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It starts when Geralt notices Marlene going to town for her monthly supply run three days early.
She might have gotten away with it, too, if Geralt hadn’t been struck with a sudden bout of insomnia and gone for a late-night walk of the vineyard, returning as the sun threatened to lighten the horizon.
He walks up behind her as she and the stableboy, Giles, finish strapping the horses onto the cart, careful to walk heavily enough that his feet make noise against the smooth cobblestone.
She turns, offering him an almost sheepish smile. “Didn’t know you were up, Master Geralt.”
“Hmm,” Geralt offers in return, poking at the cart wheels. They’re stable, of course, as B.B. would never let his household fall into disarray. But he checks anyway.”Wait right there,” he says, after all four wheels are checked and approved of.
He emerges a few minutes later with a purse of crowns, which he tosses onto the front seat of the wagon, in easy reaching distance for Marlene. She rolls her eyes as she clambers up, pocketing the coins.
“‘S my fault for not rationing the supplies correctly,” Marlene grouses. Giles climbs up beside her, stifling a chuckle behind his hand.
“Nonsense,” Geralt grunts, patting a horse’s flank affectionately. “Five Witchers would drive any normal cook to the point of insanity. Stop trying to give your salary away.”
Marlene laughs brightly and flicks the horse’s reins. “Never, Geralt. Not a chance.”
Despite how blasé he is, however, the early supply run won’t stop bothering him.
He checks the larders for signs of vermin, then checks it again, but the vineyard’s cats are as efficient as ever, despite their dogged avoidance of him. He goes over the ledgers, reading and re-reading each line, but even accounting for the voracious appetites and snacking habits of Witchers, they should have more than enough to feed the estate each month.
He sets his mind to clearing out the vineyard and surrounding estates of archespores, which distracts him until the rest of the Witchers set out on the Path, and by the time next winter rolls around, he’s almost forgotten it.
That is, until it happens again.
This time, Marlene does come to him, brow furrowed in confusion. “I don’t rightly know where it could have gone,” she complains. “I could have sworn I had enough flour for one last batch of biscuits, but I go to look and it’s disappeared! An’ as far as I know, nobody’s been cooking in my kitchen besides me n’ Alba. P’rhaps the cats are getting fat and lazy.”
Geralt sends her away with a conciliatory pat on the shoulder and an extra bag of coin, and checks the larders yet again for rodents or bugs.
He doesn’t even get the faintest whiff, and walks away more confused than ever.
Geralt might get a little bit obsessed, to the point where both Yennefer and Eskel tease him individually about it, and then together, though they’re both careful to do it where Marlene can’t hear.
“The mighty Wolf,” Eskel taunts, “brought low by some missing cheese.” He gets a hunk of bread to the nose for his trouble.
“I’m fairly sure imps aren’t real,” Yennefer remarks over a half-glass of Eveluce. Geralt glares as he sets a Yrden around a jug of milk.
“Last time you tried an exorcism didn’t end particularly well,” Eskel notes, braiding Yennefer’s silky hair. Yennefer snorts where she sits on Eskel’s outstretched legs, painting his toenails with something eye-wateringly bright and pungent.
Geralt ignores them both, lighting a candle.
“The last summoning worked great, though,” Yennefer says, leaning back to admire her work. Eskel wiggles his toes, earning himself a light slap on the thigh. “After, of course, Geralt managed to defeat the incarnation of Evil itself.”
Eskel chuckles, tying off his work as well. He’s done something complicated but elegant this time, winding its way around Yen’s head and settling softly over her shoulder.
“You don’t have to be here,” Geralt points out, reinforcing a line of chalk.
Eskel leans forward, winding his arms around Yennefer’s waist and propping his chin on her shoulder. “But then we would lose time with our dearest, darling, beloved,” he teases.
Yennefer dries the varnish on Eskel’s toes and banishes the smell with a wave of her hand. “No matter how hare-brained his schemes are.”
“Ha, ha.” Geralt lights a bundle of dried herbs tied together, placing them in the middle of the chalk circle and sitting back to watch the smoke lazily make its way to the ceiling. “Guess we’ll see if it worked soon enough.”
It didn’t work.
Geralt’s big break in the case also comes around as a result of late-night insomnia. He wanders into the alchemy lab sometime around witching hour, idly rubbing the moisture out of his hair after a midnight dip in a nearby pond.
Gaetan, to his credit, does not freeze when being caught using a piece of highly specialized alchemy equipment to bake the moisture off hardtack. Instead, he glares challengingly at Geralt, daring him to comment.
“So that’s where the flour went,” Geralt says, folding the towel, slinging it over his shoulder, and seating himself on a low table, currently devoid of ingredients and knives. “Where’s the rest of it?”
He asks out of genuine curiosity. There aren’t a whole lot of places a hoard of food can be stashed in an estate occupied by multiple Witchers without being sniffed out, and as much as Eskel likes to tease, Geralt’s pretty sure he would have said something had he found it.
Gaetan squints at him, so Geralt keeps his face carefully impassive. He’s not sure if Gaetan would react worse to anger or laughter.
Finally, Gaetan stalks over to the ingredients corner of the lab, shifting a crate of alchemical supplies to reveal a thin plank of wood, which he then shifts to reveal a canvas bag, half-full of preserved foods.
“Pretty good place,” Geralt says, shifting slightly to peer into the bag, and wrinkling his nose at the trace of buckthorn smell that still lingers on the food.
“Don’t...” Gaetan grits out, fists balled. “Don’t kick out Aiden because of me. I’ll be gone in the morning.”
“Who said anything about getting kicked out?”
“I stole from you.”
“It’s not stealing if you’re allowed to take what you want.”
They lapse into a moment of silence. A dusty room covered by a trapdoor and some leaves; a sprawling estate with a stable and a household staff.
Geralt breaks the stillness by shrugging, reaching over and rooting through the bag. “I get it, though.”
“What the fuck does that mean,” Gaetan demands. His shoulders have dropped from their hair-trigger tenseness, though, which Geralt takes as a good sign.
“Look,” Geralt sighs. “We’ve all starved on the Path. And I’ll never forget the state I found you in.”
“Fucking pathetic, you mean,” Gaetan sulks.
Geralt shrugs. “I’ve been worse.”
Gaetan doesn’t ask. After a moment, Geralt sighs again, leaning forward to heft the sack out of its hole and drop it by his feet, in easier rummaging range. “I can’t say anything that’ll make you believe that you’re safe here. But if you don’t believe the Butcher’s word, at least have enough faith in Marlene’s character to believe that she won’t let you starve, so long as she can hold a ladle. She’d beat me ‘round the head with it if she found out one of you wasn’t getting enough to eat, y’know.”
Gaetan’s fight leaves him all at once, and he sits heavily. “Damn, you know how to hit where it hurts.”
“We’re not starving again,” Geralt declares. “Not while this vineyard and its magically reappearing grapes have anything to say about it.”
Gaetan snorts, but after a silent moment, cocks his head. “You mean that, don’t you.”
“No more Honortons,” Geralt says, stealing a bit of jerky and tearing it in two, popping half in his mouth and offering the other one to Gaetan. “No more Blavikens, either,” he adds as Gaetan accepts.
Gaetan snorts, tucking the jerky into his lip. “Being full wouldn’t have stopped Blaviken.”
“No,” Geralt returns, standing and offering a hand. “But it would have made it a hell of a lot easier to deal with.”
Gaetan takes the hand, grunting as he’s levered up. He regards the stash of food. “I’ll.. give it back to Marlene in the morning.”
“Don’t have to,” Geralt says. “Still yours, if you want it.”
Gaetan’s grip on the bag tightens.
Geralt takes pity on him, and steers the reins of the conversation away from where they’d been veering dangerously close to sentimentality. “The poor cats have been going out of their minds trying to find the invisible mice, though. They’d appreciate the jerky.”
A handful of dried fruits pelts him on the head as Gaetan hefts the sack and marches off, rolling his eyes and muttering about Wolves.
Geralt makes a mental note to give Marlene a few extra crowns on shopping day and the recipe for Witcher waybread as he nudges a crate back over the sack-shaped hole in the ground.
Two weeks later, Geralt returns from Novigrad hefting a canvas-wrapped package.
Gaetan raises an eyebrow at the hefty bundle when Geralt knocks at his door, but takes it easily enough when it’s thrust into his hands.
“‘S a gift,” Geralt says, when Gaetan stares at him. “Open it.”
Gaetan rolls his eyes, but plucks at the ties. The canvas, falling away, reveals a sword rack, the wood a deep orange and striped. A similarly patterned bowl had caught his eye in the back of an Ofieri merchant’s display, and the when the merchant had revealed the Zerrikanian tree it had come from - tigerwood - Geralt had taken a moment to wonder if maybe Destiny hadn’t released her claws from his back yet.
Gaetan’s eyes widen, and Geralt thinks he might catch a hint of salt in the air when they alight upon the inscription, carved innocuously along the bottom edge: Teigr , in a looping Nilfgaardian script.
Two swords and a medallion, all that it takes to mark a Witcher’s grave - or sometimes just one sword, for a dead school and a caravan in pieces.
“Put it up,” Geralt says, just to fill the silence. “Give you something to come back to, when you’re having shit luck on the Path.”
“Alright, White Wolf,” Gaetan says, reaching a carefully-steady hand out to trace the patterns of the wood. “No more Blavikens. And no more damn Honortons.”