To Slay a Different Monster

Maecht’s border stones rose out of the snow like blunt teeth. Roach’s breath plumed white as they crested the ridge and looked down into the valley—patchwork fields browned by late autumn, a braided river flashing pewter under a flat sky, and the Duchy’s keep crouched on a limestone bluff, banners hanging limp against the walls. Geralt felt the familiar prickle that came with new country: different soil, different airs, different rumors that all tasted the same on the tongue.

Silence. It was a living thing these days, riding his shoulders, crawling into his bedroll, lying heavy under the beat of Roach’s hooves. He’d learned to live with quiet long before he’d ever heard a lute, but it was a different quiet now—full of words not said, songs that didn’t get written because he’d sent the man who wrote them away. The Path made room for regret the way water made room for a stone: it took the shape and kept moving, yet the weight stayed.

He’d taken the notice from a nail at a roadside shrine after three days of drizzle and empty roads. Manticore hunting in Maecht. Generous reward. Duchess Annelise’s crest waxed in red. The coin promised was enough to make even a saturated market of witchers sniff, but the figure wasn’t what made his hand close on the parchment. Monsters were predictable. Work put your feet where thinking couldn’t reach you.

He leaned forward to scratch Roach’s neck. “Castle first,” he said. Roach flicked an ear. He caught the scent of the town as they descended: tannery piss, woodsmoke, boiled cabbage, damp wool, human bodies crammed inside walls for the winter. Someone hammered sheet metal. A woman shouted. A child laughed and then choked on it when someone cuffed him into silence. The market square opened like an ulcer, stained with old blood, and a posting board leaned under the weight of petitions. The manticore notice had been re-pinned there as well, the corners curling.

He stepped into the tavern because that was what you did in a new place: you asked and listened and pretended people were better at telling the truth than they were. The door banged, heat hit him, and eyes slid away. Farmers with chapped hands, a butcher with grease under his nails, a pair of guards with Maecht’s stag embroidered on their collars. He took a table in the corner and ordered something hot. The stew tasted of fat and pepper and old bones. He ate because the body knew its business better than the mind.

When he asked, “Where?” the room gave him the cagey turn of heads that said fear had moved in and found a chair. The innkeep finally pointed with his chin. “Out by the sheepfolds. Three nights back. Farmer says he saw a tail like a rope with a thorn at the tip. Says it stung his dog. Dog went stiff and black.” The man’s eyes flicked to Geralt’s medallion, then to the swords. “Duchess put up coin. You’ll want to see her steward for that.”

“Bodies?” Geralt asked.

“Bits,” someone muttered into his cup. “We put what we could find in sacks. Father Rennis said prayers. Didn’t do much.”

Geralt finished the stew. He sent the bowl back clean. The copper he placed on the table was heavier than it needed to be. People talked more when they thought you weren’t counting. They didn’t have more to say. It was fine. He wasn’t listening for truth as much as cadences—fear set words at a pitch you couldn’t fake.

He slept that night in a lean-to behind the stable, the straw damp and the roof dripping against his shoulder. He did not mind. He preferred the honest stink of animals to the press of a common room. He lay on his side, cloak over his chest, eyes open, watching his breath fog in the cold. He could hear Jaskier’s voice if he let himself. Not the songs, but the small sounds: a huff when a verse failed him, the stutter of a laugh when he made a joke at Geralt’s expense and waited to see if he’d get a grunt in return. He closed his eyes and forced his lungs into the slow rhythm that dragged sleep down over him like a net.

Morning came gray and thin. He washed in a trough and saddled Roach, the leather straps stiff with frost. He checked his potions, checked the edge of his steel and silver both. The witcher’s work of preparation was a ritual that trimmed the day into manageable pieces: swallow, bindweed, cat, a little white gull for stamina. He didn’t think of the last time he’d ground celandine over a fire with someone’s humming keeping the pests away.

The castle guards took his name with careful politeness when he presented himself. Geralt of Rivia, answering the Duchess’s notice. The steward’s lips twitched at the title as if it tasted sour and necessary. He was led through a hall of spears and tapestries, past a courtyard where pages were running drills under a sergeant’s curses. Winter had pressed the court into a tighter, louder clump. Perfume and damp wool and the clack of rings on goblets bled together.

In the steward’s chamber, maps were rolled on a table like sleeping snakes. “Her Grace is most grateful for your swift arrival,” the steward said, smoothing a hand over his balding head. “Reports say manticore. A nasty business. We are not equipped.”

Geralt studied the crude map the man unfurled. “Tracks?” he asked. “Claw marks? Tail barbs? Corpses?”

“I have…I have the reports.” The steward pushed papers across, his ring scratching the parchment. Descriptions were muddled by fear and ignorance. Tail with a thorn. Wings like leather. Roar that turned bones to jelly. Poison. He read without lifting his head, marking contradictions, noting the places men lied to themselves to make a story whole.

“How much?” he asked, when the steward ran down, breathless with nothings. He already knew—the notice had named it—but hearing it from a court mouth made it real.

The steward named the figure. The number sat heavily between them. Enough to winter in comfort. Enough to fix a saddle, replace boots, pay a healer for a peasant child’s fever and not blink. He nodded. “I’ll need to see the sites.”

“We’ll send a guide,” the steward said, relieved to have a course set. “And you’ll dine tonight, of course. Her Grace prefers to meet her contractors.”

“Fine,” Geralt said. He rolled his shoulders until the scar along his collarbone tugged. He felt the itch of a fight coming—the clean kind, bile and steel and rules he understood. He let the thought settle, its edges dulling the ache of silence that had taken up residence in him, and followed the steward out into the clamor of the keep.

The great hall of Maecht was built to echo. Every gilded cornice and stone rib threw sound back in perfect clarity—ideal for a bard trained to fill spaces like this. Jaskier could count the breaths of the court between the notes, measure how long a duchess would hold her goblet at her lips when the melody turned tender. He could ride the hush like a horse he didn’t trust.

He perched on the dais below Duchess Annelise’s high-backed chair, the stag banner behind him like a painted forest. Beeswax candles smoked sweetly in iron chandeliers, heat pooling in the rafters. He adjusted his grip on the lute, the polished wood smooth from courts and councils, and began.

The ballad was flawless. His fingers knew the work before he told them—trills that danced but never dared, a voice pitched to be beautiful without demanding, the kind of song nobles liked to hear about themselves. He had written it to order after listening to three advisors and one fawning cousin insist that Maecht’s courage was like marble and her prosperity like spring wheat. He kept the metaphors simple so no one would choke.

“Through frost and flood, Maecht’s heart stands,” he sang, the vowel pure enough to make the old hunting dogs thump their tails. “Under Annelise’s steady hands.”

Faces softened. A couple at the trestle table closest to him leaned shoulder to shoulder, satisfied. A boy page mouthed the words he already knew. The Duchess, young for her title and steadier than most, watched him with polite attention, her mouth set in that small half-smile that meant she liked the performance but would not be seen to be moved by it.

He modulated into the next stanza, thumb flicking a high note, and felt nothing. His chest held an engine where something messy should have lived. The applause at the end would come like rain on slate—loud, cold, brief. He’d bow. He’d be fed. His quarters would be warm, his sheets would smell faintly of lavender stuffed into sachets by a laundress who knew how to please a patron. He’d sleep. He’d wake. He’d sing again with winter-bright technique until he forgot what it felt like to misjudge a campfire story and make a farmer guffaw into his beer.

He crafted the illusion that he was moved by his own song and hated how good he was at it. He twisted the final line of the verse into a plaintive shape, bent just enough grief across it that widows felt seen without remembering what they’d lost.

He thought of mud. Of thin soup in a village after the grain had mildewed. Of nights with his back against a tree where the stars hurt to look at because it was too cold to joke about it. Of laughter because the joke was the thing that would keep your teeth from chattering. Of Ger—no. He hammered the door on that thought with the balsa-wood nails his new life allowed.

He dipped his chin and played the instrumental bridge he had stolen wholesale from a song about river barges in Novigrad and no one here would ever know. He thought of how those boatmen had clapped him on the back, how they didn’t clap like courtiers. He thought of a witcher standing with his arms crossed, listening with a patience that felt like safety. He sang all the things he could not say: that the castle’s tapestries crowded his lungs; that the compliments slicked his skin like oil; that he had traded the honest danger of the road for a schedule stitched with velvet thread.

When he reached the crest of the final chorus, he poured the kind of gold into it that made stewards love him for making their duchess look radiant. He held the last note just long enough to shape the air and released it exactly where the hall would send it back, soft as if the castle itself whispered amen.

Silence kissed the end and then broke into clatter. Goblets hit tables. Palms met. Someone blew a two-fingered whistle and was elbowed for it. The Duchess nodded, that small smile now full, and lifted her hand. “Master Jaskier,” she said, rising enough to honor him without ceding her height. “Maecht is richer.”

He bowed, the angle drilled to a nicety by a decade of rooms like this. “Your Grace is generous. Maecht provides inspiration simply by breathing.” The line landed neatly. A murmur of pleasure. He straightened. Eyelids heavy, mouth loose in a charming fatigue, as requested.

Servants moved like fish in a clear stream. Wine flowed. The master of revels consulted him about the next song with the reverent terror of men who feared both boredom and innovation. Jaskier agreed to something light after the stew, something with a chorus the cousins could bellow and not disgrace themselves. He took his seat at the lower end of the dais for a moment to swallow a sip of watered wine and gather his face back onto his skull.

A young noblewoman leaned in, perfume sharp with orange peel. “I wept,” she confided. “Do you do commissions? My father’s hawk, Thorn, was the finest in five counties.”

“I weep for Thorn already,” he said smoothly, and smiled a little so she knew he was laughing with her and not at her grief. She flushed with pleasure. He catalogued her aunts and uncles and who would pay, because that was his work now: knowing who wanted songs to make them larger than their lives, and obliging.

He let his gaze drift up and out over the hall to keep his posture open. Candles guttered, shadows made the carved boars along the far wall seem to breathe. A huntsman told a joke and slapped the table, sauerkraut launching onto his sleeve. Jaskier’s fingers flexed with the desire to make something that wasn’t a commission, to write a melody that could only be played outside, where wind took half of it away and the rest sat sweet on your tongue.

He thought of the road with a physical ache, as if it pressed a palm to his sternum. He imagined a pack pulled tight to keep out rain, a cloak that smelled of horse and smoke instead of lye. He imagined the voice he missed—dry, unimpressed, cutting through his fussing with two words and making him laugh anyway. He took another sip of wine and swallowed around it.

“Another?” the master of revels prompted at his elbow, hopeful, already lifting a finger to signal the room to hush again.

Jaskier smiled as if joy were a coin he would always have enough of. “But of course,” he said, standing, lute already in hand like it had grown there. He stepped back into the light, and the hall leaned toward him like an audience does when it trusts a man to give them exactly what they expect. He began the bright, easy tune with a crisp strum.

It sounded perfect. It landed perfectly. He lowered his eyes to the strings so they wouldn’t see the way his face slipped when he let himself breathe. The applause that would follow already rustled at the back of the room like a tide he could time with his heartbeat. He sang anyway. He always did.

“Make way!” The herald’s voice cut clean through the bright chorus Jaskier was leading, a trumpet of authority that silenced the huntsman mid-laugh and froze the master of revels with his finger in the air. “Announcing Geralt of Rivia, called the White Wolf, witcher, come at Her Grace’s invitation.”

The name punched the air out of Jaskier’s chest. His finger slipped. The chord went wrong, an ugly, exposed wobble that scraped across the hall. He pulled for the next note and found nothing. The sound died under his hand. The lute went quiet like a throat closed on a sob.

He looked up because he could not not look. The doors had opened; candlelight ran down wet leather and steel. The man in the doorway might have been a cruel trick of memory made flesh. The same height as in a hundred camps, the same breadth of shoulder he’d stood in the lee of when rain came sideways, the same white hair tied back, damp at the temples, one thick lock fallen forward to stick at his jaw. Sword hilts peered over one shoulder like patient beasts. He walked in with that particular steadiness that made rooms seem to tilt toward him and away at the same time.

Jaskier’s hand still rested on the strings. His thumb pressed into the polished edge hard enough to bite. He felt nothing in his face and too much in his chest, all at once: a heat that crawled up his neck, the old, clean hurt of a word said on a mountain and the filthier, newer hurt of being replaced by a quieter silence. Anger burned like dry straw—brief, bright, blinding—at the same time as something humiliatingly small and sharp pricked just beneath it. Hope. Stupid, insistent. He swallowed and failed to find spit.

The court’s murmurs gathered like bees. “The witcher.” “That’s him?” “By the Path, look at his eyes.” People turned, necks craning. Duchess Annelise lifted a hand for order, expression interested but not unkind. Jaskier could hear the breath of the room again now that he wasn’t filling it. He could hear his own, too loud and too shallow.

Geralt’s gaze swept the hall without rush, as if he measured exits and threats and the number of people who would make trouble for him with the same calm he gave to a creek’s depth before stepping in. It passed over silver goblets, curled hunting horns, the Duchess’s stag standard, and then it found him. The hitch was microscopic—no, not that word, no hitching, not now—it was small, a stillness that hadn’t been there a heartbeat before. The corners of his mouth didn’t move. His eyes did. They sharpened as if he’d drawn a Sign between them to clear the air.

Jaskier could not assemble a charming apology to the room. He could not conjure a jest to smooth the interruption, could not make them laugh and make them love him for being so delightfully human. He stared down the length of the hall and felt each pace Geralt had to take to reach the dais like a note he had not written. Rain ticked off the witcher’s cloak. A smear of old blood darkened one sleeve at the seam. His jaw was set in that familiar line that meant he’d slept badly or not at all.

You don’t get to look at me like that, Jaskier thought, and his throat closed on the you. You don’t get to look at me like I am something you have to step around. You don’t get— He remembered the heat of a campfire on his knees and Geralt’s shadow falling across him when he was tuning and the easy, unthinking way he’d leaned back into it for warmth. He remembered a mountain and a word that had ended a life. He remembered leaving with his heart raw and pretending it was just another song learned too young.

The master of revels hissed his name under his breath, urgent, as if that could pull melody out of him by habit. Jaskier did not look away from Geralt to reassure him. He let the silence sit. He let it wear his shape so everyone would see it. The Duchess tilted her head, interested, weighing whether this pause was part of the entertainment. The noblewoman who had spoken of her father’s hawk pressed fingertips to her throat, eyes bright with curiosity and the thrill of a scene.

Geralt stopped a respectful distance from the dais and bowed—formal, precise, the kind of movement that made light ripple over the scars at his neck. “Your Grace,” he said, low and even, the sound carrying without effort. The hall leaned to hear him; Jaskier’s body remembered the acoustics of that voice like a body remembers a lover’s bad habits. He wanted to be sick. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to walk down off the dais and shake him by the shoulders and say I learned to breathe without you and I hate you for making me glad you’re here.

The Duchess’s smile notched up a degree. “Master Jaskier,” she said without taking her eyes off Geralt, a polite reminder and a nudge. “Perhaps a pause in the festivities while we greet our guest.”

“Of course,” Jaskier said, except it came out huskier than he intended, not a purr but a man whose song had been torn out of him. He cleared his throat and felt the hall notice it. He set the lute down on its stand because his hands were not steady. He arranged his mouth into something that could pass for a pleasant line and stepped back. He kept his shoulders even and his chin lifted because he would not hunch like a scolded boy in front of this man. He would not.

Geralt looked at him once more, quick, like a thumb over a scar to check it hadn’t opened. Then he looked away. Jaskier’s anger flared at the insult of that economy and guttered because he knew it for what it was: survival. He could have turned the moment into a line, but there were no words left that wouldn’t poison him on the way out.

The murmurs slid into whispers, and the whispers into a low tide of speculation. Jaskier stood two steps from his stand, very still, breath measured. He felt the storm break open under his ribs and did not let any of it touch his face. He watched the witcher’s shoulders square in front of the Duchess, watched the way the candlelight salted his hair, and could not pretend any longer that the ache he’d been tamping down for a year was anything but the shape of this man leaving and the impossible, terrible fact of him returning.

Geralt’s mouth was a straight line, the kind he used with kings and aldermen and anyone who thought they could make him explain himself. He held the Duchess’s gaze and waited for her to speak, each heartbeat a thud he refused to admit had anything to do with the bard two strides behind his left shoulder on the dais.

“Maecht welcomes you, witcher,” Annelise said, voice smooth and pleased, the court’s attention flowing back to her like she’d tugged a ribbon. “We are in need of your…expertise.”

“Your Grace,” he said again, measured. “I received your summons.” He could name weapons faster than flowers, but he knew enough to keep his tone respectful. He knew enough not to look at Jaskier again. The first look had lodged like a crossbow bolt under the breastbone.

“Come,” she said, beckoning with a hand heavy with rings. “We will talk of beasts and borders and the price of peace. After Master Jaskier has completed his set, of course.” A hum rippled through the room—amusement, curiosity. She turned her smile on Jaskier like the sun on a well-bred garden. “Unless the mood has shifted?”

Jaskier’s laugh was neat, practiced. “Your Grace, the mood is entirely in your hands,” he said, voice steady now. Geralt still heard the scrape from before, like a knife that had missed its sheath. He saw Jaskier’s fingers flex at his side and flatten on the lute’s belly. Knuckles pale, then easing.

“You’ll be shown to your quarters after my steward notes your needs,” the Duchess continued to Geralt, warm as if none of the tension in the hall existed. “For tonight, enjoy our table. Eat. Dry yourself.”

“I’m fine,” he lied, and let his eyes flick once to the edge of the dais, away from Jaskier. He catalogued exits, windows, guards whose hands were too close to their swords for a Hall this civilized. He felt pinned, as if every noble throat craning to see the witcher at court had sewn a stitch through his coat and into the floor. He had fought wraiths that felt less like traps.

“Master of revels?” she said. “A pause for palate-cleansing, then more music.” The man bobbed and flapped; servants moved, pitchers lifted, chairs scraped. Noise came back in, chatter a polite cover.

Geralt breathed without letting his chest move. Don’t look. He had spent a year not looking at anything that would turn into Jaskier if he was tired enough: a jacket hung on a peg, a bright scrap of cloth on a market stall, the way a river took a curve and threw the sound of its lay against the bank just so. He had done a poor job of not hearing him anyway, in the places between towns where wind made the same sound under spruce boughs as fingers did over strings.

The Duchess rose, both hands on the arms of her chair, and started down the dais steps with the slow confidence of someone who had always been watched. The court divided to make a path for her. She paused within arm’s reach of Geralt, close enough for him to smell rose oil under the roast meat and spilled wine. “Walk with me,” she said, a request shaped like an order.

He did. The cloak weighed heavy on his shoulders, wet leather dragging, the points of the swords at his back a reassurance. He passed near the lute’s stand. Jaskier had not moved. Geralt felt the tug, the ache of an old tether, but kept his head level and his eyes forward.

“Tell me, witcher,” Annelise said in a tone meant for him and half the room besides as they moved toward a small raised table to the side. “Is it true what they say? You can smell fear?”

“Yes,” he said, because she would decide whether that made him exotic or a tool regardless of what he answered. He could smell sweat drying in wool, the damp dog reek of men who had hunted all day, the crisp wax of candle smoke. He could smell Jaskier, even from here—soap he remembered from a bath house in Posada, wine, a little starch, and under all of it the warm salt that had nothing to do with any of that. A room away and it hit like stepping into a familiar roadside inn and finding it rebuilt without the sag in the floor.

“And do you smell it now?” she asked, amused.

“Yes,” he said, and the corner of her mouth twitched. She liked plain answers. He filed it alongside the way her guards didn’t look at his swords like they wanted them; they looked like they wanted to prove they weren’t intimidated. He filed the way Jaskier’s shoulders had squared for the crowd. He filed the tremor that had been there under the singer’s first word to cover the silence.

“Good,” she said. “It keeps men honest.” She settled onto a seat, gestured to the one at her right that had been left conveniently empty. “Sit, witcher.”

He did, feeling the weight of a dozen eyes and one pair that burned a line between shoulder blades like a brand. The table spread steamed. He took a piece of bread because it gave his hand something to do. He did not taste it. He did not look up when the first notes of Jaskier’s next song slid into the air—different now, slower, a hair lower than before. The hall softened around the tune without quite knowing why.

“Tomorrow, you’ll see the pasture,” Annelise said. “We think it is a manticore. The carcasses suggest—”

“It isn’t,” he said, automatic. “Likely not. Manticores don’t…” He stopped because he didn’t have the evidence he wanted yet, only the prickle at the back of his neck that told him the job would be messier than a straight hunt.

The Duchess’s brows lifted. “We will see,” she said, unoffended. “Your kind prefers proof to stories. I appreciate that. Still. While you’re here, you’ll be feted and fed.” She took a sip of wine. “Your bard will see to the festivities. He’s proven very adaptable.”

Geralt’s jaw flexed. He swallowed dry. “He always has been,” he said, and heard the roughness like a rough edge caught on a nail. He drew breath to say nothing else.

The lute’s line braided under the clink of goblets, under the low murmur of gossip. Jaskier changed key with a turn that made the back of Geralt’s neck prick. He’d long ago learned to track a fight by sound; this was the same—track a man’s mood by the muscle of his wrist on a string, by the breath he pulled before a line. The song was perfect. It hurt anyway.

Geralt sat with his hands flat on the table and his face a mask he knew too well, and let the worst thought come and sit beside him like an old friend: that he had been a fool to come for coin when there were a thousand other duchies with monsters and none with this man in them. That the Path had led him exactly where he hadn’t wanted to go. That the contract had become something else the moment the doors opened. He didn’t move. He listened. He kept his eyes off the dais and the musician on it like they were the edge of a cliff he couldn’t trust himself not to step over.