Work Text:
After he saves Nimue from the idr's fearsome insectoid mandibles, the white-haired man with the golden eyes does not speak. He dresses austerely, in dyed-black linen and leathers. He carries two swords on his back, cleans them meticulously even though he never uses them in her sight. Nimue has heard the songs, the legends whispered in her tiny village of Vyrva; Stribog, the old man who gathers the children next to the Yaruga and weaves his words into story, has told her of Geralt of Rivia, of Yennefer of Vengerberg and their Child of Destiny.
Geralt of Rivia has been dead for over a century; if the witcher truly is Geralt of Rivia, Nimue travels with a ghost. She speaks to him, sometimes. She tells him, I am Nimue of Vyrva, and I am bound for Aretuza. She asks, Are you the White Wolf? and receives no answer. She tells him the stories she has heard from Stribog as he sits, cross-legged and vigilant, at a distance from her campfire.
Many years ago, there was a witcher called the White Wolf and a sorceress called Yennefer of Vengerberg. The witcher fell in love with the sorceress, who wanted nothing more than a child, the one thing the White Wolf could not give her. She searched and searched, and almost died, but the White Wolf saved her, tied their fates together. When the White Wolf came upon his Child of Destiny, she was Yennefer's child too.
The white-haired man does not speak. He does not react. He does not look at Nimue, running the whetstone down his silver sword, over and over. His hair hangs in his eyes as he bows his head.
"I always loved the stories of Geralt and Yennefer," Nimue admits. "To be loved so much, through an immortal life...who wouldn't want that?"
The white-haired man stands, sheaths his sword, and slips off into the forest.
Nimue hears things in the trees—the familiar howling of wolves and wind, the unstable weather of Temeria. Sometimes, she hears screams; Nimue has never seen a monster, but there is at least one witcher left in the world, so there must be monsters still, too.
The white-haired man always returns, looking the same as he ever does: tired, a bit unkempt, his hair tied messily and his clothing worn thin. When Nimue manages to glimpse his face on rare occasion, she thinks he looks sad.
He is protecting her, she realizes as they pass by Maribor, taking the road northwest to Dorian and Gors Velen. He watches over her during the day, silently hunting and bringing meat to cook, and at night he does his witcher's work, patrolling, animal in his cautious, surefooted movement around the campsite.
Not once does he speak, and not once does his pale, pale face move from its careful, neutral expression. His golden eyes, with their depths of anguish and loneliness, seldom meet Nimue's blue ones.
Once upon a time, Nimue recites, stretched out by the fire, full on roast catch-of-the-day, there was a golden dragon who took the form of a man. She tells all she remembers of Geralt and Yennefer, their longing and love and excitement and conflict. Yennefer wanted the dragon egg so she could have a child; Geralt wanted her to be safe, even if she could not have everything she wanted. In the end, Yennefer left him, breaking both of their hearts, until they met again.
"It's beautiful in a way. They're...what is it, symmetrical. They're the same in a lot of ways." No reply. "She died," Nimue continues. "That's how the story ends. They save their child, and they die together. The child...she's still around, Stribog says."
Metal on stone. Steady. Over and over.
Nimue has always been curious, too curious for her own good. Too interested in romance and stories and intrigue, and so she follows the white-haired man into the woods one night. She feels a tug in her mind—the whispering Chaos that Aretuza will teach her to harness—pulling her after him.
She comes upon him in a small clearing, kneeling. The white of his hair turns silver in the light from the full moon. His head is unbowed; he looks at the sky. His posture is meditative, but there is a slant of yearning to it. He does not move at Nimue's entrance, though he must hear her, with his preternatural senses.
"Are you looking at the stars?" After weeks traveling alongside him, Nimue expects no answer. "There's Aevon, the River, and next to it, that cluster? That's Blathanna, the Flowers." She pauses, bending over the man's shoulder to trace out the constellations with a pointed finger. "And to the east, Stribog calls that star Taedh...Taedh something, it means 'the Poet, Alone.' It showed up in the night sky one day and no one had named it, but there's a song Stribog sings. One of Callonetta's apprentices wrote it. I don't remember the song, but I remember the story."
A poet fell in love with a knight as beautiful and cold as winter, and followed him to the edge of the world, hoping to warm his heart and win his love through song. He wrote verse after verse, year after year, and the knight was unmoved. In his old age, as the poet lay dying, he asked the Mother, Melitele, that the knight might live forever through his songs, and Melitele denied him. Three times the poet asked, and three times he was denied, once for each guise of the goddess.
His beloved, stricken by the death of the poet, prayed day and night for a week to the goddess. When she came to him, he entreated her with the weight of all the service he had done her in his life, every beast slain and village saved, to grant the poet's wish. Yes, she told him, but at a price: The poet's songs will live on forever, and I will place him among the stars, and he will watch you wander the world for as long as you live. In exchange, I will take your voice, so that you may never sing the songs, and never speak to him again until you join him in death.
The knight acquiesced. The deal was struck. The poet lives now among the stars.
"No one knows who the knight was," Nimue confesses. "Or the poet. Most of them fall in love at some point, and there are no love ballads from a bard to a knight. None that Stribog knows, at least."
She knows, when the man bows his head, staring blankly at the ground, that the conversation is over. As she walks away, she looks back at the witcher, and she would swear that his shoulders are shaking.
As they near Gors Velen and the ship that will take Nimue to Aretuza, she tells her witcher (after a month, she has started to think of him as her witcher, like a guardian spirit looking out for her) happy stories. She sings him the songs of Master Dandelion, up to the one-hundred-and-eighty-second verse of "The Fishmonger's Daughter," in which the heroine elopes with a siren and fights off an army of suitors with a rake.
The witcher follows close behind Nimue through the crowded marketplace, toward the harbor. He gives a silent, baleful look to the sailor who attempts to fleece Nimue out of more money than the voyage to Thanedd is worth, until she haggles the price down to something reasonable.
She bids him farewell at the wharf after six weeks of travel. Nimue darts forward, grabbing him up in a quick, tight embrace. He stiffens and then returns it, uncertain, until Nimue steps back.
"A few questions, before I leave," Nimue requests, the pieced-together stories swirling in her mind slotting together into something that almost makes sense. "Are you...are you the White Wolf? Geralt of Rivia?" He faces her calmly, his golden eyes turned amber on this overcast day. "The one who loved Yennefer of Vengerberg?" Minute shift in expression; it pains him to hear her name. "And you...you can't speak?"
He breaks eye contact, then, cutting his gaze to the ground. His brows draw together; two deep-etched frown lines appear between them. Once again, the conversation is over.
"Witcher," she says decisively, "Geralt, if you are Geralt. Thank you for escorting me this far." He gives a deep nod of acknowledgment as she sketches a quick curtsy. "I have no coin for you, but I will dedicate myself to finding the truth of your story."
With one more curt nod, the witcher turns on his heel and is gone as quickly as he'd arrived in her life, charging through the thicket to behead the idr. Nimue boards the passenger ship bound for Thanedd and, that night, she stands on the deck and stares up, up, at the twinkling star east of the Flowers.
The Poet, Alone.