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He doesn’t wake.
At the end of the day, he’s human. Human senses, human reactions. He might have a keen ear and quick feet – he learned to, after so many years on the road – but he’s tired from the long ride and he feels safe amongst the Witchers, relieved that he and Ciri had reached Kaer Morhen without incident. He has a drink before he goes to bed, and perhaps he drinks too much, trying to understand the storm of the past few days.
Not that he would’ve been a match for her anyway. A warning to the others is the best he might have hoped for, a scream muffled by the thick walls, but he doesn’t even manage that. The door isn’t locked, and the knife slides easily into his neck. Pain slips into his dreams. He is asleep, and then he is neither asleep nor awake.
He senses the moonlit glint of the knife as Ciri leaves. Hears the bubble of blood in a gullet, no longer his, that hisses and…stops. He had been cold when he fell asleep, his chest a little tight from the mountain air. He doesn’t feel it now.
He waits for something to happen – to fade away, shudder out of existence like candle smoke. His thoughts are surprisingly still. Usually, he has so many of them wheeling and chirping, a flitting murmuration of attention, but all is quiet now. He isn’t even afraid.
The door creaks. Yennefer’s feet whisper on the cold floor as she hurries towards him.
‘Jaskier!’
She doesn’t see what has happened; there’s no light, and he had slept on his side. She must be in a hurry, not to smell the blood.
‘Jaskier, come on, wake up! I need you.’
When her shaking elicits no response she seizes his shoulder, turns him. Realisation makes ripples like a stone dropped into a pond. Yennefer’s mouth twists, but her expression is unreadable – she always was like an ocean, beautiful and unfathomable.
He should have put that in a song. She would have liked it, and if she hadn’t then she would have threatened him with something terrible. He wouldn’t have minded.
‘Oh,’ she says, a little puff of sadness in the still room. ‘Oh Jaskier.’
She checks, though he can sense there are other urgencies calling her, feeling for a pulse that has long ceased to flutter. Her hands come away bloody, red streaks nestling in her palm lines even after she wipes them on the sheets.
When she leaves the room, Jaskier follows. She said she needed him, after all.
He tracks her, unnoticed, through the dim corridors, keeping an instinctive watch for danger even though he knows he can’t be seen, can’t warn her. Kaer Morhen is nervous, the air humming with a metallic scent of unease. He’s relieved when she makes it to the laboratory unscathed.
‘If I had my magic,’ she mutters as she pulls down bottles, arranging them with quick fingers. ‘If I had my fucking magic.’
You can do it, he wants to say, can’t. She still has his blood under her fingernails. She scans shelves of herbs and jars, hesitates by a lump of red rock that gleams like dusk in the candlelight. Shakes her head, moves on.
The rock is for him. If he were alive, she would have told him what to do with it.
Yennefer is lost in her bottles and herbs, brewing. Jaskier reaches for the rock. It doesn’t occur to him that he shouldn’t be able to pick it up, that he has no hands to speak of, no fingers or thumbs, that he is only an echo of what he once was. As soon as he has the rock, he knows where Yennefer wants it to go. Geralt. The thought sends a soft pang through him; wasted time, wasted feeling. Jaskier always had too much feeling for most people to bear, let alone a Witcher. Perhaps that too much is all that’s left of him.
It doesn’t matter now.
The walls seem to shiver as he winds through them, the air heaving with magic and sound. By the time he reaches the hall, it’s already started – Ciri screams, and the mountain trembles. Even if Jaskier had a voice, it would be drowned out. He has to get closer to Geralt.
Flying glass, monsters, swords scything the cold air – Jaskier drifts through it far more easily than if he’d been alive. When Vesemir drives the knife into Ciri, Jaskier flinches, but there is a hush in the room afterwards, an opportunity in the silence. He lets the red stone fall. He hadn’t realised how hard it had been to keep his grip on it until the weight is gone.
They all hear it, but only Geralt seems to know what it means. Clever Yennefer.
She joins them as Geralt tries desperately to talk Ciri out of it, fails. When Yennefer brings the glass to her wrists, the smell of blood makes Jaskier faint and strange. The three of them vanish, and Jaskier is left behind, merely an ache in the room; a bruise, fading.
Then, they return.
Jaskier’s grip is weakening by the time Geralt discovers the truth.
‘Where is that bard?’ he asks, surveying the chaos with a weary eye. ‘Surely he hasn’t slept through this?’
‘Geralt,’ Yennefer says, and Geralt must hear it in her voice, her heartbeat.
He doesn’t get angry. Doesn’t punch things, or shout. Jaskier always wondered what Geralt might do if something happened to him, how he would feel it (oh, Witchers feel, even Geralt). He supposes it’s different with Ciri. There is no monster to fight; only a girl, raw from sobbing.
Geralt’s face flickers, though, a rush of thought and – pain? – quickly smothered. Jaskier is glad that Ciri is being checked over by Vesemir and doesn’t see it. He hopes that she doesn’t remember.
Later, when the worst of the mess is cleared up – Geralt throws himself into it with an intensity that speaks of grief, though there has been so much loss that Jaskier can’t tell who it is for – Geralt and Yennefer sit on the edge of the shattered stone walkway. They speak to Ciri, and Ciri returns to the keep. Only then does Jaskier drift closer – it’s harder to hold on outside, where the mountains reach to the sky. Like falling snow, he is being blown and buffeted, pulled apart.
‘They’ll burn the body,’ Geralt rumbles. ‘The ground’s too hard up here to bury anyone. For Witchers there’s…something different.’
‘Geralt…’ Yennefer’s hands are stained with more than one person’s blood now. ‘I don’t…I’m sorry.’
Geralt nods. The air between the two of them is still spiky, but Jaskier senses it will thaw, eventually. He hopes so, for both their sakes. They don’t mention the red stone. It has been forgotten, kicked aside in the chaos, but Jaskier doesn’t mind. He did what was needed. They will have to find someone else to tell the rest of the story.
At his last moment, they both look up, as if they have heard something – a snatch of a melody, the whistle of a sandpiper, or the song that snow makes amongst the mountaintops.