A Road of Ash and Song

The road had been a river once, the cobbles washed clean by spring floods. Now it was a spine of broken stone, brown with soot, black with something that had been blood and now was only a smell in the heat. Smoke crawled along the ground, low and stubborn, tasting like singed wool and old iron every time Geralt breathed. The air had a weight he knew from burned villages and battlefield mornings—the heaviness that settled when shouting stopped and nothing took its place.

Jaskier walked a few paces to his left, close enough that Geralt could track the shuffle of his boots without looking. He didn’t sing. The lute stayed under its oiled leather, slung higher than usual and tied twice so it wouldn’t jostle against the corpses they skirted. A cart lay on its side with one wheel still spinning even though there was no wind, as though the road hadn’t yet figured out that the people were gone. A banner snagged on a fence post hung limp, the emblem scorched to a ghost.

Geralt kept his eyes on the ditches. Ghouls were swift to come when flesh was left to rot on open ground, and where there were ghouls there were often worse. His medallion pulsed once, a dull buzz he felt more in his teeth than at his throat—residual magic, stale as smoke. He adjusted the straps of his swords and glanced at the sky. Gray pressing down. Even the crows were quiet.

“Smells like burned barley,” Jaskier said at last. His voice was low and even, as if speaking too loudly might break the road. “And… something else.”

“Grease. Hair.” Geralt nudged a shield aside with the toe of his boot, revealing a man underneath with eyes open and a mouth full of ash. He moved on before the details fixed themselves; there was no point in naming faces he couldn’t save.

Jaskier’s swallow was audible. He kept his hands tucked into his cloak despite the rising heat. “I once wrote a line about smoke curling like a woman’s hair. Seems trite, now.”

“Then don’t write it.” Geralt scanned the hedgerow. The path curved ahead to where two pines leaned together like conspirators. He listened. Far off, metal clinked. Not armor. Loose tools, maybe, knocking in a wagon someone had dragged away. Or just the echo of his own memory.

They stepped around a blackened patch where something had burned down to bone and metal buckles. The buckles were gold, a polished gleam under soot, useless and bright. Jaskier paused a heartbeat longer than necessary and then continued, boots whispering over cinders. His shoulders were hunched to protect the lute and more than that, the shape of a man trying to be smaller.

“Do you think,” he said, and his voice faltered, the question catching like thread in a thorn, “if we’d been here—”

“No.” Geralt didn’t look at him. “This wasn’t our fight.”

Jaskier let out a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Everything is everyone’s fight now. Or nothing is. I can’t tell which.” He kicked at a splintered spear haft and winced when it skidded into a puddle that was more oil than water. It smeared and didn’t ripple.

A line of footprints cut through the soot ahead, fresh, thin. Not soldiers. Barefoot. Small. Geralt slowed, and Jaskier, keyed to his gait after years on the road, fell into the pause without question. Geralt knelt and touched the edge of a print. Still moist at the center. He looked toward the trees.

“Refugees,” Jaskier said softly.

“Maybe.” Geralt stood and adjusted his grip on Roach’s reins. The mare’s ears flicked, restless, but she kept moving. She had seen this and worse. So had he. He felt it like an old bruise, tender in cold weather. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t have to. Jaskier didn’t press.

They passed a fallen signpost pointing nowhere. Someone had hacked at it with a dull blade. The letters were smeared into gouges. Their shadows stretched thin and long in the hazy light, twin smudges that didn’t look like men as much as stains that would never wash out.

Further on, they reached the crest of a low rise. From there, the battle spread itself out, orderly in its ruin: shattered siege ladders, long trenches like open mouths, the pale scraps of tents melted into the earth. A cooking pot sat where it had been dropped, its contents turned to tar. Beyond the field, a village huddled with its doors shut and shutters nailed from the inside. No smoke rose from its chimneys. Geralt smelled the ghost of porridge and fear.

Jaskier tugged his cloak tighter, though the afternoon had grown warmer by degrees. A child’s doll lay near the road, its face burned away. He did not look at it. He looked at his boots, at the line they drew one after another, as if keeping pace with Geralt’s back could be purpose enough.

They didn’t speak when they saw the battlefield markers. Wooden stakes driven into soil, ribbons tied at the top whipping in a breath of wind too faint to move the smoke. Each ribbon a color—blue, red, black—some for names, some for prayers. Geralt inclined his head as they passed them and felt Jaskier do the same, a mirror tilt.

“Sing later,” he said, surprising himself. It came out rough, like gravel under a wheel. “Not here.”

Jaskier nodded. “I wasn’t going to.” His mouth pressed thin. The words he didn’t say crowded the air anyway: that he didn’t have a song for this, that his tongue felt like leather, that music seemed like laughter in a graveyard.

The sun slid a handbreadth lower, turning the smoke from gray to a dull orange that made everything look like an old bruise. They walked. Boots, breath, the soft creak of leather. Geralt’s eyes moved, left-right-left, counting carrion birds and the places they didn’t land. Jaskier counted steps, then lost count, then started again.

Near the stream that cut the field in two, they found a horse still standing, reins tangled on a shattered axle. Its legs trembled. Foam crusted its lips. Geralt approached in a straight line, hand visible, voice low. Jaskier stopped several paces back, holding Roach and watching Geralt’s profile with a focus that had nothing to do with beasts and everything to do with the way Geralt’s jaw set when he pressed down the part of himself that cared.

He freed the horse, let it drink, then sent it on with a slap. It lurched away, stumbled, found its feet. Jaskier released a breath he’d been holding, slow through his nose as if exhaling too fast might break something inside him.

When the stream ran thin again, the road picked up, edged by blackberry brambles that had sprouted new leaves through ash. The green looked indecent. Life, arrogant in its insistence. Jaskier brushed his fingers over a leaf as they passed and glanced at his fingertips to see if the green would come off.

They didn’t talk about where they were going next, or why. They didn’t talk about the last time they’d walked through a place like this and the way it had ended. Geralt’s silence had shape and substance, a wall with a door he’d left unlocked. Jaskier didn’t try it. He walked through the ruin beside him and matched his pace.

By the time they reached the fork where the road bent toward the village and the track dropped down to a cluster of low hills, the light had thinned to a dull smear. Geralt paused and listened. The hills to the south were quiet. The village to the west was quieter, if that had a sound. He angled them toward the hills.

Jaskier didn’t ask why. He only fell in step, the leather cord of his lute case creaking softly as it shifted. They moved together through the smoke until the shapes of the dead and the ruined lay behind them, and the silence kept pace.

The alderman’s eyes were ringed with red, his mouth a flat, exhausted line. He stood in a doorway because the door itself had been torn off its hinges. Behind him, the village looked like it had held its breath for days and hadn’t exhaled. No smoke from the chimneys, no dogs barking. Only the soft, irregular thud of shovels—then the pause when the diggers heard Geralt’s boots and stared.

“Not much coin,” the alderman said, and Geralt nodded once, as if the number didn’t matter. It didn’t. He took the purse anyway and tied it to his belt. Jaskier’s hands stayed at his sides, fingers flexing once, twice. He didn’t try to haggle on Geralt’s behalf, didn’t smile.

“The dead weren’t ours,” the alderman added. “Mostly southern. We wanted to bury them. Our priest left. The ground’s hard.” His eyes went to the road leading out to the fields, then back to Geralt. “They come at dusk. They take what’s left.”

“Ghouls,” Geralt said.

The alderman’s throat bobbed. “And worse?”

“Not yet.”

“Good.” He didn’t sound relieved. “There’s a pit. Fresh dug. We started… and stopped.”

Geralt told the diggers to go home and bar their doors. He told the alderman to light fires along the main street and keep them fed. He told Jaskier to boil water and bring the salt and the small sack of crushed celandine from Roach’s saddlebag. Jaskier did it without asking why. His mouth set itself into a line that mirrored the alderman’s.

The pit was where the alderman said it would be, a few hundred paces beyond the last cottage, where the land dipped and held smell. The bodies had been dragged to the edge—men in half-burned surcoats, boys with down still on their jaws, a woman with plaited hair that had not been burned at all. The plait lay heavy and wrong across her shoulder. Her fingers were curled like she’d held someone’s hand and then remembered too late that it was gone.

Geralt stood downwind, breathed shallow, and set his satchel down. He unstoppered two vials and swished them against his tongue: Cat to cut the light’s flatness, Black Blood to make himself poison. He flexed his bandaged forearm from a fight weeks back, then rolled his shoulders and drew silver.

Jaskier took the shovel the diggers had left and started to widen the pit. He dug like a man who had never dug but had decided to make his hands learn. The first clod broke and fell; he flinched at the wet sound. Then the next fell, and the next. He kept digging.

“Oil,” Geralt said. Jaskier stopped, took the clay jar Geralt passed him, and sloshed a line around the pit’s lip. The smell of rancid fat cut the sweeter smells and helped not at all.

Dusk came in a series of failures: first the sun failed to burn the smoke away, then the sky failed to hold any color but brown, then the light failed to make edges sharp. Geralt clicked his tongue twice. Jaskier stepped back from the pit and wiped his hands on his cloak, smearing gray into brown.

They came quiet. They always did. The first was on all fours, ribs showing through hide, eyes like a dog’s gone wrong. Its mouth opened in a grin that didn’t mean anything. It crawled toward the pit, then stuttered to a stop, sniffing. The Black Blood’s bitter tang sat heavy on Geralt’s breath. He let it scent him.

Two more slipped from the brush. One’s back legs dragged. Its nails were worn down to black crescents; it had been digging somewhere else. They didn’t look at each other. They looked at the bodies like water.

Geralt waited until the first reached the oil line, until its front claws sank in and it scrabbled and smeared. He raised his hand and Igni’d the rim. The oil flashed. Heat shoved at his face. The ghoul screeched and flinched back, then lunged forward anyway, driven by a hunger that burned through pain.

Geralt stepped into it. Silver cut through sternum and spine and out, a clean motion, a habit more than an act. He pivoted, the second’s jaws snapping inches from his thigh, and drove the blade up through soft palate. Black fluid sprayed, hissed where it hit the flames. He swallowed reflex and held his breath. It didn’t matter. The potion made his blood taste foul even in his mouth.

The third tried to skirt the fire. Jaskier moved without being told, shovel striking the ground in front of it with a sharp clang. The ghoul flinched toward the noise, and Geralt’s sword took its head clean. It tumbled into the pit, bumped against the woman’s plaited hair, rolled to a stop with its teeth showing.

More at the edges now. A scuttle, a low hiss, the click of hunger. Geralt planted his feet and let them come. One two three, and his arm burned from the steadiness. Sweat ran cold along his spine. He controlled the arc of the blade like drawing letters he’d known since boyhood. They were nothing but meat that moved. He made them stop moving.

He called a sign and the air thickened. The next lunge hit a shimmering wall—Quen—and skittered, confused long enough. Silver bit. The bouquet of rot and ash and rancid oil wrapped around them, a weight. Jaskier’s breath came harsh and fast, but he didn’t leave. He watched Geralt’s back and smacked the shovel against stones when eyes glinted in the brush, drawing them, keeping them from circling. It was clumsy and brave and exactly what was needed.

When the last one lay twitching, its spine severed, its mouth working without purpose, Geralt stepped forward and crushed its throat under his boot. Silence came back in thin strips. He held it, listening. A fox barked, far off. Nothing else.

He cleaned the blade on a tunic that had once been red and was now the color of wet dirt. He extinguished the oil rim with another sweep of sign, steam rising in a sour gust. He crouched and, with practiced motions, severed the tongues and livers from the ghouls. They went into a small jar with salt, sealed and marked. Jaskier watched and didn’t ask. They would sell; everything did, now.

They dragged the bodies into the pit, living and dead both. Jaskier took the woman with the plait. He did it with care that had no audience. He set her in the pit like a person and not a problem. Geralt noted it and didn’t say anything. Words would have bumped around and broken.

By the time they sprinkled salt and shoveled the first clods back, full dark hung above the fields. The fires in the village were orange beads through the trees. Jaskier’s hands shook once when he lifted the shovel again. He steadied them by gripping higher. His palms would blister. He didn’t stop.

They lit the pit and stood back. The heat pushed the smell up, away. The flames crackled around the edges of armor, charred cloth shrinking. Jaskier spoke without looking away.

“Do they feel it? After?”

“No.”

“Good.”

They stood until the flames settled and the bones cracked and gave. Geralt twitched his head toward the village. Jaskier nodded and followed. Behind them, the fire did its slow work, and the night filled itself in. They walked toward small light, toward water set to boil and the alderman’s tight mouth. The work was done. The war wasn’t. They took what was in front of them because it was the only part they could lift.

They took the alderman’s lent room—four boards and a door that didn’t latch—and the bench by the hearth. Someone had left a jar of barley on a shelf and a cracked cup. The village had nothing to spare and had given it anyway. Geralt set his satchel on the table and began to lay things out with the same order he used for a fight: vials to the left, dried roots and leaves to the right, wrapped pellets of resin in the middle. He rolled his shoulders and shook the last of Cat from his system with a swallow of water. Jaskier shrugged off his cloak and draped it near the hearth, close enough to catch heat, far enough not to smoke.

He took his lute out because that was the thing he did when he didn’t know what else to do. Fingers found strings out of habit, checked tuning without sound, then plucked a line barely above breath. The melody came quick—the way they always did at first—something minor that walked along the same planks they’d just crossed. Smoke, a road, a witcher’s blade. He shaped it, then reached for words.

“There was a field of—” He stopped. The word he wanted was too clean. He swallowed it and tried again. “There was a road—” But roads didn’t hold anything except what people put on them, and right now that was bodies, broken wheels, scraps of banners ground into dirt. He closed his eyes, saw the woman’s plait in the pit, the alderman’s trembling throat, the diggers pretending not to listen for screams. The old songs wanted a turning point, a bright line to throw light back on darkness. He couldn’t find one that felt true.

He let his hand fall. The lute’s last note stopped too quickly; it sounded like something being cut off. He set the instrument down, careful, as if it were a child asleep, and stood. “What do you need?” he asked, voice low enough not to startle the room.

Geralt didn’t look up. “Two measures of verbena. Three of celandine. The clear jar.”

Jaskier found them, hands moving through sachets he knew by touch now. The verbena had a sharp, almost medicinal scent that cut through the greasy smell clinging to him. He weighed it with the little brass scale, tongue peeking out at the corner of his mouth the way it did when he threaded a needle. He handed it over without spilling a grain. Geralt’s eyes flicked to him, then away just as fast.

The rhythm of work built itself. Jaskier ground dried petals in a mortar, the pestle’s rasp against stone steady and patient. He poured boiled water into the heavy-bellied pot and watched the first bubbles, counted out loud when Geralt needed him to, fell quiet when he didn’t. He tore strips of cloth for filters, stacked them neatly. He reached for a bundle and paused.

“Is that—”

“Fool’s parsley.” Geralt nudged it closer with a knuckle. “Don’t touch your eyes after.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Jaskier said, but lightly, without flourish. He pinched the stalks and stripped them with precise, slow movements, then washed the bitterness from his fingers in the bowl they’d set aside for it. The water went green around his knuckles. He watched it stain, then tipped it out the door and listened to it patter on the hard earth.

The whole time, the song pressed at him. Lines he would have written, once—hero stands, hero falls, people cheer, people mourn—rotated and fell apart. He pictured a tavern where people were too tired to clap and too hungry to care, hands like the alderman’s rubbing at nothing. He could sing for them—he wanted to—but the old oldest trick of a chorus everyone could shout died in his throat. He could not—would not—ask them to swallow lies, even pretty ones.

“Knife,” Geralt said, and Jaskier placed it handle-first into his open palm. The witcher’s forearms were still spattered with dried dark; Jaskier reached for a cloth and dipped it, then, without thinking too long about it, took Geralt’s wrist and wiped. The skin under his fingers was warm; the fine white lines he knew so well cut through the splatter like a map. Geralt didn’t pull away. He didn’t move at all, except to turn his wrist so Jaskier could get at the undersides.

“Thanks,” he said finally, like the word had weight he needed to balance.

“Mm,” Jaskier answered. He folded the cloth, found a clean edge, kept going. He kept his eyes on the work. He didn’t say, I can’t sing about you cutting monsters to pieces while children starve behind shutters. He didn’t say, I need something that isn’t fire and field to hold onto. He pressed the thought down like he was tamping herbs.

Heat and bitter steam filled the room. Geralt’s movements were efficient, stripped of anything that wasn’t necessary. Jaskier matched him. He capped vials. He labeled them with a stub of charcoal, letters careful and straight. He tied off bundles exactly the way Geralt liked them tied, two wraps and a tuck so they couldn’t shake loose on the road. When he reached for the celandine, his hand shook once, a fine tremor. He flattened it against the table, waited for it to pass, and kept working.

Outside, someone laughed—high and sudden—a child, then stopped as if someone put a hand over a small mouth. Jaskier breathed through his nose and thought of the way Geralt had stepped into the first ghoul without blinking. He thought of the jar with tongues and livers, of the way the salt had hissed. He thought of all the times he’d taken horror and turned it into something bearable with rhyme and tune. He had never been more averse to it. It felt obscene to sand down edges now.

When the last vial was sealed and set in the rack, Geralt leaned back and rubbed a thumb along the bridge of his nose. “Eat,” he said, not an order so much as a nudge toward the barley.

Jaskier nodded. He measured out a handful and set it to boil with the last of the salt and a scrap of dried onion from his pouch. He stirred until the grains swelled and stuck together. He divided it between the cracked cup and a dented bowl and slid the bowl toward Geralt. They ate without talking. The barley was bland and stuck to his teeth. He swallowed anyway, chewing more than the food needed, grateful for the act.

After, he washed the cup and wiped the table. He reached for the lute once more, held it for a long moment, then set it back in its case. He didn’t string words over the day. He didn’t try to force his mouth to be clever. Instead he checked each stopper twice, ran a finger along the line of vials to feel for any looseness, and counted them again under his breath.

Geralt’s eyes followed his hands. There was something almost like a question in his face and then it was gone, tucked away with the rest. Jaskier let the silence sit. It felt honest. It felt like the only thing they had that wasn’t spoiled.

When the hearth sank to coals, he pulled his cloak over his knees and leaned back against the cold wall. Geralt stretched out on the floorboards, one arm under his head, not asleep, not yet. Jaskier’s fingers curled against the woven edge of the cloak and traced the pattern there, a distraction. A line of melody rose again, and he held it in his head without words, a low hum that he didn’t let out. He closed his eyes and listened to the soft clink of glass settling, the breath of the man on the floor, the village outside holding itself still. The song could wait. Tonight, hands and quiet were enough.

They left the alderman’s room when the village finally exhaled. Outside the walls, the air smelled cleaner, night cooled enough to feel like a separate thing from the day. They didn’t go far, just to the edge of a fallow strip where the ground rose enough to put a little distance between them and the murmurs of the village. Geralt found a place half sheltered by a crooked thorn and kicked a shallow ring in the dirt. Jaskier gathered what kindling he could scrounge without stripping living branches, fingers brushing lichen, the bark damp and stubborn. The spark took anyway, coaxed with flint and patience until a small, sane fire licked at itself and held.

Dinner was what they had: the last of the barley scraped carefully from the pot into a dented tin pan, a strip of jerky softened in hot water, two withered carrots cut small to pretend at generosity. Jaskier watched steam lift off it like a prayer that didn’t dare ask for anything. Geralt handed him the pan and took the cracked cup without comment. They ate with their hands, the way they did on the Path when forks were unnecessary weight.

The flames took their time biting into the thicker twigs. Jaskier let the heat flush his cheeks, watched the orange glow paint Geralt’s jaw, the long scar across his throat making a pale line that caught and held the light. The night around them had thinned to that quiet that isn’t quite silence: wind moving through dry stalks, something small shifting in a hedge, a distant dog that gave up after half a bark.

Jaskier swallowed, the food sticking a little, and said, “What comes next?” The question left him with a softness that surprised him, no brightness on it, no flourish. It was just the words, simple, naked as the tin pan in his hands. He looked into the fire when he said it because he didn’t trust his face if he had to see Geralt’s.

At first he thought Geralt hadn’t heard. The witcher’s gaze stayed on the flames, not the dancing but the coals underneath, as if he could see where each piece would collapse. The lines at the corner of his mouth were cut deeper tonight, unreadable. Jaskier waited, not fidgeting, the way he waited before the first note when a room held its breath.

The fire popped. A thin thread of sap in a twig hit heat and snapped. Geralt blinked slowly. “Don’t know,” he said after too many seconds had passed to be casual. The words were flat, emptied of the usual gravel, like stone worn smooth by a river.

Jaskier nodded as if he agreed with something, though he didn’t know what. He rotated the pan on his knees. He could feel its faint warmth through the fabric of his breeches. “We’ve always known the next town,” he said. “A temptation to spend your advance on garlic sausage. A local with an opinion about your eyes.” He meant it to be light, but it came out like inventory. He rubbed a thumb around the rim of the pan. “The next song.”

Geralt’s mouth twitched—not a smile, just a muscle remembering—but his eyes didn’t soften. “There are always monsters,” he said. He didn’t sound convinced, and that unsettled Jaskier more than if he’d declared the end of monsters outright.

“Mm.” Jaskier watched a coal sink into itself and collapse. He remembered the pit and the way bones sound when they give. He lifted a small piece of jerky to his mouth and stopped halfway, lowering it again. “Is that enough?” he asked, quieter. “Killing the… the small ones while the big one rolls over everything?” He didn’t say the empire’s name. He didn’t need to.

Geralt’s jaw worked. He set the cup down in the dirt, upright, near the fire where it wouldn’t cool too fast and wouldn’t catch. His hands were very still. “It’s what I can do.” He said it like a fact, like an oath. Underneath, Jaskier heard the scrape of something else. I don’t know how to do anything else.

Jaskier thought of his own hands, calluses from strings and ink, the way they’d fit around the pestle earlier, steady because he’d decided they would be. He looked up then, couldn’t help it, and took in Geralt’s profile, the place where stubble had missed a scar, the way his eyes looked a little more yellow when the fire caught them. There was a hollowness there that wasn’t hunger. It made Jaskier press his lips together to keep anything foolish from spilling out.

“I used to think if I sang it right, if I made them see, it would matter,” he said, not sure why he was saying it out loud. The fire made him honest. “That you’d be safer because the story wrapped around you and people would… not throw bottles.” He huffed a broken laugh that had no humor in it. “Tonight I tried to find where to put the hero and the chorus, and all I found were… names I don’t know.” He shook his head once, frustrated by the shape of his own mouth. “It feels wrong to make it pretty.”

Geralt’s head turned at that, just enough to show the line of his nose. He didn’t say, Your songs helped. He didn’t say, They kept me warm when everything was cold. He looked back at the fire, as if the movement itself had been more than he could afford. “Maybe it isn’t pretty,” he said, like the words tasted strange.

Jaskier tucked his hands under his knees to keep them from doing anything unnecessary. He wanted to touch Geralt’s forearm and feel the heat of him, to anchor them both to something not made of ash and obligation. He stayed where he was. “So we move,” he said eventually. “We keep moving.” The statement was a question with the interrogation mark sanded off.

Geralt’s eyes followed a coal until it went black. “We move,” he said, and there was nothing in it, no promise, no plan. Just the act of lifting one foot, then the other.

They let the quiet come back. Jaskier fed the fire one thin stick at a time, careful not to make it bigger than it needed to be. Sparks snapped up and died in the dark. He felt the night looking at them. He felt the place where the day’s grief had lodged behind his breastbone and refused to shift.

After a small forever, Geralt picked up the cup again and drained the last swallow as if the taste could be changed by the delay. He set it down with the same care as before. The emptiness on his face wasn’t hardness. It was absence, the space left when a thing is taken and nothing is put in its place. Jaskier wanted to fill it with something, with sound or touch or rage, and found himself empty too.

“What comes next?” he asked again, not because he expected a different answer, but because some questions insist themselves. His voice didn’t waver. It barely made it across the fire.

Geralt didn’t speak. He stared into the flames as if they were a door he might walk through if he could just read the handle. The fire burned down a fraction more, and there they stayed, two men and a little ring of heat in a field that had seen too much, waiting for a next that wouldn’t name itself.

The fire burned down to a ring of embers, the thorn’s crooked shadow cutting a dark shape over the glow. Wind moved lightly through the fallow strip, colder now that the heat had nothing left to bite. Geralt lay with his cloak pulled up, eyes closed, breathing even, and found no edge to fall over into sleep. Every time he let his body loosen, the day pushed back into his head—white bone, black earth, the sound of flies. He turned onto his side, the ground’s small stones finding old bruises, and kept his breathing steady. After a long minute, he opened his eyes.

Jaskier sat three paces away, his back to the thorn trunk, knees drawn up under his cloak. The fire’s ember-light caught on a needle, the glint small and steady as it moved. He had his doublet pooled in his lap, the fine blue worn down to a tired dark in the half-light. His hands were close together, shoulders hunched forward as if to hide what they were doing from anyone who might come upon them. The thread pulled through with a soft whisper, then paused. Pulled again, paused. His fingers trembled. The light made the tremor look worse than it was, exaggerating every hitch. He kept at it anyway, jaw tight, mouth pressed thin. He didn’t look up.

Geralt watched him without moving. He could hear the thread rasp through cloth, the small click of the needle’s tip meeting his fingernail sometimes when he guided it closer than he meant to. Each time, he tensed a fraction, checked his own hands where they lay near his chest, and stopped himself from saying anything. There was no monster in the field. There was only a man trying to make a torn thing hold together.

Jaskier licked his lower lip, pulled the seam tight, and made a knot. The knot slipped. He swore under his breath, soundless, just the shape of it. He thought he was quiet. Geralt heard all of it—the breath sucked between teeth, the swallow, the tiny noise when the needle pricked the pad of his finger. Jaskier’s hand jerked, and he stuck the finger in his mouth like a boy. He kept it there a beat too long, eyes closed as if embarrassed by his own skin. When he pulled it out, he wiped the fingertip on his cloak and bent over the work again.

“Here,” Geralt said, a single word that moved across the space and lay between them. Jaskier’s head turned, quick, eyes wide, like a stag expecting an arrow. Geralt pushed his aether oil toward him with two fingers. Jaskier looked down, not understanding, then up again. Geralt tilted his head at the finger.

“Oh,” Jaskier said, too loud and then quieter, “oh.” He dabbed a little on his fingertip, the sharp scent cutting through old smoke and damp wool. He had to swallow once more against it, but the bleeding stopped.

He shifted on the packed dirt, hooking his ankles around each other to make a steadier lap. The needle moved again, more careful now, though the tremble was still there, stubborn. Geralt stayed on his side, eyes half-lidded, a position he could hold for hours. He let out a breath that might have been agreement. Jaskier didn’t ask what for.

The seam he was mending wasn’t important. It ran along the edge of a pocket that had caught on a nail in the alderman’s hall. It would have held even if he’d let it gape. He worked it anyway, stitch by stitch in thread that didn’t match perfectly. He was good at this sort of thing—he had to be. Finer clothes cost coin he didn’t always have. He’d learned to make them last. Just now his skills fought themselves. The needle slipped again and again. He sighed. He kept going.

“Too dark,” Geralt said eventually, not a complaint, just a fact. Jaskier’s mouth twitched and didn’t find its humor.

“I’ve stitched in worse,” he answered quietly, eyes on the cloth. “Backstage by candle stub. In the rain, once, while you argued with a ferryman about whether the river counted as a separate tariff.” He glanced up quick, the line of his mouth smoothing. “It didn’t.”

“Mm.” Geralt let a ember collapse. He lifted a flat palm and held it over the coals until it warmed and brought it to his own chest. He made no move toward the kettle or tinder. There wasn’t enough wood to justify a larger fire. They didn’t need the light. They were past needing to see each other to know where they were.

Jaskier drew the seam closed, the edges meeting neat enough that from a distance it would look unbroken. He made the knot slower this time, like he was trying not to scare it. The thread held. He exhaled, shoulders dropping a fraction. He turned the doublet and found another place where the stitches had loosened—a frayed bit near the cuff. He set the needle. He worked. The rings under his eyes looked darker in the red light, and Geralt wanted to smooth them away with his thumb. He didn’t move.

Wind lifted Jaskier’s hair off his forehead and set it down again. He pulled the doublet closer to him, as if his body heat would make the cloth behave. The needle went in, out, in, out. The tremor leveled into a steadier rhythm now that the knot problem was behind him. Geralt watched his hands until the simple focus of it shaved the edges off his thoughts. The hours since morning loosened their grip. He could have watched that small work all night—hands making something not worse.

Jaskier’s breath came more even. He didn’t look up, but his body turned a little toward Geralt, unconscious, drawn to warmth. His knee bumped the thorn’s trunk and stayed there. The fire hissed once, a tiny protest, then settled again. Somewhere down the slope, a fox barked, short and abrupt.

When Jaskier reached the last few stitches, he paused. He stared at the gap as if it were a decision. His lips parted, closed. He put the needle through and did not pull it tight right away. He sat like that, holding the thread in place with two fingers, his gaze out past Geralt, past the coals, to where the field went dark. Geralt saw his throat work, once. The tremor returned to his hands, smaller, a shiver threaded into each finger. He tied it off anyway. He bit the thread. He set the needle into the cloth to keep it from going astray.

He smoothed the doublet with both palms, like a benediction. He didn’t put it on. He held it against his knees and looked at the seams he’d made and found in them, perhaps, something to trust. He nodded to himself, the smallest movement. He swallowed again and said nothing.

Geralt shifted onto his back, careful not to break the quiet’s crust. He looked up. A thin strip of sky had cleared, a few hard stars showing through. His body was tired without sleep, the kind of tired that feels like weight on the bones instead of in the muscles. Beside him, Jaskier’s posture unwound by degrees, a coil releasing a turn at a time. They didn’t speak. The thread trailed a little from the needle, a faint line catching ember-light like a hair. Jaskier picked it up, wound it around two fingertips, and tucked it into the cuff. He set the doublet carefully on the ground by his hip. The tremor in his hands eased.

In the not-quite-dark, Geralt turned his head enough to meet his gaze. Jaskier’s eyes were red-rimmed and very awake. Geralt lifted his chin a fraction, an acknowledgement, a kind of thank you for something neither of them could name tonight. Jaskier answered with the same small movement. He drew his cloak tighter and slid down an inch, the thorn’s trunk now brushing his shoulder. He didn’t close his eyes. Neither did Geralt. Their breaths matched for a while, unplanned.

They stayed there like that—two points in a field, kept in the same circle of warmth by necessity and something else—until the embers dimmed to dull stone and the cold came in more insistent. When the tremor returned, it was in the air around them, not in Jaskier’s hands. Geralt reached out without looking and nudged the kettle closer to the coals so it would catch whatever heat was left. Jaskier’s calf shifted, his boot toe touching the edge of Geralt’s cloak. He didn’t move it away. Neither did Geralt.

The night did not give them sleep. It gave them time, the slow kind that lets a mind get used to the shape of another body’s presence in the dark. It was not comfort. It was not enough. But it held. And in the held space, their breaths fell into the same pattern and stayed there, and something that had felt torn all day was no longer pulling at the edges.