A voice came from the darkness.
“What are you doing out here?”
Jaskier did not think.
Thinking had never been his strongest skill in a crisis.
Reacting, however, he did beautifully.
He spun around with a strangled shout and swung the frying pan with every bit of fear, desperation, and theatrical violence in his body.
Metal met face with a sound that was deeply, horribly satisfying.
The figure dropped.
Hard.
For one stunned second, Jaskier stood there panting, pan raised, the boy clinging to his leg.
Then the body on the ground groaned.
Jaskier blinked.
“Oh,” he said.
The man at his feet was not a monster.
At least, not obviously.
He was large, armored, and very much alive, though one hand had gone to his face where the pan had struck him. Silver flashed faintly at his shoulder. A sword hilt. Then another.
Jaskier’s stomach dipped.
A witcher.
“Oh,” he said again, with considerably less confidence.
The man groaned once more and rolled onto his back, glaring up at him with one golden eye that caught the little light there was.
Jaskier lowered the pan by a fraction.
“In my defense,” he said weakly, “you approached two terrified people in a haunted forest after dark and led with a deeply sinister question.”
The witcher stared at him.
Then he touched his bleeding nose, looked at the blood on his fingers, and let out a slow, pained breath.
“I didn’t creep,” he said.
Jaskier stared. “You appeared silently from the trees.”
“I walked.”
“Silently.”
“I’m a witcher.”
“That is not as reassuring as you seem to think."
***
Continue reading:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/82623221/chapters/230142141
