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It’s been a long fucking day, a not insignificant portion of which has been spent covered from head to toe in river muck and drowner bits which is his own fault, really, but what the fuck are you supposed to do when you’re surrounded have drowners coming at you from all one direction, but there were a lot of them, okay? It’s not like tossing a bomb into a murder of drowners is always his first resort. Just sometimes. Most of the time. Okay, fine, the only time he doesn’t is when he’s run out of bombs, are you happy now? Anyway, the point, the point is, that it’s been a long fucking day and now that he’s scrubbed meticulously clean and wearing fresh clothing while his work gear dries, he’s damn well going to sit here in a quiet corner of the tavern and pull out his yarn and his hook, and anyone who so much as looks at him sideways can go and get fucked.
“What are you doing?” a raspy voice says, right next to his ear. Lambert doesn’t jump, because he’s a witcher, of course he heard someone coming.
Except, he didn’t.
“Minding my own business, what the fuck does it look like?”
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. Would you like me to go away and come back again? I can try being noisier.”
“You didn’t,” Lambert growls, looking up into a pair of green, catlike eyes set in a brown, scarred face. Witcher. His glances down to the medallion on display. A Cat, of all things. Fucking fabulous.
“Suuuure,” the man drawls, grinning a lopsided grin, and bending down to pick something up off the floor. “Here, you dropped your little stick. I’m Aiden.”
Lambert ignores him, snatching his hook back, and continues crocheting. He's half way through a row before he realises his tension has tightened, and the row is pulling in. With a sigh, he starts the row over, making a concerted effort to keep his hands relaxed, if not his mind.
“This is the part where you tell me your name,” Aiden persists, sliding onto the bench next to Lambert, close enough to touch shoulders. “Wolf school, right? Not many of you left, I hear. So what are you doing? It looks like knitting, but I’ve never seen a knitting stick like that before.”
“Counting,” Lambert growls, making a determined effort to focus on his stitches. “One, two, three, four…” he remembers the 'Do Not Disturb' sign that he saw hanging on one of the doors upstairs, and considers appropriating it to stick to his forehead.
“Okay yeah, good,” Aiden says, standing up again and moving away, having taken the hint.
His peace is short-lived, however, as Aiden soon returns with two steaming plates of food, followed by the innkeeper who clunks two frothing mugs of ale down on the table.
“No offense, but you seem like the kind of guy who gets completely absorbed in a task and forgets to eat.”
“Offense taken,” Lambert growls.
“It’s a trait I share,” Aiden grins. “Which one of us are you going to lecture? You’re the one who didn’t hear me approach.”
Lambert doesn’t know how to deal with this. He wears his unsociability like armour, it’s usually enough to give him a good three feet of people-free space, and here this obnoxious Cat witcher is, invading it without so much as a by-your-leave. He tries a different angle, perhaps he can bore the man away.
“It’s crochet. A bit like knitting, but you use a hook instead of two needles. Makes a thicker fabric, good for blankets and scarves and winter hats. Knitting is better for things like socks that can’t be too bulky. I take a few fleeces home every winter to spin and dye, you know you can get some great colours out of different plants, if you use the right alchemicals with them. Woad with soda ash gives a lovely blue, madder and chalk this red. Quite colourfast too, if you soak the wool in a solution of alum before dyeing." Lambert pulls a hank of woad-dyed blue yarn out of his bag to show Aiden who, to his surprise, is watching Lambert with interest rather than boredom. Fuck.
He shoves everything back in his bag, but that’s a mistake because now he has nothing to do with his hands. They naturally gravitate to the plate of food in front of him, and it’s not until he’s distractedly eaten half the meal that he remembers the Cat witcher paid for it, and now it would be rude to be rude. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“What do you want, anyway?” he blurts out, trying to focus on the plate in front of him. There’s a generous slice of roast lamb left, pools of gravy, a small pile of perfectly cooked, unseasoned (just the way he likes them) beans and carrots, and a half-eaten slice of buttered bread. He regrets not paying attention while he was shovelling food in his panic, because you don’t get beans cooked just right very often and it’s too late not to have some sort of obligation to the Cat – fuck him, I didn’t ask for this – but since he’s already started eating, he might as well savor what’s left. He looks at the bread, large bites taken from the very centre a signifier of just how unsettled he is. Usually he’d save it for last to clean the plate, but now he can’t even remember how the bread tastes. He takes another bite to check.
“Oh, the usual things. Good food, fine wine, decent company.”
“Why are you annoying me then?” Lambert challenges, looking up from his meal to see Aiden watching him.
“I don’t know,” Aiden admits, meeting Lambert’s eyes for a moment. “Thought you seemed interesting. Haven’t changed my mind. Like to learn more about your thing that’s not knitting. Guxart and some of the other Cats knit, but I never had the patience.”
Lambert looks back down at his food, suddenly trying to resist the temptation to explain everything he knows and how he learned and all about the mathematics, the geometry that applies to the structure of crafts, and… fuck it. He pulls the new hank of blue yarn back out of his bag.
“Hands,” he barks at Aiden. Aiden obediently holds his arms out, palm up, and Lambert untwists the hank, looping it around so he can wind the yarn off into a ball. Aiden moves his hands so the yarn doesn’t catch while Lambert works. Good, he’s done this before. Lambert gives him a nod of approval, and the Cat beams back at him.
Lambert focuses back on the yarn and his ball, winding first around the smooth ear of a chair to make sure there’s a hole in the centre so the yarn doesn’t stretch out and lose its elasticity. At Kaer Morhen he has a special tool for this, a thick, smoothly polished rod of timber that Eskel likes to make crude jokes about. If he had to carry around every useful bit of equipment he wanted to out on the path, he’d be travelling with a wagon rather than a horse, so he’s learned to improvise and adapt. Improvise and adapt, that should be his motto, ha.
When the ball gets too large for its small post, Lambert tugs it off and keeps wrapping, competing with himself to wind off the neatest ball that he can, making sure he doesn’t pull too tightly so the yarn will stay relaxed.
Much easier doing this with a partner, the number of times he’s had to untangle hanks of yarn he’s wound off on his own, taking hours longer than necessary. Still, he does enjoy this part. There's a certain mindfulness to it that's far more satisfying than meditating.
“Thanks,” he says, making eye contact with Aiden again when the last tail of the yarn falls away from his hand. Mischievous green eyes twinkle back at him. “You know about pi?”
Aiden arches a perfectly shaped black eyebrow. “Sweet or savoury?”
“Circle pi, that pain-in-the-ass number that’s just a bit more than three.” Lambert picks up his hook and makes a loop with the yarn. “See, if I use a small stitch, about the same height and width, I can fit six stitches around the centre. Circumference is radius times two times pi, or close enough to the radius times six. The radius is one, 1 x 6 equals six stitches. So next row, the circle will get bigger by one unit, how many stitches will I need?”
“2 x 6. Twelve?” Aiden guesses, sliding up next to Lambert so he can watch more closely.
“Right. And the next?”
“…eighteen,” Aiden says, after a moment’s thought. “So you add six more stitches every time you go around? But Pi isn’t exactly three.”
“No, but you can’t make one tenth of a stitch. You could do an extra stitch every ten rounds, but the fabric is stretchy enough that a single stitch out of sixty won't be missed, and the numbers are all nice and neat if you do six every time.” Lambert pulls on the tail of yarn, unravelling his circle again.
“What are you doing? That was a great little circle!” Aiden objects.
Lambert makes another ring with his fingers. “How would you calculate it if I use a stitch that’s taller, but the same width?”
“How much taller? How many stitches make a flat circle?”
“Twelve. The stitch is about twice as long.”
“That’s the same as your second row before. So… add six for eighteen?”
Lambert works eighteen stitches into the round, and the edges curl up like a bowl. Aiden frowns at it.
“Why didn’t that work?”
Lambert points to the middle of a stitch. “That’s where the third round was before. But the top of the stitch is where the fourth round would be, if I was using the smaller stitch.”
“Oh! So Multiply by four. 4 x 6. Twenty-four!”
Lambert dutifully unravels the row, and increases the stitch count to twenty-four. The circle sits flat again. “What about the next row?”
“Six. 6 x 6. Thirty-six. So this time you’re adding twelve stitches each time. And if there was a taller stitch you’d start with eighteen, and add eighteen stitches each time?”
“If the stitch is tall enough, yeah. The trick is getting the right number in that first ring, then you can just add the same amount each time.”
“Huh,” Aiden says, seeming pleased to have figured it out himself. “Clever. Can you show me how to make the stitches?”
“Sure. I’ll show you how to make a beanie, you southerners are always complaining about the cold up here, even in summer. Once this circle is big enough, it will make the dome of a hat. Then you can work straight rounds until it’s as long as you want, try a few different stitches out too. Maybe some more interesting ones, if you pick it up quickly enough. I’m only staying here tonight, heading back out tomorrow. But – I’m going east. If you happen to be heading that way too, maybe we can fit in a few more lessons.”
A week later, Aiden has a gorgeous, soft blue beanie that he wears proudly in spite of what Lambert would call sweltering summer heat. They’ve picked up a contract or two together, and nobody is more surprised than Lambert to find that he doesn’t completely hate it. It’s not working with another witcher, he’s done that before without the same sense of… something right. He fights well enough with Geralt and Eskel and Coën, of course, but in the case of his fellow Wolf witchers and the Griffin, they've trained for it. He fought side by side with a Viper once, and it had taken as much of his attention to be aware of what the other man was doing as it had taken to focus on the actual fight.
With Aiden, somehow, it's different. Their fighting styles are complementary, and training together is turning it from a chore into fun.
Another week, and Lambert wakes up to a deserted camp, no sign of the Cat Witcher anywhere. If it weren’t for a note pinned with Aiden’s knife – one of his many, many knives – to a tree stump near Lambert’s head, he might have wondered if he’d imagined the whole encounter.
“I’ll be back.”
Lambert has his doubts. Cat witchers aren’t renowned for their reliability. But he can’t deny the void created by Aiden’s absence, and he hopes that’s not the last he’s seen of him.