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“How are you, darling?” Yennefer ran her fingers through Geralt’s white hair, occasionally getting caught on specks of dried blood.
“Glad I’m not riding through wintry Kaedwen with my back torn to ribbons.”
“That man really laid into you, didn’t he?”
“Worst whipping I ever had.”
“Had a few, have you?” She tried to make her voice sultry and suggestive.
“Some, but never anything like that.” Geralt clearly failed to pick up on her innuendo.
“I get it though,” he continued. “It was well deserved.”
“Lambert deserved it.” That seemed like a rather important detail.
“I didn’t look after Lambert properly, so it was as much my fault as it was his. If I had negotiated our pay a bit better, he never would have stolen a thing.”
There was certainly such a thing as taking being your brother’s keeper too far. “Even if that were true…” Yennefer said. “They had no reason to punish you so severely. They had their sausages back after all.”
“Stealing food in a famine…” Geralt seemed thoroughly unconvinced. “That elder would have spent months hearing people complain about hunger. Every parent in that crowd would have thought about whether to feed all children equally or sacrifice some so the others might survive. That sort of hunger… it does something to people.”
“Makes them cruel, apparently.” No matter what he said, she’d never agree that he had deserved that punishment.
“Made us want to leave,” Geralt said. “We just kept riding to put as many miles between us and that place as possible.”
“Without stopping to take care of your wounds?” She knew that witchers knew better. As rough as they were with their bodies, they did take care of their wounds.
“We didn’t have any herbs or potions. Our best hope to get any was to make it into a larger town, Ban Ard or Ard Carraigh.”
“That’s days of riding.”
“Wouldn’t go any faster if we stopped to complain about it, so we kept going.”
“You must have been in excruciating pain.” And he wouldn’t admit to that, not to her now and certainly not to Lambert at the time.
“The cold probably numbed it. It wasn’t a big deal.”
Yes, she had called it. Having your skin stripped off by a whip-wielding maniac barely registered on the witcher scale of pain.
She wondered if she had rolled her eyes so hard he had been able to hear it because Geralt chuckled.
“I honestly didn’t think it was that bad. Lambert kept trying to get me to stop.”
“If Lambert is the voice of reason, you really know you’ve lost your marbles.”
“Roach had a really even gait so I just settled into a rhythm. My back would rip and burn with every step, but it was predictable, so I could breathe through it all day.”
“All day,” Yennefer repeated. That absolute lunatic. That infuriatingly stupid man with his utter lack of even the slightest sense of self-preservation.
“Sooner we made it into town, sooner I’d be able to brew some Swallow.”
“You get a pass. You must have been half delirious. But what’s Lambert’s excuse?”
“He tried. I refused. He probably didn’t think he had any right to tackle me off my horse. Not after what had just happened.”
“Witchers….” She said with as much disdain as she could muster. Lambert must have been wrecked with guilt, not that he’d admit that any more than Geralt would admit to being in pain.
“Couldn’t find any way to get comfortable that night. Finally, I just lay down on my back. It hurt, but every other position pulled open wounds and that wasn’t any more comfortable. Plus I was freezing.”
“You? Freezing?” One benefit of his mutations was that Geralt’s thermoregulation was superb. No matter the temperature, he was hardly ever too hot or too cold.
“In the morning, my throat was parched and I was dripping with sweat. The wound fever hadn’t made me wait very long. Guess it was the hunger. I wasn’t as strong as I should have been. I felt wretched, but the only way through was to keep riding.”
Wound fever. Common enough in ordinary humans, but for both Lambert and Geralt to suffer from it within a few months, something had to be seriously amiss for the witchers. Yennefer had seen Geralt receive terrible wounds and stitch them up in less than hygienic conditions without ever falling ill.
“Could Lambert not have ridden into town alone and brought you back the herbs you needed?”
“I didn’t have the heart to suggest it. He would have seen it as me sending him away. And with how bad I was feeling, I wasn’t sure how long I’d last out in the wilds on my own. We were at least four days’ ride from Ard Carraigh.”
“You rode all that way with a fever and your back in shreds?”
Well, if any of the gods wanted to make some brain appear, it certainly wouldn’t be crowded out of a witcher’s head.
“Never got a chance. Couldn’t settle into a rhythm that day. Was just bouncing along and every movement seemed to rip my flesh apart. Before midday, I started to see black specks in front of my eyes and then my ears started ringing. Next thing I knew, I was face-first in a ditch and Lambert was swearing up a storm. His horse had barely skidded to a halt next to me when he already flung himself from the saddle and turned me onto my back, which made me black out again.”
“Hold on. You passed out and fell from your horse?”
“Not my finest moment.”
“You were in so much pain, you actually passed out.”
Geralt shrugged. “Pain, blood loss, hunger, fever, take your pick. Poor Roach was worried. Had never seen me dismount like that.”
“Because clearly that’s who we’re worried about here. Your horse. Be thankful that I know that you apparently survived. Otherwise I’d find this story anything but entertaining.”
“I just wanted to tell you about Lambert.”
“Well, if you’re trying to make him sound any less of a prick, you’ve failed miserably so far.” Because right about now, skinning Lambert with a carving knife sounded very appealing.
“Wait until you hear the rest.” Geralt smiled. “He’s a good man, Lambert.”