The rain had gentled to a silver hiss by the time the last of the lamps were snuffed in the villa opposite. Geralt set a plain wooden box on the study table and slid its lid aside. The contents did not glitter. They did not need to. The box held things that valued privacy over spectacle: vellum sheets cured from monsterhide so smooth a quill tip seemed to glide of its own will, a coil of dimeritium-thread to frame and ground a circle without choking it, two bone styli polished to an almost oily sheen, and a small stoppered vial of ink that smelled faintly of pine, salt, and the breath one takes before speaking a true name.
Yennefer stood at the window, one hand on the sash, watching the rain give Vengerberg a cleaner face than the city deserved. She didn't turn when he set a circle-board on the table and began to draft; she didn't have to. The change in the room's temperature told her what she wanted to know. The lines he drew weren't the toy geometry of hedge-wizards. The outer ring locked with eight cardinal points, not four. Between them, nested arcs received the narrower path of a secondary weave. He lifted the dimeritium thread and let it kiss the ink, not hard enough to unsettle the stroke, just enough to bind the promise to a material the world respected.
"What will you forbid?" she asked finally, without moving.
"Nothing," he said. "What will be kept."
She turned then, the window making a black halo of her hair. "You want a secret contract."
"I want an agreement to keep each other's names intact when we walk out of this room," he said. "Not a muzzle. A treaty. If either breaks it, memory becomes a forest fire in both directions. This is not compulsion. It is consequence."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then we part with civility and no hard feelings," he said. "And I learn the long way what you might have taught me in a season."
Her gaze passed over the circle like a jeweler evaluating a rival's handwork. "Terms."
"Neither of us shares methods, rituals, recipes, or personal histories revealed during instruction," he said. "No summaries, no paraphrase cloaked as anecdote. No 'a friend of a friend' smoke. No instruments of compulsion used on either mind. No circles drawn on skin. No oaths extracted under fatigue. Nullification only by mutual consent, in this room, with both hands on the same circle. No third-party enforcement. It holds because we decide it does."
Yennefer's mouth made the line it sometimes formed just before a compliment she was unwilling to deliver. "And if I say yes," she murmured, "do I sign in blood like a romantic, or do you prefer something vulgar, like paperwork?"
He set the bone stylus down and pushed the circle-board toward her. "Blood is for bonds. This is for trust."
Her hand hovered over the stylus, then lowered. She signed her name once in her court hand—precise, practiced—and once in the older script she had learned before anyone in a gown had ever said her name kindly. When she finished, the ink sank, then rose, darker, as if inking itself a second time from beneath. The circle answered, a low hum felt rather than heard, the tail end of thunder leaving one's teeth.
"And your mark?" she asked.
Geralt extended a thumb and pressed it to a smaller inner sigil—no flourish, no drama. The ring brightened and then went dull again, like a gaze deciding to be polite. Yennefer's eyes tightened a fraction, then softened—a private acknowledgment of craft done cleanly.
"It won't stop gossip," she said.
"It will make gossip harmless," he answered.
"For most men," she said. "Not for me."
He let that go. Some defenses weren't arguments. They were armor worn to bed.
When she returned to her villa that night, the wards recognized her the way a cat recognizes a hand: not by scent or shape, but by the insistence with which the owner declared the house hers. The rooms had not been rearranged by servants. The carpets lay exactly as she preferred—half a hand's breadth from the hearth so ash could be swept without catching. The laboratory smelled like citrus and charcoal in proper proportions. She shut the door, stood very still, and let the quiet answer back.
Memory is not an obedient dog. It is a fox with a den in the least convenient part of the mind, and it will bring you what it stole when you are busy. When she closed her eyes, the pictures arrived—not as visions, not as someone else's handwriting, but as if the house had acquired a second set of windows and winter had walked past them at the right speed. The crooked alley where a father's ridicule had become a ration that never ran out. The carriage with curtains that trapped air and fear equally well, and the woman riding opposite, evaluating and promising not to fix what she had not yet weighed. The room where a girl's chin learned to lift without permission from anyone alive. None of it felt like pity. That was what unsettled her most. It felt like a record kept by a careful clerk, inked neatly, filed properly, annotated when needed, and never used as collateral.
She went to the glass, breath fogging its surface, and cleaned a small clear circle with her thumb. Her reflection looked back, precise and unflattering. For a long minute she watched herself as if she were her own subject. Then she smiled—mean, private—and blew out the candle with a violence it didn't deserve. In the darkness afterward, the wards purred against her palm like a proof of concept. She slept. When dreams came, they were fewer.
Geralt woke before the cathedral bells agreed on morning and set the villa to a new discipline. For six months, the house obeyed a schedule tighter than any noble's: sunrise to first light, theory and breath; first light to noon, lattice and linework; noon to dusk, failure and repetition; dusk to midnight, report and repair. He cut the Signs out of his fingers like bread crust, leaving the spirit of them where the habit had lived: the urge to push (Aard) transmuted to vector math; the temptation to burn (Igni) stripped to a question asked of energy about where it would rather go; the shield (Quen) rewritten as a governor of flow instead of a wall; axiom turned from Axii into permission, defined and limited.
Yennefer did not teach like a kindly aunt. She taught like a mathematician with a grudge against sloppiness. "Again," would be followed by "slower," and then, if a third correction was required, "with the part of you that listens." When he drew a curve to test a minor fold, she moved his wrist a degree, not a hand's breadth. When he let the line wobble into seduction, she slapped her palm over his and hissed, "It is not your lover, it is your ledger. Make it balance." When he smirked, she let the chalk fall, turned, and set him to copying a page of rune calculus until his shoulder asked for mercy.
He did not relax into her demands. He stepped to them. There was a difference. She noticed. On the fourth day of the second week, when he managed a transient slit—no wider than a handspan, no longer than a breath—that carried a flame from one candle to its twin and left the space between them unscarred, she did not praise him. She said, "Do it again," and did not look away while he did.
He fell into a pattern as familiar as training in snow: morning breathwork, no heat, no power, only the shape of a structure held in the mind until the mind shuddered like a tired muscle; midday lattice, runes laid on Runeweave and lifted, swapped, inverted, normalized until each admitted it hated being called by the wrong name; afternoon falses—deliberate failures to teach motion the limits of its own appetite; evening reports, not spoken, written, because writing forces the mouth to shut and the hand to justify, and thought improves under the weight.
On the tenth day he cut space accidentally. It punished his arrogance with elegance—taking a lemon he had not intended to move and sending it three steps into a wall half an inch to the left of where reality had agreed to be. The dull thud of fruit meeting brick at speed echoed like a demonstration. Yennefer did not dazzle him with corrections. She handed him a fresh lemon and pointed. "Again. Without vandalism this time."
He learned to taste the earliest warning signs of a tear that would not stitch clean: the metallic tang behind the tongue, the way hair across the nape lifts when a fold prepares to shear, the faintest ache in the lower ribs when an anchor point slides. He invented, with her, a vocabulary that made sense to both of them: creep for drift; bite for an anchor's willingness to hold; hum for the loudness of a silent fold; guilt for the way a bad cut lingers. He stopped making the kind of mistake that kills by accident. He saved his appetite for mistakes that educate.
The first time a portal opened cleanly enough to step through, it was only the length of her laboratory table and twice as wide as his hand. An apple went in. The same apple—same bruise, same notch—came out. Yennefer's face did not change. The corner of her mouth did, just enough to make the room expand a fraction.
"Now, walk," she said.
"Not yet," he answered. "Anchors first."
"Then you've been listening," she said, which, from her, was nearly a cheer.
Anchoring is where boys die. He had watched men who could conjure a cut so perfect it looked like a shadow trip on the second step and vanish into death without time to scream. He refused to be a boy. He learned anchors the way a mason learns walls—not with blue fire and pretty words, but with weight and willing stone. He built arrays—three points, not two; triangles rather than lines; redundancies a coward might call caution and a professional calls staying alive. Lodestones set in etched brass cups, shells of copper threaded with rune-stitches, a little marble from a ruin outside the city that still remembered when kings promised things they could not keep.
Once the anchor-academy learned his name, he began walking. First across rooms, then across the courtyard to a line he'd scratched under the fig. He went with his shoulders locked and his chin level and his eyes seeing everything and nothing both. The first ten steps were show; the real work was felt in the way the world refused to wobble after. "Again," Yennefer said. "Now carry something that could break." He carried a clay vessel of oil through a slit no wider than his breath and did not spill a drop. She allowed herself a single, honest nod, then made him do it with water because water laughs at men who boast.
Mana is rent. Everyone lies about it. They say it is free. It isn't. It is paid for by the body or the room or the thing you've hidden under the floor for a day like this. Geralt refused to pay with body for anything more than a lesson. He wanted storage, not theft. He wanted a stone.
The first candidate was skyglass from a lightning-struck ridge Viv brought down in a single pass, a wedge that sang in the hand and made the teeth itch. It was lively and stupid. It would spend himself if he let it. The second was heart-amber from a grove south of the city, resin with secrets fossilized into faithfulness. It behaved but sulked when asked to carry power not its own. He bound the two together with a filigree cage that looked decorative until you read the lacings—not pretty at all, merely precise. The third piece came from a river-turned-stone found in a troll's backpack—a common rock made uncommon by patience and pressure. He sat with the three on the table for a day and a night, moving them by fractions into configurations that argued less and promised more. When he was finished, the room knew. Not because it brightened—no vulgar glow—but because the air adjacent to the device stopped trying to be interesting.
"It wants to be useful," he said.
"You've bribed it correctly," Yennefer said. "Now ask it for work without letting it assume you are lazy."
He inlaid the lattice that regulated loan and debt—no gulping, no hunger-strikes, a steady draw modeled off a strong heart walking uphill. He engraved a governor along a copper trace he'd stolen from one of her older plates and improved in three places and left alone in one because he could tell which line of her hand demanded respect. He set the stone under the table and connected it to the anchor array with a cable plaited from dimeritium's more agreeable cousin. The laboratory did not change. His shoulders did.
They began to talk about permanence.
"Not like ours," she said at once, hands off, as if his thought had burned the table. "No public gates. No crowns. No network you can be blackmailed with. If you insist on building something that remains when the builder is absent, you will build it small."
He wrote to Vissena , the letter dull on purpose, the postscript not: "Clear the old granary. Sweep the dust. Place a bowl of water and an iron rod in the center and leave them overnight. If the bowl is still, if the rod is cold, do not move them. Expect company within a month. It will not be Kaedwen."
For half a month more, he walked the cut from both ends—a day in Vengerberg, an evening in the keep, then back on a horse like a man of lesser means. He had Viv carry a coil of line in her claws, letting its length whisper between worlds as he tested whether any piece of reality tried to steal it. Nothing did. He sent through a sack of grain. He sent back ten apples in a basket and found no extra rot. Apples are honest too. He sent, finally, a crate of brick to Kaer Morhen and, afterward, received a piece of chalk pressed with Vesemir's thumbprint. You cannot forge an old man's thumb. He smiled when no one could see.
The day he lit the permanent pair, Vengerberg wore a morning like a borrowed cloak—mended, valuable, not hers. Yennefer watched from the threshold, arms folded, face arranged to prevent him from thinking she cared whether he succeeded. He cared enough for both of them. He laid the last runes, not in ink, in metal; he screwed down the case, not with force, with commitment; and he touched the governor with a finger that had learned when not to tremble.
The slab did not glow. The air did not sigh. The stillness changed flavor—less of a room, more of an intention.
"Step," she said.
"First," he replied, taking a broom and sending its bristles forward. They came back intact. He followed with a length of linen. It returned without a new smell. At last he set his hand against the cut. The world accepted. From the other side, a room older than this city put breath in his ear—stone, warm from work, lavender tucked somewhere by a woman who liked the smell and lied about it.
Yennefer didn't wait for ceremony. She walked forward as if late for a meeting, hair cutting a neat black seam through the air. She reemerged a beat later, not breathless, eyes bright in a way that had nothing to do with power and everything to do with satisfaction.
"It will do," she said.
"Not 'well done'?"
"Don't be greedy." She circled the device, the careful hunger of a craftswoman inspecting the spine of another's work. "The draw is modest. The governor is elegant. You've resisted the temptation to overbuild. You refuse adornment where adornment would compromise function. There is a kind of beauty to that. A severe one."
"You sound almost kind."
"Don't push your luck," she said, but the words had no teeth.
He built a second pair in secret—a smaller, uglier set, hidden in a stand of firs two miles out, for when cities prove they prefer spectacle and men prove they remember grudges. He locked it behind a riddle only a witcher would answer and a ward only a woman who had taught him would be able to move aside without complaint. He did not tell her. Not then. He would, when it mattered.
The six months ate themselves, as months with work to do always will. He learned portal opening not as a trick, but as a grammar. He learned the cost and decided to pay it with stones that could afford the bill. He learned when not to use them: storms, births, funerals, any time the house of the world felt wobbly. Yennefer learned witchers in a way that did not turn him into a jarred specimen. She bored clean through the layers of rumor and registered the instrument: grip, point of balance, the honest dullness of endurance. He corrected one of her matrices and she did not pretend she had always meant to do it that way. She corrected one of his small habits—standing too square when handling a cut—and he did not pretend it had been stylish rather than wrong.
They did not become fond. Fondness is complacency wearing perfume. Respect settled instead, bone-deep, reluctant to say its name aloud in case it spoiled.
On the last night of the sixth month, the city celebrated something—saints or harvest or the endurance of markets; it didn't matter. Fireworks wrote temporary arguments across the sky and then apologized for them. In the study, the device hummed with a dignity fireworks could not understand. Yennefer stood beside the table and rested two fingers on the edge, not to claim it, not to steady it, simply to tell the room that she had been here when this was finished. Geralt watched the cut breathe—so shallow now no one outside the room would notice if they were not told.
"Now what," she asked, and the question wasn't a test.
"Now," he said, "the thing we built isn't a leash. It's a door. It stays shut unless it should be open."
"And who decides should?"
"We do," he said. "Or we ask the house."
She glanced at the circle-boards stacked in the corner, at the little box in which their contract slept. "The house has learned to answer."
"It has," he said. "So have we."
She looked at him then, for once without pose or armor or the arched brow men mistake for seduction because their vocabulary is poor. "You could have done this alone," she said. "Badly. Loudly. In pieces."
"I could have," he said. "I would prefer not to die in an essay about pride."
"Nor I," she murmured.
They didn't toast. They didn't clasp wrists. They didn't make theatrics of departure or arrival. He put out one lamp. She put out the other. In the dark, the room felt less like an achievement than a promise held in escrow.
"Tomorrow," Yennefer said, hand on the door, "we begin with fold turbulence in crosswinds."
"Tomorrow," Geralt said, "we begin with why that's a bad idea during an eclipse."
"Pedant," she said affectionately, which for her was nearly indulgence.
He grunted, which for him was nearly laughter.