A Little Sacrifice 10

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The next day they organised something of a ceremonial supper. Essi and Geralt bought a dressed lamb in a village they passed through. While they were haggling, Dandelion surreptitiously stole some garlic, onions and carrots from the vegetable patch behind the cottage. As they were riding away they also swiped a pot from the fence behind the smithy. The pot was a little leaky, but the Witcher soldered it using the Igni Sign.

The supper took place in a clearing deep in the forest. The fire crackled merrily and the pot bubbled. Geralt carefully stirred the stew with a star-shaped stirrer made from the top of a spruce tree stripped of bark. Dandelion peeled the onions and carrots. Little Eye, who had no idea about cooking, made the time more pleasant by playing the lute and singing racy couplets.

It was a ceremonial supper. For they were going to part in the morning. In the morning each of them was going to go their own way; in search of something they already had. But they did not know they had it, they could not even imagine it. They could not imagine where the roads they were meant to set off on the next morning would lead. Each of them travelling separately.

After they had eaten, and drunk the beer Drouhard had given them, they gossiped and laughed, and Dandelion and Essi held a singing contest. Geralt lay on a makeshift bed of spruce branches with his hands under his head and thought he had never heard such beautiful voices or such beautiful ballads. He thought about Yennefer. He thought about Essi, too. He had a presentiment that… At the end, Little Eye and Dandelion sang the celebrated duet of Cynthia and Vertvern, a wonderful song of love, beginning with the words: ‘Many tears have I shed…’ It seemed to Geralt that even the trees bent down to listen to the two of them.

Then Little Eye, smelling of verbena, lay down beside him, squeezed in under his arm, wriggled her head onto his chest, sighed maybe once or twice and fell peacefully asleep. The Witcher fell asleep, much, much later.

Dandelion, staring into the dying embers, sat much longer, alone, quietly strumming his lute.

It began with a few bars, from which an elegant, soothing melody emerged. The lyric suited the melody, and came into being simultaneously with it, the words blending into the music, becoming set in it like insects in translucent, golden lumps of amber.

The ballad told of a certain witcher and a certain poet. About how the witcher and the poet met on the seashore, among the crying of seagulls, and how they fell in love at first sight. About how beautiful and powerful was their love. About how nothing–not even death–was able to destroy that love and part them.

Dandelion knew that few would believe the story told by the ballad, but he was not concerned. He knew ballads were not written to be believed, but to move their audience.

Several years later, Dandelion could have changed the contents of the ballad and written about what had really occurred. He did not. For the true story would not have moved anyone. Who would have wanted to hear that the Witcher and Little Eye parted and never, ever, saw each other again? About how four years later Little Eye died of the smallpox during an epidemic raging in Vizima? About how he, Dandelion, had carried her out in his arms between corpses being cremated on funeral pyres and had buried her far from the city, in the forest, alone and peaceful, and, as she had asked, buried two things with her: her lute and her sky blue pearl. The pearl from which she was never parted.

No, Dandelion stuck with his first version. And he never sang it. Never. To no one.

Right before the dawn, while it was still dark, a hungry, vicious werewolf crept up to their camp, but saw that it was Dandelion, so he listened for a moment and then went on his way.