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Jaskier had used that "man with bread in his pants" line nine times before he used it on the white-haired witcher. He might not have been as confident about its success otherwise. It had never failed to make a lady laugh, and had been one of his more successful lines with men. He reckoned this was because men liked food, and men liked thinking about what was in other people's pants.
Had he known that the man brooding in the corner (and at the time he had wondered at the futility of simply sitting in a corner to remain unnoticed and unmolested when one looked like that, but later reasoned that people who looked like that had to sit somewhere) had he known he was a witcher--the Witcher--he would have used a different line. Perhaps the pun about lonely knights, or the one about rancid stew.
___
They threw rocks most often when Jaskier and the Witcher, Geralt, rode into town. Sometimes potatoes or dead rats or scraps of food or whatever they had on hand, along with the usual curses and threats. Jaskier was surprised that many of them had so much to spare, scrawny and haggard as most of them that lived on the outside of town often were. He almost felt for them, but was nonetheless quick to prove that the difference between himself and the Witcher was that he wouldn't hesitate to throw a hearty imprecation, or even a rotten bit of fish, right back.
"Why do you do it?" he asked Geralt once. They sat on the top of a crumbling tower of a long abandoned fortress, on a broad landing at the top of stone stairs open to the night sky. The turret that should have been over their heads had been knocked away and lay in the dark grass below where Roach, the Witcher's mare, pulled up the thick, glossy turf by the roots, and Jaskier, a romantic, imagined that this must have been caused by a great siege or dragons or sorcery. It was cold up there but what remained of the walls sheltered them from the wind and Geralt had said that they were protected. Protected from what Jaskier didn't ask, and was mostly pleased to not be sleeping in the damp and to have a small fire.
"Why do you do it," he asked again, "when they seem to resent you so, when they barely pay what they owe when they pay at all?"
Geralt sat cross-legged, leaning toward the fire as he cooked their supper of several potatoes Jaskier had rescued from that morning's thrown vegetation. He shrugged, golden eyes glinting in the firelight. Jaskier had seen them after a fight, after his elixirs had blown the pupils huge and black, darker than any night he had ever known. Jaskier preferred them this way.
"It's what I do," Geralt said solemnly, poking at the fire which threw his bulk (for he wasn't much smaller out of his breastplate and pauldrons) into a hulking black shadow flickering against the tower wall, big as a troll, dark as a wraith. Jaskier was getting good at frightening himself.
Jaskier frowned and thoughtfully strummed his lute. "No," he said at last, "No, that won't do. You've got to give me something more to go on. No one will be inspired by a ballad about how a witcher is as a witcher does and a witcher does just because. Oh, actually I like that."
Geralt breathed a laugh. It wasn't the first time he'd done it, but there hadn't been many. "I don't imagine I'll inspire anyone, no matter my answer," he said.
"That's not true; you inspire me."
"That doesn't seem to be difficult."
Jaskier considered taking offense but the night air was so crisp and the fire so warm that he felt it wasn't the right atmosphere for a strop. "You inspired that mother today," he said instead, "saving her child from the blood-whatsit."
"Bloedzuiger," Geralt corrected.
"Yes… I'll never think of something to rhyme with that." Jaskier sighed. "But I never heard such gratitude heaped upon a person. I believe she'd have kissed your feet if they hadn't been covered in muck."
"I inspire fear," Geralt said, menacing or bitter, Jaskier could not tell, but the effect was diminished when there followed a sudden hiss as Geralt, turning the potatoes, reached too near the fire and was burned. He slid the injured finger into his mouth briefly before saying, "She can be both grateful and afraid, they're not mutually exclusive."
Jaskier smiled. Luckily, the Witcher was not watching him. "Is that why you do it?" he asked. "Mothers and babes?"
"Fucking hell."
"There's nothing wrong with wanting to save women and children, Geralt. It's good for your image." Jaskier sat his lute aside then stretched out on his side to rest on his elbow. "You know I had a priestess tell me that some of the locals believed that if a pregnant woman crossed paths with a witcher, she'd bear a mutant child. So if you go around saving babies, well, only good can come of it, quite apart from, you know, living babies."
Geralt only 'hmm'ed in that way that he had when he had nothing to say or was unwilling to say what he did have to say, but at length he looked over at Jaskier.
"Why do you sing and compose poetry, Jaskier?" he asked.
Jaskier thought. "Are you trying to be clever or are you genuinely asking?"
Geralt spread his hands, the tip of his cooking stick waving red and smoking, a strange wilderness wizard chef. "You had a choice. You could have done anything--"
"I could have been a witcher, you mean?" Jaskier said proudly.
"--almost anything." Geralt amended, then looked back to the fire. "I didn't have a choice," he said flatly, and fished something out of the embers near the edge. "So, of all the things you might have done, why do you sing?"
Jaskier watched Geralt. He'd become an expert at it. He'd learned that Geralt wasn't free with his expressions (neutral grimace notwithstanding), that every reaction was carefully measured unless he was caught unawares, which was almost never, so that what he gave he gave sincerely. The knowledge occasionally moved Jaskier to match his gravity, but not often.
"Well," Jaskier said, "because I'm good at it and because I enjoy it, because I sometimes get paid for it, and, occasionally, other people get something out of it." He paused for effect. "Oh, damn... you were being clever."
Geralt, to Jaskier's satisfaction, suppressed a smile and ate his potato.
___
The wyvern was actually quite beautiful. Grotesque, loud, and terrifying, but beautiful. It thrashed stark and red against the green expanse of the sward, flattening the grass and churning up the soil as it struggled, and when it rolled in desperation Jaskier could see the beast's belly, dark and softly furred. Its long raptor claws furrowed the ground as it moved, and sometimes it seemed to shudder along the length of its body like a cat, scales as red as poppies rippling to catch the light, glittering in the morning sun.
The Witcher, by contrast, was a black smudge of motion around it, only the milk-white of his hair and the bright flash of his sword, arcing and singing keenly, could match it for spectacle.
"Be still, you damned--" but the Witcher did not say what damned thing the wyvern reminded him of as he brought his sword down. It hit home with a dull, unpleasant sound and Geralt spun, leapt out of the way of the wyvern's flailing limbs, then took up his first position and raised his sword again.
The wyvern cried out furiously and thrashed.
"I am doing my best, you impatient beast!" Geralt said, and struck once more. The thick vine which had ensared the wyvern's leg broke with a snap, and the wyvern, suddenly free, screeched shrilly, so that Jaskier had to cover his ears where he hid nearby at the edge of the thicket, in the dense, almost impenetrable vine growth where the wyvern must have been searching for its supper when it was caught up. The wyvern circled on the ground once more, seemingly thrown off balance by the leg which had been trapped and now loosed. It bled and looked as if the beast had attempted to gnaw at it. Perhaps it would have freed itself that way had he and Geralt not found it. Then it lifted its great wings, shook them out so that the grass shivered all around it and Geralt's hair was blown in a cloud around his head, then flew up and away and did not look back.
The Witcher stood in the ruined grass and spat. "You're welcome," he said.
When Jaskier approached him moments later he found Geralt inspecting his sword, the iron one, not the silver.
"You saved it," Jaskier said. That had not been what he had expected when the Witcher first headed up the hill.
"It would have gotten free eventually," Geralt said and sheathed his sword, then began walking down the hillock, back toward Roach and the road they'd left when they had heard the wyvern thrashing and crying.
"I mean you didn't kill it," Jaskier amended, hurrying to keep up, slipping on the dewy grass of the slope.
Geralt shrugged. "It wasn't hurting anyone."
"Mightn't it now? That it's free?"
"Sheep."
"Sorry?"
"They like to eat sheep. Pigs, dogs. They don't kill humans except in defense."
"So it might kill a human? In defense? And you let it live?"
Geralt was quiet as they continued down the hill and Jaskier thought he might not answer. When they reached Roach she was stamping nervously, having muddied the ground around her, disquieted by the screams of the wyvern. Geralt went to her head and spoke quietly to her to calm her, and Jaskier looked back up the hill. He was never sure where he should look when Geralt talked to his horse.
The top of the hill was black where the wyvern had ravaged the ground, but otherwise verdant against the perfect blue sky beyond, and the wind was still and quiet. Had he really just seen… that? Who would believe it? Moreover, was it a tale he should tell? That sometimes a witcher did not kill the beast, sometimes he set it free to torment livestock or worse?
"It might," Geralt said aloud and Jaskier turned to him, realizing that Geralt was at last answering his question. "It might kill a human," he said, stroking Roach's muzzle. "But so might you or I. If I were to kill every creature that possessed the potential to kill a human… I'm not sure what that would even bloody look like." He tossed Roach's reins over her neck, went to her side and swung up into the saddle, dark against the sky when Jaskier looked up at him. "And I would be very tired by the end of it," he said, and reached out to pull Jaskier up behind him.
On the road again they rode alongside the foot of the hills and Jaskier heard a queer trilling far off, then a high screech. Through a break in the trees he could see a shape distant in the sky, not a bird. It looked black and plain against the bright blue expanse and so far away, rolling, diving, climbing playfully, but Jaskier knew that, up close, it was a brilliant, shimmering red.
___
Sometimes there were monsters, and sometimes there was money, rarely both, Geralt liked to say.
Sometimes there were neither.
In most places, however, money or monsters or not, Geralt knew someone. Someone he had usually known for an unspecified number of years ("many'' was the typical answer) who would be friendly and offer them shelter, who were as likely to slap the Witcher on the back and ask him to share an ale as to shake his hand and offer a place to sleep and supper with the family. They usually had strange names like Janstone Bearhands or Badger Twofeet or something equally fantastic that Jaskier could not have dreamed up on his own. They were quite often dwarves or halflings or secretly werewolves. Or sometimes they were a knight errant the Witcher had once saved from catastrophe, or a disgraced baron whom the Witcher had once freed from a curse. They found at least one of these in nearly every town, even the least friendly, so that from one household to the next one could be sure to hear of either Geralt's magnanimous virtue or absolute villainy.
But sometimes there were not even those.
"I don't reckon if we finished early we could get supper sooner," Jaskier said, and swung the axe down to split another log. The axe stuck midway.
"At the rate that you're going," Geralt said, and brought down his axe to slice cleanly through the wood, "I don't think that's a question you'll have to concern yourself with. Perhaps if you tell them your real name someone will bow and scrape and fetch you some furs to sit upon and offer you a roast goose."
Jaskier dropped the axe and let it and the log tumble over. "Do you really think so?"
The Witcher scoffed and kept swinging.
They had moved stones, mucked stalls, and chopped wood for the last several hours in exchange for the promise of food and shelter for the night in the farthest and most watery of backwater hamlets Jaskier had ever been sorry to have visited. He examined his hands, blistered, bleeding. He looked to his clothes, stained from months on the road in spite of spending what little coin he had earned having them laundered, and his boots, once a delicate fawn color, were two shades darker than when he'd bought them (it hadn't taken him long to realize that Geralt favored black for more than just dramatic effect). It was the longest he'd been away from home, even a very temporary home, in his life, and he had just decided that he was finished.
"I'm not really that hungry anyway," he said, and sat down on a pile of logs.
Geralt, who was by now accustomed to Jaskier's senseless complaining, would have likely continued to ignore him if not for the scent of blood. When he saw Jaskier's hands he swore.
"Why didn't you say something, Jaskier?" he said with some irritation, but his hard hands held Jaskier's delicately as he examined the open blisters. With a surreptitious glance toward the cottage where their employer was, Jaskier imagined, sat with his mucky feet up having an ale, Geralt fetched a demijohn of water and washed Jaskier's hand, then pulled a small vial from the bag at his belt along with a clean cloth, and bound Jaskier's palms hastily. The medicine stank but so did everything else in this village. So did he.
"Set up the logs for me if you can," Geralt said. "I'll swing."
In the evening they washed at the well and the farmer's wife brought their supper to the barn where they were to sleep. There was a time, Jaskier mused, that he had worried about his figure, was careful not to overindulge, but now he ate as heartily as Geralt without giving it a thought.
That night Jaskier dreamed of something terrible. He could not remember it when he woke, but the fear remained, and he sat up, cold and damp, gasping in the musty night air.
"Are you well?" Geralt asked, and he sounded quite close though Jaskier could not see him. Night in the barn was utterly dark. He reached out and touched something that was warm and soft and alive.
Jaskier swallowed and said lightly. "Oh, just indigestion."
"Of course," Geralt said.
He lay back down, necessarily removing his hand from whatever part or Geralt he had touched.
"I'm not tired," Geralt said, even closer now that Jaskier was lying down, loud in his ear though he spoke softly. "I should be awake for a few more hours, if that makes a difference to you."
Jaskier shrugged noisily against the chaff, wishing that he could see stars overhead, the moon through a window, or even a distant candle flame. If he asked Geralt to make the Igni sign he was sure that he would, and the barn would flare white and warm for a brief moment.
"Why should it?" Jaskier asked, almost with a laugh.
Geralt did not answer, but after a while something large moved noisily in the chaff, and Jaskier felt the warmth of Geralt nearer, could hear his slow (very slow) breathing, and thought that Geralt must be lying as close as he might without touching.
When he woke again it was morning and Geralt stood over him, buckling and lacing the complicated arrangement of armor.
"The farmer brought news of an attack in the next village," Geralt said. "Townsfolk reckon it's a werewolf but it's as like a wild boar."
Jaskier sat up, blinked. He wasn't going. He wasn't traveling another mile that wasn't toward proper civilization.
"Are you coming?" Geralt asked without pausing in his dressing, as if he knew, as if he sensed. Because Geralt had never asked that before.
"Of course," Jaskier said, and found that it was true, so he yawned and rubbed at his eyes and stood to brush the chaff from his pants. He said, "Do you think we earned breakfast as well?"
___
There was a fight being broken up in one corner as Jaskier entered the dark tavern so that few people looked his way. He knew from past experience that the tavern wasn't any brighter during the day than it was then, an unknown hour past midnight. It was why he had chosen this particular alehouse. That and a wench he thought would be obliging.
Someone threw a bottle which just missed his head and another fight broke out across the room. It was a good excuse to stoop as he moved through the crowd toward the back of the establishment where he found a harried looking man in an apron and dark moustache.
"I'm looking for Vixena," Jaskier said, starting in a whisper and ending in a shout.
"A what?" the man shouted back, and gave Jaskier a brief but suspicious once-over, too distracted by the possible damage to his establishment to spare more than that. Perhaps, Jaskier thought, wearing Geralt's studded black leather jerkin hadn't been the best choice for being inconspicuous. He'd thought it might not stick out as much as his new, cheerful green one, but it hung on him queerly so that it looked stolen, nevermind the blood.
"Vivexa?" Jaskier tried, shouting close to the man's ear.
"Vereena?" the man said, without looking at him.
"That's the one!" Jaskier said triumphantly, perhaps too loud as a nearby patron overheard and turned to look at him with marked suspicion on his unpleasant face. Jaskier smiled brightly and the man sneered grotesquely, then turned away.
"She's in the back," the barman said, and then threw himself headlong into the fray.
The "back", Jaskier found, was the alley behind the establishment, and what Vereena was doing back there was having an extravagant piss near a tree. He waited in the shadows until she was well away from the makeshift necessarium, smoothing her skirts as she went. She was thinner around the middle than he remembered, but her hair was still golden in the flickering street lamps and she hummed a familiar happy tune.
He stepped out into the moonlight and bowed.
She was startled but thankfully did not scream.
"Has anyone ever told you that you're beautiful, my darling?" Jaskier asked, almost a song, and smiled.
Vereena squinted. "Jaskier?" she said at last, uncertain.
"Who else, my love?" Jaskier smiled.
There was a moment's pause during which she narrowed her eyes (blue as a spring morning, he'd once written), and he had a fraction of a second to reconsider the wisdom of this surprise approach before she slapped him.
"Darling," Jaskier said, rushing to come between her and the door which she seemed determined to enter, to leave him in the alley with his cheek and pride stinging, "there seems to have been a misunderstanding."
"A misunderstanding is one thing we can agree upon," she said, and crossed her arms over her bosom, which, unlike her waist, had not diminished. "I understood that you loved me, because that is what you told me, and then you left me abed, alone, and took my favorite silk scarf."
He had done. It had perfectly matched his plum bonnet.
Jaskier spread his hands pleadingly. "A token, my love," he said. "I've kept it near always; it is dear to me, as is your memory."
"Is that right?" Vereena said, smug but sweet. He appreciated that. "Where is it?"
"I…" Jaskier said, then patted himself, but Witcher's jerkin or not, he knew he did not have it. "I lost it in Novigrad," he admitted, "when an unfussy necrophage tried to eat my liver."
"What is--" Vereena began to say, but her face softened as she got a better look at his clothing. "Jaskier… are you bleeding?" She reached for him, quite tenderly, he was pleased to note. "Are you hurt?"
"It's not my blood," Jaskier said, then swallowed, because it had been a while since he'd seen her or her like, and when she stood back, aghast, he caught her. "No! No, I haven't hurt anyone. It's not like that; it's a friend."
Her eyes softened again, sparkling in the moonlight, then someone, a man, came shuffling by and Jaskier pulled her into the shadows, close against him so that they wouldn't be seen. She let herself be pulled. She smelled like days-old ale and vaguely of a latrine but she was the fairest thing he'd seen in weeks, and she'd forgiven him the moment she'd thought he was injured.
How long, he thought, how long would it really take to hold her against him, to whisper soft words into her sweet little ear until she unlaced her bodice and lifted her skirts for him? How long before she was finished working, before she would go home to her clean, warm, sweet-smelling bed chamber where he would be welcomed as if he had never left? Not long, he was sure, not long at all.
Too long, he thought, and pushed her away enough to see her face again.
"You see," he said softly, and brushed a curl from her temple, "I rather need a favor, my love."
A little over an hour later he found Geralt where he'd left him in the forest. Roach, already a temperamental mount beneath Jaskier, stamped nervously as they approached and he dismounted. She could handle the graveyard stench of sundry undead but the smell of her master's blood seemed to set her on edge.
Geralt was still when Jaskier approached, eyes closed in the darkest of night where nothing but his hair and pale face shone under the waning moon. Jaskier knelt, set aside his bundles and reached out, sure that Geralt would catch his hand by the wrist before he could be touched, but he did not. Jaskier felt for his pulse at the soft skin of Geralt's throat.
There was none.
"I'm not dead," Geralt said so suddenly that Jaskier jumped and cursed excessively. "You're just very bad at that."
"And you're very lucky I don't turn around and take back all these gifts I brought for you. I don't see you for months and months and when I find you the first thing you do is get your belly torn open. Perhaps I should have left you that way!" Jaskier said, as viciously as he could in his fright, but it was belied by how hurriedly he unpacked the bundles to hand over clean cloths, herbs, and most of the things that Geralt had said he would need.
"I always say I'm going to learn more about healing and yet there never seems to be time," Jaskier said. "You're far too ready to get your throat cut and I don't know what half of these are meant to do."
"I am sorry," Geralt said, somewhat begrudgingly, "to have frightened you." He gasped and growled as he sat up to press a fresh cloth against his side where the shirt was torn open, where his hands were black with blood in the night. When he had inspected the haul he said, "It's not everything I asked for."
"No," Jaskier agreed, "Vereena, my contact in the city, she gathered all that she could but her mother is a cook not a healer. I thought this could get you through the night, and in the morning we could see your friend."
"I told you," Geralt said, voice quiet with warning and pain--he was always churlish when he was injured. "I've got a bounty on my head here and I'm in no bloody shape--"
"Trust me, Witcher," Jaskier interrupted. "You may be the master of monstrosities but I am a virtuoso of intrigue, artifice, and the occasional masquerade." He stood and proudly unfurled something from the last bundle.
Geralt stared, then dropped his head, and softly said, "Fuck."
Just before dawn Jaskier led Roach to the guard house at the gate to town. A figure rode astride her, hunched but large.
"Who's that then?" the guard asked, yawning as he exited the little hut and Jaskier was glad to see it was not the same man he'd had to bribe the night before.
"Julian Pankratz," Jaskier said, because his stagename was now recognized over much of the continent, even if this gentleman did not present as his usual admirer. "At your service," he added, and bowed slightly then regretted it immediately as the long, dark traveling cloak he'd decided to don over his grass-green doublet swished impressively to reveal the silk lining, making more of a spectacle than he'd hoped. He was trying for simple and provincial, rather than his usual refined and rakish. He cleared his throat.
"We are traveling through your fine hamlet on our way to Temeria, my old Nan and I," at this he gestured to the rider, a hooded figure in a cape and black cowl. Only the barest outline of a pale face was visible in the hazy morning light, framed by wispy white hair.
"Your old Nan?" the guard asked, sucking his teeth.
"Yes, quite ancient," Jaskier said, then added, "and much beloved, of course! My beloved old Nan and I. That is, my grandmother's mother, on my mother's side." He coughed.
"Mm-hmm," said the guard, and stepped nearer to Roach's flank, peering up into the darkened face beneath the cowl. The figure didn't really sit their horse like a lady, but perhaps the guard reasoned, as Jaskier hoped he would, that most nannas weren't so worried about being as lady-like as they had once done, and the rider did indeed wear a complicated layering of linen skirts, ending just before thick-socked ankles and shockingly large women's shoes.
Just then the sun popped up over the horizon and Jaskier nudged Roach so that she stood nearer to where it crested the distant mountains.
The guard squinted, raised a hand to shade his eyes, seemingly oblivious to the purpose of the movement. "And where," he asked the hooded figure on the horse, "are you come from so early in the morning, beloved Nan?"
"Oh we camped in the forest," Jaskier said quickly, "no coin for an inn, only enough to break our fast this morning, and for tolls, of course." At this he paused to hand over a coin. "My old Nan is hardy that way, likes it a bit rough."
"What?" the guard asked, and made a disgusted face at Jaskier as he pocketed the coin.
"Oh, no," Jaskier said. "I mean that she doesn't mind roughing it. She's from the old country you know, and--"
"What old country?" the guard asked, all of his attention on Jaskier now, stepping closer. Jaskier could just discern the familiar complicated swearing from the direction of the cloaked figure.
"Elder...town?" Jaskier tried, and took a step back to avoid the guard treading on his boots.
"Shut up, Julian," Geralt said from beneath the cloak, in a voice only a little higher than his own but somehow older sounding, tired and pained. Possibly the last two were not false. To the guard he said, "I'm Zofia Pankratz, sister to Amelia Mazurina, and I'm here to see my kinswoman on my way to Temeria, and then on to Mahakam."
The guard straightened at the mention of Mazurina's name and looked to the ground, unwilling now, it seemed, to purposely or even accidentally look the Witcher, that is, Jaskier's beloved old Nan, in the eye.
"She is expecting me," Geralt continued. "If you would like to deny me entrance so be it, but I shall task you with fetching her here for me to explain why I shan't be visiting before I've gone to my final rest with my foremothers in the Iron Mountains."
"No," the guard said suddenly to the ground, "I mean yes, madam, of course," then motioned toward the hut from which a second man hurried, and they both opened the larger of two gates to let Jaskier, Roach, and her rider pass. As they did, Jaskier overheard the guard mumble something that sounded like a prayer.
"What in the devil was that about?" Jaskier asked when the gate was closed behind them and he assumed that they could not be overheard. The streets were quiet so early, but store keepers were about. One threw a bucket of rancid water out into the street and he had to dodge it swiftly to keep it off of his new cordovan boots.
"Amelia Mazurina is the healer we're going to see, a powerful one, as much feared as she is revered."
"You mean a sorceress from that reaction."
"Perhaps," Geralt admitted.
"Will we be alright?"
"If we aren't caught and hanged or flogged, me for fraud, you for debt."
"Quite," Jaskier said. "Anyway, you owe me a crown; my contact and my pantomime got you in contrary to your assertions that there was, I quote, 'no bloody chance, you clown-hearted whoreson'."
Geralt made a noise but Jaskier was certain it was pain and not humor. When he spoke again it sounded as if it was through clenched teeth.
"Yes," he said, "it is a comfort to your ancient old grandmama to know her progeny is a master of lechery, skullduggery, and puerile absurdity."
Jaskier slowed Roach to lessen her jostling Geralt. He hoped that Amelia Mazurina deserved her notoriety. He said, "I'd be offended but that's nicer than anything my real grandmother has ever said to me."
____
The Cat's Head was a rather nicer inn than they'd frequented lately, particularly as lately they had frequented none, only dirty hollowed out places in trees stinking of fox piss and crawling with beetles, or hammocks of tangled grapevines stinking of rotten fruit and crawling with spiders. This was not, for once, due to any insolvency on their part, but lack of opportunity following a tip about a pack of werewolves that led to nothing (as all tips about werewolves usually did for Geralt), but sent them the long way around a dense forest. So a roof and a floor and four walls was enough for Jaskier to be grateful, but here the food was also hot and palatable and the room was clean and there were two palliasses. Jaskier didn't mind sharing in principle, but for practical purposes, Geralt liked to spread out.
There was also a bath house, bless the gods. They hadn't had one of those since Cintra, he thought, back when… well, when what had happened in Cintra happened. A well and a pail, or a trickling, freezing stream were good enough to get the stink off but there was nothing like a tub of steaming water (heated and hauled in by someone you'd paid so that you didn't have to heat or haul it yourself) to make one feel a little less like a tramp. He was thinking of writing a song about it.
He had just related this to Geralt when he heard a splashing sound behind him and turned to watch Geralt, naked but for a scowl, drop his clothes into his own tub to soak. He followed them shortly after, favoring a shoulder injury as he did so.
"Did you hear me?" Jaskier asked because his mouth had gone dry and he couldn't think of anything else to say.
"Don't I always?" Geralt said, and sighed as the hot water rose up to meet him until it lapped and splashed at the sides of the big tub when he ducked beneath it. Only his knees were visible for a full minute.
Jaskier turned to his own clothing, examining them as he shed each layer. His once beautiful robin's egg doublet now frayed, torn, and stained brown in ways that he didn't want to think about and his linen undershirt and braies were embarrassingly yellowed.
Across the room, Geralt surfaced noisily, reaching up with his good arm to awkwardly pull at the thong in his hair. The shoulder was healing, and Jaskier knew that Geralt wouldn't hesitate to use it in a fight, but apparently washing his hair wasn't worth the strain.
"Go on," Jaskier said, and crossed the room, still in his small clothes. He knelt behind Geralt's tub and pushed his hand away. "Save your strength."
"It isn't strength I'm saving," Geralt argued but didn't resist. "It will heal faster if it rests."
"That's the most sensible thing I've heard you say in days," Jaskier replied, and untied the thong as Geralt reached for the soap and passed it back to him, and then an ewer of clean water, and when his hair was clean he passed a cloth also, and Jaskier washed his back.
Jaskier began to hum as he worked and Geralt slipped deeper into the water as Jaskier moved around him, dropping his head to rest against the deep wooden bath, eyes closed, sighing low in his chest, a sound that Jaskier knew better than anyone by now, its varied approval and warnings, baring the skin of his throat in a way that Jaskier felt sure few people saw. There were places there, under Geralt's square chin, soft vulnerable places, which almost never saw the sun overhead, nearly as pale as his belly, the turn of his hips, the innermost part of his thigh. More people, Jaskier knew, saw those.
Jaskier dropped the cloth and reached into the water. It had gone grey from road dirt and soap, but he found what he wanted to find easily enough from practice. Geralt was already half hard from the warm water or Jaskier's attention or both, and Jaskier only just grazed him at first, to let Geralt know his intentions, but Geralt already knew. As if to prove this Geralt did not speak or even open his eyes, only 'hmm'ed again in a way that Jaskier also recognized, and Jaskier took hold of him in earnest, and set about coaxing something more from his friend.
This was, of course, not the first time this had happened. The first time this had happened was in Lyria, only weeks after Jaskier had started following Geralt everywhere he'd let him, and months (or years in the more remote areas of the continent) before any of Jaskier's songs had begun to precede them, to make their entry into a town or tavern easier. Another monster, another injury, another unfriendly town. There had been so many, there would be so many to come.
That time the bath had been smaller, barely large enough for Geralt to sit in and Jaskier had felt for him, watching the muscle-bound warrior fight with a small square of cloth, trying to scrub his own back with his one good arm (apparently the shoulder was a recurring or ongoing injury), sat in a little round tub like a toddler.
"I don't suppose I'd corrupt your flesh if I gave you a hand?" Jaskier had asked, himself yet unwashed, waiting his turn with the basin. "I've learned by now you're not chaste but perhaps there are rules, sanctity of the witcher body or--" but he hadn't finished because Geralt had thrust the dripping cloth at him and hunched forward over his own knees.
"I'd be grateful," was all that Geralt had said, and Jaskier got the impression that he wasn't the first to offer the Witcher a back scrub. Later, he would learn that, in spite of his infamy as a butcher to man and beast alike, Geralt got offered quite a lot, particularly by local maidens. Sometimes the wrong kind of reputation got you the right kind of attention.
Jaskier had scrubbed away, careful of the raw places where a basilisk had raked Geralt over some stalagmites (although in the ballad it was the basilisk's razor sharp scales that damaged both man and armour--Geralt was particularly annoyed by that bit of misinformation), until Geralt's head hung so limply between his own knees, and the muscles in his back so relaxed, that Jaskier made bold to take up a dish and pour water over Geralt's shoulders, and scrubbed there, too. Arms, neck, hair, and chest, all with Geralt's easy cooperation, moving his body with just a gentle nudge or soft word from Jaskier who had made his way around the tub, and who had not asked about the scars, and who did not exactly try not to stare. At last, all but Geralt's face (one simply did not wash another man's face unless he was dying or already dead) and groin and backside had been tended to, and Geralt had stretched his legs to hang them out of the tub, his hair dripping onto the floor and his eyes closed, and, unsurprising to Jaskier, his cock as stiff and straight as a pike, half hidden by the grey water.
Jaskier had wondered briefly if that was his cue to be finished, but then again, what was the point of this whole endeavor, this trek for adventure and inspiration, if not to try new things. Men were not new to him, but witchers... Geralt himself would argue that witchers stood apart.
Geralt did look at him that first time. Jaskier had plunged the cloth into the water between Geralt's spread legs, not too close for suspicion, not yet, and brought it dripping to Geralt's belly, and lower, slowly. And Geralt had looked at him, those golden eyes almost a normal human brown in the evening halflight and dim candleflame, neither question nor accusation nor even lust, and so Jaskier had simply hummed and looked to his work, moving lower still, over Geralt's erection which twitched in his hand, and when he looked up again Geralt's eyes had closed again, face slack.
"Hmm," Geralt had said, and stretched out even more.
Geralt had not offered the same for Jaskier and Jaskier, to his own surprise, hadn't asked. They hadn't kissed or cuddled (though they had shared a bed), or even spoken of it, and the next day, the next hunt, the next adventure, had proceeded much as the one before (inasmuch as they were all different).
This time (and Jaskier could still count how many times there had been… if he was the sort to count such things, which he was), in the Cat's Head, Jaskier made it back to his own bath while the water was still warm, and by the time he'd satisfied his own urgent need for both a wank and a wash, Geralt was dressed and gone.
It should have bothered him, Jaskier sometimes thought, to give and yet not receive in return. He sometimes wondered why it didn't. He sometimes wondered if it actually did.
___
He found Geralt waiting for him at the trailhead, after all the dwarves and other men had gone. Jaskier was the last one left besides the dragon and the egg and their protectors.
Geralt did not speak, just fell in after Jaskier as he walked past, following him down the trail. Jaskier assumed this was because Geralt thought he couldn't make it down the mountain safely alone, which he resented, but also felt was rather sweet.
"She's not good for you, Geralt," Jaskier said over his shoulder. He didn't say it very loudly. He didn't have to.
"It doesn't matter. She's gone."
"She'll be back. And she still won't be good for you."
Geralt was quiet for a long time, only the scuff of their boots, the scrabble of rockfall could be heard, and a hawk far off.
"You say that because you don't like her," Geralt said at last, and Jaskier wondered if his willingness to talk about it was an apology or something else.
"Like her?" Jaskier scoffed. "She's the most powerful sorceress I've ever encountered, and the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. If I wasn't bloody well terrified of her I'd probably be in love with her too. That's like accusing the mouse of not liking the cat, if the cat could also do magic that could turn the mouse into a castrated flea and banish it to--to--I don't know... the place where sorceresses like to banish things!"
"You don't have to like her, Jaskier," Geralt said, though he didn't sound angry. "You don't even have to love her. You don't have to do anything as far as I'm concerned."
Jaskier stopped, twisted as if he might turn around to face Geralt but thought better of it, walked on a few steps further down the trail, then stopped suddenly once more so that Geralt was right there when he turned to face him, standing a little taller than Jaskier on the slope. Jaskier climbed to the same level, then higher.
"Just because she hurts you," he said when he could look down at Geralt, feeling that this would lend weight to what he was about to say, "just because she can make you miserable," he paused and softened his voice, "and she does make you miserable, my dear Witcher, that doesn't mean it's love."
Geralt stared up at him for several long seconds, then turned and headed down the mountain. "I never said it was," Geralt growled, "dear Bard, and I don't recall asking you. I wouldn't ask you, of all people, if ever I thought I needed assistance identifying such a thing, particularly as I have long suspected that you, like me, are incapable of it."
Jaskier hurried to catch up, sliding and scrabbling among the scree and dry nettles. "I can never tell when you talk like that if you're trying to be ironic, but I know those aren't your words, Geralt. The unfeeling Witcher," he scoffed and made a complicated motion with his hands though Geralt could not see, and nearly lost his balance, "I knew within seconds of meeting you that those stories weren't true. And I knew very shortly afterward that the only feeling you trust is pain."
That stopped Geralt again. He turned and Jaskier skidded to a stop just short of colliding with him or falling onto his backside. Geralt caught him by the arm, gripping him there a little too tightly for comfort. Jaskier thought he would say something, and indeed Geralt opened his mouth but only to bare his teeth, then closed it again.
"This is what she does to you," Jaskier said softly. "This is who she makes you. Full of self-doubt and recrimination. I don't even think it's her fault, just something between the two of you that draws it to the surface, like infection from a wound, before she fucks off to leave it to fester while I watch."
Geralt's eyes narrowed, pupil's contracting into vertical, black slits, gilded all around. Jaskier hated when he did that.
"Why do you fucking care?" Geralt asked, close enough that Jaskier could smell Yennefer's scent on him, and could see the livid place on Geralt's throat where she had marked him.
Jaskier, for once and with great effort, said nothing.
Geralt released his arm. Jaskier felt the blood rushing back.
"Put it in your next ballad," Geralt said at last but without anger, then turned to walk down the mountain path just slow enough that Jaskier could keep up.
__
"To Geralt of Rivia!" someone shouted, and swiftly added, "may he one day be man enough to grow a beard as long as his sword!"
The raucous laughter that followed had been precisely what had first brought Jaskier down out of his room and away from the woman (and the food and the bottle) waiting there. Such a good time and the familiar tones of good, drunken storytelling could not be ignored by a man in search of tales for any reason.
The inn was full of rowdy patrons and summer hung warm and heavy in the smoky air, but from his place on the stairs, half dressed (and with an even less dressed woman at the top of the landing whisper-shouting for his return), Jaskier had no trouble spotting the table of dwarfs surrounding a big white-haired, leather-clad witcher. They were all well in their cups, even Geralt, who smiled genuinely when he raised his mug, even if he did not chortle or shout, nor sing along when someone began a chorus of The Dragon and the Druid (not his work, but enviously popular).
Jaskier leaned on the rail. How long had it been? It was not even rhetorical. He couldn't remember. A year? Not that long, surely. It was never very long, however much time actually passed. When Geralt spoke of destiny it was usually about his sorceress. Jaskier thought that one day he might point out just how often, in all of the continent, the two of them managed to be in the same place at the same time, and how frequently it was just when the other was needed.
Geralt looked no older but then he would not. He had some new armor, more silver studs than Jaskier remembered, and he did look well, but he looked tired also. Not just for the night, but for a long time.
Jaskier thought of their conversation, of what he might say. "I've been in my books too long, Geralt! Teaching has drained me of all inspiration. Fame has left me paralyzed! I've hit a wall so high I cannot see the top. I'm impotent (maybe not that), inconsolate (that was overstating the facts) and desperate (that was true). May I ride with you again?"
No, he thought, too needy. Too straightforward. Better instead to remind Geralt of why he was such a good companion, of how each complemented the other.
As if sensing that he was being so intensely scrutinized, Geralt looked up. Or perhaps it was more likely that he smelled Jaskier, over the scent of ale and sweat and perfume that hung in the room. For whatever reason he looked up and found Jaskier unerringly. There was a long moment during which Geralt did not react at all, and then he raised his glass and smiled, and Jaskier stopped wondering what he would say to the Witcher.
___
"Why is it that you never seem to age?" Geralt asked, and tossed a small bone from his supper into the fire. It hissed and sizzled for a moment and then was quiet.
Jaskier, absently strumming his lute and humming, was momentarily taken aback. Geralt rarely asked him anything about himself that wasn't immediately pressing. 'What are you doing here, Jaskier? Have you seen my horse, Jaskier? Why aren't you wearing pants, Jaskier?'
They sat beneath a stone outcropping, just near enough to the sea that it could be heard, a distant, pulsing roar beyond the warm crackle of the flames. Geralt ate his hare and Jaskier, once again watching his figure, drank a little and ate nothing. The light from the fire lent a warmth to Geralt's pale features, his white hair almost golden, and if the Witcher's hulking shadow thrown against the mountain seemed smaller than it once had done, that was surely a failure of Jaskier's memory, or a trick of the light. It was so like a hundred other fires and hares and nights they'd spent together through the years that Jaskier was almost nostalgic for the old days, when they had nothing, and he was no one, and nothing concerned him but his next lyric.
"It's hardly been a year," he said at last. "Have you really missed me so much that it seems longer?"
"You know that's not what I mean."
Jaskier did. Geralt wasn't the first to mention it. "Good wine and bad women, I like to think," he said. "Including Yennefer--" and at Geralt's quick glance he amended, "she sold me some powerful restoratives once, back when I had more coin than sense."
"And now?" Geralt asked.
"Now I've got plenty of both," Jaskier answered, and strummed his lute as if to punctuate his own wit, then shrugged. "I've also been magically healed a few times, does that sort of thing stick around?"
"It might."
"It would be funny, just your luck, if I lived to plague you for a hundred years and it was all your fault for saving my life." He plucked out a simple melody and watched the firelight dance over his strings rather than watching Geralt. "I wonder, when I do die, will you find yourself another poet like me and call him Jaskier, the way you do Roach?"
"I won't find another like you, no matter what I call him," Geralt said.
Jaskier looked up, but Geralt was only picking another small bone out of his hare, frowning.
The wind picked up, the fire flared, and it began to mist. Jaskier hurried to tuck his lute away into its leather satchel and both he and Geralt moved to sit closer to the outcropping, sheltering from the light rain.
"And you, Geralt?" Jaskier asked when they were shoulder to shoulder, looking out over the night-dark grass, the sound of Roach nearby doing her best to shorten it. "I know you won't live forever," technically he did not know, but he had always assumed, "but I've never asked; how long will you live?"
Geralt shrugged against him, hands clasped over his drawn knees. "What does it matter? I don't have anywhere to go, nothing to head toward, there's no end in sight for me, and yet no future either besides more of the same." He didn't sound sorry for himself.
There was a moment in which Jaskier thought that he shouldn't say what he wanted to say. Life had taught him (several times cruelly) that it was usually better to heed that impulse than not, and yet, he did not.
"You have a legacy," he said and waited for Geralt to quiet him, but Geralt only tensed. Jaskier did not actually see the movement, but the leather of his jerkin creaked. "If you want it. All you have to do--"
"I appreciate," Geralt said suddenly, "that you've never written about it, not that I've heard anyway."
Jaskier shrugged. "You asked me not to."
Geralt 'hmm'ed in a way that seemed to say 'as if that's ever stopped you.'
"Also," Jaskier conceded, "I thought it was better to see what comes of it. It may not inspire confidence in the witcher profession to know that they go around demanding children as payment."
"That's not--" Geralt argued, anger in his voice but Jaskier cut him off quickly.
"I know!" he said, then, "I know, Geralt," softly, and when Geralt seemed to relax he laughed. "Anyway, Calanthe threatened to have me castrated."
___
The twig, when it snapped, did so under a boot rather than a giant clawed paw as Jaskier expected. He jumped all the same, then straightened when he saw to whom the boot belonged.
It was a child. About ten years of age.
"Why are you dressed like that?" the boy asked, and had good reason. Jaskier was wearing a wolf's pelt, huge and stinking, and about forty years old if a day, moth-eaten (if moths ate such things) and grotesque, but he was helping Geralt.
"Get on with you!" Jaskier hissed, swiping his paw through the air as the flanks of the skin sagged at his side and the gaping mouth bobbed on his head, most of the fur on its snout and all of its whiskers long since rubbed away. "I'm assisting a witcher! You're in danger! There's a foul beast in these woods! Be gone!" Jaskier spoke the last a little louder, stepped menacingly toward the boy while raising up, trying to frighten him, but the child only frowned stupidly from beneath a straight and dirty blond fringe.
"Are you well?" the boy asked.
Jaskier frowned, he hoped not stupidly. "Yes. But out of curiosity why do you ask? Why are you not afraid?"
The child picked at something urgent in his left nostril, then inspected it and flicked it away. Jaskier stepped aside to avoid the projectile.
"A witcher killed that werewolf two months back. Nobody seen it since. Nobody died since, except old man Grenberg and he was old, nigh fifty, and a calf what was born still."
"Two months?"
The boy shrugged.
Then another twig snapped. This was not under the boy's boot nor Jaskier's and they both looked at each other with curiosity, then turned to find a monster.
Not a monster technically, only a bear, but a large and hungry looking brown bear, which, to Jaskier, was the same thing. It snuffed at the air, swinging it's giant head from side to side slightly, as if sizing up one and then the other of its prey, which to eat, or which to eat first.
Jaskier, after the first moments in which he was completely frozen to the spot, stepped in front of the boy and said, "Behind me!" but the boy did not hear this because the boy had promptly run away. Jaskier did not spare a glance to watch him go.
The bear raised its head and made a sound between a wail and a growl.
"Oh," Jaskier said, because he'd never practiced what he should say to a bear. In response the bear snorted at the ground, and took a step.
"Don't do that," Jaskier pleaded, but the bear took another step and Jaskier said quietly, "Geralt?" and then turned and began to run.
The bear followed. Jaskier didn't see that it followed him but he could hear it crashing through nettles, feel it thundering over the ground, felling trees, causing the mountains to tremble. At least he thought that he could feel and hear all of that. Perhaps that was only his pounding heart, but it would make for good imagery if he survived.
He began to look for a tree to climb but there were only saplings or tall, soaring trees without lower branches, or squat rowans stripped of fruit. He surprised a fallow deer in some brambles and she leapt out to frighten him even more. He tried to follow her, reasoning that she would know a good hiding place, but she was away in a moment, over the trunk of a large felled tree, bounding with enviable swiftness and soon lost to him. He vaulted over the trunk too but not half as nimbly, especially when the wolf's hide--he'd forgotten about the hide!--tangled in his legs and he tripped, fell forward, tumbling over himself and sliding on damp moss, and felt something give way in his leg. He cried out, but now that he had remembered the pelt he struggled to free himself of it, tugging at the cords that lashed it to his neck and around his middle.
The woods were quiet, Jaskier noticed, and he struggled to slow his breathing, to hear better and to not be heard. He was hidden, he hoped, behind the tree, and after the pelt was off of him he risked raising his head to look behind him.
The bear was there. It stood some distance away, sniffing the air in Jaskier's direction, its loose lips quivering over yellowed teeth as it panted and snuffed. Jaskier ducked his head again, considered praying, thought better of it, then counted to three. When he stood again, somewhat unsteadily, he thrust the pelt out and away from himself, toward the bear who, to Jaskier's surprise, seemed startled by this action, and Jaskier took that opportunity to turn and run again.
Right into Geralt.
Geralt pushed past Jaskier wielding not a sword but a large branch, and in his other hand Jaskier's fine bluebell cloak. He waved them about madly at the bear who had begun to poke at the wolf's pelt with his nose. The bear looked askance, balked, then turned and lumbered back into the forest.
"Hah," Jaskier said loudly at the bear's backside, not because it was funny, but because if he didn't say something he might vomit.
"Are you alright?" Geralt asked, and threw aside his weapons to catch Jaskier who was sinking to the ground.
"There," Jaskier gasped, "was a bear."
"I know," Geralt said, helping Jaskier to sit and then knelt beside him to inspect him for injuries. "I thought they had all been run out of these woods. It was likely the pelt that brought him here. Bears have been known to steal a wolf's supper if they can." Jaskier hissed as Geralt moved his right leg. "He was just trying to see if you'd made a kill."
"I nearly was the kill!" Jaskier cried in both annoyance and pain as Geralt turned his ankle carefully.
Geralt only made a knowing sound and then gently released Jaskier's foot.
"I'm sorry," he said surprisingly softly, and Jaskier had some trouble meeting the earnestness of his gaze, so instead he looked down at his mud-caked boots, his lovely cordovan boots. "I didn't think--" Geralt continued, "there wasn't supposed to be anything in these woods, I only wanted to entertain you."
"Entertain me?" Jaskier scoffed.
"We haven't seen more than a wild dog for weeks and you complained that you were bored."
"Are you trying to blame this on me?" Jaskier asked, nearly a screech, no trouble now meeting Geralt's eyes with anger, but Geralt, the rascal, was smiling.
"No," Geralt said, a bit indulgently, "forgive me."
Jaskier narrowed his eyes and tried not to smile back. "This is your revenge for that time I dressed you as my Nan."
"No, Jaskier."
"Or when I mistook that doppler for you and gave him your horse!"
"It isn't!"
"It looked exactly like you, Geralt!"
"I know," Geralt said patiently.
"What were you planning anyway, to let me wander around all day until I was lost?"
Geralt stood and scratched his head. "I thought I'd wait 'til dark, rustle through the shrubbery out of sight, wailing and lamenting."
"Wailing? Lamenting? Is that what you think ballads are made of?"Jaskier held up a hand warningly. "No, no, don't answer that."
Geralt smiled broadly, not trying to hide it. He fetched Jaskier's bluebell cloak and draped it carefully over one arm, then reached out with the other.
"Come," he said, "we'll find an inn, I'll look at that ankle and have them fetch up supper for you."
Jaskier frowned but reached out. Geralt pulled him carefully to his one good foot and slung Jaskier's arm over his shoulder to support him.
"And a bath," Jaskier said, wobbling drunkenly to balance himself on one foot without relying too much on Geralt.
"Of course," Geralt agreed, then, with a laugh in his voice added, "Will this suffice or shall I carry you?"
Jaskier, in spite of his own answering chuckle, declared, "Get fucked, Witcher!"
The innkeeper, recognizing Jaskier, his soiled clothing and disheveled state notwithstanding, offered their largest room which included a bath, something he was gratefully finding more often these days, and two women with comely bosoms and large pots carried up heated water so scalding Jaskier was obliged to wait for it to cool.
"You know," Jaskier said as he sat to undress, dried mud flecking off onto the floor, "I've read of places where they build their baths from stone and light fires under them while you bathe."
"That's not a bath, that's stew," Geralt said, watching him. He had already shed his breastplate and pauldrons, boots and belts, and now he stood looking as if he might make himself useful if Jaskier would allow it, but Jaskier had said that he could undress himself. He clearly felt guilty for the trick in the woods and Jaskier intended to make the most of it.
"I have often thought it would be nice," Jaskier continued, "to be stewed, all your meats made tender and the like."
"Hmm," Geralt agreed or did not agree (Jaskier didn't care), and crossed his arms.
Jaskier stood to remove his pants and nearly fell.
"Here," Geralt said, catching him almost before he knew himself to be falling. "Let me...no, just let me," he growled, then softened. "Don't make such a fuss. You've had worse."
Jaskier let him, and within moments they were moving over to the tub. Geralt supported him as he slipped into the water, which was still almost uncomfortably hot.
"The hot soak will help," Geralt said, but crossed the room to retrieve a vial from his belt, then came and knelt by the bath and poured a few dark, viscous drops into the water. To Jaskier's surprise it was not the cloying stench of rot or the astringent scent of antiseptics that filled the room but that of juniper.
"That's lovely," Jaskier said, of the water, of the smell, of Geralt's undivided attention. He meant all of them. He leaned back, and closed his eyes.
There was movement in the water, the sound of it swirling. He opened his eyes to find Geralt plunging a cloth into the bath to wet it, then motioned for Jaskier to sit up.
"Are you going to bathe me as well?"
"You can do it yourself if you prefer?" Geralt said, proffering the dripping cloth with a neutral expression.
Jaskier grinned, though in reality he wasn’t certain that it was a good idea. "Oh no, I fully intend to take advantage of this opportunity."
“You’ve done it enough times for me,” Geralt said, soaping the cloth.
“That’s true,” Jaskier agreed too quickly, readying a steady stream of chatter to keep the atmosphere very, very normal and not sexy at all. “Not that I’ve been counting but—“
“Quiet,” Geralt said, “or I’ll leave you to it.”
Jaskier was quiet. Geralt began by scrubbing a little too roughly at Jaskier’s back, but soon he gentled, and the hot water and rhythm of scrubbing soothed Jaskier’s worries. He had never been bathed before, not really. Women in his bath were not there to wash him, and he found the experience less arousing than he feared. Geralt was perfunctory and exacting, until he reached Jaskier’s injured leg, when he slowly lifted the foot from the bath, handling it tenderly.
“How is it?” he asked, turning it this way and that, kneeling at the foot of the tub, his big hands making Jaskier's foot look surprisingly dainty. It was throbbing, but not unpleasantly, and there was a tingling sensation where Geralt touched it—something he’d felt before from the Witcher’s hands.
“Much better,” Jaskier said, mouth dry, and Geralt ‘hmm’ed thoughtfully, then released him to take up the cloth again to scrub at his legs.
If he noticed Jaskier’s arousal, and surely he must, he did not mention it, nor even suggest that Jaskier finish washing himself, but moved around to the side of the tub, his hands and the cloth further up Jaskier’s thighs, one and then the other. Jaskier watched him, the sharp profile he knew so well from riding or walking beside him, the hands he’d seen take life or preserve it by sword or knife or other deadly means. He watched him until he couldn’t, until the desire to ask for more was overwhelming, and he dropped his head back and closed his eyes.
Geralt paused, his hand, not the cloth, resting high up Jaskier’s inner thigh, and let it rest there long enough that Jaskier lifted his head and looked at him. Geralt was watching him. Waiting for something. Jaskier breathed once, twice, three times before Geralt spoke.
"With your permission," he said, and Jaskier almost felt guilty for all the times he’d snuck up on Geralt in the same way. He’d never asked. Perhaps he should have. Perhaps that was all he ever needed to do. Just ask.
"Granted," Jaskier tried to say, but it had not really been a question, or else there must have been something in his face which Geralt understood, because he had hardly begun to speak the word when Geralt's fingers encircled him, gently, firmly, exactly right, and began a rhythm that set the water lapping against Jaskier's belly even as he gasped out the last syllable.
Jaskier had never been self-conscious about his performance as a lover (or receiver of sundry acts) and he did not intend to start, but neither did he intend to finish as soon as he felt he must, with Geralt's golden eyes on him (because the Witcher had not stopped staring) and Geralt's inexplicably soft hand so demanding. And when Geralt made a noise, a quiet, low sound deep in his chest, Jaskier's will nearly broke. He thrust out a hand to Geralt's bicep to slow him, and leaned forward slightly, pulling himself forward by his grip on Geralt's arm.
"Too soon, I don't--" he said, almost inaudible, perhaps entirely inaudible to anyone but a witcher.
Geralt smiled, but he slowed, and Jaskier's grip grew stronger, pulled him nearer. He could feel the flex of Geralt's arm beneath his fingers and he could hear Geralt's breathing even over his own panting, and smell Geralt's skin, his hair when he leaned into the warmth of him, road dust and horse flesh and long days in the sun. He closed his eyes to bury his face into the wide expanse of skin from shoulder to jaw as the Witcher leaned there over the bath, touching him so gently, insistently. He could feel Geralt shift, felt Geralt's breath hot against his shoulder, his own condensing to wet Geralt's throat, and then Geralt spoke.
"Come for me," Geralt said, and Jaskier did.
When he lay back gasping, grinning because, well, what else was there to do, Jaskier opened his eyes to find Geralt still watching him. There was color high in his pale cheeks and his pupils were blown wide, almost elixir-black but not quite, and he looked at Jaskier as if Jaskier had just struck him a blow.
"Geralt?" Jaskier asked, uncertain, then realized that he still gripped Geralt's arm and let him go, dropped both hands into the water. "Are you--"
Geralt raised a hand dripping from the bath, his half-rolled sleeve wet to the elbow, wrinkled where Jaskier had gripped him, and touched Jaskier's face, his cheek, the corner of his mouth, and then kissed him.
It felt experimental at first, the way that Geralt's lips moved against his like a question. Not a question for Jaskier, and yet when Jaskier answered Geralt softened, relaxed, and then Geralt was in the bath. Jaskier wasn't sure how it happened, but suddenly the water rose to splash out of the tub and he was pinned beneath a wet, mostly clothed witcher on his knees, straddling Jaskier's legs until Jaskier broke the kiss to laugh out loud, the pain in his ankle utterly forgotten as he wiggled about to pull his legs over Geralt's, up around his hips, and to wrap his arms around those big shoulders as Geralt kissed him and kissed him and kissed him.
Later, when what little water that was left was beginning to grow cold and Geralt was no longer clothed, Geralt sat in front of him, back to Jaskier's front, and Jaskier bathed him as far as he could reach, then washed his hair and plaited it for no reason other than he could.
"Where did you learn that?" Geralt asked, touching the top of the braid gingerly, then pulling the end of it around to see.
"A gentleman never tells," Jaskier said, not because he was a gentleman or because the story was particularly off-color, but because, for all that Geralt fornicated his way across the continent, he wasn't a fan of bawdy speech. "But if you must know--"
"I mustn't," Geralt said, and punctuated the statement by leaning back to lay his head against Jaskier's shoulder. He was heavy; the wood of the tub dug into Jaskier's back under their combined weights, and his breathing was necessarily shallow, but demonic hell-horses, if there were such things, couldn't have dragged him away.
____
On the road the next day, Jaskier told Geralt that he would have to return to Oxenfurt for the fall.
"How soon?" Geralt asked. They were riding away from town, each mounted, Geralt on Roach, now a chestnut rather than a bay, and Jaskier on the grey gelding he'd ridden from the academy. It had a name but Jaskier called it Horse.
"I was planning on heading back today, strangely enough. I'll return, of course," he added quickly when Geralt said nothing, eyes on the strip of road that stretched on between Roach's bobbing ears. “That is, I’ll find you again. We always do.”
"I'll ride with you as far as White Bridge," Geralt said.
"Will you? What about the drowner in Ban Gleán? They're offering a fortune!"
"It will likely still be there."
"And after that?" Jaskier only asked hoping that he knew the answer.
"North," Geralt said.
That evening they made camp in a clearing blanketed in cool grass and flanked by gnarled, shaggy yew trees and elderberry bushes dropping the last of their summer fruit. Geralt fussed over Roach for a long time, longer than usual, but when he joined Jaskier by the fire he brought two apples and lay down near him, pushed aside the lute to rest his head on Jaskier's thigh.
"Shall I tell you a story?" Jaskier asked.
"I don't like--"
"Yes, I know, but this one's true!"
"You say that about all of them and all of them are complete nonsense."
"True things usually are."
Geralt took a large bite of his apple and at length asked, "Does it rhyme?"
"Is that important?"
"It is. Tell me an unembellished true story that rhymes."
"Oh...hmm, very well," Jaskier agreed, and cleared his throat. He didn't sing, but it was an effort.
"Of an evening dark and fine I lay…” he began, “hmm… in the sweet, cool grass of a country glade; when softly blew the, ah… sweetened air, to touch my maiden's flaxen hair; for she beside me, hah, beauteous lay, and would not—“
"Are you making that up as you go?” Geralt interrupted. “It's not very good."
"Of course I am,” Jaskier said petulantly. “You put me on the spot!"
"You've made me a maiden."
"Buggery hardly goes over well in these things."
"Moreover, I'm not beautiful and haven't got flaxen hair."
"Arguable on the first point, for the latter, let's say snowy?"
"Also arguable."
"Oy,” Jaskier said, and poked Geralt in the chest, “mind who's the poet and who's the Witcher. Go on, then, what would you say, Monster Slayer and Master Sonneteer?"
"I don't know,” Geralt shrugged against him, eyes flickering up at him in the dim firelight. “Something more sinister. Bone or ash or cold moonlight."
Jaskier suppressed a smile. "Not my typical style but not bad either, and uncommonly romantic imagery from the brute of Rivia. You're not a doppler, are you?"
Geralt reached to move Jaskier's hand from where it lay on his stomach to the bare and furred skin of his chest beneath his loosely open collar. Jaskier's heart quickened even as Geralt's was slow and steady, but Geralt only said, "Your ring is silver," and tapped the band on Jaskier's finger, proving that he would not change form from the touch of it.
Jaskier laughed softly. "I wasn't serious, Geralt."
"My mistake," Geralt said, but did not let go of Jaskier's hand. With his other Jaskier began to brush Geralt's hair, straightening it with his fingers, fanning it over his thigh. It was indeed a cold ash-grey in the moonlight. A breeze blew through the glade, smelling of wood smoke and lavender, of apples and elderberries, and much more that Jaskier could not name.
"It'll rain in the morning," Geralt said, watching the fire.
Jaskier smiled and replied, "That's a problem for tomorrow, isn't it?"
The fire snapped and hissed, drying and devouring the dampened wood, and the poet and the Witcher watched as sparks flew up and out, caught by the wind, onward into the night, along the star-flecked break in the treeline that was the road to Redania, as if hurrying to precede them to the next adventure.