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Yennefer swirled her impeccable fingertips through the fluffy pastel pink bubbles covering the surface of the delicious, steaming hot bath, enjoying the attention of what seemed half the women of all of Beauclair who had all crammed together in a spacious ballroom in the Beauclair palace. Two of the most talented hair-dressers in the city tended to her long curls, brushing them out and treating them until they shone.
Her skin had been treated to the point of perfection, her feet were softer than silk and gentle harp music floated through the room as attendants flitted about, bringing in dresses and shoes and a seemingly endless amount of small cakes, white wine and bouquets of dark roses spilling over every available table and shelf.
She had not yet figured out what was going on, but she was determined to enjoy herself while she figured out this newest mystery. There was a taste of magic to the air, more so than usual, strong enough but subtle enough that it affected Geralt, but not her. It did not feel like directional magic, just a gentle sprinkle of magical suggestion on a town dressed up for one of the local love-festivals, that could be enough to have triggered all of this and she was confident that the root cause would reveal itself soon enough.
“Is champagne to your liking, Lady Yennefer?” one of the many who were currently tripping over themselves to serve her every imaginable need asked as he offered her a selection of bubbly drinks in tall, fluted glasses.
“It is very much to my liking,” she said as she decided to test her audience some more. She took the glass offered to her and stood up in the bath, bubbles slipping down her wet skin as she stepped out and onto the hastily placed fluffy towels.
“Thank you…?” she started fishing for a name, but the attendant was hyperventilating a little already so she shrugged and walked along the fluffy carpet on the floor towards the dresses, her movements accompanied by several soft sighs around the room.
“So, what is the occasion?” she asked as she surveyed the dresses displayed along the tall, stained glass windows of the ballroom. They were all dresses she would gladly have paid good money for. They were all in her style, dark, tight, concealing her skin but still revealing in the figure hugging shape offered by the luxurious, almost metallic fabrics. The accessories were equally exquisite in black opals and bright diamonds set in white gold worked into impossibly thin swirls as delicate as spider-webs.
“Your wedding, of course, Lady Yennefer,” one of the many women said with a big smile on her face, not bothered in the slightest that Yennefer seemed to have forgotten as she pulled out a long clothes-rack full of exciting looking black lace underwear. “It is the highlight of the season, or I’d rather say, the highlight of my life, at the very least. You shall make such a beautiful couple.”
“I see,” Yennefer said as the underwear was presented to her one by one while perfumed oil was rubbed into her elbows and knees. She sipped champagne and took her time looking at the selection presented to her while at the back of her mind she searched for any magical resonance within the building that could clue her in on what was going on.
“Remind me, whom am I to marry?” she asked as she nodded at a strappy pair of lacy undergarments, covered in tiny little gemstones. Eager, gentle hands aided her as she was dressed in the underwear and she knew even without looking that her breasts looked absolutely exquisite. It was almost a shame to cover herself in one of the many dresses at her disposal, but there was a limit to the amount of people doing manually controlled breathing in her presence she could endure.
“It is bad luck to see the groom before the wedding, my Lady,” one of the many maidens chuckled and they all seemed to agree as Yennefer chose a pair of ankle-high boots, sturdy and practical in black, sensible leather that she could run in if need be. They would not show under the dress anyway.
She tried asking for a few more details as her skin was dusted with crushed pearls and her makeup applied to her specific instructions, but it was mostly laughed away and soon enough she entered the Beuclair castle solar accompanied by a dozen trumpets and red rose petals filling the air. It seemed all of Beauclair were there, dressed in their best, cheering and crying as she walked slowly down the aisle towards the dark robed figure awaiting her.
For a wild moment she imagined it was Emhyr, and she only realised how much that thought interested her when she came shoulder to shoulder with her apparently intended and saw it was not him.
The figure was not as tall as Emhyr, but in a brooding contest between the two of them, she was pretty sure the figure next to her would win. He was pale, he had sky blue eyes and mostly looked puzzled throughout the ceremony, observing his surroundings with the air of a matron returning to the household after it had been managed by the menfolk for a fortnight.
“Nice to meet you,” Yennefer said, pouring her own wine and taking a sip as they sat at the head of the lavishly decorated table at the wedding banquet they had been kindly but firmly escorted to after the wedding ceremony was over. “And you are?”
“I am Dettlaff,” the vampire murmured. There was no mistaking those teeth.
“Ah. Friend of Regis, I hope?”
“Depends on the circumstances.”
“I am Yennefer. Yennefer of Vengerberg.”
“A friend of Geralt’s?” Dettlaff asked, his voice so low she could barely catch the hint of good humour in his voice. She laughed and took a tiny little cheesecake from the table and popped it into her mouth. Dettlaff did not react, he just stared at whatever seemed to catch his eye at the moment, and more specifically, anything that was not her.
“A dear friend, depending on the circumstance,” Yennefer said as she turned her attention to the situation around them. People were swooning over each other bringing the two of them flowers and singing songs and granting them everything from stables to entire vineyards as wedding presents. There was an awful lot of handkerchiefs being used all around. “Have you noticed something odd going on?” she asked, since it seemed Dettlaff was as unaffected by the subtle magic as she was.
“I have been informed that I am not well socialised,” Dettlaff said, as if testing every word before speaking them, “but I must admit this comes off as strange behaviour.”
“Ah, glad I am not the only one.”
“I hope you will not be offended if I abstain from consummating the marriage?”
“Disappointed, perhaps,” she said. The wine was good and Dettlaff was interesting and funny in a confused kitten sort of way. He was not very pretty but he had an aesthetic that matched hers and she knew they looked very striking as a couple. “But not offended, no. I assume this arrangement was as much of a surprise to you as it was to me. How did they rope you into these fine clothes, not to mention the Solar?”
“I saw no reason to resist,” Dettlaff said, still as a statue and seemingly unaffected by Yennefer’s response. “They were not harming me.”
“Do you happen to know why they dragged us together and wed us?”
“No, but it is vague and everywhere,” Dettlaff said. “I have asked a few of mine to investigate. They can sense it as well.”
That came as a surprise.
“You can sense the magic?” she asked, turning a little in her gilded chair to look at the still figure beside her. “I thought it would not affect you.”
“I can sense how it changes the humans,” Dettlaff mumbled as he folded his hands in his lap. “They are… warmer. Their temperature is rising and their hearts beat faster. There is adrenaline, shortness of breath, dilated pupils, all symptoms of falling in love but it seems to be projected on us.”
“They are all in love with the idea of us together?”
“It seems so.”
Yennefer drank wine and enjoyed the little desserts presented to her through the evening while Dettlaff seemed to be far away, all until they were carried off by eager hands with many lewd cheers and suggestions for pleasure towards a massive bedchamber. It too was dressed in their style in rich black velvets, white silk and a surprising amount of leather, but as the doors closed behind them there was a sudden silence that did not match with the constant noise of the evening’s festivities.
Yennefer wandered around the room for a while as Dettlaff stood by the door where they had left him, watching her in the mindless sort of way that a guard would at the end of a ten hour shift. Not interested, not stressed, just waiting for whatever would happen next.
“They’re all outside the door?” she whispered, very low but confident the vampire would hear anyway. Dettlaff just nodded.
They were waiting for the highlight of the evening, she supposed, so she sat on the bed, dropped back and sighed at the canopy before voicing a delighted moan, loud enough that it even startled the vampire.
The effect was immediate as cheering and applause sounded from the other side of the door, then the party slowly drifted off down the corridor.
“That should take care of the crowd,” she said as she sat up again and looked at her husband. “So, my main suspicion is that this is a love charm gone wrong. It has gone unfulfilled for some reason, and the magic is seeping out everywhere.”
“And it does not affect us, for you are a sorceress and I am a vampire,” Dettlaff said in a hollow voice. “We are their romance novel couple, and they wish to see us together even if we have never met and our… species do not match.”
“Have any of your minions found the source?”
“Not directly, but I know the approximate location,” Dettlaff said as he walked over to the huge windows and opened one of them. They were far up in a north facing tower, across the lake directly below they could see the tourney grounds in the distance and beyond that the distant lights of Corvo Bianco.
“I could portal us out of here,” Yennefer said.
“Flying is more effective for scouting purposes,” Dettlaff said, but it sounded like a suggestion.
“Flying?”
“You may ride me.”
“Ride-... oh.”
She took a step or two backwards as Dettlaff changed shape. She had expected a bat or something, maybe a raven or something at least natural looking, but the vampire changed into a true monstrosity of beaten looking wings and two extra arms. One of them scratched gently at the skin of the eyeless skull, before he stretched this way and that, as if getting comfortable in his new shape.
He hunkered down a little so she could climb up and he guided her into place with his long clawed hands, settling her feet on his protruding hip bones and making her hold on to his extra arms with her hands.
He was not as gross to the touch as she had initially expected. He looked like he should be sticky somehow, yet he was dry and surprisingly silky, the heat of him was in stark contrast to the dead, skinned looking appearance of his transformed body. The flight was different than she expected as well, contrary to what the size of him and his wings would imply, he seemed to stick to gliding through the air and defying all rules of science.
Dettlaff seemed much more at home like this, gliding slowly over the moonlit trees with bats and the occasional bruxae swooping along in his wake. Yennefer glanced over her shoulder when the vampires swept past them, but Dettlaff sent his thoughts to her, what he was seeing and feeling. Through his shared visions, she saw the vampires following them were just curious, woken from their slumber prematurely as a higher vampire passed by and now the vampires were just flying by to check them out, paying a primitive sort of respect to a distant relative.
A couple of very big bats swooped by in front of them and Dettlaff gave her a mental prod of warning just before he shifted his weight and steered left towards a small lake by a big clearing.
“I know that house,” Yennefer said, confident the vampire would hear her over the wind. “It is here. Land behind the house.”
Dettlaff gave no indication he had heard her, but did as he was told, landing lightly and soundlessly in the short grass behind the simple log cabin and the small barn located just behind it. The horse watched them indifferently as Yennefer climbed off Dettlaff’s back and resisted the urge to pat him as thanks.
“I can sense it, but the man who lives here can be a bit erratic,” she whispered. “Wait here, just in case.”
Dettlaff folded himself up and nodded while Yennefer cast a protective spell dampening the sound of her feet in the dry grass as she made her way across the field towards where the strange magic felt strongest.
Curiously enough, it was by a makeshift clothesline strung up between two birch trees. She glanced at the blue coat with the white stripes down the sleeves, they were grey and aged now and the coat more repairs than original fabric, the colours not exactly the same where the fabric had been mended. Some undergarments, shirts so worn she could have seen daylight through them had there been any daylight. Two pairs of boots stood upside down on poles, shiny with fresh mink oil.
She turned around, knowing it could not be far away but she also did not know what a love charm had to do with Vernon Roche’s laundry.
About to give up, she turned to go and find the man himself but then she saw it.
The red cord that Roche used to tie the front of his coat lay on a branch by one of the trees, apparently haphazardly tangled together and put to the side. She bent down and picked up the amateurishly made design of interwoven rope. It was very close to a design meant to break misunderstandings and entwine the hearts of lovers, but some of the threads crossed over wrong, it was back to front and not entirely finished, nor was it imbued with anything else than a touch of vague magic with no direction or intention.
It could have been accidental, but it could also have been the work of someone working from a half forgotten memory. Either way, it was likely why the love charm had not worked as intended, but instead made the entire country in love with the idea of Yennefer and Dettlaff being in love.
“Oh well, it was fun while it lasted,” Yennefer said with a small smile on her face as she carefully corrected the mistakes of the love charm, making sure none of her own intentions or wishes influenced the original. Once corrected, she felt the subtle change in her surroundings as if the entire world sighed and relaxed after a long day of tension.
Brushing invisible dust off her sleeves, she was about to turn around and go back to her husband when the tip of something very sharp touched the back of her neck.
“Who are you.”
She did not have to look around to see who it was. She was surprised she had not smelled the elf approaching in the first place, but she withheld her comment since not even her magical abilities could save her if Iorveth decided to send the arrow flying at point blank distance.
“A friend of Geralt’s,” she said, knowing her name very likely meant nothing to Iorveth, who had after all seen Geralt around with Triss back in Temeria. “Yennefer of Vengerberg.”
“A friend?” Iorveth scoffed, but the scoff was cut short as red mist materialised in between them. There was a gasp of surprise from the elf, then a thunk as the arrow entered flesh, but not her own.
She spun around to see Iorveth backing off, another arrow at the ready as he stared at Dettlaff who was tilting his head and trying to look at the arrow stuck in his chest.
“I’ll assume it is serrated,” Dettlaff said, sounding more annoyed than pained as he tried to yank the arrow out.
“Leave it, I’ll help you get it out later,” Yennefer sighed and looked at Iorveth. “That was uncalled for.”
“What the fuck?” Iorveth whispered, still staring. “Why’s he not screaming or dying?”
“Long story short, he is a vampire and do not feel pain as you do,” Yennefer said, not bothering to conceal the threat. “Why are you here, aiming arrows at innocent women?”
“I…” Iorveth started, then seemed to blank out. “I don’t know.”
“I think I do,” Dettlaff said as he bent down with some difficulty. He took the love charm from the branch it was resting on, plucked Iorveth’s weapons from his unresisting hands and placed them to the side before placing the charm in his hands. “And I think you know as well.”
Iorveth did seem to know. After a few moments of just staring at the artwork, he tucked the charm in behind his shirt and seemed to ignore both Yennefer and Dettlaff as he wandered off towards the house as if in a trance.
“You think he might be in there?” Yennefer asked.
“He is,” Dettlaff said as he pulled absent-mindedly at the fletching of the arrow stuck in his chest. “He is walking towards the door now.”
They watched in silence as the door opened and the entire plot of a romance novel unravelled before their eyes. There was the initial shock, the door slammed in Iorveth’s face. There was the negotiation through the closed door, it opened again so Roche could yell directly into Iorveth’s face, backing him towards the bannister of the little balcony until Iorveth could back off no further.
“And now comes the stumble,” Yennefer said as Roche tripped in his anger and Iorveth caught him in his arms. She had never seen Vernon Roche trip over anything, nor see his legs so weak that Iorveth had to hug him to his chest to keep him from falling.
“Is this how humans normally do it?” Dettlaff asked as he tried to work the arrow out of his chest.
“No, it is how the stories say humans do it,” Yennefer replied as the two over at the house stared into each other’s eyes, there were even fireflies dancing around the place. “Prolonged eye contact… licking of lips…kiss in three… two… one…”
They watched the first hesitant kiss turn desperate, the two of them clawing uselessly at each-other’s clothes as they tried to undress the other person instead of doing the sensible thing and removing their own. Neither of them seemed to be wearing socks, nor have any care for missing buttons as they ripped each-other’s shirts open.
“I think they will be fine. There is a significant increase of blood to their erectile tissues, so it is safe to help me get the arrow out, now,” Dettlaff observed dryly.
“You can see that?” Yennefer asked, surprised even as she told herself she really ought to have expected it.
“If you help me remove this arrow, I’ll let you watch as well,” Dettlaff said as Roche and Iorveth seemed to agree they needed a bed and clumsily kissed their way indoors. Yennefer smiled and pressed her hand to Dettlaff’s chest, making the barbed arrow fold back on itself so she could pull the arrow free without resistance. Dettlaff grunted an appreciative thank you as he inspected the hole in his coat.
“That sounds like a fine date,” she said as she tossed the arrow to the side and as she conjured up a small table, two chairs and a bottle of wine, she felt as much as she saw the heat and blood sensitive visions of the vampire’s sight drift telepathically into her mind.
It was not uncomfortable at all. It came as natural to her as Dettlaff’s company, his dry humour and nonchalant attitude towards human particularities was a breath of fresh air after almost a century of people trying to be clever around her.
“Lady Yennefer?” Dettlaff said after a good while of watching and commenting on Roche and Iorveth’s creative furniture use. They had unravelled the love charm to tie Roche to the headboard and that had done nothing to deter either of them, so Yennefer and Dettlaff had agreed to start on a second bottle to celebrate the love-match holding strong even as the initial charm magic died with Roche’s begging for more and Iorveth giving it to him.
“Yes, my dear vampire husband?”
“This is a fine date.”
“I wholeheartedly agree.”
“We might not be truly married, but… would you be interested in copulating in a more comfortable location? Strictly recreational activities, of course.”
Yennefer tapped a finger to her glass, pretending she was thinking it over, but his gaze was on her now, and she could see herself through his mind. She looked relaxed, a bit flushed, warmth and blood pooling in the flesh of her loins. Dettlaff was not focusing on that though. He was looking at her face, and she looked like she was genuinely having a good time.
She liked that look on herself. It had been far too long since she had taken a lover without planning it out first, without calculating her best opportunities. Dettlaff was uncontrollable and not really useful to her, and all he offered was some fun on the side, no strings attached.
“Agreed. Strictly recreational,” she said and raised her glass. Dettlaff did as well, and as they tapped their glasses together in a toast to their new deal, the two in the cabin came simultaneously and fell breathlessly into each-other’s arms, just like in the novels.