Chapter Text
It always starts with blood.
Yennefer of Vengerberg has known this since she was young. She has seen infants enter the world, their screams picking up where their mothers’ left off, their tiny bodies smeared with gore. She’s seen hands split open from the friction of tools before calluses could harden the skin. She’s seen pigs and chickens slaughtered, dirt soaked dark and pungent where they were dragged away—and death is an ending, yes, but each ending is the beginning of what follows, just as every beginning requires an end.
There is always a cost, and to Yennefer, this one is inconsequential. She has bled for much, much less.
Ingredients gathered, she clears a space to work. Herbs and chalk go on a low table, but she sets the book on the ground. Every time she touches it, she’s surprised how slight it is. The potential it contains should be bigger, heavier. But haven’t people thought the same of her?
After Sodden, drained and reeling, she took refuge in this empty cottage. There was no village for miles, and the sky, far from the clog of smoke, was huge and blank. As soon as she walked in the door, she felt the echo of past magic, as thick as cobwebs. It was a few days later that she found the book in a box of useless treasures. Undyed leather bound the pages, which were covered in a cramped scrawl of uneven ink. Every word of it was Elder. That was why she stopped pacing the tiny hut and empty fields long enough to flip through the pages, where she found, in minutes, this. And something old and knotted gave a cramp of pain inside her.
The sorceress will never regain her womb, Borch said. But surely stranger things have happened. If destiny could give Geralt of fucking Rivia a child, after a fashion, why not her?
There’s nothing to be lost by trying, she thinks, even as her imagination points out how wrong she is.
On the bare floor, she copies symbols in chalk. In a wooden bowl, she throws the herbs, a mass of green and purple and white, then grinds them as fine as she can manage. Their juices stain the wood; she can smell them, bittersweet and stinging in her nose.
Finally, Yennefer takes up her knife, calls upon her magic, and opens the meat of her arm over the bowl. Déjà vu wells up along with the blood—a shattered mirror, the thin skin of her wrists, helpless despair a growth inside her throat—as it mingles with power and soaks into the herbs.
Gritting her teeth against a wash of dizziness, she watches until a centimeter of dark liquid covers the remains of stems and flowers. Then she bandages the wound tightly with her other hand and teeth before cupping the bowl in both hands and closing her eyes. She can’t afford to waste power on healing, as her full strength has yet to return in the week since Sodden.
It always starts with blood, but life has movement, too. It changes and grows. There is more than the beginning.
Slowly, bubbles appear in the fluid. One or two, born and burst in a span of seconds—but in a minute the surface is fizzing, the mixture alive, herbs frothing as they dissolve. The stew is climbing higher now, creeping up the wood. The floral, coppery perfume is so strong Yennefer can taste it.
When the liquid reaches the brim, the bowl full and heavier than its contents can explain, she calls out a phrase in Elder, and the old wood cracks. The thick mixture spatters to the floor, to the cluster of sketched symbols, and smokes where it lands. She falls back on her heels, panting.
And waits.
She doesn’t expect it to work, she tells herself. Not really, not after everything she’s tried. After this, she’ll stop.
You knew the cost of enchantment.
If it does work, though, what will happen? The spell doesn’t specify how or when she’ll get her baby. With so major a gap, it’s foolish to perform it at all, but…
She won’t imagine a child in her arms, on her hip, in her home. She won’t imagine touching and talking and teaching. She won’t imagine listening, laughing, loving. Being loved.
Yennefer stays crouched there on the floor, panting, heart racing, still light headed. On top of all that, her eyesight has gone blurry.
No. Not her eyesight.
A patch of air in front of her is shimmering. As Yennefer watches warily, defensive magic at her fingertips, patches of color appear as if through fog: blue, black, ash white.
Then it swells—fast enough she nearly lashes out—darkens like a bruise, and disgorges a girl on Yennefer’s smoking, bloodstained floor.
The portal is gone. The girl stares at Yennefer, half-crouched, panting, eyes wide as a cornered animal’s, and Yennefer stares back.
“Who are you?” the girl asks first. Her white-blonde hair is streaked with mud and tangled with twigs.
“You first, if you don’t mind,” Yennefer says, much more calmly than she feels. Is fate taunting her with someone else’s child? She looks so small to Yennefer, but she must be half-grown, not much younger than Yennefer was when she was taken to Aretuza.
The girl draws in a breath, gaze flicking across her. “Yennefer?”
“Pardon?”
“You’re Yennefer of Vengerberg, aren’t you? Your eyes.”
Yennefer is off balance, and there’s nothing she hates more. “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me,” she says coldly and far too truthfully. Inside her, chaos is itching for an outlet, but she will not harm a child, not unless she is forced to. “Your name, please?”
“Ci—Fi—” The girl hesitates, biting her lip and studying Yennefer’s face. “Ciri,” she finishes.
Yennefer squelches the urge to address her as Cificiri. “And you—” she begins to ask, before the answer hits her like a blow to the stomach. That day on the mountain. Geralt’s admission. She dug the story from an unusually brooding Jaskier on the way back down. “You’re the child surprise. Geralt’s child surprise.”
Slowly, the girl—Ciri—nods.
For fuck’s sake, thinks Yennefer.
It’s true. Fate is playing a joke on her. She will never be free of Geralt of Rivia. For a childish moment, she glares at the book lying harmlessly on the floor, pages spread like hands in a gesture of innocence. You know full well I wanted a baby, she thinks, MY baby, and then she drags her attention back to Geralt’s child surprise.
But before she can speak, Ciri asks, “How did you know what happened?”
Yennefer blinks at her. “Sorry?”
“I mean, how did you know to bring me here now?” Ciri rephrases, clearing up exactly nothing. “Were you watching us?”
Yennefer sifts through that for a moment before asking, “You and Geralt were in trouble?” Despite herself, her pulse quickens.
“You didn’t know?” Ciri frowns. “But then why—”
“Never mind that. Tell me what happened.”
“We were ambushed. Nilfgaard. There were a lot of them, and Geralt tried to take them all and yelled at me to run, and I did, but some of them chased me, and he tried to stop them, and then I couldn’t hear him anymore, and I tried to lose them, and I’d just found somewhere to hide when…” She takes a breath and gestures at Yennefer. “Here I am.”
“I see,” Yennefer says, buying time. Time Geralt may not have. But surely he can take care of himself, a big bad witcher against some trifling humans. And if he can’t, why is that Yennefer’s concern? She made it clear a year ago—to him and to fate and to the world—that she wanted nothing more to do with him. Geralt of Rivia is no longer Yennefer’s problem.
She looks at the wide-eyed girl standing in front of her, waiting for Yennefer’s help. “Fuck,” she says aloud.
Ciri laughs. “Now you sound like him.”
She’s doing it for the girl, and only for the girl, she tells herself as she beckons Ciri closer so she can feel the resonance of her last location. This child may not be Yennefer’s, a spell book’s mockery aside, but she is a child, and she’s done nothing to deserve Yennefer’s grudge. Ciri needs safety and freedom, and she needs Geralt.
If Yennefer’s lucky, this will be quick.