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Geralt had been trying to tune out the conversation at the table next to his.
He’d secluded himself at a table in a corner of the inn. In front of him he had a well earned ale and a bowl of stew, and he’d been intending to spend the evening relaxing quietly and perhaps challenging a couple of the other patrons to a game of gwent.
But he couldn’t help overhearing part of the heated discussion taking place at a nearby table.
“I want him to know it was us!” a furious looking woman seethed. From the strong stench of alcohol coming from her, she was either a drunk or a barmaid. Possibly both, but Geralt was leaning towards barmaid. She seemed too deadly sober to be a drunk.
What was definitely odd was the extremely well-dressed woman she was sharing a table with. In Geralt’s vast, worldly experience, a lady who looked that haughty was not one to a lower class of establishment such as this. Not unless there was a seriously shady deal going down.
He told himself it was none of his business and tried to tune them out.
“We’ll wear a symbol of some sort then,” the arrogant woman snapped. “A buttercup or something. I don’t know. The point is, are you in or out? Will you help us show that bastard why he shouldn’t have trifled with any of us?”
“Alright, I’m in.”
To Geralt’s relief, the meeting ended there and no one else dared disturb his quiet except the pretty maid who’d been eying him up from across the bar for most of the evening. It transpired she was very curious indeed about the rumours spread about a witcher’s… stamina, and was keen to see for herself how much truth there was in the idle gossip.
He was in a very good mood the next day, especially when the armourer sent a runner to inform him his gear had been repaired ahead of schedule. He’d even given Geralt a discount because the witcher had saved his daughter from a kikimora three days earlier.
He’d just been thinking about grabbing a spot of lunch when a familiar voice called him from across the market square.
“Geralt!”
He turned to see his old friend, Dandelion, ducking and diving through the crowd.
“Dandelion,” Geralt’s lips quirked upwards, happy to see his old friend after over a year apart.
“It’s been too long! I haven’t seen you since Kagen. When you cleared that awful smelling monster out of the sewer! By the gods, it took me weeks to get the smell out of my favourite doublet. How’ve you been?”
“Doing well, Dandelion. I had a couple of easy contracts. How about yourself?”
“Excellent! I won the poets competition in Novigrad in the spring, and the bard’s competition in Vizima a couple of months later. I’ve been doing just fine! Let me treat you to a drink, old friend. Though you’ll have to pay because I have no money.”
Geralt just snorted, used to his friend’s penniless ways. No sooner did the bard have money in his pockets than it was frivolously spent on the sweet treats and the little trinkets he so enjoyed.
They strolled to Dandelion’s inn, a much more salubrious establishment than the one Geralt had chosen.
The inn was quiet, it being rather early for lunch, but there were still a few early customers. To Geralt’s surprise, the arrogant looking woman from the night before was seated at a table, looking considerably less conspicuous than she had the previous evening.
She caught sight of them, and her eyes darted instinctively to the bar. Geralt followed her gaze and realised that he’d been right. The other woman from the night before was indeed a barmaid; she was standing behind the bar, rag in hand.
“Monica, my lovely!” Dandelion beamed. “Two ales and two pies for myself and my noble friend here.”
Monica’s grip on her rag tightened, but she gave him a friendly smile and called out that the drinks would be brought out soon.
“You know her well?” the witcher enquired of his companion.
“Oh, very well, I should say,” Dandelion beamed. “A truly delightful girl.” He waggled his eyebrows in a way many maidens, despite their better judgement, found charming. “You know how it is Geralt. Most of these women are stuck in the towns they live in their entire lives. Then suddenly, a good looking fellow with stories of grand adventures comes along and they just…” He trailed off, grinning.
Geralt thought of his own companion from the night before and had to concede that, while unashamedly boastful, Dandelion’s description was not entirely inaccurate.
Monica set two mugs upon the table before them and Geralt was concerned to see that her hand was trembling. He looked up at her, fearing she might be ill, and noticed a small posy of buttercups pinned to her dress.
She squeaked in fright as she realised he was watching her, and quickly scuttled off.
Dandelion ignored all this and raised his tankard in a salute before bringing it to his mouth to take a gulp.
It was faint, almost imperceptible, but Geralt thought Dandelion’s drink smelt slightly off. Different from his own drink at any rate.
He surged forward, meaning to grab the tankard away from his friend, but in his haste, he knocked the table forward, jostling Dandelion’s arm and causing the bard to spill the drink all over himself.
“Geralt,” he spluttered indignantly. “That was my favourite doublet!”
The smell, if it had been there at all, had already faded and the witcher wondered if the drink had indeed been tampered with, or if his time on the Path without his friend had made him more paranoid than usual.
“The purple doublet is your favourite,” he protested.
“ Was my favourite. This is my current favourite!”
The bard was not placated when Geralt offered to buy him a replacement drink from the surly bartender who had now replaced the girl. He hurried to his room to change, with the witcher following much more slowly behind him. The arrogant lady from the night before scowled at them as they left.
“Dandelion,” Geralt looked around the bard’s room uneasily, as though a monster might spring from under the bed.
“I’ll never get this stain out,” Dandelion mourned, ignoring the witcher. “And it was such a fetching shade of blue on me.”
“Dandelion!” Geralt tried again, more insistently.
“What?”
“Did you see that woman sitting in the inn with us?”
“No. Was she pretty?”
Geralt did his best to describe her and Dandelion’s face lit up in an instant.
“The gorgeous Erica! Her husband is forty years her senior, fat and impotent. It was practically my duty to show her a good time!”
“So, she has no reason to hold a grudge?” Geralt had to check.
“None at all,” Dandelion insisted. “I have another rendezvous planned with her tomorrow evening.”
Geralt looked at his friend consideringly. The bard was not known for his monogamous habits.
“Any other rendezvous planned?”
Dandelion looked completely unrepentant. “A few.”
Geralt couldn’t shake off the unease he was feeling, so when Jaskier declared that he no longer felt like eating pie and was going to go and find a bowl of clam chowder from his favourite stall by the docks, Geralt insisted on going with him.”
It was as they settled down at one of the outside tables that Dandelion was spotted by a handsome young man.
“Dandelion!” he exclaimed, sliding onto the chair next to the bard and edging it closer so he was practically plastered to the bard’s side.
Geralt couldn’t help it. He stared.
Dandelion blushed. Though he still gave the young man a charming smile.
“Jakob, how lovely to see you again!”
“It’s been too long!” Jakob pouted.
“We saw each other yesterday,” Dandelion reminded him nervously, looking towards Geralt for help, but the witcher was struck dumb.
This young man was clearly a lover, but never once in all the years Geralt had known the bard, had Dandelion even hinted that he bedded men.
“Exactly,” Jakob grinned. “Too long.” His hand slid under the table and Dandelion squeaked as Jakob’s hand clearly made contact with something.
Geralt felt embarrassed enough on the bard’s behalf to look away, but out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of the ring on Jakob’s other hand. A buttercup sealed in resin and set upon a gold band.
He watched as the same hand fished into a pocket to withdraw a small envelope that he shook surreptitiously over Dandelion’s bowl, emptying some powder into the chowder.
“What did you just put in there?” he demanded.
“Geralt?” Dandelion asked, confused.
Jakob had paled as he discovered first hand how intimidating a witcher’s stare could be. He yelped, before promptly falling off his chair and sidling hastily away.
Dandelion, the idiot, was idly raising a spoonful of chowder to his lips as he watched his lover disappear from view. Geralt snatched it away before the moron could poison himself.
“He slipped some kind of powder into your bowl.” He eyed his friend accusingly. “What have you done?”
“ Done ?” Dandelion spluttered in outrage. “Why do you assume I’ve done something?”
“Because it seems the gorgeous Erica had teamed up with the lovely Monica and the overly keen Jakob to try and poison you.”
“Why would they do that?” the bard sounded genuinely baffled.
“Perhaps because they discovered you were fucking the other two as well as themselves.”
“I never promised them exclusivity!” the bard protested. “Erica’s married, for Melitele’s sake, and Jakob is engaged to a merchant’s daughter.”
“Humans,” Geralt huffed. “It doesn’t matter if you didn’t promise monogamy, or that they were being unfaithful when they slept with you. They expected you to be sleeping only with them and they don’t seem happy to have found out you’re not.”
“How hypocritical! Truly, Geralt, what is our society coming to?”
Dandelion began to wax poetic about society’s many hypocrisies, but Geralt tuned him out. He sourced them an untampered bowl of chowder and escorted Dandelion back to his room at the inn. Monica, luckily, appeared to have finished her shift for the day.
“Are you alright, Geralt? You’re being awfully quiet.”
The witcher meant to shrug off the question, but his treacherous mouth had other ideas.
“Since when have you bedded men?”
Dandelion, fortunately, only looked bemused at this blunt question. “Since I was sixteen and finishing my studies in Oxenfurt. I had a study partner who was, naturally, besotted with me. One late study session, he asked me if I’d ever considered lying with a man and offered to show me the benefits. I was curious, of course, and took him up on the offer.”
“But I’ve only ever seen you bed women.”
“Well, yes. But one of society’s many injustices is a… lack of understanding, shall we say, for such predilections. A bard’s living relies on his reputation, so I’ve always made sure to keep those liaisons quiet.
“I must confess, if I’d known Jakob was the more open type, I’d not have given in to him. If it got out among certain circles that I sometimes frequent the beds of men, I’d find quite a few doors slammed shut in my face.”
Geralt’s stomach twisted, and he tried to tell himself it was because he didn’t like the idea of anyone hurting his friend. It certainly wasn’t jealousy. It certainly wasn’t because Geralt’s occasional impossible fantasies turned out not to be so impossible after all. Except, Dandelion had never seemed to consider Geralt as a potential partner.
“Geralt,” Dandelion seemed nervous now. “Are you OK with this? I know it makes many men uncomfortable when they find out. I… I don’t want to lose your friendship over this.”
A moment of madness overtook the witcher; he threw caution to the winds and strode swiftly across to his friend, anchored a hand in his hair and ducked his head to kiss him the way he’d imagined doing so many times.
Dandelion made a startled ‘mmph’ sound, but when Geralt moved to pull back, his own hair was tugged sharply to keep him in place.
By the time he was released, they were both wild eyed and panting.
“Was that all it took!” Dandelion demanded indignantly. “Following you around for years, singing your praises, being your stalwart companion, and all I had to do to get kissed was admit I like to bed both men and women?”
“I didn’t want to press my attentions where they might not be welcome,” Geralt pounced on Dandelion’s mouth once again. The bard responded enthusiastically while mock glaring at the witcher the entire time.
“I don’t have many friends, Dandelion. And none as dear to me as you. I didn’t want to have you back away from me because I perhaps felt something for you that you could not return.”
Dandelion’s mouth curled upwards in an elated smile. “You stupid witcher! I’ve been yours since our first adventure together, and there’s nothing you could do to change that. Now,” he moved backwards towards the bed until his calves hit the frame and he sprawled backwards onto the mattress. “You and I have some lost time to make up for.” He held out a hand for Geralt.
Tugging off his shirt, Geralt grasped the proffered hand and allowed Dandelion to pull him downwards onto the bed.
Many hours later, and Geralt had just dozed off into a happy, sated sleep, when the sound of the key in the lock woke him.
He opened one eye an imperceptible fraction. Dandelion was still sprawled contentedly next to him, snoring softly.
Three figures crept through the doorway, hushing each other in a way that was probably supposed to be quiet.
“Shhhh,” a familiar female voice whispered a touch more loudly than the other two. “We don’t want to wake him.”
Geralt cleared his throat and reached over to light the bedside candle with a small blast of igni.
The three co-conspirators all jumped in fright as Geralt’s impressive, scarred, naked figure sat up in bed and calmly looked them over.
“Forgot which room was yours?” he asked, unimpressed, as Monica and Jakob squirmed and Erika glared at him.
“What are you doing here?” she snarled.
“I think the more pertinent question,” Dandelion sat up as well, having woken up when Geralt lit the candle, “is what are you three doing here. And what the devil have you been trying to do to my food?”
Geralt growled at the reminder, and it was too much for Jakob and Monica who both fled from the room, leaving only the proud Erika to face them.
“You cheated on me!” she fumed. “With them!”
“No, you cheated on your husband with me. We never discussed a more permanent arrangement. A couple of nights of heated drunken passion do not justify trying to poison me!”
“Poison? Don’t be dramatic. It was a mild sedative.”
“And what exactly were you planning to do with me when I was at your mercy?”
Neither seemed to care that Dandelion was naked, chest covered with Geralt’s teeth marks and with the tops of his hips displaying the beginnings of some finger-shaped bruises. Geralt wanted to tug the covers over his bard to hide the display from Erika’s angry scowl.
“I was going to tie you up and smash that precious lute of yours in front of you,” she sneered.
She might as well have said “I was going to murder babies in front of you”. Dandelion’s reaction was the same. He went sheet-white and gaped like a fish, gasping ineffectually for air.
“Geralt!” he wheezed. “She was going to hurt my baby! Geralt, do something!”
Luckily, the precious lute in question was safely tucked next to the bed, in easy reach of Dandelion. Geralt sighed and hoisted himself out of bed, catching Erika’s arm and dragging her from the room. She regarded him contemptuously.
“Do you expect him to be true to you? Do you think you’re special?”
“Yes,” Geralt told her bluntly. He had no illusions. Dandelion would continue to sleep with others when they were apart, just as Geralt would. But he knew his friend well enough to be confident that if he discussed their being exclusive while in each other’s company, then Dandelion would likely agree. Especially if the noises he’d made earlier were anything to go by.
“Stay away from him,” he gave her a final warning. “Or I will track down your husband and let him know exactly what you’ve been up to.”
He shut the door in her face and turned back to the bed, where Dandelion still lay looking like the cat that had caught the canary.
“That was wonderful, darling!” he praised, curling up close to Geralt’s side when the witcher climbed back into bed. “Allow me to show you the full extent of my appreciation.”
He ducked his head under the covers, kissing his way down Geralt’s chest, not stopping when he reached Geralt’s hips.
Perhaps he should try and engineer it so that he saved Dandelion more often?