Teaser of my new fanfiction
Pretty Flower for a Pretty Bard
A Geralt/Jaskier one-shot based on The Witcher book series
The village had dressed itself in flowers.
They hung from doorposts in ropes of green and white, nodded from the handles of carts, and floated in wooden bowls of water set before thresholds. Someone had tied them to the horns of an old brown cow, which accepted the honor with the heavy patience of a saint. The road through the village had been swept clean, though the spring mud waited at either side like a creditor.
Jaskier approved of all of it.
He approved of the ribbons, the garlands, the barrels of beer already opened before noon, the girls with flowers braided into their hair, the boys pretending not to look at them, and the old women who missed nothing. Most of all, he approved of the long table set near the green, because it promised both supper and an audience, and Jaskier had always considered those two things proof that civilization, however battered, might yet be saved.
Geralt leaned against a fence beside Roach and watched him approve.
“You look,” Jaskier said, tuning his lute, “as though someone has invited you to be hanged.”
“Someone invited you to sing.”
Jaskier plucked a string, frowned, tightened the peg, and plucked again. “They are holding a spring marriage feast. Songs are required. Joy must be organized. Young love must be encouraged into making foolish promises before witnesses.”
“Only to people who brood beside horses.”
Roach nosed at a garland tied to the fence. Geralt moved it out of reach without looking. Jaskier noticed, because he always noticed when Geralt did something gentle in secret.
The feast had not yet begun in earnest. Men were raising a maypole in the green while children shrieked around them, very nearly underfoot. The village elder, a broad man with a beard like a winter broom, stood nearby giving instructions that no one seemed to obey. Beside him toddled a small girl in a wreath much too large for her head. Every few steps it slipped down over one eye. Each time she pushed it up with both hands and marched on with grave importance.
“That,” Jaskier said, “is clearly the true authority here.”
Geralt followed his gaze. “She’s a toddler.”
“All the more reason. Kids of such tender age have not yet learned politics. Their tyranny is honest.”
The little girl was trying to carry a basket of flowers. The basket bumped against her knees and shed petals behind her like evidence after a crime. She stopped at one of the wooden boards laid in a half-circle near the maypole and crouched to examine the marks painted on it.
Runes, or what passed for them after several generations of village memory and bad winters. Some were old. Some were nonsense. Some might have been old nonsense, which was often worse. Geralt narrowed his eyes.
Jaskier saw the change in him.
“That is your least comforting answer.”
“It means no one is bleeding.”
The elder clapped his hands. “Master bard! When you’re ready.”
Jaskier straightened as if the words had pulled a string through his spine. He stepped away from the fence, and the afternoon seemed to turn toward him. It was a trick he had. A dreadful, shameless, useful trick. He could stand in mud with his boots scuffed and his sleeves rolled, and still make people believe a brighter world had entered by the side door.
He glanced back once. Not at the crowd. At Geralt.
Geralt looked away first, which was foolish, because he could still hear him.
The song began lightly, with a teasing verse about spring catching old men asleep and young girls awake. The village laughed. The elder’s wife laughed the loudest, elbowing her husband until his beard shook. Jaskier bowed into the sound and carried it with him, turning the second verse softer, warmer, threading courtly polish through village rhythm until even the boys stopped pretending boredom.
Geralt had heard him sing in courts, taverns, camps, roadsides, prisons, one rather damp ditch, and a baron’s hall where the roof had been on fire. Jaskier adjusted himself to every place without becoming less himself. Here, among garlands and churned grass and beer foam, he sang as though marriage were not a trap, not a bargain, not two families counting coins and fields, but a promise made by people ridiculous enough to hope.
The little girl had stopped dropping petals.
She stood beside the half-circle of boards, staring at Jaskier with her mouth open. The wreath slid over one eye again. She did not fix it.
The song moved into the blessing verse.
The elder lifted his hands. Couples came forward in pairs, some shy, some grinning, one already arguing under their breath. Women brought ribbons. Men brought cups. Flowers were passed from hand to hand, woven, tied, tucked into belts and hair. The elder spoke the old words after Jaskier sang them, making them heavier, more official, less beautiful.
The child repeated them too.
Not all of them, and not correctly. She mumbled, skipped, hummed where the sounds were too large, and drew her fingers through spilled pollen on one of the rune boards.
Geralt stopped leaning on the fence.
Only a little. A witcher learned to distrust little changes. The smell of crushed grass sharpened. The garlands stirred, though the wind had dropped. Roach lifted her head and snorted.
Jaskier was still singing.
Of course he was. If a dragon had landed on the maypole, he would have tried to rhyme it with “devotion” before running.
The girl picked a flower from her basket. A small one, white-petaled, yellow-hearted. She looked at it, then at Jaskier, as if some perfect law had revealed itself.
The blessing ended. The crowd clapped, shouted, laughed. Someone threw a ribbon. Someone else threw a crust of bread for no clear reason.
Jaskier bowed, flourished, caught the ribbon, missed the bread, and received applause as if both had been planned.
The little girl marched straight through the newly blessed couples and stopped in front of him.
Jaskier lowered himself at once, one knee in the grass, lute held safely aside.
“Well,” he said, solemn as a duke before a queen. “Have I passed inspection?”
She thrust the flower at him.
“Pretty flower for the pretty bard.”
Something in the half-circle of rune boards gave a soft, dry crack.
No one else heard it. The village was clapping. The elder was wiping his eyes, maybe from emotion, possibly from beer. A dog barked at nothing.
Jaskier accepted the flower with both fingers, as carefully as if it were made of glass.
The child nodded hard enough to lose the wreath over both eyes.
Jaskier did not laugh. He reached out, lifted the wreath back into place, and bowed his head over the little flower.
Geralt watched Jaskier smile at her, not the bright stage smile, not the wicked one he used before a rude song, not the lazy curve he wore when he wanted forgiveness before committing the offense. This was quieter. Unpaid. Unguarded.
The flower in Jaskier’s hand opened wider.
It had already been open.
Geralt pushed away from the fence.
Jaskier looked up at him, still kneeling in the grass, the white flower held between his fingers.
Geralt looked at the rune boards, at the child’s pollen-streaked hand, at the garlands moving without wind.
“I was going to. I have been gifted it by a lady of discernment.”
The little girl nodded, satisfied with this accurate account of events.
Geralt crouched and took Jaskier’s wrist, not roughly. His fingers closed around the pulse there. Jaskier went still, but only for a breath.
“Prickle? Heat? Numbness?”
“No, no, and no. Are we being haunted by a daisy?”
“Chamomile,” Geralt said.
Jaskier blinked. “You know flowers?”
“Forgive me. Are we being haunted by an herb?”
The corner of Geralt’s mouth shifted before he could stop it. “Maybe.”
The little girl leaned closer and whispered, loudly, “Flowers listen.”
She smiled, pleased to have explained the world.
Jaskier tucked the chamomile behind one of the lute strings, just above the carved rosewood. “Then we must be careful what we say.”
Geralt’s hand was still around his wrist.
The crowd called for another song. The elder called for beer. The newly blessed couples called for luck, kisses, witnesses, and in one case the return of a missing shoe.
Jaskier looked down at Geralt’s fingers.
The chamomile remained where Jaskier had placed it, small and white against the dark wood of the lute. For a moment, as Jaskier rose and turned back to the waiting crowd, Geralt thought he saw another bloom in the grass between them.
Then a boot crushed it into the spring mud, and the feast went on.
