Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Redania needs to pacify the White Wolf. And it’s not like the slut will dare to sleep around on him.

The problem was, Julian’s father was correct. He wouldn’t dare to sleep around on the White Wolf, he was petrified enough by the prospect of sleeping with the White Wolf, and castigated himself for thinking that he might have enough value that he could put off marriage until… some undefined later circumstances. Until he’d finished this song. Until it was someone less oblivious when they’d been lampooned. Until, until, until. Until he was bound to his horse and for the den of the wolf.

Julian could think of much better uses for silk ropes.

That, he reminded himself, was hysteria. He was very familiar with hysteria. He’d carried smelling salts for his mother for years, but even if they’d been secreted in some pocket here he wouldn’t be able to reach them, and so he needed very much to avoid the hysterics before they started. So. How did it go.

In Scarlet Town, where I was born,
There was a fair maid dwelling,
Made many a man cry well-away
Her name was Barbara Allen.

All in the merry month of May
When green leaves they was springing,
This young man on his death-bed lay,
For the love of Barbara Allen.

Only it wasn’t for love, was it, it was fear, of these very bleak walls perforated by arrow slits like caesura. Julian made a bet with himself about whether there were any tapestries at all inside, or if they just let the cold of the stones seep into their very beings. That was the hysteria again. It was a suitable den for the White Wolf, so what if -

In Kaer Morhen where I was bound
There was a tyrant waitin’
Had struck the scalp from many a man
He was the Wolf of Kaedwen

Except that any good narrator would have been lamented, and Julian had been firmly assured that he was not. He was worthless, or rather, he’d spent his worth on frivolities and had no value left. His brothers smirked, his sisters had the grace to look guilty in their pleasure.

He’d thought he had worth in marrying, was all. That he wouldn’t be cast away like garbage. Not unless the king himself demanded it, and Julian had steered clear of insulting him. He hadn’t thought his own father would suggest throwing him away on the White Wolf.

When the White Wolf first emerged, Julian was first emerging also, from a childhood flushed with youth and beauty and talent, a rose in his father’s garden. Beloved. Chucked under the chin and granted nicknames that had grown frostburned since. Jaskier had been a prize, the accomplished daughter of a count. Promised to a duke.

Well, until he grew into Julian and discovered the duke’s beautiful sister, that was. And the following count’s daughter. And the sexy nuns. And the chaperone of the next count’s niece. And the earl found him in bed with his ex-wife and her chaperone and that was the end of that.

He wasn’t careless, he’d been very careful not to sleep with men, get himself pregnant, and ruin his reputation, no matter how attractive the men were. But his reputation began to exceed the bounds of private, and his options were growing limited, and his father’s patience had been more exhausted than Julian had thought. 

As Julian pressed the bounds of his sexual demesne, the Wolf had been pressing the bounds of his physical realm. At least as successfully. He’d taken some of the counties Julian had caroused in, and the rumors of just how were… things Julian tried not to think about.

The Wolf was inhuman, ravenous, unstoppable. The wolf had a bear’s temper and a fox’s cunning. The Wolf tore men apart with his teeth and women with his… at this point there was usually a polite cough and a flower metaphor that Julian was past the point of being shielded by. Well, he was about to find out the literal truth of that metaphor, and his nervous whine was covered by the creak of the small door in the castle’s gate.

Julian had thought he would have to remind himself to check for the slitted eyes that marked a Witcher, but from the instant the man stepped out through the gate it was obvious on some bone level, deep beneath his skin, where the animal instincts lay. This was a predator, moved like one waiting to start the hunt and the kill, and Julian knew he was the prey. His heart hammered faster and his hands began to sweat, his hands, fingers he needed for the strings of a harp he hadn’t brought with him, and his throat closed up with the tension of fear.

The White Wolf used Witchers as shock troops, hammering into a city, burning the houses of anyone important and taking their occupants back to the Wolf’s lair. Those who were seen again appeared through a mage’s portal just long enough for their very public deaths, struck by one of the paired swords from a Witcher’s back. Those who weren’t… didn’t even have flower metaphors ascribed to their fates. It simply wasn’t spoken of in front of a lady.

On the nights Julian snuck back to Oxenfurt, they said the White Wolf was simply faster and deadlier even than his army, that he was in fact part wolf, and that was why the people taken from their manors usually didn’t leave his bed alive. So it wasn’t like Julian was guessing that he would be raped to death. He knew. He was only guessing about what had caused the terrible scar across this creature’s face.

Oh, hang it, may as well call him a man, Julian was loose enough with the term in the privacy of his own head.

They’d sent the bravest diplomat to Kaer Morhen. Julian took his own twisted pleasure in the way the man’s voice squeaked as he said, “Sir - lord - we’ve brought a gift, a peace offering from Redania.”

The Witcher looked them over, arms crossed over a massive chest. Julian tried to imagine what he was seeing: the well-dressed diplomat, perhaps a wet trickle down one leg, the three guards, the one bedraggled lady bound to her horse.

“I don’t see any wagons,” he said.

“The gift is an offering of alliance,” the diplomat said, rallying. “A marriage alliance with Redania.” He gestured at Julian. “The Viscountess de Lettenhove.”

They hadn’t let him bring his trousseau, or even retwist his hair that morning. Some wedding. Some proposal.

Melitele - no, she couldn’t help him here, who was the god in Kaedwen? -  the creature was coming toward him. Julian gripped the ropes that bound his own wrists, pressing the nails through the soft fabric and back into his palms. Performers’ tricks, hide the tension where it wouldn’t be seen, the brush of fingers together at the waist while the other hand gestured expansively. Can’t chew a lip or a tongue, not when the face is such a useful tool. And if there was anything leaking from his drawers, perhaps the skirts would conceal - the Witcher was circling behind him. Julian focused hard on his bowels and took a single deep breath, the kind he’d take before he began a story.

Hwaet we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum

It only echoed around the hall of his mind, but he knew how he’d send it rolling if he had the voice in his head, and the unfamiliar language coupled with the very familiar recitation steadied him until he could see the Witcher again.

“A marriage,” said the Witcher. “That’s a first. Viscount something?”

“Julian Æthelflæd Pankratz,” Julian supplied, letting the Viscount stand. He wouldn’t call the Witcher’s reaction a recoil so much as a scoff.

“You got anything a man can wrap his mouth around?”

Julian licked his lips around the hysteria and said nothing. The Witcher shrugged and collected the reins of Julian’s horse, which dangled loose where they’d passed beyond the range of the ropes and any hope Julian might recover them. The horse, unspooked by whatever Witcher aura set Julian’s hair on end, followed docilely through the gates of the looming fortress that dammed the whole valley.

They always gave Julian the most docile horses.

“Wait!” called the diplomat. The Witcher paused. “Does this mean you accept?”

There was something of the same scoff in the Witcher’s expression. “Tell King Vizimir from Eskel that if he wants to negotiate with the White Wolf, he’d do better to talk to the White Wolf,” he said. “But we’ll take the lass.”

The gate thumped behind Julian, the horse, and the Witcher, and that was that: the end of Julian’s life. No escape now, if there had been any before. He stared fixedly between the horse’s ears and waited for the panicked ringing to die down.

“All right, let’s get you down,” said the Witcher. Eskel, apparently, the White Wolf’s second in command, known for worrying his enemies like a dog before he tossed them across the field. He drew a knife, and before Julian had even finished tensing he’d cut through the ropes that bound him.

“That was silk,” Julian informed him, his tongue escaping at last. He couldn’t recall if silk withstood attempts to pierce or slash it, if this was another terrifying display of Witcher strength. The Witcher paused a moment, looking at him, and then shrugged.

“They came to give you a wench?” It was a different voice, and of course there would be more than two Witchers in the castle, Julian was forgetting his ghost stories. The one coming down the stairs now wasn’t as broad as Eskel, or as obviously battered, but he carried himself like a fight waiting to happen.

Something wrong in Julian’s brain wanted to make that a song.

“They came to give the White Wolf a bride,” Eskel answered. The second Witcher whistled. Eskel added, almost in the tones of an invitation, “Piss off before you make yourself unwelcome, Lambert. Unless you’d rather make yourself useful and take the horse?”

The Lambert Witcher made a rude gesture that Julian knew how to cap, but he arrived at the side of the horse fast enough to unnerve Julian further. Julian gritted his teeth, watching his vision go a little swimmy, and was reaching for Barbara Allen again when he felt something around his waist and found himself juggled to the ground.

His scream was a perfect tonic D.

“Hush,” Eskel said with a hand clamped over his mouth. “No one’s hurting you. No one’s going to hurt you. I’m taking you to Geralt to decide what to do with you.”

Julian struggled for composure. The hand stayed over his mouth, waiting past the point when he’d stopped screaming, but there was no painful pressure, just a locked, patient grip until - what? The tension drained sufficiently from his shoulders? Whatever it was, eventually he satisfied Eskel, who dropped him, checked him over once more, and gave a curt nod. He took off walking without looking back, and Julian had to scramble to keep up, which was only partly a matter of catching up. Witchers, it turned out, walked fast. And Julian decided he would rather be near the one who had promised not to hurt him.

With it in front of him, where his body didn’t panic. Damn it, he’d never wanted to be the protagonist of a ballad, he’d just wanted to sing them.

This particular trip was an Orpheus into the underworld, and he was lucky to have a guide, even as his brain slipped into Io la Musica son, ch’a i dolci accenti, sò far tranquillo ogni turbato core. The keep was much larger than it looked from outside, and it looked big to start with. It had to have been carved back into the mountain, and when Eskel threw open a door, Julian had reached Sia testimon del core qualche lieta canzon che detti Amore.

He was a little annoyed to be interrupted, and much more grateful that the room they’d entered had a real window, even if it wasn’t paned with glass and so let in the autumn chill.

There were two women and two men in the room, a ratio that set Julian aback even as he flipped through his automatic analysis of the audience. The women were violently beautiful, the one black-haired and purple-eyed, yes, a gods-blessed purple, the other’s hair a russet that glowed with red and her eyes why-even-bother-anymore gemstone pale. The men, as if a counterpoint, were colorless: one an almost comical representation of middle age that Julian was surprised to see in the Witcher fortress, and the other he might have mistaken for an albino if not for the golden eyes.

Well. That was unfair. The white hair, cat-slitted eyes, ridiculously powerful build on a ludicrously svelte figure, two swords hung over the chair arm, and silver medallion emphasizing the pallor of the complexion, along with a presence that comfortably occupied the entire room and left very little space for breathing - that gave truth to all the rumors about the White Wolf. Julian whimpered.

“Hm?” said the White Wolf.

“Sorry, Geralt,” Eskel said. “Redania sent tribute.” He waved a hand at Julian.

“Tribute?” the brunette echoed. “They’re sending people now?”

“I thought slavery was illegal in Redania,” said the black-haired sorceress.

“So did I, Yen,” said Eskel, looking to Julian for an explanation. Julian shrugged tightly and fluttered a hand at his waist. He was trying to process both that the White Wolf’s name was Geralt and that his sorceress Yennefer was staring right at him, Yennefer who Julian had written a song about, she might have heard it - 

“Do you have a name?” Yennefer asked. Julian breathed and stumbled through a mockery of the bows he’d been practicing since he was three.

“Julian Æthelflæd Pankratz, Viscountess de Lettenhove, my lady.” He winced as his contemptibly high voice squeaked even higher.

“I would have said, but I couldn’t remember it,” said Eskel. The White Wolf grunted.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with a viscountess?” he asked. Demanded. No one answered. Eskel was looking at Julian, who was too terrified of his audience, not to mention the squeak in his voice, to speak.

“Marry her,” said Eskel when this became clear.

“No. What else?”

He sounded so much like Julian’s father that Julian stifled a whimper. He had had this dream before, where he was not only eaten but insulted, and woke shivering with sweat. Those dreams weren’t supposed to come true. Fun discovery, he sweated just as much awake as asleep. 

“What are you good for?” Eskel asked, and at Julian’s look - gods and sorcerers, what must his face be showing - he amended, “What are you good at?”

“Music,” said Julian instantly, gratefully. “I can paint, and sing, and play flute and viol -” - and anything else put in front of him, but never mind his failings now - “- and manage conversations at a salon and compose and flyt-on-the-fly and - and I audited classes in all the major arts at Oxenfurt.”

That was a secret not even his father knew. He assumed all the finishing school classes Julian had missed were because he was out carousing, which was perfectly in character and not wholly untrue.

"Did you now,” said the brown-haired sorceress, who must be aware that women weren’t allowed at Oxenfurt.

“So you’re educated,” Eskel said. “History, geography, politics and all that?”

Philosophie, Juristerei, Medizin, und leider auch Theologie, Julian’s mad brain recited. He said, “Yes.”

“Well there we have it,” said Eskel. “The cub needs a new tutor.”

“Perhaps,” Yennefer muttered, and then louder, “And you need a bard, Geralt.”

“I don’t need a bard,” said the White Wolf.

“You don’t need a beard either,” said the middle-aged one.

“You do. A bard can turn the Butcher of Blaviken into…” She gestured at Julian. There was a pause. “Come along, dear, you said you could flyt on the fly, try the reverse.”

The ‘dear’ in her mouth sounded as patronizingly insulting as any flyt Julian had composed. “The Wolf, the winner, the welcome of widows?” he suggested. “There are syllable constraints for a reason. You need scansion and syntax to sing praises to prudes, inversions on indices only run lewd.”

The White Wolf blinked.

“...my lord,” Julian appended.

“You see!” said Yennefer. “You need a bard for… syllable constraints.”

“Propaganda,” said the other sorceress.

"Public relations, Triss,” said Yennefer.

“Huh,” said the White Wolf. “What do you need then, bard?”

A room with a lock, Julian thought. “A place to work,” he said. “Paper and ink and quills - or slate and chalk. Things to write with. A lute or a harp.”

“Eskel,” the White Wolf said.

“I’ll get him set up,” Eskel answered. “Come on, then, bard.”

But before they could leave, the second sorceress, Triss, said, “Julian, is it?” He stopped a moment and looked back at her. “All shall be well.”

And it rattled around in his head, without echo, as they walked the steps of Kaer Morhen.

Eskel led Julian to his new room himself. Julian was beginning to wonder what he had done to deserve the undivided attention of the White Wolf’s right hand, but - all shall be well, she had said. And he wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t going to the White Wolf’s chambers to await his death.

Instead Eskel led him to a small room with its very own fireplace and a bed only big enough for one. And a door.

“It’s not much and it’s not made up, but you can do with it what you like. We’ll see what you can get off the next few tribute wagons,” Eskel said. “I mean, the kind with things in them, not people.”

His voice ended in a growl, and Julian instinctively stepped backward, into the hall where he would not be cornered. Eskel abruptly stepped into the small room, away from Julian, and just as he was breathing, again, and steadying himself, Eskel growled, “I hear a heartbeat.”

He certainly set Julian’s off hammering in his chest, but Eskel seemed to have lost interest in him completely, crossing the room and reaching into the fireplace and up the chimney. There was a scuffling and a shriek, and he pulled from the chimney a small foot followed by a medium sized girl.

Julian, without thinking, cried, “Don’t hurt her!”

Eskel lowered his hand. The girl stretched her arms out so that her palms touched the floor, and as Eskel loosened his grasp she pulled herself into a standing position like a gymnast coming out of a cartwheel.

“Huh,” said Eskel. In retrospect, Julian thought, it must have taken a great deal of strength to hold so large a child one-handed. On a human he’d have already been mentally undressing anyone who could do that.

“He’s not going to hurt me, I’m good at climbing,” the girl scoffed. She peered at Julian. “You’re new.”

“I - yes. Today.”

“I’m Ciri.” She paused. “You’re supposed to say your name.”

“Julian.”

“Ciri is our cub,” Eskel explained. “The White Wolf’s daughter. Ciri, Julian’s here to teach you.”

Ciri squinched up her nose.

“Give her a chance,” Eskel warned.

Ciri sighed dramatically and let her nose unsquinch. “I found a weird rock,” she announced. “Do you know what it is?”

She removed it from a buttoned pouch on her shirt and held it up. Julian leaned down to examine it. It seemed to have many layers, and a ribbed somewhat circular pattern on it.

“No,” he announced cheerfully. “It’s certainly some sort of fossil, and a mollusc, but I don’t know what kind. Do you want to find out with me?”

“What’s a mollusc?”

“It’s a word for all kinds of shellfish, like clams and mussels but also snails,” Julian said.

“How did it get up here? ” Ciri asked. “The ocean’s not for miles. I’ve never been.”

“Not ever?” Julian asked, miming astonishment, and then abruptly dropping back out of it. “Me neither. But I would guess that either the ocean used to be a lot closer, or they got washed up in one of the really big floods. Those happen sometimes.”

“How?”

“That is a question for your lessons tomorrow.” Once Julian had some smattering of an idea what to teach her. He wasn’t certain that flood narratives were what the Witchers had in mind for… the White Wolf’s daughter. The White Wolf had a daughter . Where had he gotten one? Did he have a wife somewhere as well? How did nobody know about this? If he had a daughter he had a succession, and that laid to rest Redania’s plan for letting the Warlord’s empire fall to pieces around him - possibly, there were certainly plenty of examples of warlords’ children letting the empire fall to pieces around them instead.

“Something to look forward to,” Eskel said. “Come on, let’s dunk you in a hot spring before supper. Where did you even find this much soot?”

“In the chimney. I need it for hugging Uncle Lambert.”

“You astonish me. Uh, Julian - there’s hot springs. If you keep going down but not outside you can’t miss them.”

“Right,” said Julian, and waited for them to leave.

“Any chance we’ll get a song tonight?”

“Already?” He hated his voice, hated his voice, squeak squeak squeak -

“I don’t know what’s usual for these situations,” Eskel admitted.

Julian winced. “Performing immediately,” he admitted in turn. And not having such luxuries as his own room and bed. For a bard. For a viscount…

Eskel was already closing the door behind them. Julian sat heavily on the unclothed bed and, at last, let the last hour wash over him.

He was alone, in a foreign country, with a door between him and everyone else. And he didn’t know what he wanted to do next.

It was not, he suspected, throw himself from the window, though a quick inspection showed that was a viable method of suicide and a nonviable method of escape no matter how many bedsheets he tied together. He should have guessed that from the gorges they had passed on the way up here. Neither did he want to seek out more terrifying Witchers or get lost in the endless bowels of Kaer Morhen.

Which left… staying here.

And he was expected to perform tonight, in front of the White Wolf and who knew who many Witchers and sorceresses. “Oh, hell,” he murmured to himself, and quietly, for the first time since he’d left Redania, began practicing scales.

If Julian were being honest with himself, he’d expected a hush to fall on the room when he entered the dining hall. A bard always wants a grand entrance, and Julian felt he deserved one as the White Wolf’s… bride. Sacrifice. The only human in the room?

But he wasn’t the only human in the room, he was only the White Wolf’s bard and tutor, and there was no drama to that at all. And everyone else seemed to know where to sit, so he just hovered in the doorway wondering what the organizing principle was.

He knew what he’d do if this were a normal court: stop a kitchen servant, ask when the subtlety was coming out, then follow it out in parade, singing something worshipful. Hildegard, maybe, and if they didn’t find him a seat after that he’d sing something catty. But here, surrounded by Witchers who could and maybe would kill him so much as glance at him, he hesitated. In the doorway. For fifteen minutes.

Come on, Julian, he thought. They’re making you boring. Go and plop down on the throne if they’re not going to make it clear where you should sit.

He took a step forward, watched a couple of heads turn toward him, and froze. Prey. After a moment, the heads swiveled back around, uninterested, and went back to the food that Julian very much wanted to eat, he was hungry.

Eventually Ciri came down from the high table and demanded to know why he was still just standing in the door.

“I don’t know where to sit,” Julian explained. Ciri stared at him blankly.

“Wherever you want to,” she said.

Julian tried to think how to explain the rules of seating arrangements and rank and networking, and settled on, “I don’t know anyone here.”

“Ohh,” said Ciri. “You can sit with me then.” And before Julian could protest that a bard was far more likely to be placed in front of the fire without a chair at all, she dragged him up to the high table and squeezed to one side so Julian could share her spot on - it was a bench. They had a bench at the high table, and Julian was sitting two places down from the White Wolf.

“That’s Aubry, he doesn’t talk much, and Uncle Lambert, who’s funny, Vesemir, Yennefer - she knows everything - Aunt Triss, Uncle Eskel, and this,” Ciri said with relish, as if it were the prize of her collection, “is my papa. Have you met my papa? Papa, this is Julian, she’s going to teach me about rocks tomorrow and she says Kaer Morhen used to be underwater. There, now you know people! She wasn’t coming in because she didn’t know people.”

“Hm,” said the White Wolf.

“I wasn’t sure what seating protocols Kaer Morhen follows,” Julian apologized.

“What’s a fucking seating protocol?” Lambert asked. Julian’s eyebrows rose as he glanced at Ciri. He hadn’t learned that word until he started sneaking out of finishing school.

“Rules for where people sit, versus rank and relationship and alliance,” Julian said, for Ciri’s benefit. “Haven’t you got - I don’t know, a great aunt your father doesn’t speak to anymore?”

“Fuck no,” said Lambert. Julian hesitated. Lambert swiveled in his chair and gestured at the hall, a chicken leg still in one hand. “Wolves, Cats, Manticores, Bears, Cranes, Vipers, Griffins.”

“Which are…?” It sounded like a skipping song, and was ready to become one in Julian’s mind.

“Witcher schools. Don’t you know anything?” Ciri asked.

“Nothing of importance,” Julian said. He was finding himself extremely grateful to Ciri’s presence; it was so easy to focus on interacting with a child and forget, if deliberately, how thinly the thread of his life dangled.

“Except that Kaer Morhen was underwater,” said Vesemir. Julian hadn’t thought there were old Witchers, but seated this close he could see both the slitted yellow eyes and the graying hair, and it was difficult to deny.

“A very, very long time ago,” Julian said firmly. “Longer than…” He stopped. The White Wolf’s eyes were on him. “A long time ago.”

Witchers in general were intimidating. Julian supposed he was going to have to learn to deal with that, for all they loomed and panted and woke something deep in his belly that writhed about. The White Wolf was all the more so, and his eyes seemed to bore into Julian, holding him there until all that was left was the thing that squirmed.

He was also, Julian had to admit when his eyes wandered seeking anything else to focus on, intimidatingly handsome.

“How long?” the White Wolf demanded.

“Sorry?”

“How long ago was Kaer Morhen underwater.”

“I don’t know exactly,” Julian stalled. “I’m not familiar with the area and I didn’t exactly… specialize in geology, but - usually on the order of a thousand years?”

“Bullshit,” said Lambert.

“It could be six thousand. Or forty thousand. Depending on the oral tradition tallied.”

“Julian says floods happens sometimes,” Ciri chirped. Julian closed his eyes and breathed. Melitele - no, Merope in Kaedwen - preserve me from the helpfulness of children.

“How often?” asked the White Wolf.

“Is it going to happen soon?”

“It’s a subject of popular debate among geologists at Oxenfurt,” said Julian. “The short answer is… we don’t know. You can’t plan on it.”

“Hm,” said the Wolf. There was a pause.

“It could all be a lie,” Julian offered. A lie repeated in the historical tradition of a dozen different countries. Even if they did vary on the timing and the cause.

“It’s bullshit,” Lambert said, forcefully this time. “Forty thousand years? That’s a nonsense number. Nothing was alive that fucking long ago. Nothing fucking existed that long ago. That’s the sort of bullshit number sorceresses come up with right before they curse you to count until the sand runs out on their forty-fucking-thousand-year timer.”

His voice had risen loud enough to reach the other end of the table. Yennefer looked down at them, gathering attention to herself - that was a bardic trick - and swirled her wine knowingly. “She’s right,” she said.

“Bullshit,” said Lambert, but without conviction this time.

“Yes, you’ve rather expressed your opinion on the subject, Lambert,” said Yennefer quellingly. “The world may end in cosmic flood tomorrow, or sorcerous ash the next day; the mountains might erupt or fire fall from the sky. You can’t plan for that. Can we move on?”

“I heard you wanted a song?” Julian said desperately. “What sort of song?” The only thing rattling around in his head was the Fall of Ys, and he hoped for some prompt to move him away from that in this crowd.

“Impress us,” Yennefer demanded, and, well, Ys would do that. So Julian stood up. He took a breath - then, seeing how rowdy the hall was, decided that trick alone would not work, stood back on the seat he had just vacated, and called.

It was a herald’s trick to make yourself louder than anyone would believe, but bards learned it too. Ladies didn’t, but Julian wasn’t exactly proficient at being a lady. It didn’t really matter what he said, but he tended to go with hwæt - the same syllable he’d jerked himself to calm with earlier that day.

It was loud enough to gather the gaze of several hundred Witchers. The breath Julian drew was a little shaky.

Ordinarily he would give an introduction, outlining the story so his audience could match gestures when he switched out of common language. In context, he didn’t think he wanted his audience to know about a decadent court being flooded and all its inhabitants drowned, survived only by a phantom on a beach. But that was what was in Julian’s head, so he skipped the outline and ornamented the shit out of the verses to make up for it.

It was just what Yennefer had asked for: not in a well-known tongue, already known for its ornamentation, and in Julian’s voice, high. It was about the fall of a king while he stood in front of just such a ruler, and a city underwater when he’d just been reassuring the table that that hadn’t happened in even Witcher memory, and he hated singing it. It was too high, and reminded him of the things he disliked about his own admittedly fine voice. It was a fine voice. People commented on it. It was fine.

And you wouldn’t want to be more than fine, would you, Julian? His father’s voice prompted in his head.

He finished the song and flourished a bow to Yennefer, who tipped her wine glass at him with a tiny smirk. “As my lady requested,” he said. “If I might lighten the mood a little -” and he launched into Female Sailor Bold, the good version, the one without a love interest and where, depending on how you sang the final verse, the home she rested at might not be ashore.

He may have rewritten it a little.

But there was adventure and pirates and crossdressing, and he got to growl out the pirate voices, and Ciri shrieked and clapped her hands at the growling, and it was almost as far from Ys as you could get while staying with the sea.

“I want to be a pirate,” she announced to her father as the song ended, and Julian was lucky it didn’t end on an elongated note. “Can I be a pirate?”

“On the good ship Bedtime, perhaps,” Eskel suggested. Julian, intent on his work, noticed other conversations starting up, and wavered about taking the floor back.

“One more song?” Ciri begged.

“Let the bard eat,” the White Wolf said. “Though - first -”

For a moment Julian thought he had taken a page from Julian’s book, as he climbed up on his bench. He didn’t need the bardic trick for gathering attention; the hall quieted again as he stood. And kept quiet enough to hear him across the room, though he barely raised his voice.

“This is Julian, our new bard,” he said. “And she’s mine.”

“White Wolf!” the room chorused, in as abrupt unison as soldiers saluting or the choir that every director dreamed of. Standing there, Julian thought, the Wolf did have a sort of conductorly charisma, the sort of thing that made you want to do your absolute best, to shine for him - 

“It would be polite to sit down before he does,” Yennefer murmured in his ear. “Unless you had something to add?”

Julian sat abruptly. Yennefer drifted back to her seat like a ghost, and Julian felt like he’d been dunked in one, the cold of the grave rising up into his body like the rebec part to The Unquiet Grave. What had he done wrong? What did Yennefer know?

Fuck. He’d always performed, in the bardic sense, as a man. He’d forgotten women didn’t bow.

Whatever Yennefer might have known, or thought, or guessed, she had said nothing about it by the next day. Julian found his own way down to the dining hall and discovered that breakfast was an informal meal stretched across enough hours that people could take it as they chose, and as such relatively short on Witchers. With a bit of practice, he might be able to avoid them entirely.

Ciri found him at breakfast regardless and Julian explained to her what little he knew about fossils and geology and different types of rock, and why gems and metals tended to be found in mountains, and managed to segue this into a look at a map to see which countries might be rich in which materials instead of Ciri’s plan for a trip to the nearest gorge to pan for emeralds. Which she would not find since it was the wrong type of rock.

He was pretty pleased with himself. For a bard with no experience in education and no lesson plan, he’d managed to get something princessly into her head. Principle exports by way of geology, it could be worse.

“Do you speak any other languages, princess?” he asked as they pored over the map.

“I’m not a princess,” she objected. “I’m a cub. And I know some Skellige.”

“Oh?” he said, surprised. Not a language he would have thought to prioritize. “Like what?”

She paused a moment to tally, then recited in Skellige, “Shit fuck cunt ass bitch.”

“Oh,” said Julian faintly. He’d had to work to learn those words.

“Uncle Lambert teaches me,” said Ciri blithely.

“Does he know any other words in Skellige?” Julian asked.

“I don’t know,” said Ciri. “Are there mountains in Skellige?”

“Not exactly. Islands are sort of underwater mountains,” Julian said. “What about Nilfgaardian, do you know any of those words?”

“No. Are there mountains in Nilfgaard?”

“Yes, over by Vicovaro.” He waited a moment for her to find it. “There’s gold mines in Vicovaro. The Nilfgaardians call it gullr.”

“Gullr,” Ciri repeated, and they slowly transitioned into getting Ciri a small vocabulary of Nilfgaardian, though the words she wanted to start with - wolf, Witcher, sword, silver, steel, goose - were not ones Julian would have chosen, and some of them - pirouette, roundhouse kick - strained the borders of his vocabulary in Nilfgaardian and the common speech alike.

Ciri was the one who informed Julian when it was time for lunch, and brought him down to the hall, where she tried to seat him next to her at the table again. Julian balked.

“I know we haven’t gotten into court etiquette yet, but that’s a very good way to insult someone,” he said. Ciri frowned.

"How?" she asked, and so they were both standing by the table talking about seating rules and how people felt entitled to them based on rank when the main door swung open and a flood of Witchers came pouring into the room. Julian froze.

It wasn’t like he could tell, from a distance, who was a Witcher and who wasn’t. It was just that nearly everyone here except Julian was either a sorceress or a Witcher, and it was pretty clear which was which based on gender and… physique alone. Julian wasn’t particularly much more comfortable with sorceresses than with Witchers, and the flood of bulky men who had all killed before set his heart racing. He wrapped one hand inside a fold of his skirt and rubbed his thumb against his fingers. Fidget where the audience can’t see you, and hold your ground.

No one at the table was having difficulty with that. They leaned into each other’s space like old friends, like Julian’s companions at Oxenfurt had. Even the White Wolf bore this invasion of his space without a flicker of expression, including when Eskel blatantly dug an elbow into his side. Ciri strolled up with less concern than Julian would have approached the children’s table at Lettenhove.

“Is there a problem, cub?” Eskel asked as they came up to the table. “You’ve usually started by now.” He snagged a roll off the table and bit into it.

“Julian says bards don’t sit at high tables,” Ciri said. The White Wolf looked at him and grunted.

“Tutors?” he asked. Julian shook his head. “Sorceresses?”

“Oh, definitely,” Julian said fervently, happy to have something he could agree to.

“Hm,” said the Wolf. “Witchers?”

“Er… no,” said Julian.

“Then sit down,” said the Wolf, gesturing at the chair Ciri had chosen for him. “Well, cub? Is the kaer underwater?”

Ciri cheerfully prattled about gold and gems and mountains, keeping attention mostly off Julian. He discovered he was ravenous; between singing the night before and avoiding Witchers at breakfast, he’d barely eaten since he’d gotten to Kaer Morhen, and the nervous bellyache was subsiding into sheer hunger. He’d been longer without food, when he was caught up in composing or his father was punishing him for some escapade, but - no one seemed to mind when he took more than was proper.

Certainly all the men around him were eating far more than was proper, and the tables were set for it. And the food was good. Simple but pleasurable, the way you could eat in Oxenfurt if you got away from the schools, bread baked fresh and variable, meats with sauces - multiple kinds of meat, which Julian assumed was a high table treat until he saw the same spread at every other table. Not a lot of vegetables, and the potato featured prominently. Julian spotted a beet salad at the sorceresses’ end of the table, unique across the room.

Witchers, he realized, didn’t like to eat their vegetables, and he hid a smile behind a roll. It… humanized them somehow. Even though they weren’t human. Hadn’t they started out that way?

Was there a song in that, about boys who didn’t eat their vegetables? A silly song; Ciri would like it. There were boys scattered amongst the Witcher tables, cheerfully not eating their vegetables either, and maybe he could sing it for them, too, little islands of humanity.

Not the sort of propaganda Yennefer had suggested, but he might write it on his own time, and never sing it. He’d written a lot of songs at home that he didn’t sing outside his room.

At the end of the meal, when Julian was wondering what he was meant to do with his afternoon, someone called his name. Julian looked up, and behind him, and found a man who looked about the same age as Vesemir, and was standing close enough that Julian could see his eyes were not slitted. Julian’s grew wide.

“Lady Julian?” the man guessed.

“Just Julian,” he said firmly. Not even the chief sorceress was Lady Yennefer here - the high table called her Yen - which meant he could drop the gendered honorific without comment.

“Jan Eskelsson, not that Eskel. I’m the steward here. Eskel-that-Eskel said you might need clothes.”

Seeing as he’d been delivered with just as much dowry as the clothes on his back, yes, perhaps, Julian thought. “The keep has some?” he asked. “Then thank you, Jan-Eskelsson-not-that-Eskel, lead the way.”

“Does the high table know you have a sense of humor?” Jan asked, doing so, his tone inviting. Julian widened his eyes again.

“Oh no, Melitele forbids it,” he said.

“Best not let them find out then,” said Jan. “They might adopt you. More than they already have.”

“Can that… happen?” Julian asked, trying to fit all of his desperate questions - who are you, how many humans are here, where are they, how do you survive being surrounded by Witchers - into one offhanded question.

“My daughter Julita, who bakes the bread here, adopted a Witcher as her uncle. Most of us are here out of gratitude, and it was a rarity at the time, but it’s growing more common. Not that you need to worry; the White Wolf himself claimed you, no one will lay a finger on you. Witchers are nobler than nobles that way.” He paused, leaving Julian an opening to contribute, as if he hadn’t been deliberately answering the unasked questions.

“It’s very good bread,” said Julian stupidly.

“I’m sorry, you were a noble,” said Jan. “Maybe you had more honor than those my people came here fleeing.”

Julian thought about his four failed engagements, rampant affairs, and giving up his allegiances to be married to the White Wolf, whose appetites everyone knew. “I don’t think so,” he said. But then, his king had asked him to do this, and his father had proposed it, so - “I don’t know if any of them do.”

Jan hummed a note that sounded suspiciously similar to the White Wolf’s grunts, and unlocked a door. “Here we go. Unused tribute chamber.”

Julian’s jaw dropped. It was somewhere between a junkyard and an antique shop. There seemed to be some organizational system - boots here, priceless golden goblets there - but it was nevertheless all jumbled together like an antiquer’s wet dream.

“It’s never quite a priority to get it cleaned up,” Jan said apologetically. “You’ll find Witchers only care if something is useful, and vassal kings are still trying to figure out what Witchers like.”

“Has anyone told them?” Julian asked, nose deep in a chest of clothes, mind half on the fabrics and half frittering away at an ode to the White Wolf’s closet.

“You’d have to ask the high table about that,” said Jan. He was sticking around to watch Julian - but of course, they wouldn’t want Julian stealing the White Wolf’s things, as if anyone would be that stupid. So what was reasonable? Could he get by on three changes of clothes?

There weren’t that many skirts in the room. Could he get away with three changes of doublets and hose?

He tried, as innocuously as possible, to pick out his favorites of the really beautiful doublets. No one was skimping on the tribute to the White Wolf, though they might think of sending a tailor as well. Julian tried on one of them, pulling his hair out the back. No mirrors in here to check, but it seemed a pretty decent fit. He could make the rest of that over, the principles couldn’t be very different from dresses. Now, to find hose to go with it…

He wasn’t sure how long it took. The shoes were the most difficult part, since he didn’t have the skill to rework those and had to go with the best fit even though it clashed with his favorite purple-and-gold outfit. And he had to leave such pretty things behind. But he made a small stack of clothes, with some papers and inks and quills in a lovely little basket, and made his way back to Jan, spirits high and a little tense as he waited for Jan to comment on his choices.

“Did you find everything you need?” Jan asked. Julian hesitated.

“Well… I do need a lute. Or any kind of instrument, really. Barding, you know.”

“I will add it to the list of requests,” Jan assured him, and bent to lock the room. The lovely, lovely room. If only Julian still had his lockpicks. Wait, no, stealing from the White Wolf was a terrible idea, he’d had that exact thought himself half an hour ago. Longer? Long enough to change his mind a little. “Julian?”

“Yes?”

“It’s not my place to say, but you’re in a unique position here. To talk to the Wolf about human concerns; to tell humans what Witchers are really like. If there’s anything I can do to facilitate that… Let me know. Not just as steward.”

“Oh,” said Julian. “Thank you.”

“And if you can, quit being so scared of them. There’s nothing a Witcher likes more than courage,” Jan said. And as if to avoid telling a noble that to the face, he left Julian standing there.

Quit being afraid of them. As if that were so easy to do.

For some time Julian wore doublets and trousers and no one said a word. They didn’t even seem to notice. If you had asked Julian before he came to Kaer Morhen, he would have said that that was exactly what he wanted - for it to be utterly unremarkable - but he found himself feeling… miffed. It had felt momentous to him; why didn’t anyone else take note? He was a bard. He deserved notice!

He decided it must be because of how he was avoiding people. If he showed up late to breakfast, he could grab a couple of rolls and take Ciri off to her lessons, and since Witchers seemed to eat breakfast whenever they felt like it there were few people in the hall at any one time. He could avoid lunch similarly, and then spend all afternoon in his room preparing lesson plans and warming up his voice and all he had to do was get through supper surrounded by Witchers, singing other people’s songs in front of them.

Though perhaps he did not entirely avoid them in the afternoons. There was one day when he was trying to walk a particularly bad composition idea out of his head and accidentally wound up on the training ground. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye, so fast he squeaked and fled across the court. The next thing he knew he was on the outer wall of Kaer Morhen.

The view outward across the mountains was magnificent, but not so much as the view inward to the training grounds where Witchers sparred, or egged each other on, or even, tired by their exertions, stripped their shirts off in the mellowing afternoon light.

“Merope, goddess of whores,” Julian breathed, and stayed to watch. They might not be human but they looked it, and Julian was certainly only human. By the time he tore his attention away he was well on his way to sunburn, and needed a bath to wash off more than sweat.

Until then he had washed in his room, tolerating the bemused looks of the servants who brought him basins, but - well, Eskel had said that if he went down but not outside he couldn’t miss the hot springs. And all the Witchers were safely occupied, as Julian was now thoroughly aware. So he went looking.

He had heard of the hot springs while still in Redania. Kaedwen had several, most big enough for a single family and generally owned by that family. There were dirty student jokes about what that family of rural Kaedwenian farmers did in their hot spring. Julian was prepared to brace himself if he had to share, provided no one tried to take advantage. Without an invitation.

The baths of Kaer Morhen were miles beyond that. Julian felt and smelled them before he arrived, a thick dampness and a smell of pasta that made him think he was closer to the kitchens than the baths until he rounded the corner. And why not? Redanian travelers agreed that hot springs smelled like hell.

Then he turned the corner and found himself in a vast cavern of more than a dozen pools, the top of it writhing with steam, the highest pool actively bubbling with heat. Julian’s jaw dropped.

“Merope, goddess of whores,” he whispered again, too awed even to have poetry bubbling up in him. Although… poetry like the water in that top pool…

When he recovered himself he went around to each pool, dipping a finger in to test its heat. He scalded half his fingers that way and for once he was glad he didn’t have a lute to regret the injury over. At last he slipped into one of the lower pools, letting the mild current wash his dirt away, and relaxed for the first time since he came to Kaer Morhen.

He’d had some regrets when he finally heard other people coming and discovered the pools were lacking in things like drying cloths, but since then he’d made a habit of visiting the wall in the afternoons for… inspiration… and bringing his own towel to the baths afterward. As someone with the libido of a rabbit on aphrodisiacs, it provided some much-needed relief.

But even with all this avoidance in the day, and going to the hot springs when no one else was there, someone should have commented on his costume in the evenings when he performed, and no one said a word. Julian would be so full of pent up fear and anxiety he thought he would burst, and then suddenly it would all be over, he wouldn’t even remember what songs he had sung, and there would be the typical smattering of dutiful applause before he was let off. And no one commented on anything.

He wanted more than that weak applause, but he didn’t dare risk singing his songs. Or, worst, Yennefer’s. So he went on with Orfeo for the sorceresses and “As I Went Home on Monday Night” for the Witchers. Which, with just a few alterations - if he could just -

As I came back from on the Path (as drunk as drunk can be!)
I saw a Viper at table where no Viper should be
I called the Wolf and I said to him, “Would you kindly tell to me
Why is a Viper in Kaer Morhen, where only Wolves should be?”

- then it was almost a legitimate historical ballad, and Julian was going to get himself in trouble trying to sing his own songs again. For something he couldn’t even sing in the right octave.

So he was walking the halls, the back halls where he was unlikely to run into someone, to pace out the verse coming through in his head that he couldn’t stop, when he ran into the White Wolf himself coming the other direction down a disused hallway. Julian froze.

“Hm,” said Geralt. “Notice you’re wearing trousers.”

Every nerve in Julian that was not already panicking at the presence of a Witcher kicked in screaming.

“And not riding horses,” Geralt continued.

So much for having an excuse. “Yes, sorry, the -” Julian began, preparing to explain about the leftover tribute not being strong on skirts.

“Do you want to be riding horses?”

Julian’s sentence sputtered and died. “Um… yes?” he asked.

“C’mon.” Geralt brushed past him, and Julian, not sure what else to do and wanting neither to disobey the White Wolf or have him in his blind spot, turned around and followed.

Geralt took him down a staircase so steep it had to be for either servants or fire escape, and suddenly they were in a courtyard by the stables. Julian followed him into the stable and down the length of it until they reached the stall of a pretty nondescript bay mare. Julian certainly wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a picket, except perhaps by how blankly she stared at him.

“Roach,” Geralt announced. Julian stared at his face searchingly. He wasn’t sure what emotion this was, or what sort of observation Geralt was making. Surely they didn’t have cockroaches in the stables. “You got one?”

“Er… no?” Julian said. Geralt shrugged and gestured to the next stall over, where a nearly identical horse stood.

“My spare. Go ahead.”

“Ah… does she have a name?” Julian asked.

“Also Roach.”

There was tack in front of the stall. Julian did know how to saddle a horse, and went about it as quietly as he could, listening for the sounds of leather and metal from the next stall over. The horse seemed unimpressed, or possibly didn’t notice. Julian wasn’t sure if it was stupid, or deaf, or some form of equine comatose. He supposed it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like the horses he’d been given before were any less docile.

“You don’t have to take me riding,” he offered when he led the horse - Roach? Or was its name Also Roach? - out and found Geralt sitting patiently on - Roach? Roach the First? - in front of the stables. Roach I wore a similarly glazed expression to Julian’s mount. Maybe that was how they dealt with having to carry Witchers. Maybe Julian should try it. “I mean, it’s very kind of you, my lord, but I can ride myself. I won’t run away.” He wasn’t sure if that were true or not. It hadn’t, heretofore, occurred to him to run away.

“Monsters,” said Geralt.

“I’m sure you could send someone - you have important duties -”

“Exactly.”

Julian mulled that over as they rode - at a comfortable amble - out of the keep. To his surprise, Geralt turned not left down the road toward civilization, but right and up farther into the mountains.

“Are we not going to take the road?” he asked.

“Ground’s better this way.”

The unbroken ground of the mountains was a smoother ride than the road up to the keep. Well that was. Information. Why not simply maintain the road? And Geralt had important duties, for which reason he was not delegating someone to keeping Julian alive on a ride outside Kaer Morhen.

Nothing in this place made sense.

Geralt did not deign to explain any of it. He continued ambling up the mountainside on Roach I, leading Julian who-knew-where, and Julian continued following him like a good little subordinate, his mind humming over ballads about people who followed one thing or another out into the wilderness and then died horribly. There were a lot of ways to die horribly in the wilderness. It was one reason he’d generally avoided such places.

Mind, accompanied by the White Wolf, he was pretty sure there was only one creature that was going to kill him, and it wasn’t like being in Kaer Morhen would stop him.

“Roach’s a good horse,” Geralt said at last. Julian considered the stocky build, glazed eyes, and braindead composure of the horses they rode.

“What’s good about her?” he asked, to make conversation.

“Once threw a kikimora queen two feet from her face. Accident. Looked at me like I’d interrupted her salad, and went back to it. Best horse in Kaer Morhen.”

“You… choose horses for not running from monsters?” Julian asked. It seemed like a terrible idea, everything should run from monsters, preferably just slightly slower than Julian himself. Although he supposed a Witcher might have other priorities. “You don’t want one that’s fast, or that would fight the monsters with you, or carry you into battle, or -”

“Nope.” For a moment Julian thought that was all Geralt would say. “Horse versus monster, monster wins. Want the horse after. Sticks around, doesn’t get involved. Walks forever between fights.” He patted Roach’s neck. Julian, dubiously, followed suit. It did not seem to have any impact whatsoever on Also Roach’s sturdy plod.

“So Witcher horses are bred to be -” everyone else’s shitty rejects “- implacable?”

“And to run in circles.”

Julian had heard about this. “In the ring, for strength training.”

“Nope. Big circles. If a monster breaks after them, keep it busy and bring it back for us to kill. If a human tries dirty tricks, just wait for it to come back around.”

“So… you’re out on the Path all year, surrounded by people you expect to steal your horse, and your one companion is… someone that shuts up and, and wanders in circles when threatened in hopes it gets back to you?”

“Used to be the best a Witcher could hope for.” Geralt glanced back over his shoulder. Nice shoulders. If you didn’t know what they belonged to. Good for fantasies but not, Julian informed his libido, any more realistically fuckable than a bear. Geralt said, “Fifteen years ago. Things change.”

“And now?”

“Open question.”

“Jan says you like courage.”

Geralt grunted.

“Bards aren’t very courageous. No rushing into battle for us, we’re better writing about it afterwards. From a nice safe room far away. With lutes. And -”

“Charging is usually a bad idea anyway. Write a song then.”

“A song?” Julian echoed. “Can it be a poem?” Poems were allowed, even expected of young ladies, as long as they weren’t too good.

“Hm,” said Geralt. Julian was beginning to suspect that the various grunts had meanings. He tentatively classified this one as encouraging, and got to composing. Something classical, on an established theme, which of course would have to be some sort of satire to fit Witchers in…

“No lute,” Geralt observed.

“Mmhm,” said Julian absently. “Jan said he’d order one.”

They rode for a while after that; Julian wasn’t tracking the time. Every so often he’d test an alliterative phrase on Geralt, and Geralt would grunt, and Julian would try to decide if that was a good grunt or a bad grunt, mostly based on his own inclinations.

“Look,” Geralt said once, and Julian looked out across a lovely valley and an array of mountains in varying layers of blue.

“Mm, very nice,” he said absently, working over another verse in his head.

“From the tall one there you can see the world’s shadow fall east over the desert.”

“Mmhm.”

“It’s an overnight trip. Maybe two, with a human.”

“Mmhm.”

“We could go. You’re good company. Don’t talk too much.”

Julian was jolted into the present by laughing so hard he fell off of Also Roach, fortunately on the path side of the horse so he didn’t have to find out if Geralt would catch him before he fell off the mountain.

“You’re probably the first person in the world to say I don’t talk too much,” he said when he caught his breath. Geralt was either waiting patiently or making a face that said Julian was insane, it was a little hard to tell.

“It’s been two hours and I’ve talked more than you have,” said Geralt.

“It has?” asked Julian.

“Look at the light,” said Geralt. Julian tried to figure out how to look at something that was not physically present, and found himself cross eyed, which was annoying.

“I ought to be able to describe things better than you,” he complained. “I’m a bard. Bards describe things. Although, mostly events. Concisely. Maybe that’s why, it’s about metaphor not description, nobody has time to write a song that’s actually about gardening arrangements, who would let their roses choke out their briars, or vice versa? No, that’s a metaphor for love, and a sickly sweet one. What were we talking about?”

“Camping.”

“You want to take me on a boys’ night. Because I don’t talk too much. Okay, sure. Why not take Aubry?”

“He’d spend the whole time guarding me and telling me about the things I ought to be doing instead.”

“Whereas I will spend it telling you about metonymy. Brilliant device. How else could you get a rhyme for Filavandrel? Well, kennings, obviously, but then you get into syllable constraints.” Julian’s mouth closed abruptly as he was reminded of the poem he was supposed to be working on. And he was going to start talking about that, which was supposed to be a surprise, unless he distracted Geralt quickly. “What’s the thing you’re supposed to be doing instead?”

Geralt grunted. Perhaps Julian had gone too far. “Letter to Redania. Can’t write for shit.” He paused, then enunciated, “Procrastinated.”

Julian processed this. “Do you need a scribal hand, or assistance with composition?”

Geralt looked at him uncomprehendingly. Julian had not realized that those golden eyes could look so helpless, and realized abruptly that he was never going to be afraid of Geralt again. Not when he could summon this vision at a thought.

“Never mind. I can do both, and I am… familiar with Redanian turns of phrase. What is it you’re wanting to write?”

“Hm,” said Geralt. For a moment Julian thought he was just going to go completely silent, but it turned out Julian had not in the least figured out his turns of… grunt, because he followed this with, “Tell Vizimir to sod off about sending people.”

“Oh, I can do that,” Julian said with great relish.

“Hm,” said Geralt, looking at him. “Getting dark. Ought to turn around.”

“Oh thank the gods I don’t want to go bare bones camping,” Julian said.

They made it back down just after dinner, and Julian was prepared to go to his room without supper, but Geralt showed him how to sneak into the kitchens and woo Marlene with sad puppy eyes. He could have just ordered food to be prepared, he was the lord of the keep, but he made truly impressive puppy eyes instead. Julian suspected some sort of Witcher control over pupil dilation. He and Julian ate it together in the council room while Julian drafted the letter Geralt had been struggling with, translating comments like “fuck off with the proposals” into polite Redanian phrases.

Julian was rather pleased with his work. He’d always been a little bit proud of Redania’s court, the politest and best-behaved on the continent. Redanians knew how to cut with a quick word without taking things to the dueling grounds. It was a prickly, backstabbing comedy of manners and no one ever said what they meant and he hated it, but they were the best. He wasn’t sure what he felt about taking Geralt’s extremely straightforward phrasing and converting it into ornate Redanian court language. Like tucking a moth’s wings back into the cocoon, perhaps.

He may possibly have added his own dagger-deep cuts into the transitions between phrases, and a couple of sly jibes at Lettenhove in particular. They surprised him, dribbling out the end of his pen like splotches in a careless penman’s work. He took a moment to sit back, staring over Geralt’s shoulder out the window where the moon was beginning to set. In the candlelight, Geralt’s head shone like a second moon.

Lettenhove, his father, had abandoned him to Redania’s interests. That was what he was for. Redania had spent the coin of his life at the Warlord’s shop, and purchased… nothing with it. Was that what he was afraid of? Plenty of soldiers had gone the same way. If he had been born a man, he might have offered his life in no better cause.

To die mutilated on a battlefield, or not; to die skewered on a prick, or not. But that wasn’t what was promised to soldiers, they were supposed to return in glory, and ladies were supposed to have good marriages that gave them influence and households of their own to run, security. Whereas Julian had been sent only for his death, and here he was scrounging for his own safety as a bard, as his father had forbidden him to do.

Ah. So he was angry. Well he knew what to do with that: shove it down deep, hide it behind a court mask, and let it out only to be snide. He’d been snide. His father could understand that, as long as it didn’t interfere with his father’s plans for Lettenhove.

“You should have Yennefer read this over,” he told Geralt.

“She couldn’t write it.”

“But she can read it. She can check if there’s anything there that’s - not what you mean,” Julian said, and yawned. “In the morning.”

“Hm,” said Geralt. “You have lessons with Ciri in the morning.”

Julian made a face. “And I haven’t planned anything.”

“Sleep then. And - keep her away from the geese.”

“Why, what’s wrong with the geese?”

“Hm,” said Geralt. “Go sleep.”

“My lo - Wolf,” Julian acknowledged, automatically, and automatically correcting his old habits. He could feel Geralt’s eyes on him as he walked away.

He got through lessons, somehow, napped through lunch, and the next night, after some frantic afternoon revisions, he performed his “Head Ransom” for the after-supper entertainment. It was… fine. Classic, even. Court meter, referencing masters, a play on the poem-for-one’s-life trope mixed into the Witcher delivery of trophies. He wouldn’t be ashamed of it in any court, or afraid of it having an impact. Here it received Julian’s usual desultory praise.

Except that as the applause died Yennefer stood up, clapping a slow, sarcastic rhythm. “What lovely drivel,” she said. “Perfect for Oxenfurt, or Lettenhove, or wherever it was you learned to be mediocre. This is Kaer Morhen, bard. Be brilliant. Shine brighter.”

“Be brilliant?” Julian repeated, hardly believing his ears. “You want brilliant? That had perfect structure. Five kennings a verse, I defy you to do better. You want brilliant - “ His fingers reached for an instrument that wasn’t there. “Brilliance requires a lute,” he said, and launched nevertheless into the song he was writing for Ciri.

It was just the sort of doggerel he got kicked out of classes at Oxenfurt for, things that stuck in the head and tapped feet against the owner’s volition. For Ciri, and the still-human boys at the Witcher tables, it was full of flibberty gibberty, slappedy tappity internal rhymes to trundle the words into each other, and he’d be damned if it wasn’t a child’s clapping game the summer after he first sang it. For the adults, a sop, he’d written a simple chorus that played on politics:

It’s not the cub that they come to protect
It’s the bear she will become
It’s not to be wolves that your darlings defect
But from traps already sprung

He finished the last chorus and didn’t wait for a response, striding from the room. Yen called out after him anyway, still mocking: “Very good, little bard, you can be brilliant angry. When you can be brilliant happy, we’ll talk.”

From the Witchers… well. He kept hearing snatches of it around Kaer Morhen for days, from faces that twisted into annoyance when they recognized what they were humming. And Ciri came darting in to supper the next day chanting the first verse, bare feet slapping on the flag stones in rhythm with her child-happy voice.

So it had done what he meant it to.

Yennefer sent his letter with no revisions. Ciri pulled an exuberant goose trick, which taught Julian some of the specialized vocabulary of Kaer Morhen and made it very clear that if she did not approve of him, he would not still be there. Julian washed, and wanked, in the hot springs.

Nothing seemed to have changed. And yet Geralt’s golden eyes kept watching him, which would have been creepy a week ago, but now whenever Julian started to get unnerved he imagined Geralt begging treats off the cook and straightened his spine. The helpless look from earlier in their ride he… tucked away, not sure what exactly he wanted to do with it. He kept singing other people’s songs.

And in a week, one of the Witchers came back with a rebec.

It was the red-headed Wolf Witcher, who brought it to Julian with a shrug and an awkward grin. “You said you needed a lute,” he said.

“This is a rebec,” said Julian. The Witcher shrugged again.

“Can you use it to make another song?” he asked. “I’d like to hear another of your songs.”

Julian sputtered a moment. That was exactly what he wanted for his songs. He wanted people to want to sing them, to be unable to keep from singing them, to spread them far and wide and who cared how cleverly it was crafted. It was just - he never - his father had said -

“I can make you a song,” he said. “What’s your name?”

Gweld rhymed beautifully with the Aedirnian word for hero. For a moment Julian hesitated over the composition, bow poised over the rebec’s strings, and then he set it down again. He could write a song for Gweld, as he had written for Ciri; he could write individual songs for Geralt and Eskel and every Witcher whose name he knew. That wasn’t the propaganda they needed, and it wasn’t writing from joy as Yennefer had challenged him to do.

He ran his fingers over the rebec’s body, caressed its neck. Gods and monsters but it had been weeks since he’d had sex, maybe he should get laid, or write about it. When he thought about sex, though, all that came into his head was Geralt’s face as he said fuck off with the proposals.

As bold and open a statement as could never be said in Tretogor, and it… challenged Julian to be as honest. And when he looked inside himself, he didn’t have anything that open to say.

Fuck it, thought Julian, and wrote two songs.

The first was what he had promised Gweld, a bold little ballad playing on the rhyme that took a week outside his rooms asking people for tales of Gweld’s exploits to populate the verses. It wanted to be sung in a clear tenor that complemented the rebec, the tenor that Julian had wanted since before he knew his voice wouldn’t drop, but with his personal limitations it crowded the register of the rebec until both of them were merely texture. What he wouldn’t give for a lute.

The song was in Aedirnian, but Witchers picked up languages wherever they went and Julian wasn’t sure if there was a language they did not collectively know. He ran it past a Witcher named Serrit who had been most helpful in commenting on Gweld’s exploits, albeit derogatorily, and Serrit put the song back another week by correcting his Aedirnian.

“Perfection requires patience,” Julian sighed. It had been three months since he arrived at Kaer Morhen, and two weeks since he started tracking down individual Witchers for interviews about Gweld, and he was starting to lose his fear of Witchers, at least one-on-one.

The second song he wrote mostly by accident. It was about Geralt, the Witcher he didn’t fear. The chorus came to him first, and the verses straggled along for weeks afterward as he tried to set the history of the Warlord’s conquests to their music. He finally gave up on the song he wanted to write and filled in the edges with stupid little ditties about the things Geralt did on their rides.

He was still fiddling with them both when Serrit broke down and told him the Aedirnian was fine, Gweld would love it, would he please just sing it already and be done. So Julian took his rebec to the hall that night and sang “Gweld Held der Felder” - not a finished title - for the assembled Witchers.

When he finished there was a pause, during which Julian saw Gweld sinking down into his chair, vanishing slowly underneath the Wolf table. Then suddenly the entire hall erupted into noise, applause and shouts and a few howls and, Julian thought, possibly a couple of voices singing a line they remembered. Lambert, Julian noticed, kicked Gweld under the table hard enough for him to pop back up again.

“How long have you been sitting on that? ” Eskel asked. Julian shrugged and tried to explain about it not taking long to knock together the bones of a song, and much longer to get the details and ornamentation right, but his eyes were on Yennefer, wondering if he’d met her challenge.

“Brilliance requires a lute, eh?” Geralt asked. Julian hemmed, and Geralt raised a hand. “One came up the Trail this afternoon.”

Eskel reached behind his seat, where his two swords usually hung, and pulled out a real, honest-to-onions lute. Julian found himself reaching for it with eager hands and mentally apologized to his rebec. He lost himself for a moment in tuning it.

“Well, then?” Yennefer asked. “Do you have any other lute-inspired brilliance for us?”

Julian looked up, fingers poised over the strings. “I do have one other song,” he said, and started “Golden Eyes.”

He started with the verse about the Warlord’s conquest of Ard Carraigh, which really deserved its own song but there was so much to cover of the last twenty years, it needed an overture, and “Golden Eyes” was - not cooperating in that direction. It had a beautiful, haunting melody and the fact was that Geralt was not a haunting person. And these people, who had been there for Ard Carraigh, deserved better than Julian’s bumbling second verse.

Geralt, at the head of the table, was listening politely, and his face looked not unlike the time he’d tripped over a root and landed smack on his ass, then scrambled to his feet and grunted like nothing had happened.

He deserved the kick under the table that told him to take credit for his actions.

Eyes, wide unblinking eyes
As golden as the sunrise
No one can break the Wolflaw and escape
Those golden eyes

Julian paused a moment, letting his fingers run over the lute melody, and launched into the real verses. The puppy eyes Geralt had made at Marlene begging for an extra honeycake. The root trip, when his eyes had been so wide as he fell that Julian could see the white clear around them. The time they went camping with Triss and Aubry so they could watch the world’s shadow pass over the desert.

That tune, that chorus, those verses - it was a farce. Julian would never have dared to sing such a thing in Tretogor. At the Wolf’s table, where the were no lords but brothers - he listened to the hall stop listening in wonder and start guffawing. He saw Eskel shove Geralt’s shoulder over the root trip. He put in extra emphasis so that Ciri could turn and ask, “Did you really, Papa?”

He finished the final so-there cord with a flourish. Yennefer was the first to rise clapping, but far from the last. The room flooded with noise.

“By all the gods, didn’t know our bard had the fucking balls,” Julian heard Lambert exclaim through the roar. He kept his eyes on Geralt, his lord, whose eyes were crinkling a bit at the corners, and both of them waited for the noise to die down.

“What is the customary reward for a bard who gives his lord such a poem?” Geralt asked. Julian looked into his eyes, and he was not afraid.

“The reward I most sorely desire for such a poem is that I might keep my head,” he said.

“I’m sure I can offer you something more than that,” said Geralt.

“If it’s a very good poem, traditionally, the lord might grant the poet a gift - a cloak, or a sword, or a ring,” Julian offered. Geralt looked worriedly about him, as if he might so discovered another lute hiding behind Eskel’s chair. “But - if it’s a truly great poem, from a truly great poet - the lord might grant that poet the opportunity to join his court, and compose more such poems.”

“That,” said Geralt. “I want that.”

Julian bowed. “I am yours to command.”

“Wolf, if I might interfere,” Yennefer said. Geralt gave her a confused nod, Julian an exasperated look. They had just done a Scene, she was ruining his dramatic moment. “I told you to talk to me when you had been brilliant happily. I believe I owe you a boon.”

“Can we talk about it in private?” Julian asked. Yennefer inclined her head. Now there was a queen. Julian could write songs about such dignity.

For now - he spun around and flung his arms to the hall. “Gweld!” he called to them, inviting the response, “and the wolf with golden eyes!”

And the applause came to him.

“So what is this boon you would ask of me in private?” Yennefer asked, perhaps an hour later, when they sat alone in her workshop. Julian was beginning to wish he had not requested privacy; the spell ingredients were staring at him. Some of them quite literally.

He took a deep breath. “I’ve heard that sorceresses, to become so, they can… change their shape. Alter their form entirely,” he said. Yennefer gave him a very slow, suspicious nod. Julian breathed again. “Can you make me a tenor?” he asked.

“What,” said Yennefer. “No, don’t answer that, it wasn’t a question. Bard. Julian. May I guess, from the… bard, and the Oxenfurt, and the doublets and hose, and the tenor - are you perhaps not Lady Julian?”

Julian squirmed uncomfortably.

Yennefer did not relent. “Is there perhaps a request you should make of Geralt before you come to me? To let his Witchers know that they should be referring to you as he?”

Julian did not say anything.

“And why -” Yennefer’s voice was rising “- do you come to me asking about an extremely painful and irreversible decision with consequences not even magic can alter, and ask to change your voice. Don’t you have any other priorities?”

“My priority is my voice,” Julian objected. “That’s what bothers me, as a musician, professionally and constantly, every day. Every time I open my mouth the voice that comes out is not in the range it should be, and I talk a lot.”

“I have heard observations to that effect, yes,” Yennefer said.

“So can you do it?”

Yennefer fixed him in her gaze. “I am the strongest sorcerer, man or woman, on the northern continent. Yes, I can fix your little vocal problem. It may take me a few days to read up on the exact anatomy in question.”

“You mean… I could be a tenor by the end of the week?”

Yennefer sighed. “Yes, bard, I can make you a tenor this very week. But you have to promise to tell Geralt and his council why.”

Julian hesitated. The voice of his thoughts beat against his skull, feathered thoughts so far from what he heard when he spoke. “Agreed,” he said.

“Very good,” said Yennefer. “Come to the council room immediately following lunch tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Julian squeaked.

“Before you chicken out.”

It was not the full council that Yennefer asked to join them the next afternoon. Julian, Eskel, Yennefer, Geralt, and Ciri - Ciri! - filed into the council room, all but Julian giving confused glances at each other to see what the problem was. Julian took a chair and stared at his hands. There was a pregnant pause.

“Well?” he heard Yennefer’s voice say, and he knew she was looking straight at him.

“I asked Yennefer for a favor,” he began, and stopped. He didn’t have the words. He always had the words.

Well. He had the “Female Sailor Bold,” he had “Polly Oliver” and the “Famous Flower of Serving Men.” There were plenty of words, they just all went the wrong way, or didn’t go far enough. His brain spat out lyrics and rejected them.

“Did you betray the Wolf or otherwise come to do him harm?” Eskel asked.

“No!” Julian exclaimed.

“Truth,” said Eskel, and sat back again.

“What is it, then?” asked Geralt, and Julian looked up into - wide, unblinking eyes, he’d written that himself.

“I’m not a man, and Yennefer said she’d change my voice, but only if I told you,” he said.

“Oh. That,” said Geralt.

“You knew?” Julian squeaked. Hated his voice again. Probably would have squeaked even if it had changed.

“You said ‘boys’ night.’ Guessed before then, but.” Geralt shrugged. “Not my business.”

“Well Yennefer thinks it is.”

“If his voice is going to change, if he starts smelling different, it’ll be easier on everyone if they know why,” Yennefer said. Eskel nodded. Which made everyone but…

“Ciri?” Julian asked. She was looking puzzled.

“I know Julian can be a boy’s name too, but - is there anything else we should call you?” she asked.

Julian hesitated. “I never thought that far.”

“You didn’t have a dramatic vision of this moment?” Yennefer asked.

“It’s not exactly a heroic moment for the ages,” said Julian. “It’s just…” He shrugged.

“What do people call you when you do well and they’re fond of you?” Ciri asked, pulling the subject back on track.

“What do they call you?” Julian retorted.

“Cub,” said Ciri.

“But everyone calls you cub,” said Julian.

“Exactly,” said Ciri smugly, and Julian thought of how she lived, wild and beloved and without a glimmer of doubt that she was both, and it was instantly clear what he should choose.

“Jaskier,” he said. His parents had called him Jaskier when he was tiny, when he was beautiful and talented and promising and valued. They’d stopped well before… things changed.

“Buttercup?” Eskel echoed, and coughed at the look Geralt sent him. “Sorry, I just thought, in context, you’d choose something… hearty and masculine and chivalrous, like Harald Hardcounsel or Roger Eric du Haute-Bellegarde. People do,” he added defensively. Julian wondered if he had chosen Eskel Bearbreath or something.

“No, Ciri has it right. Jaskier,” he said.

“All right,” said Geralt. “Want me to tell the others?”

And just like that, he was Jaskier. It was all so much easier than Julian, Jaskier had ever imagined. Geralt stood up at lunch the next day - he’d made Julian come to lunch on time - and jerked a thumb at Julian.

“Bard’s a boy. Name’s Jaskier,” he said.

“Wolf,” came the reply, in varying tones of acquiescence and confusion. And everyone called him Jaskier.

The first time a servant came to his door and called him sir, which was that afternoon, Julian dropped his rebec bow and caught it by the tip, and lost all composure checking whether the bow had sustained any impact damage.

In the general hubbub as the Witchers were leaving the hall after his songs, he heard someone comment, “You know, all the bowing makes sense now.”

He even went down to the hot springs when they might be occupied, for the first time, and slid into a pool visible from the others. One of the male servants raised a hand in greeting and went back to his conversation.

It was so easy. Jaskier had been dreading this all his life and it was so incredibly easy. His father would have beaten him half to death if he’d so much as breathed a word, and here he was just - Jaskier. As if he were at Oxenfurt, another student, except everyone knew who he was and he wasn’t sneaking away and there weren’t any secrets to guard. Just Jaskier.

And on Friday, Yennefer changed his voice.

She’d done some sort of experimentation to make it hurt less, she said, and he’d chosen a very non-invasive procedure. She smeared his throat with some balm of Triss’s, and spoke some weird words and made some gestures that Jaskier closed his eyes about, and told him not to speak until Sunday. Jaskier, against every natural inclination, shut himself away and did not speak or sing.

And on Sunday, when he had checked with Yennefer at noon that it was late enough, he went to his room, and closed the door, and sang “Nessun dorma” in the original pitch, and grinned like a loon.

In the evening he sang Gweld’s song with the rebec, melody low enough to accentuate the twining counterpoint of the instrument.

And every day after he sang and sang and sang, songs pouring out of his throat and his brain, coating slate and parchment and paper and dust. Here I am, he sang. This is me.

Jaskier.