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The first rock catches him squarely on the shin before it vanishes, disappearing into the folds of his robe to clatter somewhere behind him. Stregobor nearly thinks it’s come flying off a cart going by if not for the pack of boys—perhaps men, if barely—crouching in the dirt over a game of dice as he goes past.
Or if it wasn’t for a second rock, thrown higher, bouncing off the back of his hand with a sharp pinch. Or the promise of a third, fourth, fifth—easily a dozen rocks between their hands, cradled loosely in their palms. One might even think they were part of the game, a fangless round of dice played for loose pebbles instead of coin, if one wasn’t paying attention.
Only he isn’t, clearly, as another rock thumps off the leather of his belt with a muted thwak from his other side. Certainly not from one of the boys, though they press the advantage with his attention drawn away to throw another rock right between his shoulders. As Stregobor turns back to them, one boy slip his last stone surreptitiously behind his boot.
Stregobor could kill him. Could kill them all if he wanted to. Would, if he hadn’t discovered early in his youth how little worth it would be. It only takes one idiot with a well-aimed blade to put down even the finest sorcerer with nothing but some undeserved luck, and he's always found that bartering in the marketplace of public opinion greases the wheels of his work far better than anything else. (Though really, why he bothers to stay in Irion’s tower now that he has no need for its security is a mystery in itself sometimes. But Stregobor isn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, and it’s hardly like Irion will come back to claim it. The tower and the town around it is no Ban Ard, or any one of his other estates, but it serves its purpose well enough.)
He turns back to continue on his way, the street eerily quiet but for the clatter of stones underfoot and a rumbling murmur of low whispers. They dog him as he goes, impossible to pin down, skittering between sloppily boarded windows and patchy eaves, and every muckscraper in the street wears the same close-mouthed, mulish expression when he meets their eye. For as many people are in the road—many, he notices now, more gathered and standing like sacks of shit than he’d expect could manage in this quiet—the silence is unsettling.
A door opens in his face, lambasting him with hot air from inside the inn and a racket of sound, and Stregobor ducks inside. To avoid the oncoming storm brewing on the sea this morning, surely on its way to Blaviken by now, he tells himself, as much as to avoid what felt like the hard-eyed stare of every peasant and beggar gossiping in the street. The inn is at least far under its regular capacity of drunks and debauchery: scattered groups of townspeople sit together, dotted between with travelers headed to the coast and some sailors headed upriver. They glance up at him only briefly as he crosses the room, before bending back to their meals or staring cow-eyed at the enthusiastic racket of a man in the corner, picking furiously at his lute and swaying atop a bench that may not hold his weight for much longer.
Stregobor usually prefers his sordid masses to be of the conjured, delicately naked variety, but having picked his way to the farthest corner from the door, he sits, resigns himself to watching the bard muck his way through a repertoire of maudlin bullshit. One song about the melodramatic death of a vampiress (as though there’s any other kind). Another, jauntier tune about falling in love with a man made of marble and gold, which for all its bloated warbling seems very much like a thin metaphor for sucking cock. A third song about a fishmonger's daughter. Stregobor finally waves a hand for an ale towards the end of a slower, blessedly quieter piece about a shrike, the butcherbird impaling herself on her own thorn while reaching for her prey through the brush, glad to die herself so long as he dies with her. A table full of men beside him sing along, fervent but out of tune; it’s clearly not the first time they’ve heard it.
Stregobor freezes, fingers wrapped loosely around the handle of his tankard as the song’s last notes hit the air and fade away unaccompanied.
Wait.
He’s heard that story somewhere before.
Scattered applause trails the singer as he slips down from his rickety makeshift stage, tucking his coin purse away and fiddling with the buttons on a doublet so green it nearly hurts to look at under the lamplight. Stregobor considers waving him over, or perhaps slipping one of his wretched little urchins some coin to stick him in the back and deliver him to Stregobor’s tower to interrogate at his leisure—ever since Marilka cut her losses and escaped Blaviken, it's been so hard to find eager help—but his idle planning turns out unnecessary. The heavy, pitted table hardly moves as the bard scrapes back the bench and sits, of all places, across from him and starts, of all things, to solicit Stregobor for feedback.
“Thoughts?” the man asks. “It’s a newer song—I’m still floating it around, working out the kinks. Getting feedback from my audience, you know, the noble work of the bard.” He waves the serving girl down, points at Stregobor’s ale and another man's dinner, clearly intent on making himself right at home. To Stregobor, he adds, “It’s been a riot in Creyden so far, but I wanted to give it a run in Blaviken before I try it on the Redanian side of the border.” He tilts his head towards the rest of the patrons watching him as he sits, and the newcomers pouring through the door. “They seem to've liked it well enough these last few days.”
“It’s fine,” Stregobor says eventually, smoothly, smirking at the furrow that appears between the man’s brows. “An odd metaphor, isn’t it, the shrike? I would dearly like to know how you came by the inspiration.”
The preening little idiot smiles wide at that and Stregobor knows he has him, but—but something about this bard, with his violently bright doublet and a lute so fine the very air around it seems to shimmer, that smile of his that seems better suited on something less human—
Predator, some old, old part of Stregobor’s mind hisses, a relic of the boy he had been before he learned to hold true power in the palms of his hands and under the heel of his boot. Predator, the only thing that learns to smile like that is the one that knows it’s the most dangerous beast the room, or sits at the beast’s right hand and knows it will come to no harm—
“I’ve got this friend,” the bard is saying as Stregobor schools himself away from paranoid histrionics, pulls order from the chaos, “though you could just as well call him my muse, as cliché as that sounds, since he’s always having unbelievable adventures—”
“And did he tell you about a particularly interesting bird he saw fetching its supper one day?” Stregobor drawls. He could make this man tell him, could pull the information right from his rattling, empty skull. But in the marketplace of public opinion, there’s no sense in stealing what’s being offered up so freely.
“So I have this friend,” the man says, carrying on as through Stregobor hadn’t spoken and grinning broadly like he knows exactly what he’s doing, “well—I suppose I call him my friend, but I’m not certain what he’d call me. Something rude, I’m sure, but that’s just his sparkling personality. We’re great old chums.” He kicks his feet up on the table between them, leaning back against the wall to spread his weight and leave his hands free to strum absently at his lute. “We’ve traveled together for years, for whole seasons, except when I go home to teach and he winters at his family’s estate—truth be told, I’d rather we not part at all,” the man sighs and winks, and Stregobor can’t believe he hasn’t turned this imbecile into a newt yet, “but that’s mostly because I’m wildly in love with him, which is neither here nor there at the moment.”
“If you say so,” Stregobor mutters into the pause.
The bard’s smile doesn’t flicker. Neither does the light in his eyes. “I do! So, anyway—this friend and I, we meet on the road a few months back, winter melting meekly into riotous spring and him coming down from his family’s mountain stronghold—”
Off the rocks of Aretuza, Stregobor swears he’s heard sirens less enamored with their own voices than this fool. But then again, he is a bard. “Poetic.”
The man sniffs, a proper little noble tic, well-practiced and clearly often used. “I haven’t met any sorcerers, I don’t think, but I’d marked your lot down for better connoisseurs of the arts.” And then he shrugs, moving blithely past their traded barbs like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. “Where was I? Ah, yes—my friend and I, we meet. We meet, and I say to him, ‘Hello, old friend! How glad I am to see you so soon after our parting, with the snows barely melted and you so far south already to greet me! And already I hear you’ve had adventures without me—you ran afoul of a vukodlak outside Vizima!’” The man rocks forward, folding his legs neatly under him on the bench, as the girl brings by his ale. “And my friend, great wordsmith that he is, replies, ‘Hm.’”
Stregobor snorts despite himself.
“Now, I’ll allow that that’s not a lot,” the bard agrees, “But owing to our long and storied relationship, I knew that what he meant was, ‘Hello, friend! I too am glad we weren’t parted long, and happy to find you so early in my travels! But it was no vukodlak I found in Vizima. The people only believed it so, fed lies by the wicked man who made the monster in the first place.’”
“That’s quite a lot to make from so very little said,” Stregobor says.
“Eh,” the bard flaps a hand, just missing his tankard, “you rub enough oil on a man’s bottom and there’s little you don’t know about him, I’ve found.” He takes an overzealous swig of his ale and grimaces. “Right. Delightful. Where was I?”
“Rubbing oil on your friend’s bottom.”
He expects a scowl, at least a frown, but the man ducks his head and huffs a laugh. “No accounting for a mage’s taste in art or humour then, is there? So then,” he plays with the handle of his tankard, turning it back and forth to watch the ale slosh inside, “my friend tells me ‘it was no vukodlak’ and colour me surprised! I ask him, ‘What was it, then? A beast you’ve faced before, or something new?’ Because you see, my friend—” The bard’s voice is still cheery and mild, but a muscle twitches in his jaw as he speaks. Something pinches in the corners of his eyes, and after his next swallow, he sets down his tankard with deliberate care. “My friend, he didn’t look well when we met. In form, yes, fine, though he did look like he got an arse-kicking once on principle and twice for safe-keeping.” The man takes a deep breath, suddenly, and when he releases it the tension bleeds from him like it had never been there.
Stregobor is impressed. It’s a marvelous act.
“It was his eyes, you see,” the bard continues. “He has such lovely eyes, but—he looked—so, I ask him again. I say, ‘What sort of monster was it, that has you so unwell? You can hardly sit still tonight, so wracked with grief and rage! What a sorry tale you must have played a part in, unwilling and unasked!’”
Stregobor smiles with all his teeth. “I’m sure I can guess what your friend said next.”
“Aren’t you clever?” The bard winks at him. “Again my friend says, ‘Hm.’ Which here, of course, means, ‘Yes, dearest friend, a sorry tale it was indeed! No vukodlak it was but a striga, a princess cursed at her birth by the hand of a cruel and wicked man.'” Lute in hand again, his fingers flit across the strings, an accompaniment to his own dramatics. “And ‘No!’ say I, but ‘Yes,’ says he. ‘So scared was the man that she could turn hearts and minds away from him, that he branded her a monster before she’d even been born a babe.’”
Stregobor is sure, suddenly, that he’s heard this story somewhere once before.
Meanwhile, the bard smiles brightly and tips his chin as the girl brings his meal, and adds once she’s gone, “‘A beast ruled by instinct, monstrous by her very nature.’”
The girl, a beast! Her cries for justice, nothing but base nature—her thirst for blood, revenge in all but name! It’s a line from his song. The bard strums over the chords for it as if he sees the thought in Stregobor’s mind, although Stregobor can recall little else. Between the men loud at his back and the girl bringing his ale, he’d missed most of it. It hadn’t seemed important then, and now with the men somber and muttering and the girl nowhere to be found, he can't recall the rest but for bits and pieces.
The lute is loud in the hush of the inn. Since the bard had stepped down from his stage, the quiet has been broken only by the creak of the heavy door as people come in from the street to join their friends in twos and threes. The notes ring loud and fade slowly; patrons look their way before turning back to their own murmurings.
The hunter now the hunted, prey she calls him, a memory of punishment and pain—upon her very blade she does pursue him, whatever cost, his loss shall be her gain!
A man’s voice cuts across the quiet, rising sharp and angry somewhere beyond them before he’s hushed, a drunk no doubt too far in his cups. Stregobor sees the man in question when he glances over his shoulder at the sound; the door to the inn swings open to let in the boys from the street, and in the slice of daylight he can see the man is ruddy with rage and drink, finger pointed vaguely towards the back of the inn as he gesticulates at nothing.
Stregobor remembers he’s being terribly rude. But if the bard had noticed his lapse in attention he doesn’t comment on it, instead poking idly at the knife brought to him with his meal. Stregobor thinks, abruptly, about undeserved luck. “It sounds like your friend had a difficult time.”
The bard hums in response, uncharacteristically taciturn after all his peacocking. “He certainly did.” His gaze trails to something over Stregobor’s shoulder before it snaps back to meet his eyes. “So I do the only thing I can, as I’m a bard after all—well, and also a viscount, though that’s more a hereditary affliction than anything else—” The man’s smile is as cold as his voice is warm. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “I say, ‘Dear one, your adventures never cease to amaze me, nor your heart in making me proud to call you my friend. I'll write a song, for you and for her, and sing it from the tallest locked-up towers to the trodden shit of market squares, so everyone will know the truth of what happened that day.’” He leans back against the wall again but his voice, dangerously low, carries easily in the silence. “‘I must know all the details,’ I say to him. ‘You have to tell me everything!’”
The bard’s fingers stir again on the neck of the lute, plucking a melody out of what must be habit. A melody—
Ah.
Fuck.
A melody Stregobor has heard hummed and mumbled and sung in stupid, drunken bluster in every town and inn and market day and empty stretch of silence in the streets for nearly three years now, since some upstart idiot started singing it from Posada to the sea—
"And he did," says Jaskier, as the air in the room goes cold and thin, still but for a slow wave of heads turning their way. “He told me everything.”