Chapter Text
Jaskier couldn’t stop weeping for the life of him, and his life very much depended on it. Fuck coming up with an escape plan—all of his intellect was spent ensuring his eyelids didn’t freeze shut.
“You’d be crying too if you had a bolt stuck in your thigh,” Jaskier muttered to the messenger boy chained to the tree beside him. A fresh wave of tears washed over his cheeks; his split lip stung. “This is your fault, anyway. What idiot tries to take on a camp full of poachers alone?” He grimaced. “You know what? Don’t answer that.”
Golden shafts of firelight flicked through the gaps between trees, far enough away from their makeshift torture chamber that any residual warmth was a feverdream. Jaskier would do anything to turn back the hourglass to earlier that evening, when he was basking in the warmth of that fire, his lute propped on his thigh, brimming over with cocksure confidence as he lifted a poisoned demijohn of wine from his pack. Fuck, if he were honest, he’d do anything to stick his hands into a burning pit of coals. Or his head. The poachers had been twanging out bawdy tunes on his lute for the better part of the night, every last one of them incapable of holding a tune. Their bloody fingerprints were all over her polished soundboard, and they’d managed to snap her newly strung chanterelle during a lively rendition of The Lusty Young Lycan. Jaskier was going to come back to haunt them as a wraith if they even contemplated using her as firewood.
He shuffled around in the frozen mud, hoping to find a position that would relieve the throbbing pain in his thigh, to no avail. There was no comfortable position to settle in when chained to a tree, especially not on a night so frigid it threatened to unman him. The poachers had taken his expensive cloak and rabbit-lined gloves as spoils after the skirmish, and the dimeritium was cold enough to burn where Jaskier’s woolen tunic bunched up to expose his bare skin.
A poacher dumped Jaskier’s pack into the mud, searching through its contents with the toe of his boot. The crew started a new song, though they were drunk enough that they couldn’t agree on which. They passed around bottles of vodka, their voices splitting into disparate lyrics over the same melody.
Jaskier thumped his skull against the tree in a half-hearted attempt to end his misery. “A month,” he groaned. “I’ve been following this crew for a month. A month of crawling through the dirty knots Kaedwen calls villages, a month sleeping in mud and surviving on piss-poor ale served in taverns held together by spite and mold. Finally, finally I catch up to them. And what happens? A poxfaced messenger barely in breeches comes galavanting into the clearing with his sword drawn like he’s swinging around his cock, hoping to be the hero who saves a dragon.” He spat a mouthful of blood onto a tussock of dead grass. “If you had just waited until dawn, this would have all been done and dealt with, but—oh Meletile’s sweet cunt, they’ve found my good ink. Hey! Hey you! Yes, you there, with the ugly mug and the weird chin. Put that cap back on the bottle right this instant. That jar costs more than your mother makes out on the streetcorner in a month—aaaand isn’t that lovely, he’s using it to draw a well-endowed member on that sleeping fellow's face. No one has any respect for the arts anymore, let me tell you,” Jaskier sighed. “Even now, they don’t take me seriously. I mean, look at the two of us. You’re beaten bloody senseless, and all I have is a few scrapes and this bolt in my thigh. I’m not even a worthy punching bag to these folks, just dragon chum in case the fine lady here gets it in her head to start incinerating things.” He craned his neck to look at her (and she was a her, if the crest above her eye was to be believed). “I taste really, really bad, by the way. All gristle and bones.”
Her one visible eye rolled towards him, pale blue swimming in a wide, silver-white sclera, assessing him like he was a pig on a butcher’s block. A warning rumble came from deep within her chest, a sound felt more than heard. She let off a small burst of raw Chaos and jerked against her chains. The magic was immediately consumed by the metal, though its residue hung charged in the air between them. It’d be terrifying if Jaskier could be any more terrified. As it was, he was just hoping to meet his end without pissing himself.
Said dragon was the entire reason he was there at all. She was the quarry the poachers had been chasing north, a dragon large enough to bear a rider, larger than a horse, with razor-thin teeth and claws that gauged deep furrows in the frozen earth. Just her hide would make them unfathomably rich. They’d shot her with a crossbow too, before staking her down with a web of dimeritium chains and setting up camp. They were waiting for her to weaken; it was difficult to fence poached dragon parts to the highest bidder if you were nothing more than a smear of ash in a Kaedweni clearing.
The crew tossed aside Jaskier’s lute (Literally. He watched as it made a shallow arc through the air) and pulled out stacks of contracts from the messenger’s bag. They pried open wax seals, reading the pleas inside with affected accents. “To whoever finds this message,” one of them squalled. The poacher’s caricature of Keracki vowels was so clumsy that Jaskier had to tamp down a fierce urge to correct his pronunciation, despite having long ago forced his own mouth to fit around the artificial roundness of Oxenfurt common. “A sea monster plagues our shores, drowns our fishermen, smashes our ships. We beg the dragon riders of Kaer Morhen to come to our aid. We are prepared to pay—”
On and on it went.
“Dragon needed to clear an infestation of wyverns. They’ve gone from stealing livestock to stealing children. The town has little coin, but the crown will surely reward any monster slain—”
“The Kingdom of Redania is seeking those with experience in hunting monsters—”
“We are in great need of a dragon rider—”
“The town has burnt to ashes—”
“All of our menfolk are dead—”
“We will pay double for the return of our children’s bodies—”
“Help us. Please—”
The poachers cackled, tossing a few scrolls into the fire for kindling. Parchment fell to the mud as they passed around another demijohn.
Jaskier cleared his throat as he shifted again. “Say, knight-in-ragged-armor, you wouldn’t happen to have any more bright ideas? Perhaps on how to escape? Normally, I’d love to improvise, but I’m finding it a bit difficult to deviate from the script tonight. I’d be happy to write a song in your honor if you manage to think up a miracle. Something punchy, maybe a rondel or a—shit fucking cock!”
The messenger’s head lolled onto his shoulder, and he stared at Jaskier with glassy, unseeing eyes. He was younger than Jaskier thought; a boy more than a man. Blood bloomed bright along his temple, dripping in angled rivers down his pallid face. It stained the front of his leather jerkin and darkened the messenger guild patch clumsily stitched over his heart. His lips were blue and slightly parted, frozen on a final exhale.
Jaskier lurched his head away from the corpse, choking down bile. He tried not to imagine another’s face—sandy curls, pale eyes, far too young. He failed. Fuck.
His skull cracked against the trunk. Think, Jaskier. How was he going to get out of this? Surely he had managed to escape closer scrapes—it wasn’t his first kidnapping. But all he could think about was searing pain and the messenger’s blank eyes. What little sense he had left was circling the single, horrible trick he had left up his sleeve.
They wore his father’s colors. Most dragon poachers did, more from superstition than any allegiance. They knotted dingy scraps of sky blue fabric around their necks, their arms, their heads. His father was the bogeyman hiding under poachers’ beds, a scary story to keep them from fencing dragon parts elsewhere. It was an open secret that the Count de Lettenhove had an iron fist on the procurement of dragonflesh. He opened his purse the widest and thoroughly crushed his rivals.
So Jaskier just needed to let these guys know who they had chained up, convince them that he was the wayward son of their malicious patron. If his luck was good, they’d let him free just to be spared some superstitious cosmic retribution. If his luck was bad, they’d keep him chained all the way to Kerack, but they wouldn’t leave him here for carrion.
There was just one teeny, tiny problem. As far as the Continent was aware, the Count de Lettenhove famously had no surviving sons.
So, it wouldn’t work. Jaskier couldn’t think of a better plan.
He was composing the magic words that would hopefully earn him his freedom when the first poacher dropped like a boulder into the mud. The camp fell silent except for the dragon’s labored breathing. Then—shouting as the poachers scrambled around their camp, clutching at their mouths and stomachs and heads. One by one, they fell to their knees, slid off logs, collapsed into bushes. They clawed at their throats with rigid fingers and foamed at the mouth, gasping for air. Jaskier held his breath, expecting to be the next victim of what had to be dragon-magic. Eventually, the camp was once again silent, the poachers prone and unbreathing.
And Jaskier was still alive.
He counted to a hundred. Once. Twice. Then waited a few moments more just to be sure. When he was confident a poacher wouldn’t whip out a crossbow and pin his head to the trunk with a bolt, he wiggled in earnest, hoping to slacken his restraints. It was a slow process. He shimmied his shoulders to scoot to the base of the tree until he was all but lying in the mud. Then inch by painful inch, he crawled out by shuffling on his knees and elbows, his head cocked at a strange angle to slip through the chains. Hot copper flooded his mouth as he bit down on his tongue to keep from crying out. His world tunneled to black. He pressed the side of his face against the tree and slipped his head from the chains. The messenger's corpse listed to the side, no longer kept upright by tension, and Jaskier had enough wherewithal to shift out of the way before it could slouch over him.
He lay there panting for a long time, trying to gather his scattered wits amongst embers of pain. Ridges of frozen mud cradled his cheek, dug into his shoulder. He palmed the icicles from his lashes, clearing them along with a smear of hot tears. Fading firelight painted swaths of ruddy gold over leaf litter and tree roots. Jaskier’s tunneled sight came back in increments, until he was staring right at the dragon.
She was elegant, even pinned down like a bug—Blue-silver and long-necked like a crane, with a whip of a tail that thrashed against the ground. A web of dimeritium held her down, staked and woven around massive oaks older than dynasties. She jerked against her bonds, realizing, as he had, that this was her chance for freedom. Her raw flesh wept where dimeritium had rubbed against it. She tried to stand, her flank fluttering with pain and panic as her claws pressed against the earth. One wing was bent awkwardly underneath her weight, the other was pressed uselessly to her side; still, her muscles rippled as she tried to fan them open. The chains flashed blue, and the lingering, acrid scent of aborted Chaos burned through Jaskier’s sinuses. She pushed her bonds to their limit; chains creaked as they were pulled taut, and trees groaned against the strain. It wasn’t enough. She collapsed back to the dirt with a pained grunt, chains clattering around her.
Right. He had a job to do. Oak bark curled under his fingernails as he pulled himself up. He forced his injured leg to hold his weight, dutifully ignoring the stars that arced across his vision. Mind over matter, Jaskier. There wasn’t time for pain. He limped towards the campfire, grinding down on his molars. The lead poacher had fallen next to a log bench by the fire— the same burly gentleman who had shot the bolt through Jaskier’s thigh before he could flee, whose signet ring was stained with the blood from Jaskier’s split lip. He had a keyring looped around his woven belt, a thick band of iron with more than a dozen skeleton keys, each the length of a palm. Jaskier knelt, fumbling with jerky, pained movements as he yanked the corpse around until he was clutching the heavy ring. He shook it in a celebratory jangle. Gotcha.
He stayed well within the dragon’s sightline as he hobbled back, humming snippets of lullabies to soothe her. Or possibly to soothe him. His injured leg dragged behind him, catching on forest debris, hot blood dripping down his leg. Every step threatened to send him sprawling to the ground. He was easy prey. There was a good chance he was about to be reduced to ashes—a small mercy, given the way his wound throbbed in agony. The gods only knew how long it would take to get to the nearest healer. Triple that number to find one that would actually help, rather than dribble chicken blood over his wounds under a full moon for the small, small price of everything in his coin pouch and the clothes on his back.
At least incineration would be quick.
She watched him with a baleful gaze as he knelt by her head—well, it was more like a controlled collapse. A loop of chain dug into the bones of his right knee. “Hello there, pretty girl,” he soothed, his voice following the melody of a lullaby as he fumbled with thick keys, his fingers stiff from the cold. “Please don’t eat me. I’m not here to hurt you.”
They had muzzled her with a mass of leather straps and locks the size of his fist. If he removed anything, it had to be that. One by one, he took keys into his non-dominant hand and shoved them into the locks, his wrist straining as he tested them. She growled, her jaw shifting under the muzzle as if she was trying to snap at him. He hummed another lullaby under his breath as he worked, his voice turning pitchy every time she shifted. When the pins on the final lock clicked and tumbled open, he yanked the heavy muzzle off her snout and dropped it onto the ground in one fluid motion, his hands held aloft in a gesture of peace. She watched him for a long moment, an opalescent membrane blinking over her visible eye. Then she closed her eyelids in a slow blink, the intensity of her gaze softening.
She stayed still as he crawled around the web of chains, jabbing keys into locks. He kept his gaze lowered and his head bent close to the ground, squinting in the gray of pre-dawn, but he could feel her gaze raking over him, testing his mettle. Or sizing up her first post-shackled snack. He tossed the used keys to the ground. Once Jaskier discarded half of them, the dragon shifted, testing the restraints. They were loose enough that she could move from lying to sitting, and then from sitting to standing. She shook her entire body, rattling the chains and shrugging them off. They fell to the ground in turns. He had enough sense to scurry away, scraping his palms against stones and roots as he put as much distance between himself and a pissed-off dragon as he could. He collapsed onto his back once he ran out of stamina, his spine curved awkwardly around a fallen branch.
There was quicksilver movement in the corner of his eye, an unfurling of wings, an arc of a long, slender tail. Then a noise unlike anything Jaskier had ever heard—a bird’s warning call by way of guttural thunder, an undulation inside his skull. Dimeritium flashed bright blue, and all of his hair stood on end. It was the charged moment before a lightning strike. A flock of birds scattered into the sky, arcing above the spindling arms of late-autumn trees—there were worse views before death.
But there was no white-hot flame or stray thunderbolt aimed for his heart. The dragon launched herself skyward, the camp’s flimsy tents collapsing under the force of her downdraft as she pumped her torn wings, her blue-silver scales blending in with the dawn sky as she spiralled upwards, wobbling with injury. And then, when she was hardly more than a suggestion of wings, she levelled out and speared north to make her way towards—
Papers caught up in the dragon’s ascent fell like leaves back to the earth. A contract drifted down, landing on his chest, its delicate wax seal crumbled. It was the one about the sea monster, beseeching a dragon rider to come to their aid. It was a bitter, familiar cry for help. One that would never make it to Kaer Morhen now that their messenger was dead.
Unless…
He groaned, clutching the contract in his fist as he stood back up. The clearing was destroyed, chains and corpses and contracts strewn everywhere, all half-buried under disturbed detritus. The messenger’s bag sat next to the smoldering campfire, the leather dark and tacky with blood, contracts spilling out of its open lip. He stumbled his way towards it, only stopping when his dragging foot hit something.
A bottle.
Specifically, his wicker-wrapped demijohn, the one he’d filled with poisoned wine that morning.
His empty wicker-wrapped demijohn, the cork missing. The jug had fallen by the wayside next to a poacher’s corpse.
He blinked at it, nudging it over with his foot. Then a hysterical laugh shuddered out of him. It didn’t stop. Not when he picked up the messenger’s bag and shoved the crumpled contract inside. Not when he bent down to pick up another, and another, and another. Not even when, in the watery light of dawn, he threw his lute case over one shoulder and the messenger’s bag over the other, and limped north towards Kaer Morhen.
Jaskier stumbled among the stones, weighing them against one another. Too small. Too austere. Too ugly. The dreary mountain ridge was studded with slabs, all ripe for the taking. He settled on a sturdy chunk of Kaedweni granite, flecked with feldspar and laced with lichen and soft tufts of moss. Really, you couldn’t ask for a better deathbed.
He itched to hammer out the first clumsy attempts at his funeral dirge. He had composed it while trudging up a miserable deer path snaking through the Blue Mountains. Then his leg had buckled, sending him tumbling down a scree—scraping his hands and knees and ego in the process—and so he continued to compose it while blindly limping north, lost in a sea of rocks and trees. Now he sat on the stone, his lute impossibly heavy in his arms, and even with stiff fingers, even with a head full of cotton, even with a wound that throbbed to each beat of his erratic heart, the music came easily to him. It didn’t linger long—the sharp winds that blew across the mountain ridge stole the song away as soon as it was born, his dirge as lost as he was.
He was plucking out the melody for the refrain—something catchy but with the appropriate gravitas—when a shadow fell over the ridge, blotting out what little sunlight filtered through the overcast sky. A dragon. Not the lithe, silver creature he had saved. No, this dragon was a hulking beast, all muscle and hard-plated scale. Death incarnate. The mountain trembled when she landed. She dug her talons into the earth, snapping her wings taut to keep herself from skidding off the edge.
Jaskier had time to run the entire gamut of emotions before Roach turned to look at him. He settled on awe, like always.
She was as large as a manor house, standing three men tall at the shoulder. The ridges along her copper scales were burnished a shimmering red, except for the pale splash between her eyes. She took Jaskier in with slow, serpentine movements, her long neck bowed low to the ground, her tongue flicking out to taste the air. Fat plumes of steam trailed from her nostrils, her throat glowing as if a lit pyre rested between her teeth. Scrub grass burst into flame underneath her, crumbling to smoldering ash. The ridge had gone from cold to sweltering, and even the harsh wind couldn't dash away the overwhelming scent of burning brimstone. Sweat gathered along Jaskier’s nape. This was it. She was going to scorch him.
She rumbled a sound like a great oak being rent in two. But, instead of opening her maw, she tucked her wings against her side and folded her legs underneath her, settling onto the rocky ground. On her back was a saddle made from enough leather to bedeck a small army, and on that saddle was a man. Geralt pushed a pair of leather goggles onto his forehead, peering down at Jaskier with an inscrutable expression. His face was soot-streaked from a hunt; the skin around his eyes was pale and unmarred.
Jasker had hoped to have this reunion in a densely populated marketplace, somewhere with plenty of witnesses, where he could have a chance to explain himself before Geralt skewered him through with a blade. Over the past day, his fantasies of reconciliation had morphed as he relied on spite to keep him standing; he dreamt of collapsing on Kaer Morhen’s front steps at the exact moment his heart gave way, messenger bag in tow, his fingers forever stuck in a crude pose that could only mean fuck you, absolutely.
The spite had leeched from him as soon as Roach blotted out the sun. Or maybe it had left when his bones became too heavy and his mind too slow to continue his unplanned, impossible shamble north. Either way, he was exhausted and dreaded whatever fight lay ahead. If he had any good sense at all, he’d turn tail and flee.
But that was a moot point, because if he had any good sense at all, he wouldn’t be in the Blue Mountains in the first place.
Roach watched Jaskier with half-lidded eyes as Geralt undid the harness that kept him in the saddle. He dismounted his dragon as easily as he would a gentle palfrey, a sleek dash of streamlined leather moving deftly across the harnesses that criss-crossed Roach’s flank. So Geralt wanted to do this face-to-face. Or perhaps hand-to-hand. Jaskier sighed, shouldering his lute and ignoring the way his vision swam as he grabbed the messenger bag by his feet. Best to get this over with.
Jaskier’s heavy wool cloak billowed around him like summer-weight silk. The force of the wind was the only thing keeping him upright; his injured leg protested every ounce of weight it had to bear. Geralt shouted something, but the wind garbled the words, crumpling them like parchment. Jaskier closed his eyes as he focused on moving forward, breathing in sharp lungfuls of overwarm air with every shuffling step. He clutched the bag to his chest. He just needed to hand it over, and then he could finally—
The wind banked, and Jaskier lost his balance. He gave up any pretence of trying to stay standing, fully expecting to smash his chin against a rock on the way down. A firm hand grabbed his arm, keeping him upright. Jaskier was awash in the scent of ash and brimstone and hot leather. Geralt. Geralt, whom Jaskier wanted to collapse against so badly that it manifested as a physical ache. Geralt, who was probably staring at him with that horrible, flat gaze he cast towards him at Caingorn. Perhaps there was a knife already against Jaskier’s throat. Perhaps Geralt would be kind enough to kill him before he gave in to his urge to look. But Jaskier was weak. Always weak. He opened his eyes.
Geralt’s face was a blur that assembled itself in pieces: white hair pulled back at his temples and stained gray with ash; a smattering of sharp features, beads of sweat carving riverbeds through a layer of soot; a pair of candle-flame eyes, the pupils slit so narrow that the irises looked like gold coins. He held no knife to Jaskier’s jugular, wasn’t even armed with his swords. His mouth was moving, but the words meandered on their way to Jaskier’s ears. “Delivery for Kaer Morhen,” Jaskier said in response to whatever the hell it was, forcing his mouth into a smile. His split lip cracked open.
Geralt’s eyebrows swooped down, pinching the skin between his eyes. “You’re covered in blood,” he said, long after his mouth finished moving.
“Am I?” Jaskier glanced down and, yes—the bottom of his brilliant blue cloak was stained with mud and blood and other unpleasantries, along with his boots, his trousers, and the front of his doublet. His gloves had been so saturated with it all that he had tossed them soon after he started north. “Most of it isn’t mine.” He looked again. “At least I don’t think so.”
The wind warped and choked Geralt’s words. “Most of it—”
“Is the usual messenger’s.” Jaskier held out the bloodied bag. “We had a bit of a run-in with… bandits. Unrelatedly, I’d appreciate directions to the nearest healer.”
Geralt wrenched the bag from Jaskier, slinging it over his shoulder. His grip on Jaskier’s arm threatened to shatter bone. “You reek of infection.”
Jaskier balked, trying to take a half-step back. He only managed to sway dangerously. Geralt kept him rooted to the spot. “I—you don’t exactly smell of roses either—”
Geralt ignored him, pulling off his glove with his teeth. He pressed the back of his hand to Jaskier’s forehead, to his cheeks. His touch was ice cold, like springmelt, like hoarfrost, and if Jaskier leaned into it—well, he was just a man. Geralt flared his nostrils and cursed. “You’re running a fever,” he said, as if it were somehow Jaskier’s fault. He pulled his hand back with a shake, flexing his fingers. “Do you have dimeritium on you?”
“Um—” Jaskier had to think really hard on that. He wanted Geralt’s freezing hands all over him, cooling the blood boiling just under his skin. “No?” Except, actually, yes. “No, yes, I bet I do. Just a bit, in my thigh. The tip of a bolt.”
“The bandits had dimeritium-tipped bolts?” Geralt hissed. He tugged Jaskier forward.
“Yes,” Jaskier lied, leaning back against Geralt’s hold. “Now, which way to that healer again?”
“You won’t make it to a healer like this.” Geralt pulled him along despite Jaskier’s paltry attempt at digging in his heels. He took a few stumbling steps forward.
“Then if you could please just deposit me back on that lovely piece of granite right over there—” Jaskier jabbed a finger at an indiscriminate point somewhere behind him.
“Jaskier.” Geralt’s voice was rough as gravel, even when shouting over the wind. “There’s a storm coming.” He jerked his chin towards the sky as if that explained anything. Jaskier did, in fact, have eyes. All day, he had watched as dark gray clouds fat with snow built up on the horizon.
Jaskier’s confusion must have bled to his expression, because Geralt’s face swam in front of him. He gripped both of Jaskier’s arms, grounding him. “There’s a blizzard on the horizon, and you’re running a fever so high your brain should be cooked in your skull. You shouldn’t even be standing—you’ll die before you ever make it to a healer on foot. So, unless you’d prefer to freeze to death, get on Roach.”
Jaskier processed that horrible image for a long moment. “I’ve heard freezing to death can be quite peaceful, actually—hey!”
Geralt snarled, and what little blood Jaskier’s body contained all rushed to his head as Geralt threw him over his shoulder like a sack of grain. “Put. Me. Down!” Jaskier emphasized each word with a fist to Geralt’s spine.
“No.”
Jaskier squirmed, trying to slide out of Geralt’s grip, but he was too weak to give it a valiant effort. “Just leave me,” he said, going limp. It felt like there was a red-hot knife twisting into the meat of his thigh. In his last moments his body betrayed him—he couldn't help but cry fat, ugly tears streamed down his face. He couldn’t help but cry fat, ugly tears. “What’s the difference if I die here or there?”
“You’re not going to die,” Geralt said, in a tone that was anything but comforting. It was the exact kind of thing you’d say to someone who was definitely, totally going to die.
Geralt deposited him against Roach’s forearm. The wind had whipped the heat away from her, and she was no longer scorching with post-hunt fever. Instead, she was warm in a way that made Jaskier feel like all of his bones were melting. He rested his cheek against her, and she snuffled at his hair, the little horns along her chin scraping against his scalp. Her grumble made his skull quake.
Geralt muttered something to her, his words snatched by the wind, and then launched himself up the ladder of harnesses. He scaled it in record time, Jaskier’s lute—when did he get that?—and the messenger’s bag in tow, busying himself high above Jaskier’s head. Jaskier expected him to return with the little pouch of medical supplies he kept in Roach’s saddlebags, like he had countless times before. Clean bandages, jugs of vinegar water, catgut sutures, and a little wooden chest of neatly organized herbs. Instead, Geralt returned to the edge of the saddle empty-handed. He slid a foot into a loop on the harness and carefully lay belly flat until he hung upside down over Roach’s flank. One arm extended towards Jaskier, who could only blink up at this bizarre show of acrobatics.
“Grab my arm,” Geralt explained when Jaskier didn’t move, shaking the arm in question.
Jaskier stared at it like it was a snake readying to strike. “I can’t.” It was even true. Geralt was just out of reach. Their fingertips might brush if Jaskier stood on his toes, but Jaskier could barely stay vertical even with Roach’s support.
“You’re going to. Use Roach’s arm as a foothold. She won’t let you fall.”
Roach was warm, and Jaskier was so, so cold—except for his simmering blood and the tongues of flame that licked over every inch of his skin. His muscles were melting into slag. He had the pervasive animal instinct to curl up and hide away, to keep his death a secret. Something between him and the earth.
“Jaskier.” It wasn’t the first time Geralt said his name.
Jaskier leaned further into Roach. He’d meant to do the exact opposite. Had meant to walk away, as if he could ever walk away from Geralt. Roach pressed her nose into the center of his back, snuffling. His face was wet. “You should leave me here.”
“No,” Geralt growled, in a tone that brooked no argument, the word cracking under all the weight it was made to hold. Jaskier’s eyes found Geralt unbidden and—and he could find no explanation as to why Geralt was looking down at him like that, gaze as bright and intense as flame. “Now grab my fucking arm.”
Ah. Ice trickled down Jaskier’s spine. He was surely already dead, then, laid out on a slab of Kaedweni granite with his lute in hand. Perhaps he was still tied to that tree, crows pecking at his blue-lipped corpse. Or this was some cruel trick in his final illucid moments, a hallucination pulled from the depths of his heartache to torture him.
Because Geralt looked as if it mattered whether Jaskier died on this ridge or not. As if it really, really mattered. Geralt reached down as far as he could, his hand that much closer.
Fuck it.
He grabbed Geralt’s arm.
