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1.
“Yen,” Geralt says, “might be time to slow down.”
“Slow down?” Yen’s speech is always so clipped, her movements so careful, that she still passes as sober to the people around them. Geralt knows her well enough that the perpetual affable grin on her face is a sure sign otherwise. So is the majestic arch of her glass as she waves it in the direction of the colorful tents, the crowds, the cheerful autumn sunlight catching in the red and gold leaves. “It’s a beer festival, Geralt. Wasn’t it your suggestion to attend?”
“Sure.” Geralt takes a step in front of her, broad shoulder angled to deflect any jovial townsfolk who might stumble into their space. “Don’t remember suggesting you down a whole barrel yourself.”
“You have.”
“Well--”
Yen holds up one palm, the one that’s not holding the beer glass. “No talk of your vaunted witcher tolerance, please. I’ve no use for boasting. I do, however, feel a sudden pressing need to visit that booth…”
She directs her gaze toward a cerulean tent where smiling men dispense foaming tankards of pale amber. There’s a smile in those violet eyes, only slightly hazy with booze. Geralt would do anything to keep that smile there.
So he rolls his own eyes, smiles fondly, says: “Shit-faced it is. Just promise me something.”
“Anything, darling.”
“Say you won’t portal anyone into the privy this time.”
“Anything but that.”
“Yen.”
“Would you leave me defenseless before the boorish sensibilities of unrefined men?”
“Yen.”
Yen flutters a long-suffering sigh into the air. It smells of fine malt beer. They should go back to that tent afterward, if Yen’s still standing.
“Very well,” she breathes. “Though that will leave a number of uneducated men today. On your head be it.”
“I take full responsibility,” Geralt says drily.
They come close a couple times.
First is the nobleman, or so Geralt assumes from the finery of his doublet and the ridiculous blue hat adorned with the feather of some exotic avian or other. The nobleman’s hoisting a glass of something dark with a creamy head. He looks at Yen on Geralt’s arm, looks at Geralt, raises one aristocratically plucked eyebrow before returning his gaze to his glass. Yen sees it. A moment later, the nobleman’s eyes widen and his free hand reaches down desperately to cover the sour-smelling stain that has mysteriously appeared on his crotch.
“What was that for?” Geralt asks, ignoring the fussing of aids and assistants behind them.
“An untoward thought.” Yen lowers her lips demurely to her glass.
Next is the group of women standing off to the side of the green and yellow tent. They’re conspicuously sober, crossing their arms and flicking their eyes at the menfolk they’ve come to help. They catch sight of Yen, who’s starting to wobble as she walks. One of the women says something that even Geralt can’t catch and the others cover their mouths with their hands and chuckle, their eyes watching Yen.
Yen’s free hand wanders up to the obsidian star at her throat, almost idly.
The cawing of crows is the only warning before a sudden barrage of white fluid descends from the skies directly onto the women’s heads. They cover their heads with their arms and flee screaming into the nearest tent, whose green and yellow fabric is promptly speckled with bird droppings.
“Oh my,” Yen says. “If only some wiser individual had taken them under his wing.”
Geralt’s not exactly shallow in his cups at this point and he has to laugh. “Doubt they’d listen to him. You know what they say: birds of a feather flock together.”
Yen wraps her arm around his more tightly. “Such a burden to carry around all that wisdom, unheeded. It must be quite the albatross around the neck.”
“Hm. Hardly. He has a bird’s eye view of the situation.”
Yen’s giggling now and butts his shoulder with her forehead.
“Does that mean I win?” Geralt says.
“It’s not fair,” she giggles. “You’ve that blasted witcher’s tolerance.”
“Oh, so you can bring it up.”
“A natural arrangement. Do as I say, not as I do, darling.”
Geralt kisses the top of her head. “Seems to keep me out of trouble so far.”
Yen tilts her head to look up at him through her eyelashes and his bloodstream reverses gravity, pulling toward a point south of his heart. “Remarkably so. Maintain this streak of good behavior, and I may have to keep you.”
Geralt kisses her head again, thinking but not saying: Keep me.
She releases him to wrap her arm around his waist, squeezing tight.
They drain their last glasses quickly. They leave soon after, and when they get home they head immediately toward the bedroom.
2.
It’s a quiet night. Geralt’s lying with his head in Yen’s lap and the wine bottle is sitting on the table. Neither of them has touched it in a bit-- but this being the, what, third one, they don’t need to. She’s reading something or other-- the title’s in some kind of magic gibberish and whenever he asks, she gives a different lovingly sardonic reply. He doesn’t mind. Not at all. It’s like meditating, lying here in the peace of the moment.
The peace is broken by the sudden meow-like cry of a-- peacock-- he’s sure of it-- except it’s coming from inside the house.
Geralt sits up. Yen closes her grimoire with the decisive thump of many, many pages coming together, and she sighs.
“The hell was that?” Geralt says.
“My alarm,” Yen says. “Excuse me, I’ve a pressing engagement that I must see to.”
“Now? With a peacock?” Geralt looks out the window. Pitch black. “Yen, it’s the middle of the night.”
“Not with a peacock. And I fear that duty waits for no woman.” That’s her only explanation before the room’s washed in the swirling golden light of a portal. She doesn’t step through. Instead, she lifts her arm and a translucent peacock materializes out of the air in a swirl of tiny green lights. It’s massive. She’d never be able to hoist it aloft like that, if it were material.
Geralt leans back against the couch, raising his eyebrows though she won’t see it with her back turned to him. “Thought you preferred kestrels.”
“Generally speaking, yes.” There’s a faint curve to her lips. “For messenger work. This is a different task.” She jerks her arm up and the ghostly peacock takes flight, winging its way into the portal.
Geralt gets half a second to wonder what’s happening before he hears that meowing cry and a man shouting. “What the bloody--” He knows that voice. “Damn it, woman! Why must you--”
“Regards, Jaskier,” Yen calls out, and the ethereal peacock returns to her offered arm. Jaskier’s voice has time to yell half a curse before the portal closes on whatever profane wit he hoped to deliver next.
“Now then.” The peacock disappears in a flurry of flameless green sparks. Yen pats her palms together as if dispersing dust and returns to her place on the couch.
“What was that?” Geralt curls his arm along the back of her shoulders, and she nestles into the expanse of his chest.
“Oh,” Yen says, smiling widely now, “a little system I’ve set up. I’m alerted whenever Jaskier makes a statement that’s particularly asinine or exaggerated. Ordinarily I’ve more pressing concerns than seeing to your bard’s emotional maturation, but tonight, I felt generous.”
“Generous.” Geralt presses a kiss into the sleek softness of her hair. “That how he sees it, too?”
“A master teacher must be willing to forgo the validation of gratitude, Geralt.”
Which means no. Geralt hums a non-answer into her hair and makes a note to ask Jaskier the next time they meet.
This proves unnecessary. A month or so later, Geralt’s on the Path again when he hears that a bard named Jaskier is among the entertainments on offer at the local harvest festival, after the children’s dance and before the piglet race. When Jaskier spies him, the bard grabs Geralt by his sword strap and bellows into his face: “That woman, Geralt! What is that woman doing to me?”
“What woman?” Geralt asks innocently.
“Ah, Geralt, you’re much better at the brooding loner act. Leave the blushing innocent to the professionals, will you.” Jaskier releases Geralt with a dramatic sigh. “Honestly, though. Can you possibly talk a modicum of reason into that… that witch of yours? Every time I’m speaking to a… a patron of considerable repute, she interrupts with her damnable sorcerer’s shenanigans!”
“Hmm,” Geralt says. “Your patrons of considerable repute. They wouldn’t consist exclusively of rich men’s wives, would they?”
Jaskier sputters magnificently. “Geralt! I won’t stand to have my honor insulted so!”
Geralt’s medallion hums.
“Look out,” Geralt says.
Jaskier blinks. “What?”
There’s a whoosh and a flash of golden light before a spectral peacock descends, claws out and tail-feathers extended, upon Jaskier’s head.
3.
Geralt’s heard that you’re not supposed to go to bed angry. If he and Yen adopted that rule, they’d never get any sleep.
“Come on, Yen,” he says. He finds himself saying that most nights but on this particular night, they’ve both had too much cheap wine. The cheap stuff’s an accelerant, somehow, making their arguments catch quicker than if it had been Est Est. Gotta be alchemical.
“Come on, what.” Yen hiccups through the last word and her eyebrows knot tighter. “Come where. Come when.”
“...what?” He realizes he can’t remember what they’re arguing about. Did he use her personal store of ingredients to brew potions again? No, that was last night...
Yen backhands the whole conversation away. “You know what, Geralt?”
She’s stormed off before he can say “What?” again, slamming the bedroom door behind her. The next thing he knows, something’s heavy thumping against the wall and the floor.
Geralt rubs his ears. Pretty sure he’s not supposed to hear the curses that Yen’s snarling through the room. “Hey, Yen? Do you need-”
“No, I do not need any of your gracious assistance at the present moment, Geralt, thank you so much for your compassionate inquiries.” Behind the door, something heavy crashes with a metallic ring.
Geralt gets up from the sofa. “Yen, what are you doing in there?”
“You shall have to wait and see, won’t you?” Another metallic crash, another curse.
“...okay.” Geralt pauses, listening.
“Geralt! Mind your own godsdamned business!”
Did she always have to be reading his mind?
“Depends,” Yen’s voice says from behind the door. “Must you always be eavesdropping on my private activities!” A heavy bulk crashes with particular vehemence against the floor.
Geralt sighs. “Don’t break anything expensive, okay?”
He goes and he sits on the couch again and blinks at the bottle of wine on the table. It’s still got two glasses worth. The sound of swearing and heavy things thumping makes him restless-- wasn’t that the flapping of a leather strap with a metal buckle? So Geralt doesn’t bother pouring out a glass. He takes his next gulp from the bottle. It only cost a couple crowns. Pouring it in a glass would give it airs.
The wine’s almost all gone when the bedroom door opens. Geralt stands, to see-- himself, if he were a ten-year-old boy trying on his daddy’s armor. Yen’s so insistent on herself that he forgets how tiny she is. But now she’s standing in front of him in his armor with half the buckles undone and she’s swimming in it. The chainmail’s weighing her thin shoulders down and the shoulders are halfway down her biceps, the greaves jut above her knees. There must be six inches of space between her chest and the chest piece. Like she’s wearing a metal barrel.
Yen’s also taken off one of the white pillowcases and stuck it on her head, chef’s-hat style. The sword strap fits okay, at least. She is just not a woman built to carry forty pounds of metal and she’s already staggering under the weight.
But she still lifts her chin and flashes those violet eyes and growls in a raspy attempt at a baritone: “Look at me. I’m Geralt of Rivia. I’m too manly to have emotions.”
Geralt stares. She’s even drawn his scar over her cheek with-- something, sorceress’ cosmetics.
“Hey,” he says. “That’s not--”
Yen holds up her hand. His leather gloves are far too big for her, the edges of the fingers flopping over, and she’s trembling to hold up her arm with all that chainmail hanging off it. But she’s doing her best. “Silence, woman. You know nothing of my deep dark witcher secrets. Nevermind your own trials at Aretuza, enduring constant interruptions from that meddling crone Tissaia, and the bloody awful mess of your entire life-- what can you possibly know of suffering?”
Geralt flushes, or feels like he’s flushing. He doesn’t actually know if people can see it. “Okay, I get it. You’ve made your point. Gonna take that off now?”
“Take it off?” Yen plants her gloved fists against the mass of metal at her hips. It’s the part that protects his ribs. “Pah. A witcher never lowers his guard. We strut about, grunting manfully. That’s good enough for us.”
“Mm hm.” Geralt tilts his head. “Know what. Could use a few adjustments, but you don’t look half bad in that.”
“Of course not.” Yen’s baritone is weakening by the second. “I’m Geralt of Rivia. The wenches of the Continent should thank me for gracing them with the overpowering potency of my manhood.”
“Mmm.” Geralt doesn’t know why this is working on him. He’s pretty sure it’s not supposed to, but he finds himself stepping into Yen’s space and reaching down to where the codpiece ought to be. She left it off, seems. Wouldn’t make much of a difference if she’d put it on-- his chainmail hangs down below her crotch. “You’ve got me curious, witcher. I’ve heard tales of your…” He flails for something teasing and alluring but the booze gets in the way. “...manhood.”
Yen shows mercy. She smiles anyway. “I could have my pick of wenches, you know. So I favor the fairest ones. Pretty little things in…” She looks him up and down, runs the tough hide of his gauntlets along his hip. “...hmm, black velvet, let us say. With laces up the sides.”
Geralt knows the one. The memory of it springs to mind, along with the drawer where he last saw it. Been awhile since they played this kind of game but tonight, his skin could use the touch of velvet.
She must be reading him-- her smile’s a cat’s smile, leisurely, the prey cornered.
“Well,” he murmurs, blinking twice and wondering if it looks anything like a maiden batting her eyelashes, “lemme see if I’ve got… anything to suit your tastes.”
Yen’s hand reaches around to the swell of his buttock, squeezes. “What a lovely, agreeable wench you are.”
For you, Yen, Geralt thinks. Is there anyone else he’d do this for? ...well, yes. This is the type of request he likes: something he knows he’s capable of.
They head to the bedroom. Yen’s leaning on his arm so she doesn’t stagger under the weight.
4.
There’s a busking troupe in the streets below. It’s an unusually hot day and they’ve got the windows wide open. Geralt’s shirtless. Yen’s sitting in the lightest black silk dress she owns that’s not a nightgown. Still, moist beads glisten on her skin. Geralt knows better than to even think of it as sweat. Ladies do not sweat, he’s been assured; they glow.
“Nice tune,” Geralt mutters.
Yen presses a glass to her forehead. She’s been conjuring bits of ice into their glasses but they melt in a matter of minutes. Even magic has its limits. “Yes. I always found Gerellian’s tunes particularly… tolerable.”
“Gerellian. Never heard of him.”
“Her. Though the wider public only learned that she was a woman after her death.” Yen lowers the glass into her lip. They’re seated at opposite ends of the couch, their legs paralleling each other but not touching. Even that bit of body heat seems too much. “Surely you’ve heard her music. You’ve not spent all your years crawling in the muck.”
A spark of annoyance lights in him, but it’s too hot to fight. “Pretty much,” Geralt says. “I only learned to use a fork last year.”
“Ha.”
Down below, the fiddler’s striking up a tremendous little solo. Yen smiles faintly.
“They played this at the ball,” she murmurs, eyes somewhere far away. “After we ascended.”
“Ascended?”
Yen’s gazing into a moment that’s not here, not now. Geralt sips from his glass of iced wine.
“Do you know this dance, Geralt?”
She’s looking at him, eyes keyed into awareness but haunted still. A sadness.
“What dance?” Geralt tilts his head. The song does sound vaguely familiar. “This still the Gerellian song?”
“No, silly. This is a song for royalty, or it was, originally. For courts and well-to-do balls where daughters are bartered like swine.” Yen swings her legs off the couch and plants her bare feet on the carpet. It’s particularly plush, worth at least four drowner contracts. “It’s similar to a quarter dance. For ‘O Merry Alderman’ and ‘An Autumn’s Tale.’ Tell me you’ve at least seen it.”
“Probably,” Geralt says, though the names mean nothing to him.
Yen sighs and stands. Her arms look vulnerable and delicate as she holds them out to him. “Stand up.”
“Wha? Why?”
“Let me show you how to dance.”
Geralt puts down his glass and stands. Standing is always the real test of drunkenness but he manages okay. She holds up her palm and he stares at it, then at her.
“Hold up your hand. No, not touching.” Yen takes his wrist gently, nudges his hand so his palm hovers a few inches from hers. “Like this. Now, look at my feet. Mirror me. And one. And two. Yes, step back. Almost.”
They’re not so different, dance forms and sword forms. Geralt knows it and still feels himself a lumbering clown, performing this outdated waltz on Yen’s plush carpet, in this crowded human city. He isn’t built for this. When he moves, it is with practical purpose: to save his life or to threaten someone else’s. This dance, this carpet, the sound of music trickling in from outside-- he’s not adapted to it. He’s a warg posing as a lady’s lap dog.
Yen inches closer, lifting one arm to drape over his shoulder. They’re barely moving now. Their skin is too hot where they press together.
“In a dance,” she murmurs into the bare skin of his chest, “there is one who leads, and one who follows. Those taking the roles may change, in this progressive age of ours. But the roles themselves, the necessity for them-- never.”
Yen lifts her head. Her forehead is glowing. She blinks twice, rapidly. Sweat might be dripping into her eyes.
“And you, Geralt? Given a choice, do you lead in the dance? Or do you follow?”
“I don’t know.” He’s still swaying, though the music’s paused. He doesn’t know what else to do. “Kinda new to this.”
Yen lowers her gaze. “As am I. As long as we’re being honest.”
“They taught you how to dance at Aretuza. I thought you said.”
“Yes. They taught us magic, and court dances, and proper banquet etiquette, and other arcane secrets.” Her eyebrows dip together for a moment. “But not this. Neither to lead nor to follow. And so, we who are so accustomed to dancing alone-- we find ourselves knowing the steps, but not the spirit. Do you understand me, Geralt?”
No, he thinks. It is the easy answer. She’ll get frustrated if he says no. She’ll sigh and that familiar edge of irritation will harden her voice, but the conversation will move on to less dangerous territory.
But yes, Geralt thinks now. They didn’t teach us how to dance at Kaer Morhen, either. Only to fight, defend, and kill. If we’re not under threat of death, we’re helpless.
Being with Yen, it can feel like life or death. That ought to be his specialty, but it’s a different kind of life, another sort of death. He doesn’t know the forms or the footwork. Isn’t even sure when the music starts and he’s supposed to begin.
“Maybe,” Geralt winds up saying. He knows from the way her eyes cloud and her shoulders dip that she sees the cowardice in his answer.
“Oh well.” Her voice is light but hard, curled with a smirk. “I suppose we’ll just have to make up the steps like the inebriated fools we are. Pass me the bottle, Geralt. I’ve a mind to get roaring drunk.”
He does, and she does. Too late to answer differently. Too late, he thinks, while the two of them keep swaying, even though the buskers have stopped and there’s no rhythm to match them.
5.
When they return to the house from an ill-advised jaunt to the local elven ruins, they’re tired and saddlesore. Worse, they smell like horse. Yennefer hates smelling like horse. As soon as they reach the house, she summons hot bath water and she won’t hear anything more from Geralt until they’re both stripped down and getting a proper soak.
Then comes the wine. She keeps a careful inventory of her house’s stockpiles, but especially her collections of pillows, blankets, grimoires, intricate dresses, and wine bottles. Her stomach’s gone sour with the cheap shit that Geralt gravitates toward, so tonight it’s the ‘17 Cindaran. They deserve a little something for all the hours they’ve spent in the sun. A terror on the complexion.
They start with the ‘17 and it is everything the wine merchant had promised as he squirmed under her gaze. Yennefer will have to revisit him in a more conciliatory mood.
After that it’s the ‘41 Biturica, a robust red from somewhere in Metinna. It has all the smooth tannins and rich body of a Metinna wine, wondrous mouthful, etc., etc. She lets the phrases stream from her mind like water through fingers. Who gives a shit? The wine’s good, but Yennefer’s turning sour all the same.
Geralt starts supplementing his glass with his Witcher brews. This has become routine for them. She could wonder why; she doesn’t.
Once that distinctive slur blurs his words together, Yennefer stands.
“I’m to the privy,” she announces. “Don’t fall asleep on me.”
“Me?” Geralt hoists his wine glass lustily. A few drops spill over the rim and trickle down the glass onto his fingers. “I’m more energetic than I’ve ever been. C’mere and see.”
“Hold that thought. Hate to see it go flaccid before its time.”
“Hey…”
She goes. Her steps wander up toward the privy, her feet padding on the different textures of rugs, stone, rugs, stone. She’s almost reached the door when it occurs to her that her bladder’s not full at all. It’s the room that felt full. Too full of him, and her, and the sloppy fools they become when they’re together.
Why- Yennefer flings the word away from her. Something in her knows why they end up like this, and the rest doesn’t want to hear it. This can be enough. The evenings are comfortable, the nights warm. She has known so many nights in the cold. Why not seize this? What mad urge would lead her to discard this rare, precious, fleeting thing?
The chill of stone against her palm startles her. She’s been standing in her empty doorway for-- how long? How can anyone tell? The moments flow soft and shapeless. Time. Right. Yes. Time is passing, even if the wine says otherwise.
Yennefer walks again-- not down to Geralt, but up to her chambers where she keeps her grimoires, her intricate dresses. That room below is still too small for her. She wants to look at-- oh, something pretty. A jewel or two. Something stupid and gaudy that she can conjure and wave away. No. Something powerful. That particular carved bone in the back of her trunk that could obliterate a small farming village with the right word. Yes. She finds herself in that corner, throws open the heavy lid to a musty dust-smell, and she forgets what she’s looking for when she spies the seeing stone.
Dull little thing. She isn’t sure why she bought it in the first place-- it can create and subsequently project a record of a conversation, which had seemed vaguely if intangibly useful at the time. Damn her habit of impulse buying at the alchemical supply store. She can’t resist that little shelf of baubles they always place near the proprietor’s desk.
She takes out the crystal and gazes into the reflection of her own eyes in its facets. Recording a conversation. That sounds vitally important of a sudden. Yes. She has some things she’d like to say. So much bubbling inside her. She could tell Geralt how insufferable she finds his play at emotionlessness. Or that herbmonger in the marketplace that she knows very well there was no shortage of widow’s eye this month, the avaricious hag. She lifts the stone to eye level, activates the enchantment, and lifts her chin.
“Tissaia,” Yennefer begins.
Well. That’s unexpected. All these years later, and when she’s drunk and tottering into the territory of maudlin, Tissaia’s name still comes first to her lips. Fine, she decides. She’s alone up here, and Geralt’s more than content to drink himself into oblivion down below. Why not indulge a drunk whim in delightful privacy?
Yennefer runs a hand through her hair. “I’m terribly drunk. I’m not going to apologize for it. In fact, I shall argue that in some ways it is a direct result of--”
She has to pause. The landscape of her life already stretches far. How to summarize it?
“--everything,” Yennefer says. “And you have indeed been the primary moving force in my life, haven’t you, Tissaia? Mine, and the lives of all those young girls who came to Aretuza knowing damned near nothing about magic or the world beyond our own hovels. Much less the courts of kings. We were easy targets to manipulate, weren’t we. I wonder-- when you pulled me from the pig farm, did you already harbor designs for me?”
Yennefer pauses again. She’s not even sure what she’s saying but the impulse to keep talking is too strong. It’s the ‘17 Cindaran, it’s the memory of eels sliding off stone. It’s the snapping of a hunchback’s spine, vertebrae by vertebrae, as it is molded into shape.
Yennefer lifts the crystal to her gaze again. “Do you remember what you told me before ascending? You asked me to picture the most powerful woman in the world.”
Her posture. Yes. Her hair. Yes.
“You did not ask me to picture her position. The people around her. Her long, long decades, alone.”
She’s drunk and her thoughts are swimming. Once, she was young enough for the story of her life to proceed in chapters, like a book-- each period had a clear beginning, a closing event or time that she could call an end, and a segue into the next chapter. Now the sea of time has risen and all of her moments have floated to the surface, the images and memories blurring together. She has sometimes been a hunchback, a pig farmer’s daughter, an apprentice, an advisor to kings, a rogue sorceress. Those many years pour into one extended moment: no matter what she was or where she was, she has always been alone.
“Tissaia.”
Yennefer sees her own fingers curled tight around the crystal. They should be an old woman’s by now, wrinkled, the knuckles inflamed. They aren’t. They can see so many more decades yet. Centuries, perhaps.
“Tissaia,’’ Yennefer says again, and her young-old-ageless hands shake like her young-old-ageless voice. “You never told us the actual worth of power. Our manner of power. We can unmake little pieces of the world, yes. Children are terribly charmed by us. Portals, golems, the ability to hear people’s nasty little thoughts, the chance to live another five hundred wretched years on this plane. What splendid gifts you gave us. For what? To what glorious end? If I should gain the entire world-- what is that world to me?”
A pig sty, Yennefer thinks. The muck and splatter of animals doomed to slaughter, and she herself sunk knee-deep in that mud and squalor. A queen among swine.
Tissaia. Yennefer thinks of her now, of her own megascope folded away in the corner. She could use it to call upon Tissaia now, have this conversation in person. It’s under the canvas next to the jars of drowner parts, the ones that Geralt’s harvested for her. Geralt’s little offerings, piled into a shrine.
The idea makes Yennefer laugh aloud in the empty room. Geralt’s shrine. She’d knock it aside to take out the megascope and drunkenly harangue her old teacher? After all these decades? What a scathingly pathetic idea. It does offer some amusement, alongside a sting of embarrassment that she bothered to entertain the thought at all.
Yennefer releases the enchantment. The seeing stone has still recorded her face, her voice. Who knows, she thinks with reckless abandon. Perhaps she and Geralt will get wild-drunk again-- they do that a lot these days-- and Yennefer will conjure a kestrel to wing the stone to Artuza. Liven up the old crone’s day. She must yearn to know how her former pupils are doing.
Yennefer exhales. She smells the wine on her own breath. Really, they ought to slow down one of these days. Too late tonight, of course. Tomorrow. Perhaps.
She pockets the crystal in one of the pockets of her dress. Wonderful dress, this one, to have pockets. Downstairs, Geralt’s sunk deep into the hoard of pillows that Yen’s piled onto the couch. She seats herself on the bit of space that Geralt’s granted her and leans backward, squishing him into the cushions.
“Aaargh! I’m drowning!”
“Serves you right, you lush.” Yennefer drapes one lazy arm along his hips and thighs, squeezing the muscle and tendon just above his knee. “I told you not to fall asleep on me.”
“And I thought you were going to the privy.”
“Surely by now you recognize the secret meaning encoded in those words. There are mysteries that a woman must see to in privacy.”
Geralt struggles to sit upright. He manages to squish most of the pillows beneath him and look Yen face to face at last. “Rouging your cheeks again? Dunno why you’re so worried about how you look.”
“Do you take offense to my efforts?” Yennefer leans down, presses a kiss to the warmth of his forehead. “Perhaps I should bathe less often. Sprinkle myself with a bit of sewage, hm?”
“No, please,” Geralt groans, curling himself around her. “It’ll remind me of work.”
“Now that is one thing we’d both like to forget, I wager.” Yennefer lifts the wine bottle off the table and tsks gently. “Geralt. None left for me?”
“I’ll get a refill.”
He does. Yennefer loses track of the vintages and regions at this point-- they stick with red to avoid hangovers, though they each have their separate cures for such maladies.
He’s good to her, Geralt. They laugh together and lean together and press teasing kisses to each other’s bodies, and she wonders how long he’ll stay here, in this house in Vengerberg. A witcher off the Path. She has never allowed anyone to stay this long. Is this what it would look like, feel like? Having someone to whom she can extend a hand and ask: lead or follow?
The moment comes when the wine has done all it can for them and the bedroom calls. Geralt’s about to lift her bodily when she stops him with fingertips to his shoulders. “Wait.” He stops on command. The pang of her heart is sharp and too tender. Lead or follow, Geralt? Do you have your answer yet?
Yennefer reaches into her pocket and takes out the seeing stone. A word brings the enchantment to life. Yennefer stares into the reflection of her own violet eyes as they glow in the stone’s magic. The artifact’s carrying the memory of what she said upstairs, drunk, to a woman she has not seen in decades.
Another word alters the enchantment. The stone’s memory is erased and it prepares itself to record something new. Yennefer lifts her chin, smiles her rosy-cheeked wine-lips smile.
“Tissaia,” Yennefer sings, “eat your heart out.” She lets the stone catch a glimpse of Geralt’s arms and hands around her waist, and she ends the memory.
“What’s that?” Geralt murmurs. He’s too drunk to care much.
Yennefer snaps the fingers of her other hand. A kestrel pops into existence, all bright eager eyes and spotted feathers. At a nod from her, it takes the seeing stone in its claws and wings through the open window, into the night sky beyond.
“Oh,” Yennefer says, “just a letter to an old friend.”
“Sending a letter now? Odd time for it.”
“Really? Is there something else I should be focusing on?”
She says it like a tease. Geralt knows that tone and grabs her fully around her waist now, standing up and lifting her over his shoulder. He totters and nearly dumps them both into the couch in his drunken stagger, but he stays upright. They’re both laughing even as they stagger, unsteady and reeling, toward the bedroom door.
(+1)
Yennefer’s out all day. It hadn’t been her intention. Truly, she’d awoken in the morning with the intention of going to the market and buying a few herbs. Then she’d heard the tapping on the window. Geralt had still been asleep, so he didn’t see her throwing open the windows, the kestrel flying in, the letter it dropped onto her table before disappearing in a flourish of sparks. He hadn’t seen her open the letter and read the familiar hand:
Yenna,
Think of you often & fondly.
Found suitable post at last in Aedd Gynvael. Cold but ruins well-preserved. Excavation already promising. Eager to hear of your adventures, if you’re inclined to join me.
Await your reply.
Yours,
Istredd
She’d read the note over and over until she already knew the words by heart. Then she’d burnt it in a candle flame but she could still see the letters before her eyes.
Yours.
Yennefer marvels at the word’s effect on her. How little accustomed she is to thinking of anything as totally, irrevocably hers. How arbitrary and fleeting the entire world feels in her grasp. She knows it to flow like sand, not a single lasting shape. All of it so soon gone. Behold the audacity of this man, to call himself hers after so many years passed since they were lovers.
Ah, she finds herself thinking as she wanders the city streets, unable to return home or to pause anywhere for long. Ah, but still he calls himself so.
Foolish man. Impressively daft. Quite the marvel, really.
Yennefer wants to reply immediately and to await another morning with another kestrel and the tangible words it will bring. She also wants to laugh, dash out some cutting derisive remark and entertain herself with visions of Istredd’s expression. The nerve of the man, to call upon her so. Really.
Yes. The nerve of the man. He’s reached out to her with an open palm and asked: I am leading, will you follow?
She is sure of one thing: that she is glad to be asked, in so many words.
So Yennefer wanders the city of Vengerberg and some of the fields beyond, and it is the darker hour of dusk when she returns to the house. Geralt’s waiting for her on the couch, already drunk. He sits up when she walks in.
“You’re back.”
Yennefer sets her packets of herbs aside. “Yes. I thought of running away to join a local juggling troupe, but I couldn’t tolerate the costumes. Green is not my color.”
Geralt’s smile is loose, goofy one might say. “Funny. Where were you really, Yen?”
“Walking.”
He shakes his head slowly, a drunkard’s loose underwater motions. “Don’t like it when you lie to me.”
Yennefer sits down in the chair next to the couch. “Well, if you’d like to know. I received a message from an old acquaintance. Another mage. There’s some work in Aedd Gynvael, it seems. I wanted to think it over properly.”
“Aedd Gynvael.” Geralt moves his lips around the Elder Speech. He looks like a horse chewing its bit. “Way up north. Your friend must be freezing her tits off.”
“Yes. I thought the same.”
“You wanna go?”
That is the question, isn’t it?
Yennefer sits back in her chair. “I don’t know, Geralt. It’s been… comfortable here, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Geralt rubs his bare heel on the rug. “Comfortable.”
“Too comfortable?”
He shifts his jaw from side to side.
“Too comfortable, then.”
He shrugs, meets her gaze. “Never been one to stay in one place for long, Yen.”
“Yes, Geralt. I’m well aware.”
“I just mean. Think I’m getting soft.” Geralt pats his stomach. City life has indeed rounded him out, padded his lithe frame. “Might slow down if I keep up this easy living another year.”
“How hazardous,” Yennefer says. “I’d hate to fatten you up into nekker bait.”
“I’d deserve it.” Geralt shakes his head. “But hey, don’t listen to me. I’m drunk.”
“That goes for both of us.” The lie comes to her smoothly. “I… may have indulged in a sip or two in my circuit around the city.”
“Hell, Yen.” Geralt scratches the back of his head. “Is some tavern owner gonna ask me to cover the cost of shattered windows?”
“I’m perfectly capable of civilized behavior, thank you very much. When I’m treated with proper courtesy.”
“Sure, sure.”
Yennefer’s staring at him and his unfocused viper eyes, his lazy-jawed drunk smile. She wants him to fight her, to say: no, keep me. Keep this. The nights, the days, us together, a home. But he doesn’t and he doesn’t think it, either. He’s thinking of whether he wants to pour White Gull into the next glass or keep it wine, in case they make love later; too much Gull might interfere with his capabilities.
Eventually Geralt looks up at her. Something alerts him, though the awareness is slow-moving, blurred. “You okay?”
“Yes.” Yennefer brushes her hair out of her eyes with one hand. “Something has just occurred to me. A request I'd like to make.”
He almost grins. She can’t help but take a peek into that mind-- he’s hoping it’s-- ahh. Well, yes. That would make a pleasant evening, too, and gods know he excels at it. But first.
Yennefer rises, crosses to the couch and sits down in the cushions. He shifts onto his side to make room for her. She lays her palm against his chest and lets the steady pressure tell him that what’s coming is serious, she wants him to listen.
“Geralt. I love you.”
She hears the shockwave it makes in his head. A rock launched into a still pond.
Yennefer breathes through her own reaction and his. She is leading, she is holding out her hand. Let it be steady.
“I want you to know that,” she says. “It is utmost in my considerations. If I go to Aedd Gynvael, it shall be with you.”
She is saying so much, she feels breathless and dizzy. She might faint. The feeling passes like a mirage but still she can’t believe how much has left her mind and entered the open air between them.
Geralt’s looking at her.
“Would you.” She swallows. “Would you come with me?”
She isn’t thinking of Istredd. At this moment, she can’t even remember his face. Geralt’s face takes up her imagination, his white hair, his yellow feline eyes. His scars. The way he smiles when he knows that she’s disrupted some shitheel’s life with magic and he silently approves. Admires her for it, even.
“Sure.” The edge of Geralt’s mouth curls into a smile. “Getting a little bored around here, anyway.”
Yes, but-- Yennefer doesn’t know what she wants to say. There’s an insistence she wants to make but she can only feel its urgent, pressing impulse, not its words. She finds one of Geralt’s hands and squeezes it tight in her own.
“Ah, Geralt. So ready to make the long journey north. Leaving all this luxury behind.”
Geralt shrugs one shoulder, smiles his loose drunk smile. “I can’t say it was ever really mine, was it?”
It was. It could have been. It can be. Yennefer squeezes his hand again in place of what she can say.
“Thank you,” she says. Then, suddenly and wildly: “I love you.”
Her witcher lies back in her cushions. The viper eyes flicker and she can’t help but reach into them for the answer she hopes to hear. She enters, hoping to find a warm answering sea. What’s there is cold, an icy rigidity too frozen to answer. It can neither lead nor follow.
Geralt closes those eyes and turns his head to kiss her inner wrist.
Yennefer smiles with closed lips. “Ah. Geralt.”
Geralt presses his forehead into the palm of her hand. His eyes are still closed. He nods and doesn’t speak.
There. An answer. She knows what her own will be. Tomorrow, she will conjure her own kestrel. She will write a letter and tell Istredd that they are coming to Aedd Gynvael. It is a long journey to the utmost northern boundary of Narok. There is still time for another answer.
But that is tomorrow. Tonight she is cold, and she presses herself to Geralt’s chest.
“Come to bed,” Yennefer whispers.
Geralt’s eyes open. He swings easily upright and when he stands, he lifts her up with him, still effortless. Yennefer folds herself around his shoulders and closes her eyes as he carries her toward their bed and what awaits them.