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The forest is quiet save for some game in the distance and birds in the tree tops. Too quiet. Lambert sighs and pushes himself forward again. His footsteps disturb the soundscape, but still not to what it should be.
Fuck everything.
He shouldn’t even be here to observe the forest – not at this time of the year, which should see him safely in Kaer Morhen. Instead, here he is, traipsing through some godsforsaken forest in northern Aedirn, freezing his damned balls off. He’d thought the Blue Mountains were the only place to go this cold this early in the colder season; but then, below a certain temperature, it all feels the same to him.
Fucking Auckes.
He’d run across the other Witcher in Vergen, accompanied by a tall woman who’d seemed faintly familiar and smelled of Witcher. She hadn’t given a name, but Lambert had had bigger things to worry about.
Such as the contract Auckes had mentioned while they were trading rumours and warnings they’d picked up on the Path that year.
“For a Cat?” Lambert had clarified. “As in, looking for one of those mad fucking bastards to take it on?”
Auckes had shaken his head. “Heard the contract was on the Cat. Dunno who, or why, for that matter,” he’d said, shrugging while staring into the distance. “Cat strife, y’know?”
Only years of practice had allowed Lambert to stay unaffected - at least outwardly. It was stupid to panic anyway; there were dozens of Cats still left, the Caravan larger than any other of the schools. The chances of the Cat in question being Lambert’s Cat were vanishingly small.
“Off their fucking rocker, all of them,” he’d grumbled. Auckes and his mysterious friend had chuckled in agreement, before they’d moved on to which towns were better left to their own devices. The words still had stuck with Lambert, long after he’d crossed into Kaedwen, until he had finally been unable to bear them any longer.
So here Lambert is, following rumours and vague descriptions given to him by the dwarves in Vergen. “Not the fucking White Wolf,” he grouses. Of course it isn’t; pretty boy with his pretty human bard would never be caught this far at east at this time of the year. “Any less information and y’all would have just kept your traps shut.”
It’s not entirely fair, but Lambert isn’t inclined to be fair right now. Not when Aiden hadn’t shown up to the agreed meeting spot a couple weeks ago. Not when there is a contract out on a Cat. It is all just a little too fitting to be mere coincidence as much as Lambert hopes - nay, prays, to gods he doesn’t believe in - that he is just reaching for connections where they are none.
He has almost turned around a dozen times since encountering Auckes. He hasn’t. Terrible dread has been driving him forward, even when it has left him frozen inside, suffused with a brittle sort of calm that has been straining under his tumultuous thoughts.
What will he do if he gets there and finds a bloated corpse floating in the shallow waters? If he finds a piece of armour or a sword or, most damning, his medallion? If he finds nothing at all?
Because what else could he hope to find? It’s been weeks since he talked to Auckes, considerably longer since the contract was put out; if the poor sod had come out of this alive, he was either long gone or had succumbed to his injuries.
Lambert tries not to dwell on this, but the forest doesn’t make it easy.
Every caw, every flutter of wings, every groan that might signify the approach of a horde of necrophages has been putting him on high alert, pushing those terrible thoughts to the forefront of Lambert’s mind.
At his grimmest, what keeps him putting one foot in front of the other is the thought that closure will do him good. Or rather, it will be better than wondering forever and ever if Aiden has simply grown sick of him after all.
He is considering making camp for the night when he finally sees it: the signs of a fight Vergen’s hunters had noticed a couple of days ago. When the alderman had told him, he’d imagined some cut down brush, or possibly tufts of fur and splashes of blood - can’t trust a human or even dwarves to tell animal blood from other kinds if it’s not fucking black as ichor and stinking to the heavens - but that’s not what he finds.
A path of destruction carves through the forest, saplings and small trees cut down and heavy skid marks cleaving through the half-frozen ground, indentations where someone pushed themself off into the air, and many of the majestic old trees have trunks looking rather worse for wear.
“Call this less of a sign, and more of a fucking well trained barker’s cry,” Lambert murmurs to himself, because the alternative is thinking about how many Witchers it would take to cause this level of havoc - and how desperate the fucker on the defensive must have been.
He follows the path of the fight until he gets to a large clearing, though he cannot make himself actually enter it. The stench of Witcher blood is overpowering, days old and all the more pungent for it.
After a moment’s hesitation, Lambert reaches for a vial of Cat - how fitting - and downs it. Two blinks later, the world screams at him, most of all the trail leading out the other side. It’s a lot of blood, even for a Witcher, and so it’s no surprise that whoever used to contain that blood had to be dragged away.
What is more of a surprise is that after a while, the trail becomes too faint to see even with enhanced eyes. But by then, Lambert doesn’t need it anymore - the scent of injured Witcher is more than enough to guide him. It leads him right up to a cave, mouth unobtrusive and overgrown with moss. A pretty sight, inasmuch as Lambert is able to judge such things; the late afternoon sun glints off of the coarse stones and catches mesmerisingly in hanging drips of ice.
It’s tits which hang down, Lambert’s mind supplies, which means he’s looking at stalactites. What a useless thing to remember right now. Frozen tears would be a more apt name, if Lambert were one for poetry. He is not.
He is careful as he moves closer to the mouth of the cave; careful and quiet. There’s two distinct heart beats inside, one of them Witcher-slow. Lambert tries to keep his hopes down. All he can smell is the moss and remnants of Witcher blood and days-old injury. He may be able to distinguish that from human or other blood, but when Witchers bleed, they all just smell like Witcher. Mutated and wrong. Sometimes, he thinks Cats and Vipers smell more wrong than others, but that still does not let him distinguish one of them from the others.
Quiet footfalls approach before he can talk himself into entering the cave after all. It’s a man that appears, grizzled and clad rather adventurously in detritus commonly found in a forest.
“Aren’t you cold?” Lambert blurts. He certainly is, and he’s dressed considerably warmer than the man - a druid, even if Lambert has never seen one that is such an embodiment of all the stereotypes about the old magic wielders.
“Good day to you, youngling,” he says, further cementing the image. Lambert lets his face speak for him. The possibly-a-druid chuckles, and visibly scans Lambert. “What can I do for you?”
Lambert squints at him, but then decides that he might as well. “You have found someone. Might be someone I’m looking for. Can I see ’em?”
The druid’s face closes off immediately. “Come to finish him off?”
Lambert rolls his eyes. “Wouldn’t be asking if I were.”
“Hm,” the druid replies. He musters Lambert for a moment longer, before he relents. “Guess you’re right at that.”
He steps to the side, gesturing for Lambert to follow him deeper into the cave. After one last breath of fresh air, Lambert does.
The walk to the main cave is short, the stench of injury and infection getting stronger. It’s enough to make a Lambert’s hand grow clammy; overpowering a Witcher’s immune system to the point of giving him an infection is no mean feat.
The druid pauses at the final bend, judging by the volume of the laboured breathing and the sweat of sickness hanging in the air. “Found him in quite the pickle. The fellow was left for dead, and he would have been if it wasn’t for his - you know… thing.” The druid looks meaningfully at Lambert.
“You mean, if he weren’t a Witcher?”
“Aye.” The druid gives him a hard stare. “It is not a pretty sight.”
“Won’t frighten me,” Lambert says, and promptly eats his words when he rounds the final corner.
There, on a mattress made from logs and branches and woven river grasses, lies a form he’s too familiar with. His heart skips several beats until his eyes alight on the shallow rise-and-fall of the rib cage. Relief so strong it almost drives him to his knees floods through his body.
“Aiden,” he breathes. There is no mistaking him, even looking like death warmed over. Bandages cover his arms and torso and even his head; it’s hard to tell with his legs hidden under blankets, but there is no reason to think they look any better than the rest of him. Still, he is a sight for sore eyes.
A low groan, and then Aiden cracks open the lone eye not covered in gauze. Lambert has never been so glad to see the venomous green glint back at him, even hazy with pain.
“Lam?”
“Aiden,” he repeats, uncertain what else to say.
“Good to see you,” Aiden says, voice scratchy with disuse. He promptly starts coughing.
The druid hurries over, picking up a jug of water and carefully propping Aiden up. It hurts to see his lover so weak, unable to even support himself enough to drink.
In the silence, Lambert manages to gather his wits. “I thought you were dead!”
Aiden swallows, some of the water trickling down his cheek. “Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated,” he says, wincing when the grin on his face appears to pull on whatever injury is currently hidden underneath bandages.
Lambert blinks stupidly for too long, not quite able to believe that Aiden would already joke about this.
Who is he kidding? Of course Aiden would joke about this.
It’s that which finally makes him realise that Aiden has, indeed, not ditched him because he wanted to, but because he’d had been the subject of a contract, after all.
“What happened? Who did you piss off?”
Aiden chuckles, another low, rough sound and lets his eye flutter closed again. “That’s a long story,” he says. He sighs. “But it seems like we’ll have all the time in the world for me to tell you.”
Lambert smiles, almost against his will. “Gonna hole up in Vergen, once you’re well enough to be moved. You’ll be stuck with me all winter.”
“Looking forward to it.” Aiden sighs again, and then slackens in what appears to be genuine sleep.
Lambert watches him for a long moment. The druids eyes bore into his side, and he knows there are questions in his immediate future.
Too many questions, probably. Plus, he has many questions of his own. But as a worried as he is over Aiden’s condition, most of all, he’s glad that Aiden is still alive to answer those questions.
Everything else has a hard time mattering in the face of that.