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Beware, said the last of the Witchers, take heed / for we shall not return except in the time of man’s greatest need.
An occupational hazard of bards that Jaskier didn’t learn in school but quickly learned while performing is this: sometimes very large, very scowly, and very armed men just show up to performances, and then they rudely drag one off the stage and across the town, with no respect for one’s clothes, one’s instrument, or one’s purse.
“Really, this is – ow – really quite – ouch – undignified,” he protests, trying without success to wriggle free from the firm grips on his shoulders. “I do have functioning legs, you know, and this is not at all necessary!”
Another occupational hazard: mostly, people don’t listen to bards.
The guards continue not listening as they drag him out of the tavern he’d been charming into a free dinner and free bed and into a hall on the other end of town. It would be a great hall for a performance, actually, all high ceilings and wide spaces for maximum seating, but unfortunately the only occupants are a gorgeous woman dressed in expensive silks and a scowling man with his arms crossed.
Jaskier doesn’t know the woman, so he sweeps into a bow for her. “Good morn, my good lady, and well met! I suppose you might be in need of the services of a bard, and I am, of course, the finest in the land, but I do think your men could have been a little gentler when recruiting me,” he says.
The woman ignores him, which, rude, and instead turns to the man. “This is him?”
“This is him,” says Lord Blackwell, consummate thrower of parties and cheater of contracts. “Do it.”
The woman holds out a hand. Lord Blackwell scowls.
“You know the deal. Half up front, half afterwards. Or you can deal with this alleged bard yourself.”
“Alleged!” Jaskier yells indignantly. “I am a graduate of Oxenfurt! There is no alleged anything about me.”
Sadly, Lord Blackwell ignores him too. That’s a habit of his, ignoring people. It’s probably why his wife had been so bored during the last party – and so eager to drag Jaskier back to her bedchambers afterwards, when her husband had passed out from too much drink.
He does hand the woman a purse, though. And a rather substantial one.
“My good sir, you should be ashamed,” Jaskier tells him. “If you have enough to drop on a woman, you certainly have enough to pay a humble bard for entertainment.”
“I didn’t pay you to entertain my wife,” Lord Blackwell spits, finally turning to Jaskier.
Jaskier shrugs. “She asked.”
“You should have said no!”
“What man turns down a lovely lady who requests the pleasure of his company? All she wanted was a little joy . . . which, I’m sad to say, was quite lacking in her life.”
Lord Blackwell swells like a frog, but the woman turns to him before he can reply.
“As fascinating as this conversation is,” she interrupts, “I’m ready. Are you?”
“More than.” Lord Blackwell grins, savage and fierce, his rotted old teeth on full display. It sends a shiver up Jaskier’s spine, because grins like that usually don’t bode well. Usually they mean he’s about to chased out of town, thrown into jail, or even sentenced to hang. Nothing’s ever stuck, but, well, Jaskier edges towards the door anyways. “Do it.”
The woman raises her hands, and a dusty old tome rises from the floor to eye level. She chants some ancient words and Jaskier catches words here and there, but then a giant gaping black void tears itself open in the ceiling.
“Hmm. So you’re a sorceress,” Jaskier says. “I don’t suppose I could convince you to close that, couls I?”
Something in the void screeches, ancient and animalistic.
The sorceress smiles. “No. But I will give you a word of advice, bard: run.”
Well, that’s one thing Jaskier can do. He hops to his feet, swings his lute back over his shoulder, and takes off at full speed. He has no desire to find out exactly what curse the sorceress invoked or find out what thing is going to come out of the portal, after all.
He does kind of wish Lord Blackwell had done the usual thing, though. If he’d paid Jaskier the full promised amount for performing, Jaskier might not have slept with his wife.
Might. She had been quite lonely, after all.
Screeching echoes in the distance, and Jaskier picks up the pace. Hopefully after a few days, whatever the sorceress summoned will give up or collapse. Spell constructs can generally only last so long.
Occupational hazard of being a bard, after all: sometimes one just has to run.
A few weeks later, Jaskier has come to the slightly frightening conclusion that no, this spell is not going to wear off or collapse. Every night without fail, the second the sun dips below the horizon, the damned screeching begins anew, and whatever unholy abomination of a construct the sorceress raised hunts Jaskier down like it’s starving and he’s the only thing it can eat.
Even before the guards dragged him out of the tavern he was playing in, he had little coin to his name, so he has no way to pay any other sorcerer to end the construct curse. And that, of course, assumes that any hedgewitch he could find in some backwater town could end the curse – if the curse has persisted this long, the caster must have been very powerful and the curse very old.
And old curses are hard to break.
The hours start to blur together, and then the days. Jaskier sleeps by day and runs by night, running, always running, his feet beating the rhythm into the ground and his lute thumping on his back. His fine clothes grow grey with sweat and dust, but that helps to hide him from the monsters’ eyes. He sings every ballad he knows and whispers every story he’s ever heard to keep himself company. He cuts through forests and swamps and plains, and through it all the monsters follow him.
He tries to find refuge in a town, one night.
He never does that again.
Jaskier almost concedes defeat, after that. Walking in the town decimated by the construct is enough to make any man lose his stomach contents, and Jaskier had only had a full belly due to the kindness of the town that took him in – the kindness he repaid in blood, and death, and destruction.
As he stumbles towards the road, he passes by slaughtered men and women and children, some clutching belongings as they fled, but most empty handed. The construct didn’t give them much time.
One man he passes is holding a very long sword. That alone wouldn’t be notable – many of the men armed themselves, or tried to – but this sword is covered in rust underneath all the blood and viscera. Jaskier wanders closer, curious as to why the man would have gone for a rusty sword rather than a clean one, and as he peers at it, he spots a wolf’s head stamped into the cross guard.
It’s not a family crest, too plain and simple, but it stirs at Jaskier’s memories of a long ago ballad, a song out of ancient memory, crafted during war and forgotten during peace. A song of warriors, of monsters, and of the mutants who had hunted monsters.
A Witcher’s blade.
Jaskier had thought it a beautiful tale, but far too fanciful. Who would believe tales of men mutated into monsters, with cat eyes and sharp fangs and silver swords? Surely, he had thought, the bard who had crafted the ballad had an excellent imagination, but the ending had been abrupt and not the sweeping dramatic one normal for that time period.
The Witchers had not been praised for saving the world, for keeping the peace, for killing the monsters. They had been driven out and away, until at least they had gone into the mountains and never come down. A sad ending, Jaskier had always thought.
But here is a Witcher’s blade in a dead man’s hand, and Jaskier is being chased by a construct that just won’t end, and perhaps, he thinks, perhaps there is some truth to the ballad after all. Perhaps monsters are real – and perhaps so too are the monster hunters.
Jaskier looks up. The path he is standing on splits in two directions. One leads to the west, towards the coast. The other leads north, to the mountains.
Jaskier hitches his lute higher on his back and sets off towards the mountains.
The days grow shorter and the nights longer. The weather turns brisk and biting, and Jaskier barely has any chance to enjoy the warmth of the sun for the small amount of time it shines the sky. Food is scarce in the mountains, and water even more so. And every night, the construct – the monster – gets closer and closer and closer.
When Jaskier finds the dagger, it’s almost on top of him. He’s lost his lute and he’s bleeding, and in fact he thumps right against the tree as he tries to catch his breath before it dawns on him that the tree he’s using to support himself has a strange pattern on it.
A long dagger with a yellow hilt, blue and reds soaked into the end. It’s not faded in the least, even though the tree has grown and warped the end of the blade. And the blade is the exact same silver as the ancient sword Jaskier saw in the village. If anything points to magic, that would do it.
Also, Jaskier has very little choice, given the furious screeching of the now very close monster.
He takes a deep breath and smears his palm over the blade, wincing as the rough bark catches on his wounds. It’s ice cold to the touch and hard as stone – and even as Jaskier stares at it, absolutely nothing happens.
He curses. Some ballads are just made up tales, and apparently this is one of them.
Still: “I am Jaskier, and right now this is sort of my time of greatest need!” he tells the possibly-magic dagger. “So any time you want to summon an ancient monster hunter, that would be excellent. Preferably now.”
The tree remains silent, the dagger remains unmoved, and Jaskier remains imminent monster lunch.
“Damn,” Jaskier says, and sinks to his knees as the dizziness finally takes hold. “I would have loved to meet a Witcher.”
Idly, as the screeching reaches a truly horrifying pitch, Jaskier thinks that his blood is a perfect match to the red on the hilt, shimmering in the dim light. Perhaps, he wonders, that is how the dagger got so red, if others have come chasing a fanciful tale and ended up dead here too. Maybe this tree has grown so large by fattening itself on the corpses of those who came before.
“That is an exceedingly morbid thought,” a voice says, too loud and right by Jaskier.
Jaskier yelps, flinches back, and hits his head on the tree.
“Oh, now you’ve done it,” is the last thing he hears before he passes out.
Jaskier wakes up, surprisingly. He is not dead, most shockingly. He is also no longer in a lot of pain, as his wounds have been bandaged and neatly packed with something vaguely sweet and pungent. And there is a fire going that he has been gently laid in front of.
“What,” Jaskier says, “the hell.”
Which is when the three hulking masses on the other side of the fire that Jaskier had thought were trees prove that they are not, in fact, vegetation, because they turn around. And have glowing yellow eyes. And massive swords strapped to their backs.
“Oh my god don’t eat me!” Jaskier says, because, hey, why not try it? And he can’t exactly run away.
One set of yellow eyes blinks. “Why the hell would we eat you?” says the man the voice belongs to. “You smell disgusting.”
And, well, fair enough. Jaskier sniffs at himself and shudders. “I am as ripe as a Nilfgaardian ballsack,” he agrees. “But I don’t think the construct that was chasing me with its sharp and shiny teeth cared about that. Speaking of that, um, what happened to it?”
One of the other men grunts. “Not a construct. Plumard.”
“ , , , I was being chased by a fruit?”
“No. Plumard.”
At Jaskier’s blank look, another man sighs. He leans forward, stirring a pot that Jaskier only just realizes is the reason for the fire, and explains what a plumard is. Or probably does, anyways; Jaskier is far, far too busy staring at the man’s scars, which are so deep in his face and so widespread that it seems impossible any man could have survived them.
I am Jaskier, and right now this is sort of my time of greatest need!
“Oh my god, you’re a Witcher,” Jaskier says.
This time, all of the men – the Witchers – blink.
The scarred Witcher, as it turns out, is named Eskel. The one who had startled the hell out of Jaskier is Lambert. The one who communicates mostly in grunts is Geralt. And they are all Witchers, flesh and blood and bone made magic, who hunt monsters and absolutely murdered the hell out of the whatever-it-was that has been hunting Jaskier.
“A sorceress summoned it?” Eskel says slowly, after Jaskier has relayed the tale.
Jaskier nods and nearly spills the soup Eskel so kindly gave him. “Out of a very big, very dark void.”
The Witchers exchange glances. They do not look like fun ones, either. They’re darker, grimmer, and dangerous.
“What did she use? Book, incantation, or flowers?”
“Uh, book.”
Geralt grunts. “Not good.”
“We know that, Wolf,” Lambert says, rolling his eyes and kicking back his heels. “Guess the old man was right. One copy did survive.”
“We tried our best,” Eskel says wearily, with the edge of a long worn argument. “So why did the sorceress summon a monster to go after you, Jaskier?”
Having three pairs of brilliant yellow eyes is somewhat disconcerting. Jaskier squirms, and this time he does spill his soup. He flails and shakes his hand as it burns, but then a strong hand is yanking the bowl away and mopping up the liquid with a blanket. When he looks up, Geralt is there, the fire dancing off his bone white hair as he hands Jaskier another bowl with a firm look.
“Don’t drop this,” Geralt growls.
“Okay, yes, yep, no dropping, got it,” Jaskier says weakly. “Um. So. I sort of sleep with a lord’s wife? And he hired a sorceress.”
Silence meets his explanation.
“They unleashed monsters back into this world because you cuckolded a lord?” Lambert asks slowly, after a long, painful moment.
“In my defense, she was quite willing, and he didn’t even notice til the morning.”
The Witchers share another glance. This one is wearier than the last, resignation drawn in every line on their faces. It makes Jaskier’s heart ache, a little, remembering how the ballad had emphasized how Witchers were feared and hated and, eventually, exiled, just for doing the jobs they had been created for and killing monsters. Clearly, even though the world has forgotten them, they have not forgotten the world.
Eskel rises to his feet. “Tomorrow, we hunt,” he declares. “Today, we prepare.”
By some unspoken signal, Eskel and Lambert disappear into the brush. Geralt paces a little circle, peering into the darkness, before resuming his spot before the fire and going still as stone again.
Jaskier clears his throat. “So, um. Where did they go?”
“Hunting. We need food.” When Jaskier looks at the pot, Geralt sighs. “More food. Hunting requires energy.”
Jaskier means to ask more questions, truly he does, but then he catches sight of Geralt’s sword, resting gently against the log the Witchers were sitting on, and the wolf’s head embossed upon it is a perfect match for one Jaskier saw so long ago. It even, when he reaches out tentative fingers, does the wonderful job of not vanishing like the hallucination Jaskier is half convinced this is.
“You really are a Witcher,” Jaskier says in wonder, tracing over the wolf’s head.
“Yes,” Geralt says.
“And you really killed the . . . plum thing.”
“Yes.”
“You saved my life,” Jaskier tells him.
Geralt grunts. “Occupational hazard.”
“Being a Witcher comes with occupational hazards?” And then Jaskier remembers, oh right, Witchers were meant to hunt monsters, all the things that men could not kill, magic gone wrong, nature evolving out of control, experiments that went too far. “Um. I don’t suppose any of you might be in need of a bard?”
“Why would I need a bard?”
“To sing of your deeds and spread your fame, of course.”
“I don’t need fame.”
“No, but it certainly won’t hurt.” Jaskier taps a finger against his chin and looks at Geralt for real this time. He’s tall, of course, and muscled and strong. He has shockingly white hair and golden eyes that glow in the dark. And he came to the rescue of a half-dead, foolish bard. Yes, he can work with this. “So how about we make a deal?”
Geralt gives him a look. Jaskier continues talking anyways.
“You help me down off this mountain, and I’ll sing about you.”
Geralt doesn’t even think about it. “No.”
“But Geralt – ”
“No.”
Jaskier pouts. “Every bard needs a muse, and a perfect one stumbles into my lap, and he refuses to let me use him! How is this even fair? The gods themselves – ”
“Life isn’t fair. And we would help you down the mountain anyways.”
“Then I owe you a debt.”
“You have no coin. There’s no way you can possibly repay any debt.”
“Well, no,” Jaskier concedes. “I’ll have to get a lute, first. Alas, I lost mine. Very sexy lute she was, too. I wonder if – ”
Geralt lifts his arm and points. “I found it. Wasn’t too far.”
And sure enough, right across the campfire is Jaskier’s beautiful companion. She’s a bit rougher around the edges now, but she’s here and she’s safe in Jaskier’s hands, and he’s crooning to her about the wondrous Witcher who rescued her before he remembers that he has an actual audience now.
An audience who is blushing very slightly. Apparently Witchers can blush.
Jaskier takes another nice, long look at his rescuer. He hasn’t time, exactly, or the company to scratch his itch, but now his monster has been vanquished, and his rescuer is a damn fine sight for sore eyes. And Geralt did retrieve his lute.
“That makes two debts,” Jaskier says, and sashays his way across the fire until he can drop into Geralt’s lap. “However shall I repay you?”
Geralt blinks up at him, startled, cat eye pupils expanding and hands tentative points of contact on Jaskier’s waist, like he isn’t sure what to do, like people don’t regularly fling themselves at him.
People are fools.
“What are you – ” Geralt says, right before Jaskier grinds down and cuts off that line of questioning.
“Well, the ballad did say the Witchers would return in the time of man’s greatest need,” Jaskier says. “And I have a rather pressing great need right now. Are you going to rise to meet it, oh great White Wolf of legend?”
It turns out that the ballad of the White Wolf is sorely lacking in truth.
Geralt is so, so, so much more.
“I,” Jaskier pants out, dazed and sore and beyond satisfied, “am going to write you so many songs.”
“How are you even still coherent.”
“Darling, if you want me to stop talking, you’re going to have to do better than that.”
“Go to sleep.”
“But – ”
“Go to sleep,” Geralt says. “We have monsters to kill in the morning.”
“I thought you did kill the plum thing?”
“The spell that summoned the plumard would not have stopped with that. Once the door is opened, it cannot be closed. More will have followed.”
Jaskier thinks about that for approximately two seconds before he decides that perhaps the morning is a better time to have that kind of terrifying realization. Instead, he drops his head back down to Geralt’s unfairly muscled chest and cuddles closer.
Then he brightens. “Wait, that means I can write you even more songs – ”
“Shut up and go to sleep.”
Behold, sang the bard, take heed / for here stands the Witcher who made the monsters bleed / he saved my life and he saved yours / so pour him some ale from your town stores.
FINIS