Chapter Text
“Fuck off.”
“Isolde….”
“No, you can’t take him, he's mine.” Isolde holds her son in her lap, cradling his unconscious form. His head rests carefully on her chest, once dark chestnut curls lay flat in a stark white. His teeth are longer than they should be.
Gods, what have they done to her dear boy?
“Love—” Vesemir starts again, crouching near his wife. His expression is pinched, as if all the pain laid before him is his.
In many ways it is.
“Fuck off.” The words were more a growl now, sharp brown eyes locking with muted gold. “He came back from the mountains. If you still wanted to make a Witcher out of him, you had your chance. I won’t let you fucking hurt him anymore. I...fucking hells—”
She gasps for breath and the mage behind them rolls her eyes.
“Stop being so dramatic. He knew that he was signing up for—”
“Shut up you rotten-hearted bitch. I watched you make him suffer again and again and a-fucking-gain.” Isolde’s voice broke, blotting her tears on her shirtsleeve. “You touch him and I’ll slit your fucking throat.”
“He wants to go on to the Dreams.” Vesemir spoke softly, reaching out to touch her shoulder. It’s rebuked with a hiss. “I’m sorry, tiger.”
“Vesemir what— Fuck you, no.” Isolde screams as her husband’s arms tighten around her, pulling her away from Geralt’s prone form.
Other hands take hold of her son, taking him for more. “You can’t, you fucking whoreson! No! Please, gods, he’s suffered enough...please.”
“He wanted to continue on, Isolde. He wants to be a Witcher. He won’t be happy in the keep…and it’s not our choice anymore; it’s his.”
“And you found this out...?”
“In the infirmary, while you slept.”
He’d crept in while she wasn’t watching. The mongrel.
“Fuck you, Vesemir. He might not be my novice anymore but he’s still my child. My pup. Do you give a child all the sweets they want? Let them run at dangerous ledges? No you don’t. We’re their parents, Vesemir. We look after their best interests.” Isolde tosses her head back, crunching into her husband’s nose and making him reel back.
She pulls away, flinging herself at the door only to be grasped by another. “Osbert, I’ll cut your fucking cock off in your sleep.”
She only hears a sigh as she’s tossed over a shoulder.
“Don’t you huff at me, you cur! You were always the laziest fuck in the keep but this is a new low for you, you base hedge-born measel!”
“You don’t mean those words.” Osbert sighs, his voice tender.
She absolutely does.
-
Isolde screams her way to the solar, her pitch and volume only increasing with each step further away from Geralt.
Osbert sets her down as carefully as he could while avoiding a knee to the face.
“Get the fuck out.” She growls, pushing her now loose hair out of her face, the other wives around the room murmuring softly.
“Isolde—” Mica reaches out to sooth his fellow help-mate. His soft tenor, usually soothing to her, only grates on her remaining nerves.
She turns and swiftly attempts a kick at Obsert’s shin, which is dodged with a Witcher’s speed. He raises his hands in surrender, backing out of the room. She follows right behind him, slamming the heavy oaken door in his face.
Mica approaches her again, no little concern writ across his features.
Fuck that.
“No. You don’t get to placate me.” Isolde growls, feeling more feral than the wolves they claimed as their moniker. Mica startles, backing away from the furious woman.
He casts a worried look behind him, dark hair tossed over a broad shoulder as he glances at his fellow wives in alarm
“You fuckers voted for him to continue on to the Dreams. Who the fuck voted yes?” Isolde scans the room, spying shame, guilt, and confusion among the gathered faces.
“We didn’t.”
“You just let those fucking mages torture him and then take him for some more?” Her scream left her throat raw, tears breaking new mutiny against her will. They spilt over, dripping down her cheeks. “Without even fucking voting!?”
“Isolde,” Gretta says, very softly. Her voice cracks. “They didn’t let us.”
The gentle woman grips her hand, and she feels the shaking, but can’t tell which of them it is.
“They didn’t ‘let’ you? Who didn’t ‘let’ you? The Mages? Our husbands, who share this home with us?”
“There’s nothing written about a second vote.” Mica intones blankly. “I’ve scoured the library, but it hasn’t happened before. Geralt is ‘special’. He’s the only one to have come back ‘complete’.”
Gretta adds, “Once they go from a novice to an initiate, they’re out of our hands.” She grits her teeth. “Lior pointed that out to me.”
Of course she did.
Cunt.
Isolde takes a deep breath, holds tight to her helpmates. “It was implied. They survive the Mountain, and they stay with us. The witch-eyed stay safe with their mothers.”
“But Geralt isn’t witch-eyed, is he?” Tali rasps, eyes red and dark with lack of sleep. “He’s to be a Witcher.”
Someone hugs her—Mier, maybe—and begins to howl with her. Someone else joins them, holding tight as if they might shatter.
-
The next morning she sits herself in front of the fire, the solar door remaining firmly closed to her husbands. The smell of wood burning fills her lungs, but nothing will move the ache in her bones.
Her journal is pressed between her hands, but she doesn’t have the heart to write. She’s written so much about her pain. How she’s coped. How she’s moved on. But this pain...is too much. It is hers.
She doesn’t move from her spot, sitting vigil for her son. Pleas for her to sleep go ignored. Food and kind words are offered, to variable effect.
Her only comfort is that Morgan has survived, and it’s plain to everyone that she cannot stand the next Trial. Her mind too shattered... too incomplete.
Isolde runs her fingers through soft auburn hair, and catches herself thinking, If only he, too…
No. She wouldn’t wish this on any more of her children.
If Geralt dies, she doesn’t know what she’d do.
But it won’t be pretty for anyone.
-
The moment there’s a tentative knock on the solar door, Isolde is on her feet. Someone has come bearing news.
“He lives.”
Those are the only words she needs to hear before she’s rushing out of the room.
“Isolde, please. You need sleep—”
“I need to see my son. Try to stop me and I will stab you, Tjron.” Isolde huffs, side-stepping the tall man.
-
Geralt has yet to waken by the time Isolde has arrived, and she’s glad for it. She sits at the edge of his bed, using the barest touch to brush his hair back.
“Oh, you little shit.” She whispers and Geralt’s eyelids flutter.
“Mama Isolde?” His voice is weak from screaming, eyes cloudy with exhaustion.
Isolde picks up his hand, kissing where the restraints left horrid marks. “I’m here, you little bastard. You lived.”
“I couldn’t leave Eskel alone, could I?”
“Oh, certainly. Eskel.” She rolls her eyes. “I’m so proud of you.”
He starts to smile.
“You look awful.”
“I know.”
“You know what?”
“I know how I look now. I saw...I saw in the river.” Geralt’s eye close again, expression contorted in pain.
“So?”
“I look more monster than human.”
“No more or less than any of your brothers. Can you walk?”
-
Isolde spirits Geralt into the Kitchen, settling him carefully next to the fires with quiet Morgan tucked against his side, each of them humming back and forth.
She says it’s to keep an eye on them, but every damn wife in the keep knows it's because the mages can’t come here.
Vesemir hangs like a spectre at the door, opening and closing his mouth like he’s dying to say something. Always stopping short, a longing in his eyes.
Fuck his longing.
Isolde plies Geralt with food and drink, whatever his stomachs can manage. She might not have been able to stop the Dreams but damn everyone if she couldn’t care for him now.
-
Isolde stands on the curtain wall, watching the newly minted Witchers train. There’s a ghost of a smile on her face watching Geralt and Eskel spar. Those two…
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sure you are, Vesemir. But for what? Are you sorry that you let them take him or sorry that I’m upset?”
“I’m not sorry that we took him for the Trial. Look at him.” The silver wolf nodded towards Geralt. “This is his choice...I’m sorry that it caused you so much pain. As much as you will never forgive me, he wouldn’t have forgiven either of us if we had held him back.”
She doesn’t flinch from his touch as she clenches her teeth. “You’re right. I won’t forgive you. But...he is happy.”
“Truce then, love?”
“Hm.”
“Come. Your vigil is over.”
-
As they lay in bed together Isolde thinks:
If he won’t protect his children, I will.