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Coën doesn’t know what to make of Lambert the first time he meets him, little more than a week after he arrived at Kaer Morhen at Vesemir’s invitation. The Wolves have been kind enough, if a little unsure of themselves around him, and it’s been almost than half a decade since he wintered in a keep—since Kaer Seren fell. It takes some getting used to.
Vesemir is a hard man, but kind. They shared stories of training young witchers on the journey up to Kaer Morhen. Stories from a long time ago, and an impossibility now. Eskel, scared in a way that would make humans wary of him, is more welcoming than any witcher Coën has ever met outside his own School. And Geralt, dour and quiet, makes space for him in their too-large keep and challenges him to games of Gwent any chance he gets.
But Lambert… The others have warned him about Lambert, about his temper and his attitude and the things he might say. Coën expects a big man, an angry man, one unpleasant to be around. A witcher straight from the stories humans spread. What he gets instead is someone shorter and smaller than the other Wolves, though not by much, a sardonic man, a grieving man.
Coën can see it in his eyes, that old and weathered feeling. Not fresh like Coën’s own, but constant like Coën’s fears his will be.
When he looks at Lambert, scarred and brash and more than a little rude, he sees someone who might actually understand him. Lambert mocks him, his morals and his teachings and the pox scars he tries so hard to hide under his beard, but he never mocks him for Kaer Seren. He never even asks. None of them do, and sometimes he wishes they would.
He sees Lambert smile for the first time mere hours after he meets him. It is tradition for the Wolves to get blind drunk of the best Gull Coën has ever had and trade stories of the Path, apparently. It is not at all like Kaer Seren, and the difference is startling in how much it aches. Still, he joins in, because it is what is expected of him here, and the Wolves are infinitely curious about what his life has been like.
Before Kaer Seren fell and Coën lost everything. Always before.
Lambert tells of them of a hunt for a fiend, of his brutality and lack of care for the humans paying him. It’s shocking. It goes against everything Coën was taught. Lambert leans back in his chair, a proud grin on his face. A brutal thing. A false thing, put on to show off, to enrage them. A deliberate production uncaring of the disappointment around him.
All of this, Coën sees in a single instance, and he understands more than he cares to admit.
If he was ever given the chance to find the humans and the mages that had decided Kaer Seren needed to fall, maybe he would look the same when he was done with them. Maybe this is how a witcher looks when his life is nothing but anger and revenge and that all-encompassing grief.
Coën wants to know him, wants to understand him, wants to see if there’s any hope for a real smile beneath the layers rage and performance that seem to envelope him.
If there isn’t… Coën doesn’t know what that will mean for himself, for the grief that he too is now made of.
“Kaer Seren was colder than this,” Coën says during their second winter together. The third one he’s spent at Kaer Morhen. Wherever Lambert was last winter, it was far from here. None of the others had questioned it, and they’d still welcomed him with open arms when he arrived.
Coën can’t name many witchers who didn’t come back to winter at Kaer Seren. The ones that didn’t were dead, and they all knew. That was how it worked.
They’re cooking together. Or they’re supposed to be. Lambert’s cutting vegetables at the counter and grumbling about the cold, while Coën battles with the keep’s archaic cooking equipment.
“Oh?” he says, and Coën can’t tell if he’s genuinely curious or just being polite. Then his brow furrows. Lambert is not often polite.
He talks of Kaer Seren so rarely, and only with Vesemir, and never about where he was when it fell. Delayed by heavy snowfall, lingering in bed of a man he’d saved from a pack of nekkers for days longer than he should have. He still doesn’t know how long after the avalanche he arrived—he never will.
All he truly remembers from it is seeing the tallest turret of the keep peeking out from the mound of snow, and the damning knowledge that every Griffin inside was dead.
“It was higher up in the mountains than this; it snowed year round,” he says, and his voice doesn’t shake at all. “There was always someone at the keep to maintain the trail. I remember it snowing over in the middle of summer once, made it impossible for me to take the trainees down to teach them how to hunt.”
“You trained?” Lambert asks. The look on his face is unreadable.
He shrugs, pretends the memories don’t hurt. “Sometimes, for the boys that made it through the Grasses. My last cohort—” He has to cut himself off, if only for a moment. “Years before the avalanche. We are taught to work together, to travel together when we can. I had two boys who took that to heart. Followed each other everywhere, trained together constantly. Couldn’t find one without the other.”
When he went back last summer, Vesemir at his side and a cart waiting to be filled with everything they could scavenge, he found them. Or, he thought it was them. Curled together under the snow. He hopes it was them, that they had each other at the end of it all.
He looks at Lambert and finds him, somehow, smiling. Not a happy thing, not truly, but something sad, something nostalgic, something filled with so much understanding that Coën very nearly asks about it. But if there is one thing Coën has learned about the youngest Wolf, it’s that asking him anything personal will result only if scoffs and yelling and insults.
The smile is still there though, and his gaze is distant, and Coën almost regrets bringing anything up. Of all the expressions he thought he’d see on Lambert’s face, this is not one of them. Grief, yes, that is a constant, but not this sad fondness, this sheer loss.
A loss Coën understands.
Then Lambert scoffs, and the smile is gone, and only a second or two has passed. “Come on then, I know you can tell better stories than that,” he says, pointing at Coën with his knife. “Tell me about your worst trainees. Melitele knows I was a fucking nightmare.”
“I don’t doubt that for a second,” Coën replies, smirking at Lambert when he rolls his eyes.
So, he tells his stories, and Lambert listens with a surprising patience. But he doesn’t smile again. A snarky comment or two, a scoff, an eyebrow raised in amusement, but not a laugh or a smile. Not anything like he’d shown before. Like he can’t bear to do it here.
Coën can’t exactly blame him.
They’re fighting again, Lambert and Vesemir. They’re always fucking fighting. At least Eskel and Geralt don’t make any moves to get involved this time, disappearing elsewhere into the keep while Coën tries valiantly to tune the noise out.
He doesn’t even know what they’re fighting about, is the thing. It tends to be one of three things: Lambert’s attitude, Lambert’s actions on the Path, or Vesemir’s determination to keep a dead School going. Coën won’t ever say it, but he does agree with both of them. He’s simply not one to engage in an argument he’s not involved in.
Still, they’re loud, and all he wants to do is finish the rewriting of this journal. An old one from Kaer Seren, barely salvageable, and he’s spent all winter rewriting it as best he can. It’s all he has left of his old home. A dozen journals, some armour and swords, and decades of fading memories.
He can see them, Lambert and Vesemir, tucked in the kitchen while he writes away in the great hall. For the most part, he tries not to look—tries to bloody focus—but he finds himself glancing up at them every so often. Whenever their voices raise, whenever Vesemir sighs in such stark disappointment that even Coën feels like a reprimanded trainee.
It’s the keep today, the state of it, the pointlessness of maintaining parts of it—at least to Lambert. It’s the traditions, the history, the nameless forgotten witchers that lie within its wall—at least to Vesemir. If Coën could dig Kear Seren out of the snow and the rocks and keep it preserved in time forever, he would.
Then Lambert laughs, loud and abrasive, and Coën’s head shoots up to watch. He’s grinning, violent, manic, something that would terrify a human but serves only to frustrate Vesemir more. It’s not the first time Coën has seen it, and he likes it less every time. As though Lambert is standing on a cliff’s edge and will fall at any moment—do something he’ll regret.
If he hasn’t already.
“Fuck you, old man!” he barks, storming away a second later. He’s always been loud, and this is no different, slamming doors and stomping up stairs. Coën watches him go, teeth worrying at his bottom lip.
Always so angry, like he doesn’t know how to be anything else. A rage that follows him, that seeps into the stones of the keep and the very air around them, that haunts every conversation they have with him. It’s there in his grin, in his laugh. Never a thing of real joy.
Coën thinks about grief and longing and how it’s everywhere, all the time, in everything he does. In everything Lambert does.
The freest Coën ever sees him is when they are drunk on too many mugs of Gull.
It’s just the two of them. Everyone has already left for bed, drunk out of their minds and falling asleep at the table, but Lambert somehow managed to convince Coën to stay. Maybe it was the thinly veiled desperation in his voice. Maybe it was the look in his eyes. Maybe it was the way he white-knuckled the bottle of Gull in his hand.
They’ve gotten through all their stories from the Path this year, all the difficult hunts and the easy ones, the underpaid ones and the ones that turned out to be nothing at all. There isn’t much else that they talk about, unless Eskel brings up ‘conquests’ and he and Lambert go on about noble women and stablehands and whatever else. They’re not conversations Coën likes to take part in.
So, truly, he doesn’t know what else there is to discuss. Stories of training, of Kaer Seren, are fraught and fragile and more often end in one of them snapping and walking away. Talking about sex feels disrespectful to the very lovely blacksmith he stayed with for a week in Velen. Talking about other witchers… Coën still can’t bring himself to name any of his brothers.
Their names are buried in his journals, which rest in Kaer Morhen’s libraries now, and they will even after this keep inevitably follows Kaer Seren.
He and Lambert sit in silence, drinking more Gull than they should, heads nodding towards the table and shooting back up again. It’s a little awkward, a little uncomfortable, and he doesn’t know how to break it.
And then, without his control, he says, “Have I ever told you about the first time I went to Cintra?”
Lambert raises an eyebrow at him, staring muzzily. “Don’t think so,” he slurs. “Go on, then. Lay it on me.”
It’s a messy story, always has been. One of cultural differences and misunderstandings and Coën stepping in where he was not needed. All of culminating in a near marriage, a water hag interruption and Coën very nearly getting thrown off a cliff for his troubles. And no payment, obviously.
He does sometimes visit the woman who was almost his wife. She’s sweet, even if she laughs at him almost every time she sees him.
By the end of it, Lambert is cackling, louder than Coën has ever heard him. It’s contagious, and Coën snorts into his mug of Gull. His mouth is spread wide, his eyes crinkled, and his body loose in a way only Gull can bring. They’re drunk, and Lambert’s laughing, and it’s not something he’s ever heard when they were sober. He wants to hear it when they’re sober, wants to believe it’s something possible.
“Fuck, you’re full of surprises, huh?” Lambert says once his laughter fades, smirking at him across the table.
“I haven’t done anything like that since,” he replies.
Lambert laughs again, short and sharp like it’s exactly what he expected Coën to say. “Of course you fucking haven’t. You gotta meet up with me on the Path, I’ll show you all kinds of fun.”
Coën very politely—very drunkenly—doesn’t mention the euphemism. “I’d rather not, thank you.”
“Suit yourself.” Lambert shrugs. “I ever tell you about the time we—I almost got fucking kidnapped in Beauclair?”
“What the fuck, Lambert?”
“Ran into a damn Cat in Rivia of all places,” Eskel says, voice laced with an unfamiliar disgust. His scars only make his sneer more prominent.
Geralt frowns at the table. “What are they doing so far north?” he asks.
Coën is content to sit and listen. It’s not often that the Wolves talk about the other Schools, except for his own. The Cats in particular are a touchy subject, one that raises all their hackles. He sits back on his chair at the edge of the library’s singular remaining table, and sips the Gull Lambert had brewed only the other day.
“Fuck if I know,” Eskel says, shrugging. “Maybe the money’s better up here.”
Lambert snorts, but he doesn’t say anything, even though he looks like he wants to. It’s not like Coën can agree either way; he’s never been beyond Cintra—not enough time in the year to make it worth it. But Lambert, who does not always come back every winter, he would have made the journey.
“He do anything, the Cat?” Geralt asks. He looks pissed, ready to fight, like it doesn’t even matter that the pass closed days ago. Or that the hunt would have been seasons ago now.
“Took my damn contract off me, spat in my face and stole one of my fucking potions.”
Lambert doesn’t laugh, not like Coën expects him to. Instead, he’s holding a bottle of Gull to his lips, eyes narrowed in amusement and a secretive smile on his face. Coën frowns at him, tries to figure him out in the way he has failed to for years now. Because he’s holding something back, because he’s hiding things, and he’s looking at his brothers like he’s daring them to figure it out.
Still, there is the grief, something like longing. It’s always there, haunting him the way Lambert haunts them.
Coën swallows, stares at Wolves who are still somehow younger than him, and says, “I ran into a Cat in Cidaris once. Long time ago now.”
The room falls silent, all eyes on him and the smile on Lambert’s face suddenly gone, replaced with a familiar curiosity. “Thought Griffins kept to themselves,” he says.
“For the most part,” Coën replies. “But I am not one to reject help when it is offered.”
He does not have the distaste towards the School of the Cat that the Wolves do. After all, his School did not even hear about the tournament until almost a year after it happened, and the Cat in Cidaris is the only one he has ever met.
“He offered to help you?” Eskel asks, as if Coën has ever been known to lie.
“We both needed the money, and the hunt…” He can’t even remember what it was anymore. Probably a chort. “It wasn’t the kind of thing one should take on alone. He was kind enough, split the coin with me, patched me up, bought me a drink and went on his way. I never saw him again.”
Neither Geralt nor Eskel seem to know what to do with his information, as if he’s broken their little minds completely. But Lambert… Lambert is smiling again, the same as before, hidden and secretive and still desperate to be discovered.
There’s something in his eyes now, something more than grief, for the first time since Coën has met him, and Coën does not know him well enough to tell what it is. He wants to know. He wants to understand something other than grief.
If he asks, Lambert will never tell him.
It’s rare for there to be two witchers in the one place, even rarer for there to be three. But here Coën is, fresh off an exhausting hunt in southern Temeria, keeping his guts in his stomach by sheer force of will and a shaking hand against his skin, staring at the two witchers on horseback in front of him.
“Oh fuck,” says Lambert, and Coën is falling and falling and falling.
When he wakes, it is dark, and he can hear the crackling of a campfire. His guts are where they should be, his stomach is stitched up, and his bags sit undisturbed next to him. He blinks and tries to sit up, but just because he’s been stitched up does not mean his body is ready to move. The grunt that falls from him is long and loud and full of pain.
“Ah, you’re awake.”
The voice is unfamiliar, heavily accented. Coën stares at the man silhouetted by the campfire, at the horses on the edge of the clearing, at the bedrolls laid out next to each other, and his brow furrows in confusion.
“Lambert?” he says.
The man laughs, a low sound, and when he turns Coën can see the bright yellow of his eyes. “Draining the dragon, as he likes to say. He won’t be long. How’s your stomach?”
“Well, still got my guts, so…” he says, and then he feels immensely impolite, taking up this much space when they’re practically strangers. This man—witcher—saved his life. “Coën of Poviss, School of the Griffin.”
“I know. Lamb told me who you are. Aiden of Gemmera, School of the Cat.” Aiden holds his hand out, and they clasp each other’s forearms, awkward and a little sweaty on Coën’s part.
Lamb. Lambert. It’s strange. He’s never heard of Aiden before, but he thinks of a secretive smile, of stories about Cats and Lambert’s unusual silence. Things make… an amount of sense, after that, but he’s too sore and tired to properly think about it.
“Honoured to meet you,” he says, because not even injury will stop him from doing what he was taught to do.
“I… Likewise, I suppose,” says Aiden of Gemmera, and the frown on his face is a confused thing. The Cat years ago had been the same, Coën remembers that.
The silence that follows is quickly interrupted by Lambert stomping into the clearing. He stops short when he sees Coën awake, and he lets out a loud an exaggerated sigh. Entirely unfamiliar. A different kind of production, something almost childish in it.
Still, he says nothing. Coën lets him check the healing wounds, lets him hand over a vial of Swallow now that he’s awake enough to drink it, lets him pass over the rabbit he hadn’t even realised was cooking over the campfire. It’s strangely easy, if a little odd, but Coën sees the way Aiden and Lambert move around each other, handing things over in a comfortable silence and knowing where each other are at any given moment. Everything begins to make a little more sense.
“How long have you travelled together?” he asks. He knows he’s polite. He knows he is not a Wolf. He can only hope it is enough for Lambert to answer.
But it is not Lambert who answers. It’s Aiden. “Oh, about fifteen years or so now, I think,” he says, like it’s nothing, like it’s not almost as long as Kaer Seren has been gone.
Aiden has nothing to do with Kaer Seren. Everything has to do with Kaer Seren.
“You think?” Lambert replies around a mouthful of rabbit, resting on the bedroll next to Aiden. Their thighs are touching. “Still can’t fucking count, huh?”
And Aiden, rolling his eyes, ducks over to kiss his forehead.
Whatever Aiden’s response is, Coën doesn’t hear it, the words muffled like his ears have been stuffed with cotton. He stares at Lambert, at the ease with which he holds himself. At the smile on his face.
It’s not like any Coën has seen before. Easy and loose and happy. A tiny thing, a little tick up of his lips, but his gaze is locked on Aiden, on the Cat he has kept secret for fifteen years. He looks fond. He looks like Coën is sure he once did, when his keep in the mountains was still standing and he could count himself one of many. It is not a look, a smile, Coën has seen or will ever see at Kaer Morhen. It is just for here, on the Path, with Aiden.
“You good, Coën?” Lambert asks after a beat, frowning at him, body tense like he’s ready for a fight. “There a problem?”
He could mean it in multiple ways. A problem with his wound. A problem with Aiden. Coën has neither.
“No problem. Just tired,” he says, because that at least is still the truth.
He doesn’t say that when he looks at them, two people who’ve learned how to move around each other—two people who look like they care deeply for each other—he does not see the grief usually so present in Lambert’s eyes. He sees something else entirely, something good. Something that looks, finally, like joy.
So he also does not say, as he slumps back on the bedroll they’ve put him on, that all he feels right now is relief.