the training ground at a slower pace, and Eskel falls into step next to her. She’s not sure what happens in the next few seconds, but Eskel makes a complicated expression, and turns to look at her, the same press between his eyebrows as Geralt. “I haven’t been fair with you, have I?”

Ciri takes a moment to stop walking, to process what he’s speaking about: to process that he has, apparently, noticed his own behavior. She makes a confused expression at him to prompt further explanation.

Eskel stops alongside her. They’ve barely gotten halfway down the hall. “There’s certain things that I haven’t been able to… get past, after your arrival, but none of them really concern you. Not fair to alienate you for them. There’s no point in me being all up-in-arms with you, lass.” He lets out a heavy breath. “I’m sorry.” 

It’s a better apology than Lambert had managed, she thinks, astonished, though twice as cryptic.

“Same for the others. Nothing that’s happened to make them unfriendly, or—or closed off is your fault, Ciri. Just know that, hm?”

Ciri, really, has no idea what he’s talking about, but it’s clear he’s trying to tell her something important. No, actually. She’d lied—she does know what he’s talking about. It’s the something that none of them talk about. The huge, dark ghost that hovers over them all in every room of the keep. 

“Alright,” she says, though. “I accept your apology.” She can be cordial so long as Eskel is willing to act like a person. “Does this mean you’re going to be normal about me, now?”

Eskel laughs, startled. His laugh is sort of like Geralt’s, except that it’s rumblier, scratchier. She thinks she can hear his scars in his laugh, as if they’ve reached down through his face to score his throat. It’s still nice, though. It’s lower than Geralt’s. “Yeah, lass. Promise. Let’s get that snack to Geralt, hm?”

Well. This is a rather promising development, she thinks, as they make their way back through the keep. A fantastic day, really. The problem of Eskel, it seems, has folded itself up into a neat little bow without her having to do anything, really. 

“You and Geralt,” she asks, half out of curiosity, half to test if Eskel is really going to follow up his promise, “how long have you known each other?”

Eskel gets a reminiscent look on his face. “Oh, a long time now. Since we both became witchers: and there wasn’t much of our lives before that, you know. They started ‘em young.” He refocuses on Ciri, and smiles. “Knew him since he was smaller than you, and that was a few hundred years ago.”

“A few hundred?” she exclaims, startled.

“Oh, yes.” Eskel’s expression turns to something between sympathy and amusement. “You didn’t know? Witchers live a long time, lass. Geralt looked damn near the same when he came back from that Cintran banquet with news of you as he did bringing you into the Keep.” He brings a hand up to run through the short-cropped back of his hair. “I’ve known him longer than anyone else,” he says, matter of fact, “except maybe Vesemir, but I didn’t know Vesemir in those early years.”

“You really didn’t know anyone longer?” Ciri asks, slightly awed.

Eskel gives her a look that’s both odd and sad. “No, lass. Geralt was the first I met in Kaer Morhen, I’m fairly sure: and the rest of our generation are dead.” 

Ciri’s awe drops away like a stone. In a moment, something hits her: the huge, dark thing in Kaer Morhen is, at least in some part, grief. She opens her mouth and closes it again. She doesn’t know what to say to that. She’s just a girl with cheese in her pockets.

“That’s the lot of a witcher, though,” Eskel says, with a cheeriness that Ciri knows is meant to lift the heavy air around them. “We know what happens when we go out on the Path. Not usually a long life expectancy for fools that go around fighting monsters for a living. We just fare a little better than most. Geralt comes back every winter, and that’s the most I could ask for. Gotta count your blessings sometimes, hm?” He smiles. It looks twisted with his scars. It is sincere, though, Ciri thinks, and her heart aches: to lose and lose, and to be genuinely glad to have one person left. 

“I lost everyone in the attack on Cintra,” she confesses. “But Geralt…” she struggles through finding the words. “He is not something old for me. But he’s something new. And he’s there. ” She looks, tentatively, at Eskel, and hopes that what she’s trying to say will come across.

Eskel gives her his sincere, sad smile. “Don’t be afraid to lean on him, lass. He doesn’t express it much, but he cares. He’ll be there if you ask him to be. And…” he pauses. “Well. Hopefully, you’ll find others who you can rebuild with.” He puts his hand on his shoulder. Ciri thinks, maybe, he’s offering himself as someone like that, in the future. Someone to be there. She manages her own sad, genuine smile.

They’re approaching the courtyard. “Alright,” Eskel says, and pokes at her cheek. Ciri drops the smile to wrinkle her nose at him. “Pep up, now. Don’t want Geralt to think I’ve been making you sad, do we? He seemed rather peppy this morning. Nice to see him like that.”

Ciri takes a deep breath to let some of the sadness flow out of her body—the sadness that’s transient, anyway, not the stuff that will live with her for as long as she can imagine. Perhaps forever. “It is,” she agrees.

Chapter Text

Ciri goes first into the courtyard to announce their presence; she finds Geralt still working steadily, and the training grounds more than half cleared already. Her errant, abandoned shovel has been propped up against a wall back where Geralt had first started shoveling away the snow. She shivers as she steps outside—her boots are of much better make for the winter than before, but the cold still seeps up through the soles—and calls his name. “I’ve brought food,” she says. “And Eskel.”

Geralt looks up, smiling warmly (happy to see her, she thinks. It catches her off guard). His smile shifts to a grin when he sees Eskel. “Shirking your chores?” he asks, one pale eyebrow raised to tease.

“Or making sure you’re doing yours,” Eskel banters back. “If Vesemir asks.”

Geralt grins on, amused, and drives his shovel into a thick patch of snow with one swift movement so that he can take the food that Ciri offers him. Eskel raises an eyebrow, in turn, at the amount of food that Ciri has pilfered from the cabinets. Shame starts to bubble in her stomach. She can only turn her attention back to giving Geralt the bigger share that he warrants as the bigger person. She’d taken more than strictly needed, but… well. That was just prudent, wasn’t it? Geralt needs a lot of food, like all the witchers, and whatever Ciri didn’t finish would be tucked away and available for later. She was dividing it equitably for their needs, and that was the important part.

(She lets Geralt divide his share up with Eskel, though, and doesn’t offer any of her own. The security of leftovers in her pockets is nice.)

Geralt and Eskel exchange a few more meaningless verbal volleys, and then it’s sort of implicitly decided that Eskel will stay and help. Ciri’s not sure quite where the silent bit of communication happens, but somewhere in between their banter and life-roughened laughter, Eskel picks up her abandoned shovel and starts working from the small patch she’d already cleared.

Ciri feels a bit guilty for not actually doing the work prescribed to her, but she has no real issues with this. She hops up on the wall, still cold from the stone but safe from the snow, to watch and nibble away at her cheese. 

“What were you really meant to be doing?” Geralt asks, low and teasing.

“Cleaning the library,” Eskel says, with a shrug. “It isn’t really that dirty. Coën’s in there all the time, and he’s not the type to let his spaces get cluttered.”

“Melitele knows how he befriended Lambert.” 

Ciri giggles conspiratorially.

“Be fair,” Eskel chides. “You haven’t been in his little alchemical experiment lab, but it’s really quite neat, considering how much he explodes in there—and the infirmary’s no worse the wear for him making White Gull in there.” 

Geralt only rolls his eyes, still seeming amused. “ Mess is a part of personality, for some. Don’t give him too much credit. He left spiders all through the armory when he cleaned it, year before last.” He tosses another shovelful of snow over the retaining wall.

It’s sort of strange to see him bring up petty grudges. Ciri’d thought that one moved past such little, meanspirited things when one became an adult. She remembers what Coën had said about Lambert and Geralt. Perhaps, she thinks briefly, that hostility is not entirely Lambert’s fault. 

Eskel sighs at Geralt like one of Ciri’s disappointed tutors and starts to work around the base of one of the strange training machines. “All that to say that I’ll get back to the library later. Vesemir won’t notice.”

“You’ll jinx it,” Geralt comments, still lighthearted. “No better way to summon him. He’ll make you do laps again.”

Eskel waves it off. “He’ll make me do laps anyway. That’s all you’re missing, with your fuckin’ ghoul bite—I’d be a bit less hasty to drop my excuse for ditching training, even if I was a stubborn bastard about getting hurt.”

“Go sit in the library, then.” Geralt smirks. “You can give Ciri the shovel, if you’re so anxious to get out of a little exercise.”

Ciri hopes that he will not give her the shovel. To her relief, Eskel sighs again, but does not leave. Together, he and Geralt clear the training grounds just past mid-morning, and Ciri amuses herself in the meantime by watching the snowy expanses around the keep. There are movements in the distant woods. Not monsters, though, she thinks. No, Kaer Morhen is a safe place. Those are foxes and thrushes out in the trees. Life, still thriving just outside this castle full of ghosts. It’s comforting.

When it’s finished, Geralt calls Ciri down off the wall. “You have your knife, don’t you?” Ciri glances toward Eskel, but Geralt doesn’t seem to be worried that he’ll stop their training session, so she pulls her dagger from under her shirt. Eskel looks surprised, but says nothing. He settles back against the wall to watch as Geralt shows Ciri how to stand with a weapon in her hand. (Feet apart. Knees bent. Strong, but not brittle, got that? You have to be ready to move.)

Ciri doesn’t learn all that much, that morning. As it turns out, the way you place your feet is very important, and so is the way that you hold your weapon when you strike out. She keeps shifting her stance without meaning to, and then Geralt puts her back where she’s meant to be with a hand on her shoulder or her side and pushes her foot back to position with his own and has her try again. The consistent movement does warm her up pleasantly, though. By midday, she’s managed a workable strike. Geralt says so, at least, with a smile that looks… proud. 

“More tomorrow,” he promises, and ruffles her hair. It falls immediately into her eyes. She really will have to start tying it up like he does, she thinks. She stows her dagger away.

“She looks like you, when you were small,” she hears Eskel say, lowly, when the three of them head back inside. That sparks a small rush of her own pride. Her, strong, brave, competent like Geralt. It’s a good thing to be. It’s something she has to be, now that she’s out in the world.

Geralt’s good mood is only strengthened when Vesemir agrees to let him properly train again ( alright, alright, you can spar with Eskel. Melitele knows you’ll find ways to train otherwise. Better you not be stupid about it ). It’s interesting. He’s not giddy, the way Ciri knows some people to be when they’re happy. And he is happy, she thinks. Geralt’s uplifted mood is more like vindication that things are going right. A satisfaction at the good things in life. He seems almost smug.

That’s a good way to look at things, Ciri thinks. Not dependent on spontaneously feeling cheery. 

The rest of the day goes by pleasantly fast; she goes out to spend some time with Roach, who has stopped nipping at her and allows Ciri to feed her bits of apples. Roach is also very large and very warm, and Ciri finds it quite pleasant to tuck herself up next to her in the hay and the warmer air of the stable. A little reverie from the cold. She understands, more and more, why Geralt cares for Roach in the way he does, careful to rub her down and keep the cold from getting to her bones and murmuring to her as he takes off her saddle and her packs.

In the late afternoon, Ciri goes to the training grounds again to watch the witchers properly train for the first time. She’s seen them through the Keep’s windows, before, but she’s usually off doing something with Geralt so that neither of them are too caught up in feeling left out of the whole affair. It was more for Geralt’s sake, really. But now, with Geralt and Eskel set up for a warm-up match, and Vesemir barking corrections at Lambert and Coën across the field, Ciri gets to see Geralt spar for the first time. 

It’s not surprising, of course. She’s seen him fight before. 

(She recalls the fight with Vereena, and she’s a little comforted to find that there’s not so much fear attached to the memory now. She trusts Geralt now. He’d had a reason. Vereena’s last words still ring eerie in her ears, but… well. Anyway. She remembers the strange luminous-eyed creature, the way it had twisted around Geralt, played dead. It sends chills down her spine.)

The point, though, is that watching Geralt spar is very different from watching him fight. It’s very different for Ciri, first off, since she isn’t five steps from certain death and wearing a dress as she has been every time that Geralt has pulled a sword around her. It gives her an opportunity to really watch , safe on her perch of the stone wall. She thinks she must have noticed it before, but for all of his strength, Geralt fights rather elegantly. Ciri’s no stranger to fighting, something she thinks Geralt forgets; her grandmother was a warrior, after all, and Cintra was hardly a flimsy tapestry of a city, like Oxenfurt. She’d watched guards training through windows all her life. They had used brute force to land their hits. They would hack at targets the same way that Ciri imagines one must use an ax to take down a tree. Geralt, in comparison, directs his attacks with measured force, the accuracy needed to hit a monster’s neck and the strength to sever the head. He also spins quite a lot. Ciri had always scoffed at dancing and even more at dancers, but she realizes with a moderate amount of displeasure that it might actually be similar to fighting. What she and Geralt had worked on earlier… footwork. She could vomit. Really. 

Geralt’s style of sword fighting also differs from his peers, though. He’s paired against Eskel (an obvious choice), and Eskel, with broader shoulders and a thicker frame, fights more like a Cintran soldier. Not quite the same, but more than Geralt. Geralt’s strikes are measured, but Eskel’s seem to be meant to inflict as much damage as possible when they do hit. It doesn’t seem to be a very smart tactic. Geralt loses the first match, but then seems to pick up speed, and beats Eskel gracefully on the second and third. 

He’s grinning as he reaches a hand out to pull Eskel bodily up from the ground. (Ciri has to marvel, sometimes, at strength which she forgets is inhuman.) “Tell me again how I shouldn’t be sparring?”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re a marvel of modern alchemy.” Eskel cuffs him across the shoulder. Geralt laughs. “Don’t get cocky. You’ll have a harder time doing that when I’m allowed signs.”

“We could use signs now,” Geralt suggests, casually, flourishing his sword as he had earlier in the morning. Ciri thinks he’s getting a bit full of himself. 

Eskel laughs, this time. “Like hell.” He falls back into a fighting position. “Rules were you spar, but only with swords. What happens when I use Aard and your dainty ghoul-bitten ass gets blasted back through that wall?”

“Easy excuses for a loser,” Geralt teases, and then they’re sparring again, easy as that. 

“What are signs?” Ciri asks, later, during the time when they should be washing up for dinner. (The witchers, apparently, like to play cards by the fire instead.) 

Geralt looks over at her from his Gwent deck with his eyebrows just slightly higher than usual, which means he’s surprised. “I haven’t told you?” he asks, and Ciri is relieved that this isn’t one of those emotional witcher secrets that he likes to keep. She shakes her head. “Hm. They’re simple spells that a witcher can cast. Mostly for assistance during battle.”

“Also helpful with cooking,” Coën puts in, from over his own deck of cards. (He’s losing. Geralt, Ciri has found, is rather good at this game; she still doesn’t understand the words well, but he wins quite often, and always with a silent, smug smile.)

“With cooking?” Ciri asks, dubious.

“You must have seen this one.” Geralt makes a strange shape with his hand and points it into the fireplace. A blast of flame streams from his hand. Ciri holds back a gasp. “Hard to light fires in the cold and damp without it.”

Ciri feels a little silly for not remembering Geralt’s supernatural ability to start a fire from his fingertips, but in all fairness, he hadn’t done anything so dramatic as that when they’d been out in the woods. She’d barely thought to call it magic. It was the kind of thing that Mousesack had done with such nonchalance that she’d barely batted an eye.

Mousesack had also been doing magic, though. So. She’s back to feeling silly. 

Lambert saunters up behind Coën and rests his arms over the back of his chair. “Hell of a lot easier than carrying around flint and tinder.” He seems to be in a good mood tonight. Ciri marks that with pleasant surprise.

“Why don’t you use that in all your fights?” she asks, eyeing the strange contortion of Geralt’s hand as he relaxes it from its position. “Seems much easier to light a thing aflame.”

Geralt shakes his head. “Not in the middle of a forest. Roach and I generally prefer to be left uncooked.”

She feels even sillier now for suggesting it, but she giggles at his joke all the same. 

“You’re not gonna show her the rest?” Lambert runs a hand through his mess of reddish-brown hair. Ciri wonders if he cuts it short again before he goes out in the spring; it’s not quite long enough to tie back, like Geralt’s, and it’s not so short-cropped and utilitarian as Coën’s or Eskel’s. 

“The rest?”

Lambert grins. It still looks rather malicious, but Ciri’s beginning to think that it might just be his face. “Sure.” He pushes off the back of Coën’s chair, and retreats to an open part of the hall. “Watch this,” he calls. “Coën! Come at me!” 

Coën shakes his head, but still grins and gets to his feet. Ciri watches, wondering, as Lambert braces himself with a forearm in front of him, still grinning madly. The whole ordeal has turned into a sort of production in a startlingly short amount of time. Perhaps he means to disarm Coën? Augment some fighting move?

She’s absolutely startled when Coën takes off running at him at full speed, which is both alarming for how fast he is and how hard he’s going to hit Lambert upon impact. She nearly opens her mouth to say something astonished before there’s a flash of golden light in front of Lambert’s arm. Coën angles his shoulder forward at the last moment and collides solidly with the golden light, sending both him and Lambert careening in opposite directions, laughing like boys. 

“And that’s Quen!” Lambert announces, looking quite proud of himself. “The witcher’s shield!”

A shield made of nothing. They’d been ridiculous about it, but that is impressive. Ciri’s no warrior, but she knows how heavy a shield is, and how hard it can be to get it back once one has lost it: she has to consider, once again, all the talk about witchers. People had always seemed unimpressed by them, scornful of their supposed necessity; but witchers really are uniquely suited to fight monsters. Better than anyone Ciri’s ever met, certainly. 

“Is that how you lost all your sense, knocking your head about like that?” Geralt calls to the others, stretching his legs out to their full length before the fire. He’s got laughter in his tone.

“You might’ve got your brain boiled out your ears by a second set of trials, but the rest of us have to put honest work into getting as stupid as you,” Lambert calls back, and despite what Ciri would’ve expected from their previous interactions, he sounds amused by the whole ordeal as well. As he and Coën make their way back to the fire, he tips suddenly and purposefully to the side so that their shoulders collide and Coën stumbles, laughing. “Showed you how the sign worked, didn’t it, Ciri?”

Ciri takes a cue from Geralt and straightens up in her seat next to him, squaring her shoulders as best she can and pulling her expression into her best approximation of his gruff nonchalance. “I suppose,” she says (it comes out a little more haughty-royalty than she intended, but that’s fine too). “Showed me how to get my skull cracked, too, should I feel the sudden impulse for it.”

Lambert laughs again, and saunters close enough to ruffle Ciri’s hair (she ducks away from his hand, protesting, but not before he’s made a mess of her already-unbrushed hair). “Dramatic, all you royals. No wonder Geralt gets caught up with you all so often. Don’t you worry your pretty head, princess, you couldn’t form signs anyway. Need to be a mutant freak for that.”

Geralt tilts his head up in that questioning way of his, leveling his appraising look at Lambert. “Have you been drinking?” (And that makes a little more sense. Ciri doesn’t think Lambert is a bad person, necessarily, but he’s usually more prickly around the unit that is her-and-Geralt.) 

Lambert shrugs. “Drunk a little earlier. New batch turned out well.” He grins, showing all his teeth. Properly wolfish, Ciri thinks. “You can have some if you promise to get hammered. Anyway—” he turns his attention back on Ciri— “If your knight-protector won’t take up the rest of your education, then I’ll tell you about the other signs. We’ve got… what, you’ve seen Igni and Quen, so that leaves…”

“Axii,” Coën supplies helpfully, shuffling his cards around. He must be thinking up some new theory, but Ciri honestly doesn’t think it’s going to help him much. Geralt’s beaten him fairly soundly the past few rounds. It’s a skill gap (like her and Eist at knucklebones). “And Yrden.”

The firelight dances over his face as Lambert nods sagely. “Right.” He stalls for a moment to think; Geralt has shaken his head, amused, and gone back to the game, so Ciri takes it as tacit approval and turns to focus on Lambert fully. They don’t get along too well, but she’s not going to turn down an opportunity to learn about the witchers. “Not much to demonstrate for Yrden,” Lambert begins; “best I can figure, it’s a kind of a holy sign, but one that works against monsters rather than imagined devils. Like, uh… damn. Melitele’s got some of those holy symbols, doesn’t she?”

“Sure,” Geralt answers, blithely, placing down a card that makes Coën groan and slump back in his chair. Ciri sees Geralt hiding a smug smile at that. “There’s a few variations on the three circles for her three forms.” 

“Some use to you getting adopted by that priestess after all,” Lambert declares, turning back to Ciri to continue his explanation and ignoring Geralt’s raised eyebrow at his comment. “There, then. Like Melitele’s circles. Keeps evil at bay, most times, if you cast it well.”

“Explains why yours barely keeps back a drowner,” Coën says, from behind his cards.

“Hey!”

Ciri giggles, and Lambert turns back to face her, looking honestly hurt, like a puppy dog denied a treat; the sight sends her into a small fit of laughter. 

“S’ what I get for trying to educate the youth,” Lambert sniffs. “May the gods curse me if I ever try philanthropy again.”

“No, continue!” Ciri manages, through fading hiccups of laughter. “Keep on, I want to hear!”

Lambert sighs melodramatically and drops himself onto the arm of Coën’s chair. Coën doesn’t seem to mind the jostling, and puts up a hand to steady his friend. “Heart’s not in it, princess. There’s Axii, which is—” he catches a glimpse of Coën’s cards, and is immediately diverted. “Fuck, have you been playing Geralt with this deck the whole time? Those are shit cards, Coën. Geralt builds his deck like a life mission, you’d never beat him in a year and he’s a right motherfucker for letting you think you could—”

“Hey.” Geralt shifts to kick Lambert in the leg. 

Lambert points an accusing finger at Geralt as Ciri laughs. “I’m not going to let you fleece my friend like this, asshole!”

“He knew what he was getting into,” Geralt says, dismissively.

Coën looks a little downcast. “My deck’s not that bad, Lambs.” 

“Don’t put money on that,” Lambert declares. “He took my horse one year.”

Geralt rolls his eyes. “I was always going to give it back. Wouldn’t leave Vesemir stranded with you for a horse that won’t eat carrots.”

“Bullshit. Eskel had to threaten you.”

“Win next time, then.”

Lambert makes an affronted noise as Coën attempts to hide his laughter next to him. This is all very amusing, Ciri is sure, but she still hasn’t heard everything she’s been promised.

“And the last sign?” she pushes.

“Oh, Axii.” Lambert waves a hand. “It’s mind control, more or less.”

Ciri thinks that’s a much more important skill than he’s setting it up to be.

“Well, ‘s not as simple as that, really. More like… influence, ‘nd it takes a lot of concentration to uphold. Gotta be really good at it to make someone do something against their will, and you gotta be even better to keep it up for longer than a few seconds.”

Ciri feels a little stunned. “You could use that when you fight? When you spar?”

Lambert laughs. “Not for sparring. Eskel’s got better force of will than me n’ Geralt combined, and it wouldn’t be sword practice if he just spun us in circles; anyway, the sign works better on creatures with lower intelligence, so people are hard. Besides, it’s bad manners to use Axii on your friends. In a fight, you really gotta have yourself together, so it’s not always a better option than a good sword.”

Ciri takes that information in and nods. Power, she finds more and more, comes with limitations. (Her grandmother’s pride made her enemies. Mousesack’s magic wasn’t enough to keep him safe from the doppler. The woman in the camp had sickening power over her servant, but it didn’t stop him from killing her savagely in the end.)

“You should ask Eskel to show you Axii, though,” Lambert says, faux-casual in a way that means he’s teasing. “He could make Geralt do backflips on the table.”

“He could not,” Geralt counters. He looks downright offended. Ciri pulls herself out of the dark pit of her thoughts to pull a corner of her mouth up into a weak smile.

Lambert waggles an admonishing finger. “You never know unless you try. Bet he could make you howl, White Wolf.”

“Eskel’s not that much stronger at magic. You only side with him to side with him.” 

“Course I side with Eskel. He’s always been my favorite brother—’fore I adopted Coën, of course.” He drops a hand onto Coën’s hand, clumsily affectionate. Their friendship makes a little more sense to Ciri every time she spots a gesture like that. They do suit each other, in their way. Complementary, she thinks the word is.

Coën, for his part, laughs. “A real part of the family, huh?”

“Sure, why not? A griffin’s part wolf anyway, ain’t it?”

Ciri has seen her fair share of noble crests with a griffin at their center, and she is fairly sure that’s not correct. Maybe Lambert’s home-brewed alcohol is actually as strong as he claims it to be. The fire crackles in the oversized hearth; it’s warmer than she expected, cold as it usually is in this drafty old castle. Maybe it’s the company that keeps it warmer.”

“Lion,” Coën corrects, matter of fact. “Close enough, I suppose; though if you really wanted to argue semantics, the Cats would have a better claim on me.”

Lambert’s expression falters, suddenly and obviously. Coën doesn’t see it, with Lambert behind him, but Ciri sees Geralt’s yellow eyes flicker up from behind his cards, tracking over Lambert’s suddenly-stony face. A moment later, he says, “We’ll give you a pass. Lambert’s needed someone his own age. Few hundred year’s a long time to take up the mantle of being the pestering youngest child all on one’s own.” 

The deadened look to Lambert’s face brightens a little at the insult. “Better than being a fuckin’ relic.”

“You can take that up with Vesemir,” Geralt replies, a hint of a smile at his lips. “I’m sure he’d love to hear what you have to say about that.”

“What about me?”

Ciri jumps at the sound of Vesemir’s voice booming through the hall. His presence is still unsettling and startling. She’s not sure what to do about it; she can’t have a sudden Coën-sponsored heart-to-heart like with Lambert, that’s for sure.

It’s nothing dire for now, though. Vesemir is accompanied by Eskel, and they’re both carrying dishes of food for dinner. Geralt smugly lets Lambert stumble through a faltering explanation that crumbles under the severity of Vesemir’s raised eyebrow, and then they have dinner, and for the moment, everything is fine. 

She sees Eskel a great deal more, in the next few days. He and Geralt really are fast friends, which she’d known, but it’s very evident now that Eskel has stopped acting as if she’s a disease-ridden rat that Geralt keeps as a pet (to be risked for the sake of spending time with him, but generally avoided). He’s alongside her and Geralt more often than not. 

They don’t act like children—not outside of the ways that all adults seem to do—but Ciri thinks she can see echoes, sometimes, of the way that they would have been when they were her age. They leave each other space, but she thinks they were probably glued to each other at the hip at one point. Two boys running around this massive, empty keep together. A pair. It makes an implicit sense, but it’s still odd to think about. Geralt had not been someone that she associated with other people , really, when they were journeying through the forest, and he’d done nothing to counter that. Yennefer was the only name that Ciri had in relation to him, and he’d been far from willing to talk about her, the strange, dead woman. 

Yennefer isn’t here in the keep, though. Ciri thinks she still haunts Geralt—his silence, his frigidness, maybe, had been his grief, in its first moments—but he’s coming out of it now, bit by bit. Surrounded by friends. Home. Maybe… with her. Geralt’s presence is certainly a comfort to Ciri, who has lost everything else. Maybe she can be a sort of comfort to him.

Eskel is a much more concrete presence. He’s very pleasant, Ciri finds, though he’s rough around the edges like the men he calls his brothers. In a few moments, she thinks she might actually like him better than Coën, who has been her favorite non-Geralt witcher all this time; it feels rather like betraying Coën, who is far too courteous and decent a man to be betrayed, so she tries to ignore it. Still, where Coën is stilted for the sake of courtesy, Eskel is rough and still considerate. There’s more warmth to Eskel. If she were the kind of person to trust very easily, she thinks she would already feel safe around him. 

Geralt tells her, one morning while they’re cleaning small mountains of tracked-in dirt from the floor of the main hall, that he’s glad they’re getting along. Ciri tells him that she’s glad, too.

She’s all the more glad for it when Geralt has to leave her for the day. It was rather silly of her, really, to think that she could just glue herself to Geralt for the entire winter, save for the times that she wanted to go off on her own, but she’s confronted with the fact that she really has no plan when Geralt tells her that he needs to go hunting. Ciri feels rather annoyed at the need for fresh meat. Still, it’s Geralt and Coën’s turn to go out and kill something so that they can eat, and Ciri isn’t going to act like a little girl clinging to her mother’s skirts. She puts on a brave face and says that she’ll be fine (and there really won’t be that many problems, if she avoids Vesemir and finds something to do for the day). 

Geralt suggests that she spend some time with Eskel, though, which is… not an unpleasant idea. That’s company, and Eskel seems more predisposed than any of the others to actually answer Ciri’s questions. 

And speaking of Ciri’s questions. Eskel’s presence offers a good way to take up some of her day; and if she’s feeling particularly brave, she still has not returned to those lower halls to see the room beside the storeroom, the one that even Geralt had seemed wary of. She’s braver, now. A little stronger. If she wants to know more about the ghosts in Kaer Morhen’s halls, she thinks she’ll have to see what’s down there.

Maybe. Maybe after talking with Eskel. She’ll have another chance at this, certainly, but less people in the keep means less people to see her sneaking around the halls. It’s a good opportunity. If she’s brave.

That’s for later, though. In the meantime, she says goodbye to Geralt in his snow gear (the crossbow in his hands looks ancient, compared to the ones that Ciri saw in Cintra’s artillery) and agrees when Eskel invites her out to the stables with him. He offers to show her how to check the horses’ feet. 

“I can’t claim to know everything about how a horse is shod,” he tells her, “but you pick up a few things over a hundred-odd years. It’s important to know how to care for the beast that’s carrying you everywhere.”

Ciri follows him out the main doors of the keep, bundled against the snow in her cloak. She steps in Eskel’s footprints as often as possible to avoid getting her own feet stuck in last night’s fresh snowfall (part of why they’d gone hunting today; easy to track the animals). When they reach the stable, he pushes the door open and holds it for her, ushering her into the warmer interior of the structure. It still smells very much like horses. 

“Geralt’s already shown you around, has he?” Eskel asks, and Ciri nods. Geralt had been more eager to show her the stables than the training course; she’s already had a run-through of all the important elements. “Good. I’ll skip the introduction, then. Would you like to brush Roach?”

They settle into a rhythm soon enough, caring for the horses. Roach nickers at her the first time Ciri tries to run the brush through her coat (do you call a horse’s hair a coat?) but she settles soon enough. It makes Ciri feel proud. Geralt has told her that Roach doesn’t often like people, but she’d acclimated to Ciri fairly quickly. Maybe she’s special, to Roach. Just a little. She bets Lambert couldn’t get along with Roach the way she does. 

Watching him, Ciri gets the feeling that Eskel doesn’t care for his horse in the same way as Geralt, who cares for Roach like a companion. Eskel treats his horse like… well. A horse. He brags a little to Ciri about his speed, tells her that he’d gotten the animal after saving the life of a knight and that they’d beat Geralt and Roach in a race down the mountain last winter, but his horse seems more like a steed to him than a friend.

He talks about Roach much the same. “She’s not quite faster than the last Roach,” he tells Ciri, “but it seems Geralt went for strength, this time around.” He pats Roach and feeds her a tuft of hay. She doesn’t so much as nip at him. “Can’t say I’m not glad of it. Haven’t beat him in a horse race in a long time, now, and it’s good for his ego to get beaten once in a while.”

“The last Roach?” Ciri asks, furrowing her brow.

Eskel mirrors her confused look back at her for a moment, but then he laughs. “Ah. It’s not something you’d know yet, I suppose. He names all his horses Roach. I think it makes him feel better when he loses one of ‘em.” He returns to maintaining his own mount.

Ciri considers that for a moment. She’d already thought Roach to be a strange name; it’s all the more strange, now that she knows it’s a name he’s chosen to be somewhat permanent, across every horse he’s ever had.

To make him feel better, Eskel’d said. Ciri feels suddenly sad to think of Geralt watching his horses die over the course of his long, dangerous life. It seems almost childish, to keep naming them the same things, like family cats; as if they’re all one animal that never really dies.

She’s curious, suddenly, and gestures to Eskel’s black steed. It’s a beauty of a horse, really. She’s surprised he hadn’t bragged more. “What’s his name?” Ciri asks, hoping for something normal.

“Oh, him? This is Scorpion,” Eskel answers, undeterred from his task of brushing him, and Ciri sighs. It’s a fine name for a horse, probably, out of context, but really. She won’t be able to make fun of Geralt for naming his horse Roach at all, if all of the witchers have named their horses after various bugs.

Just to be sure, she points to the gray horse that she thinks must be Lambert’s. He’ll be more than willing to mock Geralt and Eskel, she thinks, and he’s the safest choice for a decent horse name; rough, blustering man that he is, it’ll probably be something intimidating like Onyx or Slate. Ridiculous, to be sure, but better than Roach. “And Lambert’s?”

Eskel snickers. “I’ve heard him call her Mousie. Don’t tell him I told you that, though. He likes to pretend he’s not an affectionate bastard.”

Ciri covers her mouth to hide a giggle. It’s amusing enough that it almost makes up for the fact that even Lambert has managed to name his horse after some kind of vermin. She wonders what kind of thing Vesemir would name one. 

Once the horses are brushed (and Eskel tells her that it’s an important thing to do often, especially when you’re riding so frequently, to keep dirt out from under the saddle, and especially when it’s cold, to warm their muscles back up) Eskel shows her Scorpion’s hooves, tells her how a horseshoe works, tells her to check for rocks that might get stuck under them. 

“The shoes aren’t necessary, if your horse has strong hooves,” he tells her, running a hand down Scorpion’s mane. “They’re mainly protective. If you keep them up properly, you avoid a lot of unnecessary accidents. Still, I’ve seen them more and more in these past years: more and more, it’s a farm you’ve got to get a horse from, and those horses don’t have hooves as strong as their predecessors. Something they’re doing is breeding it out of them. You have to keep shoes on those.” 

It’s all extremely practical. Ciri feels, as she often does, as if she’s being exposed to a whole other world. She’d really thought, when she’d lived in the Cintran castle, that she knew everything about life. That she was in touch with the world around her. She’d thought that playing knucklebones with the city boys brought her into contact with non-royal life. It had, to an extent; but nowhere near what life for the common people actually was. Even her grandmother, she thinks, battle-hardened and raised in war, didn’t know what common life was like. She couldn’t be counted as royalty raised in a cushy palace, but what did Calanthe, Lioness of Cintra, know about being a farmer? About the bartering in marketplaces? It’s a whole new world that Ciri lives in, now. It’s still far from being a farmgirl, living at Kaer Morhen in the lifestyle of a witcher, but it’s an even farther cry from royalty.

She absorbs it all as fully as she can, though. It’s important.  

“Ciri,” Eskel says, hesitantly, after he’s talked through just about everything that he can and they’ve fallen into a lull. “You and Geralt… do you have a plan?” 

Ciri pauses. She knows what Eskel’s talking about. She doesn’t know how she wants to answer it. She gives him a questioning expression to stall for time. 

“You being a princess, I mean. And the people after you. What does he intend to do? You could stay here at Kaer Morhen as long as you need, obviously—Vesemir couldn’t turn you away, and I think he’d be glad of the company—but…” he lets out a breath, brow furrowed as he considers her. “That’s no way for you to grow up, is it? 

He’s nervous for them, Ciri realizes. That’s reasonable. She is, too, when she lets herself think about it. “We haven’t talked about it,” she says, summoning false confidence, trying to appear unworried. “Skellige, maybe. I’ve got family there from my grandfather, cousins, and they wouldn’t abandon their alliance with Cintra. They’d be—” she bites back an impossible. Nothing is impossible after the fall of Cintra. “They’d be difficult for Nilfgaard to attack. I’d likely be safe there.” Something occurs to her, and her gaze darts across the hay-strewn stable floor, as if the answer to her sudden quandary lies there. “And then I suppose he’d leave.” It’s a sudden weight, that knowledge. It shouldn’t be. Geralt has been… well, Ciri has never known if he’s supposed to be temporary, has she? Her grandmother had only told her to find him; he’ll get her to safety, surely, but how much does the Law of Surprise obligate? 

Geralt had said he wanted her. He would not abandon her. But being his child of surprise does not make her his child, nor him her father; would he stay in Skellige with her? Continue to be her protector? Become more of a knight than a witcher?

She feels suddenly and horribly vulnerable about it. She knows her cousins in Skellige, cares for them, but they are relationships kept up only through occasional visits over the years. Geralt cares, about her, and she trusts him, and after she’d lost everything, Geralt is the only one she really has. She doesn’t know what she’d do if he left. She’d survive—she is her grandmother’s child, she is the lion cub of Cintra, she hasn’t survived this long to suddenly do anything else—but she doesn’t know what she’d do. She looks up at Eskel and feels very much like the child she’s been trying not to be. She tries to keep back the tears that prick at her eyes. “Would he leave me, Eskel?”

Eskel looks at her with an overwhelming pity. No—no, she’s misjudged. He looks sympathetic. “I can’t speak for Geralt—” you probably can , Ciri thinks, after all this time— “but I don’t believe that he would.” He looks at her for a moment longer, quiet and terribly vulnerable, and then takes a knee in the hay in front of her so that he’s looking her in the eye, and puts a hand on her shoulder. “He cares about you, lass. He’s promised to keep you safe, hasn’t he? In his own way? He doesn’t break his promises. And he doesn’t leave the people that he cares about.” A wry, bittersweet smile pulls at the corner of his mouth, and he drops his gaze from her eyes to the clasp of her cloak, the missing button. He moves his hand to adjust it, and then rests his arms on his knee. “Not unless he’s being very stupid. And I don’t think he’ll be stupid about you.” 

Ciri doesn’t ask how can you know? Because if anyone can know, she thinks it’d probably be Eskel. Still, her questions do not dissipate, and so she stays quiet and bites her lip. 

Eskel, in her silence, continues. “No, I don’t think he would. You’re his child of surprise, aren’t you? He’s taken on that responsibility. And not just because he has to. He gave you his old cloak.” The wry smile appears again, and his eyes flit to the missing button, and then he looks back at her properly. “Talk to him about it, hm? He doesn’t like to talk about things that he’s worried about, himself, but he will if you press him. It’s your future, too. You should know what’s happening.” As he holds her gaze, Ciri thinks she sees the sympathy return, but in a different way. “And when you know, maybe you could tell me, hm? Be easier not to worry if I knew.” He half-smiles again, averts his eyes, and brushes off her shoulders. Ciri doesn’t know Eskel very well yet. Still, she thinks she understands him.

Chapter Text

They spend a little more time in the stables. Ciri doesn’t intend to while the whole day away here, and she doesn’t suspect that Eskel does either, but the hay and the horses make it a little warmer than the stony halls of the keep and that’s reason enough to linger.

It’s quiet, for a while, following their conversation. Ciri doesn’t know how to resume a normal interaction after something of that emotional weight. She decides to leave it to Eskel, though none of the witchers have shown a real propensity for emotional intelligence. It’s a little indulgence for herself. Let the adult do the work for a little bit. 

And he does, eventually. Once Roach is soft and happy from brushing and Scorpion’s coat is glossy, Eskel remarks that it’s close to lunchtime, and suggests that they go to the kitchen. It’s an easy invitation to accept. 

She runs her fingers along the lining of her cloak as they walk. Geralt’s cloak. The information rings new and delightful in her head. Geralt had given her his old cloak. Picked it out for her, from among all those other cloaks. That’s a special thing to do for someone, she thinks. It adds, also, to her mental image of herself, looking like a younger version of Geralt. With her hair tied up the same way, wearing his old cloak… Lambert had been a son of a fucking whore for saying what he did about Ciri’s mother, but he had implied that she looked like she could be his daughter, hadn’t he? Younger, smaller, but similar. 

And she’s learning to fight now. Knife lessons (still casually hidden; Ciri wonders who Geralt thinks will disapprove) are going well, if Geralt’s subtle praise is true, and Ciri is buoyed by the thought that she’s getting stronger. More capable. She’ll be able to truly protect herself, soon, without the strange and awful power that threatens the people around her. 

It’s over some bread and smoked meat that Ciri finally feels at ease to continue her conversation with Eskel. (There’s a bit of bread left to the side that she could sneak into her pocket, should she want to, but… she thinks about Geralt and Coën, off to get more food, and the ease at which this simple fare stays available, and thinks, maybe, it’s okay to leave it there. She’s still got a bit more food under her pillow anyway.) She still doesn’t really know much about Eskel, but he always seems willing to talk about Geralt, and Ciri has something she’d like to hear about the subject.

“What was Geralt like, when he was my age?” she asks, keeping her tone light and casual, hiding the fact that she’s been thinking about it for no real reason.  She splits her attention between Eskel and the fire in the stove, which cuts the chill of the room pleasantly. 

Eskel hums thoughtfully and pushes a stool close to the fire for him to rest his feet on. Ciri follows suit, though she doesn’t have a stool, so her heels rest on the stone floor. “Rather like you, really. A bit broader in the shoulders, but—” he takes a considering look at her. “Pale hair, intense eyes, an attitude. Wanting to get strong. All the same building blocks.” He pauses, still looking at her; Ciri shifts under his gaze. He turns to face the fire. “We would’ve been just past the Sacking at your age, too. Young and stubborn and fresh out of tragedy.” A bittersweet smile appears on his face; while he’s looking at the fire, Ciri can only see the half of his face that remains unscarred. It’s almost like looking at a different person. “Uncanny, really.”

Ciri doesn’t feel particularly complimented by the descriptors he’d used, but she’s rather gratified to be told that she’s similar to Geralt. She ignores the part about her own tragedy. “The Sacking?”

Eskel looks back to her, eyebrows raised. “Nobody’s told you?”

Ciri racks her brains for a moment, trying to remember any mention of the term. She shakes her head and tries not to look too abashed for not knowing something that is apparently common knowledge. 

Eskel gets his smile back. It twists his scars so that he looks almost mocking. “Well, you must have noticed that this place is a little big for the number of witchers running around it.”

Oh. She’s about to get the story, isn’t she? All this wondering and asking, and she’s about to get the story she’s been waiting for by complete coincidence. She feels a little stunned.

“I don’t remember all the details,” Eskel tells her. “I don’t know if I was them to begin with. But there used to be many more witchers, years before you were born.” His smile twists further. “The way Vesemir tells it, the life of a witcher used to be gold and women, as much as either as you could find.” He pauses, frowns. “That’s not fit to be telling you, though. Apologies, lass. Anyway—things were good for witchers. You could make a real living. Got treated nicely, I hear, if you can imagine that.” Ciri’s heard nothing nice about witchers her entire life. Her grandmother had always seemed distasteful toward them. She imagines it must have been quite different. “Must’ve sat wrong with the nobles, though. I hear it was a mage who first started all the trouble—which is ironic, understand, ‘cause it was mages what made our mutagens in the first place.” 

Mutagens. Ciri feels as though she should know what that word means, but if she ever heard a definition, it escapes her; she makes a questioning face at Eskel, who mirrors it back for a moment before he seems to realize what it is she’s confused about.

“You know that witchers are made, not born, don’t you, lass?” Ciri nods—that’s the story, isn’t it, little boys get taken to become witchers—and Eskel continues. “There’s a sort of—hell, I don’t know how to explain it. Potions? ‘Cept they’re more like toxins. When we’re boys, they put something in our system that changes us: gives us the strength, the tolerance, some of the substances. Mutates us. That’s what they called the Trial of the Grasses,” he notes, dutifully, and Ciri nods accordingly. “It’s what makes us not human. Inhuman. Depends who you ask. I tend to think it just makes us better suited to killing monsters.

“Anyway. It was mages who created the mutagens. They’re responsible for witchers, at the end of it. Must’ve regretted it, though; the way I hear it, that last mage was the one who convinced the townspeople to attack the keep.” 

Townspeople attacking the keep. With the implication that the townspeople had done damage? “Surely a castle full of witchers is stronger than a mob of peasants,” Ciri says, derisively, before her brain can catch up with her mouth. 

“Under normal circumstances, probably,” Eskel agrees, blithely. “Geralt—” He bites his tongue. “Nevermind. There were mages, too, is the point. And not all the people in the keep were witchers yet. Not properly. Boys have to be trained, before the mutagens: they were no more witchers than you are, just better-trained at the sword. It’s harder to fight when you’re protecting someone, especially when you’re up against a large group.” He pauses, and the air feels heavier, though the fire continues to crackle with the same lazy ease. “They killed everyone in the keep that day. That’s witchers, and trainees, and the mages who made mutagens. Just dumb luck that some of us happened to be elsewhere.”

Ciri says nothing. Once again, she feels dumbstruck by the depth of tragedy that Eskel’s gentle, casual demeanor seems to be built upon. 

He turns to her with a strange look in his eye. Compassionate. Careful. The firelight leaves his scars dancing in their own shadows. “I’ve heard what happened at Cintra. Know that many of us understand, lass. Geralt understands.”

Ciri turns her face away. Her hair, left down today to preserve some warmth over her neck, falls in a blessed curtain over her face. 

Eskel continues to speak, diverting the conversation. He’s very decent for that. Ciri appreciates, at least, that he continues to make small choices to allow her her dignity. “Anyway. The attitude toward witchers was getting worse then, even besides the pogrom. Some pamphlet or other already had people riled up over witchers being criminals, if they hadn’t gotten around to calling us monsters yet. The Griffin school fell not too many years later. We still had mutagens, but the teachers got reckless with them; barely one in five boys survived the trials to begin with—”

Ciri’s eyes snap over toward him. Four out of every five boys dead? That would be—she was no good with sums, but that would make twenty boys dead just for the witchers who still returned to Kaer Morhen. For more witchers… for all these centuries before… she feels dizzied. 

“—but they wanted stronger witchers to make up for our losses,” Eskel continues, as if he’d said nothing but the bare facts of life, “so they started experimenting. They put Geralt through two rounds of the Grasses, and it made him stronger than just about any witcher I’ve met in my lifetime, but it killed all the other boys they tried it on. It’s no easy thing, surviving that, much less twice. That’s what turned his hair white, by mutation or stress. He still doesn’t like going by the room where they did it.” He laughs, hoarsely. “We used to say—me and the boys in our cohort, Geralt didn’t find it so funny—that witchering was going to be a walk in the park, because nothing would hurt worse than the Grasses.”

His gaze catches Ciri’s, and he must finally notice the horror that has eclipsed her, because his expression shifts concerned. 

“You alright, lass?”

She feels a bit sick. “How may people have died here?”

Eskel blinks. “Many,” he says, slowly, as if he’s realized some of the enormity of his words. “Most witchers die out on the path. But that first round of the trials would have killed most of the boys in the rooms under these halls.” 

The fire pops.

“It’s not a kind truth,” Eskel says, finally. Ciri puts her attention back on the fire, but she can see him out of the corner of her eye, frowning slightly. “But it is the truth. Better you know. Ignorance keeps you some peace, but it keeps you from understanding.”

Ciri had wanted to understand. She hadn’t prepared herself for this, though. Silly, maybe. Castles are large. Multitudes of people die within castle walls, why would it be different here? It’s only…

Her rationalization fails her. There is an image in her head of hundreds of boys her age. And this keep was full, once. As Eskel tells it, the cracks in the foundation of the old stone dates back to a massacre: but what he also tells her, though less explicitly, is that it was built on massacre to begin with.

“Are you alright?” he asks, again.

Ciri doesn’t know how to answer that. “It’s awful,” she says, raspier than she means her voice to be.

Eskel nods, sits back in his chair. Pushes his feet a little closer to the fire. “Things often are.” 

Ciri decides she needs a little time alone. She says as much to Eskel, though her words are hurried and only half-recognizable, and leaves the kitchen before she can hear or see a response from him. He lets her go without protest.

The cold stone of the halls echoes her footsteps back to her. It feels startlingly empty. Other than her and Eskel, it is only Lambert and Vesemir still in the keep; Ciri doesn’t know where either of them are, but she doubts that she’ll come across them in the labyrinth of Kaer Morhen. She’ll avoid where she knows Lambert’s alchemy lab to be from the occasional muffled explosions and noxious smells, and she rarely sees Vesemir anyway. Wherever the old man spends his days, Ciri has never found it, and she doesn’t intend to go do so today.

She does have an intention though. When the nausea of the horror settles a little bit, she finds a hardened resolve in the pit of her stomach. She’d achieved one of her goals for the day. She’d found out Kaer Morhen’s horrible secret, the one that had laid shivering under the stones since her first day there: all that left was the room. The one Geralt had looked at warily. The one he’d refused to speak about. She has a dark feeling that it’s all connected, but it doesn’t matter anyway. While Geralt won’t be looking for her, while she has the determination to do it, she needs to go look. 

She doesn’t remember the way well. It’s been weeks since her arrival at Kaer Morhen, and she hasn’t gone back down the stairs into the lower levels since that first night. She approaches the staircase with a torch stolen from a wall sconce with apprehension. She doesn’t think there were many twists and turns on the way; but she could have forgotten them. She was busy being guided by Geralt and being intimidated by the immense empty stature of the keep, that first night. 

No matter. Nothing else left for it now. If she needs help, she’ll just have to scream. Someone will hear her. When Geralt gets back, he’ll come looking for her. It’ll be alright if she gets lost. She only has to go . Now.

She takes a breath and starts down the stairs.

The darkness there is shocking and oppressive. The keep itself is shadowy enough in the daytime; when she’d first arrived, it had been night already, and almost a new moon, so that there was hardly any light to begin with. Leaving the last traces of sunlight behind is rather terrible. But she’s committed already, and something small in her brain tells her that she can’t back out now, not now that she’s made a decision, even if the only one who would bear witness to her cowardice would be herself, and so she continues on.

The stone walls all look much the same, but she manages to follow the hallways straight on for a while. She looks for any identifying marks on the walls, something familiar to orient her in her surroundings, but none of the chips in the stone or the crumbling pieces of walls ring any bells. She can only continue on with the quiet crackle and snap of the torch in her hand. 

She thinks she hears a sound, once. Dry. Scraping. She whirls, presses herself against the wall, holds her torch out, but there’s nothing there. 

Rats, she reminds herself. Rats and bugs, like Eskel had said. Her mind has tricked her with these same falsehoods in the same kind of halls before, and Eskel had said it was probably just vermin. She’s familiar with vermin. She’d lived in a castle. Her grandmother ran a tight ship, but she wasn’t always there to run it, and even with a competent staff it’s difficult to keep rats out of pantries and empty dungeons. Ciri should be far past the fear of a rat running over her feet. She’s no precious maiden. She should be fine.

Some small, traitorous part of her mind tells her that that is not what rats sound like. Trying not to whimper aloud, she pushes the thought aside and turns her back reluctantly on the direction of the noise to continue on. She tries to ignore the thought that she could die here, trapped in the omnipresent darkness. 

Sconces line the walls, some holding unlit torches, though Ciri can see on closer inspection that the wood of most has started to rot away. One swarms with woodlice that she doesn’t see until she’s far too close, and she nearly shrieks as she recoils. It’s all too clear a reminder that this space is too big for the people who remain. Nobody has been down here to light the torches down the hallways, to make this space liveable, for years now. 

With that growing unease in the pit of her stomach, Ciri continues on. And on. And she begins to think that she must have passed the hallway she was supposed to turn down, so she takes the next turn, and it’s not the place she’d intended to find. There’s three doors at the end. A bit of panic starts her heart racing, but she tries to ignore it. She’s not going to get lost down here. She’s not going to get lost down here. It’ll all be alright if she gets lost down here. But she’s not going to.

She thinks about the dry, rasping sound. Just a rat. Just a rat.

She follows her tracks back and takes the next turn. Not correct. The panic starts to rise, until she thinks she can feel it in her throat, and she takes quick steps back to the main hall and takes the next turn, and then…

There’s two doors. She lets out a breath and feels her heart begin to calm. 

To confirm, she goes to open the door on the left, the storeroom. To her relief, the chests are all there, just as she’d remembered them: not as they’d left them, though, that night. Eskel had said he was going to come back and clean up, hadn’t he? It goes up on Ciri’s mental list of points in Eskel’s favor, that he’s true to his word. It’s different than honesty, she thinks. Anyone can tell the truth, but not everybody follows through on their promises. 

Not many people tell the truth, either, but that’s a separate issue. Eskel seems very forthcoming, but that’s only in stories. He’s had nothing to lie to Ciri about yet. She’ll have to keep watch for that.

The dust on the floor here has already been disturbed: once by the faint imprints that Ciri recognizes as her, Geralt, and Eskel, as well as the clothes Geralt had tossed onto the floor in his search, and once by clearer boot prints that must have been left by Eskel. Ciri attempts to step in these imprints anyway. She doesn’t know why she feels the need to avoid leaving any traces, but she indulges the little paranoid thing in her brain that tells her to do it.

She opens the lid of one of the chests to reveal the other cloaks, all twins to the one around her shoulders, and it all sort of hits her at once. Trainees. Witcher trainees. These are dead boys’ clothes.

She slams the lid closed with more force than she means to and tries not to breathe too hard. Be reasonable, she thinks. Some of those boys grew up. Her cloak—Eskel said it was Geralt’s. She’s not wearing the clothes of a boy that was killed. Or… her other clothes? The shirts that Coën had stitched a little fitter for her? Her boots? There’s no way to know. There’s more clothes by far than there are men here. Even if they hadn’t died as boys… it’s an enormous weight over her lungs to know that all the boys and men who wore those clothes are dead. 

She turns with a terrible feeling in her stomach and leaves the room, pressing the door gently but firmly closed behind her. One thing left to do. One more door. There’s no bootprints in the dust to follow, so she leaves her own when she steps up to the door, the one Geralt looked at as if it could bite. Her hand remains thankfully unbitten when she places it against the creaking wood. She pushes the door open.

It’s a curious sort of chamber. It’s large; the light of Ciri’s torch doesn’t reach the back walls. The space is all open, at first, and only reveals furniture as she starts further into it: tables, first, topped with dusty equipment, old glass vials and… needles. Injectors. Ciri holds her light closer and finds herself a bit unnerved with their size. Grandmother always said that medicine like that was unnatural, better left to mages; that a Cintran should stay true to those methods that have worked, sterilize with alcohol and sear closed with fire. Rely on Mousesack’s nature healing, if you must. Science was always closer to magic than Grandmother cared for. 

Ciri remembers, though, that there had been mages in Kaer Morhen once. Mages and what must have been an awful kind of science. 

She lifts her torch again, lets the light spill as far as it will, and finds a row of… chairs, beyond the tables. They must be chairs. They’re blocky, inelegant constructions, rudimentary and unpolished even by the roughshod standards of chairs made in wartime in Cintra. The legs are too thick, take too much wood, and there are thick armrests, as well, and Ciri discovers as she draws closer that the armrests are not just decorated with flickering shadows but with leather straps, decayed and moth-eaten.

That creates a very clear picture of the chairs’ intended purpose. 

The pieces of the puzzle start to come together. Chairs to keep people in them; sturdy so they can’t be broken, weighty so they can’t be moved. Scientific instruments on the tables. Mages at Kaer Morhen. Mutagens. That’s what turned his hair white, by mutation or stress. He still doesn’t like going by the room where they did it. There were boys in this chair, once, strapped down and at the mercy of large needles and the sort of magic that mages pretend has reason behind it. She knows it with a terrible certainty.

She is under Kaer Morhen at the moment. The stone walls are thick. What kind of pain had Eskel described? What was it like for them? Would Ciri actually be heard, now, if she screamed for help?

She shivers. Her curiosity doesn’t let her leave, not quite yet, and so she walks the perimeter of the room: plenty of sconces for torches, to keep it well lit, but no windows. Dark stains in the wood of some of the tables. A torn strap on one of the chairs. Once she knows she has seen all there is to see in there, she retreats from the room and presses her back against the closed door.

There is the secret of Kaer Morhen, solved. Tucked away under their feet. Unspoken of. Ciri knows that she understands, now; this section of things, at least. She does not feel victorious. She does not feel gratified. She wonders, with a wave of nausea, what they did with all the bodies.

The way back to the main hall is easier. Caught up in her thoughts, she barely has time to be wary of the darkness. She follows the hallway forward and forward and forward toward the stairs. She thinks about Geralt. He still doesn’t like going by the room where they did it.

She hears a sound behind her.

She’s just seen the light from the main hall, seen the stairs, but the rasp of something against stone has her whirling around, brandishing her torch like a weapon. Again, she could swear she sees movement in the shadows. Something slipping away around a corner until she can no longer see it. 

It’s too present for her to forget this time. It’s too present to explain away. Ciri has seen rats in dark halls before, seen cockroaches along a pantry floor: none of them make the sound she heard, like paper curling and burning in a fireplace. 

She is close to the safety of the light. She could turn and flee up the stairs. She stands, stock-still, and watches the shadows. Her torchlight flickers. Gutters. She stays frozen, held in place by horror or curiosity, or by the terrible enormity of everything she’s learned in the day. Something is in the shadows. She’s sure of it. She’s sure of it. She’s sure of it.

“And what are you doing down here?”

Ciri whirls around, and there’s a figure at the top of the stairs. It takes her a few moments to discern that it is Vesemir—she doesn’t know his silhouette, not like she knows Geralt’s or even Eskel’s, though he and Geralt both have white hair—and knowing who it is doesn’t calm her still-racing heart. She opens her mouth to try and explain herself. She feels inexplicably guilty. She’d done nothing wrong , really, she was only looking around. There is something in the shadows.

She gapes like a fish for a moment and turns back, holding her light out into the darkness. Nothing moves. She hears no sounds.

“Well?” Vesemir asks, voice deep and grating. 

“I heard something,” Ciri says, resisting the urge to retreat up the stairs. She doesn’t want to be close to whatever is down there, but she doesn’t quite want to face Vesemir either. It’s true, anyway; a plausible excuse, and she doesn’t need to mention that she was also looking through the terrible experiment room. “There’s something down there.” 

Vesemir’s footsteps echo behind her, and Ciri flattens herself back against the wall so that she can let him pass. He stops beside her and holds his hand out. She hands him the torch and starts slowly up the stairs, closer to safety but still close enough to watch.

The old man moves cat-like down the corridor, footsteps soft and steady. It’s a sign of good balance, Ciri thinks blithely. Movement that’s controlled. The sort of thing you see in old soldiers and not in new ones. He reaches the first turn-off, and looks around the corner before he brings the torch around to light the way. Is he able to see in the dark? Ciri takes a few steps down the stairs, trying to see better.

After a few minutes, Vesemir appears from back around the corner with a speculative hum. Geralt must have learned that from him. “Nothing there now.”

Panic rises anew in Ciri’s throat. She has to be believed. This can’t be explained away this time, not as a little girl’s paranoia, now when she knows what she heard. “But there was something there,” she exclaims, “something in the shadows that dragged along the floor, it wasn’t a rat, I know it wasn’t—”

“Hush now.” 

Ciri falls silent, chastised immediately into silence as if it were her grandmother speaking. 

Vesemir hands her back the torch and starts up the stairs. “I believe you, girl. I’m not in the habit of disregarding dangers.”

A wave of emotion rushes over Ciri. She races to catch up. “I saw it before, upstairs, and Eskel said it was just a rat or a spider but—”

Vesemir holds up a hand and silences her once again. “The young ones get too comfortable here. Eskel’s a sensible one, but he can be overconfident.” He looks back at Ciri as they reach the top of the stairs. His eyes are severe. “Even if I hadn’t seen the shadows, I would be a fool to disregard a warning.”

Ciri nods dumbly.

“Come. Sit.” 

Ciri replaces the torch in the sconce she’d stolen it from and follows Vesemir to the grand table. He sits at his customary place at the head, and gestures for Ciri to sit at his right. She feels very small. 

Vesemir doesn’t look at her like the other witchers do. They all seem as if they’re trying to examin her, figure her out; Vesemir’s eyes are almost dismissive, as if she’s not worth the trouble of trying to figure out. She still doesn’t know how he actually feels about her.

He believes her. 

“You’ve seen it too?” Ciri chances, hesitantly.

Vesemir sighs heavily and rubs at his eyes with his fingertips. “Glimpses, and only in the places nobody else tends to go. Not the normal vermin; the medallions don’t seem to pick it up, though, so we’ll need to investigate, if it’s not just my eyes playing tricks on me . ” He says the word like a curse. In his next movement, he lays a hand over the scarred wood of the table. “We’ll talk when Geralt gets back. I have a feeling it’s something to do with the strange specimen he brought back.”

“The creature? But you didn’t find anything, did you?”

“Found that it was unnatural. Mutated. Same with a bit of a leshy Eskel brought back with him. Said it was acting strange; it’s built differently than any leshy I’ve seen.”

Ciri takes the information in silently. Geralt had said the world was changing. What did that mean for whatever was in the shadows?

“Whatever it is,” Vesemir continues, “we’ll formulate a plan when we have the manpower for a proper search. It’s not going to kill us within the next few hours if it left you alive down there.” That sends a chill down Ciri’s spine. “I have other matters to talk to you about.”

That’s not what Ciri was expecting. “Like what?” 

Vesemir laces his fingers together and braces his forearms on the table. “Geralt says you see things. Things you shouldn’t know.” 

Ciri freezes. “What do you mean?” she asks, trying not to sound like a liar. 

“His sorceress, for one,” Vesemir says, raising an eyebrow at her. 

Oh no. She’d forgotten. That first moment, the jubilation of finally finding Geralt: she’d asked about Yennefer then. She’d told Geralt that she heard the woman’s name in a dream. She shouldn’t have been talking about things she’d seen in dreams at all, she’s sure that’s connected to the other things she does, but she hadn’t thought to hide it just then—

Vesemir is still watching her. 

“It doesn’t happen often,” she counters, defensively, and then immediately regrets her word choice. “Really just the one time, and I think that must have been destiny, something about the connection between me and Geralt—”

“Destiny doesn’t do that, girl.” 

“Well—” Ciri scrambles for words, and her heart starts to race. “Brokilon. Brokilon, then. They made me drink the water there, and—”

“You drank the waters in Brokilon?” Vesemir interrupts. “And you are here, now? You remember your childhood?” His tone grows fiercer with every word. 

“Well, yes,” Ciri amends, sensing that she’s said something wrong. Her cover story hasn’t worked. “But that’s—well, the dryads weren’t expecting it, but that should have been enough to show me something, shouldn’t it? It—” she cuts off, remembering what the second tree had actually shown her. What are you, child? it had asked. Not promising.

Vesemir keeps a narrowed gaze on her, and Ciri shrinks under it. “The waters of Brokilon are irresistible. To drink from them, you should have forgotten and begun to turn into a dryad yourself. If you did not…” He purses his lips. “That might be fate indeed. It does not explain why the dryads let you leave.” 

“Mousesack came to take me,” Ciri rushes, eager to present a real answer. Her memory crushes her a second later. “Not Mousesack. A doppler made to look like him—like the druid that lived in court with me,” she adds, remembering that Mousesack is not universally known, as she had thought when she was small. She pushes down the lump in her throat at the thought of his death. “He said he was going to take me to Geralt, and I wanted to leave, so they let me…” Vesemir looks disbelieving. She trails off. “That’s still fate, though, isn’t it? He said he was honoring the Law of Surprise.” 

Vesemir looks at her for another long moment. Ciri holds his gaze tentatively (don’t show weakness, some illogical part of her brain says) and tries not to shy away. “What exactly did you do, all that time between Cintra’s fall and when you found Geralt? A girl of what, twelve? Unaccounted for for weeks, long enough to make it to Brokilon and out again and wind up on someone’s farm after following a doppler? ”

“I’ll be thirteen, soon,” Ciri says defensively, resolve crumpling as she finishes, “Belleteyn’s not very far now.”

Vesemir’s gaze is unflinching. “Look, girl. Geralt’s too chivalrous to press for answers. I’m not. If you’re living in my keep, you play by my rules. You answer my questions. Now, if you would.”

Ciri feels cowed. In defense, she draws herself up into her persona of nobility, haughty and disdainful. “I am the princess of Cintra, in case you had forgot,” she starts, earning herself a raised eyebrow from Vesemir. “I am not a delicate and fragile child. My grandmother raised me better than that. I am no stranger to combat. The doppler was sent by the forces of Nilfgaard in an attempt to capture me—no doubt, they wish to eliminate the last true claim to Cintra’s throne. Fortunately, I was able to hold my own in a fight—” lie, she’d been overcome very quickly, but she had gotten one good jab in at least— “and managed to escape.”

She doesn’t outline the very strange encounter she’d had with the doppler, tied to a tree and abandoned. She’d been there a while. She’d nearly thought she was going to lose a toe in the cold, unable to move as she was before Dara freed her. The doppler hadn’t returned for her. She still doesn’t know why it had just… stopped trying to kidnap her.

“Very convincing, your highness,” Vesemir says dryly, and Ciri fights to keep her composure. “I don’t ask you to posture with me, only to tell me the truth. A propensity for visions is to be expected, with your mother’s abilities. I have to assume that that is what you’re creating so many half-truths to try and cover.” 

“I have no reason to lie,” Ciri says, trying to preserve her bravado.

“No,” Vesemir agrees. “And my advice is to realize that before trying to lie to me again. You’re not good at it.” He sinks back into his chair and waves a hand dismissively at her. “Feel free to tell me if any further visions of the future occur. I’d like to know if something else is going to get into these walls. Now, go find Eskel and tell him to meet me here. Lambert, too.” 

He orders her around like a child, which Ciri does not appreciate; she stands with a royal hmph that she doesn’t need to summon up for the sake of pretense. 

As she’s leaving, though (attempting to stomp without making it obvious that she’s stomping) the implications of the conversation sink in. He wasn’t concerned about her visions. He wasn’t… accusing her. If she thinks about it, he could have been entirely professionally curious, until she started twisting stories to explain things away. She feels a little guilty. She might have assumed the worst of the old man. She doesn’t admit that to herself, though. She pushes the thought away and heads to the kitchen, where she’d seen Eskel last. 

Because Vesemir’s going to want to talk to Eskel about the thing in the lower halls. Because there’s something in the lower halls, alongside chests full of clothes for dead children and seats fit for a torture dungeon. She shudders. She walks a little faster.

Chapter Text

Geralt and Coën return just before dark, by which time Ciri and Eskel and Lambert and Vesemir are all seated around the table in the main hall like some strange little council. Geralt has a deer over his shoulders. Coën holds their crossbows and a brace of rabbits. They’re both damp, but neither of them look fazed by the cold. Ciri is struck by a rush of gratitude that Geralt is back, after everything that’s happened that day. It nearly brings tears to her eyes.

It takes a moment of calculation, careful consideration, but Ciri makes a decision. She stands and goes (at as steady a pace as she can manage, not desperately fast but not slow enough to prolong the moment either) to Geralt, and before she can overthink it, she puts her arms around his middle and presses her face against his chest. 

Geralt stills for a moment, probably surprised, but then he shifts the weight of the animal on his shoulders and puts an arm around Ciri. Damp, but warm. Solid. He smells like snow and sweat. She’s glad he’s there.

“What’s going on?” Coën asks, as Ciri allows herself one more lingering moment to cling to Geralt. “Lambchop? What are you sitting around for?”

Ciri pulls away from Geralt (and he places his hand on her head for a moment as she does, heavy, comforting contact) and tries to keep the desperate edge off her voice when she tells him and Coën, “There’s something downstairs. In the halls.”

“We’re going to do a search,” Vesemir says, and when Ciri turns to face him, he seems a bit annoyed by the prospect. Over the last few hours, as he talked with Eskel and Lambert and devised a full plan, Ciri’s gotten the sense that he’s less than ecstatic about having something unknown in his halls without his permission. The walls are crumbling and spiders live in every other corner, but Vesemir still seems to feel some sort of responsibility, if not ownership, for the keep. As if he can keep it standing by sheer force of will. As if it will stand as long as he does.

After a quick talk over logistics, Geralt and Coën stash the fresh meat in the kitchen to be dealt with later. Ciri follows them to be close to Geralt for a while, and discovers quickly that though she was undisturbed by the animals themselves, she is far less amenable to the idea of skinning and gutting things. It doesn’t matter, though. In a tense silence, they detour to collect weapons and various pieces of armor, and then she and Coën follow Geralt’s brisk strides back to the main hall. Geralt straps on his breastplate. Coën opts for a mail shirt. It’s the first time Ciri has seen his armor; it’s strange to see him in armor like a knight’s. She’d thought all witchers would wear leather, like Geralt. 

When they are all gathered in the hall, armed and attired, they initiate the search. 

“No offense, princess, old man,” Lambert says (with a tone that indicates he’s about to say something offensive) as they light torches to take into the lower levels, “but are you sure you saw something? Some big fuckin’ rats around here, and if they’re not setting off the medallions, they’re not monsters. ” The swords on his back glint in the light, and he’s strapped on bracers. He’s following along with the program, though begrudgingly.

“I was not imagining it,” Ciri says, very tensely resisting the urge to stomp her feet like a little girl. Pity there’s no horseshoes around for her to throw. “I’m not a child, and I haven’t been so sheltered that I don’t know what a rat looks like. I’ve eaten one before. I’m familiar enough to tell when it’s not…” she takes a breath and tries not to shudder. “It was not a rat. Vesemir doesn’t think it’s a rat either. I would be well obliged if you kindly shut up.” 

Annoyingly, Lambert only looks approving (and a bit amused), but Ciri thinks she’s gotten her point across. She feels a hand on her shoulder and looks up to see Geralt, looking back with his eyebrows slightly raised as if he’s trying to communicate something. Ciri picks it up, this time. Don’t waste your time on this. Hand on her shoulder to reign her in. She’s still annoyed, but something in her heart thrills at picking up his cue. He and Eskel do that—communicate with slight changes in expression, as if a connection like theirs is beyond words—and it’s exhilarating to have a moment of that feeling.

The plan is to go level by level: spread out and clear a floor, hopefully find whatever is there, eradicate it if necessary, and head upwards, so that they can sweep the whole of the castle without letting something past. That’s the plan, at least. 

Geralt tries to tell Ciri to stay up in the hall when they go down the stairs, but she points out that being left alone will only put her in more danger, and he looks at her for a long moment before he nods and waves her along. She doesn’t know if he actually believes her reasoning, but she’s loathe to question whatever keeps her from being left to wait.

The halls are much less intimidating with several witchers and a torch to each one, but slowly they all spread out, going down different halls, and it gets quieter and quieter and the dark starts to press in from all sides. Ciri winds her fingers around a buckle on Geralt’s breastplate as if he’ll disappear if she doesn’t keep contact with him. He glances down at her, but says nothing about it. He presses the torch further into the darkness.

“Describe again what you saw,” he asks, once they’re completely alone. His tone is low enough that Ciri can barely make out the words.

Ciri’s mind races, trying to think of a way to describe what she’d seen outside of the description she’d delivered to the group earlier—something scraping, not walking but dragging, small and shadowy. “Shouldn’t we be quiet?” she whispers back, as she thinks. “Won’t it hear us coming if we talk?”

“Your footsteps are loud,” Geralt says. “It’ll hear us either way.” 

Ciri feels a bit crestfallen at that.

“Well—” she starts, attempting to summon up some new information. She hadn’t actually seen much of the thing down here. “It sounded papery,” she tries. “Not like claws or like fur. Something else entirely. And I think—” she pauses, unsure. “I think it might be part of something larger. I don’t know entirely, I didn’t see anything more, but it felt like some small part being pulled back to the rest of it. I think I saw the same thing by the library, one day, and it felt… it felt like I was surrounded.” 

Reliving that episode in the halls upstairs calls to mind the vivid image she’d had while scared out of her mind and alone in the dark: her, in the midst of a tall, gnarled forest, and a tree moving. No way out. Everything malevolent.

“It slithered,” she recalls. 

Geralt hums his understanding and continues to press forward. In the sudden silence, Ciri feels apprehension creeping in again. Being with Geralt helps, but even her protector can only create a small circle of safety around them. Everything else is still out there. The air is too still.

“Can we keep talking?” she whispers. 

Geralt looks down at her for a moment, expression indecipherable in the sparse torchlight, eyes reflecting amber, and nods. “Want to tell me what you were doing down here?” he rumbles, looking ahead once more.

The shadows shift around a shattered bit of stone in a way that makes Ciri’s breath catch in her throat. “Exploring,” she says, by impulse. With further consideration, and a pressing desire to speak and fill some of the silence, she decides that she doesn’t want to keep more secrets from Geralt than she has to. “Eskel told me about the attack on Kaer Morhen,” she says, “and the trials. I saw the room down here with the chairs, and the—the needles. That’s what it was for, wasn’t it? The trials?”

“Yes.” Geralt gets a pinched-looking expression on his face. 

Ciri doesn’t know what she was expecting from that question. More disclosure, maybe. Geralt opening up about something. Luckily, maybe, she’s still too chilled from fear to feel disappointed. “It was all covered in dust,” she adds. “Why hasn’t anyone been there in so long?”

Geralt glances down at her again, and she can see the faint hints of reticence in his expression before his eyes are back on the hall in front of them. He directs them around a corner. “No more mutagens. The last mages who would make them are dead. That means no more boys. No more trials. No more witchers.”

Eskel must have mentioned something about this, but this information hits Ciri as if it’s all new. “No more witchers? So you’re the last?”

“Last of the wolves.” Geralt peers into the dark, eyes narrowed. “There are other schools, other witchers, but there are less of us every year.” He is silent for a long moment. He and Eskel have many similarities, but the way that they tell stories—or talk about things in general, maybe, this isn’t much of a story—is markedly different. Eskel tells things with such nonchalance that it hardly seems important, even as he speaks of massacre and dead boys. Geralt seems reluctant to speak about those sorts of things at all, and when he does, their emotional weight is clear without him trying to convey it. “When we die, none will come after us.”

Ciri’s gaze falls to the floor. She tries not to twist her fingers further in Geralt’s shirt. She doesn’t know how to explain the things she’s feeling. She would say that her heart aches, but it’s not that, not exactly. Her heart aches for the loss of her grandmother, the loss of Mousesack, the look on Dara’s face when he’d told her that she only brings ruin to those she’s around. It’s an entirely different feeling to see the empty halls, five witchers in a castle meant for a hundred. She doesn’t even really know if it’s empathy. These men’s struggles are not her own; Geralt’s, maybe, in the most general way, but she does not think that either of them expect her to fight his battles. She has kept herself separate from the others. She’s friendly with Coën, but that’s all it can be: she can’t afford to let the avalanche that destroyed his keep hit her as well. She has her own tragedies to take to heart. She thinks that Eskel is probably a kind man, but she does not empathize with him. The stories are horrid only because they’re true. They shake her in the same way she had been shaken the year that a serial murderer took up residence in Cintra’s capital. She had been in no danger. She had known none of the victims. But to know that people had died so gruesomely, so close to the castle…

She hears a noise.

Her hands close into fists without her intention, and she looks up to see Geralt, sharp and alert. He’d heard it too. He looks down at her, yellow-eyed and severe, and she nods. That was the sound of the thing. The sound of whatever is down here.

He passes her the torch. His sword slides from its sheath on his back with a low rasp of steel against leather, and slowly, he steps away from her and the circle of light into the darkness. His footsteps are silent. 

Within a few moments, he’s around a corner, and Ciri can only strain her ears to try and hear what is happening. It’s near deathly quiet. She feels the darkness pressing in around her again, and presses her back against the cold stone wall so that she can see both sides of the hallway, should anything creep toward her. She tries to keep her breathing from quickening and reminds herself that Geralt is nearby. She can call for him. Truly, this time.

A loud cry echoes suddenly through the halls. 

She is so focused on the quiet, straining for any sound, that the distant yell jars her violently. She drops the torch in her shock, and the flame gutters. She’s not sure if she makes any sounds of distress as she drops to the ground to try and save the flame. In her panic, she’s too hasty, and a desperate grab for the torch burns her fingertips. She bites her lip to keep from crying out, and gets the torch back in her hands, this time without grabbing the fire by mistake. 

Geralt’s around the corner in a moment, hands on her elbows, getting her to her feet. She looks up at him as he steadies her, but he’s not looking back at her; his eyes are focused on the dark of the hallway back the way they’d came, where one of the other witchers had yelled. “Come on,” he murmurs, low and serious, and then he’s taking the torch and leading her by the hand back through the passages. She tries to hold the torch out to lead their way, but he moves with surety whether the halls are illuminated or not. She holds tight to his hand and cradles her burnt fingers close to her body

She’s not sure exactly where they end up. The twists and turns of the lower passages are unfamiliar and badly lit, and she struggles to organize them in her mind. They do find their destination, however; Eskel and Coën are already standing at the mouth of the hallway, talking to Lambert, who holds up a… thing.

It looks almost fleshy, like a tentacle. When Ciri first sees it, it’s obvious that it’s something that’s been cut off of a larger whole, into a chunk small enough to fit into Lambert’s fist, but still, it wriggles. She shudders.

Vesemir appears out of the darkness a moment later. Lambert looks up to see the three of them arriving and holds the squirming mass up higher. “Got part of the bloody thing. The rest got away; it didn’t like the fire. Went into the fuckin’ walls.”

“What is it?” Geralt asks, letting go of Ciri’s hand to look closer at the thing. She presses herself right back up next to him and sticks her fingertips into her mouth to nurse away the pain of the burns. She sort of regrets putting herself closer to whatever Lambert is holding, but there’s a sick curiosity building in her stomach. She wants to see it too. “A tail?”

“Nah,” Eskel says. When Ciri glances over at him, there’s a mounting look of horror on his face. “That’s a root.” 

“A root?” Vesemir echoes, severe.

Eskel turns to face him. The dancing shadows from the torches mask his face. “The leshen arm I brought back. We have to check it.” 

The stinging in her fingers has lessened, so Ciri takes them from her mouth and simply cradles her hand back against her chest. “Leshen?” she asks. Vesemir and Eskel have already turned and started back toward the beginning of the maze of passages. Coën and Lambert exchange a glance, and start after them. 

“A forest spirit,” Geralt answers her. He’s still holding his sword; he doesn’t sheathe it as they follow after the group. His eyes flit between the other witchers and the darkness behind them. “It’s got limbs like a tree. Usually a deer skull for a head.”

“But I thought forest spirits only showed up deep into the woods,” Ciri recalls, remembering Mousesack’s lessons. “You’re only supposed to run into them if you’re going the wrong way. And we’re in a clearing.”

“They’re not supposed to have roots, either,” Geralt mutters. “But the world grows strange.” 

Ciri can’t quite make out the quick, hushed conversation between Eskel and Vesemir; she imagines the witchers can, though, because she sees Lambert and Coën talking to each other in the pauses that follow remarks from the first pair. She feels awfully left out of this whole thing. Not in a childish way. She’s interested in survival, which means that she has to know what’s going on, and whether by circumstance or by lack of education, she’s missing a piece of the puzzle here.

Vesemir and Eskel lead the way to the laboratory, where Ciri had watched Geralt and his mentor perform a string of experiments on the strange, unsettling moon-eyed creature from the woods. Eskel throws the door open and moves quickly around one of the tables. He stops in front of a table that holds what looks like a branch. Tendrils spiral off from it; some small, some large and starting to grow bark of their own. The mortar of the wall behind it is cracked and crumbling where new offshoots have pushed their way through.

“It’s in the walls,” he says, sounding hollow.

Vesemir swears. 

“What do you mean it’s in the walls?” Lambert demands, shoving his way into the laboratory as well. “That thing should be dead. Didn’t you burn it?”

“Of course I burned it,” Eskel replies, his tone practiced and even. (Better at dealing with Lambert’s outbursts than Geralt, Ciri notes. Or at least more willing to deal with them.) “This branch came off during the fight. It was acting strangely, so I brought some of it back to test.” 

“And?” Lambert demands.

“And nothing. None of the tests returned unnatural results.” Vesemir leans over the table to examine the wall and swears again.

“Neither did the creature we saw.” Ciri looks up at Geralt for confirmation. “Did it?”

“No,” he says, a furrow in his brow. “It didn’t.”

Lambert slams the disembodied root down onto the table. In better light, Ciri sees bits of new bark growing along the length of it. It calls to mind the scraping, slithering sound it must have made in startling clarity. “ Something fuckin’ unnatural is going on.” 

“Do you think it’s some new mutation, then?” Coën puts a hand on Lambert’s shoulder as he speaks, as if to rein him in. Lambert still bristles, but he doesn’t yell anymore.

Geralt makes a noise of agreement. “Things are changing lately. Something’s changing these monsters.” 

There’s a bit more chatter that’s impenetrable to Ciri; this and that about mutations and alchemical processes and terse tones throughout the discussion. She picks up none of it. She worries briefly about being left out of information, but her mind quickly wonders to the things that she does know; the thing that she’s been hearing, that she’s been feeling the presence of, is a strange creature made of vines and branches that has been living in the crumbling mortar of the castle walls. Everything else is eclipsed by the thought of that. Something in the walls. Not just in front of her, or behind her, but all around her, cutting off escape; she’s surrounded by this thing that has been creeping slowly toward her for weeks now. 

“The fuck are we supposed to do if this thing doesn’t set off the medallions?” Lambert finally says, bringing Ciri back to a conversation that she can understand. Sort of, at least. She knows that they all wear medallions, all with a wolf emblazoned on them except for Coën. She also knows that the medallions are supposed to do something in the presence of a monster. Something that they’re not doing, at the moment. It seems to unnerve the witchers, if not upset them, which is worrying. “The fuck are we supposed to do at all? We can’t set the keep on fire.”

Vesemir exhales slowly, his jaw tense. “We’ll burn it as we find it. We’ll finish our sweep of the keep; burn whatever you can, and we’ll find a more permanent solution.”

“Is that wise?” Eskel’s tone is tentative, careful. “It’s done nothing so far, has it? If it’s not aggressive, it might be better not to provoke the thing. Give us more time to think of a way to kill it in one fell swoop.”

Ciri’s mind is flooded suddenly with the image of a forest that she’d gotten back in the hallway by the library; dark, foreboding, branches like gnarled fingers. Silent. Still. Right up until the moment that it moved. “No,” she says, surprising herself. The witchers all turn to look at her. “No,” she continues, before she can stop herself from saying something that she knows is important. “It’s just been waiting. Biding its time. It’ll strike if it has the chance. And Lambert already proked it.” She gestures at the severed root. Her fingers still sting from the burns—a dull pain.

Vesemir looks at her for a long moment, and then nods. Ciri’s heart catches in her throat before she manages to swallow it back down. He believes her.

There’s a scraping, wooden sound, then, and Ciri’s gaze immediately goes to the root on the table. She bites back a wave of horror as it wriggles .

“Fuck this.” Lambert swipes the thing off the table, onto the stone floor, and with a quick motion he sends flame streaming from his hand. Ciri reels back; the room echoes with sounds of surprise and displeasure from the other witchers. Within a few moments, the root is turned to ash, and the stone beneath it is blackened by the fire. 

“Lambs,” Coën says, running a hand over his face. “Warning, next time.” 

“So we’re burning the things,” Lambert continues, ignoring Coën’s exasperated words. “Yeah?”

Vesemir sighs. “We’ll try and find whatever center it’s created. It must have a central point.”

“Right.” Lambert pushes his way through the group to get to the original branch, the one that Eskel brought back from his encounter. Ciri is quick enough this time to step back before he throws it down onto the stone and burns it to a crisp. He bathes the wall in flame next. The stone goes black. She can’t see any sign of the new growth anymore. 

Vesemir sighs again. This time, though, he does it the way that Mousesack used to, when Ciri was doing something particularly rebellious or unnecessary; she sees the face of her exasperated teacher in the old witcher, in the tight lines of the forehead and the press of the eyebrows and the very, very begrudging fondness underneath it all. She hasn’t been overcome by her loss for a bit, now. She’s been able to distract herself enough, bother Geralt into giving her dagger lessons and learning to do chores around the keep, that she’s been able to feel it less and less, but this yanks at something deep in her chest. Among the other high emotions of the day, the sensation floods through her and leaves her feeling short of breath. So much loss. So much death. Everywhere she goes, everyone she sees; Cintra burned around her, and when she fled she left only death in her wake, death around her in that field, and now she is here, surrounded by death again, and Mousesack is gone. She’ll never see him again. He’ll never pin flowers into her hair when she leaves for summer trips to Skellige. He’ll never implore her, exhausted, to pay attention to her lessons or to show up on time for events or to follow her grandmother’s instructions. He’ll never sneak an odd animal into the castle to show her, because Calanthe won’t approve trips into the forest, but he thinks she ought to know what a hedgehog is like. He won’t sigh at her again. Tears pool up in her eyes faster than she can think to hold them back. People are still talking around her, but all she can think about is how she would have been better, if she’d known. She would have shown up on time. She would have paid attention to everything he told her. And Melitele knows she would give everything to be chastised by him again.

The feelings rise in her like the tide coming in, like sudden waves washing away the marks she’d made in the sand with her Skelliger cousins: she flees into the hallway. She feels so incredibly childish, being overcome like this, but distancing herself from the hurt has only brought it all back stronger. There’s a monster in the walls. Eist and her grandmother are dead. She’ll never see Mousesack again. 

When she gets around a corner and lets herself sob in earnest, it feels like a release. The feelings have not lessened: no matter how she tries to push it away, her grief is larger than she thinks she will ever be able to hold. All the emotions of the day, however, feel as if they’ve been pent up in her veins. Letting them free relieves the pressure of it. She thinks all this dimly as she presses her back to the wall and slides to the floor, bringing an arm up to cover her face. She clutches at her cloak with the other hand for something to cling to. Something to hold for comfort. She manages to pull it a little closer around herself through the delirium of tears. Her fingers still hurt.

After a few moments, she becomes aware of someone else in the hall. Geralt hesitates for a moment at the corner, but then he goes to her. Kneels next to each other. Tentatively, he puts a big hand on her shoulder. Ciri extracts herself from her arm, still sniffling and with tears still streaming from her eyes, to look at him properly. 

He looks confused, but he… he is there, and he has been through so much, and he understands . She’s certain of that by now. She gives in and heaves herself up and into his arms. Slowly, she feels his arms circle around her, one around her back and the other cradling her head, and she lets herself cling to him as she sobs. The weight of his arms and the solidity of his armor are comforting, as much as anything can be.

“Alright?” he rumbles, quiet and low in his chest, once her sobs have subsided a bit.

She nods on impulse. Shakes her head after reconsidering. Nods again. “Everything is so… much,” she manages to choke out. She says nothing about Mousesack, not just then. It would sound nonsensical. 

Geralt says nothing to that, but he smooths a hand over her hair. She tucks her nose back against his armor and tries to even out her breathing. As her breaths become more regular, and the heavy feeling of having cried descends behind her eyes, she tries to focus on the smell of the leather.

Eskel’s voice echoes through the hall a little later. “Is she alright?” he asks, first, and then, “Are you alright, Ciri?”

Geralt pulls away to look at her questioningly, hand on her shoulder. 

Ciri tries not to sniffle. “I’ll be fine,” she calls back. Her voice wavers without her meaning it to. 

Geralt twists to look over his shoulder at where Eskel must be, and Ciri thinks that he’s probably doing the thing where the two of them speak without words. Eskel’s footsteps sound in the next few moments as he returns to the other witches.

“You should get some rest,” Geralt says, when Eskel is gone and he’s turned back to her. “You’ve had a long day. It’s getting late.” And it is—amongst all the excitement, the sleepy winter sun has long since set. Still, she has concerns.

“I can’t sleep if the—the leshy is still out there,” she tells him, stumbling over the name of the creature. She sniffs. She is tired, well and truly, especially after crying, but it’s not as simple as all that. “What if it comes for me?”

Geralt looks at her appraisingly for a long moment, considering that. “How about you sleep in the hall,” he finally proposes. “Next to the fire. We’ll bring down blankets and you can sleep in one of the chairs. It won’t go near an open flame.”

Ciri sniffs again, and then gives up and wipes at her runny nose with the collar of her cloak. “Do you promise?”

He adjusts her cloak where she’s displaced it so that it covers her shoulder again. He’s got a complicated expression on his face. “I’ll stay by you. The others will handle what can be done tonight.” 

The comfort of his presence assuages some of her worries. She nods her acquiesence. Her head feels heavy. 

For the second time that day, Geralt helps her to her feet, gentler this time, and they go to rejoin the others. Ciri stands close behind Geralt like his shadow, quiet and morose. He exchanges a few quick words with the others—confirming plans for the night, establishing that Geralt and Ciri will stay in the hall—and then they go to leave. Eskel moves to go with them.

Before they can leave properly, though, Lambert steps toward them. “One second,” he says, and when she glances back and realizes that he’s looking at her, he says, rather awkwardly, “Get a good rest. You’ll be no use if you’re exhausted and your nerves are gone to shit.”  

Ciri only stares at him, puzzled. Under her gaze, he wrinkles his nose and half-turns toward Coën, so that his shoulder is facing her. He makes a motion like a dismissive wave. His movements are tense and slightly unwieldy. “Go away, princess. Nobody asked you to hang around.” 

Eskel snorts a laugh. Lambert turns sharply to glare at him, and then Geralt has a hand on her shoulder to guide her out of the room. She feels a little stunned. Lambert’s words were crude, as always, but they were… kind, she thinks. Well-intentioned. Well-meant in the brusque, abrupt way that he speaks. 

“Is he… usually like that?” she asks, quietly, as they’re walking toward her room to collect blankets and such. Does Lambert always hide something like that under harsh words, she means. Is it something you simply have to learn to see?

Eskel, evidently still amused, laughs softly under his breath. “He’s a softie, under it all,” he tells her. He’s walking alongside her, she notices belatedly. He usually walks next to Geralt, when the three of them are together, so that he and Ciri take up opposite sides of the hallway. He’s put her in the middle today. “Won’t admit it for the life of him, but he is. Don’t I say to give him a chance?”

He does, Ciri notes. Not the same way as Coën, who seems to have a rosier view of Lambert than strictly warranted. Eskel doesn’t sugarcoat the rougher patches, but he’s never been dismissive of Lambert, not when he comes up in conversation nor when he’s an ass about passing the venison at supper. 

She’s pulled from her thoughts when Eskel swings an arm straight over her head to hit Geralt on the arm. “Don’t roll your eyes,” he admonishes, still with a smile in his tone. “You’re just as bad as he is, you great sap.”

Geralt mutters something that Ciri doesn’t quite catch, but Eskel laughs again. 

Despite his levity, though, Ciri has not forgotten why they are here in the first place. The dark edges of the hallway are less unsettling with both Geralt and Eskel there, but they have not lost their uneasy effect. There is still a monster in the walls. (There is still a laboratory and chairs with restraints made for children in the lower level.)

They retrieve blankets and a pillow from Ciri’s room before they return to the main hall (there is nothing else to retrieve before she sleeps; even if this were not an unconventional arrangement, she no longer brushes her hair before bed with a fine comb, or changes into a soft nightgown. Much has changed). Ciri tries not to look behind them with every step down the curving stairs. She only manages to curb the impulse most of the time; when she does check, Geralt and Eskel look down at her with something like concern, but she sees one of them look back as well. She feels better for knowing her fear is not irrational. 

In the hall, Geralt pulls two chairs together to form a sort of cot for her, with chairbacks for head and footboards. The chairs are large enough and she is small enough that she fits between the makeshift railings of the chairs’ arms when she curls up, and she creates a small nest of blankets to keep her warm in the night. Eskel is building a fire in the huge fireplace. Ciri thinks she’ll be comfortable, if not comforted. 

Eskel contorts his fingers in that strange way and looses a blast of flame on the wood stacked in the fireplace. It looks both stronger and more controlled than either Geralt’s or Lambert’s; he’s the best at signs, Ciri remembers. She thinks dimly that fire like that would be a strong advantage in a fight.

She really is very tired, and she’s only gotten more so since she admitted that to herself. Nervous energy still hums in her heart and through her body, but she’s stopped running on adrenaline and she feels a bit as if she’s crashing. She nestles down into her little pile of fabric, blankets and cloak, and begins to breathe a little deeper. A little slower.

More and more vaguely, she registers Geralt and Eskel talking in low tones to each other just a little ways away. She tries for a moment to hear what they’re saying, but their voices are too quiet and the crackling of the fire is getting too loud and she is too tired to truly make out what they’re talking about. She abandons the attempt and simply shifts her head a little closer to the fire to feel its growing warmth. 

“Goodnight, lass,” she hears Eskel say. She manages a sleepy g’night in return.

“Sleep well,” comes Geralt’s low voice a moment later. In the warmth of the fire and her blankets and the certainty of his presence, she does feel much better. She hums something back in acknowledgement and closes her eyes.

He doesn’t say sweet dreams, she thinks, sleepily, with some humor. Probably because he knows that neither of them ever have any.

Chapter Text

When she awakes, the keep smells like smoke. The remains of the fire smolder quietly in the hollow of the fireplace. It’s not until she wakes a little more—stirs from her blankets, emerges from her nest between the chairs—that she realizes the embers have ceased to give off smoke, and the smell is coming from elsewhere.

She doesn’t know what to do with this information except panic, and so she turns out toward the open space of the hall, only to be confronted with Lambert, slumped in one of the grand dining chairs with a rather jaunty hat pulled down over his eyes.

“Where is Geralt?” she asks; her voice comes out a mixture of panic and anger that she doesn’t quite mean. 

Lambert tips up the brim of the hat to give her a nonplussed look. “Not here. Obviously.” 

“He’s supposed to be protecting me.” 

“Yeah, we traded off.”

“You’re not protecting me. You’re half asleep.” 

“Astute observation, princess,” Lambert drawls. He scoffs, then, and pulls the hat back over his eyes. It’s got a feather in it, ragged and discolored with time, that waves to and fro as he moves it. “I’m just resting my eyes. I’ll hear if anything tries sneaking in here. It’s still early. Go back to sleep if you want.” 

Ciri opens her mouth to say something rude, but catches that particular habit of Lambert’s where he couches his niceties in sarcasm. He’d offered to keep watching over her while she got more rest. She makes a frustrated noise. She can’t be properly mean if he’s going to be sort of nice under it all.

“Where’d you get that hat?” she asks, instead.

Lambert stirs enough to pluck the thing off his head, turning it back and forth in front of him as if he’s examining it for the first time as well. The feather—a discolored brown, now; perhaps a ruddy sort of color, once, like Lambert’s hair—sways in the air. “Coën found it while we were sweeping the keep. Reminded me of someone.” 

He sets it back atop his head as Ciri clambers out of her blankets, thinks better of it, and settles back into her chair-cot with her legs crossed and a blanket around her shoulders. Cold as her room gets when night settles in, the big open space of the hall gets far colder without a fire. It still smells like smoke. 

“Who did you know who would wear something like that?” She doesn’t bother hiding her distaste. She is her grandmother’s child, in many ways, and she has certainly inherited the Lioness’ dislike for flamboyant, ostentatious clothing. Finery was expected sometimes as a part of royal tradition, but Grandmother had always been more comfortable in armor, and Ciri could never see a reason as to why someone would dress like a fool on purpose. In public, at that. Bards often got strange looks when they circled through Cintra. Ciri was no exception amidst crowds of judgemental Cintran citizens. One could expect little else, if they were so desperate for attention as to resort to feathered hats. 

Lambert clicks his tongue. “So much judgement, little princess.” Ciri rolls her eyes. “He was… an old friend of mine.” He runs a finger across the brim of the hat. “Wasn’t much like me. Or like anyone else, for that matter, but. I reckon that’s part of what makes a special person… special.”

It’s an awfully vulnerable thing for someone like Lambert to say. Ciri nestles herself a little further into her blanket cocoon and twists her lips from disdain back to something more neutral. No need to spoil the moment.

She should ask about the progress with the thing in the walls. Lambert doesn’t seem worried, though, and she’s warm in front of the embers of the fire, and it’s such a strange phenomenon to see him like this. 

“Was that his hat?” she asks, lightly. The word was settles heavy in her ears. “Your friend?”

Lambert toys at the brim of the hat for a moment, but then lets his hand drop and his gaze flit to the floor. “Nah. Looks like somethin’ of his, but he’d never been here. More likely Geralt’s bard left some of his ridiculous wardrobe in Roach’s saddlebags a few years back, before they had that falling out, and it just got left here.” He snorts a laugh, but his humor seems to have a bittersweet edge to it. “Or maybe there used to be some other witcher here as crazy as him. Doubt it, though.”

“He was a witcher?” Ciri frowns. “If he was a witcher, why hadn’t he been here? I thought all the witchers came here for the winter.” 

Lambert smiles at her, melancholy, and for a moment, he actually looks like Eskel. “Not all witchers get along, Princess.”

“But he was your friend,” Ciri presses, not understanding.

He pulls the hat down over his eyes again and shrugs. “The rest of ‘em don’t know about that.” He makes a flippant gesture with his hand before folding his arms across his chest. “Geralt only found out after he’d already died.”

There’s a finality to that sentence. His body language sends a clear message: he’s done talking about this. He’s going to retreat now.

Ciri, in a moment of bravery and resolution, decides not to follow that social cue.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” she says, softly, and watches as Lambert’s body tenses, very subtly, all over. “He sounds like he was very special to you.”

Lambert is silent for a long moment, until finally he says, “We all lose the people who are special to us.” Ciri can’t see his eyes to decipher his expression, but she hears the harsh edge to his voice. It’s the same rough edge that she hears in his crude jokes, the way he fights with Geralt. Things make a little more sense to her.

“I understand,” Ciri tells him, because she does. 

There’s another long moment of silence. Slowly, deliberately, Lambert raises his hand to the hat and gives Ciri a short, purposeful salute. She still can’t see his eyes. She thinks they both understand each other better than they did at first.

It’s not long before news arrives from the upper levels. By then, Ciri has managed to put the chairs back in their rightful places and pull on her boots, but has not deigned to abandon the warmth of her blankets. She huddles in a chair by the embers and revels in the warmth. Her conversation with Lambert had distracted her for a moment, but now the pervasive sense of wrongness starts to sink in around her again, the edge of anxiety that had buzzed around her all the day before. 

Lambert perks up, first, at the sound of something that Ciri can’t hear. He doesn’t jump to his feet or draw his sword, though, just takes off the jaunty hat that reminds him of his dead friend and hangs it on the back of his chair. A minute or so later, Ciri hears the sound of boots on the stairs, and then Geralt appears at the entrance of the hall. 

His eyes scan across the hall for a moment before they land on her, and his expression shifts just a bit. She barely sees it from across the hall. He starts across the hall toward her, unhurried but still purposeful as he always is. Ciri doesn’t think she’s ever seen Geralt meander. She thinks she’d be unsettled if he ever did.

“I hoped I’d be back before you woke up,” Geralt says. Ciri hears the apology in it. Sorry for leaving when I promised I’d stay. She shrugs. Geralt kicks the back legs of Lambert’s chair as he passes, hard enough to jolt the other witcher up and into a tamer selection of curses. Geralt feigns as if he’s not paying attention, but Ciri catches the ghost of a smile on his face as he crosses the remaining ground to reach her and put a hand atop her head. She looks up at him. His usual leather smell is woven through with the scent of smoke. “Did you sleep, at least?” he asks.

She nods (which is a strange sensation, with the weight of his hand on her head). “I haven’t been awake long,” she tells him, flippantly, because there are other things to talk about: “What’s happened with the thing in the walls?”

“The leshen,” he reminds her, and lifts his hand to run it over his hair, pushing back a few stray hairs. There’s something black—ashes or soot, most likely—tinging strands of it grey. “The sweep’s almost finished. More of the fuckers than we thought.” 

“S’pose that means I’m back on duty, then,” Lambert says, heaving himself up and rolling his eyes as he does. “Where’d you leave off?” 

“Eskel and I were near the library,” Geralt tells him. “Coën and Vesemir made it through the other side of the floor; probably checking the stairs now.” 

Lambert nods and plucks the hat off the back of his chair. “Best to get it over with,” he says, as he ambles toward the stairs, and punctuates the sentence with a yawn.

Geralt focuses back on Ciri. “Are you feeling… better?”

Since last night, certainly. She’s come down from the haze of panic, and things feel a little less desperate. She’s feeling braver. She nots curtly. “If you need to finish disposing of the thing, I’ll come with you,” she declares. 

A moment later, she realizes that the seriousness of her statement might have been hindered by the fact that she’s still wrapped in blankets, but she puts her best brave face on regardless. Geralt gives her his appraising look for a few moments and then nods to her. She drops the blankets (with regret) and follows him out of the hall.

“Lambert,” Geralt calls up the stairs, “I’ll go back with Eskel; you find Coën and Vesemir. Old wolf might appreciate a break.” 

As they climb, Ciri sees a blackened spot on the stone wall of the stairwell. 

“Sure,” Lambert drawls; his voice echoes down from the flight or so of stairs he’d made it up ahead of Ciri and Geralt. “I’ll tell the old man you think he needs to sit down. Get him a rocking chair, maybe.” The sounds of his voice and his footsteps fade quickly, though, as he makes it up the rest of the stairs.

Ciri and Geralt find Eskel in the library, which is either by logical conclusion or (Ciri’s preferred theory) through some sixth sense that Geralt and Eskel have developed solely to find each other in the maze of the keep. When they find him, Eskel’s tugging at the bottom of a bookshelf, feet braced against the cobblestones. The shelf is actually moving, slow as it may be, and Ciri marvels for a moment at what the sheer weight of it must be and how strong Eskel must be to move it.

“Ah,” Eskel says, when he looks up and sees them. He grins. He’s got soot and sweat on his face. “Help me?” 

Ciri senses, through a combination of courtly nuance and regular logic, that the request for help moving the heavy thing is not for her. She steps aside to let Geralt through, and settles down cross-legged on the table that sits in the middle of the room. The two men move the shelf much easier than it had been for Eskel on his own. 

Eskel ducks behind it, once they’ve gotten it a foot or so away from the wall. “Nothing?” he says, a bit incredulous. His voice echoes strangely off the stone and the wood of the shelf. “We just keep seeing less of them as we go,” he says, and Ciri realizes belatedly that he’s talking to her. “There were a good number of spots that we found—roots coming out of the walls—in the first few hours, but it’s like they’re hiding now.”

“Or gathering back together,” Ciri offers, without thinking.

Eskel stares at her for a moment. Ciri squirms. She’s not sure where that thought came from. 

“Help me with this one,” Geralt calls, already getting a solid grip on another shelf. Eskel goes to help him, same as before. They scrape the shelf full of books across the stone floor; it’s not altogether a pleasant sound, but Ciri supposes it’s better than—

She freezes. For a moment, just a moment, she’d thought she heard the slithering sound of the leshy’s roots under the rasp of the wood against stone.

Roots explode from behind the shelf a moment later.

Geralt swears, and the shelf topples away from the wall and falls with a grand crash. Ciri scrambles back on the table. Roots surge out from a massive crack in the wall that the bookshelf had hidden; Geralt’s sword is drawn before Ciri has time to think, and he slices through the tendrils before they reach him and Eskel. In the next moment, Eskel holds a strong stance with his hands extended toward the roots, and a stream of flame pours from his fingers. The roots sizzle and writhe as they burn. 

The one Lambert had burned in the laboratory hadn’t made a sound. Now, though, as Geralt pours more fire onto the blaze, Ciri swears she hears some high-pitched screech, quiet but resonant. Like the things are screaming. She shivers. 

When there’s no more movement within the wall, Geralt directs fire at the squirming, charred remains of the roots left on the ground. One writhes enough to hit the bookshelf, and the wood catches fire; Eskel swears and stamps out the fire. The room is filled with smoke. Ciri coughs and lifts her shirt up over her face to protect her watering eyes.

“Don’t think I’ve seen one that big yet,” Eskel says, when the fire on the floor is taken care of and the smoke has dissipated somewhat. He’s got the blade of his sword in the crack in the wall, prying out burnt roots and showering his and Geralt’s boots with ashes. “Nasty, that.”

Together, he and Geralt pull the rest of the shelves away from the walls, but no other cracks appear and no roots make themselves known. Geralt looks at the fallen bookshelf and sighs heavily. Eskel claps him on the shoulder. 

“Later,” he says, with a thin smile smudged with soot. “Let’s finish looking over the rest of the floor first.” 

“Yeah. Out in a bit,” Geralt tells him. 

Eskel shrugs and leaves the library, tossing an, “I’ll check the hallways,” over his shoulder.

Geralt lifts the bookshelf back to standing with little aplomb; because, Ciri realizes, all the books have fallen from their places. There’s quite a mess left on the floor where it had fallen, books splayed across the stone and scattered this way and that. 

“It really is too much to do right now,” she comments, in tacit agreement with Eskel. He tends to be very reasonable when it comes to this kind of thing, she thinks. “Better to come back to it later.”

Geralt rubs a hand over his eye (which only smudges more soot across his face, leaving him with the equivalent of either a half-mask or a black eye). “Yeah,” he says again, heavily. He sounds tired. “Later.”

“Coën will help put them all back, I’m sure,” Ciri offers, in a last attempt at cheering him up.

Geralt nods and waves her on toward the door. She gives him one last look, unsure if she should be concerned. It’s been a long night for him, she decides. Nothing drastic. She heads out after Eskel.

She looks both ways down the hallway; Eskel’s nowhere in sight. She calls his name, and there’s a casual response from her right. A feeling of anxiety starts to creep over her for a reason she can’t pinpoint. Geralt steps out of the library behind her, so she starts off toward the sound of Eskel’s voice. Tracing through the hallways as they start to twist and turn is simple enough, but the anxious feeling only worsens. 

This is where she’d had that moment of panic, she realizes. When it had felt like a forest was closing in around her. When she’d heard the sound of the roots on the stone. With a twist of her stomach, anxiety turns to panic.

“Eskel!” she calls, picking up her pace. She doesn’t see Geralt’s face as he keeps pace with her, but she can feel his concern. “Don’t go in there alone!” 

Eskel is only around another corner. Ciri lets out a breath of relief when she sees him, sword drawn, checking over the walls of the hallway. He looks up from examining a small crack in the mortar to raise an eyebrow at her. “Everything alright, lass?”

“I just—” Ciri stops short, uncertain of how to explain the sick feeling in her stomach. “I don’t think you should go any further down that hallway.” 

Behind him, the hallway only gets darker and darker, further into the keep and further from the light of the windows. Maybe it’s better for the witchers, with better vision, but it unnerves Ciri. She can’t forget the feeling of being trapped in a forest of dead, rustling branches. 

Eskel gives her a sympathetic look. Ciri frowns at him. She feels patronized. “Don’t worry, lass. It’ll be fine.” He gestures behind her. “And Geralt’s here.”

In the next second, a vine snakes out of the darkness of the hallway and wraps around his ankle. Geralt yells and leaps out from behind Ciri, but the thing jerks Eskel’s feet out from under him before anything can be done and pulls him bodily into the hall. Eskel drops his sword as his hand hits the ground. And then he’s gone, save for the sound of his voice.

Ciri can only stand and stare. She’d known. She’d known. Shock washes over her like a wave and things seem noiseless for a second before the world around her comes back into focus and she hears Geralt yelling, “Come on, Ciri!” 

She shakes herself from her reverie the best she can, though she still feels shaken and unsteady. Geralt carries his own sword and Eskel’s as he plunges into the darkness ahead of her. Ciri takes a deep, desperate breath. She can’t be left alone. Not like this. She runs after Geralt. 

The shadows grow deeper, and thicker, and Ciri finds it harder and harder to breathe, but she keeps herself moving. She’s certain that she’ll get lost in the dark, trying to follow the noises of scuffles and screams, but then, in a flash of light—Eskel, hung upside down, fire streaming from his hands, and—

There’s a figure in the hallway. Not human. Ciri doesn’t see it long (Eskel’s fire doesn’t last long before they’re torn back into the darkness) but she’s sure of that much. It’s huge. It towers over the witchers, and its head scrapes the ceiling. The light of the flame creates many shadows that obscure the details, but Ciri sees the layered bark that makes up the thing’s skin. The vines that wrap around it. It looks like a skeleton of a tree.

The leshy.

The firelight glints off the two swords that Geralt carries, and a moment later, in the shadows, Ciri sees the metal flash again. She draws her dagger from its place under her shirt and backs away. She can’t go, can’t leave them, can’t risk being attacked by roots with nobody there to save her, but she knows she’s no help in a fight either.

All she does is bring chaos with her. All she does is level monuments and splay bodies across a field. All she does is get people killed. 

Another blossom of light reveals Geralt’s face, as he traces his hand across his sword and lights the blade itself ablaze; with light, Ciri sees Eskel, armed again, cutting his leg free from the leshy and rolling back to his feet. There’s a gash in the leshen’s bark armor, but vines quickly wrap their way around it to cover it. 

“Well, we found the thing’s central point,” Eskel quips, breathlessly, retreating to Geralt’s side. “Take off the arms. Then we burn it. Stay back, Ciri!”

Geralt nods. Ciri nods, as well, though he can’t see her, and takes another few steps back. She puts both hands around the hilt of her dagger. The leshen lunges.

Geralt dodges out of the way, and turns to slice off the vine it had used to attack. His flaming sword sizzles as it cuts through. Ciri hears the same screeching she’d heard before, but this time, louder, higher; she presses herself back against the wall and tries not to be noticed.

Eskel takes a run at the creature, though Ciri can see that he runs unevenly, favoring the leg that the leshy had grabbed. Geralt follows close behind. Eskel lights his sword ablaze, and in a coordinated attack, they twist and cleave their swords through the vines and layers of bark that stand in place of the leshy’s arms. The leshy screams, high and grating. Ciri winces. Its left side catches flame.

Geralt and Eskel draw back, fall into swordsman stances, and another rush of vines comes at them. A number of practiced moves slash most of the tendrils out of the air, but Geralt makes a sound of pain and Ciri watches in horror as he severs another vine and then pulls the end of it out of where it had embedded itself into his stomach. In the light of their flaming swords, the blood dripping from the still-wriggling vine looks black. Panic curls its fingers around Ciri’s heart and starts to squeeze.

Eskel directs a stream of flame at the leshy, and it lets loose its awful scream before knocking his hand aside with a loose vine. Geralt recovers and slashes the thing’s main trunk, distracting it long enough for Eskel to wash it with flame again. This time, lashing out almost blindly, the vines manage to strike Geralt in the chest and Eskel across the head. Geralt is thrown back, past Ciri, and Eskel staggers back toward the wall. 

Ciri sees the vine before Eskel; it slithers up behind him, through a crack in the wall, and wraps itself around his sword arm before plunging itself into his skin. Eskel yells. His sword drops from his hand and the fire goes out. 

Ciri sees the next vine first, too, as if in slow motion. Her heartbeat pounds in her ears. Tears prick at her eyes. It raises itself up in front of Eskel like a snake, as he struggles against the one around his arm and tries to pry it off. She’s suddenly certain that this moment is dire. 

Her feet move before she’s aware that she’s made a decision. Her heart pounds faster as she runs toward the creature, the thing that’s been terrorizing her all this time, the thing that’s going to kill Eskel if she doesn’t make it stop.  

The thing pauses as Ciri throws herself between the vine and Eskel. And then she closes her eyes and screams.

She’s not certain what happens when she screams. She never has been, not any of the times that it’s happened before. What she knows is that she’s fucking scared. Her body does the rest.

When she opens her eyes, the ceiling is raining dust and mortar. Cracks run up and down the walls. The leshy lies a good distance away, and though Ciri can’t make out much in the dark, it looks as if it’s been… deconstructed, almost. It looks scattered. Stunned. The vines lie in loops around masses of bark. 

It hits her a moment later what she’s done. What she’s revealed. She turns, but Eskel isn’t looking at her; his fingers are twisted into a sign, and flame lights up her vision as he aims a stream of fire at the vine around his arm. The vine writhes. 

Ciri remembers the dagger in her hand and ducks around Eskel to cut the vine away from the wall. It’s thicker than she’d anticipated, and it takes several draws of the blade against the vine to actually sever it. She feels the heat of the fire against the side of her face as she does. 

The burnt remains of the vine still cling to Eskel’s arm. He swears and retrieves his sword from the ground with his opposite hand. In the time since Ciri’s scream, Geralt’s gotten to his feet and stalks toward the scattered form of the leshy with his sword ablaze in his hand. His free hand covers the area where the vine had stabbed through his stomach. Blood seeps past his fingers and spreads out across the white fabric of his shirt. 

Geralt makes it to the leshy first, but Eskel, still with the vine dug into his arm, is not far behind. Geralt drives his sword down into the central mass of vines that seem to make up the thing’s core; he closes his eyes, and his expression twists in concentration, and flames blaze out from the blade. Eskel drops his own sword (his right arm hangs limp at his side) and forms the sign for fire again. Geralt’s flames burn the thing from the inside and Eskel’s fire washes across the outside to burn the rest away. Ciri feels the heat of it even from so many paces away.

When the bulk of it has been burned away, the severed vines twitch and wriggle, but don’t seem to move with any intent. Eskel sags back against a wall. Geralt goes after him, catching him around his good arm and his waist to let him gently down to the ground. He leaves a bloody handprint on the remains of Eskel’s already-charred shirt. Ciri runs to go to them.

“You need to burn it out,” Eskel is saying, through gritted teeth, when Ciri gets to them. “It’s in my arm. You need to burn it out.” 

“You’re already burned,” Geralt tells him, but he forms the sign with his fingers anyway. Ciri can see the red, angry skin around the vine, where Eskel had already tried to burn it off of him. “Ciri, give me your dagger,” he calls, and Ciri does as she’s told and hands him the weapon.

She doesn’t have the strength to look as Geralt burns off the rest of the vine, but she smells it as plant and flesh burn, and she has to force down a wave of nausea. She looks back, once, long enough to see Geralt hold the blade of her dagger over a tongue of flame and then move to excise the vine that remains dug into Eskel’s arm. Blood still spreads out to soak even more of his shirt.

Footsteps clatter down the hallway, and the other witchers appear; Lambert first, with Coën and Vesemir close behind. 

“What the fuck happened here?” Lambert asks, latent horror under the twist of his lips, as he closes the space between him and their little huddle. Ciri says nothing. She doesn’t feel like the one who should explain it. She doesn’t trust herself to speak right then.

Lambert takes in the situation fairly quickly on his own, though. 

“Bloody hell,” he mutters, and crouches next to Geralt. “Give me the knife.”

Geralt gives him a sidelong look and doesn’t yield the dagger.

“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” Lambert growls, and pulls Geralt’s hand away, wresting the dagger from him. “You’re bleeding out. Let me do this.”

Geralt sighs heavily, irritatedly, but slumps back against the wall and rips a sleeve from his shirt to press against his stomach and stem the bleeding. Ciri goes to him; Coën is there, too, a moment later, looking over the wound and assessing the damage. 

“Are you alright?” Ciri whispers, shaky and tearier than she means to be, but it’s the only thing she can think to say. She puts a hand on his arm just to make sure that he’s still there, solid and real. To ground herself. 

“I’ll be fine,” Geralt grits out. “Been through worse.” He looks up at her face, then, and must notice that she’s distraught, because he raises a hand to smooth her hair back from her face. Ciri feels blood from his hand smear across his forehead. She sees him notice it, too. He grimaces. 

Things move systematically, after that. Lambert burns the remaining roots and vines in the corridor while Coën and Vesemir half-carry Geralt and Eskel down to the infirmary. Ciri trails behind, feeling like a lost child. She watches soberly as Geralt and Eskel’s wounds are wrapped, and as Vesemir examines Eskel’s eyes to be sure that his brains hadn’t been knocked around too bad. Lambert catches up soon after, and takes over the medical processes for Coën, who convinces Ciri to take her attention off Geralt and Eskel for a moment so that she can clean up. He wipes the blood off her forehead gently, but not gingerly, and lets her take care of the soot on her hands and arms. She doesn’t remember when she got soot on her arms. 

Once things have settled, she’s under the impression that the wounds that Geralt and Eskel sustained will heal quickly and without fanfare. None of the other witchers had seemed too worried once everything had been stitched up and bandaged and a small round of some potion had been administered. 

Vesemir had demanded to know what had happened in the fight. Ciri sees Eskel’s eyes track over to her, and remembers in a rush what she’d done; he says nothing, though. Geralt gives a quick, rough synopsis of events, and leaves out Ciri’s involvement. Vesemir narrows his eyes and raises a white eyebrow, but before he can comment, Geralt interrupts to say, “I’ll tell you the rest later.”

Vesemir looks skeptical, but he lets it pass.

At midday, Geralt and Eskel (and Ciri, by association) are ordered to rest while the other witchers finish clearing out any remaining roots. The sense Ciri gets is that they’re all fairly sure the main part has been wiped out; they all saw the single arm the thing had grown from, though, so it’s important to take out all the other parts as well. 

Ciri ventures out to get them all food. She returns from the kitchen, her arms laden with food (and realizes as she reaches the door that she hadn’t even thought about squirreling something away, this time), and pauses at the door to the infirmary. Eskel lays in one of the beds, as he’d been told; he sits propped up against the headboard with one leg bent to prop up a book and the other straight out. 

Geralt sits in a chair next to him, which he is definitely not supposed to be doing, with a hand on Eskel’s bandaged arm. “I’m sorry,” Ciri hears him say. 

Eskel shrugs and then winces at the movement. “I told you to do it. I’d rather have a few more battle scars than lose my arm to that thing.” He puts his uninjured hand over Geralt’s. “You could mope if I died. Don’t pout over helping me.” His gaze flits up to Ciri, at the door, and he raises an eyebrow. “Speaking of helping me.”

Geralt turns to look at her, too, and for a nonsensical moment Ciri considers turning around and going to eat in the kitchen by herself. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she tries instead, as she steps inside and dumps the food (a few cuts of dried meat, some bread, a few of the nicer root vegetables from the cellar) on a table.

“That’s your mother’s power,” Geralt says, evenly, rather than letting her off the hook.

Ciri looks at him uncertainly. 

“I figured it was something like that, when you knew about Yennefer,” he continues, saying the name that he’d almost refused to say the whole of their trek up to Kaer Morhen as if it’s no trouble at all. “Something powerful runs in your family, Cirilla.” 

Ciri breaks his gaze to look at the floor. “I don’t want it. I still don’t want to talk about it.” 

Geralt lets the silence hang in the air for a moment before he says, “We’ll talk about it later.” 

Eskel laughs, raspy. “You sound like Vesemir, Ger.” 

Geralt gets a vaguely disgusted look on his face and purposefully prods at Eskel’s bandages. Eskel says, ow, but then laughs and closes his book in order to hit Geralt over the head with it. Geralt bats the book away, but he’s got a small smile on his face nonetheless.

“You’re not supposed to be out of bed, are you?” Ciri asks, chancing the subject change. She’s fairly certain that Eskel will back her up in giving Geralt a hard time over not following medical instructions. 

Geralt raises an eyebrow at her (he caught the subject change), but then rolls his eyes. “I’m stitched up. They act like I’m going to shatter to pieces.” 

“They act like you’re going to rip your fucking stitches,” Eskel counters. “And I’ll tell Lambert to do them next time if you fuck them up. I’d put you back in that bed myself if I didn’t think it would take two arms.” 

“Lucky me,” Geralt says, dryly. 

She manages to go the rest of the day without talking about It. They eat, she listens to Geralt and Eskel’s conversations, and she very carefully avoids Vesemir’s eyes when he steps into the room to chastise Geralt for being up and about. After the morning, the afternoon feels like an extended exhale of relief. 

At nightfall, Coën stops by to change Eskel’s bandages (as does Lambert, but he hovers sullenly by the door rather than helping or acknowledging that he was concerned, which is what Ciri thinks). Ciri sits cross-legged on Geralt’s bed and actually looks at Eskel’s arm this time. She feels a little sick. 

Eskel’s upper arm is a mottled map of pink, white, and red; it’s healing already, and the blood has been washed away, but the severity of the burns (along with the scar from the vine that had gotten into his arm) is clear. He looks down at his own injuries with a sort of detachment; not unbothered, but certainly not distraught, either. 

“You’re going to have scars,” Ciri says, when the burns are treated with salve and the bandages replaced. Coën and Lambert had left to bring back dinner, talking in hushed voices. She says it without thinking.

Eskel hums an affirmative. “Hardly my first time,” he says, with a sardonic tone, and Ciri feels very silly for a moment. 

“These will be bad, though,” she presses, unsure of what her point really is. There’s something so drastic about the injury that he doesn’t seem to be acknowledging. She doesn’t know how it can go unacknowledged. 

“Sure.” Eskel settles back against the headboard, neck cushioned with a pillow. “The ones on my face were, too. It’s not about that, though, lass. This is just skin. It heals or it doesn’t. There’s no sense in weeping and moaning over something that’s already happened just cause it’ll make me look a bit different. Scars don’t change a man, Ciri. Not me, nor anyone else.” 

She feels almost chastised. She thinks about it for a moment. She nods, finally. It seems catastrophic to her, such a significant, permanent change. The world is full of those, though, it seems. Ciri stops being a princess. Something rakes its claws across Eskel’s face. Ciri topples a monument with her voice. Scars don’t change a man. They just exist.

She’ll understand it better once she thinks about it more, she decides. 

They eat dinner. Eskel is released to his own room to sleep, but Vesemir is insistent that he does not want Geralt walking around until the morning. Ciri waves good-bye to Eskel, who ruffles her hair and smiles at her, genuine, without hesitation. She gets the feeling that he does not really want to go, but she also gets the feeling that he’ll be back in the morning. By the time that he leaves, the sun is long past the horizon, and it’s time for Ciri to retreat to her own bedroom, cold and empty and a floor away from Geralt. 

“You should get some sleep,” Geralt tells her, moments after it occurs to her that she does not want to leave. She looks at him uncertainly. 

She remembers the first few nights in Kaer Morhen. How she’d wanted to follow after him so they wouldn’t be apart, so that she could keep that feeling of safety. Things are different now. They know each other better. Ciri doesn’t need to be with him to feel safe. But she wants to be. Especially after everything that’s happened.

“Can I stay here?” she asks, voice smaller than she intends.

Geralt blinks at her. His yellow eyes are almost luminous in the shadows and dim candlelight. “Of course,” he says, a moment later, once his surprise wears off.

Without another word, Ciri kicks her boots off, blows out the candle, and tucks herself up next to him in the bed before either of them change their minds. It’s not really big enough for the two of them, but he puts an arm around her regardless and she’s sure he won’t let her fall off. She feels safe.

“I was so scared today,” she confesses, small and quiet, in the dark. 

“That’s alright,” Geralt says, and she feels the rumble of his voice through his chest. “Means you’ve got sense.”

“I want to learn to fight,” she tells him. “Really fight. Like you. Like a witcher.”

There’s a long pause. Ciri wonders if she’s said something wrong. But, after a while, Geralt says, “Alright.”

Ciri falls asleep feeling safe and warm. She doesn’t forget everything that’s happened. But she feels that she can keep going despite it. She sleeps sweet and dreamless for the first time in a while.

Chapter Text

What Ciri finds, as fear of the leshy fades by days and then by weeks, as the winter buries the keep in layers and layers of snow, is she looks very different than she did at the start of the winter.

She sits cross-legged in front of an old looking-glass, and a different person looks back at her. She wears her hair differently, now. She used to prefer leaving it down, griped when the maidservants put it up for courtly events, liked it best when she shoved it up into a boy’s cap; she’s started braiding it back, of late. Keeps it out of her face when she trains. 

Her face is different, too. Hunger had sloughed the baby fat off of her cheeks, when Geralt first found her. Good, hearty food has given her back some of her roundness, but training has strengthened all the lines of her body, she finds. Her jawline is stronger. Her cheekbones are defined, but not pronounced. She’s got her fair share of new marks across her skin, too. A cut still lingers, fresh, from when she’d fallen off the balance beam the day before and broken open her cheek. She’s got a bruise on her shoulder, where exercise has slimmed and strengthened her biceps into lines of lean muscle, and another on her hip, and several on her legs. 

She likes it, though. Likes herself this way. Strong and wearing boys’ clothes and constantly better able to take care of herself. She does sort of miss the nice dresses, sometimes, but the only dress that she has left is Vereena’s, tucked beside a dead witcher’s armor in the trunk at the foot of her bed. She doesn’t know if she wants to put it on again. She doesn’t know if she wants to be wearing a dress among a group of heavily armored witchers.

She carries herself with more confidence now, she thinks. When she goes down the stairs for breakfast, she does it with a bounce in her step and her dagger in her belt. She laughs at Coën’s jokes and makes fun of Lambert and catches things when Eskel tosses them to her across the kitchen. She can hold Vesemir’s gaze, now. She thinks they’ve reached a sort of agreement, her and the old man. She’s still reticent to talk about whatever strange power has its roots in her, but Geralt must have explained it to Vesemir once he recognized it, because Vesemir doesn’t press. She thinks she’s earned his respect, a little, by getting stronger. She thinks she fits in better around the keep now. 

She knows that Eskel agrees with her on that point, because he’s told her so, warm and smiling and with a pat on her head after she figures out a complicated bit of footwork with her practice sword. He’s got an annoying habit of pushing her out of her comfort zone to prove that she’s fitting in well, though. This particular morning, he suggests that she go and help Lambert in the stables, with a smile that’s equal parts encouraging and impish. Ciri scowls at him, but puts her chin up and says that it’s a wonderful idea. She’s too proud to back down from a silly challenge like that (even if she grumpily thinks that Geralt would never make her help Lambert with his chores). 

When she finds Lambert and tells him that she’s going out with him to the stables this morning (she does not phrase it as a question; too much opportunity for him to say no or make fun of her), he raises an amused eyebrow. 

“Who put you up to this?” he asks, humor in his voice. “Coën?”

“Nobody,” she protests. “I can make my own decisions, thank you.” When he manages to arch his eyebrow even higher, she turns her face away and says, “Eskel,” as short as she can.

Lambert calls Eskel an absolutely filthy name, but he says it with a smile and seems to mean it with love. “Go get your cloak,” he tells her.

Ciri’s stronger now, but not enough to warrant pretending that she’s any help in opening the grand main doors of the keep. She lets Lambert drag one of the heavy doors open and brushes a stray strand of hair out of her face to tuck it back into her braid. It’s no intricate thing, not like the kinds of braids that maidservants would put into her hair at Cintra, but it works well to keep her hair out of her face. She enjoys it. She’s getting better and better at doing it herself, and Geralt helps her, sometimes. He’s actually a bit better at braiding hair than Ciri is, to her chagrin. He’s got cleverer fingers and more experience dealing with his own hair. Ciri has resolved to learn one fo the fancier braids to show him up. She’s not sure how she’s going to teach herself with no examples, but she thinks she’ll manage it somehow. 

Lambert gets the door open, and Ciri follows him out through the gap in the doors, chin up and ready to face the snow. Lambert looks appraisingly at her as she steps outside, and reaches over to tug her hood up over her head in one movement. Ciri protests, but he just grins toothily at her. Ciri resolves to pout the whole way, if he’s going to treat her like a child. (She is warmer, though. She would’ve needed to put her hood up regardless. She thinks it’s… she thinks it’s affectionate, from him. Like his way of taking care of her.)

The walk to the stable is short, and Ciri does breathe a little relief when she steps into the warmer, musty air. It’s still a little chilly. She keeps her hood up.

She takes a peek over at Lambert when she goes to pet Roach. When Geralt steps foot in the stables, it’s like he’s found another home; something about the motions of taking care of the horses is calming for him. Maybe the routine. Maybe just the contact with some other living thing. Creature comforts, Ciri thinks is the saying, but she’s fairly sure it’s not actually supposed to mean being comforted by creatures. 

The point is, Lambert isn’t like Geralt in the stables. He, obviously, sees stable duties as a chore, and only actually takes care of his own horse. Not that Roach would let him brush her or check her shoes anyway—she bites at him, which Ciri finds very funny—but she suspects that he wouldn’t do anything even if Roach was a sweeter tempered horse. He walks through the barest motions, rolls his eyes the whole time, throws hay down like it disgusts him. It all seems awfully performative to Ciri. 

There’s little moments, though, that catch her eye. Because Roach is nasty and mean and only really likes Geralt (she tolerates Ciri because of pure bribery, and Ciri’s running out of sweet things to give her before Geralt catches on), but Lambert’s horse is a sweet tempered thing. Which seems like it should contrast horribly with his personality, but Ciri sees him walk in, and pet the horse’s head very gently, and whisper something to her that puts a smile on his face, and it makes her think, not for the first time, that Lambert does a lot of things because he wants to be seen a certain way. Not because he actually is. 

It makes her think of the strange hat he’d found, the night she’d slept in the main hall while they hunted down the leshy.

“Lambert,” she says, while she’s thinking about it, the way that the inhabitants of Kaer Morhen only seem to recall dead witchers outside of their halls. She’s gotten better about asking questions lately. A little less anxious about it. Lambert’s usually pretty fair game to answer her questions, anyway. “How many witchers are there left? Do you know?”

Lambert pauses over his horse, hand run halfway through her main. He looks surprised. “I dunno. Few from each school—most are doin’ a little better than us, I think. Coën’s the only griffin I’ve ever met, but I don’t think he’s the only one left. The cats—” A dark cloud goes over his expression, but he wrestles it back to normal quickly enough. “Last I heard, they had solid numbers. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Why’d you ask?”

“Geralt said something about the world changing, when we were traveling here,” Ciri recalls. “He said there might be more monsters in the winter, now. That you might have to go fight them. It seems like it might take more witchers.” 

Lambert snorts. “Fuck that. Geralt can keep his white knight delusion and go freeze his ass off for a few ungrateful coins. Far as I’m concerned, a season with monsters and no witchers’ll only make them appreciate more what they have. Might even get us better pay.”

Ciri frowns at him. “You don’t think you should go and help people?”

“For the kind of coin they’re giving nowadays?” Lambert makes another ungraceful noise. “Wouldn’t be doing this if I could pick up any other job. Certainly wouldn’t do it for free.” 

“You don’t think it’s…” she scrambles for the words. “Some kind of destiny? Something you’re best suited for?” 

He outright laughs at her, this time. “Is it some kind of destiny, when you fall asleep in an alley and a rat gnaws off your toe? No, princess. It’s no more destiny than your kingdom burning down. We’re both just best suited for survival.” 

Ciri goes quiet at that. She doesn’t want to say that she sort of feels like it was destiny, her kingdom burning down around her, conquered and massacred, while she survived. It’s the same kind of destiny that Dara saw, that made him leave her. He recognized the danger. This thing that lingers in her, that Geralt says is her mother’s power, seems to doom everything around her. 

Later, when she and Lambert return from the stables (and she sticks her tongue out at Eskel, who snorts), she goes out to train with Geralt. When he’s done having her run through footwork and then go a few rounds on the balance beam and then finally lets her spar with him with the wooden swords (he trounces her easily), he looks out at the blanket of snow that spreads into the forests and decides that she’ll run the Killer tomorrow.

“Run the Killer?” Ciri asks, panting heavily, her wooden sword at her side. “What do you mean, run the Killer?”

Geralt looks over at her, half a smile on his face. “It means you’re going to run the Killer. You get snow in your ears, Ciri?” 

Ciri gapes at him, mildly disgusted by the prospect of what he’s suggesting. “I barely survived walking up it the first time,” she protests. “You call it the Killer. ”

Geralt shrugs and tosses his own wood practice sword to the side. His next move is toward his real sword, so that he can do his own exercises. Ciri is perpetually a little miffed that he treats her training like a warmup. “You’re stronger now. It’s not supposed to be easy.” He spins his sword in his hand and then does a complicated little pirouette to slash it across one of the training dummies. “We’re past the peak of winter. The thaw’s going to start, soon, and it’ll be more manageable.” 

Without a suitable complaint to make, Ciri pouts at him. It only gets her a small, amused smile from her protector. She goes inside to eat some warm stew, to hopefully delay her transformation into a princess-shaped ice pop during her inevitable demise.

They head out for the Killer as soon as Ciri and Geralt are done with their morning chores the next day, a few hours after sunrise. She braids her hair back for the trial. Eskel decides to tag along as well, which Ciri isn’t completely sure isn’t just an attempt to avoid his own chores, but she takes it in stride. She appreciates his presence at her imminent funeral. 

He doesn’t wear any of his heavy armor out for this expedition, and she can see the bandages around his shoulder where the Leshy had gotten its roots into him. It still makes her slightly sick-sad to think of, the way his flesh had been ripped and burned away to get the thing out of him and the pain it’s caused him even weeks later. He says the bandages are more for support than for a wound, nowadays, but she can’t help feeling slightly bad about it. 

Ciri’s allowed her green cloak only up to the start of the trail, where Geralt tells her, “You can leave that here. It’ll weigh you down while you run.” 

She makes a very displeased expression at him, but unclasps the cloak and drops it onto a nearby stone to keep it from soaking up the snow.

Geralt actually has the audacity to roll his eyes at her for that. “You’ll be fine, Ciri. You’ll warm up once you start moving.” He inclines his head toward the path (he’s got his hair half-tied back today, in the simple way that he usually does it) and starts off at a slow jog. 

“More sullen than Lambert, you are,” Eskel teases her, starting off as well. “Never thought I’d see someone pout more about their exercises.”

Ciri makes an offended noise at that, and runs the short distance to catch up with them before slowing to their speed. Eskel grins at her. She feels a little played, and wrinkles her nose at him, but says nothing more on the matter. She really cannot develop a reputation of being worse than Lambert. Melitele preserve him, or whatever.

“The point of this is not to go at your top speed,” Geralt says, and she turns her contemptuous attention off of Eskel and onto him. “Not your slowest, either. It’s about endurance and accuracy. If you can keep yourself strong and consistent, you’ll have succeeded.”

Well. That seems fair enough. Maybe this won’t be the worst thing in the world. She’s much stronger than she was when she last braved this trail, after all, and it’s no longer snowing like the world is trying to kill her personally: all wonderful points toward a good experience on the trail. Geralt leads them off the main path and onto a side path that Ciri assumes is more for training than travel. She takes a deep breath and rolls her shoulders out, ready to run. She sees the very first hint of an incline. She can do this. She’s been training for this, and this is just the next step of that training. 

A mile later, her lungs are burning and heaving, her face is flushed so red that she can feel her heartbeat in her cheeks, and she tells her companions very seriously that she feels she’s about to drop dead. 

Eskel starts jogging backwards , the asshole, and turns to her with a totally clear face (besides the way that his scars are often livid of their own account, especially in the cold) to say, “Have a little more faith in yourself, lass. This is the easy section.” 

“The easy section?” she gasps out, exasperated, feeling stray hairs stuck to her face with sweat. It’s awful and a little itchy and she thinks running is probably something that the gods invented and intended only for war. She can’t see why you would do this save for saving your own life. Adrenaline had made this far easier in the past. 

“Come on, Ciri,” is all Geralt says, forging ahead, and she makes the most pitiful noise she can (it garners her no attention, save for a warm laugh from Eskel) before renewing her resolve as best she can and following after. 

The terrain, to her chagrin, does get more difficult as they progress. With increasing regularity, they duck under and around trees, up over stones, through creeks. She discovers a minute hole in her boots that she hadn’t known about, when the river water gets into it and wets her socks. She bemoans it for the space of almost a single minute before Geralt arches an eyebrow at her over his shoulder and she begrudgingly shuts up.

She makes it another two and a half miles (Eskel’s best estimate) before Geralt slows to a stop, looks her over, and says that they’ve done enough for today. Ciri’s hands are already planted on her knees to let her breathe deep, and she heaves an extra sigh of relief when he says that they can walk back. 

Geralt and Eskel talk in easy tones as they start the trek back to Kaer Morhen. Ciri drags herself along beside them like a bereaved sewer rat and thinks she probably looks the part, too, with her hair all plastered to her face and her clothes a sweaty mess. The witchers both look fine, obviously, completely unaffected, which Ciri resents, but tries to spin more positive by promising herself that she’ll be like that, someday. Strong. Enduring. Less sweaty.

“I remember the first few times we ran the Killer,” Eskel muses, in his tone that says I want to tell a story . 

“You fell,” Geralt agrees, blithely.

Eskel gives his raspy laugh and knocks his shoulder into Geralt’s. “And you might’ve been fine the first few rounds, but I remember the time you tried it after that second set of trials. Legs like a fawn. Must’ve taken years to get all that dirt you ate out of your system.” 

Ciri tries to laugh at that, but only manages a half-hearted sound. Her lungs are still burning, and she feels like she’s dragging her aching legs after each other with every step she takes. Geralt glances down at her, and reaches over to ruffle her hair. She can only imagine what monster he’s created of her braid, with the state of her hair at the moment, and she sticks her tongue out at him. 

“You can keep running, Ciri,” he says, with a raised eyebrow, and Ciri immediately recants her expression with a pleading, regretful look. Her mockery is not worth running again. She catches the ghost of an affectionate smile on his face. 

Ten minutes later, as her energy dips even further, Geralt pauses to really look at her again, and then dips to one knee. “Come on,” he says, gesturing to his back, and it takes Ciri’s brain a second to process what he’s offering, but she’s too grateful once she figures it out to hesitate in looping her arms around his neck and letting him scoop her up piggy-back. In retaliation for the rest of the day, she buries her sweaty face into his shoulder and dozes lightly to the low sound of his and Eskel’s conversations. 

She rouses more as they approach the keep again. She’s certainly breathing more evenly now, and though her legs aren’t going to feel normal after this, they’ve ceased to scream at her. She could certainly walk. Geralt doesn’t kick her off, though, so she tucks her chin over his shoulder and watches the trees. 

Eskel goes to get the door, when they’ve finally gotten back. While he’s heaving the great thing open, Geralt turns his face just slightly toward her and says, low and rumbly, “You did well today.” 

Ciri’s too exhausted to keep up more fronts, at the moment. She makes a satisfied noise and lays her head back down. She feels the soft shakes of his laughter underneath her, and he carries her inside. (Lambert makes fun of her, when he sees them. She successfully sticks her tongue out at him without having to take it back.)

The other thing that has changed significantly since the start of the winter is that Lambert has perfected whatever alcohol he’s been trying to brew. Most of the men had been drinking anyway, whatever liquor it is that they have and won’t let Ciri touch, but they all seem a little excited for Lambert’s new concoction. Even Vesemir. Especially Vesemir, actually. The first time they all try it, he claps a hand around Lambert’s shoulders like a father with his son and says, “Now this is a good batch.” 

Ciri makes a note that alcohol is, perhaps, a functional way to get on Vesemir’s good side. 

She doesn’t usually see them drink. Around the time that they start to get loud is usually when she excuses herself to go to bed (or Coën makes some excuse for her to leave). Before that, she’ll sit in front of the fire and have a few sips of whatever wine or mead they’re working their way through. It’s a nice environment, for the most part. 

She feels a little babied by the fact that they won’t even let her try whatever Lambert’s cooked up—Eskel tells her that he makes it more like a potion than a drink, and it’d probably be toxic to humans; she doesn’t quite believe him, but she lets it stand—but it’s obvious that it takes a toll, when the witchers start getting much louder than usual. When Coën and Lambert start wrestling each other to the ground, Ciri primly takes her leave. She’d grown up around rowdy drinking adults, which makes her equal parts more comfortable around them and more aware of when she no longer needs to be in the room. The Skelliger cousins liked their mead, and Ciri liked them, but being the only sane person in a room got tiring.

She does manage to get some sleep that night. Some. She falls asleep to the muffled sound of voices from down the stairs, and wakes sweaty and panicked from a nightmare, sometime in the dead of night. She scrabbles for her cloak and pulls it around her, soft and warm. Somewhere in the haze of things, she decides that she has had enough of braving it on her own. Just for tonight. Just for tonight, she’s going to go look for comfort.

She pulls on her boots, wraps her cloak tight around her, and pads her way out toward Geralt’s room. She pauses outside, and actually hears snoring. Right. Hard drinking, tonight. He probably wouldn’t be of much use to her, even if she did manage to rouse him. Subdued, she turns and decides to go to the kitchen for a midnight snack, instead. She can take care of herself. She’s been doing it for a while, anyway.

She’s deciding whether she’s feeling more in the mood for some bread or some dried meat when she passes the main hall and sees the fire still flickering. She didn’t think anyone would still be awake. She ducks into the room, half-expecting to see Vesemir pondering something by the fire and bracing for an awkward encounter, but it’s Eskel sitting there, instead.

His gaze tracks over to her slowly. “You’re up late, lass,” he says, with that rasp to his voice that sounds like his scars actually reach into his throat. “What brings you down here?”

Ciri still doesn’t talk about her nightmares with Geralt. They’d given each other the courtesy of ignoring each other’s bad dreams, when they first met, and while Ciri’s sure that Geralt would let her clamber into his bed to ward off the nightmares now, they don’t discuss the contents of the dreams. It’s the sort of thing that can go unspoken between them. 

Eskel’s different, though. She doesn’t know where that line lies, with Eskel. “I had a nightmare,” she admits.

He considers her for a moment (she realizes, belatedly, he’s probably drunk, and functioning a little slower) before gesturing to a spot in front of the fire. “Do you want to come sit?” 

She takes a moment to decide that she does, actually. She goes and sits. 

“Why are you up?” she asks, once she’s gotten herself settled in one of the arm chairs.

“Thinking,” he answers, his gaze faraway. “There’s been much to think about, lately. All this fate that’s been happening. All this… you.” He gestures to her all-encompassingly, and she narrows her eyes at him, but he doesn’t seem to mean it negatively. 

“Only nice things about me, I hope,” she says, in lieu of something productive, and burrows down into her cloak. 

That gets a laugh out of him. “Of course, Ciri. I’ll promise you that.” A moment passes, the firewood crackling and echoing through the stone hall. His next question surprises her. “What were you dreaming about, lass?”

She doesn’t know how to answer that. She hasn’t been asked that in a long time. She finds that she does want to talk about it, though. She’s not sure how to say it, but she’s fatigued by the clutch of fear that the nightmare had on her heart. “Fate, as well,” she says, finally. Images of running through dark woods flash through her mind. Running from the Knight. “Finding Geralt.” She draws her knees up to her chest and tucks her face into them. “I suppose my mind’s been thinking for me, in my dreams. I try very hard not to think about what it means that Geralt and I are caught up in fate like this. What it means for Cintra. What it means going forward.”

“You’re not the first princess to be promised as a Child of Surprise, if it’s any comfort,” Eskel muses.

Ciri frowns. Of anything, that’s not what she’d been expecting to hear. “I’m not?”

“Oh, Geralt wouldn’t have told you,” Eskel says. He’s casual about it, detached; Ciri’s found that he’s not often casual about things unless he’s making an effort not to expend his usual warmth on a situation. She thinks that the alcohol probably helps to dull whatever he’s trying to hide. “It’s not something we talk about, really.” He smiles, and that lacks his usual warmth, as well; it tugs at the hideous scars on his face in a way that Ciri rarely sees. The scars really do look ugly, in that moment.

Ciri doesn’t mean to press. She knows that the witchers have plenty of things that they don’t talk about, and they certainly don’t take well to being asked about them. Geralt wouldn’t say a word to her about Yennefer. Lambert doesn’t tell her anything at all. But Eskel did bring it up. “Who was it, if you don’t mind saying?” she asks, tentatively.

Eskel smiles reassuringly at her. It’s not quite so comforting a motion as it would be, usually, because he’s still got that bitter twist to his mouth that pulls at his scars and makes him look gaunt, but it tells Ciri that she wasn’t in the wrong to ask, at least. “Diedre, was her name. As it turns out, saving the lives of strange men often leaves you tied to their unborn princess daughters. That’s how Geralt ended up with you. Says that’s how your father had a claim to your mother’s hand, too.”

“Who was she tied to?” Ciri asks, frowning. Her nightmare still floats around in her head, but new curiosity and intrigue dull it. “Geralt can’t have had another Child of Surprise before me, can he?” Unless it’s one of those mysterious things they don’t talk about. And that doesn’t bode well for Ciri, does it, if Geralt’s left another princess to some unspeakable fate under his care—

Eskel laughs, and shakes his head. “No, no. It was me, lass. Though Geralt should’ve known better than to claim the Law of Surprise, after watching me fuck it up.” He looks thoughtfully, mournfully, at Ciri. “By all rights, he’s doing a better job with you. I wouldn’t even acknowledge Deidre, and when it came down to it… well. She wanted my help. Came to me and asked for it, even, and she wasn’t pleased when I refused.” He gestures at his face.

It takes a few seconds for Ciri to parse out what he means, but then her mouth drops open in something between horror and shock. Perhaps both. “She did that to your face? I thought that’d been a wyvern, or… or a kikimora, or something—”

“No, just a girl. A remarkable girl, given, but that wasn’t her fault. You’ve heard of the mess with the Black Sun?” Ciri shakes her head no. Eskel sighs. “Probably better that way. It’s got many characters and no happy endings. Deidre was no monster, though. Just… hurt.” He loses focus on Ciri, for a moment, and watches the middle distance with a pained look on his face. “She didn’t have help when she needed it.”

“What happened to her?” Ciri asks, soft as she can. She doesn’t mean to disturb his reverie.

Eskel shrugs. "I dunno. Haven't seen her for years. I suppose Geralt's better at this whole responsibility thing. Probably how he's kept his pretty face." He lets out another deep sigh, then, and looks at her truly again. “I don’t mean to scare you, lass. It’s not a portent of things to come. I just—” he gets a pained, constricted look on his face. It sort of reminds Ciri of how Geralt looks when he talks about his lost Yennefer; she assigns the expression to the emotion of regret. “There are things you should know, aren’t there? You’re one of us, now, and… and there are some things you’re entitled to know.”

Ciri doesn’t know why he’s told her this story, either, but she unfolds herself from her cloak to each over and pat his hand somewhat awkwardly. She tries to parse through her own concern privately. Adds it to her stack of things to think about (or the stack to not think about).

“I—Geralt’s doing better, with you,” Eskel tells her. “And I’m glad. You’re good for each other, the two of you. You’ll be good.” He reaches over to cup her face in one of his callused hands, and when Ciri smiles, tentatively, he smiles back. It looks less painful this time.

“I think you should get some sleep, Eskel,” Ciri tells him. He nods amicably, and lets her help him to his feet and guide him up the stairs. He’s a big, burly man, but he’s still in enough control of his body that Ciri can effectively direct him without stumbling under his weight. He’s more drunk on sadness than Lambert’s alcohol, she thinks. But he is still drunk.

He pauses to smooth her hair, when she gets him to the door of his room. “You should sleep, too,” he tells her. “Training in the morning, right? Bright and early.” She nods. “Small miracle,” he says, with the last hints of that bittersweet smile, “that you’re here. And happy. Geralt’s doing a hell of a lot better with you than Vesemir did with us.” He pats her hair one last time, and goes off to bed.

Ciri heads to her room, gusty and rat-filled as it is. She wonders if he’ll regret saying all that in the morning.

Chapter Text

Ciri sort of expects to be left to sleep in late the next morning; it’s the only reason that she allows herself to stay up so late, thinking, staring up at the ceiling that she can barely see for the dark. Her mind whirls with a few things: mostly the enormity of everything around her. It’s sort of like the grim discovery of the legacy of dead boys haunting Kaer Morhen, hearing Eskel’s story about his own child of surprise. There’s an entire lifetime outside of her, for everyone else in the keep. She’s not entirely sure what the lifespan of a witcher is, but she’s got enough of a sense of it to know that it’s long. Longer than hers has been or will be. 

For a fleeting moment, the part of her that is still small and afraid, the part that was raised by a  warrior queen, whispers, it would be easier, if I was like that. Strong. Long-lived. Death would be no object to her, twelve and small, if she knew she could live past one hundred years. Outliving the knight with the black-feathered helmet would be as comforting as vindictively satisfying. 

That’s not really what being a witcher means, though. She feels almost guilty for the thought. Ciri should know better than most humans what the odds of a witcher living really are: five men living past the expected time is impressive, until you think of the hundreds that died around them. There was an old set of armor from a witcher in the chest that rests at the foot of her bed now. If half the oppressive sense of grief is the knowledge of all those dead boys, young like her, and the presence of their deaths in the keep, the other half is the absence of the adults. The lack of knowledge of their deaths. 

Ciri thinks back to the start of the winter, when she and Geralt had shown up wind-whipped and exhausted (well, mostly her; Geralt and even Roach had seemed to fare better). She thinks about the way that Eskel and Geralt had caught each other in their arms, just briefly, but still remarkably affectionate for their standards. She thinks about the way that Lambert and Vesemir had welcomed them back. It’d seemed brash to her, at the time, but now she thinks that there was… relief, in it. Not celebration, but thankfulness.

What would they have done if Geralt and Ciri hadn’t shown up that day? If Geralt had succumbed to the wound that brought him to Ciri in that merchant’s cart? If he’d laid, dead and blackened from a ghoul bite, and never made it up the mountain? 

What other assumption would there be to make, if he hadn’t appeared at the grand doors to the keep? 

Maybe you could think, if you were a witcher waiting for the others, that he’d just missed the opening in the path. Maybe he’d been caught in the snows and hadn’t been able to make it up the Killer. It’d very nearly happened to them, after all. Ciri doesn’t think Geralt had accounted for being incapacitated and then burdened down with a traveling companion in his travel plans. 

But if they hadn’t made it. If it had just been Eskel, Vesemir, Lambert, and Coën sitting in this old, drafty keep, with one less witcher to keep company. Ciri gets the sense that there hasn’t been anyone more than them in a good long while. Even Coën, acclimatized as he is, seems to be the most recent visitor before Ciri. How long has it been since the last witcher that didn’t show up for the winter? How long since the man who’d left his spare armor in the chest in what was supposed to be his room? 

Geralt’s expression had faltered, when he’d seen it. Had he known whoever slept here before Ciri? Had he cared about them, the way he cares about Eskel and Lambert and Vesemir? 

Ciri imagines herself in that armor, briefly. She imagines herself fighting the monster in the woods with the glowing eyes. She imagines the armor back in the chest. Imagines Geralt returning to the keep alone. Imagines the witchers’ silent grief over her.

She wants to be strong. She wants it so badly. She wonders if all that grief is just the price of it. 

She’s been having the dreams again.

For a while after the Leshy was killed, her nightmares had stayed nightmares , not the strange prophecies that slip unbidden into her sleep sometimes. Lately, though, she’ll wake up with a different kind of unease in her chest and the echoes of that strange voice in her head, the one that whispered Yennefer’s name to her when she was on the run. 

She’s trying to ignore it. 

She’s got the echoes in her head, this morning. She starts awake in a cold sweat, not entirely able to remember what had actually appeared in her dreams just moments before, and peels herself away from her pillow in an attempt to escape the clammy sense of apprehension that settles on her while she’s still laying under the blankets. It’s easier to just get a start on the day. She takes a deep breath to brace for the cold and goes to change her clothes for the day. 

Vesemir had told her to tell him, if she were to start dreaming again. Ciri… appreciates the sentiment of that, she supposes. She sits on her bed, pulling the blankets back around her shoulders, and runs her fingers through her hair enough to separate it into sections for a braid. 

Ciri appreciates the sentiment. Vesemir seems like he should be reasonably aware of what’s going on with her, insofar as he seems aware of what had happened with her mother. She is sure he doesn’t know about all of it, though. She’s certain he doesn’t know about the destruction she’s caused. About the people she’s hurt. She feels incandescently guilty for a moment at the thought of continuing to hide this from the people who are keeping her safe, but she fights the feeling down. She likes these people. Cares for them, even, for Coën and his silly romantics, for Eskel’s strange melancholy, but she has not forgotten her promise to herself. She is a survivor, and that means putting herself first. She can’t jeopardize her safety for the sake of honesty. She decided that a long time ago. 

So she’s not going to tell him about these dreams.

Ciri has learned many things, over the last few months. Not the least of which is sword fighting, at which she’s gotten quite good for her age and size, if Coën and Eskel are to be believed. The both of them are a little too nice for Ciri to take at face value, but she appreciates their encouragement nonetheless.

Geralt praises her steadily, sensibly, without fanfare. Nods. Small smiles. Measured utterances of good job, or better, or you’ve gotten quick at that. His approval lights something glowing in Ciri’s chest when she manages to get a move right, or clear a section of the obstacle course without falling, or even just when he notes that she’s been keeping her footwork very consistent. She hopes, constantly, that she is living up to his expectations of her. 

Lambert, to her surprise, offers positive comments about her training, too; always in oblique and sort of roundabout ways, but he does offer them, nonetheless. He tells her, not the worst you’ve done it, as a way of admitting that she’s done it well. He tells her, a wyvern wouldn’t kill you too badly if you countered like that, as a way of saying that she’s improved. 

He happens to be walking Ciri through some practice drills, a day that Geralt’s gone hunting. She gets through a set of drills and pauses, breathing heavy, sweating even in the late winter chill. It’s when Lambert looks her up and down, pats her head with just enough force to teasingly unbalance her, and says, not bad, princess; one day you might even hold up against me, that she has the sudden realization that he sounds like her grandmother. 

It’s a silly enough thought that she starts giggling, harder than his joke warranted, so that he gives her a strange look. It’s not an uncanny resemblance. Something about the brusqueness of it, though, the reticence toward praise and awkward treatment of affection, feels like the way that Grandmother would treat Ciri. She’s struck with an image of Lambert in one of the lioness’ dresses, his red hair in a dignified braid. It has her laughing harder and also feeling deeply sad. She misses her grandmother. She does. 

Geralt is the one who does the majority of her training, for a while. The other witchers are more than happy to help—Ciri thinks that training her is the most variety they’ve had in a while, and they’re all anxious to do something new—but he’s stubborn about it in a way that he is about things that are important to him. He relaxes about it once Ciri has the basics down. Ciri thinks, with a little glow of that warm thing in her chest, that he wanted to be the one to teach her. That he wanted to be the one who made sure she knew how to take care of herself. She’s very aware how easy she is to please with any sign that Geralt cares about her, wants to care for her specifically, wants to keep her around. It doesn’t make the feeling any less gratifying. 

Once Ciri knows the basics, she’s treated more often with lessons from Eskel and Lambert and Coën. Eskel teaches much like Geralt does, with more praise; he often pauses, and tells Ciri later that he keeps thinking she should be able to do signs, and has to stop and recalculate certain moves to account for her lack of magical ability. She doesn’t bother to mention that she does have some magical ability. She does, however, briefly think that if there’s a world where she has some better control over her strange ability in the future, perhaps Eskel would be a good teacher for incorporating that into her swordplay.

Coën fights differently from the other witchers. He has a more straightforward fighting style, Ciri thinks is the best way to describe it: he hits heavier, and leaves himself open to more of the hits that Geralt insists will kill Ciri in a second, if she leaves open a certain weakness. He wears more armor, he explains to her, and apologizes frequently that his teaching won’t be as helpful as the others. It’s a matter of the witcher schools, he tells her. His training just isn’t suited to her, built slight and fast and not quite as strong. He offers himself for practice fights, instead, offering her a chance to learn to defend against his style of attack, and he moves slowly enough that she is actually able to pick up some useful skills. 

Lambert teaches more of what Geralt and Eskel have to teach, but Ciri notices that he doesn’t go easy on her the way that the both of them do. She hadn’t really realized that Geralt was going easy, for a while; his exercises drain her, and he doesn’t spare her any effort, but once she gains some muscle and starts to hit her stride, he still treats her like she’s prone to break if pressed too hard. Lambert has no such compunctions. Just as Ciri starts to get frustrated with how slowly Geralt runs through drills with her, Lambert calls her to run the obstacle course on a higher difficulty than she’s ever done it, and refuses to listen to any of the others’ complaints about it. It’s bitterly hard, and Ciri ends up battered and bruised, but she hits the snow with a kind of bright shock. It’s bitterly hard, but she hadn’t immediately failed. Lambert is right. She can do more. She gets back up to do it again. 

When he faces off against her with the wooden practice swords, he doesn’t bother going slow; not as slowly as Coën does when he’s giving her time to think through a technique, anyway, and not as slow as Geralt and Eskel do in their practice duels with her. Lambert makes it difficult for Ciri. He isn’t shy about whacking her where she leaves her defense open, where Geralt makes a touch like he’s fencing and then backs away to make her do it again; it smarts like a bitch, but she grudgingly has to admit that it’s a better teaching technique than Geralt’s gentle touchés. She learns to cover her ribs a lot quicker after Lambert gets a solid hit in with his oak blade. He isn’t trying to hurt her. Ciri knows that for sure. She’s better at interpreting his rough demeanor, now, and she sees the concern under his brusqueness, when he jogs to come help her up after particularly bad falls. He doesn’t want her to be hurt. He doesn’t treat her like a baby, though, doesn’t treat her like she’s made of porcelain, and Ciri appreciates that more deeply than she knows how to communicate to him. As a sort of reciprocation, she takes any chance that she can get to hit him as soundly as possible during a practice fight. She doesn’t bother holding back. He’s older and stronger. He can take it. She thinks he understands the affection in it.

What is really interesting is when Vesemir steps out onto the training grounds, one morning, when she and Geralt are getting in an early practice before the witchers get into their harder routine. Vesemir tells Geralt that there is a section of the wall in one of the upper halls that needs to be patched, and sends him to do it. 

Geralt frowns, but puts down his practice sword and beckons for Ciri to come along. Vesemir holds up a hand to stop him. Just you, he says, to both of their confusion. Ciri will stay out here with me.

Geralt had looked at Ciri, the way that he does to check in whenever they have to be separated without talking it through beforehand. It’s not as concerned as usual, though, more bemused. Ciri knows, objectively, that Geralt trusts Vesemir, that he considers him something like a father. It’s nothing that Geralt has directly said, but it’s clear in the way that he acts. In the way that he doesn’t even seem to realize that Ciri feels very awkward being alone with the old man. 

Ciri decides, though, to trust that trust. She nods, briefly, and Geralt goes off into the keep by himself. 

She’s surprised when Vesemir picks up the practice sword in his wake. Now that all the children have had a chance, he says, you should have some real instruction.

The exercises that Vesemir runs her though are a mixture of all the different things that the others have shown her, combined into something that makes the best of all of them; Geralt’s technique, Eskel’s steady encouragement, Lambert’s instinct to press her past her comfort zones. Ciri ends the lesson out of breath and feeling rather achey, but feeling electrified all the same. 

Vesemir sits with her as she cools down. Offers her a snack from his pocket. Says that the boys were always hungry, when they’d finished a training set. It emboldens her to ask about the other witchers. 

“I was their teacher,” he tells her, matter-of-fact, not dreamy like Eskel when he tells stories or avoidant like Geralt’s accounts of things. “The ones that are still alive, anyhow. There used to be other teachers. I wasn’t supposed to teach—couldn’t stand the thought of it, actually, didn’t like getting attached to the boys just to see most of them die—but then the Keep was besieged.” He sniffs and rubs at his cheek. “I didn’t want to be a teacher and I wasn’t the teacher they wanted. Never was the coddling type. Couldn’t get myself to be over-strict with them either. It worked with the White Wolf, Eskel, most of their year; Lambert, though. That one always seemed frustrated that he couldn’t hate me the way that he wanted to.”

“Why would Lambert hate you?” Ciri wonders aloud, though recollections of Lambert’s frustrations toward Vesemir filter into her memory moments later. She just hadn’t quite pinned down what it was.

Vesemir leans back against the wall of the keep, looking out at the snow. He looks much younger relaxing next to Ciri than he does when he’s ordering the others around, holding the position of leadership in the keep. Still old; but less so than usual. “I don’t know how much you actually know about witcher traditions, princess. Lots of nasty stories out there about boys being taken away by the horrible mutants; they’re not entirely true. No witcher ever kidnapped a boy to undergo the trials. Some of the boys were given against their will. Lambert was one of those.”

Ciri feels frozen. “What?”

Vesemir waves a hand. “Terrible father, mother dead or unable to fight back, that’s what I got from him—he never told me as much, but certain things are clear. Young boys are more a hell of a lot more transparent than they’d like to be.” There’s a pause that Ciri interprets as young girls, too, and she takes a second to be cowed by the reminder of Vesemir telling her not to lie to him. That she’s not good at it. “None of these boys wanted to be witchers, really, and none of them are happy with it, I know that. You’ve spent time with Geralt, girl. You know how he is about it. Longsuffering and tragic; it’s his right to be, and it’s his right to take on his white-knight-quest to try and be good , but as good of a witcher as he might be, he’s never going to be truly satisfied with himself. Lambert’s very much the same as him. Geralt was abandoned by his mother, though, and never knew her. Being a witcher is all he’s ever known. Lambert was handed over by his parents. He was old enough to be scared. To be angry about his fate.” Vesemir runs a hand over his hair, smooths over strands pulled loose by the wind. “Been angry ever since. Would say I can’t blame him for it, except that he makes a fucking nuisance of himself blaming people who really had nothing to do with it all.” 

Ciri is silent for a moment as she thinks about that.

Vesemir must take her silence for some kind of question, though, because he continues, “Hates me for being the one who trained him. Hates Geralt because he’s miserable about being a witcher but still damn good at it. Eskel spends half his time trying to make peace, and Lambert only gets along so well with Coën because he only met him a couple decades ago.”

“Is that why he and Geralt fight so much?” Ciri asks, voice small.

Vesemir nods, leaning back fully and closing his eyes. “Be easier if Geralt didn’t rise to the bait every time, but he lets Lambert get under his skin no matter how clear it is that he’s just trying to get a reaction.”

Oh, Ciri mouths. She doesn’t press further. Vesemir is very cavalier with the details of his students’ private lives. It feels invasive to let him talk much more. 

Things slot into place, though. Geralt and Lambert’s dynamic. The way that Geralt defers to Vesemir; if he never knew his parents, then Vesemir really would be the closest thing that Geralt had to a father. The way all the witchers are products of Vesemir in one way or another. 

It occurs to her, later, that Vesemir really doesn’t tell stories like Geralt or Eskel. He sounds, in fact, most like Lambert. 

She lies awake many a night thinking about a spread of dead bodies in a field. If she were inclined toward a sense of humor about the situation, she might joke that at least it was better than having the dreams. She’s not inclined toward humor about this. And it isn’t really better. 

Over and over, she relives the terrible feeling of fear, of the moment before she lost consciousness, afraid and with something exploding, searing and expansive, inside of her. Over and over, she relives the terrible haze of waking and realizing what she’d done. Realizing that she had killed . 

She twists her fingers into the blankets and clenches her fists hard enough to turn her knuckles white. She sleeps like shit. She ignores the concerned looks from the witchers in the mornings. 

She also learns to play Gwent. Geralt lets her use his deck, though he tells her that she’ll have to build her own one of these days, and Lambert complains that she’s been given an unfair advantage and will never learn how to fend for herself. He mutters that it’s like having a high-pitched Geralt running around the keep when Ciri beats him for the first time. She laughs delightedly and tries not to let on that she’s heard when Eskel says to Geralt, under his breath, “It’s uncanny, really. I never thought you’d bring home a daughter.” She replays that moment over and over in her head before she falls asleep. 

Vesemir talks often about his day . Ciri knows this proverbial day from the stories that her grandmother would tell, the ones about leading an army as a girl, about the standards of court officials, about the way that people used to act. She knows that witchers live longer, and tries to do the math of it (she has to ask Geralt, and have him help her work out some sums). Vesemir, despite the white hair and the weighty bearing, doesn’t actually look all that old; at least not in comparison to some of the crotchety old courtly advisors that Ciri had known. It’s a bit surprising to figure out that what he remembers as his younger days would be at least a full generation before Grandmother. 

Strange. Strange.

Vesemir really seems to enjoy talking about it, though. Lambert tells her, his tone more affectionate than Ciri thinks he means it to be, that it’s because everybody else in the keep has already heard all the stories before. Ciri is fresh meat, and a captive audience while she’s training. You could always jump straight into the pendulum , Lambert says, in a long drawl. Try and knock yourself out. Spares you some of the pain.

Vesemir tells stories about a time that was entirely different for witchers. In his recountings, the life of a witcher is one of adventure, one of risk and reward, of coin and—whatever else he enjoyed about being a younger man is apparently not appropriate for Ciri’s young ears, but she thinks she knows what he’s talking about regardless. She’s not that little. 

He and Geralt both talk about the Path with a weight behind the word, but Vesemir says it the way that Eist used to talk about going on a voyage . Geralt says it the way that Grandmother had said war . 

Ciri has been with the witchers for months, now, and though Geralt doesn’t give recountings of his battles very often, Coën, Lambert, and Eskel are all happy enough to share tales of the monsters that they fought. Lambert and Eskel, especially, tell stories like it’s a competition. One slew a vampire—but the other blew up a nest of drowners—but the other brought down a griffin—but the other killed a kikimora without so much as a sword—

Their self-aggrandizing tales tend to take on that competitive tone, though. Vesemir’s stories are different. He, more than any of the others, sounds proud ; Ciri thinks that where the others are prone to boasting, Vesemir is the only one with a tendency to brag. He feels a real sense of accomplishment for the things he’s done. When Ciri manages to coax a story out of Geralt, more often than not, there’s an air of melancholy around him. A muted kind of guilt. 

Ciri lets Vesemir tell his stories. When they cease to be truly interesting to her, she tunes them out; she has plenty of practice from old dukes and advisors at noble functions who were used to having people pay them the utmost attention when they spoke. She knows how to nod at the appropriate places in a sentence to seem as if she’s engaged. Vesemir’s stories are interesting, though, to a girl learning a great deal about monsters and fighting and offered very little real experience with either one. Vesemir describes certain moves, techniques, the way that footwork leads into a feint, and Ciri pictures herself executing every motion with practiced precision. When she tries to reproduce what he describes, later, she very rarely gets it on the first try. She practices, though. And gets better. (And gets Vesemir to help her, when she can’t figure it out.)

One day, when it seems like the snow is going to settle for a while, Geralt takes her out onto the mountain to check some of the traps that they’d set earlier. Eskel appears to accompany them, the way he often does, and Coën sends them off into the snow with a cheery wave and a promise that he’ll keep an eye on Lambert while they’re gone. 

Ciri knows that he means to keep Lambert company in the alchemy lab, where he’s busy working at something to do with the bottles of potion that Geralt kept in his saddlebags when they were traveling and that the witchers drink when recovering from injuries. She’s heard a number of muffles explosions coming from that wing of the keep in the past few days, and caught more than a few whiffs of something extremely noxious in the nearby halls; it makes her sort of curious what exactly all that alchemy actually constitutes. 

She considers going to the lab and asking to sit and watch. Not in such polite terms as that, obviously, Lambert would laugh at her if she came in and asked nicely and she’d have to fuck something up of his to defend her honor, but she thinks that if she went in brusquely enough and was very brave and ignored any teasing, he’d probably let her stay. Tell her about what he was doing, maybe. 

At the start of all of this, she’d never have even considered seeking out Lambert’s company, much less without the support of one of the other witchers alongside her. Things continue to change and change and change. 

Some small, hopeful thing that’s grown recently in her chest tells her that it might be for the better.

She and Geralt and Eskel venture out into the bright white of the snow and the sun, and Ciri feels almost giddy with the simple pleasure of a nice day. It’s nonsensical, but she feels… happy , in a way that she doesn’t often. In a way that she hasn’t for a long time now. She has a spring in her step as they make their distance from the keep and break into the treeline of the surrounding forest. Feeling upbeat and very silly, she runs out in front of her companions (she most certainly doesn’t skip , because she’s a very mature person now, and she’d never do anything so girlish as that) and throws her arms out to spin around in the crisp, cold air. 

When she catches Geralt’s eye after that, grinning and with laughter bubbling up her throat, she sees him crack a small smile of his own. When he and Eskel catch up to her with their long, steady strides, he casually reaches over to her. Ciri expects him to pat her shoulder, maybe muss her hair, but instead, he puts his fingertips against her forehead and tips her over, sending her sprawling and giggling into the snow as he walks past. 

Ciri makes an extremely undignified kind of squawking sound, aiming for outrage and not quite able to keep the laughter down. Eskel pauses to watch and laugh as Ciri scrambles in the snow to get to her feet and charge at Geralt, who, to her delight, turns as she jumps at him to catch her out of the air and swing her around. He flips her upside down and says, “Gotcha,” as she squeals, sounding purposefully casual and just a little smug. 

She flails in his arms and laughs and laughs, lightheaded and giddy in earnest. He holds her easily as she struggles playfully, flopping like a fish and unable to catch her breath from laughter to muster any earnest attempt at escape. He flips her back up and sets her on her feet again, and she immediately launches another play-attack, which he counters by tipping her off-balance and

into the snow again. Still giggling, she rolls to her feet and aims for his legs next. 

Geralt lets her spend the next fifteen minutes of the walk letting her alternately bat at him like a kitten with a piece of string or throw her full weight at him just to have him catch her and spin her around like she weighs nothing at all. Eskel mimes new attacks for Ciri to try and laughs long and loud and warm alongside them. She gets her hair near soaked from being dunked in the snow, but she is so warm from running and laughing and sheer joy that she barely feels the cold at all. 

Finally, Geralt seems to tire of the game, and swings her over his shoulder when he catches her. Ciri tries to twist out of it, but she feels his shoulders shaking with quiet laughter as he holds her there. “We’ve got food to find, Ciri,” he says, not bothering to hide the mirth in his tone. She pouts and goes limp. 

Eskel, walking slightly behind, makes a small motion that catches Ciri’s eye. He says something to Geralt, but she’s not paying attention; as the two witchers hold a conversation, Eskel plays out a series of pantomimes to her, not breaking the pace of his speech at all. Ciri pays rapt attention, notes down every moment while holding herself as dead weight. He holds up his hand in a gesture to wait. 

After another minute, he casually puts another step of distance between himself and the Geralt-and-Ciri unit and makes a final gesture to her. With a deep breath, Ciri throws her weight to one side and twists the way he’d shown her and, to her extreme delight, manages to pull Geralt to the ground. She crows out her victory as he curses in surprise and then laughs anew. 

She doesn’t land quite as neatly as Eskel had gestured, but she rolls in the snow and manages to clamber onto Geralt’s chest so that she can pretend to pin him there. She can feel his ribs heaving with laughter under her and hear Eskel’s roaring laughter beside them and it makes her laugh all the more, until she’s bent over with it and her stomach begins to ache. 

“Alright,” Geralt says, catching his breath. There’s snow in his hair. It makes Ciri giggle. “You got me, menace. Satisfied?”

She shakes her head no , unable to speak for laughing. He does reach up and muss her hair this time, and then sits up without any struggle at all, catching her against him so that she doesn’t fall again. Eskel reaches a hand down to help Ciri up; she reaches up to take it, soft and dainty as she can manage, and then yanks as hard as she can to pull him down onto the pile as well. His eyes widen in surprise for a moment before he falls, squashing Geralt flat into the snow again. Ciri devolves into giggles once more.

Eventually, they manage to coax her to her feet, and Eskel diverts her from her mischief by pointing out the first of the snares and showing her how to tell when they’ve been disturbed, how to free an animal from them, how to set them again. She feels briefly bad for the white snow hare that lies still within it, but she reminds herself that she has to eat. She can feel bad for the creature all she wants, but whether it’s a rabbit or a doe or a bear, her survival is dependant on what she can get her teeth into, and it’s not going to do her any good to eat at herself about it. The next trap is empty, but she pulls another hare from the one after that without any assistance, and sets it again like she’d been shown. Eskel nods at her approvingly. 

The clouds return as they’re working through the last few snares, and it’s suddenly much colder. Ciri sneezes, and wipes at her nose, drawing her cloak closer around her. She’s not freezing, but her wet hair suddenly feels a lot more pressing. She remembers the mother of one of the boys she played marbles with calling that he’d get sick, staying out in the cold. 

She doesn’t feel particularly tired when they’ve pulled the last of the small game from the traps, despite being so active through the whole afternoon. She’s got better stamina than she did when she climbed the Killer for the first time, that’s for sure. Eskel offers to carry her on their return to the keep, and when he kneels for her to clamber up onto his back, she still feels a spring in her step. She enjoys her new height; she’s taller than Geralt, like this. She can see up into the branches of some of the trees as they walk back through the small path they’d carved into the snow on their initial journey.

About halfway back, she feels herself start to droop. Her energy drops. She supposes that it’s all that running around catching up with her, and slumps a little. Eskel is already carrying her, which is a small blessing. No need to admit how tired she is. 

That night, at dinner, she feels sniffly and rather faint. She’s wondering whether she overexerted herself, wondering how she managed to overexert herself when she hadn’t even done anything as strenuous as a training session, wondering if shoving another roll into her mouth would settle her stomach and make her feel normal again, when she looks over to see Vesemir frowning at her. She doesn’t freeze on instinct, but she does stop rather conspicuously with her mouth full of bread and her eyes wide like a doe. He crooks a finger at her, motioning for her to go to him. 

She follows directions much easier than she would have, at the start of this winter. For one, with Vesemir taking part in training, she’s used to his brusque and straightforward commands. It still feels like he’s bossing her around, but he always has good reason for it, and Grandmother was much the same way. As long as Ciri trusts that he has a purpose to his instructions, she’ll roll her eyes and do as she’s told. 

She steps up to his chair, and he reaches over (not very much up , to Ciri’s chagrin, she’d really hoped that she’d get taller by the end of the colder months) to touch her forehead with the back of his hand. He raises an eyebrow as he does. “Feeling tired, girl?” he asks.

On blustering impulse, listening to the rash part of her that never wants to be fallible, never wants to be weak, Ciri blurts out a defensive, “No!” and then, when Vesemir only stares her down, appends a slightly more sheepish, “... yes.” 

“You’re running warm,” he tells her. “Getting sick. Eat what you can and then go up to bed. You won’t be training tomorrow.” 

“What! But why not?” Ciri demands, alight with indignation. Sleep, sure, she’ll admit that she does feel poorly enough to warrant getting some rest, but that’s no reason to skip out on her favorite part of any day. The most important part of any day. 

Vesemir only levels her with the same don’t be silly stare. “I’m no mage, but I’ve never heard it recommended to make a sick child better by sending them out to sweat in the cold. Go up and sleep. You’ve earned a rest day, anyway.”

That does make Ciri feel a bit better. But she still pouts her way through half of another roll (she can’t muster up the appetite to finish it) and all the way up the stairs as Geralt herds her to her room. She drags her feet until he finally scoops her into his arms and carries her up the rest of the way, which she is too proud to admit is both a little delightful and also a relief. 

“I’m going to get you sick,” she declares, feeling lightheaded and more than a little indignant. “You and Vesemir and everyone else, too, and then nobody will train.” 

Geralt laughs softly, little more than a rumble in his chest. “You could try,” he tells her, “but witchers don’t get sick.”

Ciri frowns at that. “The mutagens?” Geralt nods. “Well, that’s not fair. What does Vesemir know about being sick if he doesn’t even catch a cold?” 

“Witchers don’t get sick,” Geralt says again. “None of us were born witchers, though. I don’t remember it well, but Vesemir was there when there many boys your age—human boys—running around the keep. He would have trained them. If any of us know what to do about being sick…”

“It’s him,” Ciri acknowledges, grumpily. She crosses her arms and glowers and tries not to think about Vesemir sending a hundred boys like her with coughs and fevers up to bed. She tries not to think of how they must have all died. 

Geralt brings her extra blankets and helps her situate herself into a warm, comfortable cocoon. She finds that it’s rather hard to keep herself either warm or cold enough, and tries not to actively shiver even as she starts to sweat under the weight of all the blankets and furs. 

“Get some rest,” Geralt tells her, smoothing her hair back away from her forehead. “You might feel better enough to train in the morning, after all.” 

Ciri makes a grumbling comment in response. It’s not long after she’s burrowed down into the covers and heard the click of the door latch when she finds herself enveloped by sleep. 

It’s bitterly cold when she awakes, breathing heavy and freezing in her own sweat, from a dream where she’d sat, stock-still, in that clearing, surrounded by blasted grass and bodies lying askew. She couldn’t see them clearly, but her dream-self knew the forms of the men who had tried to attack her, all those weeks ago. And beyond them… beyond them, her dream-self became aware of more, and more, of forms laying out across the field like ants from an ant-hill, many and mangled and mauled. Destroyed by her power. This is what your power causes, is what she awoke to, that voice still echoing in her head. This is what you do. You bring only death and destruction.

She lies shivering for a moment, tears in her eyes, the images of the dream running through her head. This is what your power causes.

Suddenly, she can’t stand to be alone in this cold, dark room. She needs something else, someone else, needs comfort. She’s freezing and grief-sick and a little delirious, but she pulls herself from her bed, wraps a fur around herself, and stumbles in her bare feet out into the hallway. She tries not to sway, still almost half-asleep and woozy. She counts the doors down the hall as she passes them and does not knock when she pushes her way into the right one. 

Geralt’s yellow eyes open in the dark, and he’s awake before Ciri can speak to explain herself. 

“Nightmare?” he asks, his voice low and quite and sleep-rough, and she nods. He pauses, and after a moment, as if unsure, extends an arm to her. She pads across the room and carefully folds herself up onto the bed against him. He is stiff with tension for a few moments more, but gradually, he relaxes. Ciri all but molds herself against him. He is warm and solid and that smell like leather and metal and sweat has come to mean safety , to her unconscious mind. It’s a relief to be surrounded by it, faint as it is when he hasn’t been wearing his armor, like out on the road. 

“Was it Cintra?” he asks her, soft in the heavy silence of the night.

She shakes her head. Thinks better of it. Nods. All those other bodies… her dream-self knew that they were Cintran people. Deaths that she was responsible for beyond anything she’d been able to see. 

“I don’t want to sleep by myself,” she says, a little tear-choked. She still doesn’t feel completely lucid. She feels like she had when she was small, in fact, scared and going to her grandmother after a night terror. Something in her mind tells her that she’s too grown up for this.

Geralt says, “Alright, Ciri.” The thought silences itself. It’s quiet for a long moment except for the sound of their breathing. 

“Geralt,” she says, finally, feeling very small in his arms, “it’s spring.”

“I know.” 

“Where will we go?”

He pauses for a long time before he speaks. “There’s nowhere on the continent that’s safe for you right now, Ciri,” he says, finally. It’s not what Ciri wants to hear. She knows it to be true. “Anyone who knows you’re alive will be looking for you, and whether it’s the Northern nobility or the South…” Ciri gets a bitter taste in her mouth as he speaks. “I don’t trust them. It’s my job to keep you safe. I think that the only place you might really be safe…” 

“Is here,” she finishes for him, still curled very tight.

She feels the motion of his nod. “We can stay. At least another year. Let things blow over, let people forget you. Let you train.” 

“Alright,” Ciri says, as if that resolution hasn’t melted a winter’s worth of worries off her shoulders. “We’ll stay.”