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Jaskier was singing.
Geralt was used to the sound, but hearing it through the barrier that was the walls of the halls at Oxenfurt was different. He was used to the sound ringing out around the path they were walking; the foliage deadening the sound or the vibrations echoing off the mountains that surrounded them. It was refreshing to hear. Especially as Geralt knew that Jaskier had no idea he was here.
There weren’t all that many people in the corridors — the term was over, and most of the people that were part of the university populace were elsewhere, not roaming the halls between auditoriums. Geralt had seen several suspiciously student-like people in the taverns, spilling out onto the streets in varying states of inebriation depending on how much they’d decided to indulge now that exams were over.
It was reassuring, in a way. That this element of the human experience never seemed to change. In all his long life, it was a familiar and predictable event in the calendar of the year – no matter what else was happening, the students would drink when the exams were done.
He was outside the door toJaskier’s classroom. There was some clouded glass in the door itself that left Geral with just enough clarity to look through and see that Jaskier was alone.
The song he was singing was melancholic. Wistful. Waiting and wanting in a way that he couldn’t exactly identify. He stood outside the door and listened for a while. He wasn’t all that musical himself, but he’d been listening to Jaskier for long enough now that he was reasonably good at figuring out what the bard was and wasn’t going to like.
So it was clear not just to Jaskier, but also to Geralt, when he hit a note that he didn’t like, and the music stopped with a curse.
Taking that as his cue, Geralt turned the handle on the door as quietly as possible and gently pushed it open.
“Sorry this room is — Oh! Geralt! Is it... am I late?”
“No, work in the mountains was done faster than expected, so I missed the worst of the weather coming down the coast.” Geralt liked talking to Jaskier. Not because he’d picked up a particular affinity for talking, but because Jaskier was always so pleased when he actually, as Jaskier put it, ‘Used his words.’ Geralt knew he’d never be any kind of great orator, but he would happily speak at a little more length when it was just the two of them in order to see that smile grow on the Bard’s face.
“Well I’m glad of it. Not just that you’re here early, but that you’ve also managed to arrive apparently in one piece and early enough that we don’t have to shoot straight off, but rather we can take a few minutes to actually talk about where it is that we want to head next and I can buy suitable shoes.”
“If you just bought some boots made of something more substantial than vellum you’d have the right boots for every weather and then we wouldn’t have this discussion every year.”
“Our needs on the road are very different, fair Witcher. I must appear in courts and smooth the way for your delightful presence so that you can continue your work. The clothes, and the shoes are a part of that.” Jaskier looked at him in fond exasperation. “One day you’ll appreciate what I suffer for you.”
Geralt grunted.
He did appreciate what Jaskier did for him. It was the reason that this year, though the bard did not yet know it, he was taking him to meet his brothers. Every dozen or so years they all tried to return and share information. They didn’t all go back to the Kaer Mohren every winter - that would have them too closely tied to the north east and leave too much of the continent without adequate protection now that they were so few. It was difficult to know how best to do it, but this seemed to have worked for the last century, and so it was that they worked. There was a sense that the whole of the continent was falling apart without them was difficult to ignore when they were together. There was always the anxiety that there was something out there they were missing.
It was time. Jaskier had been with him the last few winters when they’d made themselves comfortable in a town with a population big enough that there might be a monster or two that wanted to take their chances in the city walls. Where many monsters hibernated or simply travelled to the far south in the winter, there were enough that could make a nuisance of themselves in the ice-locked north that a witcher there for even a single winter could make all the difference.
Jaskier was doing something behind his desk - organising papers, putting away ink bottles and generally tidying Geralt was under no illusion that this was Jaskier actually packing up ready to leave the classroom behind. This was his home for so much of the year that he inevitably left something absolutely vital here when they set off, and it was fifty-fifty whether he remembered it early enough in their travels for them to be able to come back and fetch it. As such, Geralt was familiar with this room, and especially the strange places where things tended to roll or get put in a moment of inattention.
He strolled between the desks. He knew that Jaskier had another room that he taught. This wasn’t a performance space - not really - so he also had an auditorium space nearby that he shared with another professor or two. Jaskier didn’t just teach music, but he tried to get as many of those courses in each term so as to keep himself in practice as much as anything. Geralt was intimately familiar with the number of hours that the bard felt was reasonable to rehearse in a day, and indeed what great lengths he’d go to in order to get that time in. Geralt was as likely to pick up a spare set of strings as Jaskier at this point after enough hours spent listening to him lament that he’d not taken sufficient care when practising in the dry heat of midsummer or the perishing cold of a camp that was just a fraction too far from the next town for them to be able to forge ahead before the sun set. It seemed to make for an easier life.
On the tables that were still messed up he spotted a familiar old map. It was one that had hung in the salle at Kaer Mohren for years, but at least three times this size and with much greater detail. No, what was unique and familiar about it was the carefully drawn lines that followed, not country borders or the crossings between one lord’s land and another, but the ancient eliminations of the witcher keeps of old. When there were enough of them that there were territories, white ringed zones where Witchers could gather and be welcomed by locals. Red crossed fiefdoms where even a sight of them would result in them losing their bounties if not their lives. For all that a Witcher was as strong and wily as ten men, it was always the eleventh man that you had to look out for.
Geralt picked up the map and looked at it a little more closely. It wasn’t exactly the same as he remembered. The places filled in with a stark red were more numerous, and he could see clearly towns where he and Jaskier had escaped at great speed in the dead of night for crimes they didn’t think they’d committed.
“What’s this?” Geralt held up, his brow furrowed.
“Oh that's... well, it’s not really finished. But I offered to teach a sociology class this year, and I’ll have the same bunch next year too. Hopefully that’ll fill out what we’ve missed. They’re from all over the continent after all, and they’ve been told that this is a significant part of their final grade.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Oh. yes. Well, it’s a map. For you. And any other Witchers that we run into. I mean, I know that you’re hoping to link up with Eskel at some point this year, and I heard there’s a Cat Witcher hanging around near the Nilfgardian capitol for some reason, and that’s to say nothing of the fact that I never know where we’re going to end up. It’s a copy of a map that I found while looking through the archives this year. They were doing some kind of sort out, and it rolled out from amongst a bunch of boxes. Was helping them put it away before I saw it. I can see why nobody knows really what it is, you’d have to know a lot about your Witcher history, and it’s not really something that anyone but me specialises in, but I thought that I’d leave the details of the old territories on there. Just, you know, in case...” Jaskier’s voice tailed off as he apparently caught Geralt’s expression for the first time. “Sorry! I don’t have to, I can just burn it.”
“No.” Geralt said and his hand tightened where he was holding the map. He heard the crinkle of the paper and forced himself to relax, not wanting to damage the incredible work that had gone into it. He looked back down at it, then back up at Jaskier. “There was a... an original?” Geralt didn’t let his voice waver.
“Yeah it’s... well, I thought I should try and find a place to keep it, a way to preserve it. I don’t know if anyone has even tried to take care of it, but there must be some kind of enchantment on it because it seems to be in pretty good condition. But the edges are starting to fray, and there’s definitely been some degradation since I got it. It might have been in a protected part of the archives - there’s a kind of deep storage where things get put if they’ve been brought in and not catalogued, so I assume that’s where it’s gone, but it’s not clear how long it had been in there or how long it had been out, given that there was some kind of sorting going on—,”
“Jaskier, where is it now?” Geralt couldn’t keep the urgency out of his voice this time, and Jaskier started a little, but he smiled and turned, walking to the back corner where there was a cupboard built into the corner of the room. He opened it, and out fell a long box, nearly too tall to fit through the door frame, and Jaskier caught it deftly, clearly aware that it would be there and ready to fall.
“Here. Help me carry it would you?” Geral ran to Jaskier’s side and picked up the box reverently. It was long and thin, and he knew that inside the map would be rolled. He remembered the curling at the corners of the one that had lived in Kaer Mohren. That one had once been rolled up like this. He lay the box out, straddling it between three desks, and he opened the top carefully.
There was magic in it, that was more than clear. It was in the box as much as it was in the paper itself, and so Geralt didn’t want to pull it out. But Jaskier had before, and he’d apparently foreseen that Geralt would want to pick it up, and he gestured to the front of the class, where he’d dropped a pair of ropes down that hung a long piece of carefully sanded wood. There were clamps along the wood as well as holes for hooks, with further hooks on the back.
“It’s not perfect, but as long as we don’t leave it up there for a decade it won’t do damage. This classroom is old, and these haven’t been used for decades – not since we started getting that good chalk from Herzeleid and everyone decided that they never wanted to go back, but professors used to actually hang up huge diagrams to teach from.” Jaskier continued his description of the history of teaching at Oxenfurt, clearly still in his lecturer headspace, until the two of them had successfully secured the top edge of the map and Jaskier gently pulled on the rope to raise it up. Geralt ran thick fingers over it as the familiar shapes emerged, making sure it didn’t catch as it went up.
Finally, it was up. On display. Geralt and Jaskier took a synchronised step back to observe it.
Geralt’s eyes ran over familiar lines, catching a view of the places that he remembered from his youth. Cities that no longer existed, whole swathes of the countryside that used to be havens for Witchers, and similarly areas that he considered regular haunts now that were strongly warned against at the point when this map had been made.
He reached forward and touched a light spot on one edge. There was a hole worn through the thick almost-leather that was the fabric that it had been placed upon. Geralt could see clearly in his mind the way that it had hung and the fact that there had been a stand placed just too close to that edge, that the sword would fall against the wall from where they’d been placed upright.
“This is the one from Kaer Mohren.” Geralt said, his voice reverent. Jaskier looked at him, his eyes lighting up for a moment, before he realised what that meant.
“This was... this was taken in the sacking then. It was stolen from you.”
“Yes,” Geralt replied simply.
“Then... then you should have it. Return it.” Jaskier wrung his hands, looking down. “This doesn’t... this doesn’t belong to us, and I know that the archivist will complain but it should really--,”
“No, it can stay here. In the keep as it is now it wouldn’t stay good. The wall where it hung is long gone, fallen into the ravine below. There’s no place for it any more.”
“But it’s your history.”
“Do you know how it worked?” Geralt asked. Jaskier looked taken aback at the non-sequitur, but he shook his head. “Nor do I . Nor do any that still live. It wasn’t painted on to this surface, it was placed with magic. A magic that would keep all the maps in each keep updated together. The Witchers would return from the path and share their experiences and the borders marked here would move and morph - villagers getting desperate calling for a witcher against their lord’s wishes after years of our avoidance and creating pockets of peace for us that would be there for the next year. But whatever it was that linked them... that was known only to the mages that made them. Like the mutagens. Like so much of our history and our lives.” Geralt took a deep breath. “And that can’t come back, no matter how much of our history we bring back to the keep.”
Geralt turned on his heel, no longer wanting to look at it. He used to study it for hours, fascinated by the way that the borders between safety, neutral and danger seemed to shift and warp into each other. It was like a living thing.
Now… now it was dead. Dark. It was nothing. It was a piece for a museum.
Geralt found that he’d stood in front of the tiny copy that Jaskier had made. This one... this one was new. This was alive. He picked it up and looked at it again. It wasn’t as crisp as the map behind him, some of the shapes of the rivers weren’t quite right, and there was definitely something strange going on at the coast around Cintra, but it had been made for him. For his brothers. To keep them safe.
“I’ll just... I’ll get rid of those. I mean, we’ll pack them up and I’ll just keep them as an academic exercise, that’s fine you don’t have to—,” Geralt pulled it out of the way of Jaskier’s hand where he had been going to take it.
“No. This is… this is good.” Geralt looked up at him. “Thank you.”