Chapter Text
“Again.”
Ciri groans. The weight of the blade in her hands started to feel like a thousand pounds almost an hour ago, and now it’s simply dead weight being swung around by tired, wobbly arms.
“We’ve gone over these a hundred times today, Geralt. I could probably do them in my sleep by now.”
“That’s the point,” the man says simply, shifting opposite her and raising his sheathed blade back to the ready.
Ciri huffs, summoning up what energy she had left to reposition her feet and heave her own - much smaller - blade to match his.
The pair had been like this in an abandoned farm field, back and forth in practice forms, for the better part of the afternoon, footwork stirring up dust that swirled through the unruly wild grass in the high sun. It was hot, sweaty, and dirty, and Ciri was starting to regret ever asking for a sword of her own at all.
It had taken months of picking, prodding, and pestering just to convince Geralt it was a good idea, and another month and a half to prove she’d be responsible with it, but he’d finally gotten her one. ‘Big for you, and a bit lighter than most,’ he’d admitted to her when he handed it to her, the fine steel blade sheathed in deep blue leather that probably cost the commission of the last three monsters combined, ‘but you’ll grow into it, and it’ll do what you need it to.’
She’d taken it delicately then, as if it were going to cut her through the wrappings, marvelling at it’s fine point and the small golden lion at the pommel and thanking him over and over again while he pretended not to be just a little bit touched.
I never would have wanted it if I knew how much work it’d be, she thinks unhappily, sliding her feet forwards to first position and snapping her blade below her right hip. It catches Geralt’s with an unsatisfying thunk .
“Good.”
Ciri raises an eyebrow, but she’s too tired to say anything smart. She just shifts the blade to the left and catches his slash at her other side, letting out a huff as she swings it up to block the next hit by her shoulder.
Fourth position, fifth, fifth reversed… Ciri runs through parry after parry with Geralt, feeling the thunk of the scabbard against her blade resonate deeper and deeper in her bones with each hit.
“Keep that blade steady,” Geralt calls as she stumbles back from a hit from above, her reversed grip faltering and pushing the swords towards her face.
“We’ve been doing this for hours now,” Ciri whines. There’s a small twitch in Geralt’s eyebrow that means she’s starting to wear him down. She glowers at him, dropping her sword to the dust before looking back up at him with her very best ‘pretty please give me what I want’ expression. “Can I at least take a break or something?”
Geralt looks her up and down for a moment, casts a glance to the treeline and then back. He looks stern, and Ciri almost wonders if he’ll actually say no, but before long she hears an irritated sigh as he finally relaxes his stance.
“Ten minutes. Then we’ll see if you still remember it all.”
“Fifteen?” Ciri starts, before catching Geralt’s sideways glare that reeks of ‘if you have the energy to argue with me you have the energy to do another round of strikes’ and instead sheepishly sheathing her own sword. She makes her way to the edge of their small makeshift practice ground where their bags sit in the shade of a lone wizened oak tree, squatting down a moment to rummage through her bag before turning back to see Geralt still staring out at the treeline.
“Whatcha lookin’ for?” she calls over as she pops the cork out from her waterskin and plops down onto a nearby large rock, wincing a little as she lands too close to the side that’s been heat-baked by the sun. Geralt doesn’t say anything.
They both sit there in silence for a moment.
“There’s not anyone there, and you know it,” Ciri says indignantly, breaking the quiet after a long drink from her water, “The birds would’ve flown up if there was anyone coming out after us.” Geralt just grunts and furrows his brow a bit deeper in response. She rolls her eyes. “You worry too much.”
And that thought gets her a look. Geralt fastens his sword back to his belt with a sharp tug.
“I don’t worry without a reason,” the Witcher says, slowly making his way over to where Ciri is sitting in the shade.
“Isn’t that why we’re doing this here in the first place anyway?” Ciri says, gesturing to the dry, dusty field surrounding them out in every direction, “So I’ll be safer? So you won’t have to worry?”
The field certainly didn’t allow for any surprises. The long grass betrayed even the small movements of the field mice scurrying along the ground, and the treeline was a good dozen yards away from where the pair was now sitting under the cloudless blue sky. Geralt seemed to concede a bit to Ciri as he watches a grackle’s wingbeats shake the wildflowers by the underbrush, but shakes his head.
“I can never be sure how safe you are, even out here.”
Ciri frowns. “So why don’t we just do it somewhere closer to people, if we’re not safe even out here in the middle of nowhere?”
Geralt sighs and sits opposite Ciri, shifting the blade at his hip to lean on the knotted tree roots of the oak.
“You know as well as I do that more people means more likely something will go wrong. Someone would tell someone where you are, and the Nilfgaardian army would be hunting us down in a matter of hours.”
Ciri feels her blood chill at the mention of Nilfgaard. The silhouette of the Black Knight, his winged helmet silhouetted against Cintra in flames, was etched into the back of her mind like a knife wound. She fiddles with the string ties hanging off the rolled-up sleeves of her blouse, the small wooden beads at the ends are starting to wear smooth from the habit.
“Sorry,” she mumbles, much softer than usual, and if Geralt’s hearing wasn't so inhumanly keen he’d have to lean forwards to hear it. He rests his elbows on his knees anyway.
He’s looking at her with an odd expression that she’s never seen directed at her before - something between unreadably cold and deeply, achingly sad. Usually he only looks like that when he thinks Ciri isn’t watching, late at night by a dying fire or while passing the ruined castles of long-dead kingdoms.
And I’m kind of like those things to someone like him, aren’t I,
she thinks.
A relic of something almost dead.
She focuses on the dirt instead of continuing the thought, scuffing the rock with the toe of her boot. Her waterskin sits clutched between her hands, not empty but all but forgotten.
There’s a movement from the tree roots, and Geralt finally speaks first.
“I know this has been hard for you. We just… we have to be realistic. About this, and about you. About everything.”
Ciri finally meets his gaze, defiant blue against gold, and she can’t help but feel anger rising up in her throat like a lion’s roar.
“Realistic? This is what you call ‘being realistic’? We run away from every person we see on the road, practice fighting in the middle of an old field. You won’t even let me go into town with you because someone might see who I am.”
She can feel something clawing up the back of her throat. She bites it back in case it has teeth, lifts her jaw higher as she feels it growl.
Geralt still hasn’t broken the stare they’re locked in. He just stays there, letting her breathe. Ciri can never tell what’s going on behind his pale hair and scary face, but he seems softer now, and something about thinking that finally makes her crack.
“I’m tired , Geralt,” she says, looking back down at the waterskin. “And not just from practice. I know we have to hide, but… I’m not going to act like a ghost that doesn’t exist just because we’re afraid someone will snatch me away.”
“No one is going to take you,” Geralt says, slowly, “And I never said you’d have to disappear. Just that we had to be careful.”
“I know I have to be careful. I knew it the moment I had to run,” Ciri says back. Her eyes sting a little. “I was just hoping with you I’d… I don’t know, not have to do that so much anymore. Not the same way. But it’s just… more of it, over and over.”
Geralt is still leaning forwards, apparently at a loss for anything else to say. One hand is tugging at the Witcher emblem around his neck while he runs the other through the scruff of beard growing on his face. He sighs, heavy, tinged on the edge by what is the closest to guilt Ciri’s ever seen on him.
It takes a second for him to find the words.
“I am sorry for that, Cirilla.” He starts.
“I know this has been difficult for you. Difficult in ways no child should ever have had to deal with in the first place, and that too many have to. And I… could have made it a little easier for you, in the long run. But we can’t ignore the very real dangers in the world waiting to pounce on you - on us - if we aren’t careful.”
Geralt looks over at her like he’s expecting her to reply something back, but she doesn’t. She blinks hard, feels something run down her face. She hadn’t realized how blurry everything had gotten, she thinks, reaching up a hand to wipe something wet from her cheek.
The chain of Geralt’s pendant clinks faintly against itself as he lets go of it. Ciri can hear the sound of boots crunching on the dry grass, slowly, like he’s being extra careful not to startle her.
“How about this,” Geralt says. His voice is much closer now, and much softer around the edges. Ciri looks up through her clumped lashes to see him kneeling down in front of her on one knee, eye-to-eye with where she’s still sitting on the rock.
“Let’s work together to make things a little bit easier. Does that sound good?”
Like it’ll ever get easier
, Ciri thinks to herself, before desperately trying to push away the excruciating helplessness that’s trying to wrap itself around her. She takes a few deep breaths and focuses enough to look up at Geralt properly this time. The tightness in her chest and throat is finally unwinding, and the light filtering through the oak leaves seems a little less liquid.
“I… I think so, maybe.” she answers.
“Good,” he says, a bit of uncharacteristic softness still sticking to the edges. “And I think the first thing to do is to finish up those strikes.”
Ciri, despite everything that just happened and the last bit of a lump in her throat, audibly scoffs.
“I can’t believe after all this you’re still on those damn drills.” She can feel something at the back of her throat again, but it’s more annoying and tired than angry, and she thanks the stars that it doesn’t have claws this time.
“Language, Cirilla,” Geralt says with a raised eyebrow. Ciri lets out a stubborn snort, a
‘just try and stop me’
, and that seems to make his shoulders relax a bit. He draws his sword from the sheath it had been secured in all morning, holding it carefully across his gloved hands. The razor sharp double-edged blade sits just beyond the tips of his fingers, glinting in the afternoon sun, and the cast iron wolf set into the pommel seems to snarl at her.
“Do you know how long I’ve had this sword?” he asks. Ciri shakes her head.
She’d asked him once, during a particularly long and terrifying night they spent in the dark of the woods. No fire allowed, he’d said, or whoever was following them in the woods would find them out, so he’d wrapped her up in blankets and told her to stay quiet. Instead of going to sleep she’d made idle conversation while Geralt kept a watchful eye over the clearing, cold steel laid across his lap. He’d told her then, but the words seemed blurry now - or else I fell asleep halfway through his answer.
Geralt runs one hand the length of the blade, and she can swear she hears the metal singing as he does.
“Since I was thirteen. About your age, actually,” he adds, flicking his eyes up to watch her reaction.
Ciri’s eyes go wide. “But it’s so heavy ,” is the first thing that comes out of her mouth, even though the things rattling around in her mind are much more complicated. Who did you get it from? How is it still so sharp? Did you have to do the same drills as I did? But all she can think of is how difficult it is for her to heave it over to him when he asks for it from the other side of camp, or how the one time he let her use it she could barely manage to get through a single form. For him to have used it at thirteen...
Geralt chuckles at her response, and probably makes a face, but Ciri’s eyes are still glued to the sword. As he keeps talking he moves it, tilting it this way and that in his hands and letting the golden light glint off it at each angle.
“Oh, they trained us on swords just as heavy as this. Maybe even heavier, to prepare us better. We didn’t have a chance to fail, only to learn and learn quickly. We were the weapon, and the sword was simply an extension of us, you see?”
Ciri’s heart is beating a bit quicker now. Is that what I have to do? Become a weapon to survive?
As if he could see the tension in her face, the furrowed brow and tight-set jaw, Geralt adds gently, “You don’t need to learn like I did, but you do need to learn.”
He turns the blade again, this time bringing one hand down to the hilt into a traditional grip. Ciri goes to touch her own still-sheathed blade like a mirror, the roaring lion pommel biting into her thumb.
“In war, without a way to protect yourself, you feel like you’re at the whims of everyone else in the world, or in debt to those who defend you. But once you learn to fight for yourself... you get freedom. That’s the worth of a sword, and of knowing how to use one. And that’s what I’m trying to give you.”
“Learn to use a sword,” he says, and his gold eyes seem to flash with fire now, “And you’ll no longer need to be a ghost.”
And with that, seemingly satisfied, Geralt straightens up to his full height and sets the blade into the dirt, “Can you stand?”
Ciri gives a strong nod and finally puts the cork back into her long-forgotten waterskin, setting it aside in the shadow of the rock before unsteadily standing back up to face him.
“One more round, then,” she states as if it’s a fact, even though something in her is whispering to do more after Geralt’s speech, and this time it’s Geralt’s turn to snort.
“Three, and then we’ll be done for the day. On my honor as a Witcher,” He adds when he sees Ciri’s
‘over my dead body’
face at the number.
“Two.” She offers instead, as a compromise and to scratch her newfound itch to practice in equal parts. She expects Geralt to try and fight it, to go on again about the importance of practice and diligence and being ready for anything, but he just cracks a tired smile - a real smile, and that’s a rarity that makes Ciri smirk a little herself.
“Two it is, then, your highness,” he says, slowly walking back out into the heat of the makeshift sparring ring and drawing his shining steel blade.
Ciri stands opposite him, like always, expecting him to sheathe it. He doesn’t.
“Let’s see how you do against steel this time,” he says, holding his sword out in a ready first position.
Ciri smiles, draws her own to meet him with a soft metallic clink. It looked like a needle next to his, the shiny royal blue on the hilt contrasting with the wrapped brown leather, but it was just as sharp in the light, and just as cold to the touch.
She readies her feet into the now-familiar formation. They fall in place like it’s second nature, and Geralt smiles. Ciri looks alive now, her pale blue eyes meeting his and holding steady instead of looking down to fuss with her feet, her grip, her hair.
“Ready?” he asks.
Ciri nods, sharp and determined.
“Ready.”