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Ciri couldn’t help herself. She carried a silver sword on her back now, an equal to Geralt in the eyes of anyone who knew Witcher lore (such as it was), and yet, she looked to him for approval as she made her guess. “A wyvern?”
It was as if she was a girl at her lessons again, trying to identify monsters based on the details he, Vesemir, Eskel, and Lambert recited. But instead of pushing her to explain her reasoning so he could poke holes in it, her father nodded once, eyes gleaming in the cave’s gloom. “Looks like it,” he agreed, toeing the ruined bits of armor the men had cast aside. “Maybe even two.”
“I hope so,” Ciri snorted, adjusting her swords as she straightened. “One wyvern is hardly a challenge for the two of us.”
She didn’t have a true Witcher’s ability to see in the dark, but she spotted the faint crinkle of Geralt’s eyes nonetheless. “Don’t get cocky,” he advised.
The men, chased into the cavern by the wyvern, exchanged wide-eyed glances. “Ye’ve killed many of the beasts, then, my lady?” one of them asked, in innocent awe. He was probably twice her age, and looked to be on the verge of proposing marriage to her soon. Geralt snorted.
It annoyed her, that they used a title for her even though she had introduced herself as a Witcher. They didn’t know her true identity, of course – it must be something else about her, something in her behavior or her manner of speech that she couldn’t keep hidden. It made her feel as if, all her efforts to the contrary, she belonged among those pampered creatures she despised, instead of with the rough and grizzled man she called father.
And more to the point, she hadn’t killed a wyvern before. Not exactly.
Ciri hoped the lack of light hid her blush, but knowing her luck, it probably didn’t. “I’ve killed enough of them,” she snapped, hands on her hips, more haughtily than she’d intended. “Now, what’s the quickest way out of this blasted cave?”
~
Ciri and Geralt emerged from the cavern together. As always, Geralt took the lead, his steps unerringly light despite his greater weight. She forever felt like a clumsy cub in his wake, no matter how often Yennefer drolly assured her that it wasn’t the case. In her own defense, her new armor was an unaccustomed weight on her shoulders and back, a combination of chain and leather designed to be light while allowing her full mobility. In theory, at least. Between the sharp edges that she was forever catching herself on, not to mention the bloody itching, she suspected it was more of a hindrance than a help, at least at this stage.
But teleporting about the battlefield was harder than it used to be, and until she could do so well enough to meet Geralt impossibly high standards – entrenched, as they were, in his own Witcherly instincts and training – she would have to live with it.
She winced as her foot came down on a rock, sent it skittering backwards into the cave. Geralt’s white head tipped briefly in her direction, following the sound like a cat, and then he turned his attention forward again. A few more steps, and he knelt behind a short wall of tangled shrubbery, gesturing for her to join him.
Ears burning, sweating beneath her armor even as her breath chilled the air, Ciri joined him. She was about to apologize when Geralt pointed.
Her breath caught, and Ciri’s lips turned up. “Ahh,” she breathed, settling more firmly onto her haunches, her nerves forgotten. “There they are.”
“Two of them,” Geralt confirmed, a bit smug at being proven right. “Two nests. Hm.” He frowned briefly. “Both female.”
“Where’s the male, then?” Ciri wondered, twisting her neck to glance around, but carefully, and quietly. Focusing her senses, a magical skill Avallac’h had taught her, brought naught to her ears but the sounds of nesting wyverns, the wind, and the river below. “Any sign?”
“Maybe. Have to get closer to be sure.” Geralt drew his silver sword carefully, and she followed suit. The blade oil he used was so strong it made Ciri’s nose and eyes sting; hastily, she dropped the spell on her senses, blinking rapidly to clear her vision.
Geralt waited for her to finish oiling her blade, checking his numerous pouches and vials. It just so happened that he finished as the prickle in her eyes faded.
He glanced back, looking her over rapidly, and Ciri half-straightened for his inspection. Armor tightened and fully fastened, despite the sweat dampening her armpits and ribs; three grapeshot bombs in the pouch on her right hip, three dancing stars on her left; a spare dagger at her waist and another in her boot; and finally, three healing potions in a pocket on her chest, all prepared by Yennefer well in advance of today’s adventure. They weren’t as effective as Geralt’s own Witcher brews, but in trade were much less likely to kill her. As a supplement to her own magic, they were enough to get her through.
He nodded once, granting her his approval, and vaulted from cover without another word. Grinning suddenly and fiercely, Ciri followed with a glad cry.
~
The element of surprise was on their side.
The battle against the first wyvern went smoothly. Ciri got in one good strike on its wing, tearing the leathery surface and preventing it from taking flight. A second blow opened a line of blood on its hide, and it turned to roar in her face, maw stinking and hot—
She threw herself backwards, felt the brief redoubling of gravity that signified teleportation, and settled into a ready pose. Geralt, already moving to take her place, cut the muscles in the wyvern’s leg in a single, precise swipe, and rolled away before it could bring its claws to bear.
Ciri threw herself into a somersault and came up on the draconid’s bloodied side, securely behind its wounded leg. She thrust her sword deep between its ribs, all of her strength behind it, and then wrenched herself free, hot blood splattering her face. The creature threw its head back and howled, blood turning black as the poison on her blade began working.
“Not bad,” Geralt called, barely audible over the wyvern’s flailing and shrieking, and the thud of her own blood and breath. He sounded completely unperturbed, as ever. “Heads up.”
Ciri put the rock wall at her back and searched the sky frantically for the second monster. It was drawn in by the cries of its dying fellow, but landed well away from the wounded lizard.
The frantic flapping of two sets of wings left the air clouded with dust, and Ciri had to squint to see as the second wyvern began its attack. It feinted, and then howled and fluttered rapidly backwards as Geralt threw a grapeshot at its feet, tossing more dirt and debris into the air. The first wyvern’s cries grew softer, more pathetic, as red and black blood stained the dirt, turning it to mud.
“I’ll take right, you take left,” Geralt said, “and we go head on—“
And despite it all, all she noticed was that he was still bloody protecting her – putting her on the beast’s left, its weak side open to her strong one – and so she dove forward before he could finish, darting past the dying wyvern’s futile gnashing. “If you can keep up, that is!” she called back joyfully.
She heard his exasperated yelp as she waded into the fight, but one thing was for certain – expert monster hunter he might be, capable of killing most creatures without breaking a sweat, but Cirilla of Cintra was still quicker on her feet than he was.
So, hah!
~
Geralt’s glare could strip paint.
Ciri ignored him with all her dignity. Vesemir himself could have found no fault in how thoroughly she cleaned her blade before sheathing it, although the bruises blooming on her cheek and back, not to mention the gashes on her left arm, would have earned her a tongue-lashing or two. When she could polish the silver surface no further, she finally turned to face him, dusting her hands clean.
“Well,” she said, inspecting the wyvern corpses. The first one was in much better shape than the second, owing to the sudden desperation of the fight when it had pinned Ciri to the ground. “Clearly, we should harvest the brain from the first. The second’s been made rather a hash of, I’m afraid.”
Geralt grunted, swinging his own sword into its sheath without shifting his scowl from her.
“And we’ll need trophies, of course,” Ciri commented, drawing her knife and flipping it from hand-to-hand nervously. Her entire left side, not to mention most of her back and her poor abused rump, felt like a solid wall of bruises. She had already decided not to let Geralt see her wince, however. He was angry enough as it was. “Although there might not be a bounty. Perhaps I’ll just keep it as a souvenir, then. It’ll help Primrose get used to the scent of monsters, at least. I wish she was calm like Roach.”
Geralt crossed his arms over his chest, leather creaking, and watched her without a word.
And now, she was starting to babble. She crouched beside the wyvern – don’t wince, don’t wince, don’t let him see you wince – and grabbed a bony, scaly handhold to flip the thing onto its back—
“Wrong,” Geralt intoned.
Ciri froze, completely unmoving. Wrong was the first command she had learned under Geralt’s tutelage, along with back and down and behind me. They were engraved somewhere deep in her psyche. Somehow, just the sound of the word was enough to make her body stop, without any input from her brain.
Geralt’s boots scuffed the ground as he stepped closer. “Forgot to check that’s dead,” he said coldly. His own dagger in hand, he grabbed the wyvern by one horn, left foot braced on the beast’s closest paw to prevent it from striking. He pulled the head up with the strength of one arm alone, inspecting the lizard’s eye critically, and then drove his dagger into its soft throat, through the fragile bone at the back of its neck, and into its brain.
Ciri hopped back as the wyvern gave one last, mighty thrash, tail thumping the ground, talons churning the mud. Once Geralt wrenched his dagger free, its jaw fell open slackly, tongue lolling. A final, moaning breath escaped it. It was well and truly dead, now.
Geralt let the head fall. “Go on and collect your trophy,” he said carelessly, and stepped away, cleaning his dagger without a backward glance.
Ciri stood still, her fists clenched, glaring at the dead lizard. Cutting its head off after that display would be deeply satisfying, she suspected.
Not that it was the wyvern’s fault she had forgotten one of her earliest lessons . . . damn it all! No matter how hard she tried to impress Geralt, she would always be the noisy, clumsy, useless screw-up she suspected herself to be. Perhaps she ought to hie herself off to Vizima, accept Emhyr’s offer, and get herself knocked up as quickly as possible!
Ears and neck burning, gaze fixed and furious as she ranted internally, Ciri knelt to complete her task. She could feel Geralt watching her, and resolutely ignored him, refusing to apologize. It would be the right thing to do, she knew, but she suspected that it would break something in her; if she started apologizing to him for all the ways she had failed him, had inconvenienced him, and had flat-out ruined his life . . . well, they would be here for not only for the rest of this winter, but well into next winter, too.
She wasn’t the only one distracted. Perhaps Geralt was devising another short, biting lecture, or simply thinking about what to do next, but either way, his eyes certainly weren’t on the sky. And given that they had determined that there was a third, missing wyvern about, that was a very bad thing indeed.
~
This time, the wyvern surprised them.
Geralt’s hastily flung aard sent it tumbling back, but it was nimble enough to recover its balance mid-air, roaring. His daughter, grazed by the blast, was just as quick, transforming her stagger into a flip that put her on her feet, if perilously close to the cliff’s edge.
“Ciri,” Geralt bellowed, stunned at the volume of his own voice, not to mention it’s urgency, ”behind me! Now!”
Eyes wide, Ciri somersaulted forwards, automatically moving to obey his order – she was fiendishly quick, even without her strange magic at play – but she wasn’t quicker than an enraged royal wyvern.
Geralt saw it coming, but even he couldn’t cross the distance between them that quickly. The wyvern attacked as she was mid-roll, and managed to plant two of its talons into her back, wings flapping as its massive head struck downwards, in a vicious bite that made Geralt’s vision go red with fury, then white with fear.
He reached the wyvern just as it drew back to bite again. His first attack bounced off its scaly, armored back, but was enough to get its attention; his second pierced flesh but ground to a halt against bone. A century’s worth of habit carried him through the sword’s dance – a spin wrenched his blade free, gave it new momentum as he drove it between two plates, deep into the wyrven’s chest muscles. It roared in pain and anger, its wings hammering the air as it sought retreat.
Ciri wasn’t idle as he fought. She kept one arm up, shielding her face from the monster’s teeth, and twisted to drive her sword into the beast’s vulnerable gut. Positioned as she was, the blow didn’t have the strength it might’ve. And the royal wyvern had a male’s armored plating on its chest, protecting it further.
But it persuaded the beast to release her nonetheless. She rolled away, coming up on one knee with her blade at the ready, shoulders heaving and blood streaming from half a dozen punctures.
The wyvern – a royal wyvern, Geralt corrected himself, because when was a Witcher’s luck ever good? – was too large to take flight easily, and so it landed a few feet away, bellows-like ribs heaving. Geralt darted back into range, dodging the lizard’s muscular tail automatically, and brought his sword down on its hide in a quick one-two strike. He finished with a third that had so much force behind it, his shoulder was left aching in its wake.
He didn’t wait to see the effects of his handiwork, hopping backwards as quickly as his feet allowed. The force of the beasts thrashing left the ground jumping, but he kept his balance, mindful of the cliff’s edge on one side, the cavern entrance on the other. Ciri blurred forward from the corner of his vision, and his breath caught—
She struck rapidly, one-two-three-four, before blurring away a half-second ahead of a furious claw swipe. She rematerialized behind Geralt, belatedly following his order to get behind him. With her safely out of the way, Geralt made the sign for igni and made the rapid decision to hold the blast, raining liquid fire on the wyvern as he paced closer, one-onethousand, two-onethousand, three-onethousand—
The smell of burning flesh, oily smoke, and monster blood – it all fell away in wake of the spell’s focus. When he could sustain it no longer, he brought his sword to bear, hacking at the wyvern’s vulnerable flesh, exposed as blackened scales melted away. He only had time for a few shallow blows, the creature’s panicked flailing too fast for even him to dodge.
Ciri, clever girl, left fly with one of her bombs as he danced aside. It splattered the wyvern with burning gel, and the creature’s courage broke, sending it to the sky – an unwise decision, not that it could know that. The flames, fed by the rushing air, continued to burn, and the beast continued to scream.
There was no time to plan, barely time to think. “Stay behind me,” Geralt ordered his daughter, or tried to—
“I have a plan,” she shouted at the same time, their voices overlapping—
And the wyvern landed again, roaring, still on fire and mad as hell. With one flap of its wings, it sent them reeling, and too late Geralt realized that he’d made a mistake. They should have split up. Like this, they made a single, slow target, instead of two much faster ones – he wasn’t used to fighting beside someone, let alone someone whom his every instinct screamed to protect—
The beast stretched its long neck in a biting attack, designed to do naught by drive them back. Its small, malevolent eyes glittered like gems. Geralt somersaulted to the side, but Ciri simply dodged, keeping her feet and holding her ground. Geralt shouted her name, a useless instinct leftover from years spent fishing her out of hazards great and small, but she didn’t seem to hear him, preparing to leap forward.
But whatever it was she was planning, she’d forgotten one thing: a royal wyvern fought with its wings, as well as its talons and teeth. In the wake of its bite, its left wing struck out in a half-circle, a massive, armor-plated limb with a razor-sharp claw at its tip—
And Geralt could do nothing but watch as Ciri was thrown backwards, straight over the cliff’s edge and into the open air, the bright arc of her blood trailing behind her.
~
Her heart wasn’t beating.
It was the kind of thing that none of the mages she had known, not even Yennefer, had described in advance. Like so much of magic, it was indescribably. She had never taken much notice of her own pulse, aside from those times when it was thudding especially load, but she noticed when it stopped. The sudden stillness of that vital muscle was loud, a deep and disturbing wrongness that set her body to screaming.
She had planned to teleport into the air atop the wyvern, hook her blade under its neck, and cut its throat. Perhaps because she was already focused on that task, it took her no time to realize that it was her throat that had ended up cut. In pure, blind instinct, she clapped her hand to the wound, and used her magic to stop her own heart, to slow the geysering of her life’s blood.
But a stopped heart was almost as dangerous as a torn jugular. Her other hand was already at her chest, clasping a vial healing fluid. Even in her semi-conscious state, she didn’t bother to drink the stuff, just broke the container with a squeeze of her hand and applied it directly to her torn throat. Enchanted by Yennefer, the vial dissolved into harmless sand instead of a fistful of glass.
And then she realized she was falling, as she slammed into the cliffside feet-first.
It was a long, long way to the bottom, and Ciri spent the first few seconds of it rolling head-over-heels. She did manage to get her hands beneath her, which turned out to be a mistake, as her somersault was transformed into a shoulder-over-shoulder roll that left her insides thoroughly rattled. Scrabbling desperately at the ground did nothing but nearly break her fingers. Finally, she regained her wits and covered her head, tucking her knees to her chest, and just waited for it all to be over.
Afterwards, she wasn’t sure if she blacked out or not; awareness returned in stages, first of her hammering heart, and then of a body’s worth of pain. She got her hands and knees beneath herself and sat up, slowly, trying to focus her eyes.
Her vision cleared slowly. The sight of the muddy river, her hands fisted in the light sand – those came through first. And then the taste of her own blood in her mouth, and then the smell of it. From far above, she heard the wyvern’s furious screech and that – the reminder that Geralt was still in danger – jump-started the rest of her consciousness.
Somehow, she stood, grasping for her sword and searching the sky desperately. Where was he, where was the wyvern? And where was her sword—
She cursed. The hilt was empty. “Gods dammit,” she snarled, glaring around furiously. Of course she’d dropped her witcher blade; what else could possibly go wrong today?
In her distraction, a sudden rush of noise and wind sent her scrambling. She turned in time to see the wyvern crash into the ground; evidently, Geralt had decided on the direct approach to finding her, riding the beast directly to her side. She shouted joyfully at the sight of her father astride the monster, only to cry out in dismay as the wyvern clasped his leg in its massive jaws and threw him aside.
Immediately, it turned its attention to the woman before it. Red clouding her vision, Ciri unsheathed Zireael and clasped it in both hands. To hell with her silver sword; she would fight this beast with her own teeth and claws, if she had to. From the corner of her eye, she saw Geralt’s white head break the surface of the water, and felt her focus sharpen even further. Relief, forever rumored to make one weak, made her strong instead.
“Come on, you bastard!” she bellowed, using every ounce of breath in her body to project her voice forward. “You piece of shit! Look at me before I kill you!”
In response, the wyvern roared, long and loud. It tucked its wings to its side, preparing for a scrap on the ground.
Smiling grimly, Ciri stood braced. The wyvern roared again, tossed its head, and stomped its massive, scaly legs, all animal attempts to intimidate her, to drive her away. But it would take more than that to scare her off. Cold and calm, she waited. Distantly, she heard Geralt shout something, but couldn’t make out the words—
The wyvern put its head down and charged. Ciri gave it a single beat, and then focused her attention inward, on the wellspring of strange energy that, although depleted, was enough to propel her forward, onward, and up.
This time, her aim was true. She landed atop the wyvern’s back and thrust her sword deep into its neck. The wyvern’s roar sounded more like a woman’s startled shriek then a fearsome beast’s bellow; in something like joy, Ciri laughed, one hand on the hilt of her sword, the other scrabbling for a handhold as it thrashed.
Miraculously, her hand landed on another hilt – her other hilt, that of her silver sword. She didn’t stop to question how it came to be embedded in the wyvern’s shoulder, just wrenched it free and drove it back in, higher.
With both swords, she managed to ladder herself upward, until she was straddling the back of the wyvern’s head, her feet braced on the bony ridges of its jaw. None of the monster’s frantic flapping managed to dislodge her, for all that it rattled her teeth and nearly dislocated her shoulder. If there was one thing that Ciri knew how to do, it was hold on when all reason dictated she should let go.
A muffled explosion sent the wyvern reeling, and Ciri scrambling as her seat shifted. The beast turned to roar at this nuisance and she saw Geralt, bedraggled and knee deep in muddy water, his crossbow in hand. Unperturbed by the scaly creature’s fury, he loaded another explosive bolt and let it fly.
The wyvern turned, focusing on this new threat, and Ciri saw her chance. Without a beat of hesitation, she wrenched both her blades free and flung herself forward, over the blocky ridge of wyvern’s crest—
And drove first Zireael, and then her silver sword, through the wyvern’s eyes and deep into its brain.
~
After the noise and hectic crises of the battle, the sudden silence was . . . profound.
Ciri stumbled from her perch as the wyvern collapsed, and ended up flat on the ground once more. This time, however, instead of a hard rock, she landed on soft mud. After a brief groan, she decided to stay put, and closed her eyes for a brief rest.
It was nice this way, she thought blearily. Peaceful, almost. Kind of cold.
Actually, scratch that, it was very cold.
She was soaked in sweat, wyvern blood, her own blood, and mud. Lots and lots of mud. Her hair must be a fright: she imagined Yennefer’s face if her mother saw her now, and smiled without opening her eyes. No doubt she stank as well. No amount of maternal adoration would be enough for Yennefer to embrace her in such a state – she would be banished to a bathing chamber until a gray-haired woman emerged from beneath a battle’s worth of mud and blood.
Ciri was just daydreaming about how nice it would be to be clean when something put itself between her and the sun. Scowling, she opened her eyes, and craned her neck to stare up, and up, into her father’s distant face. He went to one knee beside her. “You all right?”
Ciri grunted in assurance, twisting to look around the late battlefield with tired eyes. Geralt gripped her about the shoulders and hauled her halfway up, ignoring her pained yelp and kick, until she was sitting beside him, disgruntled but upright. When she made no move to stand, he huffed a sigh and plopped down in the mud at her side.
They sat together, looking over the dead wyvern in silence. With Ciri’s sword sticking from its eye sockets, it almost looked like one of the props mummers and bards used in their plays. Aside from all the blood, of course. And the smell. That was the thing Dandelion never mentioned in his stories; monsters stank.
“Nice move with the teleportation,” Geralt finally said. Without looking over, he draped an arm around Ciri’s shoulders and tugged her against his side. He must have noticed that she was cold.
Ciri snorted. “Almost makes up for getting thrown off the cliff, right?” He glanced at her and she glowered sardonically, daring him to patronize her.
“Getting thrown off the cliff isn’t so bad,” he said mildly, turned back to the wyvern. “Happened to me a time or two. Rushing into battle, though—“
Ciri squeezed her eyes shut and groaned. “I know. . . .”
“Not to mention, forgetting to check that the damn thing was dead. . . .“
She covered her face and groaned again, even more pitifully than before. Geralt tightened his grip to keep her from wriggling away, but made no move to continue his lecture. The suspense was killing her. When she determined that no more stern words were forthcoming, Ciri let her hands fall, and stared listlessly into the distance.
“Maybe this was the wrong thing to do, after all,” she said dully.
Geralt blinked, once, still not looking at her, but made no other reaction. It was precisely that lack of response that let her know she had surprised him.
“Maybe I shouldn’t try to be a Witcher,” she continued when he remained silent. She found herself looking at him instead of the monster, tracing the familiar lines of his profile. For as long as she could remember, he had been a larger-than-life figure to her, impossibly strong, unattainably heroic. She hadn’t met him until late in her childhood, her head already full of tales, in which he – a humble Witcher, no match for the kings, queens, jarls, and druids he featured among – stood head-and-shoulders above them all.
She often thought him inscrutable and comfortably immortal, or at least, she used to. Watching him die had cured her of that. These days, when she looked at him, she was haunted by the thought of losing him again, losing him as she had lost almost everyone else she loved. You are Death Incarnate, Avallac’h had spat bitterly once, during one of their frequent fights. When she hadn’t responded, hadn’t even reacted, he had faltered and added, like all of your kind. As if he’d been referring to her mortality, and not the long line of casualties she trailed in her wake.
He’d meant it as a kind of apology, of course, in recognition that he had crossed a line. Like all of Avallac’h’s apologies, it had been fiercely inadequate to the task. But she had forgiven him his failure all the same.
Forgiving herself for failure was so much harder. Vesemir, a recent addition to her pack of restless ghosts, haunted her in moments like these.
“I’ll never be as good as you,” she said, sighing wearily. “I can’t fight monsters like you can. Maybe it’s stupid to even try.” She half-smiled, eyes stinging. “Problem is, I don’t know what else I can do. It’s all I’ve ever wanted or dreamed of.”
Geralt’s hand tightened on her arm. She shifted to rest her cheek on his shoulder, to hide the water standing in her eyes.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, a little while later. As the fog of battle cleared, she began to feel utterly pathetic for her display of emotion.
“Don’t apologize,” Geralt said. No matter how much he lectured her, he always forbade her to apologize. “You’re not the only one who’s ever felt that way.” He sighed. “But I’m too damn old to learn new tricks, Ciri.”
She didn’t know what else to do but elbow him in the side. “Stop that. You’re not old at all.” And besides, she couldn’t imagine him as anything but a Witcher.
He half-laughed, shaking his head, and they lapsed back into silence.
~
When they’d both caught their breath, and were thoroughly chilled, they stood and collected themselves. They both cleaned their silver swords and checked them for damage in companionable quiet. Geralt cut off the wyvern’s head and harvested ingredients with his dagger as Ciri checked and cleaned Zireael, and with naught but a few words and a gesture between them, they began picking a path up the cliffs together. The heads of the other wyverns awaited, and no doubt the men from before were still in the cave, shaking in their boots and wondering if the Witchers were even alive.
“You’re as much a Witcher as I am,” Geralt said, as they worked on the two wyverns on the plateau. A short distance away, the stranded travelers were building a fire, preparing to share a meal with the duo that had rescued them.
“You know that’s not true,” Ciri said tiredly. She regretted her outburst, regretted burdening him and feared that she seemed childish or spineless. The fact that he was attempting to reassure her just made that feeling worse.
Geralt stopped her with a hand on her elbow when she would have passed him. “We did you wrong, in your training,” he said, and she stared at him, shocked that he would think so.
Her brow furrowed. “You did not!” And then she hesitated, wondering. “You trained me the way you all were trained, after all.” Right?
His lips thinned. “We did,” he said. “Aside from the mutagens. But the thing is, Ciri. . . .” He sighed. “We trained together. We got called out for our mistakes, then we sat down, and watched our brothers make the same ones. We were mutants, but the training made us human.” His hand slid from her arm, his expression downcast as he reflected on some past memory. “But you – you never got to see anyone else’s screw-ups, just your own. I never realized until recently, how different it was for you.”
Ciri didn’t know what to say to that. They stood together in the gloom, the distant sound of fire crackling broken only by the occasional gust of wind.
“Yennefer says it’s always different, for women,” Ciri finally said, in attempted consolation.
“Might be,” Geralt agreed. “Don’t know much about women.”
Ciri smirked. “I’ve heard.”
His eyebrow quirked. “Not what I meant,” he chided, put-upon. “And you shouldn’t listen to what Yennefer and Triss say. None of its true.”
“Whatever you say, Geralt,” Ciri sing-songed sweetly, leaning in to kiss his cheek and brush past him towards the fire. He sighed, but in the way that let her know he secretly enjoyed the teasing. He followed a step behind.
“You won’t go, will you?” he asked, as they walked in step. “You’ll stay?”
Ciri felt a little pang. She was no child, she could no longer let herself believe that he felt no loneliness, no fear, and no pain. Maybe she was being selfish, to promise him one thing one day, then doubt it the next. And yet – the grim thought niggled at her – perhaps it was just a matter of time before she got him killed, as she had everyone else.
“I won’t go,” she promised, as they settled by the campfire. She hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be a lie.