Work Text:
After Geralt and Jaskier arrived at the Keep and told everyone about Jaskier’s innate magic, Vesemir having offered the lab and library as starting points to look for answers behind it, Yennefer started keeping a notebook full of her observations.
Jaskier’s blood seemed to be purely human, showing no trace of magical similarity with anyone in the Keep. The tomes they started dusting off, organizing, and reading in the Keep’s massive library hadn’t proved helpful as of yet, either.
Less important than finding answers though was making sure he could control it, exploring the extent of his control, and finding the other applications of his magic.
The endless ocean of possibilities and probabilities intrigued her.
Several weeks after he’d arrived at the Kaer with Geralt and broke the truth about his magic, Jaskier found himself settling into the rhythm of a routine.
A typical day would start by waking up with Geralt and fixing his bedhead for him before they went down to have breakfast. Then he’d either accompany Yennefer to the library or work with Vesemir in the lab, searching for possible explanations behind his magic or helping to restock potions.
After lunch, the witchers would hand off Ciri to him and Yenn so she could practice controlling her Chaos or take a music lesson while they did their usual upkeep of the Kaer. Jaskier and Yenn would give Ciri a break before dinner after their lessons, playing in the surrounding snow and chasing each other inside the halls.
Jaskier would take song requests and play on his lute as they unwound after dinner, occasionally breaking into the wine stores if they’d worked particularly hard that day. He’d retire to bed with Geralt, messing his hair up for him again while they rolled around in the sheets, and then drifted off into a well-earned sleep.
Yennefer approaches him one morning during breakfast and interrupts the routine.
She sits across from him, hands interlaced as she rests her chin on them, leaning forward and staring at him.
“Wha’?” He asks, mouth full of porridge.
“It’s not enough to just read books, you know. And your blood tests have showed nothing of note.” She says pointedly.
“I’ll have you know I have Pankratz blood, the most noble and noteworthy blood there is!” He protests.
“I want to test your magic, like we’re testing Ciri’s.”
He stiffens. “Not with the culling song, I’m not doing that unless someone’s life depends on it.”
Her face softens. “I wouldn’t make you do that. I just think it would be a good idea to explore your abilities here, at the Keep, where it’s safe. There’s open space surrounding us, plenty of places we can practice that Vesemir said won’t harm anything if accidentally destroyed. We may not be able to find the cause or source of your magic, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help you control it to the best of your ability,” she explains.
Jaskier nods, consenting to the idea. “So what do you want to do?”
“What are you aware that you can do?”
Jaskier stands nervously in the spare room Yenn chose to practice in for its distance away from the important areas of the Keep, shivering in the draftiness.
“There’s no pressure, just do what you can. The point of exercises like this is to find your limitations, and then the next time we’ll try pushing past them,” she explains.
Geralt puts a fur around his shoulders. “Even if you can’t do anything this time, it’s still progress because you tried,” he adds, sounding so much like he does when he talks to Ciri during training.
Jaskier nods, only half-hearing them as he looks around the dim empty room, taking in a shaky breath.
He’s not nervous about this facet of his abilities. He knows he can do it. He’d done it half-consciously the night he saved Geralt with his culling song, after healing their injuries with a harmony.
He’s nervous because everything — the cramped room, the darkness, the chill, the mice that will surely come, the knots in his empty stomach — reminds him of when he was thirteen and stuck in that cell.
And with those memories come memories of helplessness and desperation and a hum low in his throat and dead mice and rancid breath in his face and hands on him —
“Jaskier?”
Geralt’s concerned rumble breaks through his train of thought.
(His knight, always saving him, even from the dangers of his own mind.)
He’d backed himself into a corner of the room, trying to gulp down breaths past the flood of feeling and memory that threatened to drown him.
“Oh,” he says dumbly, looking down at his shaking hands.
Geralt and Yennefer sit down where they are, giving him space and raising their hands to project that they mean no harm and won’t approach unless he wants them to.
“What’s wrong, Jaskier?” Geralt asks, brows furrowed.
He’d told them, when he first arrived at the Keep, that he first learned of his abilities when he was younger after two men kidnapped and tried to rape him.
He hadn’t told them that he’d been held for two weeks in a cell with no light, with minimal food and water, with the men taunting him almost every day. He hadn’t told them about the ransom and how he’d spent his days ruminating over which outcome was more terrifying: either his father paying it and subjecting their family and Lettenhove to future blackmail, or his father not paying and subjecting Jaskier to the whims of his kidnappers. He hadn’t told them about the comfort the mice had given him before he accidentally killed them. He hadn’t told them how absolutely horrifying being grabbed by Creepy and Stinky was, and how horrifying it was to learn he could sing people to death if he was desperate enough.
He opens his mouth to try to explain, but for perhaps the first time since the djinn, words are hard to get out. The noise is aborted in the base of his throat.
It’s been over thirty years since The Incident, why did the memories bother him so much? He’d had no problem with singing or sex or touch since, or with calling animals to him. And when it came down to it, he had no qualms about using the culling song to save the people he loved.
And yet.
His face crumples and his arms reach out for the two of them of their own accord.
Swiftly, he’s pulled into Geralt’s lap, and Yenn’s gentle hands start stroking his hair. It was so unlike the rough, careless grasps of the men from his memories.
He grips the two of them back, hiding his face in Geralt’s chest as he releases the pus from an untreated childhood wound.
After talking, they re-strategize.
They find a bigger, warmer, and windowed room to practice in. Jaskier makes everyone promise that they won’t kill the mice he calls to him, and Geralt makes Jaskier promise he’ll eat something the morning of, even if he’s nervous. Yenn suggests that he hold something physical in his hands to ground himself while they practice.
Each suggestion puts another layer between him and the reminders that bring back the feelings and memories of The Incident.
(But more than anything, just talking to the two of them about it, with their nonjudgemental and understanding faces, helps.)
Yennefer comes up in front of them, producing a metal flute with her Chaos.
She hands it to him, teasing, “Well go on then, piper.”
Jaskier observes the flute. It’s not his usual instrument, and it’s not like the wood flutes he was familiar with, but the cool metal against his skin and the way it reflects the sparkling snow from the windowsill all help keep him present.
He puts his lips to the mouthpiece, memories of the Pied Piper story he’d read as a child coming to mind. He visualizes himself as a different kind of Piper. A Sandpiper, he thinks wryly, remembering his coastal bird moniker.
He lets a bird-like song fill the air, intending to call the few mice Geralt said he could hear in the walls toward him, closing his eyes as he arranges the notes experimentally, moving his fingers along the holes as a song slots into place —
“Holy shit — Jaskier, you can stop!” Yennefer curses.
He opens his eyes and yelps, Geralt steadying him with a hand as he stumbles backward.
The floor is a mass of brown and grey, wriggling with the horde of mice and rats that had come forth.
“Fuck,” Geralt says, looking down around at all of them. “Didn’t know we had this many.”
Jaskier hadn’t just drawn forth a few mice, he’d drawn seemingly every mouse in the Keep toward him.
He blows a quick, sharp note into the flute and sends them scurrying away.
“Wait — what if … some of them were in the kitchens,” Geralt laments, trailing off.
“Oops,” he apologizes.
“When you have power like this, never apologize,” Yenn says, echoing a line she’d once told Ciri when she woke up from a nightmare and screamed a door down, scaring herself. “When you blew that last note, what did you do?”
“I sent them back to where they came from. You know, they’ve got busy days ahead of them, things to do, little mouse families to go home to,” Jaskier says, fiddling with the flute.
“So the intention you can put into your songs seems to work more immediately than you thought, it seems.”
“I suppose so…” Jaskier hadn’t really thought about it, but it makes sense, with how rapid the healing songs had worked that night when he wanted them to.
“And when you played the song before you sent them all away?”
“Just did what you told me to, focused on calling them forward.”
“Let’s try focusing on calling just one.”
Jaskier does, finding that as he thinks about one mouse the notes slow and saunter downward, less of a flighty birdsong and more of a conversation.
He looks down to find a lone grey mouse. “Hello,” he greets.
Yenn clapped, grinning. She looked as proud as she did when Ciri managed to cast a sign successfully for the first time. “Great! Now send that one away and try to see if you can bring back a different one.”
Jaskier waves bye to the mouse and watches it run off as he blows the sharp note he’d blown earlier. He closes his eyes and focuses on trying to summon a different mouse, imagining the two mice passing each other by as the new one comes into the room.
“Brilliant, Jaskier. I think you’ve demonstrated you can be quick and specific with your intentions,” Yenn praises as a dark brown mouse comes in. She seems to be struck with a bolt of inspiration and leaves to her research.
Geralt turns to him. “How do you feel?”
Jaskier considers. “Pretty good, actually. Thank you. Not just for asking, but for, well. Understanding, and doing all this,” Jaskier responds, waving a finger around to gesture at the room.
Geralt squeezes his shoulder. “Of course,” he assures. “Now I need to go check how Ciri is faring training with Lambert. I made him swear not to teach her about bombs until she’d covered basic potions first, but I saw him look at the lake this morning like he wanted to go fishing,” Geralt says, and as if on cue, they hear an explosion and a happy shriek outside in the distance.
After Geralt leaves, the mouse that had been at the center of the floor approaches Jaskier curiously. It puts a paw on his shoe, sniffing the air, its whiskers twitching.
“You must smell the bread in my pants, hmm?” he says, bending down to set the flute on the floor and bringing a roll leftover from breakfast out of his pocket.
He breaks off a piece and gives it to the mouse, picking him up and petting its fur with his thumbs while it eats.
“So what’s your name, hmm? I knew one of your friends, Gordon. You’ll have to send him a postcard, tell him you know me too.”
The mouse looks at him, squeaking.
“I think I’ll call you Henry.”
“Jaskier there’s a mouse tangled in your chest hair,” Geralt points out as they’re getting ready for bed one evening.
“I know, Henry just wanted to cuddle while I read but he got stuck,” Jaskier explains, setting his book down and trying to wrangle the mouse off him. When he’s freed, he sets Henry down on the floor. “Goodnight, little one,” he says, and the mouse squeaks once before disappearing into a hole in the wall.
“Can you… talk to the animals? Understand them?” Geralt asks curiously, watching the interaction.
Jaskier scoffs. “No, I mean I don’t hear their voices in my head or anything. It’s more like they just seem to respond to my music, and when I look at them and they look at me sometimes there’s an understanding there? Kind of like when you talk to Roach.”
As they tested his ability to call forth and send away and direct the rodents in the Keep with his songs — namely, directing them away from the kitchens and toward the rations Jaskier secretly put in the empty room he used for practice instead — he and Henry had become fast friends. Henry would follow him around even if he hadn’t sung, and Jaskier would often put on his coat to find him curled up in the pocket, sleeping.
Jaskier sits up.
“I’ve always thought of music as a kind of language, you know. You have to learn how to write and read music, and you have to have a strong grasp of grammar and rhetoric to make good songs. Maybe animals speak music too?”
“Or nature is another language that you learned how to read,” Geralt replies, musing.
“If your music magic can affect animals, then there’s a possibility that extends to other aspects of nature too. One of the first lessons in Aretuza involves levitating a rock in exchange for a flower’s life source,” Yenn explains to him in the greenhouse.
In front of him are a rock and a pot of wilted flowers.
“I doubt I can levitate things, Yennefer. And isn’t… wouldn’t this be kind of like the culling song, if I’m killing the flower?”
“Don’t think of it as killing anything, you’re just transferring energy. In this case, your aim is to transfer the energy from the flower into lifting the rock. Usually, this exercise is accompanied by an Elder incantation but I want to see if your music can work as a substitute. Just… do what comes naturally to you, don’t overthink it.”
Jaskier sighs, imagining the rock rising in the air as the poor flowers shrivel up in response. Magic was a give and take, after all.
He hums whatever notes come into mind, memories of warmth and joy as he played in the flower field behind his parent’s estate flashing through his head.
“Not what I expected, but impressive nonetheless. We can work with this,” Yennefer comments.
The rock lay still and untouched, but the flowers in the pot had gone from their wilted state into full bloom, petals from a bud unfurling before his eyes.
Jaskier had always been more of a giver.
From then on, Vesemir lets Jaskier loose to sing to his heart’s content to all the herbs in the lab and the plants in the greenhouse.
By the time winter came to an end that year, Jaskier still couldn’t lift a rock, but he had brought Springtime’s blooms to the Keep months early.
“What about other animals? I think we’ve exhausted your ability with mice,” Yenn asks one afternoon, watching as he and Ciri took turns feeding Henry little crumbs of bread and cheese.
“You said you called the animals from the forest that night to drag away the bodies. And it seems like your culling song avoided them because you didn’t want to hurt them either, your focus was solely on the Nilfgaardians. What kind of animals were they, how did you communicate to them what you wanted?”
“It was deer, a few raccoons, foxes, wolves, and a bear too, I think. Typical forest animals. I don’t know how, I was so exhausted at that point, and a bit in shock. I just wanted the bodies gone so we didn’t have to sleep with them surrounding us and to get rid of the evidence. You know, minimize the chances of attracting any necrophages that may have been in the forest too, or leaving a body trail for Nilfgaard to find,” He responds.
“Let’s see how your calling works with other animals,” she suggests.
They end up outside in the courtyards, standing in the snow.
He brings birds of every sort to him just by mimicking their birdcalls like he’d taught himself as a kid until Yennefer tells him it’s cheating.
“Don’t speak to them in their language, make them listen to yours.”
“I think music is their language though, birds sang before humans ever did,” Jaskier points out. “So by singing and them responding doesn’t that mean I’m speaking to them in their language anyway?”
She puts a hand on her hip. “Don’t use notes that mimic their call, then. See how many… dialects or accents there are. Change the syntax, so to speak,” she elaborates.
It takes a few tries and imagination, but he’s able to call a tawny owl to land before him without any hooting involved.
“Now do it again so we can be sure that wasn’t a coincidence,” Yenn says.
This time, a crow lands on Yennefer’s head.
“Very funny, Jaskier.”
“That was the crow’s choice, not mine! She likes your hair. It reminds her of her feathers.”
They move onto the stables and the coops.
Roach huffs at Jaskier when he tries to sing her to him. She does, however, come forward when he offers to braid her mane and put flowers in it.
Lil’ Bleater comes to him when sung to, but is hell-bent on continuing to ram Lambert in the calves when he comes into her shared pen with the chickens to collect eggs.
“Ow – oi! You can’t make her stop? I thought you could control animals,” Lambert grumbles as he tries to wrestle the goat away from him, dropping and cracking eggs as he does.
“You’re ruining breakfast,” Eskel points out. Lambert glares at him.
“I guess if we have an established relationship or they’re particularly willful it doesn’t work,” Jaskier says apologetically when he couldn’t guide her away.
Yenn observes from the edge of the pen.
“Maybe that’s something to work on,” she suggests.
Lambert looks up. “I’m not going to be fucking goat bait!”
Lambert starts wearing his shin guards and training with Jaskier, Yenn, and Lil’ Bleater every other morning.
The goat is particularly angry in the mornings.
Eventually, after figuring out she prefers the songs that Eskel hums when he’s on the Path, Jaskier is able to change her tune.
When he’d first greeted Ciri at the Keep, Jaskier had bowed and kissed her hand.
“It’s so lovely to meet you, princess! I’m Julian Alfred Pankratz, viscount of Lettenhove, at your service.” He winked. “But you can call me Jaskier,”
Ciri giggled. “I know, Geralt talks about you and sings your songs,” she said.
Jaskier had raised his brows and turned toward an embarrassed-looking Geralt. “Does he now? Well, he never sings to me, so you must be something really special. That’s your real power, princess.”
One afternoon after they’d been playing around in the greenhouse and the grounds surrounding it, Jaskier whistles a song and a pair of larks come flying to arrange the flowers they’d picked into nests in their hair, making them look like they had flower crowns.
Ciri exclaims in wonder, “You’re more of a princess than I am!”
“Nonsense, you’re the only princess in this Keep,” he assures.
He looks over at where Geralt is training with Coen and Aiden, hair whipping around him as he pirouettes and parries.
“Although, if I am a princess, I sure snagged a wonderful knight.” His gaze slides over to where Yenn is sunbathing and writing in her journal on the blanket they’d brought out. “Two of them, actually.”
He looks back at Ciri, tapping her foot. “We both did.”
Ciri smiles at her father and mother figures and agrees.
“So we know your magic works with animals, but what about against other magic?” Yenn poses the question over dinner.
“You want to test if he can use music against signs?” Geralt asks as he cuts into the smoked fish that Lambert and Aiden ‘caught’ with their bombs and that Ciri helped Vesemir cook.
“That wasn’t what I had in mind, but that’s a good thought. Add it to the list,” Yenn says, and Jaskier jots it down in the back of his notebook where between drafts of poems and songs he’d been making notes of his training experiences.
“So what then?”
“Have you ever seen a snake charmer, Jaskier?”
“In Gors Velen once. Why?”
That evening, Yenn hands him his flute.
“I want to see if you can use your music on conjured animals, animals made of pure Chaos. No more magic working with nature, this time it’s magic working against magic.”
“Okay…”
“I’m going to conjure a basket and a snake, and I’m going to be controlling the snake. You’re going to use your music to try to keep the snake from moving toward you, and I’m going to use my magic to try to keep the snake from responding.”
“Like magical tug-of-war but with a snake,” Ciri comments. Yenn smiles, “Exactly.”
Jaskier shrugs. “Let’s try it.”
Yenn focuses, a basket appearing before her. There’s hissing and rattling from inside the basket before the head of a king cobra emerges, licking its lips at Jaskier.
“Aren’t those venomous?” Coen asks. Yenn nods, pushing the snake to slither forward.
Jaskier whips the flute up to his lips and starts playing, focusing on the snake’s beady eyes.
He tries the sharp note that usually sends the mice and birds away, but the cobra persists, slowly sliding toward him.
He tries a flute version of the culling song, honing his focus on killing the snake.
“You can’t kill it, it’s not real. Focus on making it turn around,” Yenn calls out.
Jaskier switches the tune, putting his intention behind the notes, moving backward to maintain distance between himself and the snake’s fangs when it doesn’t work.
His back hits the far wall but he keeps playing until the snake reaches the tip of his boot.
Yenn snaps her fingers, sending the snake and basket away into the ether.
“Maybe you need the right incentive,” she thinks aloud.
The next night, she has Ciri sit cross-legged against the far wall, with Henry held in her hands like an offering.
“This time, I’m conjuring a boa constrictor. I’m not moving it toward you, I’m moving it toward them. It’s your focus to keep the snake away, or your mouse friend gets temporarily swallowed,” Yennefer explains, handing him his flute again.
He takes a steeling breath and starts playing before she waves her hand to conjure the basket.
A brown-striped monstrosity emerges from the basket and starts slowly but eagerly writhing toward Henry when its slitted eyes spot the mouse.
He throws all his intention behind the notes, but the snake keeps slithering forward. Something occurs to him.
“Wait! Stop,” he pleads. The snake stops, Yenn looking up at him.
“I know what’s wrong. I’m using the wrong instrument,” he explains.
“What do you mean?”
“I just feel it, I know. It’s like… the language is garbled and that’s why it’s not reaching the snake.”
“The snake is just made of magic, Jaskier, it’s not an actual snake. Why wouldn’t you be able to do it with any instrument?”
“Would you use Aard and expect it to work like Igni? Or use the incantation for your rock levitating trick when you mean to use one for healing wounds? It just wouldn’t work the same, it doesn’t translate. I don’t know how I know, it’s more of a feeling, but I want to try with a different instrument. Look, if it doesn’t work I’ll go back to using the flute.”
Yennefer concedes, deeming his argument sound. “What instrument were you thinking of?”
“Do we have any bagpipes, or can you conjure some?”
“...Do you even know how to play those?” Coen asks quietly.
“I believe there’s a pair of pipes in the cellar,” Vesemir says, and goes off.
He comes back shortly. “They’re dusty, there’s probably mouse nibbles on the bag, and it needs tuning,” he says, handing the bags to him.
Jaskier tells Yenn, “Give me another day.”
Jaskier spends that evening and the next day fixing it up.
He wipes the worn pig-skin bag down and blows into it and compresses the bag until all the dust and Melitele-knows-what is out of its center. He cleans the three drones with a cloth, moving them up and down and adjusting their length until they all resonated with the same tune, puffing on the mouthpiece experimentally as he did so.
He cleans the chanter last, practicing fingering it as he holds and squeezes the bag. Finally, he tunes the chanter by sticking or removing paper on the chanter’s holes so that each hole corresponds to the proper note. He practices a bit, thankful for a summer seminar he’d attended one year at Oxenfurt where one of his professors demonstrated various wind instruments to them.
By evening, he’s ready to try again.
Ciri and Henry sit at the far wall, the rest of the witchers gathered around them. Yenn is on the other end of the hall, forgoing the basket as she conjures the boa constrictor.
Jaskier blows out the first few notes of an ever-familiar tune.
“Is he…?”
“No!”
“Yes!”
Ciri snorts, and Yenn struggles to keep her concentration as an exasperated smile splits her face, pushing the constrictor forward harder in response.
Toss a Coin was more grating than it was ever meant to sound when played on the bagpipes, especially when done by Jaskier’s unpracticed hands, the Keep’s halls magnifying the droning undertones.
Yet, there was also something oddly comforting about it.
Jaskier squeezed the bag to maintain the tune when he needed to inhale, feeling his lungs working harder than they did when he was just playing the flute or singing.
On another exhale as he reaches the chorus, he feels some resistance — not against the bag he’s squeezing, but against some sort of mental barrier. The snake is moving, but it seems to have hit an invisible wall and isn’t progressing toward Ciri and Henry.
Lambert starts cheering. “I think you’re getting the hang of it!”
Eskel encourages, “Keep pushing,” and he does, throwing himself into the chorus and second verse. He needs to take deeper and more frequent breaths, feeling his face burn with exertion.
As he reaches the chorus again, the snake starts to hesitate, turning around and back again, like it can’t make up its mind.
When he finishes the song Yenn gives him a break and disappears the snake.
“Oh thank the gods, I think I was going to pop a lung,” Jaskier pants, sitting down on the ground while Geralt brings him a cup of water.
“Good job, Jaskier,” Yenn praises quietly, still smiling.
Henry runs over to him and he picks him up, putting him in his pocket to pet him. “Hope you’re grateful,” he tells him teasingly. “I just saved you from being eaten.”
“It’s good to see that the bagpipes won’t go to waste,” Vesemir notes.
With more practice and different songs, Jaskier both increases his lung capacity and increases his ability to push back against the magic more completely, sending the snake toward Yennefer.
After a few weeks, when he starts playing the snake ignores Yenn’s mental control completely.
One morning after the witchers had come in from their usual run around the Keep, Aiden posits a devious question.
“What about monsters?”
“You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?”
They test it.
“In the mountain range and forest surrounding the Kaer, there are the occasional nekkers, forktails, and necrophages. There are more creatures closer to Kaedwen and its towns, especially so after the winter. They come looking for food,” Geralt explains.
They make it a goal to start with the creatures close to the Keep and work their way down the mountain over the next few weeks. It will give Ciri a safer way to be exposed to the monsters she learned about in the bestiary, and practice what it would be like on the Path in the future.
They start by having Jaskier hide in a tree with Ciri to observe, while Geralt and Aiden crouch below them in wait.
Jaskier has his lute strapped to his back and the flute in hand. He’s sung about monsters before but never to them, so he’s not sure what will work.
It’s not as intuitive as singing to animals he can see or to animals he knows are around. Even though he has a reference list of all the creatures that had been spotted in the mountains and surrounding areas before and a general idea of what each one looks like from following Geralt around for so long, it’s harder to put forth a call to something that he doesn’t have a clear idea of.
He thinks of his intentions as he uses the flute. Eventually, there’s a rustling in the distance, and Geralt and Aiden unsheath their swords. Ciri crouches closer to him to try to get a better view as he plays.
It turns out to just be a rather large deer. They take it down anyway so they can use the meat for dinner and the hide for clothes.
After a few afternoons, he manages to draw out a kelpie that had been hiding in the half-frozen lake Lambert had broken up with his bombs earlier in the winter.
Like having to tweak the song to seduce the right person with his singing, he’s discovered that he has to tweak the songs depending on the type of animal — he’s found that most small animals are lured by anything if the intention is behind it, but bigger animals like horses and goats and conjured animals needed something different.
Monsters especially needed a peculiar rhythm, seeming to respond better to the flute than his lute — which was a secret relief, as he didn’t want to have to worry about accidentally drawing more monsters to them whenever he plucked his lute in a forest or played in a tavern.
As he works his way down and back up the mountain with a rotation of witcher pairings — Geralt, Vesemir, and Ciri; Lambert and Aiden; and Eskel and Coen — he starts keeping a mental compendium of which beasts seem to prefer which tunes.
He lures the beasts to their deaths like the sirens of his stories. It’s better than having to lay in wait the way he’d seen Geralt have to do on hunts before.
Sometimes his music works better than Axii, calming beasts to sleep so they can peacefully dispatch them, avoiding distress for the beast and avoiding injuries for either of them.
With all the training everyone in the Keep has been doing over the last few months, Jaskier feels secure knowing that everyone in this little family will be ready to face what comes next together.
By the end of their rather long winter, Yennefer’s notebook was full.
Several pages were dedicated to her own Chaos as she noticed it come back to her, and over half the notebook contained observations of Ciri’s incredible power as they helped her learn to control it.
The rest of it concerned Jaskier.
Even after finishing going through the library, the only written similarities they could find were those in storybooks, as Jaskier often brought up: calling animals to him like a princess, leading animals and beasts away like a pied piper, and in the past, seducing people with songs like a siren.
Instead, she learned more about Jaskier and his magic by talking to him, listening to his past, and his metaphors for describing what he thought magic was and how it worked. They learned more through watching him work out what instruments and songs worked for animals and beasts through trial-and-error. She learned the most from watching him figure out how to push against her own magic, and she thinks he may have subconsciously learned more about her in the process.
Yennefer had never told anyone how she used to (and privately still does, sometimes) dream of a future in a hand-built home with someone who loved her to play her bagpipes in the evening.
And she still can’t shake the way he made flowers bloom. Sometimes the way he used magic was so opposite to what she’d been taught. She can’t always see where the balance lies in his magic when he gives so much.
They still don’t have all the answers, and they may never will.
The funny thing was that Yennefer hadn’t sensed anything magical in Jaskier aside from the djinn’s curse when they first met.
Even as the three of them came together and apart over the years, each time the only anomalous thing that she picked up on was how stubbornly young the bard looked despite his age.
Destiny was a determined gardener, one that ensured Geralt and Yennefer (and Ciri, she later learned, when Geralt told her of his child surprise) tangled together like vines over the years. Jaskier kept popping up like a weed between them, by choice.
Destiny plucked and pruned the people who didn’t matter or who prevented them from growing together — Sir Eyck, Ciri’s family, unfortunately, and various Nilfgaardians — but She was never able to remove Jaskier. Even when Geralt sent him away, and when he and Yennefer parted in Oxenfurt, Jaskier always came back to fill the cracks between them.
“Sometimes, a flower is just a flower, and the best thing it can do for us is to die,” Tissaia had told her. It had been an invaluable lesson at the time, and she’d understood the sentiment behind it.
But looking at Jaskier, Yenn thinks that it may not always be the case.
Sometimes, a flower is also a weed, and the best thing it could do for them is bloom.