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As a rule, Jaskier doesn’t put much stock into dreams.
But then again, most of his dreams don’t return to him night after night, week after week. And, really, this isn’t a dream, is it?
It’s a memory.
The first time is a week after Rinde. He dreams that he’s performing; he sees her in the crowd, wide-eyed and frightened, blurring at the edges. Looking straight at him.
After that, she seems to always be there; a flash, a glimpse, just her eyes, her hair, an arm or leg. Dream after dream, she’s there, and he’s…not sure what that means, really. He doesn’t put stock into dreams. Their meanings have never been more than child’s play at understanding the universe before.
He starts wondering if maybe he’s wrong, though, when the dreams start to change.
He’s back in that place – a purgatory, Yennefer called it. A place for those not alive but not dead yet, either. Where the djinn had sent Geralt.
Where this girl is trapped, too.
He dreams of chasing her. He dreams that he’s the thing in the mist she’s so frightened of, and it turns his stomach; he doesn’t want to hurt her. But he cannot catch her, and he cannot speak to explain.
And he knows her. He knows he does. But he can’t, because he’s never forgotten a face, and he doesn’t know her face, no matter how much those wide brown eyes haunt him; so who is she? How can he possibly know her?
He remembers thinking maybe it’s not her face, but he can’t place anything else. Odd hair and tattered clothes are hardly enough to give him a clue.
Each time he has the dream, he wakes up feeling distant, and empty, and aching.
It’s been years since Rinde, since that djinn, and thousands upon thousands of iterations of that dream, when Jaskier finally figures it out.
They – he and Geralt, that is – are in the wilds. He thinks they’re somewhere in Temeria, at current, but they’ve been following the backroads through the forests and swamps for a few days, and he’s lost track of their current position relative to any cities or towns. He knows they’re closer to Sodden and Brugge than Redania, but that’s about it.
Camp is made where the trees break for a rocky outcrop. Jaskier sets up their tent – usually unused, but even he can smell the oncoming rain, so necessary tonight – and works on building up firewood while Geralt goes and hunts for something to eat. They’ll need to go back to the main roads and find a town, soon; game meat is all well and good, but they’re running low on their rations of dried fruits and nuts, as well as spices and such to make game meat palatable.
Or, at least, to make it palatable for Jaskier; Geralt can eat the animals he catches whole and raw, and usually does. But Jaskier is significantly more delicate than his Witcher counterparts. Obviously. Also, even if he could eat the meat raw, he doesn’t think he would – he doesn’t begrudge Geralt his…eccentricities, but sometimes the sound of him tearing into still-bloody meat makes Jaskier’s skin crawl. Thinking about what it would feel like if he were to do the same makes his stomach roil. He can just manage to skin and prepare his own meat without becoming sick; anything past that is too much.
So he usually doesn’t think about it, and steadfastly ignores his stupid lizard brain’s responses to Geralt’s eating habits.
Geralt comes back with several rabbits. Jaskier has never asked how on earth Geralt can catch so many, because he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to know. The Witcher hands him one to start preparing for himself, and lights the fire with a blast of Igni.
Dinner is a decently quiet affair. At least, as quiet as it ever is with Jaskier, that is. He prattles on about their travel, his recent performances at courts, and just about anything else that comes to mind. Geralt methodically works through the rabbits he caught for himself and occasionally grunts or hums in response to Jaskier’s stories. It’s a very typical night.
Until, of course, it’s not.
After they eat, Geralt sets to cleaning and sharpening his swords while Jaskier works on some composition. Or, well, he pulls out his lute and his notebook, but mostly he sits and looks at Geralt; he’s always looked unfairly attractive in the firelight.
Who is Jaskier kidding, really. Geralt has always just been unfairly attractive.
As if he’s reading Jaskier’s mind, Geralt snorts quietly. “Going to write, bard, or are you just going to stare at me all night?”
Jaskier huffs. “And if I do?”
Geralt looks up at him. “You’re usually more hands-on,” he teases, and Jaskier can’t help the way he grins, even as his cheeks flush.
“It’s not my fault you’re irresistible,” Jaskier shoots back. Geralt rolls his eyes.
“Sure,” he says. “Come here and help me with something.”
Jaskier sets his things aside and does. Geralt widens his legs, a clear indication of where Jaskier should sit; the sword is a part of this, then. Once Jaskier is seated, his back to the fire and facing Geralt, who is perched on a stump just slightly above him, Geralt holds out his sword.
“What?” Jaskier takes it.
“The brooch,” Geralt points at the gold circle. “I need to take it off; when we come across a town next, I’ll need to take it in to the blacksmith. I always remove the brooch before I do.”
Jaskier looks down. It is a brooch on the hilt of the sword; he’d never really noticed. “Okay?”
“You’re better at doing fine things with your fingers,” Geralt explains, and when Jaskier looks up at him, there’s a grin on his face.
“That was terrible,” Jaskier accuses, but he’s smiling still, and his cheeks are flushed just slightly redder than before. “How do I do it?”
“There’s a catch,” Geralt says. “Just between the bands, with the rubies.” He traces a finger across what he’s talking about, and Jaskier can see the catch he’s talking about. “It comes loose, and the brooch slides off.”
Jaskier hums an acknowledgement and settles the sword across his lap, keeping on hand on the guard to balance it while he fiddles with the catch.
Touching the brooch feels like being struck with lightning.
He sucks in a breath and just barely manages to keep himself from throwing the sword away. Geralt makes a concerned noise and reaches out to grasp his shoulder and steady him.
“Jaskier?” he asks.
“Just a shock,” he lies. He’s staring down at the sword in his lap, the gold of the brooch glinting each time one of the flames behind him climbs high enough to cast light over his shoulder. Glinting like it does on the girl’s chest, in his dreams.
Renfri.
Geralt pets over his shoulder and cups his jaw, shaking him out of the odd reverie he’s settled into. “Are you alright?” he asks.
Jaskier smiles up at him. “Fine,” he says. “Just wasn’t expecting it, that’s all.”
There’s a pause while Geralt looks over his face, clearly unsure if Jaskier is telling the truth; Jaskier just keeps smiling up at him, hoping his eyes aren’t showing something he doesn’t want his Witcher to see. Finally, Geralt seems content with his search. He leans forward just enough to press a gentle kiss to the corner of Jaskier’s mouth. “Sorry,” he murmurs.
“It’s fine,” Jaskier says. “Not your fault. Alright, let’s see if I can get this off.”
Touching the brooch a second time doesn’t have the same effect, thank the gods. He’s able to loosen the little catch, and he hands the brooch to Geralt once it’s slid off the sword. He catches the way Geralt holds it as if it’s very delicate, how he pets over the emeralds on it with a sort of reverence.
Jaskier swallows. “Geralt,” he says quietly, as he carefully sets the sword to the side.
Geralt looks up at him, and Jaskier can just see the haunted look in his eyes before he focuses on Jaskier properly and the ghosts disappear. Jaskier’s chest aches, exactly like it always does after those dreams. Suddenly, he understands; of course Renfri would know Geralt. Geralt killed her.
But that can’t be right; he saw her in…that purgatory….
His stomach swoops.
Renfri isn’t dead.
“What?” Geralt asks, and Jaskier almost doesn’t want to ask, but he has to.
“Tell me about her,” he says.
Geralt’s eyes go steely. “About who?”
Jaskier reaches up to touch him, and is gratified when he doesn’t flinch, despite the look in his eyes saying he’s very close to shutting Jaskier out. “You know who,” he murmurs.
“I’ve told you,” Geralt says, and he’s not shutting Jaskier out, but he’s clearly uneasy. His hand has tightened around the brooch in a fist, and his eyes keep skittering away from Jaskier’s to the fire behind him.
Jaskier swallows down any number of things he could say about that. He needs to be gentle, here, careful. Even so many years after Blaviken, after the title Butcher has mostly faded, this is a sore spot for Geralt, and he knows it. More than a sore spot, actually, it’s still more of a wound.
Geralt only told him about Blaviken once. He was very drunk, and they didn’t mention it in the morning. They haven’t properly spoken about it since.
“You’ve told me what happened,” Jaskier murmurs. “You’ve never told me about her.”
There’s a pause, a moment where Jaskier truly has no idea what might happen next, be it Geralt giving in or shutting him out for the rest of the night. But then Geralt lets out a sigh, almost more of a hiss, and the fist he’s made around the brooch loosens. He looks down at it in his palm, and Jaskier does too.
“What do you want to know?”
Jaskier chews his lip. “Whatever you want to tell me, darling.”
The next morning, they don’t talk about it. But as they’re packing up the camp, Geralt hands him the brooch, alongside the pin for it. Jaskier wonders where he’s been keeping the pin, but it’s of no importance now.
“Hold onto that until my sword has been repaired, will you?” Geralt asks. He’s not looking at Jaskier as he says it; instead, he’s focused entirely on the belts of Roach’s tack.
Jaskier’s heart feels heavy at the same time that it starts to soar. “Of course,” he says. He knows what this is, what Geralt is trying to tell him: I trust you with my past. Even the parts that hurt.
He pins the brooch to the strap of his lute case, checking three times to make certain it’s secure. While Geralt finishes up covering their camp – something about not leaving a trail – he pets over the metal, feeling out the little jewels embedded in it.
Renfri is alive, somewhere. Trapped in that purgatory, unable to live or die.
Jaskier is going to find her.
He doesn’t tell Geralt.
He can’t tell Geralt; part of it is because he’d have to admit to having seen Renfri in that awful place, but a bigger part is that he can’t be sure. Yes, Yennefer had said that it’s only a place for those that are not alive but also not dead; but what if Yennefer was wrong? If he tells Geralt that Renfri is alive, and then she turns out to be dead – he could never forgive himself.
Geralt already mourned her once. Has been mourning her, actually, for…gods, for thirty years. For most of Jaskier’s life. He can’t bring Geralt’s hopes up if he doesn’t know for sure.
So, he doesn’t tell Geralt, and he waits. They separate after a festival; Jaskier stays in the city to do some encore performances, and Geralt is called by the Path. Jaskier sends him on his way with a promise to be careful and that they’ll find one another again soon.
And then, as soon as Geralt is conceivably far enough away that they won’t cross paths again, Jaskier spends an exorbitant amount of money to get to Oxenfurt as quickly as possible without the use of magic.
Magic would have been his first choice, but that cost significantly more than hiring a coach with rotating drivers to go through the nights. So the coach it is.
While they travel, Jaskier draws up a plan. He has contacts in every country north of the Yaruga, and a decent handful of countries to the south as well. Many of them owe him favors, and this is exactly the kind of thing he’d been waiting on to cash them. His focus will be Redania and the countries north or northwest of it, of course – even disgraced, she was a princess of Creyden, and he can’t imagine how far anyone might have been able to get her lifeless body after Blaviken.
He does know it was stolen from Geralt. That’s something Geralt told him originally, on that night of drunkenness; he’d taken Renfri’s body from Blaviken so that Stregobor couldn’t have it. He’d intended to build a pyre, to honor her in the only way he knew how.
But when he’d left her body with Roach to gather the wood, he’d returned and found her gone. He’d told Jaskier he figured some predator had dragged her off, or maybe some particularly nasty human. Geralt had confirmed that Stregobor never got a hold of her. He didn’t tell Jaskier how he’d confirmed that. Jaskier didn’t ask, either.
Jaskier knows now it was likely one of her followers, probably one who wasn’t in Blaviken to be massacred. It would make sense, at least. None of the rest of it really makes sense; how Renfri ended up in a deathless sleep instead of just dead, where her body disappeared to. He’s only got so much to work with.
Hopefully, as he makes contact and sends out feelers across the Continent, he’ll have more.
For now, though, he has to plan for everything. So he makes up a list of contacts and what he’ll send to them, what he’ll ask of them, and focuses on that instead of the looming question of why, and how.
Even if he is just looking for a pile of bones by now, he’s going to find her. If nothing else, it’s for his sake; the dreams still plague him, her wide, terrified eyes, the way she’d screamed that first time he’d seen her there.
He grits his teeth and refocuses on the list of things to do when he reaches Oxenfurt.
He’s greeted at Oxenfurt by one of the very contacts he’d been planning to meet, which speeds up his plans just a little. Even though he’s exhausted, they agree to meet for dinner, and he goes to drop his things off at his usual lodgings before heading to the usual tavern.
Not long after he arrives, Anatol finds him, Lew alongside, with word of Kor on his way. Three contacts in one night, which makes this so much easier than he’d expected it; word of mouth is quicker than letters, after all.
Especially when one has to code the letters. He’d expected to end tonight with a cramped hand and burned-down candle; instead, it seems he’ll be ending it mildly tipsy and at least a week ahead in his assumed timeframe.
“So,” Anatol starts, eyebrows raised. “You said something about cashing in favors.”
Jaskier nods and glances around the tavern. Not too many patrons tonight, and most are across the room at the bar. Truly, there’s nothing covert about what he’s requesting. He just can’t risk it getting back to his Witchers is all, thus the general caution.
“Yes,” he finally confirms. “And not just from you three.” He pointedly makes eye contact with Lew and Kor as well; Lew looks away, and Kor colors but holds his gaze.
“So what, exactly, are you needing us to do?”
“I need someone found,” Jaskier answers.
“And you can’t do it yourself?” Lew asks, a barb in his tone. Jaskier runs a hand over where his dagger is hidden in his doublet, a move that’s only subtle to anyone outside the table. The three men he’s sitting with know full well what it means. Lew shrinks back into his chair, properly cowed.
“I could,” Jaskier says. “But it would take too long, and I can’t risk my companion finding out about it.”
“Your com – the Witcher?” Kor asks. “Look, Jaskier, I owe you for that night in Novigrad, but I’m not sure I want to be on the bad side of a Witcher, especially not the White Wolf.”
Jaskier waves a hand and takes a long drink of his ale. “You won’t,” he promises. “It’s – it’s hard to explain, but no one is in any danger from Geralt. I just don’t want him to know I’m doing this. Yet.”
“Well then,” Anatol hums and looks around; casing the joint like Jaskier already has. “Who, exactly are you looking for?”
“A princess,” Jaskier says gravely. “Or, she used to be.”
Once Anatol, Kor, and Lew are on board and promise to go speak to their respective networks with a detailed description of Renfri and specifically what they’re looking for, Jaskier follows word of another contact to the Academy stables. If nothing else, it’ll be nice to visit Mint.
Marcel is…not exactly his favorite person. But he’s a fantastic spy, and better, he hails from Malleore; not exactly Creyden, but close enough. Jaskier can safely assume that Marcel may be able to get information about Renfri from before Blaviken, or about the infamous Shrike and her men. Actually, he’s not sure how many people know that Shrike and Renfri are one in the same, now that he thinks about it – he’ll have to make sure to put that in his letters.
Mint’s stall is the first he comes across. As pretty as ever, the stallion blinks at him for a moment before giving a snort of recognition. Jaskier feeds him a handful of oats and pets over his snout for a moment before moving on. He’s much better off here as a stud than travelling with Jaskier – especially since Geralt is jumpy about having a stallion around Roach. Rightfully so, Jaskier supposes.
He finds Marcel deeper in the stables, cleaning and oiling saddles.
“Emilia said you were around,” Marcel greets him, as curt as ever. “And looking to cash in favors.”
“Emilia is correct,” Jaskier confirms. Sometimes he forgets how quickly word spreads around here.
“I don’t owe you a favor,” Marcel points out.
“You’re right.” Jaskier hands him a new rag when he reaches without being asked, and keeps his face blank when Marcel raises his eyebrows. “But I know you like money.”
“What money do you have, as a travelling bard?”
“Enough to buy Mint back if I’d like him,” Jaskier says, not rising to the bait of the insult.
Marcel huffs, but he doesn’t say anything more. Instead, he waves the rag in a go on gesture and returns to oiling the saddle under his hands.
“I need to find someone,” Jaskier explains.
“Dead or alive?”
“Yes.”
“Cursed,” Marcel murmurs. “Alright. Tell me about her.”
“How did you know I’m looking for a her?”
Marcel looks up at him once more. There’s a twinkle in his eye that Jaskier’s never seen before; humor, certainly, but something else lurks there, too. “I know things, boy,” he says, and Jaskier has to concede that, at least. He has no idea how old Marcel is, but it’s certainly at least fifteen years older than him.
So Jaskier perches on a nearby barrel and tells him everything he needs to know.
When he’s finished his speech, Marcel is just finishing up with the last of the saddles. Jaskier helps him return a few of the tools to their places without being asked, and ignores the odd look Marcel sends him over it.
Just before he goes to leave, though, Marcel finally speaks.
“This is important to you, isn’t it? That favor you’re cashing from Lew is a life-debt. You could get much more from him than some information.”
Jaskier doesn’t turn to look back at him. He can hear the unspoken question here, the only one he didn’t answer when he told Marcel of Renfri. What does she mean to you?
It’s not a question he’ll answer, because he can’t. Renfri doesn’t mean anything to him – she means something to Geralt. It’s enough for him, but he knows very well it wouldn’t be enough for the men and women he’s asking for help. Let them believe what they want of his motives; if it gets him results, it hardly matters what the rumor mills pick up.
“It is,” he finally answers. “Good night, Marcel. You know how to contact me.”
He heads back to his quarters. It’s a little apartment in the staff buildings of the Academy, the same one he’s used since his graduation every time he returns to lecture. It’s probably the closest thing to a real, proper home he’s got, outside of Kaer Morhen.
It doesn’t feel very homey right now, but he figures that’s him, not the place.
He ends up writing several of the letters he’d planned; contacts that can’t be reached any other way, some that will disregard anything they hear or receive unless it’s in a specific code. There are a lot of good spies out there that he knows personally, and a large number of them do owe him favors. A larger number of them will just be thrilled for the chance to crack a mystery.
And, of course, he’s offering some payment. Not a lot, in the grand scheme of things; he’s not exactly made out of money, even with his inheritance from Lettenhove. But he has some money squirreled away that he can put toward this – and he didn’t lie to Marcel. If he wanted to use it, it would be enough to buy Mint back from the Academy. However, he thinks between cashing in on favors owed, appealing to the desire to solve puzzles, and offering a reward, that he might actually find Renfri in the next year or so. At the very least, he thinks he’ll have a few solid leads.
But that’s still a year’s worth of waiting. Or more.
He tries not to think too deeply about it.