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Geralt hated court. He knew it was a stereotype of witchers to be ungracious guests, unkempt boors, better suited to the dark corner of a seedy tavern than the lavish apartments of the upper classes. It wasn’t the worst of assumptions people made about him based on his profession, so he tended to let it slide more than any others although he was perfectly capable of being polite, and clean, and appreciative of the arts. At least when it didn’t get in the way of his job. That wasn’t his trouble – it was that all of the graces of high society came with strings attached. Veiled intentions, codes, dressed-up lies. At least when a nekker lunged at his throat he could be sure it was trying to kill him.
Courtiers, on the other hand…
He wasn’t even at Vizima yet and already his skin was crawling at the prospect of being asked to attend court. He didn’t have any particular god to pray to, but he hoped to Mother Nenneke that he wasn’t going to be invited to a banquet. The feast itself would be tedious and difficult to navigate, but all of the preparation was its own form of torture. Yen had always seemed to thrive on it, and there were times he could scarcely fathom how.
“You know, had a dream about you recently,” he said. It had taken him a while to settle on a way to begin, so long that the sun had sunk below the horizon and an evening chill had settled on his skin. This Nilfgaardian escort was not just an escort, it was Emhyr’s ears, and he didn’t want anyone, especially Emhyr, to hear anything between him and Yennefer but a long-overdue reunion between two… friends. Whatever the right word was for who he and Yen were to each other.
“Knowing you, it was probably filthy,” she remarked.
A smile teased his lips. Reading my mind?
She flicked a sideways glance at him, and he couldn’t be sure.
“Just the beginning,” he admitted, although it had been fairly tame by their standards. This was why he abhorred court; having to mask what he truly wanted to say behind other words, other stories. He felt Yen had a right to know about his dream of Ciri, and he wanted to talk to her about it, to talk about Ciri and about the Hunt. He had to feel out how much he was able to say, and he hated it. “But then…” he started to continue, but a snowflake touched down on the tip of his nose and he trailed off.
“But then?” she prompted.
The snowfall had started light only moments ago but it was growing heavier by the second, and the air was in no twilight chill but the icy frost of an oncoming northerly storm. For an instant he felt it was inverted; that his vision of Ciri had not been a prophesy or a warning of some far-off danger she was in, but that his dreaming mind had summoned the Hunt back into their lives. As Eredin’s Riders wove through the trees towards them at incredible speed, he was paralysed, frost racing through his veins as it had at Kaer Morhen. As it had beneath the tree where they sat once. As he had hoped it never would again.
“Ride!”
Yennefer’s command was to the Nilfgaardians, but it thawed Geralt’s blood in an instant, made him dig his spurs into Roach and turn away from the Hunt to lean forward in the saddle. He could hear their mounts’ thundering hooves advancing through the escort, the cries of the soldiers as they were knocked from their horses or daggered with icicles. He kept himself between the Hunt and Yennefer as the hounds nipped at Roach’s heels, and raised a hand to his silver sword as they neared a narrow wooden bridge – a bottleneck he could use to stall the Riders long enough for Yennefer to get away.
DON’T YOU DARE.
The thought was so forceful that it gave his fingers pause on his hilt, and he looked to Yen in front of him, clutching lightning in her fist. He gripped the reins with both hands and ducked his head low, pulling forward so that the spell Yen flung at the bridge had a clear shot. It exploded into splinters, taking several Riders and hounds with it, and the rest were halted by the sudden pileup of bodies and the gaping chasm that had opened.
Geralt saw a distant twinkling of lights through the trees as they rounded the bend – Vizima. They were in sight of the city, but they couldn’t slow down yet. “Yennefer, how’d they—?!”
“We shall talk of this tomorrow, alright? After the audience.”
Well, at least she still expected the audience to take place. That was a little reassuring. The Hunt wasn’t going to try and carry them off in their sleep before daybreak, according to her information. And he didn’t think she’d leave that to chance.
As they approached the gates of Vizima, guards in Nilfgaardian dress attempted to block their path. Geralt followed Yennefer’s lead and used Axii on one of the soldiers so that they could breeze past to the safety of the city’s walls. Roach nickered as they slowed, and he patted her neck. She had served him well, as always. “Good Roach.”
Yennefer had rounded on the soldiers, their weapons raised uncertainly in her direction. She snapped, “What are you waiting for? Close the bloody gate.”
They exchanged glances, and then one murmured to another and they complied.
He and Yennefer rode on towards the Royal Palace, and these guards had no trouble recognising her, standing to attention as they came close. Stablehands came to wordlessly take their horses away after they dismounted, and they were greeted in the atrium by a plump man with a receding hairline and an upturned nose. He gave a modest bow. “Lady Yennefer. Where is your escort?”
“They fulfilled their function admirably, got us both here in one piece. You can send someone to fetch their bodies once the sun’s up, and not before.”
“Uh… yes. Very good.” He cleared his throat and turned his attention on Geralt for the first time. He gave an even more modest bow, barely a nod of the head. “A room has been prepared for the gentleman.”
He looked to Yen. He still wanted to talk to her, a thousand questions burning into his mind. And they’d been apart too long; he felt he could pass a few days, weeks, months, just watching her. Listening to her voice, smelling her scent. She looked as radiant and ferocious as ever, though perhaps a little older.
“We’ll talk tomorrow, Geralt. Try to get some sleep,” she said. Not a little older, he realised. Quite a lot tired.
Geralt sat down on the floor of the guest bedroom and tried to soothe the worries that were flaring in his mind. Yen had taken the Hunt’s attack in stride, didn’t seem too surprised by their appearance. That was a good thing. Wasn’t it? Unless this was why she had evaded him for so long, never come to find him. Perhaps she had known that as soon as they were reunited, the Hunt would descend. Was he endangering Yennefer and Vizima at large by just being near her? Did he have some link, some bond with the Hunt still, a remnant of his days riding with them? He had bargained for her freedom, but he’d taken his own by himself. There could have been some magic contract keeping him on Eredin’s leash buried in his memory.
He couldn’t stand the bedroom any longer. Palaces never felt private, and the occupation of this one by Emhyr of all people did not help. The room had big windows looking onto an enclosed garden, and one exit into labyrinthine palace halls. He opened the door sharply and startled a slight young woman with dark hair who was passing through the corridor. She was dressed in servants’ garb and carrying a basket of laundry.
He tried to enunciate his words, in case she wasn’t fluent in the common tongue, but it came out gruff and hoarse anyway. “Could you tell me the way to the stables?”
He tossed a few florens to the groom when he looked on the verge of objecting to hosting a witcher in his stable, and Geralt was left to brush out Roach’s mane in peace. She shook her head and flicked her ears at him, and he murmured in agreement. The court of King Eredin Bréacc Glas was nothing like the court of Emperor Emhyr var Emreis.
His memories of the Hunt were usually shrouded by a fog, only giving him snatches at a time, but he could remember being thrown at Eredin’s feet. The King was not interested in the petty grovelling of those beneath him. Most Riders were beneath his notice, but Geralt was instead beneath his heel, being ground further into the dirt every time he drew attention to himself. Sometimes it was by resisting the beatings that amused the Riders so, other times by complaining too loudly of his injuries, voluntarily or not. The bruises and burns he gained from being dragged behind the Hunt’s horses every time they rode carved welts into his skin – and slowed them down.
“So give me a horse,” he’d said.
Geralt could tell that Eredin didn’t often have prisoners bold enough to look him directly in his cold, pale green eyes. He thought it intrigued him, or at least amused him. “Very well. Who among you, my Riders, would wager their steed for a chance to humiliate the dog?”
He didn’t remember winning, but he remembered riding, afterwards. He must have been very lucky. First to win, and second that Eredin had decided to keep his word. He’d never have escaped the Hunt if he was being dragged at their heels every night, but with his dark dart of a Roach, he’d had a chance. And he’d had a friend, for those months – years? Decades? Sometimes it felt as if he’d ridden with the Hunt for centuries, millennia even, so long that time looped all the way back around – in the endless night’s cold and fog.
That was what he needed now, as Eredin’s mist drifted beyond the walls of Vizima. Sitting on the hay-littered cobbles, leaning his back against Roach’s side, he watched the moon traverse the sky without being crossed by spectral riders. He rested his eyes for a few moments and awoke to sunlight streaming into the stable and a commotion of human feet and fussing.
Roach snorted as Geralt was yanked to his feet by the black-clad pudgy chamberlain, who had surprising strength that he became more sure by the second was due to sheer anger. The chamberlain was talking very fast in a very irate tone about barbarous Nordlings, and stable-muck, clothes unfit for an Imperial audience, the purpose of guest bedrooms, and probably a few hundred other things he didn’t catch. He was herded back into the guest quarters where a steaming bath and several attendants were waiting. Everyone sprang into action, and he couldn’t quite tell if it was because he was late, or if this was just the pace at which everything pertaining to the Emperor was taken.
“You think Emhyr cares if I’m clean?” he grumbled.
The chamberlain sniffed, “The gentleman will refer to His Imperial Majesty by his full title or not at all.”
“Alright,” he said, as he finished shedding his armour and stepped into the bath. “As long as you announce me by my full title, Sir Geralt Roger Eric du Haute-Bellegarde the White Wolf of Rivia.”
He knew he ought to be taking this seriously. That he had been summoned for a reason, and that reason was apparently good enough to keep Yen in a thousand-mile radius of Emhyr. But he hated court, and the only thing making this slightly bearable was imagining His Imperial Majesty dropped at the feet of Eredin Bréacc Glas and forced to abide by his rules. The Wild Hunt were sometimes called wraiths, sometimes faerie folk, but most legends agreed on one thing; their court was foreign and unforgiving to mortals. He thought that Emhyr could do with a reminder that he was just that – mortal. One of the rabble, as far as Eredin was concerned. Geralt would have liked to see that audience.