Chapter Text
Lambert stood uneasily at the door of the tidy little farmhouse. He’d made the decision to come here, because he was tired and sore and fucked-up over everything and he didn’t have anywhere else to go and he just wanted to rest, and the invitation was open, and his stuff was here, and he didn’t… have anywhere else to go, or anyone else really.
Kaer Morhen without Vesemir was an empty husk; Geralt was off with Ciri, and Eskel had agreed they’d never return to the fortress. They’d all hauled out anything they wanted to save, and burned the rest. The ruin was empty. There was nowhere else for him to go. But now that he was here it felt. Weird.
He hesitated a moment longer, raised his hand to knock, then lowered it again. No, Keira had said she wanted him to come back here, it was fine.
They’d spent a couple of weeks together, all told, had sex once drunk and a couple times sober, which he wasn’t about to admit put her in first place for longevity among his relationships with women. After the big fight with the Wild Hunt at Kaer Morhen, she hadn’t known where to go, and so he’d shown her this place-- not too far, down in Kaedwen, it was a ruined farmhouse with a wraith problem that he’d sure found the edges of, but had never solved. He’d used the spot as a great cache point for a solid decade now, had kept the house from falling completely into disrepair and had kept the nearby village safe from everything else, and in turn they’d never really bothered him about somehow never fixing the wraith issue out here. A couple of years back their herbalist had died, and he’d sold them a lot of stuff over the years to tide them over in the meantime, but this seemed a perfect solution. Nobody here would ask too many questions about a perhaps slightly-overly-powerful herbalist and cunning woman, nobody really cared why it had taken Lambert fifteen-twenty years to finally get rid of the wraiths, nobody was left who’d been trying to inherit this old farmhouse, and now here was a great place Keira could set up shop and be out of reach of anybody with political aspirations until shit settled down in the wider world. The alderman was glad to give him a gift of the place instead of paying him for the wraiths, which had been underpriced on the reward anyway.
Keira had of course promised to keep Lambert’s stuff safe, in return-- and not just the stuff he’d already had cached here. She’d come back and kept him from burning all the shit that was left in Kaer Morhen that he couldn’t carry far enough to cache but couldn’t bear to leave to, like, future archaeologists or whoever came to desecrate the corpse, and portaled it out of the ruins to store it here instead, and obviously she wanted him to come here because she’d said so, and if she didn’t, well-- why did he care? If she’d changed her mind then she could tell him to his face, fuck that. He raised his hand again and brought it forward to knock on the door, and the door swung open.
He stood there a moment, staring at it. Fucking mages. But she was in the room just inside, standing up from a chair, her tits halfway out as usual and her hair weirdly flawlessly-styled and her face porcelain-doll made-up even though she’d been, apparently, at home, alone, by all appearances hard at work on some writings spread out across the kitchen table. “Lambert,” she said cheerfully, “there you are. I had the door spelled to let you in, I hope that wasn’t weird.”
“I was going to knock,” he said, and that sounded stupid. “Uh--”
“Your horse can go right in the stables,” she said. “Do you need help getting your things?”
“I can manage,” he said.
“Let me help,” she said, and followed him out the door without putting any shoes on, or a coat, or anything. It was spitting a mixture of rain and ice, fitfully, and she was just all pale exposed skin like it was summertime, but he noticed as she stepped in a puddle that her foot didn’t get wet.
“Are you wearing invisible shoes?” he demanded.
She laughed. “Don’t sound so mad about it,” she said. “For the record, they’re not invisible shoes, exactly.”
“I don’t care what they are,” he said, disgusted, though not on any deep level. What a profligate waste of magic. But, probably it didn’t take that much to maintain. Still, what if the spell gave out in the middle of a hard fight? Now that he thought of it, she’d worn shoes in battle, hadn’t she?
He couldn’t remember. He knew she owned shoes. Didn’t she? No, she’d definitely had some on during the whole thing with the wraiths. Cute boots, red leather. She owned shoes.
She took his saddlebags, which were far heavier than she should have been able to carry so easily, but of course, as his medallion reminded him, magic. He decided he was tired enough that he didn’t care. He saw to his horse himself, and was glad to see that it was a normal stable, with real actual hay and genuine oats and nothing magical about the water either. Just a regular old stable, with another regular old horse in it, and signs that someone who knew what they were doing came by to see to the place occasionally at least.
So, the townsfolk were working out well, too. He’d hoped so. It would’ve been shitty if they’d turned out to be assholes after all, after he’d spent so long cultivating them.
A stall at the far end turned out to contain not a horse, but a goat. He stared into it in blank surprise for a moment, and the goat turned its head up to him and bleated at him.
It was Eskel’s damn goat. He’d forgotten they’d brought her here. There was a trunk of Eskel’s in the room with Lambert’s stuff, too. The goat had a name. Li’l… something. Probably not Li’l Shitter. Li’l… something-er. Fuck. Well, it didn’t matter, goats didn’t care what you called them.
He fed her a turnip, and tried not to think about Eskel, who was out there somewhere as lonely as he was. Where would Eskel go for the winter? Fuck. He went back to his horse.
Keira came back out to get the rest of his luggage as he was finished grooming the horse, and he took his personal luggage but let her take the provisions and things. Everything was a bit light, but he did have some choice specimens.
“I got you something,” he said as they went in the front door, and she gave him a keen look and he had a moment of insecurity. Fuck, that had been boyfriendy of him, which wasn’t what he’d meant. He wasn’t, like, courting her, like they were humans or something. “It’s-- uh, it’s not anything amazing, but I figured you could use it.” He dug through one of his saddlebags until he found the parcel in question, a well-wrapped jar. He pulled off the spare bandage rags he’d had it packed in and handed it over.
She realized immediately what it was. “A cockatrice eye! Oh, those are fantastically useful, thank you ever so much for thinking of me. It did strike me that I ought to have commissioned you to pick some things up for me, but to be honest I thought you’d stop by again sooner.”
Lambert shrugged awkwardly. He’d sold the other eye for a pretty sum, but the buyer hadn’t been able to afford both, and he’d hit on his plan of saving it for Keira then rather than insulting himself by offering a discount. It made a handy gift now but he was worried it would come across as too clingy of him. However, this was a straightforward offer of work, and he wouldn’t reject that out of hand at all. “I mean,” he said. “I usually spend the whole season out. This is a little earlier than I usually come back.” He weighed it, mentally. He was tired, but he always needed more work. He didn’t want to freeload off her generosity more than he could help; dependency was a terrible precedent. “If there’s something you really need, I can make another trip out before winter really sets in.”
“I don’t think there’s anything I really need,” she said. “This, though-- I’ll be right back, I’m going to pop this right into my workshop, I’ve just the thing for it.”
When she came back, her hands were empty, but she was smiling. “Let me get you something to drink-- and you’re probably hungry, aren’t you?”
“I’m always hungry,” Lambert said, “it really doesn’t matter.” He’d eaten on the way, cold trail rations-- he wasn’t going to show up hungry when he wasn’t sure of his welcome. He could always eat more, he’d been hungry so long he didn’t feel it anymore and he was on the last hole on all his fucking belts, which was a pain in the ass, but-- hard times all around, really.
“Ha,” she said, “well, I’ll get something started, anyway-- I should eat, too.” She went over to the door down into the root cellar and poked around, then pulled up a nice iron pot and hung it on the warming arm, then swung that over the fire. His medallion gave a little buzz; she’d magicked food into there, or it had been under a preservation spell or something.
He realized he had no idea if she knew how to cook. The whole time they’d been together before, he’d just done it. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could just pick up, you had to be taught. Mage school probably didn’t cover it. He’d learned, had been taught, by his mother and by the instructors at Kaer Morhen-- both how to cook in a kitchen, and how to cook on a campfire.
But if she could just do it with magic-- well, that was unnerving, but he wasn’t going to turn it down.
She handed him a cup with what smelled like quite strong beer in it, which was welcome too. “You’ll probably be wanting a bath,” she said, “at least to warm up, but take off your wet jacket and dry out by the fire for a bit first.”
He didn’t mind if he did. He sat and unfastened his boots and gradually pulled off his outer clothes and much of his armor, and she sat across from him and made idle conversation. She told him a story about a stupid client she’d had, and he told a story about a contract, and it felt pleasant and he wasn’t sure what to do with the feeling. This almost counted as small talk, which was something he could do but he couldn’t keep it up infinitely.
When he’d drunk most of the beer and was down to almost as little clothing as she was wearing-- no armor, no shoes or socks, shirt sleeves, just trousers-- she said, a bit coyly, “I went shopping.”
“Did you,” he said warily, picking up that this was something that involved him, but not much beyond that.
“Well,” she said. “Your request, from earlier. It turned out I didn’t actually have the necessary components. So I picked up… something I think will be suitable, and a couple of options.”
“My request,” he said blankly.
“And I was talking to Yennefer about something else, but she happened to offer me a spell she has, for just such a use,” Keira went on. “She and I are-- we’re not close usually, but there are… some things we talk about.”
“A spell,” he said blankly. “What--”
“You know,” she said. “For use with the.” She hesitated. “Specialty item.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“That’s obvious,” she said, with a laugh, but he had a sudden creeping suspicion that she was nervous. “Perhaps you were too drunk to remember the conversation.”
Too drunk to-- he’d only been drunk with her the one time, the rest of the time they’d been busy with practical shit. What had he requested when he’d--
“Oh,” he said, suddenly remembering. He hadn’t been able to let it go, and he knew he’d been an idiot about it, but he didn’t exactly remember what the end of the conversation had been, but-- ever since Geralt had made all his insinuations about just what Yennefer had been doing to leave him limping around like that, Lambert had been thinking about-- ah, fuck, he didn’t usually let his mouth run quite like that.
Keira’s expression shifted to a knowing sort of delight, watching him-- ah fuck, he was blushing, he could feel his face getting hot. “Right,” he said.
“I’m just saying,” she said, “if you’re not too tired, we could give it a try this evening. Or not! I had fun shopping and even if you don’t want to use it, I have plenty of use for it myself.”
“Oh,” he said hastily, and then didn’t know how to follow it up. “I’m-- interested. I’m-- I’m pretty tired but I’m not-- too tired.” His face was burning like he’d taken a Thunderbolt, fuck, this was embarrassing. But he wasn’t the kind of idiot to feign disinterest in something he-- well, shit, something he really wanted.
He hadn’t been sure if she’d want to fuck him again. He didn’t get a lot of. Well, he didn’t make a lot of offers, was what it was. Eskel didn’t count, and apart from him, well. There hadn’t been anybody since--
-- since--
He couldn’t really think about that, though, not and keep functioning. The thing was, he wasn’t good at sex without feelings. He tended to grow them, if people were too nice to him, and-- well, this had a lot of danger signs. The last thing he needed was to grow feelings for a fucking heart-eating sorceress. Mages were bad news, he knew that down to his bones.
But. He really didn’t want to go out and be cold and alone either and he’d been so fucking lonely and everything fucking hurt, inside, and he didn’t know what else he was going to do. And she’d been-- really fucking nice, was the thing, and it was perfectly straightforward, they’d helped each other out, and enjoying one another’s company was just a nice bonus, and he was too tired to resist that.
She grinned, sort of coy and sort of pleased and a little shy, actually, and sat back in her chair. “Good,” she said. “I’m glad you’re not-- too tired.”
“I’m just warning you,” he said, “if you think I’m going to be smooth, I’m not ever smooth, I’m awkward as fuck. If you get me drunk I can pretend to be smooth but I didn’t bring enough booze with me for that.”
“I don’t need you drunk,” she said. “I don’t need you smooth. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I’m, well. Sort of awkward, myself.”
“Well,” he said. “Good. Then we can be awkward together.”
Dinner was surprisingly good, and it turned out she didn’t know how to cook, she just bought things premade and put preserving charms on them and left them ready to go so she wouldn’t have to interrupt work she was interested in. She cleared off the writings from the table and packed them away before he could get a good look, which it struck him to be suspicious about but he just didn’t have the energy for that at this point.
Their dinner conversation was surprisingly engaging. She had interesting insights into the current political scene, including some good intel about how Ciri was faring with Emhyr and what the rest of the Lodge of Sorceresses, which she was avoiding any hint of rejoining, was up to without her, and listened in turn to what he’d seen with keen interest that didn’t make it feel like she was prying, somehow.
He was prepared to just settle in and shoot the shit for a while longer, but she stood up and cleared the dishes with a gesture (were they vanished? Had she put them in the sink? Were they magically clean and back in the cupboards now? How did that work? Maybe she’d tell him, maybe she wouldn’t. He didn’t ask) and said, “I have a-- if you don’t mind a magical, er, trip through a portal, I take my baths in there and it’s always set up. Would that be too weird? I could probably find a tub if I tried hard enough.”
“A magical,” Lambert said, and let that trail off. He hated portals, but there were worse things in the world, and he was interested enough in this to give it a shot. “Well, fuck, sure. Why the hell not.”
“I think I have a robe that’ll fit you,” she said, “and I keep a lot of towels in there already. Hold on, and I’ll show you the way in there.”
“I have no idea what this is,” Lambert said, blinking at what sure enough was a portal that had popped open when she’d moved a weird-looking skull on a shelf.
“I built this whole thing when I was stuck hiding as a hedgewitch in Velen,” she said, and she had her arms full of soft fabric, a sumptuous green and black brocade. She took his hand, which he hadn’t expected, and her fingers were cool and smooth against his. “Come on, it’s safe. I put a lot of effort into it, and so even though now I’ve got this place which is plenty big enough that I could put in a more normal bathhouse, I still--”
It was warm on the other side of the portal, through the odd wooden doorway, and it was like being outdoors, in a forest, at night, but there were a paucity of the usual forest scents. And there was no sky, it had a cave ceiling. It didn’t smell much like a cave. A little cool rock and fungus, but mostly it smelled of forest-- loam, earth, trees, sap, water. Rabbits-- a rabbit hopped by. There were flowers, night-blooming ones, heavily fragrant, and he followed her down a charming well-beaten path to some ruined steps, and up, and there was a tiled tub, lit with torches, set against a picturesquely ruined bit of wall, and it was full of fresh hot water, propelled through some little jets somehow, like a hot spring but without much of the harsh mineral scent springs usually carried.
“Anyway,” she said, “I liked it, so-- It doesn’t take any effort to maintain now, really-- I already spent the energy on it. So I might as well. You can use it anytime you like, it doesn’t take magic to access it, just the portal setup and that’s tied to that skull now, so it’s easy enough to access.”
“What the fuck,” Lambert said, mentally still stuck several minutes earlier, back at the portal. The tub was tiled in tiny mosaic tiles, glittering in the torchlight.
“It’s nice,” she said, a little defensive. She hung her armload of fabric on an ornate metal hook in the wall next to another hanging bundle of fabric-- printed silk, the other fabric looked like. There was a shelf nearby, full of towels and washcloths and things, all neatly folded. “Look, use as many towels as you want, they’re real-- just bring them back through the portal when you’re done so I can send them to the laundry, there’s not a laundry in here. There’s a shelf over there with soap-- the soap is real too, none of it is magic because then the effects would dissipate and I don’t want that. The water’s real too, you really do stay clean after you bathe in here. It’s not an illusion.”
“How does this work?” Lambert asked, incredulous. “How big is it? Could I just go running off that path and-- go other places?”
“No,” she said, “it’s all self-contained, it’s a cave and it dead-ends. I didn’t actually make it very big. I thought about putting more into it, but-- this is all I could really come up with, at the time, and it did kind of take a lot of effort.”
“But it’s not an illusion,” Lambert said, squinting suspiciously around.
“It’s not,” she said. “It’s a real place, it’s just-- elsewhere.”
“Wow,” he said, frowning intently. He’d-- he had a thing, a magical doohickey, he’d picked up this last time out, and it showed him illusions and let him see through them and dispel them, but as he patted his pockets he realized he’d shed his gambeson so he didn’t have it on him. That was odd, that he hadn’t thought twice about -- Well, that was fine, he’d have to take another look at the place some other time. “So I just--”
“You can just take a bath,” she said. “Do you want privacy or company?”
Lambert considered that. “Well,” he said. “I mean-- company’s nice but I should warn you, I’m pretty thoroughly trained not to have sex in the bath, they beat that into us at Kaer Morhen.”
“It was a concern?” she said, amused.
“Bunch of hormone-addled teenagers and some hot springs? Hell yes it was a concern,” he said.
“Kaer Morhen had hot springs?” she said, seizing onto the important part of that.
“Had,” he said. “They wrecked it when they sacked the place.”
“Ah,” she said. “Well… for what it’s worth I’ve never had sex in this bathtub anyway.” She smiled, and tossed her hair a little, a mannered affectation that Lambert struggled not to find annoying. Sometimes what had to be the real her peeked through, and sometimes she reverted to this sort of bullshit, and he wasn’t sure who had taught her she had to do that sort of thing. “Who’s to say a man and a woman cannot share a bath without untoward shenanigans?”
“Not a man,” Lambert said, on pure reflex, and he was suddenly even more tired than he had been.
“A Witcher, then,” she said, which... wasn’t wrong. She sighed. “For what it’s worth I suppose by that logic I’m not a woman either.” And she gave him a funny little sidelong glance.
He thought about getting more into it-- he wasn’t a man, and she ought to know that if she was fucking him-- and then thought how tired he was, and let it drop. Just like he had every other time it had come up so far. He was a fucking chickenshit coward who was going to keep getting what he deserved as long as he failed to fix the problem. “Well, I’m getting in, and getting some soap on here, because I’ve downright got a patina and I’m not pleased about it.”
She giggled, and he shed his trousers and stripped off his shirt before he could think more on that. He didn’t waste any time, but stepped out of his braies and into the water, and sank down onto one of the warm, tiled benches with a sigh.
He cracked an eye to watch her undressing, which she did mostly normally, though there was definitely a hum in his medallion as she undid some magical thing or other. Maybe her invisible shoes, he sure hoped she didn’t bathe in those. Anyway, she was as ever a pleasure to look at, and she slipped gracefully into the water and perched just about arm’s reach away, sighing as she submerged herself to the shoulders.
He ducked his head underwater and scrubbed at his scalp for a long time, finally coming up when he felt something touch his shoulder. “Mm?”
Keira was staring at him. “You-- how long can you hold your breath?”
He grinned. “Quarter of an hour, at least,” he said. He felt a great deal better already, for having scrubbed out a lot of the accumulated filth. He looked down at the water. “Hope that wasn’t too much dirt.”
“No,” she said, “it flows through, it’s fine.” She laughed. “I’m upstream.”
“Sensible,” he said. “Ah, I’m going to soap up and then submerge for a while. Keep count if you like, I’ll stay under a bit.”
“Don’t,” she said, and laughed in mild distress and amusement. “Oh no!”
He made a show of looking around as he picked up the bar of soap and one of the neatly-folded washcloths she’d brought to the edge of the pool. “I’m not going to drown,” he said, “unless something holds me under the water, and since apparently you created this whole world, you’d know if you created something that’d be holding unwary Witchers underwater?”
“Hmm,” she said, still unconvinced, but she sat back. Her breasts… behaved slightly oddly in the water, and he eyed them critically for a moment; there was maybe an illusion or something on there, or something, that wasn’t letting them move freely.
Well, it wasn’t his business, exactly. He rubbed soap into his hair and did his ears and the back of his neck and then took the soap, wrapped it in the wet washcloth, and submerged himself, as he’d said he would, and stayed under while he scrubbed the rest of himself, toes and soles and ankles and shins and knees and thighs and groin and ass and belly and inside his belly button and all the way up his ribs and all he could reach of his back, his armpits and his arms and under his fingernails, and his chest and his neck, and then he lay there for a while on the bottom of the pool, opening his eyes as he felt the soap wash away and leave the water clear.
Keira was sitting on her bench fidgeting a little, fingers lacing together and then unlacing. He could admire her from this vantage point, though she disappeared above the surface of the water at right about breast level and then, of course, was hard to see, given how light refracted. So he admired her legs, which unfortunately she was keeping demurely pressed closed, probably because she was nervous and uncomfortable because he was doing weird Witchery shit.
She was awfully pretty, and he wondered how much of it was real. What he liked about her were the tantalizing glimpses she gave him of the real person, but she was wrapped up in so much bullshit, like she felt she had to put on a show all the time. Of course the very most attractive part was the way she could shoot fucking lightning out of her hands and destroy enemies, but that was also the most frightening part of her and you couldn’t really build a relationship on that sort of aroused terror. Her sarcasm and dry sense of humor and fantastic tits had filled in the rest and at this point he was fairly hooked.
Well, it didn’t matter; he still wasn’t sure what it was she liked about him, and figured it was too much to ask for to try and get her to just be genuine with him. This was pretty explicitly a convenience thing, not like, a marriage of true loves, so. He let the last of his breath out, and came up to the surface, greatly relaxed and much, much cleaner.
She had her arms crossed across her breasts, and startled a little as he surfaced, though he came up gently, letting his face break the surface and then sitting up. “I feel about a thousand times better,” he said. “How long was that? I was done so I came up before I ran out of air.”
“I wasn’t actually keeping track,” she said, “but it was probably around five minutes.”
“Yeah I can go a lot longer than that,” he said, digging in his ear briefly to get the water to flow out. “Especially if I’m not swimming around or like, fighting. Takes up a lot of air, that kind of thing.”
“I imagine so,” she said. “You really don’t need me to keep time, though.”
“No,” he said. “I have a pretty good handle on it, myself.” He stretched his neck, feeling his shoulders unlock. “Fuck, if this were about nine degrees hotter I would never leave, I would just live right here.”
She laughed. “That would get boring for me, alas.” She sat up a little. “Oh, I should have brought some wine.”
“I’d fall asleep,” Lambert said, and sprawled out, submerging himself to the lower lip, with his head tipped back a bit and his arms hooked on the edge of the tub. “Ah. No, sleeping in the tub’s a terrible idea.”
“Nine degrees warmer,” Keira said thoughtfully. “I’m aware Witchers have a higher average body temperature than humans, but it’s not nine whole degrees hotter.”
“No,” Lambert said, “but we also don’t feel pain the same way, so it’s not like it’s gonna hurt.” He sat up slightly, looking around the weird cave-forest with a sudden burst of interest. “You don’t have a cold pool too, do you?”
“I don’t,” she said, after a thoughtful pause. She slid him a look. “Why?”
“The absolute fucking best thing,” he said, “is to sit in a hot pool until you can’t stand it, and then run and jump into a cold pool until you can’t stand it, and then run back into the hot pool until you can’t stand it. Really makes you appreciate being alive.”
“Is this like how the Kaedweni hit each other with birch branches sometimes?” she asked suspiciously.
“Oh,” Lambert said, “maybe, but I never went in for that. Just the cold and hot pools.”
She sighed, sinking down lower into the tub so the water washed up onto her shoulders. It did not wet the ends of her hair where it touched them, which solidified his suspicion that maybe her hair was entirely an illusion. He’d have to get that illusion-showing thingy out.
But then, maybe it would be rude. What did it matter what her hair actually looked like? If she wanted him to see it as flawless and shiny and weirdly swoopy at the ends, then that’s what she wanted, and why did he care if it was something else? This was at least a harmless illusion. Obviously it wasn’t like it was taking her effort she couldn’t easily spare to maintain it, if she was also wearing invisible shoes for no fucking reason most of the time.
He was going to buy her a pair of house slippers next time he was out and about. The fuzzy kind, sheepskin, that laced up the ankle. Unglamorous, practical, well-made, and comfy. That was what he was going to do, and he was going to see if she would actually wear them or if she was too busy having invisible shoes.
“I guess I could make you a cold pool,” she said, just as Lambert was mentally frozen evaluating the fact that he had just started making future plans to annoy her. “There could be room in here for that sort of nonsense.”
“I mean,” he said, and then didn’t know how to go on. “You don’t have to.”
“Well of course I don’t have to,” she said, “but I could, is the thing, and then I could find out whether what you’re describing is the sort of thing any kind of sane person would like, or if it’s just a mad Witcher thing.”
“Non-Witchers like that kind of shit,” Lambert said reasonably. “I have plenty of mad Witcher things, but that’s not one of them.” He gave up on freaking out about it, and said, “Do you own regular real visible shoes?”
“I do,” she said. “I’ll wear some later if you want.”
He laughed. “It’s not a question of want.”
“Do the illusions and glamors and things bother you?” she asked. “I’m never quite sure what that medallion of yours can sense, I don’t mean to alarm you.”
“You don’t have to--” he began, and then reminded himself they didn’t know one another all that well. “I mean. You should do what you want but like. I don’t-- I’m not going to be in any position to judge, like, what your hair looks like.”
She touched the ends of her hair, which should be wet but weren’t, and her expression was hard to read, eyebrows drawn in almost in a frown but mouth ambiguously taut. “Ah,” she said. “Well.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “And it’s not that I don’t appreciate that, uh. That you look nice, and, and that sort of thing. I do. It’s just. I don’t. If it’s an effort, you shouldn’t--”
She put her hand on his arm, stopping his speech. “If it helps you to know, I wear a fair number of illusions and glamors when I’m completely alone, as well.”
He regarded her for a moment, looking at her slender arm, the curve of her throat, the odd set of her face-- she thought he was going to make fun of her, perhaps, and he was, surely, that was how he was, but not-- like this. “Actually it does,” he said, as certainty crystallized in him; he hadn’t been sure how he felt about it but now he was. “If that’s how you want to look, you should look like that.”
“Some of it’s just keeping things under control and out of my way,” she said, letting go of his arm, but that slope to her shoulders was relief. Lambert had, for once in his entire life, said the right thing, and it felt weird and warm in his chest.
“Most of us don’t get that kind of chance to control things,” he said, and thought for a moment about what illusions he’d use if he had the ability. Mostly he was fine, he looked how he looked and it was all for decent practical reasons that felt good because they gave him control, but sometimes, well. His dad’s fucking hairline, for example, would be nice to take a break from. He couldn’t grow his hair out without looking like an idiot.
But, it was what it was.
“My hair’s frizzy if I don’t style it,” she said, like she was telling him a secret, “and it’s easiest to maintain if I do it magically.”
That made him laugh, hard enough that he rocked back. She looked alarmed briefly, and then her face set, and he stopped laughing because now she thought he was making fun of her again. “No,” he said, “no-- my hair is frizzy as shit and I gotta comb all kinds of fuckin’ shit through it to keep it under control, that’s all, I’m not laughing at you I’m laughing at me. Mutated to shit and the only thing I can do for my hair is, fuckin’, bear grease or whatever I can find, and you’re over here with magic.”
Her expression warmed, and turned-- fond, maybe? That was a lot to hope for, he’d settle for amused-- and she slid over next to him and knocked her shoulder against his, smiling. “Maybe I’ll make you some magical bear grease, then,” she said. “We can swap hair care tips.”
“Only if you want to look like hell,” he said. “My specialty-- my whole aesthetic, really-- is looking like hell at all times.”
She pressed her shoulder into his again, gentler. “I don’t think that’s true,” she said. “But. I could stand to look scarier, sometimes. I feel like maybe I’m a one-trick pony and my trick is getting old.”
He laughed, softer. “You want a makeover?” he said.
“I should change up my look,” she said. “I’ve actually been doing the Polite Fiction Of A Peasant schtick for rather a long time. But I don’t know where to go from here, really.”
“Brr,” he said, having a sudden vision of the other sorceress he’d spent a lot of time with, far less willingly, “don’t go all Yennefer of Vengerburg on me, the world doesn’t need two of her.”
Keira laughed. “Oh, pray tell, wise fashion counselor, what has she done that’s so wrong?”
“You can wear colors,” Lambert said, ticking off on his fingers, “you don’t have to enter a contest for Most Dramatic Bitch every time you enter or leave a room, you can have a conversation without it having to be a Series of Pronouncements, and did I mention you can wear clothing that contains some kind of colors?”
“I wasn’t going to overhaul my entire personality,” Keira said, and she was amused enough that her face had scrunched up, which was sort of adorable but he didn’t know if he should mention that. “Just my wardrobe.”
“Well,” Lambert said, “wear colors, I guess, and moreover maybe don’t make every single bodice in your wardrobe so heavily boned that your lungs creak.”
“I was thinking I’d stick to red and blue,” Keira said, “and I was going to stay blonde.”
“Good,” Lambert said, and then it struck him to wonder if he had a fucking type, but he dismissed that as quickly as it came; this was not the time for that kind of introspection. “I’d wear a lot more colors if they’d actually stay colors but I spend most of my life drenched in filth so there’d be no point.”
“You can wear colors with me,” she said, leaning harder on him for a moment. It occurred to him that maybe she was trying to jostle him but couldn’t actually move him, he was planted too firmly. He pushed back gently with his shoulder, careful not to slosh her.
“Sure,” he said, and thought slightly wistfully of that one box of clothes, that she’d kept him from burning without ever knowing what it contained. Maybe he could… well, he’d work up to that.
“But Yennefer’s not all bad,” Keira said. “She was very generous with her time and information, when I met with her.”
“That’s nice,” Lambert said. “She scares the fuck out of me.”
Keira laughed. “I’m not saying she’s not formidable,” she said, “but she’s not so bad as all that.”
“Easy for you to say,” Lambert said, looking down at her. “You can shoot lightning out of your hands and, like, fly.”
“You can shoot flames out of your fingers,” Keira said, amused. “It’s not like you’re some slouch.”
Lambert made a face, leaned back and held up his hand, casting the tiniest little Igni so it flickered in place, just enough that he could have lit a candle with it. “Mm,” he said, “so impressive. Meanwhile Yennefer unhinges her jaw and swallows me whole.” He let the Igni go out and pulled his hand underwater fast enough to generate a little hiss of steam where the Sign had just been. “I have no real illusions about my place in the food chain, here.”
“I wouldn’t eat you whole unless you asked,” Keira offered lightly.
He looked narrowly sidelong at her, trying to gauge how she’d meant that. He knew more about sexual fetishes than many people despite being far less interested in sex than most of his cohort, because he’d found it amusing to seek out books about the more disturbing fetishes and leave them in Geralt’s room, so he knew fine well that there were people for whom being actually devoured was a devout sexual fantasy, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you just… mentioned, particularly not if you weren’t sure how the joke was going to go over. People tended to assume you were into whatever it was, if you had to explain it, and then you sounded like you were just in denial when you insisted you weren’t.
He’d made the mistake once of making a joke about foot fetishes to Aiden, one time, and Aiden had never let him live it down, had forever afterward made jokes, had gone so far as to--
Ah, fuck, he’d done it now, he’d thought of him. He closed his eyes, just as Keira laughed wildly.
“Oh no!” she said, “you know about vore, don’t you.”
“I wasn’t going to say it,” he said.
“If you’re into that,” she said, mock-earnestly, “I support you, but I’m, uh.”
Lambert stared morosely down through the water at his feet, and hers, and thought of how Aiden would have seized upon Lambert’s distress at Keira’s stupid invisible shoes as irrefutable evidence of the foot fetish he refused to acknowledge, and then he considered maybe going back down to lie on the bottom of the pool for a while.
He laughed, bitterly. “It was an inside joke,” he said thinly, as awkward silence fell. “Fuck, it was an inside joke, and--” He couldn’t say any more.
“And you’re the only one who knows why it was funny, now,” she said quietly.
“Fuck,” he said, and closed his eyes. Finally, he laughed again at himself, sharp and bitter, and said, “It fucking-- wasn’t even about vore, I was trying to explain foot fetishes, actually, and he refused to believe that this was something I just knew about and not something I actually had, and it was a running joke for years that I was really into feet but couldn’t face it, and.” He breathed in, and let it out.
“Close friend?” she said.
“Closest,” he said.
She put her arms around him, gently but firmly enough he didn’t feel like he had to throw her off and shrink away, and held on, pulling him close. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know what that’s like.”
“Fuck,” he said, breathing through it; it felt like a big knot in his stomach. It had been well over a year. No, more than two now. Fuck. He was too warm to shiver but he twitched, all over, and then took a breath in and let it out.
“I’ll wear visible shoes,” she said, very solemnly and sympathetically, “so I don’t tempt you with my harlot toes.”
“Fuck you,” he said, laughing, and pushed her away, though not as roughly as he would have another Witcher. She was an all-powerful sorceress with lightning hands and powers of levitation but she just had human bones, after all.
She laughed. “Well,” she said, “I’m not going to lie, I had been hoping you would.”
Lambert was almost dizzy with the sudden changes in intense emotion, and it was almost as good for this sort of thing as being drunk. Feeling something was a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing, even if it was hard to keep up with.
He pushed off and fetched up with his arms bracketing her against the side of the pool. She was flushed from the heat, eyes sparkling with amusement at his reaction, and she tipped her head back a little, clearly letting him corral her against the side of the pool. Under the water, her thighs slid slick and weightless around his waist, and she leaned into his grasp a bit, lips parting, eyes going half-shut. Human bones or no, she wasn’t afraid of him, not one bit.
He looked down into her face. “Is that what you want?” he asked. It came out harder-edged than he’d meant; he’d been going for playful but the grief had clawed him open and he was raw and a little wild with it.
He couldn’t smell her, not over the scent of the water, but he could see how her pupils went a little wider, feel how her heart picked up. Oh, she was into it. He pried his hands off the edge of the pool and slid them under her thighs, grabbed her by the ass and picked her up, standing up in the water.
“Well, I already said, not in the pool,” he said, and carried her out of it, dripping. He pressed her against the wall, dripping, and kissed her.
She moaned and kicked her feet a little, though he could tell she wasn’t trying to get free. Maybe she was trying to say something but he didn’t give her a chance to, he just kept kissing her, hard and deep and aggressive. Her heart had kicked way up now and her hands were tight on his shoulders, holding on.
Finally she did pull away, though, and blinked up at him, breathing hard. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s where I wanted to go with this. But let me dry off, and come back to the real world with me, hm?”
“If you insist,” he said, and let her down. She handed him a towel from the shelf, and he took it and wrapped it around himself, a bit surprised to realize how large it was.
She toweled herself off, and her breasts moved much more normally-- she must have shed whatever enchantment or illusion was on them. She noticed him looking and smiled at him, conspiratorially, as if her breasts were some kind of secret she was letting him in on.
She was so weird. He liked her, and he liked her most when she was being weird. He didn’t know how to explain that. In a moment she’d surely pull herself together and do something she felt like she was supposed to, and he’d be vaguely annoyed and wrong-footed and have to kind of muddle through going along with it. There had to be a better way.
He put his hand around the back of her neck and kissed her forehead before he could think better of it. It wasn’t a sexy thing to do, wasn’t romantic, was just fond, and they didn’t really know one another well enough for him to be fond, but-- well, she was cute, she was being cute, he wasn’t going to second-guess the impulse. She giggled, and he let go and went to the hook where she’d hung up the fabric she’d been carrying.
“I think the green one will fit you,” she said, and he hesitated a moment before pulling down what turned out to be quite a sumptuous robe in a green tone-on-tone brocaded fabric shot with black that must have been fantastically expensive. It was lined, inside, with soft, soft fabric, dark green and smooth, maybe silk. He toweled himself off a little better before pulling it on, suddenly concerned he’d get water spots on something too nice to be against his perpetually-filthy skin.
But he was clean, just now, and he toweled his hair dry and then pulled the robe around himself. It was below his calves, below his elbows, and was voluminous enough that it went over his shoulders-- probably, the shoulder seams were meant to be dropped low, but they hit at his actual shoulders, and the belt hit a little above where he wore his trousers, but below his ribs, near his natural waist-- where he tended to wear skirts-- and the skirt of the robe was full, had godets at the hips so it would fall over full skirts if necessary, it had yards of fabric in it, all lined, and it swirled around his legs in a soft heavy sweep of pure bliss.
She pulled on her own robe, a shorter printed-silk one in pale blue and pink that wasn’t nearly so nice-- unlined, she’d freeze-- and made a face. “Sorry,” she said, “it’s one of mine, it’s a bit girly-- but I don’t exactly have a great stock of clothes for men in this house.” She hesitated. “Except, I guess, yours.”
My clothes aren’t a man’s clothes, he thought, but he was too distracted to bother saying it out loud. Instead, “Are you kidding,” he said, “this thing is fantastic.” He swiveled his hips a little so the fabric swished heavily around the backs of his knees, against his calves. “Fuck, I would live in this if I could.”
It smelled vaguely of perfume, but not too strongly. She gave him a critical once-over, adjusted the lay of the collar; it was cut like a woman’s garment, overlapped the wrong direction for a man’s, bared an expanse of his collarbones not in keeping with men’s fashion and left his forearms largely bare, but it did fit him well enough for freedom of movement.
“Well,” she said, “it’s too big for me and not my style, so you certainly can keep it.”
He laughed. “It’s not really my style for the Path, exactly, but.”
“Well,” she said, “it can go with all your other things, that stay here,” and she smiled and patted his shoulder. “Let’s go, I want to get on with our evening.”
All your other things, he thought, that stay here. All his things that were in this mage’s house, all the time. Like the box of all his other fancy clothes that were totally unsuited for the Path, that he only ever wore in rare truly private moments. That he’d only ever worn with--
Ah, he was back to thinking of him again. It was inevitable. Among the things in that box were the shoes Aiden had bought him, partly to be an ass and partly seriously. They were beautiful shoes, completely unsuited to a Witcher, and Lambert didn’t think he could ever wear them again, had only ever put them on briefly, but owning them was important, and in this moment he was suddenly, excruciatingly glad he hadn’t burned them, that Keira had given him a place to keep these things he couldn’t carry but couldn’t bear to let someone else find.
He gathered up his dirty clothes, slotted one of his knives in its sheath into the sash belt of the robe so he’d have it with him, and followed her back through the portal, wordless, gnawing at whatever emotion was filling his whole midsection even as he thrilled at the way the robe’s skirt swished around his legs as he walked. It felt so good, it was so soft, it was so heavy, it was so full.
“The more I look at you, the more I think how well that robe looks on you,” Keira said. “And here I was thinking it wasn’t your style.”
“I got unexpected depths,” Lambert managed to say, though it came out a bit hoarse. “Or like. Breadths. I don’t know how deep any of it is.”
She laughed and knocked her shoulder against his as she led him through the portal and back into her kitchen. “Knowing you it’s unexpectedly deep too,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
She laughed, and didn’t answer. Probably, she wasn’t laughing at him, though by rights she probably ought to be. “If you want to check the other bedroom, where all your things are-- I don’t know if there’s anything in there you really want to check in on? I sealed the wards around it when you left and I haven’t been in there but you might want to get some of your spare clothes or something, make sure everything’s all right?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” he said. She’d made a big deal out of sealing the wards, when he’d been here before. He’d appreciated it, a bit; the important stuff was in locked boxes, but he’d been so fucked-up over everything that had happened, he hadn’t really given it that much thought. After everything, he’d just sort of-- taken her word for it.
“This way, then,” she said, and led him through the next room, to the one after-- two rooms opened directly off the room off the kitchen, and she stood in front of one of the doors and gestured. The wards fell away, he recognized that was what they were as they dissolved, and he remembered standing here as she’d cast them.
She pushed the door open, and then stood aside. “I’ll just be-- the other room is where I sleep,” she said. “I-- if you want to-- the bed in this room should be made, there’s firewood, if you want to build a fire you can stay in here, I won’t mind. If you’re too tired after all.”
He looked into the room, and used a Sign to light the lamp attached to the wall, and then looked over at her. From just the one glance he’d seen that the boxes and things were stacked just as he’d left them. The room was a little dusty; no one had set foot in it.
“I don’t really need anything in here right now,” he said. He didn’t want to be alone. Would it be pathetic to admit that? “It’s enough to know it’s there.” And he used a tiny Sign to put the lamp back out, and turned away from the door. “I’ll leave it open, it can get warm in there, air out a bit, but I don’t need to go in there until you kick me out of your room.”
She hesitated just a fraction, eyes lingering on the dark doorway, but then she smiled at him, looking genuinely delighted. “All right then,” she said, and held out her hand.
He took it, and followed her into her bedroom.