Work Text:
Clutching her mug of tea, shawl wrapped warmly against the chill, Triss slipped into the greenhouse and sighed a little at the heat inside the small outbuilding. Kaer Morhen was in quite impressively good shape for a keep that had seen as much abuse as it had, but this high in the mountains, any stone building would get chilly, no matter how many fires and tapestries it might have. Triss spent much of her time in her little workroom, where she could build the fire high and charm the windows against drafts if it got terribly cold, but she liked the greenhouse better anyway. All the plants there were living still.
It was very generous of the Wolf School to allow her freedom of the greenhouse, so long as she left them some of the herbs and so on that they needed for their potions. Triss specialized in plants and growing things, and while she could do magic without plants involved, she didn’t like it as much, and she never really felt at home anywhere she didn’t have a green space. Most days Triss made sure to duck into the little glass building to water and prune and encourage.
Off towards one wall was Triss’ pet project, safely out of the way and on the opposite side of the greenhouse from just about all of the herbs the Witchers used, so that any little magics Triss used were less likely to interact weirdly with any future potions. From the outside her project looked rather like a very strangely shaped planter. It was a dry tree trunk, which rose and curled into a spiral, the outside slope of it bearing various sprouts and ivies. As much as anything, what it was was an experiment: Triss had a handful of different magical workings tied into the plants, including some to do with the shape of the trunk, some determining what she could make of the potential remaining in a piece of long-dead wood, and at least a dozen having to do with the interactions of the various plants growing there and their proximity and various magical properties, both native and some she had applied.
Before she settled in to work on her creation, Triss did a quick pass of the rest of the little room, making sure soil was damp and dead leaves were removed. A few eating herbs were ready for some thinning out, so she made a mental note to take some of those inside to dry when she finished, before she set her tea on the workbench next to what she thought of as “her” corner, and set to work maintaining and improving and taking notes.
Time flowed by anonymously. The early morning shadows shortened, and Triss shed her shawl as she began to sweat, although once her concentration was broken when the temperature dropped unexpectedly, and she reached absently for her tea, only to find it had gone cold as well. She wasn’t worried about time getting away from her, she had no particular obligations until well after lunch, and Ciri was impatient enough to come fetch her if Triss didn’t appear at lunch.
Some time later, Triss wrapped up another series of charms, and sat up to stretch out her back. This time she drained the tea instead of leaving it to get cold another time, and she twisted this way and that from her perch on her stool to work the kinks out of her spine. Looking around as she did so, Triss startled and nearly fell out of her seat. Sometime while she had been working, Eskel had apparently wandered into the greenhouse as well, and was quietly picking through some of the more esoteric herbs on the far side of the building.
When Triss gasped, Eskel’s hands froze, and he stayed knelt on the floor by the herb boxes, making himself as unimposing as possible. Sweet of him, Triss thought, rapidly realizing that the chill she had felt must have been when Eskel opened the door to the still-cool air outside. And what’s more, it wasn’t his fault she had been too wrapped up to realize it when he came in.
From her seat, Triss called over, “Hello Eskel, I’m sorry I didn’t greet you earlier.”
Still not rising, but returning to his tending, Eskel replied, “Hullo Triss. Sorry to startle you, I thought you’d noticed me.”
“Nothing to be sorry for, it’s your greenhouse too. I just got too focussed, that’s all.”
Some of the guardedness left his eyes at her casual reaction, and he said, “How’s this, I won’t be sorry if you won’t?”
Triss felt fondness curl in her chest. He was a lovely man, big hands deft among the stems in front of him, and even when he was behaving carefully, wary of frightening her like so many years of bitter experience had taught him to be, he was good humoured and not shy of expressing his fondness for his brothers or Ciri. None of the Witchers had been exactly thrilled about her taking up residence at Kaer Morhen, with good reason, but Eskel had never been cold to her, and Triss really thought they might nearly be friends by now. They had worked enough chores opposite one another, and compared stories of various places on the Continent that Triss felt she had an idea of the sort of man he was, and wanted to keep getting to know him.
Surrounded by green and growing things as she was, Triss felt safe enough to admit to herself that she might also like to get to know him as something other than a friend, although she certainly wasn’t about to bring that up where anyone could hear anytime soon.
Still, her heart fluttered just a little when Eskel finally stood, and stepped nearer. Belatedly realizing that he’d asked a question, Triss said, “I think I could agree to that.”
The corners of Eskel’s fine mouth twitched and Triss willed herself not to blush at all. She’d already been lost in thought enough for one day, but here she was again, losing the thread of a conversation. He didn’t hold it against her, though, and merely gestured a little at her project.
“Can I ask what that is?”
“Of course you can ask,” Triss said, grinning, and earned herself a wry look.
“Spending too much time with the little terror.”
Triss laughed outright at that, and answered the question properly. “You can come look. It’s mostly a carrier for all sorts of little experiments and so on I’m doing. You might recognize some of the plants, I’m seeing what properties I can emphasize and what I can pull power from if I need it, among other things.”
Eskel nodded, now leaning in to peer more closely at the whole setup. The thing was warded as well as she could, there were enough other plants carrying Chaos in the greenhouse that could possibly interfere with her data, and when he leaned in far enough to cross the outermost of the wards, he twitched, evidently startled. That was right, Witchers had some sense of magic, and Triss opened her mouth to apologize, but was stopped by an interested hum from Eskel.
“Have you been working on this long?”
Triss was surprised he wanted to ask, most people she had encountered found magical research impenetrable at best, and boring or irritating at worst, but when she answered, Eskel followed up with more intelligent questions about cooperation between various plants, and offered some of his own anecdotal notes about what tended to grow near to what else, in case she found the information useful.
While she answered, and asked Eskel a few questions of her own in turn, Triss kept her hands busy clipping off rosemary and mint and tying the stems into bundles to dry. For his part, Eskel returned to the potion ingredients he had been tending to earlier, and made clippings of his own. Their conversation lasted all the way out of the greenhouse, back to the keep, and through lunch, much to Ciri’s vocal boredom. Triss just smiled vaguely at the girl, a little too busy being delighted at Eskel taking interest in her work to roll her eyes at the complaining, although Triss did make sure to drag her full attention back by the time Ciri was due for her lessons, considering how much trouble she could get into if not well supervised.
She could moon over Eskel on her own time, and the plants were very good at keeping secrets.