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The gardens of the Viscount de Lettenhove’s manor house have always, in Jaskier’s memory, been in pristine condition. Not a blade of grass out of place; not a shrub untended; not a statue left to moss and vines. With one exception.
Tucked into the back corner of the gardens, hidden by a dense copse of trees, is a little flowering grove. It seems to bloom almost year round, and the trees trap the floral scent, leaving a humid sickly-sweet tang to the air. Jaskier knows he must not be the only one who has discovered it. In fact, the wooden structure and gate at its entrance leads him to believe it was placed there by someone long forgotten, though certainly not by the stick in the mud who had designed the rest of the gardens. It’s a mystery how one could suck so thoroughly all the majesty from nature, but some poor fucker, no doubt hailing from backwater Redania and laden with Jaskier’s ancestor’s coin, had managed it.
In the center of the secret-not-secret grove, there is a small natural pool whose sides have been built up with stones to make it look purposeful. Beside it lies a low bench from which one can listen to birdsong and stare at oneself in the still, shallow depths, contemplating life and beauty and the world and other such unknowable things, should one desire, and Jaskier often does.
He’s all of barely fourteen when he first stumbles into the grove. He isn’t called Jaskier then, but it’s no matter. He is fleeing.
It comes as a shock to his system when he dives into the trees for cover and instead finds himself there, in a piece of the place called his home he’d never known. He comes to a fumbling halt, wipes sweat from his eyes, pushes his fringe from his face, and says—the taste of the illicit word still fairly new in his mouth—“Well, fuck me sideways.”
(It’s something the cook had said once when he was in earshot, and he’d liked the sound of it.)
“Julian, you scoundrel, where have you gone,” Marta says, worlds and somehow only meters away. “You can’t hide forever. Face me like a man.”
He is not yet a man, nor is she yet a woman, so it is no blow to his ego to stay put.
“Gods take you, Julian,” she huffs. “I’m telling Mother.”
Marta will no sooner tell her mother than Jaskier would sprout wings and fly away. She would have to admit to too much to do so. It is, overall, an empty threat.
She makes a frustrated sound and he hears her stomp off, skirts swishing faintly.
Jaskier slumps down onto the bench and raises his hand to his mouth. Runs a finger along his bottom lip. His reflection in the pool is wide-eyed and far less harried than Jaskier himself feels.
Jaskier feels like everything has changed.
It hasn’t, he knows distantly, staring at himself. He traces his tongue over that lip like he can replicate the feeling of the previous moments, store it off forever. Make it permanent.
David had laughed, and that’s what had started it. He’d laughed and leaned in. He had a gap between his front teeth and his eyes were green. And Jaskier had thought, oh, and he’d laughed too. And then he stopped laughing, and kissed David square on the mouth.
The first kiss was fast. A surprised sort of childish peck. The second one was longer, and verged on—not to be overly dramatic—earth-shattering.
Perhaps Jaskier has looked at other boys in the past. Maybe several times. Maybe more. He’s heard of men who only prefer other men, who forgo inheritances and marriage and bloodlines to do—to do—whatever it is that men do with each other. But he’d enjoyed kissing Marta, too, hadn’t he? Enjoyed the smell of her perfume, and the softness of her skin, the smooth curve of her throat. Loved how she fit against him, how the height he put on recently made him lean over her. The bow of her lips. He’d enjoyed it very much.
So what does that make him?
If only Marta hadn’t discovered them. If only he’d had time to think. If only he’d been able to kiss David one more time, just to make sure.
Instead he’d run, and now it’s all ruined. His reflection, caught eternally in that murky place between childhood and adulthood, frowns.
Sometimes he thinks he’ll never know who he truly is. That he’ll always feel half-this, half-that. Everything and nothing all at once. He wants so much, all the time, but has no idea what would satisfy him.
He wishes—
He fishes around in his pockets, comes up with a handful of coins filched from his father’s purse. They’ll never be missed. He selects one shiny copper and puts the rest back.
It’s silly, but the discovery of the little grove feels like more than happenstance. The place vibrates with something Jaskier can’t name, feels clandestine and powerful. Like it could give him what he wants, if he’d let it.
He balances the coin on his thumbnail, exhales through his nose, and he wishes—
*
The coin parts the water with barely a sound.
*
He’s never quite sure what he wished for that day. It wasn’t made up of words; it was merely a longing. An ache climbing up his throat. A bone-deep, looming desire.
Not that it matters. Not that a coin tossed into a pool at the corner of some Redanian nobleman’s land will fix him.
Jaskier doesn’t kiss Marta or David ever again, but he does kiss many others of all identities. In some ways he loves them all. In others he loves none of them. He stops questioning it, and that helps. He sings with all the air in his lungs, as often as he can, and that helps more.
Most of the time he forgets he ever wished for anything at all.
**
Jaskier is free.
The room is the size of his closet back home, and the bed is lumpy under his back, and he has never been more comfortable. It’s his.
Well, it’s the academy’s. But his, for now. A place to shut the door. A place in which to touch and to hold. A place to sing and cry and write without judgment. No one breathing down his neck. No one ready to rap his knuckles for getting distracted or doodling, for humming as he works.
Oxenfurt does not smell like home. It—quite literally, unfortunately—smells like shit, a consequence of holding more people and more stories than Jaskier has ever dreamed of. He wants to know them all, to gather them and guard them and share them with whoever will listen.
He knows with absolute certainty that he will not go back. Won’t even consider it. Lettenhove’s place in his life is long gone and, in fact, long overstayed its welcome.
His fingers dig into the mattress, the thin blankets so utterly devoid of luxury, and he giggles. Before he knows what he’s doing, his clothes start coming off. A doublet slung across the room, shirt thrown to the floor. Trousers and underthings kicked down to the foot of the bed. He lies there naked and laughing, and for a moment it’s the same as the instant his lips had first brushed against David’s those couple of years before. Like breaking through a barrier that’s been bloodying his knuckles since time immemorial.
It feels extravagant to make so much noise. Indulgent to be stripped so bare. He claps a hand over his mouth, muffling the sound, until he decides never to be caged again, and then he shouts his joy into the pillowcase instead, hugged tight.
In only a few months, Jaskier will be barely recognizable. His body will fill out, his chest will grow a dense mat of hair, his face will lose its last vestiges of roundness. His shoulders will loosen, his smile will widen. He will start to grow into the name he’s given himself.
It’s close to what he wants. It’s so close it feels like it’s waiting under his tongue.
*
It sticks behind his teeth before it retreats.
**
“I know who you are,” he tells the witcher in wonder, with road dust caked onto his skin and his stomach rumbling. Bread in his pants, because one can’t be too picky in this day and age.
As he says it, in that precise second, the witcher upends his empty purse and one lone coin falls onto the table. Almost as if the witcher doesn’t notice. But who doesn’t notice losing their last coin?
Jaskier, for the first time in a while, remembers an earthy musk, budding bushes, a still pool. A copper held in his hand. Unnameable desire bursting from the space behind his heart.
A coin on a table, a coin arcing through the air and slipping underwater.
If he were one to believe in such things, he would say it’s a sign.
He takes it as one.
An afternoon, a headache, and some sore ribs later, he’s standing and squinting at the witcher like he’s the sun and saying, “Respect doesn’t make history.”
He hears himself say it as if from outside his body. The words tumble out of him earnestly, from deep within, and he thinks Is that what I’ve needed?
To make history? To mold and shape it in the palms of his hands, in chords and melodies? To be more than a messenger?
If there’s anything he learns that day, it’s that history is as mutable and subjective as fiction. And that if there’s anyone on the Continent that deserves to have his history rewritten, it’s Geralt of Rivia, who had given up his last coin not once but twice. Who hadn’t spilled a drop of blood. Who, it seems, had been much maligned indeed by previous history-makers.
(Whose fist had made firm contact with Jaskier’s gut, but—again, mutability.)
Sat across a fire from the witcher that night, studying the play of flames across his weary face, Jaskier resolves to be the loudest of the lot of them.
So he spends his days trailing along behind Geralt, strumming and singing his own tales, inhaling onion and death and destiny and heroics and—
**
At the academy, he’d thought it was close. That he’d had everything figured out. That he would welcome it when it came. He was wrong.
It—whatever it is—is miles away. Unfathomable leagues, most of the time. What he spotted before was merely a shadow on the horizon in the suggestive shape of his longing.
He moves toward it and away from it. Backtracks and spins around and dances out of its reach.
He will not look to the horizon. He fears that giving it a face will halt his feet, stop him dead in his tracks when there’s so much more to see.
*
“Everybody now!” he cries out to the packed room, as usual. “Toss a coin to your…”
It’s so automatic that he barely registers it leaving his mouth before he continues on with the last chorus. When the tavern at large booms out his words in unison, he nearly fumbles his instrument, steps on his own feet.
“O valley of plenty!” they reply. Some are doing their damnedest to clap along, some are dancing, others tapping their foot or nodding.
But they are all—he realizes, down to the mopiest sad sack at the bar—all paying him attention. And they all know his song. (Geralt’s song. Their song.)
Better than he himself knows it at the moment, as the lyrics dry up on his tongue in his surprise. It is only muscle memory that keeps his fingers moving on the lute.
And the crowd goes on, seeing it through to the end. Jaskier manages to join them for the last phrase, to carry the final high note. He beams out at them all and blinks away the moisture in his eyes.
“That’s all for tonight!” he calls as they clap and cheer and stomp. “Thank you. Thank you all. You’ve been astounding.”
The barmaid appears at his elbow with a brimming cup of ale, waves him away when he reaches for his purse.
“Please, let me, darling,” he says, but she shakes her head with a shy smile.
“On the house, Jaskier the bard, if you’ll come back tomorrow.”
He shrugs and chugs it as she walks away. It’s good ale. Better than he’s had in years, though tonight even the usual swill may have turned to molten gold when it touched his lips.
He feels powerful. Bloated with recognition. Oh, he could fucking soar.
When he lowers the ale, now empty, a man whose eye he’d caught at the start of his performance pushes him into a chair and climbs brazenly into his lap. Jaskier pours every ounce of his elation into the man’s lips, translating it into something akin to love as it leaves on his breath.
**
“That’s it,” Jaskier says, spitting ink onto the ground. Geralt raises a judgmental eyebrow at him. It always bothers him when Jaskier sucks on his quill. Something, something, hideous smacking sound, something something superhuman hearing. “I’ve run out of words. I’ve used them all. Poof! Like that. All gone.”
“And yet you’re still speaking,” Geralt deadpans absently.
“I’ll be forgotten! Think on it, Witcher, my genius lost to the depths of time because I’ve broken? Who will make the women weep with heartfelt refrains? Who will keep your rather tarnished name all polished up? Well, I suppose at least it would be a tragedy. Tragedies do make a good story, if you go in for that sort of thing. I’ve always found them a bit repetitive. Oh, woe is me, my family is dead, my lover is dead, now I’m dead too and it was all ever so preventable! Spare me. Whatever sells, in the end. Bards are but slaves to the tasteless whims of the masses.”
As he speaks he arranges himself artfully on his bedroll, arms pillowed under his head, one knee bent up toward the night sky. Geralt continues clearing dried muck off his boot, an eternal and fruitless chore.
Looking up at the stars, he pictures himself floating away with nary a trace. Smoke on a breeze. He pictures himself arthritic and stooped, still leading chorus after chorus of the same old song. He remembers Lettenhove, its high walls and its small-mindedness and its stuffy manners and his father yelling at him to keep down that racket as he plucked at the secondhand lute he’d saved up to purchase himself at the market. Very unfitting of a viscount’s eldest son, but his governess went to his mother and pleaded to allow Julian an outlet that wasn’t, to her words, being the biggest terror this side of the Yaruga.
“Dunno why you bother with that,” Jaskier says to his laconic companion, swallowing down anxiety.
“Needs doing,” says Geralt alongside the scrape-scrape-thud of his work.
“You could at least give me an idea. Prompt me.”
“Mm.”
“Come on, Witcher, after all I’ve done for you? Just a teeny little suggestion to get me going.”
Geralt looks over at him and Jaskier looks back and interprets his expression as something like Who the fuck do you think I am, you blathering idiot?, though the intent is likely not quite so harsh.
“Yeah, yeah, fine,” he heads off the reprimand. He kicks his bent leg into the air pointlessly to study his toes, to block out the light of the mostly full moon, and to ignore the nervous weight sinking into his stomach.
Geralt drags his knife along the treads of the second boot, twice each time, scrape scrape, then he taps the blade against the log he’s sitting on to dislodge the dirt it claimed. Thud. Jaskier counts the beats in his head. Scrape, scrape, thud. Scrape, scrape, thud.
**
The royal seal of Cintra stares up at him from where it is pressed onto the pristine scroll in blue wax.
Jaskier looks up at the messenger, dressed in, indeed, the livery of the Lioness. “For me?” he asks. “You’re quite certain?”
The man appears as if he has been on horseback for weeks, and as if he could give a rat’s arse whether Jaskier is the correct recipient. Jaskier reckons he’s not an easy man to track down, so busy he’s hardly in one place more than fortnight. If the letter is, in fact, meant for him and not some other young and dashing, if less talented, bard.
The man frowns. “Open it and find out.” Then a belated and reluctant, “Sir.”
“But should I be reading mail that is not necessarily my own? It seems uncouth—”
The messenger rolls his eyes and prods his horse, riding away without another word. Jaskier shrugs and opens the letter.
It’s for him. An invitation.
As his eyes scan the ornate script—not the hand of the Queen herself, but he grandly entertains the thought that it is the hand of her personal scribe—the words become harder to read. It is because his hand is shaking. He braces it against the back of the bench he occupies to steady it. The moment stretches wide like time is allowing it to expand, to take up the space it deserves. As if the cityfolk around him are moving at half speed, as if the clouds have frozen in the sky. As if his heart beats as slow as Geralt’s.
At the bottom of the succinct note is a sum. He reaches down to the full coin purse tied at his waist, one of three he carries these days, to feel the weight of it, hear its pleasant jingling as the crowns rub together. It is more gold than he has ever before dared to dream he would earn in his own right. It’s been a particularly prosperous summer, the best so far, and the profits may not continue into winter, but for now he is flush. The sum scrawled at the bottom is quadruple his estimate of his current holdings. It is double what he earned in the entirety of last year.
He realizes his mouth is hanging open when he drools inelegantly onto his trousers.
“Melitele’s sopping cunt,” he says disbelievingly, drawing glares from passersby. “I’m rich!” He sticks out a leg, forcing a passing washerwoman to halt in her tracks or trip. “Madam,” he entreats, sickly sweet, “so kind of you to stop. I’m wondering—where can one procure the finest Fiorano here? And do point me as well to the most extravagant tailor, if you please. One that knows embroidery and silks.”
She scowls and tries to move around him, but he draws out a palmful of coins. Looking up through his eyelashes he adds, “I’d be much obliged.”
*
It is such a disaster—through no fault of his own—that he never collects the payment and leaves Cintra with lighter pockets than ever, his fine new clothing and Geralt’s all but ruined.
He drinks the celebratory Fiorano alone in his room at the inn, witcher nowhere to be found, on an empty stomach. He vomits it back up out the window in the middle of the night and wakes up in the afternoon propped painfully against the sill.
Jaskier, after wincing at his own smell and the crick in his neck, chuckles aloud and says to no one, “At least no one will forget it, eh?”
**
At times, over the course of years, he crosses those intervening miles. Gets too close and brushes against it. He can feel its hot breath. His body welcomes it. His body craves the satisfaction of being caught.
Camilla, the lovely and widowed Countess de Stael, collapses bare and gasping atop him, hips still rolling unconsciously, wringing him out. His thumbs press divots into her thighs and she shudders.
“Gods above and below,” she curses, her clipped posh vowels wrapping oddly around the words.
He hums his agreement, wraps an arm around her waist to keep her close even as he slips out of her. It was a good round; it always is when they reunite.
“Jaskier,” she breathes, for she does not and will never know him as Julian.
“Camilla, my dear,” he says. He drops a kiss to her graying hair. “Speak to me.”
“It’s funny—now, I don’t mean any offense—but I was just thinking that you always fuck me like we’re running out of time. Like it’s the last. Should it not be the other way around? Should it not be me that’s in a hurry?”
“Goodness!” he exclaims, drawing back into the pillows and pressing a palm flat to his chest in mock outrage. “That kind of language—my poor, pure ears—”
She laughs and takes the hand and draws it back around her. “Oh, please. I’m just wondering why, if you’ll share.”
“Shouldn’t everyone?” he asks, amused.
“Perhaps,” she says, “but they don’t. Only you, my love.”
“I am not certain if this is a compliment or an accusation.”
“I keep allowing you back, don’t I? After each time you run off.”
He smiles softly. “And how many have you tested in this matter? To claim it is only me?”
“Very few and yet too many.” She now rolls off of him with a soft groan, putting her breasts on display. He can’t help but roll a nipple between his fingers, and she swats him away. “Later, you insatiable bastard. Show some mercy.”
“As you please,” he murmurs, and she is quiet so long he thinks she’s fallen asleep, until her fingers lace through his on the bed.
“Will you stay this time, my Jaskier? Stay and sing me pretty songs? Read me the latest poetry every evening? Tell me all those funny stories you have?” Her voice goes quieter, secretive, enticing to disguise the sentimental edge underneath. “It is ever so dull when you are gone.”
He gapes at her with his heart in his throat. “Camilla,” he says, the barest sound.
“Don’t answer now. Don’t deny me tonight.”
“I want to,” he says anyway. “I want to. I will stay for you. My sweet Countess.”
And he does want to, and he does stay. He takes tea with her in the mornings, serenades her in the orchard. Rides behind her down to the river and laughs with her and feeds her bites of cheese and grapes. It’s all very domestic. Idyllic, some would say. The stuff of the finest love songs, and he does write several of those, as well.
“You are the most radiant and exceptional muse for which any humble bard could hope,” he tells her. He means it. He swears to himself and all the gods and goddesses he can name that he means it this time.
He means it every minute, up until she finds him with his leg hooked around her son’s thigh in the stables.
*
Swigging again from his flask, he declares, “I fear I shall die a broken-hearted man,” and can’t help but feel relieved.
*
(Geralt wishes for peace, and as he chokes on his own blood, Jaskier thinks it’s funny that all this time it seems they’ve had the same wish. He thinks at least one of them should have it.
Later, he doesn’t remember much of that particular incident.)
**
Geralt and Jaskier part ways and come back together as they always have, but these days it is more and more likely that the collars of Geralt’s shirts will be stained with lip paint, that his nails and beard will be trimmed neat and tidy, that his eyes will carry the unfocused glint of the well fucked. When this happens, Jaskier snorts in his general direction and takes his clothing to the laundry, ignoring the bitter taste it leaves in his mouth.
Yennefer returns Geralt to him, used and besotted, and Jaskier is left to put his pieces back together each time.
He envisions, in his darker hours, a world in which it is him who puts that look onto Geralt’s face. That it is him who Geralt asks after in cities when they’re apart. That he would murmur Jaskier’s name into the night as Jaskier has heard him murmur Yennefer’s, would cling to him as he slept with a strong arm around his waist.
When these images get too sharp, the corners too defined, he packs his things and bids Geralt farewell.
**
Priscilla finds him in a tavern in Oxenfurt in midwinter drinking his body weight in hot hard cider to stave off the chill. She taps the bar and the maid slides a full tankard toward her. Pris picks it up and salutes the maid, and he greets her with a smirk as Callonetta, and she sticks her tongue out at him and calls him my most honorable Viscount for that is who he has been in title if not function since his father’s passing two years prior, and they drink like they’re twenty years younger than they are until the remaining patrons are them and a merchant propped in the corner booth who Jaskier can only hope is sleeping.
Pris is hooting laughter at something Jaskier barely heard leave his mouth, but when she quiets down there’s suddenly not much else to say.
“Jask,” she hiccups, then giggles again.
“Hmm?” he smiles as she visibly sobers herself. “What’s that?”
“Jask—”
“Yes, you’ve said that already. That’s my name, dear, or are you titted enough as to be unsure?”
“Shut up,” she says. Her eyes are blue, but not like his own—a stormy pale gray-blue that is bewitching in the low lamplight, or would be if she was not wholly Pris and everything that came along with it. “How are you?”
“What d’you mean? We’ve been talking for hours, surely you’ve caught the gist by now.”
She bodily turns toward him, places the heel of her hands on each of his knees. “No, I’ve heard about your life. I haven’t heard about you.”
Jaskier tries to take a drink and finds his mug empty and the barmaid gone. He settles for loosening the ties of his shirt, doublet having already been undone.
“Is there more to a man than his very life?”
“A life is not half a man.”
“That’s an interesting thought, actually—have you perchance read A Mortal Afterlife by—”
Her fingers come to his lips, pinching them shut. “Rude,” he tries to say, and she shakes her head.
“You have talked all night, Jaskier, about the beds you’ve shared and the tournaments you’ve won and the events you’ve witnessed and the amount of gold in your pants and you have not said one single honest thing amongst it all.”
She stops and waits, but does not release his mouth. He gestures pointedly until she does.
Rubbing feeling back into his lips, he says, “I’ve not lied to you, if that’s what you’re accusing.”
“It isn’t!”
“Then what—”
“Gods, Jaskier,” she sighs. “I’d hoped you would grow up eventually. But no, you’ve always been this way and I fear you always will.”
He all at once wants to be more sober, drunker, in his bed, or anywhere else. “Been holding something back, Pris?”
“’Course I have. Can’t be friends with such an idiot for as long as I have and not bite your tongue most of the time.” She adds, parenthetically, “You’re the idiot.”
“Thanks for clarifying. Has it transitioned into ‘bully Jaskier’ hours? I was not aware. I would have left if I’d been warned.”
“Your problem,” she emphasizes, poking him in the chest, “is that you don’t know what you want. You’ve got, what? Women and men alike, incredible fame and fortune, but nothing to come home to. Don’t you ever want to stop? What do you want? I thought I used to know. I used to know you back to front, but I’ve no idea anymore.”
She tilts a little on her stool, so he catches her under the arm. “Let’s get you home, shall we?”
One-handed, he counts out their bill and leaves it for the maid, wherever she’s gone, then lifts Priscilla against him as they exit onto the abandoned, frozen street. Her head rests against his shoulder, thaws his ears with her breath.
“Will you think about it, Jaskier?” she pleads. “It’s only that I worry.”
*
The rest of the term drags on and on, the days blending into each other. His class receives rave reviews from almost every student and their final performances are only mostly horrid. He is proud of them.
When the chancellor invites him back for a following term, hinting at a permanent position, he imagines a life in which he is not the bard Jaskier—the White Wolf’s bard—but Master Jaskier, tenured professor of poetry and music at Oxenfurt Academy.
“An enticing offer,” he says, and it’s obviously a lie of the strongest order. “I will consider it.”
**
Life becomes an exhausting, near-constant battle to keep moving. Or perhaps it always has been, and Jaskier never bothered to notice.
Seasons flow into each other, years turn one to the next. Flitting from festival to festival and court to court, he can count the number of people he’s spoken to in the last six months who know him by more than name and song on approximately five fingers. When he realizes this, he stops dead in the middle of the road.
Perhaps it is time to go back to basics.
A healer in Gelibol happens to tell him of a white-haired witcher for whom she’d stitched a cut two moons prior, who had headed north.
**
Jaskier goes north into Kovir until there’s almost nowhere farther north to go before he runs into Geralt, and then they’re climbing a mountain against all better judgment, and it’s not long before Borch drops with utter finality into the fog like a copper into a pool.
He looks at Geralt’s stricken face and knows that old foe is nipping at his heels. It says You can’t hide forever in Marta’s voice, one he hasn’t heard in decades. It says Will you stay this time, my Jaskier? in Camilla’s and A life is not half a man in Pris’s. It smells like nights beside a fire in the woods and feels like spongy dirt under his boots. It’s the sensation of waking up in a bed you know is your own, that you will sleep in again tonight and the next and the next, and it’s knowing that the body next to you will remain there. It’s the way he’s seen Geralt look at Yennefer, like she lifted the sun itself. It’s something he’s had waiting there beside him this entire time but never taken into his hands, never made his own. In a word, he thinks it might call itself contentment.
Enough is enough. He turns to face it.
*
Settled shoulder to shoulder beside Geralt, gazing out at the most incredible view the Continent has to offer with a pebble digging uncomfortably into the meat of his arse, he thinks This is what will do it. He’s had fame and he’s made history and he’s seen the world and he’s had every type of love but the best one. He’s done it all and still he’s not there, but it’s time he tried.
(Time is a limited resource, and his personal hourglass is going on half empty.)
With this revelation trying to claw its way out of his chest, he turns to Geralt, who has barely seemed to notice him there.
“We could head to the coast,” he says. “Get away for a while.” Geralt does not respond Yes, let’s, nor does he take his hand, nor does he look Jaskier in the eye, nor does he say fuck you or what do you mean? or how forward of you or finally or even hmm. In the lingering silence Jaskier says some more words, dances around the matter, presses his palm into his thigh to keep his fingers from fidgeting. The melody of his latest ballad runs through his head. He wonders if he’ll ever perform it.
“Composing your next song?” Geralt says at last, and it’s so far off the point that Jaskier almost laughs.
“No, no, I’m just, uh—” He stretches for an explanation, anything he can say to convey the gravity of his intent. He is so tired. He has come all this way. He is almost there. He wants to stop. The force of his desire weighs heavy on his tongue.
Life will give him what he wants, if he lets it.
“—I’m just trying to work out what pleases me.”
**