Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
Draw what roves and bring the young, and set the swift a-turning
O Goddess, guide my hands and tongue, impart to me your learning
For though we've ret and scutched and hacked, our work is just beginning
So take the distaff from your back, and spin a yarn worth spinning!
- Kaedweni women's working song
There lived once a queen of Redania, whose husband the king was violent and greedy. At the order of the king all those who toiled within the land were taxed of almost all of the product thereof, so that even in times of plenty the serfs starved as in a famine, and the king and his lords grew rich beyond the wildest imaginings of any king or lord before them. And for all the years of the king’s reign the people were weary of their lot, and at times the most desperate would sneak into the palaces and estates of the lords and the king to steal but a little of the plentiful food that was left to spoil uneaten, but always they were caught and executed, or the servants would be made to pour rat poison atop of that which was uneaten at the end of the night, and hungry rats and hungry peasants alike would writhe dying at the table to the great amusement of the lords and of the king. And the queen heard the cries of the hungry, and she saw the death-throes of the poisoned and the starving as she sat silent in her silvered chair and cast her eyes ever downward.
Once, only once, as the people suffered ever more and grew ever more desperate, once upon a summer’s harvest-time did a single village refuse to toil. And the king ordered his soldiers to the village, and the king brought his wife and his nobles to watch, and the king ordered every villager murdered in the commons, every man and woman and child from the weariest elder to the littlest babe, and the king and his nobles laughed at the funny faces the people made, and the queen cast her eyes downward and did not speak. When it was done, the queen walked through the commons, and so high did the blood flow that her long white gown became stained to the knees and up the trailing sleeves. And before he returned to court the king commanded that the flax should rot in the fields, for it was only a little harvest to all his vast wealth and was of no importance.
Upon returning to the palace the queen took up the bloodied hem of her long white gown and the bloodied ends of her long white sleeves, and she cut from each the barest scraps of cloth. And the queen took the scrap from her left sleeve and she buried it under the gallows, and she took the scrap from her right sleeve and she tucked it into the binding of the tax-collector’s logbook, and finally she took the scrap from the hem and she divided it up and put each piece, such a small bit of fiber as to be almost invisible, in the great hall upon the marble trenchers of each of the nobles and lastly upon the golden trencher of the king himself.
That very morning the nooses snapped upon every hanging so that not a single person could be killed, and that very afternoon the tax-collector’s many wagons of goods all arrived to the palace rotted and infested with maggots, and that very evening the queen donned her long white gown stained to the knees and up the trailing sleeves to join her husband and all the nobles at supper.
The queen strode before the high table in the very evidence of the king’s wickedness, and she was lit as though she had swallowed the sun, and she accused them all with the name of each and every person whose blood stained her gown, from the name of the weariest elder to the true name of the littlest babe who was too young yet for its naming-day, and as she spoke her heart broke and bled and stained the gown yet further. And though they struggled, the king and his nobles were frozen to their seats, and though the guards rushed at her none could touch her, for true bloodshed is a powerful magic indeed. And when the long list had at last come to an end, each of the nobles who had laughed at the deaths of the starving and desperate choked upon their fine food and were seized with death-throes. The king collapsed from his gilded chair just the same as his nobles, and they all fell dead upon the glass floors, and the queen cast her eyes downward upon them and did not laugh, but neither did she weep.
That very night the palace gates were thrown open, and the people of Redania came one and all to eat of the stolen bounty of the palace, and to reclaim the great stores of gold in the treasury. And it was determined that the queen’s highest advisor, and the highest advisor of all the kings after her, should be a serf, to bring the wishes of the peasantry to the queen’s ear and to the ear of all her descendants; and that so the king not forget what it is to go hungry the heir apparent should spend a year of his youth living just as a serf does, with all the toil and trial thereof; and so the kingdom of Redania flourished for many generations to come.
“Huh,” says Serrit, from where she lies under the covered prow. “Is there a peasant advising Vizimir, then?”
“Several generations down the line, King Casimir the Second sacked his Lord of Commons,” Adelina replies. “He said that a serf, let me see, ‘hath nōn-ōphe learnende in affairſ ophe terroire, for he hath bene raisede bihofþe bende low, tillende th' ērth, and knowſ nōn-ōphe how he must makæ ain man bende low beforæ hem.’ And who could stop him? He was king, after all.”
“Sounds like he’s full of shit to me,” says Serrit.
Petrel, at the tiller, scoffs. “Sounds like he got annoyed he couldn’t make his advisor agree to whatever he already wanted.”
Serrit snorts. “Or couldn’t make his advisor bende low beforæ hem,” she says, making what looks like a very rude gesture.
“So,” says Rach. “D’you think the story happened, then?”
“There was a Queen Falka who led a coup against the king and his court, and shortly after her assumption are the first recorded Lord of Commons and Heir’s Poverty. As to the story’s veracity, I cannot say.”
“And what of the magic in the tale?” Coën asks, finally raising his eyes from a deep frown. “Do you think it was recorded true?”
“I think that an enterprising person may saw through a gallows' ropes if given the time, and that summer heat and rain together will rot any crop if the tarps are stolen, and that poison kills a man more surely than any stained silk, and that even if such magic existed it has never favored the powerless,” Adelina says, somewhat more bitterly than she means to. “But it is a good story.”
CHAPTER 1
i do notte card
my lynnen Thredd
but de-compose
the Stem instede
doth make a stench
lyk Bowells laxe
in stagnent Poule
i rett the Flaxe
- First stanza of a poem found inscribed on a retaining wall in Merulda, approximately six hundred years old.
He will certainly die in the woods, but it will be better than – it will be better. Adelina sets her candle-holder on a small table, where it clinks against an implement she hopes to never understand, and tries to inhale shallowly. The cellar reeks of blood and excrement, and of another bitter undercurrent, not quite a scent but still yet a presence of what Adelina can only describe as misery, growing stronger towards the center of the room and reaching a wave at the big stone table that makes her stagger. There will be grime on her hems, grime on her sleeves, and she can do nothing after this but brush her cotte and rinse her shift at her washstand and hope that Oda the laundress is incurious.
The clank of key in shackles wakes him, but still she has to almost peel him off the table. He does not seem to realize his surroundings; his single open eye does not fix on her. And an unsettling eye it is, slit-pupiled and gleaming in the dark, and it stares blankly ahead as he shambles forward at her direction.
Adelina helps the barbarian limp to the tunnel, curls his mangled fingers around the little knife from her belt, and tells him, run.
He meets her eyes, and it seems for a moment that the haze of pain and confusion lifts; the gaze burns, as though he sees straight down to the marrow of her.
Then he trips on the doorjamb. Adelina catches him, braces her hip against the tunnel door (another spot to clean, and what will Oda think?) and guides him through.
Someone shouts—Adelina whirls, and there is a temple-guard at the cellar entrance, his lamp throwing the cellar into blinding light.
This is how it ends, then. There will be the “illness” that will befall her, and the interrogation, and the long slow wasting-away in prison or the short sharp drop in a hempen necklace. A life for a life, or not even that if he gets himself caught. Better to give back the barbarian now, and perhaps they will be lenient -
No. No. It will not end like this. There’s no time to reconsider, only time to slam the tunnel door and bolt it, and by the time she comes back to herself she is running, running, running, hand in hand with the barbarian.
The treeline casts strange, faint shadows in the moonlight, and the barbarian pulls them directly to it. In the deep night with even starlight blocked by tree cover, the familiar world becomes a horror. Every step is caught by a root rising to trip her, and low branches cut across her face and chest as bushes catch her and tear her skirt – all while the barbarian beside her never misplaces a single silent foot. She has never been more aware of her own breath than sprinting down a path she’s ridden for years, straining her ears past the barbarian wheezing like a bellows and swearing she can hear hoofbeats.
The barbarian raises his head and scents the air as they run, eventually leads them to the shallows of a stream that they splash through and back and through again. Then he pulls them to – she nearly smacks into the trunk – a tree, up which he disappears in moments with hardly a rustle. Adelina grits her teeth, tucks her hem up into her belt, and follows, feeling for sturdy branches and not screaming when his gleaming eye reappears along with a hand to guide her up. It burns like a brand between her shoulders, fever-hot and hotter still.
When they’re far higher up than Adelina would prefer to be in the dark, and she is gripping his hand and the branch next to her with the same grim determination with which she is not thinking about her current predicament, the barbarian whispers, “Will they recognize you?”
“Yes,” Adelina breathes.
The barbarian hisses something that’s probably a curse, and murmurs, “No sneaking back, then. We’ll wait for them to pass.”
Hoofbeats start up just in the range of Adelina’s hearing, and if she cranes her neck very slowly around she can make out pinprick light approaching. There’s splashing, then a pause, a smack and a loud canine yelp. Voices murmur too low for her to make out, and she tilts her head trying to catch it -
“Hound’s lost the scent,” the barbarian whispers, in a slow plodding cadence. Then he switches to an eager, quick-tripping patter. “Sir, we must send the pigeon to Tretogor then! I brought it along -”
Hairs raise along the back of her neck, and each word prickles across them. He shifts around, and the movement is so silent - not a leaf rustles, she can only feel it through his grip on her hand - that if she turned to him now she’s not certain she would sense him at all.
This must be how the Kaedweni guards felt, the night of the siege - hiding from warriors more predator than man, all alone in dark halls until suddenly they are not. Perfect hearing, perfect silence. She tamps down hard upon her urge to run.
“Don’t be fucking witless, Lance-Corporal,” A distinctly irritated tone colors the barbarian’s voice now. “The only way Vizimir won’t kill you is if I get there first. We camp here and start again at dawn; no sense riding over the tracks before we can see them.”
“Sir,” whispers the eager patter, “Sir we must send word! If he makes it back -”
“Are you fucking witless, Lance-Corporal?”
“Nosir.”
“Do you think me fucking witless, Lance-Corporal?”
“Nosir.”
“Lieutenant’s first watch. Sleep. You certainly wanted to earlier.”
“Lance-Corporal,” the plodding cadence again, “We’ll ride them down. Don’t throw away your own skin, or mine, for that matter.”
Either the Lance-Corporal has no response, or the barbarian doesn’t deem the conversation worth conveying to her. Silence reigns for a long while as (presumably) the men bed down, and as Adelina tenses further and further waiting for – for something. She is very, very conscious that there are three temple-guards out to capture her, and an inhumanly strong warrior of the Wolf-Lord with a knife (why did she give him her knife?) and no reason to keep her alive. He could, somehow (Adelina’s mind skips over the how with him up a tree, injured, and within earshot of the guards), put Adelina’s knife to her throat and try to ransom her back to them. He could give her up as a hindrance and leave her corpse in the branches. He could -
What he does is squeeze her hand and whisper, “It’ll be alright.”
So Adelina keeps still, and tries to breathe. Wiggles her toes, just a little – scratches a toenail up against woolen stockings woolen thread, leather shoes hempen thread. Flexes her calves – wool garters. Linen braies-and-shift, linen thread, wool cotte, wool thread, silk embroidery, silk headscarf, silk thread. It’s nowhere near enough, and her hands are occupied and she can’t rub a hem between her fingers. Start again, slower. Woolen stockings, bias cut, dyed red. Wool cotte, straight grain, green, one-two panels one-two sleeves one-two-three-four gores one-two gussets. Wooden branch, pricking her hand - no. Silk embroidery, red and pink and – yellow? Was it yellow? And she’s without an overgown and with her skirt kilted up next to a barbarian who is unclothed -
There’s a slight rustle from said barbarian next to her, which is the only reason she doesn’t fall out of the tree when he whispers, “I am Aiden, of the Cat clan.”
“Adelina of Mirt,” Adelina murmurs, forgoing title. She’d rather not give him any indication she’s important enough to ransom.
“Adelina,” Aiden whispers, “they’re asleep. We need to run.”
And so he guides her back down the tree, which is far worse an ordeal than ascending it. When they’re both aground, he leads her back the way they came, and this time they step over the stream.
“You -” he forces a wheeze into a slow, rattling breath - “hhhorses. Set two loose, steal the third. Don’t wake - dog. I’ll take the guard.”
“Not the pigeon?” she breathes.
“Go back if they lose it. Bring back more men.”
Aiden disappears from view, and Adelina is left amongst the sleeping horses, shivering in their radiant warmth. The hand Aiden had been gripping stings cold in the night air, and she tucks it to her stomach. She must hurry, so that their stolen horse will be ready by the time Aiden has – she must hurry so that they can escape their pursuers. They’ll follow after, certainly, but slow enough by shank’s mare that she and Aiden might be able to evade them long enough to tell the tale to – he will tell the Wolf-Lord, of course, and in turn the Wolf-Lord will answer to the breach of treaty, which means that he will – which means -
She is very good at staying silent during these fits. The trick is to find something to grip onto – usually it is a fistful of under-sleeve hidden by her hems, but here and now more drastic measures are needed. The second trick is to lock her knees and wait.
After a time, Adelina carefully unclenches her fingers from her neck. Does not make a noise when life rushes back into her flesh and stings through the marks, tries not to sway as her knees shake and the world blurs on its way back to reality and as she is filled with new resolve. She will make a noise. Snap a branch, scream, gasp loudly. Call for help. She made a mistake, and she will fix this. She will.
She will count to ten, and then cry out.
Twenty, then. At twenty, she will scream.
Alright, when she counts to thirty -
A punched-out gasp, a wet thunk. One of the horses whickers in its sleep, and there are shuffling noises behind her from distinctly lower to the ground than the gasp was. She squeezes her eyes shut against the sudden stinging, breathes through the sourness in her nose and the hitch in her throat.
Adelina does not look. It is less a function of her determination and more that she cannot make herself move. But she must, it is too late now, she must.
She does not look. Unties the first halter, leads the horse a little ways out, slaps its rump. Someone will have a very good day when they find it in the morning. Adelina returns, rouses the second horse. It huffs a bit—the third is awake now, too – but otherwise doesn’t object. More sustained shuffling noises behind her.
Adelina does not look.
The third horse whickers—not loudly, just a little questioning. Adelina freezes, and from behind her the shuffling stops. But there is no further noise, so she creeps with it away from camp to look for a convenient stump.
Bareback, with only a bridle, both of them weakened, in the dark. This will hurt. But it should get them through the Kestrels before daybreak.
Aiden surely knows best how to ride bareback - but his hands move only stiffly, could barely close far enough around the knife she gave him. She will take the reins, then, and ride a-front and call on all her strength. His arm, when he wraps it around her waist, is tacky. It smells of iron. Adelina does not think about it.
“Grip with your legs,” Aiden whispers. She tries, but gentlewomen have little cause to develop as strong of legs as she now needs. But, though she aches after hardly an hour, ride they do — taking care not to push the horse to stumble in the dark. They cannot keep it indefinitely, but one night will put them nicely ahead of a walking company. Said walking company will, judging by how quickly they followed, not have brought enough money for new horses. And if said walking company can be made to track them well beyond what they likely thought was a day’s pursuit at most, then perhaps they can be made to give up, or even just to die of exposure. Or to be – otherwise dealt with.
By the grey pre-dawn the horse (who shows herself, in the light, to be the handsome black bay who led Adelina’s carriage to Mirt not two days ago, red and white ribbons still braided through her mane) is well tired. Adelina would call herself the same except for how her legs scream at her, and when they both slide off her back their legs buckle under them. Aiden lies there for a bare few moments, then seems to muster all his willpower to sit up with a hiss that ends in a choked whimper. He carefully unbends his arm from his burden - two boots, and tucked in them (he clamps his hands on either side of the heel and, stiff-fingered, upends it) leg-wraps, and a pair of trousers. And rolled in the trousers is a belt-knife, rather larger than Adelina's own.
Aiden’s face and hands are red.
She looks down.
“The boots will fit you best, and I have shoes,” she whispers. “You had better take them.” And hopefully he will also take the trousers—she at least has her cotte, and he has… well, nothing at all. She puts from her mind that these are a dead man’s boots, a dead man’s trousers and leg-wraps. She never even saw his face.
She had better get used to that feeling.
He takes some time, once the trousers are on, to wrap his leg-wraps, focusing little on the calves, only on padding his feet and ankles as best he can. He keeps stealing glances at her.
Adelina has nothing to say. She stands and attends to the black bay - Lady Fiona, was it? - trying to remember what the stableboys do. Well, she can wipe the lather from her face at least, and remove her bridle. Can whisper thanks and set her loose, can hope whoever finds her will not be accused of horse-theft.
Finally Aiden says, “I will go to Kaer Morhen, to the Wolf-Lord. Where will you go?”
"I will go -" home, she almost says. But, no, she will only go home in chains. Perhaps Toussaint, to her cousin Amadis – but even if she could rely on his discretion, she would die or be captured on the way. To a temple, then - there are plenty in Kaedwen, and she could simply look for the nearest city. But would its prioress take her, when this time she’s no family to recommend her? And could she hide there knowing what would happen to them were she found? Where can a woman go who has no-one in the world?
"I will go with you, for now," Adelina decides. She has the best chance with him, against the three—the two temple-guards, and against predators. Adelina cannot kill a wolf (or gods forbid, a boar) with only her knife, but she rather suspects the barbarian could. The way red splatters his face and hands, and the way he makes no move to clean it, she would believe he could kill anything.
He wraps the linen around his left ankle, grimacing. “You’d be welcome in Kaer Morhen,” he says. His voice is closer to a rasp than anything, and it scrapes against her ears. “Geralt’ll want to know who had me and why. You’re – what, western Kaedweni?”
Adelina had thought she had trained herself out of that accent. More importantly, he doesn’t know? But – no, he heard the guards say “Tretogor” and “Vizimir.” Even if he somehow doesn’t know the name of the king, his lord will put it together. The truth it must be. “Eastern Redanian, ser Cat. As for who had you, it must be the King.”
He drops his head down on his knee. “Fuck. Any chance it was just a stupid man with a grudge against wolfblood?”
“No, ser Cat. The estate is counted in his holdings, and he has been known to visit on occasion.” Wolfblood, then? Would that be reference to the direct kin of the Wolf-Lord, and would Aiden be catblood? In any case it’s kinder than barbarian, and seems to fit better a man actually disappointed in an upcoming war.
“Well, fuck. Gods, what would he even want from me?”
“Were you never questioned, then?”
“I was -” he screws up his face. “Th - he asked me – something – but I don’t remember… there was. I didn’t have what he was looking for, but it’s. Been awhile. Since.” His hands curl tight, and his shoulders draw inwards.
Adelina sits in front of him and reaches for him – he flinches, and she thinks better of it - sets her hands palm-up on the ground between them. She needs to know. “Awhile since what, ser Cat?”
“Since they stopped asking.” He looks down at her hand, slowly unclenches his own and sets them down in a mirror of hers. It is not quite what she had meant, but he may not want to be touched at the moment. It will do.
“That is enough, I think,” Adelina says. “We should...” hide, or find water, or press onwards? Navigating court politics never prepared her for this.
“We should find somewhere to rest,” says Aiden. “I smell ash and old glass.”
Ash and old -? He limps them to a thinning of the trees, and then a clearing, which is quite populated by tree stumps and has a tumbledown house in the middle of it. Inside - if any house with rotted-through thatch and entire sections of missing wall can be said to have such a thing - are two dusty stone structures shaped like very large beehives. Each has three openings of decreasing size stacked atop each other, the lowest just about large enough to fit a person’s shoulders through.
“Glasshouse,” Aiden says, as though this explains anything at all, and then, “abandoned. Easy shelter.”
And he smelt it, from where they were? That is two senses he has mastery of, then. She will have to remember, should she need to run from him, or from any other of the Wolf-Lord’s men.
Aiden pulls himself, sideways and very slowly, through the lowest opening of the rightmost structure. “Sleep here,” he rasps, sticking his hand back out of the opening. “We’ll be hidden, and warm. Start again tonight.”
Clearly he means sleep in this one, alongside me, but – no. No, no no no. She has shared beds for much of her life, but never with a man in an enclosed space in only his trousers. She will, she is learning, do quite a lot, but – not that. She pretends she doesn’t understand, scuttles to the other stone beehive. It is cold and dark and dusty, and the lowest tier is barely tall enough within to curl on her side. Adelina grits her teeth, and shivers, and waits for sleep to find her.