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Letho receives the letter in spring, from the White Wolf’s bard, no less. He’d have taken it for a trick if not for the scent just barely clinging to the pages. Blood oranges and mariposa lilies are not scents one often runs into anywhere near Novigrad, much like the brothers that apparently left the note with Dandelion.
“I thought we were heading east out of Novigrad, Letho,” Aella questions as they pass beneath the Gate of the Hierarch.
“We were, now we’re headin’ south,” Letho rumbles.
“Obviously , but why?”
“Gotta ask someone for a favor, camp’s in the woods not far from here.”
“You are impossible, Viper,” she complains. “What favor? Where are we going? Who the fuck sent you that note-”
“Words, girl . ”
“-and why did you look like you’d seen a ghost when you read it?”
Letho heaves a sigh, stops and drops to a knee so he’s at Aella’s level.
“Need to see about a portal to somewhere in the south, if I can’t find this mage we’ll get ahold of some horses but I’d rather get there sooner if we can. As for where the portal will take us and who sent the note… Gonna need you to trust me for a bit, snakelet,” he says. “I’ll explain it to you away from so many eyes an’ ears, understand?”
She doesn’t look pleased but she jerks a nod and follows after him without asking any more questions.
# # #
The mage Letho finds is able to portal them as far south as Caravista, in Nazair, where they steal a sturdy looking horse in the wee hours of the morning. Aella is patient for the first day of travel but that evening when they make camp she sits down across the fire and fixes Letho with a steely-eyed glare.
“A’right, snakelet,” he says, conceding. “We’re headin’ for Gorthur Gvaed, the ruined keep of the Viper school.”
“So, we’re going where you grew up? Where you were made into a witcher?”
“Yes.”
“Are you gonna make me into a witcher?” she questions slowly.
It still knocks Letho’s breath loose with all the force of a shaelmaar’s strike, turns his slow-beating heart to stone in an instant. The thought of his little snakelet strapped down and screaming her throat bloody and- No.
He clenches his jaw and makes himself focus on the ache of it for a long moment.
“No.” Never, I’ll fucking skin anyone who tries, who so much as suggests it.
“So then why are we going there?”
“Because that letter in Novigrad was from a couple friends of mine that I thought were dead, they’re waitin’ for me there,” he explains.
“Are they witchers, too?”
Letho nods.
“So… they’re like your brothers?”
“Pretty much, granted the two of them are actually brothers as well,” Letho replies. “Their names are Auckes and Serrit.”
# # #
“Letho, what in the fuck is that?” Serrit questions with a critical eye trained on Aella where she’s standing, straight and proud, at Letho’s side.
“Good to see you, too, shithead. Where’s your brother?”
“I don’t know, you didn’t answer my question.”
“‘S a girl, the fuck does she look like?” he mumbles as he strides past Serrit and into what’s left of the keep.
“Got a name, girl?”
“Yes,” Aella says with a little smirk hiding at the corner of her mouth.
Serrit stares her down, waiting, and scowls when she turns to trail after Letho.
“Hey! Aren’t you gonna tell me what it is?”
“You didn’t ask,” Aella comments idly.
“I just-”
“You asked if I had a name, not what it was.”
Serrit scowls at the girl again, trailing along behind the pair. “Alright then, you little smartass, what’s your name?”
Aella grins over her shoulder sweetly, “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Letho hides a smirk at Serrit’s grumbling. They find Auckes lazing in front of a big fireplace in the main hall; he leaps to his feet as Letho rounds the corner.
“‘Bout godsdamn time!” he shouts, grinning ear to ear as he grabs Letho into a wrestling embrace. “We started to worry you hadn’t gotten our- Letho,” Auckes interrupts himself, murmuring in Letho’s ear like it’s a great secret, “there’s a little girl in our keep.”
“Good to know your eyes are workin’,'' Letho mumbles. The younger Viper releases Letho and steps over to peer down at Aella.
“Hello, little one,” Auckes grins, “I’m Auckes, that sourpuss is Serrit-” he indicates his brother, ignoring the obscene gesture he’s offered “-who might you be?”
“I’m Aella.” Serrit makes an indignant noise somewhere behind her and Aella has to press her lips together to keep from giggling.
“ Whirlwind.”
Aella smiles with all her teeth, eyes shining with mischief already; Letho has to bite back a groan of despair. He should’ve seen this coming, they’ll be insufferable before long.
“I think we’ll get along just fine, little one,” Auckes chuckles.
# # #
Auckes and Aella get along beautifully, just exactly like a fucking house on fire. You know you should probably do something to stop it, but what’s a single bucket of water to an inferno? Serrit escapes the madness with the excuse of hunting trips and he keeps fucking beating Letho out of the keep in the early hours so the big Viper is the one left to bear the brunt of their hijinks.
So far Letho has stopped them experimenting with explosives in the main hall on three separate occasions; spent an hour chastising his idiot brother on the extreme difference in resilience between a young witcher initiate and a small human girl after catching him Aarding Aella into a nearby lake; and had his heart nearly stop early one morning when he was attempting to clear out some of the rooms in the towers only to have his snakelet dive through the open window, after successfully climbing the tower from the courtyard with Auckes watching from the courtyard and grinning like a godsdamn fool.
Each time Letho nearly regrets bringing her, begins to think that perhaps asking his brothers to adapt to a human girl was a step too far, his snakelet proves him wrong.
Serrit avoids the girl at first, obviously out of his depth with a child, but Letho finds him after about two weeks with Aella in the courtyard. After that he catches sight of them there, every afternoon, working on her skills with a bow. Despite the chaos Auckes stirs up with her, Letho can see the strength she’s gained in the few months they’ve spent here; there’s a confidence and fluidity to her movements that wasn’t there before. They all trade off training her to use the daggers Letho got her; he'd already worked with her some on the Path but she progresses quickly within the walls of the keep. They teach her to cook and hunt and clean her kills, how to mend her clothes and make healing tinctures that are safe for humans and just about everything else the three witchers can think to teach the girl.
Before Letho notices the time passing, they’ve been at Gorthur Gvaed for three months, an entire season. It’s the longest stretch Letho has spent in one place since he was a child himself, undergoing his own training behind these same walls. Even realizing that, Letho doesn’t quite feel like it’s time to head back on the Path, not just yet. He’s not sure what makes him hesitate and he tries not to think about it too much. The Path isn’t going anywhere, they can return to it in their own time.
# # #
He keeps catching the girl edging towards the gates, eyeing the forest beyond the walls of the keep with a restlessness that reminds him of his own. It’s for this reason that Letho decides to take the girl with him on a bit of an extended hunting trip. He plans to take her a little deeper into the mountains than they’ve been so far, they’ll spend a few days in the wilderness and then return to the keep for a few more weeks before they set out on the Path once more.
Really, they could leave the keep for the Path at any time. The mountains are passable and there’s nothing that’s truly keeping them there but Letho’s own reluctance to leave.
It’s just…
He likes seeing his snakelet teasing his brothers, he likes seeing her well-fed instead of skin and bones, he likes glancing over to the sleeping corner in the main hall and seeing her curled peacefully in an actual bed to rest. He likes that his snakelet, his Aella, is safe here, with him and his brothers to keep her that way.
But it’s not as if he can tell anyone that, so he keeps his silence and grunts vague non-answers when he’s asked and he figures maybe it’ll get everyone to quit asking so much if he can expend some of Aella’s boundless energy.
# # #
He’d heard the shrieking as it echoed off the canyon walls and the only thought in his head was, of fucking course.
“What was that, Letho?”
“What’d it sound like to you, snakelet?” he questions, keeping his eyes up and his ears open.
“It sounded like some kind of bird, but Auckes says harpies like to nest in the mountains and they make sounds like that.”
“Auckes is right. Probably a nest of ‘em nearby,” he replies. “I need you to stay here for an hour or so while I go ahead and deal with them.”
Her eyes light up. “ I could-”
“No. You can’t. You’re not ready for a monster that can fly, much less four or five at once. You’ll stay here and you’ll wait quietly and I’ll be back in an hour, two at the most,” he demands.
“Fine,” Aella gripes, sighing dramatically and flopping to the ground with her back against a tree.
# # #
Aella doesn’t know how long it’s been but she’s bored and Letho is always so overprotective and Serrit says the best way to learn is to do; so she starts off in the direction Letho went.
She can hear them shrieking after a few minutes of walking and after a bit further she catches sight of a trio of harpies diving at someone on a ridge overhead. It’s simple to find a winding path up and soon enough she’s crouched in the trees downwind watching Letho tangle with the three flying beasts above him.
Her Viper is bleeding heavily from his shoulder and he’s favoring his left leg. There’s three harpies already dead, scattered in the dirt around Letho’s feet. One of the three still in the air looks different to the other two, it’s wings edged in purple feathers instead of the dull black and brown of its companions. This one hangs back, watching the other two swoop and claw at Letho. He’s able to dispatch one, a decisive upward swipe that cleaves its head from its shoulders, but the second is on him before he can recover and they wind up locked in a grappling match. Letho is so occupied that he doesn’t seem to notice the one watching as it shifts in the air to dive at his exposed back.
Aella sees, with perfect clarity, what will happen if she doesn’t intervene; a brief, vivid flash of blood bubbling over Letho’s lips before the harpies snatch him into the sky and drop him over the cliff’s edge. She doesn’t think beyond that horrifying image, just barrels through the trees, drawing her daggers as she goes.
Letho hears her coming, there’s no way he could miss all the noise she makes, and there’s bold-faced terror in his eyes when they lock with hers. He throws the harpy he’d been tangled with away from him, turning towards Aella as he does, and finally sees the beast diving at his back.
Aella will never be quite sure how they each knew the other’s intentions, in those few breaths between their reactions. Letho meets her eyes for a piece of a moment and then catches the harpy diving at him, rips one of his fangs free from its sheath and engages without hesitation. Aella darts past the pair to meet the harpy Letho had thrown to the ground just seconds before. Its wing is broken and there’s a slash down its side but it still comes at Aella, hissing and spitting all the while.
Aella doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t even think really, just lets the instincts the Vipers have been honing take over. She ducks a swipe, uses a dagger to block a second set of claws, twists to her left and dives into a roll that brings her up at the beast’s back. It’s simple to drive one of her blades into the center of the harpy’s back, it sinks in deep and she gives it a vicious twist before she jerks it free. The monster collapses to the ground in front of her, revealing Letho watching her with wide eyes and his mouth hanging open.
For a moment, she thinks he’s going to shout at her, chastise her for putting herself in danger, but he doesn’t. He gives her a little nod, goes down on one knee as she closes the distance between them, and wraps one big arm around her little shoulders.
“Stupid, brave girl,” he murmurs, squeezing her just shy of too tight, her face smushed into his uninjured shoulder.
“I won’t apologize, you needed my help,” she mumbles.
“Yes, I did.”
Aella is so shocked she nearly falls into the dirt when he releases her.
“You’re gettin’ faster every day, snakelet, and smarter too,” he tells her, a little twinkle of something like pride in his golden eyes. “It seems I’ve developed a bad habit of underestimatin’ you, my whirlwind. I’ll do better.”
She doesn’t know what to say so she just nods, a little dumbstruck. Letho stands and gathers his sword, wipes the blade on his filthy pants and sheaths it, and waits for her to do the same with her own blade. He’s giving her an odd sort of look when she straightens up, she doesn’t really know what to make of it.
“Thank you, Aella,” he says, calm and clear and firm. “I’m glad to have you at my back.” And he turns to walk into the trees, back to where they’d left their supplies when they’d first heard the harpies.
It takes a few minutes to gather her wits, but she goes barreling after Letho through the underbrush and falls into step at his side. He’s stunned her into silence, a feat unto itself, but it doesn’t last for long; her curiosity always gets the better of her.
“Hey Letho?”
“Hm?”
“One of them had different markings, it was bigger too…”
“Good eyes, snakelet. Was a celaeno harpy, they’re dream stealers. They’re rare, more intelligent that your standard harpy and-” The walk back to their supplies is spent learning everything Letho can tell her about the different harpy variations.
The rest of the day is spent patching up Letho’s wounds and trekking deeper into the mountains until they find a suitable place to camp. Aella asks five thousand questions like she always does and Letho answers each one and nothing feels very different; except that it does , in some little, unidentifiable way. Maybe it’s the little quirk at the corner of Letho’s mouth that he doesn’t bother to hide, or that hint of pride twinkling in his eyes every time they meet Aella’s, or the tone of his voice when he asks her to set the snares that makes her certain that he won’t go behind her to check them this time.
Aella doesn’t know how to explain or quantify what she’s feeling, this new thing that Letho has given her, but it feels a little like trust. That’s not quite right though, that word is too small and flimsy to hold up the enormity of what she feels in her heart. She wonders idly, as she returns to camp, if this is what it feels like to have a father. A whole family , she corrects herself, thinking of Auckes and Serrit antagonizing each other back at the keep.
She doesn’t say any of it to Letho but when she returns to their camp she goes over to where he’s sitting by the fire, cleaning his blade. She wraps her arms about his neck, feels his contented sigh in the rise and fall of his wide shoulders, and drops a kiss to his cheek.
“I’m glad to have you at my back, too, Viper.”
# # #
Letho watches the girl sleep across their fire that evening with only one clear thought in his mind.
My girl.