Chapter Text
The walk down the long flight of stairs took no more than a minute, but to Geralt it felt like hours, as the anticipation and dread that had settled in the pit of his stomach flared, creeping up his throat and coating the roof of his mouth. He’d spent the better part of the drive up trying to figure out how, exactly, the others would react to this development, and hadn’t managed to come up with a single scenario that didn’t end in some sort of fight. It wouldn’t be enough for him to introduce Yennefer with no further explanation of why she was there; one would be demanded of him anyway. But claiming it was only for Ciri’s sake wouldn’t work either—at least, not on Eskel, who had been there when they returned from Novigrad, and would be easily able to find the truth in whatever he said. The others—well, he didn’t even want to think about that. He’d cross the bridge when he reached it, but the bridge was fast approaching, and with every step he took down those stairs it loomed ever closer.
When he reached the bottom, Yennefer only a few steps behind him, he didn’t know whether he should have been relieved or worried that the only one who appeared to be there, aside from Ciri, was Lambert. He barely even spared a glance for Geralt; his eyes went instead to Yennefer as she reached the landing. “Why is she here?” he demanded without preamble, folding his arms defensively over his chest.
Silence, for a moment, as he scrambled once again for a defense and came up empty-handed. This time, though, he was saved from needing one by Yennefer, who returned Lambert’s accusatory stare, unimpressed. “I’m here because he invited me here,” she said, the light and casual tone in which she delivered the words not lessening their sting. “Do you need another reason?”
Geralt could tell that the exchange was only moments away from devolving into a full-blown argument, and resigned himself to stepping in. This was among the chief reasons he’d been worried about this trip; no one in Kaer Morhen was the type to back down from a fight, and neither was Yennefer. They had been intending to stay for a week, but in Geralt’s mind it was already stretching out into a series of protracted disagreements, each right on the heels of the last. “Yeah, actually, I’d say you do.” Lambert rolled his eyes as he turned back to Geralt. “And you should have a better reason for inviting people here than ‘I felt like it.’ Some of us are here year-round, you know.”
Five years ago that would have been an exaggeration, but now it was only an uncomfortable truth: people grew more able to defend themselves, stayed clustered in cities, and the need for witchers was slowly but surely decreasing. There wasn’t much they could do about it, either, except continue to prove their worth where they could. While previously that would have meant that all of them would scatter across the Continent for months at a time in search of work, the keep was in such disrepair that the upkeep alone often required at least two of them. Before the move to Oxenfurt, Geralt had been one of the ones who was more willing to stay, and at times it had seemed he and Vesemir were the only ones who cared about keeping Kaer Morhen in one piece. Now that he was gone, someone else would have taken over that duty, and Geralt was beginning to get a sense of who it had been.
“You could have taken the job,” Geralt said, and though he didn’t turn to look, he could feel the weight of Yennefer’s gaze on him. Another truth that no one wanted to acknowledge the implications of—new and fragile as this yet was. “They gladly would have accepted any of us.”
Lambert scoffed. “That’s not true and you know it. They asked for you specifically. Taking anyone else would be a last resort. Besides, no one wants to admit that Nilfgaard’s a threat. Hiring some no-name witcher doesn’t look the same as hiring the Butcher of Blaviken.”
Geralt flinched at the nickname—he couldn’t help it. It had been dogging him for decades, no matter how he tried to shake it. Lambert knew that, and it was becoming increasingly clear that he was looking for a fight. There had to be something more going on besides mere distaste for Yennefer, and he’d been away long enough that he couldn’t even begin to guess what it was. He didn’t get a chance to ask, though, because they were interrupted by Ciri at the door, and Eskel behind her. She had been talking, but stopped short when she saw the three of them, the tension in the room multiplying.
Ciri, however, had proven to Geralt time and time again that she could bounce back from these things far quicker than he, because only a second later the grin is back on her face. “Oh, good, you’re all here!” she said, and were it not for the slight edge in her voice, the scene could almost pass for normal. “We were just talking about what we should do tonight. Since Vesemir is—?”
She glanced over at Eskel, who picked up the sentence after a single, hard look in Geralt’s direction. He hadn’t heard the last of his brothers’ irritation, he knew, though he also hoped that Eskel would at least be civil about it. “Vesemir is out on a contract,” he said, clearing his throat. “Won’t be back until tomorrow at the earliest. Last one before the winter, for any of us.”
It was one of the drawbacks of living in a keep so old, and so high up in the mountains at that—it wasn’t practical for them to take many contracts during the winter, if any at all. Kaer Morhen was in a constant state of disrepair, and the maintenance it needed could often only be done when two or three of them were around to do it. And the price of gas to get up and down the mountain would barely be covered by whatever contracts they did manage to scrounge up in the cold, when the pickings were slim to begin with. No, once Vesemir was back, none of them would be leaving for months.
Geralt could hear the unspoken assumption in Eskel’s words: that he would be staying with them, at least for the remainder of Oxenfurt’s break. And he wanted to—there was a part of him, a not-insignificant one, that missed being at Kaer Morhen for the bulk of the winter months, his only responsibility helping with the upkeep, not having to worry about contracts. Faced with the reality of so many other people, though, he was already beginning to miss the quiet of his one-bedroom apartment. It was too late, though; they were there, and they’d committed the next several days to this. A sideways glance over at Yennefer led him to believe that she was feeling much the same.
Ciri cleared her throat, her gaze still bouncing back and forth between everyone as though she expected a full-blown argument to break out at any moment. “We’ve—uh—already eaten, you’re here a bit late,” she said, “but I’m sure we can find something…?” Her glance over at Lambert and Eskel would be funny if he wasn’t already so tense; she knew as well as the rest of them that the winter was the only time there would reliably be a decent supply of food in the keep. It was easier, during the rest of the year when most of them were out, to just make trips to the town near the bottom of the mountains as needed; they only had to keep enough around for one or two of them at most, and they’d been staggering it that way for years.
“Right,” Lambert replied, drawing the word out just long enough that Geralt knew he wasn’t finished with this argument—not that he’d ever expected him to be. “Sure, you can find something. I’m sure you know where everything is.” Geralt saw Eskel roll his eyes, but he didn’t comment, which was understandable, but irritated him just as much as Lambert’s comments; would it really be that hard, he wondered, to step in? Then again, perhaps a week-long visit wasn’t worth starting fights over. They’d be gone soon enough.
“I can show you where everything is.” By the time she finished the sentence Ciri was already halfway out the door, glancing back only once over her shoulder as she disappeared down the hall. Yennefer looked between the three of them, one brow raised, before she followed, and Geralt, refusing to meet the others’ stares, followed behind. If they wanted to make things awkward, they were certainly welcome to try, but he had a feeling—a possibly-unwarranted hope—that with Ciri around, they’d find it difficult.
“The place is big, but it’s not hard to find your way around once you know it.” Ciri’s voice echoed off the stone walls and floor, bouncing back and forth until it felt as though the hall was filled with it. Geralt could hear the fondness in it; Kaer Morhen had been her home for years, after all, and was a place she proclaimed to remember far better than any of her childhood in Cintra, though of course her time there—and at the keep, some years later—had been cut short. Yennefer, as always, maintained a blank face, but he thought he sensed some bit of affection there, too, though aimed more at Ciri and less at the building. It baffled him, sometimes, that others couldn’t see it; she was difficult to read at the best of times, but when it came to Ciri, her intentions and emotions had always been clear. “A lot of places to hide.”
“Not that you would know from experience.” There, again—the barest hint of a grin curving the corner of Yennefer’s mouth. She would know about this, Geralt realized, almost as much as he did; she might’ve been the only person living outside the walls of this keep that would understand what it meant to know Ciri when she was younger, who would smile knowingly at his stories (he remembered, briefly, the ice-skating one, and the way it fell from his lips without thought that night in her apartment, and shoved the thought away). Ciri laughed, and for a minute they followed her down the halls in silence—but they weren’t going towards the kitchen, and Geralt, preoccupied as he was, didn’t realize that until she’d all but shoved them into one of the keep’s many unused rooms and shut the door behind them.
“I think we’re far away enough that they can’t hear us now,” she said. Geralt and Yennefer exchanged a glance; she seemed almost as confused as he was, and it was reassuring, in a way, to know that he wasn’t the only one seemingly out of the loop. Ciri had her arms crossed over her chest, drawn up to her full height and glancing back and forth between them much like Lambert had been only a few minutes before. “Neither of you answered my texts about what happened in Rinde. Or my calls.” There was an annoyed frown on her face, but the worry behind it was barely hidden, and he felt a stab of guilt. “I tried Triss and Philippa, and Lambert and Eskel, but they didn’t know much more than what everyone’s saying. Than what they were saying on the fucking news.”
The words hit exactly where they were supposed to; out of the corner of his eye Geralt could see Yennefer’s expression tighten, ultimately settling down into the sort of forced calm normally only reserved for people she didn’t like—the same look that had been on her face at Aretuza, while Vilgefortz had been making his speech. He had known this was coming, the conversation they had outside had told him as much, but he’d been hoping that she would wait until they were back in Oxenfurt, when the dust had settled further and he and Yennefer could come up with a better explanation than the truth. It hurt, thinking about having to hide this from her, but when they were still figuring it out themselves, and the thread of Istredd finding out before they’d figured out what to do about it lingering on the horizon, they were well and truly out of options.
Yennefer, it seemed, had been thinking along the same lines as him, though, because before Ciri could continue, she was cut off by a voice that was, just like her expression, tightly controlled. “I don’t think this is the time or place to be discussing this,” she said, soft enough that Geralt could hear her with no problem, but Ciri likely would have to strain. “Not when we don’t know who could be listening.”
“Does that really even matter?” Ciri’s fingers tightened on her arms over her shirt, and she blinked a few times, turning her head away from them. “What could you possibly have to say to me that no one else should hear?”
It was only his years of practice that stopped him from looking over at Yennefer again, a gesture which surely would have indicated some kind of guilt. There were plenty of other things Ciri didn’t know about either of them, he reasoned to himself, but it didn’t numb the guilt. As was becoming the norm, though, Yennefer stepped in once again. “It’s not that,” she said. “But this is a serious conversation, and it deserves more than” –she paused to wave her hand at the dust-covered empty room around them, lit only by the light streaming through a slim window— “this. Surely you can wait until we’re able to sit somewhere and talk.”
It was almost unnerving, watching the fight slowly drain from Ciri for the second time in as many hours, all because they were in the wrong place. He would be the first to admit that yes, he’d rather do this somewhere else, but when it came down to it, the decision shouldn’t be his, either. He wasn’t the one being kept in the dark. “I guess,” Ciri said, and she rolled her eyes a little, her posture relaxing further. It put him at ease to know she wasn’t really that angry with them; they had spent so many years barely keeping in contact that the last thing he wanted was to drive a wedge between them so soon. “I just—how long are we going to keep putting this off? It’s already happened once. Not to mention all the missed calls.” She looked directly at him when she said it, not at Yennefer, and he couldn’t help but wonder if they’d been talking when he wasn’t aware of it. Surely not about something as important as this, when they had a story to keep straight.
“It won’t be put off any longer than necessary.” The words seemed to come to her so easily that it would be difficult to believe if he hadn’t been watching it, especially when he himself couldn’t think of anything to say. Lambert and Eskel would be asking too, soon enough, and that was even more of a hopeless situation. Everyone there was smart enough to catch on, if they paid attention, and it felt as though they were relying too much on the hope that they wouldn’t to make it through this unscathed. Ciri nodded, obviously just as unsatisfied as she had been the first time she brought it up, but Yennefer wouldn’t bend and they both knew it. Better to enjoy things while they could, he thought, before someone saw through the cracks and it all came crashing down.
“Well. Good. That’s good.” Another nod, and then she stepped in between them and reached for the doorknob. “Now that that’s settled…again” –she laughed, but the sound was short-lived— “we should probably get back to the others, right?”
As they were turning around to leave, though, a buzzing echoed through the room—Yennefer’s phone, which she fished out of her pocket with an expression hovering somewhere between tired and annoyed. Ciri made a comment about the fact that she was even able to get service in the keep, so far away from almost anything else, but Geralt was distracted by the way that her knuckles turned white when she read whatever was on the screen, the way she pressed the button to power it off almost violently, shoving it back into her jacket without looking at it. He raised an eyebrow, but she wouldn’t look at him, either, only at Ciri and at the hallway stretching on endlessly in front of them. “Yes,” she said, stepping around them to lead the way, as if she somehow knew exactly where she needed to go. “We should.”
~
We need to talk.
It wasn’t as though Yennefer was unfamiliar with the words. This particular message was one she’d received more times than she could count, and often from the same person. She could scroll back through their conversations and chart the course of their relationship based on when she’d received them, but that was a pointless endeavor; it wouldn’t go anywhere, and it would only upset her in the process. Despite what some of the others on the Council might think—she’d heard the rumors, of course, heard the things people said about her when they were certain it wouldn’t make its way around—she knew her own limits, even if she was also known to push herself past them. And there were rarely complaints about it. She got results. It was the sole reason she’d ended up where she was.
But where she was was a witcher keep high in the Kestrel Mountains, surrounded by some people she didn’t know and some she knew all too well, waging a war for her reputation on all fronts, and this—this wasn’t what she needed. And then there was Ciri, so certain they were going to tell her the whole truth, and while the version they gave her would certainly be as close as they could get it—she didn’t need to ask Geralt to know they’d agree on that much—there were some things that couldn’t get out, not until she knew what to do about them. Leaving Val publicly would be a scandal, the kind of thing rumors thrived on, especially after she’d spent so many years stubbornly insisting to anyone who questioned that they could make a long-term relationship work. Leaving him for Geralt—it would be nothing short of handing someone the keys to Ciri’s location; it would be all but inviting them in, and that was a risk she wouldn’t take.
No, things were stable, for the time being, and she wanted to keep them that way, so when she thought she felt her phone vibrate again as she continued down the hall, letting Ciri overtake her to lead the way, she ignored it, though she knew that Vilgefortz’s message would be burning a hole in her pocket for the rest of the trip. Later, she thought, both a resolution and a prayer. We’ll talk later.