The knock came before dawn, the kind of polite hammering men practice when the coin in their purse doesn't quite match the weight in their chest. Geralt cracked the villa's door and found a knight in clean plate already squaring his shoulders for a declaration.
"The Lady Yennefer of Vengerberg summons you," the knight intoned, every vowel polished. "At once."
"Then she must have to be disappointed," Geralt said. "At once is a bell I don't answer."
The visor twitched. "You mistake the nature of a summons. It isn't a request."
Geralt's eyes went to the street—blank, river mist threatening to thicken, a barrow-boy two houses down pretending not to listen. He brought his gaze back and let it soften without warming. "I am not in the mood to see the lady."
"Then find a mood," the knight snapped, taking a step, hand on hilt, the rest of his life arranged behind that gesture.
Geralt raised two fingers, a tilt of the wrist like a man about to adjust a collar. His voice thinned to a thread only the knight would hear. "You'll return to your mistress," he murmured. "You delivered your message. He declined. That is all."
The knight's pupils dilated, then steadied. He saluted a fraction too late and turned. The tabard vanished past the gate with the light discipline of a man who would remember none of what he could not use.
Geralt stood for a heartbeat, listening to the city recalibrate. Then he went the other way, toward the back alley and the quiet stairs and the road that led, eventually, away from Vengerberg.
He didn't make the gate.
The crowd told him first: a hush moving ahead of the usual evening market, the way people make space for authority out of habit rather than fear. Then the horses: fine-boned Kaedweni stock paid for with Aedirnian coin, bridles stitched like bracelets. Knights held a shallow crescent across the cobbles, backed by a neat pair of liveried spearmen whose boots hadn't learned mud yet. And in the center, on a midnight mare draped in silver tack, a woman who turned most heads for one reason and Geralt's for a different one entirely.
Black on black: velvet and feathers, a high collar tipping shadows along the line of her jaw, hair like a rind of night. A single choker at her throat made a cool star above pale skin. She smelled like late spring in a bottle and a library that had learned to laugh only when no one listened. The air around her behaved. It often does, around a certain kind of will.
The front rank parted on cue. The woman gave one tiny, unamused smile without moving anything but the corners of her mouth.
"You sent my courier back with the idea that he'd done his job," she said. Her voice was low, contrary to expectation: not a clarion, not a pretty bell. Smoke on tempered glass. "How very… rustic."
"I told him I wasn't in the mood," Geralt said.
"Men who say they aren't in the mood often are. They simply dislike admitting it to women who will remember."
"Do you summon everyone you haven't met?"
"Only the interesting ones." Her eyes flicked like a cats'-—quick, curious, then bored if the prey didn't answer with something better than fear. "You are the first witcher I have invited. Indulge me."
He let his gaze skate over the knights, the spears, the mare's delicate ears flicking once at a far-off cart clatter. "You always ride around your own city like this?"
"I prefer the city to come to me," she said. "But sometimes the quarry insists on walking."
"Quarry."
"Don't pout. It doesn't suit your face." The small smile sharpened. "My name is Yennefer. We can begin there."
"Geralt."
"Of?"
He paused, for no one but himself. "Rivia."
"Mmm." She tilted her head as if hearing a wrong note and filing it away for later. "You wear your swords properly, at least. So many men insist on turning their backs into coat racks."
"Bows better from the hip."
"Also less performative." She looked past him to the rain-heavy horizon, then back. "I asked for a meeting. You declined. I came here instead. It has been a long day, witcher. Shall we be civilized, or shall we make the guards do paperwork?"
A knight to her left cleared his throat. "My lady, you—"
"Don't." Yennefer didn't look at him. The word was a hand pressed lightly to the breastbone of the evening.
Geralt rolled his shoulder, as if shifting a weight that wasn't there. "You want tea. Questions. A specimen in a jar that walks and answers in complete sentences."
"I want to know why men with silver eyes pretend they are deaf when spoken to," she said, same tone, softer teeth. "And I am curious what a body like yours feels like from the inside."
"That's a first-meeting line."
She laughed, brief and unpretty. "Relax. I meant your mind. One hears… contradictory things."
"As in?"
"As in: witchers are dull, witchers are dangerous, witchers have no emotions, witchers are all emotion in armor they don't understand, witchers are sterile, witchers breed death, witchers know more about weather and less about politics than anyone I've met, and—my favorite—that witchers can be bought with sausage if it is peppered enough."
"There's some truth in there."
"I refuse to dignify the sausage rumor with research." She shifted on the mare, impatient for something that wasn't this street. "Walk with me. Your choice of street. Slow enough for men who don't work for their living to keep up."
"And if I say no?"
She looked him over like a tailor measuring something expensive and unsigned. "You won't. You're curious too. Or you would have left by the western gate."
For a moment he considered telling her she was wrong. He didn't mind lying. He minded wasting anything that might become interesting. He stepped to the mare's shoulder. The knights rippled back like fabric losing its stiffness.
They moved. Guards behind, a sensible distance. Citizens ahead, politely vanishing. Rain began to think about its job and, thinking, forgot to fall. Yennefer's mare sighed and settled into the pace of someone who knows her rider will not brook foolishness.
"You made my knight forget you," Yennefer said, conversationally. "Not many men can sculpt in soldiers."
"Your knight will remember he was busy and that he did not enjoy being interrupted," Geralt said. "You can't force memory to be generous."
"No? Watch." Her eyes narrowed, just enough to sharpen the world in their reflection. The surface of the street—not stone, but the sense of it—tilted. A light pressure acquitted itself against Geralt's temples and then withdrew, as if the air had been politely asked to announce itself.
He didn't raise a hand. He didn't blink. He let the first touch land like a feather on a table.
"May I?" she asked, and for the first time it was not a trick. It was grammar—request, not demand.
He made no show of assent. The door opened inward. She stepped into a foyer with no furniture and stood very still.
Not there, he thought mildly, and the foyer narrowed. Try down the hall you think you already studied as a girl.
Curiosity is a key in any language. She took it. The pressure eased. When it returned, it was careful. A brush, not a push. A pause, lessons learned from the pause. Then she followed where he let her.
A lane, not his. A winter market, not this city's. A man's hand shaking hard enough to spill cheap beer, and a girl's shoulders clamped into a refusal that made her smaller. The hand held a name like a cudgel. It fell, again and again. Piglet. Hunch. Burden. Her back remembered every syllable for years. The world tilted the way a floor does when you stand in one corner too long. The smell of onions and resentment. The sound of a mother leaving by not trying. The god of small humiliations doing brisk business.
A different day. A different gaze. A woman in a gown that asked the world to mind itself for once: hair pinned with calculation, hands not soft, a gaze that named—which is different from labeling. The girl as she was now, and the girl as she might be, held in the same look without breaking either. Words: price, fate, a school with a name that sounds like a bell. A carriage ride that hurt the girl in new, elegant ways, none of them physical. The taste of learning arriving faster than hunger could keep it, until hunger was ashamed of itself and learned to wait its turn. Mirrors. Lessons. Names transformed into letters, then into laws, then into a life that made adulthood a thesis defended every morning.
He let her see enough to know he knew it. He let her see his refusal to pity her, which is the worst insult and best mercy. He let her see the door out when she forgot the way in.
She came back to herself like a diver who'd chosen to surface and still resented the air. Her jaw had set without her permission. It unclenched with a soft crack.
"You are impertinent," she said lightly.
"You asked," Geralt said. "Most people don't know how to ask."
"You allowed me to read what you wanted me to read." Her gaze flicked to the line of knights, the nearest pair of lanterns, back to his face. "Which suggests you've practiced this kind of intimacy more than you advertise."
"It's not intimacy. It's fencing." He stepped around a puddle. She didn't bother; the mare could afford damp fetlocks. "You came here with a premise. I admired the work and made sure it didn't fall on my foot."
"Your metaphors are provincial."
"They're useful."
"What else are you hiding?" The question came like a blade presented hilt-first.
"What do you think I'm hiding?"
She considered him as if measuring a cut she hadn't pinned yet. "Fear. Less than I expected. Anger. More than you think. Discipline. To a fault. Faith. In a set of rules you wrote yourself because the ones you were given made you laugh at the wrong time."
"Should we stop playing children's games?" he asked, without hostility.
She exhaled, not quite a sigh. "Very well." She drew rein. The procession shivered to a halt around them. "Here is my curiosity, unadorned: I have never met a witcher. I collect rare experiences and turn them into tools. I would like to learn you. If I cannot own the blade, I wish to understand its balance."
"And the price?" he asked.
Yennefer's mouth made a shape that, on another woman, might have been coyness and, on her, was merely architecture.
"You will stay in Vengerberg for a time," she said. "You will answer questions. You will allow controlled observation. You will submit to measurements—physical, not sentimental. No samples without consent. No ritual without explanation. In return, you will have access to my libraries, my laboratory, my time—"
"And your instruction," Geralt said. "In magic."
She arched a brow. "You have your little signs."
"They're tinder," he said. "Useful. Limited. I want a map of the field, not a charm on a keyring."
"You cannot expect to become a mage."
"I expect to stop standing in the doorway as if the house isn't already on fire." He met her gaze, felt the attention behind it like a hand on a hilt. "Teach me theory. Teach me dangers. Teach me how to see where the weave thins. I won't pretend to cast sigils that aren't mine. But I won't keep guessing whether a floor will bear my weight."
"And in return I get… what? Tales of swamp frogs? A tour of your scar tissue?"
"You get a witcher who will tell you the truth about what a body feels when it's an instrument," he said. "You get a man who won't flatter you with fear. You get the other side of your curiosity: how the thing you find fascinating refuses to be collected."
"That last bit was nearly poetry," she said dryly. "Be careful. I might decide you're worth ruining."
"You already decided that," he said.
She almost laughed again. Didn't. "Terms, then. I will note mine. You will note yours."
"Say yours."
"First," she said, "no circles on me. Draw as many as you like on the floor, the table, the walls, the ceiling. None on my skin, none on my mind. Second: no geasa. No binding oaths. If I give my word, it is because I enjoy breaking expectations, not because I cannot. Third: if you attempt to use that pretty push of yours to make me forget my name, I will make yours very famous and very short."
"Agreed," he said. "My terms: no compulsion on me either—no words that stick in the brain and turn your whim into a habit. No risks you haven't taken yourself within shouting distance. No demonstrations that use the poor for convenience." He looked at the nearest knight without letting the man feel looked at. "And we do this without an audience."
She turned in the saddle, touching nothing but the air. "Go home," she told her men. "Before you learn more than is good for you."
"My lady," one began, and managed to compress seven ridiculous concerns into those two words.
"Go," she repeated, and the sound changed—from invitation to inevitability. They went.
The street took a breath it didn't know it had been holding.
"Your villa or mine?" she asked, and the way she asked made the word mine sound like a sword-polisher's dream and a thief's cautionary tale.
"Mine," he said. "It's already warded against stupidity."
"Charming." She flicked two fingers. The mare bowed with a theatrical contempt for the cobbles and then let Yennefer slide to the ground without creasing a hem. The sorceress reached the ground without looking at it, as if gravity understood it had been invited.
They walked. The mare followed unled. Rain made its decision and began, soft as a plan executed in another room.
"You let me see too much," she said after a minute, no longer looking for an audience, only the truth. "Not of you. Of me."
"You wanted an introduction," he said. "I gave you the only one that matters."
"My father is dead," she said, as if testing whether the street would echo.
"Then he can't hear me when I say he matters less than the woman who led me down a corridor to a library," Geralt said. "Which she did."
"Careful." She didn't quite smile. "Compliments make me rash."
"I'm counting on it."
They reached the villa. The fig tree whispered something about seasons. Yennefer examined the lintel with a glance that could strip a wall of paint without lifting a hand. "Your wards are earnest," she said. "And not entirely foolish. May I?"
"Don't break them to prove you can."
"I haven't needed to prove that to anyone since I was sixteen." She lifted a palm. Light gathered. Not brightness—density. She placed it flat to the wood. The wards shivered in recognition and then stabilized, folding themselves into a new posture that made them look, absurdly, grown. "There. They'll notice what they should notice. Blank out what should remain private. They will also complain less when I walk through them."
"I didn't ask you to make them friendly."
"You asked me to teach you magic. Consider it your first lesson: a ward that loves only you will betray you at the worst time."
He resisted the impulse to approve of that line. He opened the door. The villa's narrow hall accepted her like an answer to a question it hadn't realized it had asked.
"Tea," she said.
"In the kitchen," he said.
"In the study."
He gave her the study. The satchel met the table. The lamps woke and began doing their work. The city became a rumor on the other side of the shutters. Yennefer stood just inside the room for a moment, arms folded, as if measuring not the size of the study but the size of the conversation they had agreed to begin.
"Tell me one thing witchers know that sorcerers don't," she said.
"The cost of doing the right thing when no one is counting," he said.
"Moralizing." She wrinkled her nose. "Try again."
"How much an unbalanced blade hurts the wrist."
"Practical," she said. "Better. Now I owe you something: one thing sorcerers know that witchers don't."
"Go on."
"How far intention will carry a spell when competence fails," she said. "Which is a poetic way of saying: don't try to build a house with a promise in a storm. Wait for the wood."
"I don't build houses."
"You build walls," she said. "Same mathematics. Sit."
He sat. She took the chair opposite like a throne being invented around her posture in real time. She laced her fingers as if telling them to look occupied and then forgot they existed.
"This is how it will go," she said. "I speak. You listen. You ask questions. I answer the ones that are interesting and ignore the ones that make me tired. We do not pretend to be anything other than what we are. We do not indulge in romance while we are learning. We do not break furniture unless it's ugly and the lesson is memorable enough to justify it."
"Agreed," he said. "Addendum: we sleep sometimes."
"Pedant," she said with satisfaction. "Good. First: the weave—call it chaos, call it ether, call it the thing that flows through stone and blood—has a temperament. You can bully it. It will obey—once. Twice. Then it will humiliate you in public. You may seduce it. It will reward you if you remember no one ever seduced anything worthwhile with pet names alone. The correct relationship is… treaty."
"I thought you disapproved of treaties."
"I disapprove of treaties written by men who imagine they're gods," she said. "A treaty written by a woman with her hands in a ledger and a fire under her pot can govern the universe." She hesitated. "Second: your signs are not childish. They are… provincial. Their grammar is old. Useful. But if you insist on shouting at the air with a dialect it tolerates rather than enjoys, you will never hear it whisper back."
"You're going to make me whisper at air."
"I am going to compel you to be polite to the thing you live in," she said. "Which—if your reputation is even half-right—will be a first."
He allowed the corner of his mouth to move. "And in return, you will learn that my pulse is not a research subject."
"I am perfectly capable of thinking of two things at once." She leaned forward, eyes bright now in a way that had nothing to do with triumph and everything to do with work. "Begin: tell me how Axii feels when it works."
"Like setting a bone that wasn't yours and knowing it will ache when rain comes."
"And when it fails?"
"Like putting your hand into water and realizing there's ice under it."
"And when you push too hard?"
"Like hearing your own name said by someone you don't like, in a room you thought was locked."
She nodded once, as if a problem she'd been carrying around in a pleasant pocket had just found its answer. "Good. Now: forget what you know. We start with breath. Always with breath."
He took the breath. She watched the way he did. Outside, the city attended to itself. Inside, two people who had agreed not to pretend set about the only business worth doing between strangers who might become something other than opponents: making a language that could hold both of them without breaking.
An hour later, the rain remembered its promise and fell in earnest. It drummed on the shutters and made the lamps more ambitious. Yennefer adjusted the set of his wrist over a line of chalk. He corrected the curve of her mouth by saying she was enjoying herself. She called him insufferable. He said he'd been called worse by men who threatened to break furniture and couldn't.
By midnight they had made something like a beginning. By dawn, the villa would know the taste of an argument that hadn't happened yet and wasn't a threat. By the end of the week, the city would decide whether to forget them or to start the kind of rumor that makes other men go looking for their own kind of trouble. Either way, he would have learned where the floor flexed and where the ceiling could carry a thought heavier than habit. Either way, she would have a witcher who did not bruise when looked at and a new way to pronounce the word curiosity.
"Last rule," Yennefer said, hand on the door as she left the study for the night without asking where a guest might be sent. "If you tell me what to do, be right."
"Don't try to read my mind ever again," he said
"Don't give me reasons to be otherwise."