Chapter Text

Of all of the so-called Elder Races, it is the dragons who have proven themselves the most bitter enemies of the march of Progress. Oh, it is nothing to round up a band of peasants with pitchforks and put an end to a nest of brittlegills or to spear up a clutch of Guivres, which are easier to stick than fish in a barrel, but the matter becomes rather more complicated with one’s peasants are faced with a fire-breathing Addan Aenye or an angry Royal Red. Many a brave knight has met his end facing dragons’ teeth or dragons’ fire, to say nothing of the towns razed by Rivian wolfhearts or the farms burned by Smoks, the ships sunk by oakenscales and the caravans terrorized in the midnight raids of the dreaded królowie-nocy. 

In truth if it hadn’t been for the elves, the pestilence of dragons would have plagued the Northern Realms for decades more, Progress arrested by mysticism and by wyrms too used to commanding the land and the sky to surrender gracefully to humans’ rule, though the elves themselves likely did not understand the tools they handed to the northern kings when they first took to dragonback and waged war upon the world from Shaerrawedd…

-an excerpt from Lionel Altieri’s The March of Progress, or the People’s Revolution in the Northern Realms, p. 1248

…and from this day forth the skies shall be guarded by THE ROYAL AERIAL CORPS OF REDANIA, Our sovereignty protected by the brave captains and their crews, who risk life and limb for the Crown to bind a Dragon from its egg and claim it a servant of Redania, a bitter enemy of all the Elder Races…

-From the 1024 Tretogor Treatise, signed into law by King Leszek the Just

the problem with jaskier. 

mottled cutter.

“You know,” said Jaskier conversationally, squinting through the drizzly grey mist that had soaked through his horse’s mane and his pack and his theoretically mist-proof cloak, which Jaskier’d paid three extra orens for because the shopkeeper in Gelibol had assured Jaskier that he’d personally oiled the cloak against the elements, using the finest, hardiest linseed oil that money could buy, “we’re going to die in this miserable valley, I think.” 

Neither of Jaskier’s companions seemed too bothered by that idea. Dalibor – a great big slab of Novigradian throat-cutter who’d been in the Corps for as long as Jaskier had been alive and had probably gone on a nice round dozen missions like this one, in climes just as pleasant – only grunted. Burnetta, a country lass and much younger than Dal – though just as much a throat-cutter – flashed Jaskier a pretty smile. 

“It won’t be the valley that does us in,” she said, tone cheerful. In another life Burnetta would’ve made an excellent alderman’s wife, cheerful and clever and quick to soothe tempers and settle quarrels, as bluff in the face of a pair of feuding neighbors as she was staring down the point of a sergeant’s sword or the quivering grey lumps of gruel that passed as an acceptable breakfast in the Corps. 

In this life, she was unbothered by both the drizzly mist and the cold wind that knifed down from the heights of the Blue Mountains, gusts that flattened the manes of their horses as they passed and made Jaskier shiver even underneath his damp cloak. 

Burnetta’s cloak was just as soaked-through as Jaskier’s, the wind just as cold against her face as it was against his, but still Burnetta leaned over the neck of her horse and eagerly peered down into the cloudy treetops that sprawled beneath them, as if she could make a dragon burst upwards through the clouds by staring hard enough. 

Jaskier sighed. He recognized a lost cause when he saw one. 

We’ve got a better chance of an egg falling clean from the sky than finding one here, he thought, though not without some affection. Burnetta, like most of the brave lads and lasses who’d volunteered for the Corps, was completely dragon-mad. She’d go merrily into any valley, vale, cave or cavern if it meant she’d have even a scrap of a chance to see a flash of fang or scale or dragonfire. 

Jaskier himself had been a more-or-less – usually less, if he was being honest – proud member of the Redanian Aerial Corps, vires in caleo, for more than a decade now. He thought that dragons were plenty impressive, were beautiful and powerful and fascinating to watch, but Jaskier’d still prefer to keep his nose out of most caves and caverns. 

There’s got to be more bears in caves, he reasoned, than there are unbonded dragons or unattended dragon eggs, and bears don’t exactly invite lost Corpsmen like us in for tea. 

Neither did truly wild dragons, the ones who’d never known a harness or a captain or the discipline of the Corps. There was a reason that the oldest Aerial Corps in the Continent – Redania’s, of course – was only a few hundred years old, despite the many centuries of war various kingdoms, collectives and mercenary bands had inflicted upon the world. Wild dragons and civilized men didn’t tend to get along. 

Still, despite being dragon-mad and perhaps overfond of caves, Burnetta had proven herself much happier to talk to Jaskier over the course of their journey than old Dalibor had, and Jaskier, heartily tired of talking to himself, was rather fond of Burnetta and the way her cheek dimpled just so when she smiled at him, so he mustered up as much of his own cheer as he could with his face half-frozen and said, lightly, “Oh? What’ll it be for us, then, if not the valley? Wolves? Wyrms? Nilfgaardian assassins?”

“Ach, we don’t rate assassins,” Burnetta teased. She didn’t take her eyes off of the mists. “You read too much, Jaskier. ‘S only the captains like old Dijks who’ve got to worry about paid killers. Nilfgaard wouldn’t spend the coin offing you or me. As for wolves, or wyrms – ”

“Don’t joke,” Dalibor finally cut in, his voice a gruff, low growl. It took Jaskier a few seconds, as it always did, to translate the older man’s growling into actual words. 

(Jaskier, something of a bookworm even before he’d been shipped off to the Aerial Corps, spoke four languages – five, really, if one counted the profanities he could recite in dwarvish – but none of them were the particular dialect of Grouchy Old Corpsman that Dal spoke, when he indeed spoke at all, which was about thrice per day. After a month on the road together Jaskier was better at understanding him that he had been back in Baldhorn, but still needed a moment, most of the time, to figure out what he was trying to say.) 

“‘S bad luck,” Dalibor continued. He spat over the side of his horse and eyed the mists with much more caution than Burnetta. Cold rainwater, the sort that stung when it struck the skin and was about two degrees and a stiff wind away from being snow, dripped from his iron-grey beard. “Valley’s cursed.” 

That made Jaskier grin and relax a bit into his saddle. He was wary of wolves and bears but had no fear of curses. “Dal,” he said, “I think that’s the most I’ve heard you say at any one time since we left Redania.” 

Dalibor grunted again. They’d left the covert in Baldhorn a month ago and Dal typically spoke fewer words in a day than Jaskier had fingers on both hands. Adding in what Dal’d said this morning, when they’d broken camp and hauled themselves into the saddle for another day of riding – “Hmm. Rain’s comin’.” – and Jaskier’d have to start counting Dal’s words on his toes. 

“Now, wait,” Burnetta cut in, finally looking away from the treetops, which were steadily drawing level with their eyes now that their little band was plodding slowly and carefully down a steep, rocky track that would, if their map was right, bring them into the forests of the Blue Mountains. She frowned hard. “Nobody said anything to me about a cursed fuckin’ valley.” 

Jaskier paused. He didn’t hold much stock in curses – that’d be the last ten years or so of Jaskier's city upbringing – but he did like to gossip, and now that Burnetta mentioned it Jaskier didn’t think that anybody’d said anything to him about a curse at the end of the world either. 

He was rather offended. Jaskier’d told plenty of his friends where he’d been headed, after all – egg-retrieval missions like this one typically had rather high casualty rates, and Jaskier had never been above using his impending maybe-death to leverage free drinks at the Rider’s Rest – and none of them had mentioned anything about a curse, a haunting or even a particular local superstition about the wild forests of northern Kaedwen. 

“Now that you mention it,” Jaskier said, scowling, “nobody’s said anything to me either.” 

Jaskier took special care – or at least as special care as a wingless Corpsman making a wingless Corpsman’s salary could take – to stay on good terms with all of the cooks and serving girls who populated the tents and taverns of the covert specifically to get all of the best gossip first. It wasn’t like Jaskier had much else to do; despite being one-and-twenty and three years a man in the eyes of just about every nation that made up the Northern Alliance, Jaskier had yet to be chosen to serve on a dragon’s crew, either aerial or ground, and that left him at loose ends for much of his day. 

(He had hoped, before he’d gotten this assignment, that Philippa might’ve chosen him to fill an opening on her left wing. She went through crewmen like some dragons went through cattle and her left wing was usually her more exposed, since she flew port in most formations, but despite the rather high risk of being raked off of her back by an enemy dragon Jaskier’d been willing to sign on with her. 

If Philippa had chosen him, she would have been Jaskier’s dragon, or at least Jaskier would have been her crewman, and Jaskier would’ve been happy with that. 

Despite his hopes, however, and despite the carefully-prepared speech he’d memorized for Sigismund Dijkstra, Philippa’s captain, Philippa and her entire crew had been called away to Sodden Hill, to the front, the night before Jaskier’d planned to meet with Dijsktra to ask for a place on his crew, and Jaskier’d been sent all the way out here before Philippa had returned. 

Jaskier was trying not to be too bitter about it, since it was hardly Philippa’s fault that the Nilfgaardian army had swallowed up all of Metinna and was now eyeing Nazair and the Northern Realms beyond it, but he had hoped – well.) 

If we don’t die in this valley, maybe we’ll find what we came for, Jaskier told himself bracingly, trying to borrow some of Burnetta’s enthusiasm. And then I won’t need Philippa at all. 

Optimism came a little slower to Jaskier now than it had when he’d been a boy, but he could still muster up some of it these days, at least in the face of the rain and Dal’s grumblings. Jaskier’d had disappointed dreams before, after all; the chances of being chosen for Philippa’s crew were slim even among the best of the Corps, and Jaskier doubted that he was that.

Nothing else to do but keep dreaming, I suppose, he told himself. Maybe he would find an egg of his own up here, or Dal or Burnetta would, and Jaskier could sign on with one of them. That dream, fanciful as it was, was why Jaskier'd accepted ordered to come up here in the first place, instead of cheerfully deserting for Toussaint. Well, that dream and Jaskier's pride in his country, he supposed, not that he had much of that. Jaskier thought that he was a reasonably brave and dutiful sort of lad, but he could admit to himself that he was selfish, too. 

No dragon in the Redanian Aerial Corps had taken Jaskier on. They were at war and in wartime dragon crews were recruiting fairly often, more than did during peacetime, but Jaskier was tired of kicking around Baldhorn, bored out of his mind, hoping that Philippa or Kiyan or Kiera or even awful old Vilgefortz would choose him for their crew. 

This is my best chance for a dragon of my own, Jaskier thought. Or at least a dragon to crew on. Jaskier had no illusions about which of the three of them – Jaskier, Dailbor or Burnetta – was most qualified to captain a dragon, should they find any unattended egg that then hatched. Dalibor'd crewed on Kolgrim, a fierce Northern eel-neck, in the last days of the Continental War, and though that had ended thirty years ago – and Kolgrim had been dead for longer, having fallen to a mountainback flying under Lyrian colors – Dal was the only one of the three of them who had crewed a dragon before. Neither Jaskier nor Burnetta had ever flown.

A desperate and slim chance, but –

“Cursed how?” Burnetta asked, drawing Jaskier’s thoughts out of his internal gloom. He did his best to set his disappointment aside. He’d had a whole month to get used to the idea that he’d probably die out here, after all, and never taste the skies at all. The Aerial Corps’ motto might have been vires in caleo – strength in the sky – but Jaskier’d always been more of a fac aut morere sort himself, or at least he would’ve been if he’d been allowed to go to Oxenfurt and study the liberal arts like he’d wanted to.    

“Yeah,” Jaskier said, mirroring Burnetta. “Cursed how?” 

Though he often teased Dalibor, the old man did know what he was on about most of the time. He’d been in the Aerial Corps since it had been just been one broken-down old dragon and a shack in the Redanian wilderness. He'd seen it swell with dragons and volunteers during the Continental War and had seen it dwindle again in the years after. 

Dalibor, unbothered by Jaskier and Burnetta’s curiosity, just shrugged. 

“That’s what you said about the inn we stayed in last week, though,” Jaskier pointed out, hoping to bait the old man into speaking. “And the only thing that turned out to be cursed there was that turnip stew.” 

Burnetta, who had wisely turned her nose up at the stew and had been spared a truly miserable evening clutching her belly and rolling about like a colicky horse, brightened. “That’s true,” she said. “We got out of Daevon alright, Dal, so I ‘spect we’ll be alright here too, as long as we’re careful. We’re Corpsmen, aye? No need to be superstitious, like country peasants.” 

She was the only country peasant out of the three of them. Jaskier knew that Burnetta was rather sensitive about it, too – most of the men and women in the Corps came from Redania’s cities, presumably because most of the peasantfolk were too sensible to think that dying on dragonback was a good idea – so he didn’t feel like he needed to needle her by pointing that out. 

(She was sensitive, too, about being Velenish, instead of a proper Redanian like Jaskier or even a Novigradian like Dal; many of the other Corspmen in Baldhorn liked to mutter to themselves about Burnetta being a Temerian spy, due to Velen's unfortunate geography, never mind that now Redania and Temeria were allies, and had joined the Redanian Aerial Corps and the Temerian Guild of Dragonriders together to stand against Nilfgaard.) 

“Very careful,” Jaskier muttered instead, leaning over the side of his horse to peer down the narrow, steep track picked out of the mountainside. He was less worried about some nebulous curse, even if Dalibor was trying his hand at being mysterious by refusing to elaborate on just what had cursed the valley, or why, and more worried about his horse tripping on its way down the mountain and breaking both its neck and Jaskier’s. 

Dalibor, perhaps predictably, only grunted again. “You’ll see," he said, which was rather more ominous than Jaskier would’ve liked, and then the old man spurred his horse forward and down the mountain track, quickly disappearing into the mist. 

Jaskier and Burnetta exchanged a pointed glance. They did that often, these days. Jaskier hadn’t known Burnetta at all before they’d been assigned to the same expedition, but in the last month or so they’d grown quite friendly. A smile tugged at the corners of Jaskier’s mouth, mirrored by a grin of Burnetta’s. 

The journey from the Redanian Aerial Corps’ home covert – a pretty but windswept patch of land tucked into the rolling hills east of Baldhorn, where the growing number of dragons and dragon crews wouldn’t bother the nobles like it had when the Corps had been quartered outside of Tretogor – had been a long one, and Jaskier and Burnetta both had quickly realized that their journey would be much longer if all three of them were as silent and as grim as Dalibor tended to be. The weeklong ride between Gelibol and Montecalvo alone, when Burnetta’d lost her voice to a spring head cold, had nearly driven Jaskier mad. 

“Don’t worry too much about him,” Jaskier advised, drawing his horse nearer to Burnetta’s, hanging back a bit to let Dal face whatever grave and terrible threat waited in the valley below on his own. 

“For a Novigradian, he’s more worried about ghouls, barghests and old elven curses than any country soothsayer,” Jaskier continued. 

Burnetta snorted. “My gran was the old country soothsayer,” she said. “Dal puts her to shame. Really, what grown man believes in barghests?” 

Jaskier grinned and judged that there was now enough distance between the two of them and Dalibor to follow the old man without pricking his feelings. He nudged his horse, an agreeable chestnut mare who’d started to grow a shaggy winter coat in deference to the chill of wild Kaedwen, which still had heaps of snow on its mountain peaks and even halfway down the mountains on its trails, further down the narrow track and held onto her mane for dear life; on one side of the track was the mountain, tall and strong and sturdy, but on the other was a steep, hardscrabble scree of sliding rock and ice and bracken that plunged sharply down into the misty valley.  

Burnetta obligingly took up the rear position in their strung-out little train. They’d ridden this way across most of Kaedwen. In Redania the roads had been wide enough for all three of them to ride side-by-side, but Kaedwen was a kingdom of steep hills, deep forests and, apparently, very little tax revenue. Jaskier hadn’t seen a properly cut and pounded road since they’d left Ard Carriagh ten days ago. Cobblestone streets, like the winding alleys of Oxenfurt or the sunny lanes of Tretogor, were a distant memory. 

“How’s the track ahead, Dal?” Jaskier called, letting his horse decide how fast she wanted to head downhill. She’d know better than Jaskier were to step. The stones all around the track were still slick with snow and ice.  

Dalibor, hidden in the fog, only grunted back. 

“Tolerable enough, then,” Jaskier reported to Burnetta, who laughed. “If a bit wet from the rain.” 

The rain, as light as it was, continued to seep into the folds of his oilskin as Jaskier followed Dalibor down the mountain. They had woken to rain and, if the thickness of the mist was anything to go by, would likely go to bed in the rain too. Jaskier only hoped that they’d take the time to find a proper cave or sheltered hollow to bed down in, the risk of bears or wolves be damned. Dalibor’d want to get his old joints out of the wet and Jaskier was, despite all of his time in the Corps, still a Viscount’s son at heart, so his preference was for comfort whenever it was available. 

Burnetta, though, didn’t care a whit where she slept, and often pushed the other two of them on until the road – or whatever passed for the road, in these parts – was too dark to see properly, forcing their whole merry little band to camp out in the open more often than not. 

The horse-track was steep enough that they descended quickly. The trees, which had bristled at the bottom of the valley like dark teeth, now kept them company and even began to rise high above their heads. The heaps of snow thinned from impassable heaps to knee-high drifts and some trees began to inch their way up the sides of the mountain, shading the track as they grew. Somewhere beyond the mists, Jaskier could hear running water. 

If he’d read their maps right – and it was Jaskier who’d been doing most of the map-reading, since Dalibor knew this country well enough to go without and Burnetta couldn’t read at all – the river below them was called the Gwenllech, the River of White Stones, and it would guide them north to the highest and most fearsome of the Blue Mountains, where the Corps’ best and brightest minds thought that one or two of the Continent’s last remaining wild dragons might make their dens and nests. 

I do hope that I read the maps right, Jaskier thought, peering around, hoping to pick shapes out of the mists before any shapes could surprise him. All around them the Blue Mountains rose up, fierce and imposing, their snowy peaks crowning the valley on every side. The forest here – most of the forests of Kaedwen, really – was old and thick, the trees far taller and wilder than even the trees in the royal forests of Redania. Looking at their blurry shapes through the fog made Jaskier feel like a child walking into a tale stuffed with giants and magic and fantastical creatures, made it easy to imagine that Dalibor’s curse really did linger here between the trees, among the stones. It was hard to imagine a more wild place. 

A place where magic might still live, Jaskier thought. In the back of his head, he heard a faint tune. Something slow and somber, he thought, something that could make a vielle weep. He could almost taste the sound of it. 

Like he always did, Jaskier pushed the music out of his head. He was a Corpsman, not a musician, and Corpsmen who spent their time singing and composing fine tunes instead of practicing at the bow or the sword or the ballista didn’t get picked for dragon crews. 

There aren’t any giants left, anyway, Jaskier reminded himself. If they ever really lived in the first place. And this forest’s not even that wild – there’s supposed to be a village on the other side, along the banks of the Gwenllech, and villages mean people. 

Everybody knew, even a Corpsman, that nothing was truly wild any more. There were villages and towns and cities strung all the way across the Continent from Baccalá to Aedd Gynvael, from Cintra to Spalla and the Mountains of Fire. Jaskier put the mournful sounds of a well-played vielle away. 

“We are gonna have to worry about wolves, aren’t we?” Burnetta asked, drawing Jaskier out of his thoughts again. He twisted around in his saddle, grateful for the distraction, and saw that she was staring out into the trees like he had been, though instead of seeing notes of music rising from a page, crisp and black, the ink still wet, flags smudged a little in the rush to get them down, Burnetta was likely seeing something more dangerous. 

“More than we’ll have to worry about wyrms, probably,” Jaskier said. Wyrms – distant kin to dragons, flightless and speechless but just as capable of having a man’s throat out with tooth or claw – were rare these days, even in wildernesses at the end of the world, but wolves and wild dogs made their homes everywhere. 

“Good thing they teach you which end of a sword you point at a wolf in the Corps, hm?” Burnetta said, flashing Jaskier another grin, though this one was shakier than her first. 

Jaskier rolled his eyes. 

All children taken in by the Royal Aerial Corps of Redania – and even women flowered, like Burnetta’d been when she’d joined – were afforded a princely education before they were deemed skilled enough to join a dragon’s crew, regardless of whether those children came from some backwater village with more mouths to feed than food to eat or if they came from a noble family obediently tithing their fourth son. Jaskier’s time in the Corps hadn’t exactly left him a doctor or a priest or a master of the seven liberal arts, but he’d still been taught well enough. 

He could ride a horse and read a set of orders in three languages. He could shoot more or less accurately from the ground and from the sky and he could man a dragon-mounted ballista and he could swing a sword when he had to, which was more than the average footman in the Army proper could say, he supposed.  

Jaskier had not, however, been the most able swordsman in the Corps by any considerable margin, and Burnetta knew that. Her eyes glittered with mischief. 

Mischief made Burnetta rather pretty, so Jaskier didn’t take much offense, even though he’d been nice and hadn’t called her a superstitious peasant when he’d had the chance. 

“If we’re set on by wolves, I’ll do my best not to trip over it this time, at least,” Jaskier said. He’d done that once, tripped over his own sword. He’d been facing off against another cadet during a training session a few years ago. Vilgefortz, a Greater Guivre and the largest dragon serving in the Redanian Corps, had been watching the cadets and had seen Jaskier stumble, too, and had pointedly not taken Jaskier on as a crewman any time he’d had an opening. 

Jaskier did want to serve on a dragon’s crew, of course – every man, woman and child in any Aerial Corps did – but he didn’t much like Vilgefortz or any Guivre, Lesser or Greater, and wasn’t too broken up about being permanently excluded from Vilgefortz’s crew. 

Guivres are just so – snakey, Jaskier thought. It was an unworthy thought, since no dragon could help the way that it was shaped more than any man or woman could, but Guivres of any variety tended to be slender, long-necked, wriggly creatures, sinuous and serpentine, and Jaskier much preferred the solid, sensible construction of a krol-nocy or a Zerrakan. He was a bit of a traditionalist that way. 

“If you do trip, at least there’s nobody watching you out here but us,” Burnetta said, still teasing. “You’ll not scare away any drakes looking to add to their crew.” 

Jaskier huffed. He was annoyed that that story – and Vilgefortz’s pointed rejection, regardless of how Jaskier felt about it – was still making its way around the Corps’ many stew-pots. It had happened years ago, as whispers about Nilfgaard and its appetites had started to shift from half-amused anecdotes to formal, concerned reports. Jaskier’d been barely eighteen. He had practiced more with a sword since then. 

“It was only Vilgefortz who saw,” Jaskier said. “And of course I’d serve on his crew if he asked, but – ”

“Ach,” Burnetta said, shuddering, more Velenish slipping through in her voice, “I get it. His crew’s not for me, either.” 

“Oh?” Jaskier asked, surprised. His opinion about Guivres in general and about Vilgefortz in particular wasn’t a common one, among his fellow Corpsmen; most of them would happily strap into a harness and fly with Vilgefortz if only for a chance at a share of his prizes. Vilgefortz was exceptionally large for a Guivre, nearly a heavyweight, and quite vicious. He'd won more prizes than any other dragon in Redania's service. 

“Don’t mistake me, Jask, he’s a hell of a fighter,” Burnetta added hastily, like she was worried she’d offended Jaskier’s pride as a lifelong Corpsman. “But, uh, not for me. I wanna fly in more than one fight, you know?” 

“I do,” Jaskier said, smiling to show her that there were no hard feelings. Jaskier’d drawn his own opinion about the great old Guivre years ago, back before the Northern Realms had even thought to band together against Nilfgaard, when the few dragons of the Corps had been sent mostly to fight either wild dragons or dens of bandits in the hills, who'd cottoned on to the idea of firepower and raised fighting dragons of their own. Even back in those days Vilgefortz had been constantly replacing his crewmen. 

“If it’s not Vilgefortz you’d like to fly with, who’d you serve on?” Jaskier asked, curious now. The steep track was softening, the slope evening out, and the sounds of the Gwenllech were louder than ever. They were well down into the valley now, and Jaskier found that good conversation helped banish the chill of the rain. 

“I haven’t said?” Burnetta pulled back up to Jaskier’s side as the track widened back out into something that resembled – though in the way a doodle on a napkin resembled a Toussainti masterwork – a road. 

Jaskier shook his head. He had a good memory and wouldn’t have forgotten; all Corpsmen, no matter their nation or their background, had a dragon that they’d prefer to fly with above all others, and over the years Jaskier’d made a fun little habit of comparing answers across different Corpsmen. 

“Huh,” said Burnetta. She chewed her lip for a moment. “Oh, I’d be happy on any of ‘em, I guess, except Vilgefortz or old Lydia.” Lydia, a Lesser Guivre who was part of Vilgefortz's regular formation, insomuch as he had one, had taken a rather serious injury several years ago in a skirmish with a wild fire-breather and now spent most of her days grounded, though she could and did still fly when Redania needed her to. 

“And are we talking only our dragons, or the rest of the Alliance’s, too?” Burnetta asked. 

“Ours, of course,” Jaskier said, rolling his eyes. Despite all of the promises of cooperation and coordination made by the kings and their courts during negotiations last year, the various Aerial Corps – or Aerial Corps-equivalents, in the case of Temeria and its rather odd Guild of Dragonriders – Jaskier had yet to see any mingling between nations. Redanian-trained Corpsmen were hardly lining up to join the crew of a Lyrian dragon – though that could’ve been because their Greater Guivre was even more notorious for losing crewmen than Vilgefortz – and Redanian dragons had yet to allow any Kaedweni, Temerian or Caingorni crewmen onto their backs. 

“Fair enough,” said Burnetta. “That Triss, though – could you imagine crewing a fire-breather?” 

“In my nightmares, maybe,” Jaskier replied, affecting a shudder of his own. Redania’s only native breed of fire-breather was long-extinct, leaving the country with just its venom-spitting Guivres as the center of any formation, but on modern battlefields it was still the fire-breathers that drew most of the attention from any enemy. 

I want to fly, Jaskier thought, with the same hard, sharp sort of longing he’d had since he’d first seen Philippa soar over the hills outside of Tretogor, the evening sun limning her dark scales with gold. But not if it means getting cooked in my leathers or clawed off of my dragon’s back the first time we face an enemy. 

That was an idle thought, anyway. Temeria was the only kingdom in the Northern Alliance who’d brought a fire-breather to the Allied Corps, and Jaskier wasn’t so desperate to touch the sky that he’d cross the invisible line between nations and sign on with a Temerian dragon. 

Burnetta laughed and leaned across the track to shove at Jaskier’s shoulder playfully. “Be serious,” she said. 

“Oh,” Jaskier assured her, though he smiled when he did it so that Burnetta didn’t think him a coward. “I am serious. No fire-breathers for me, thanks. Temeria can keep their Triss.” 

“If I’ve got to pick from only our dragons, maybe Sheala, then,” Burnetta said. “It’d be a treat to fly on the North’s only southern dragon, don’t you think?”

“It would,” Jaskier admitted. Sheala was stunning, truly, even beyond the way that most dragons, even Guivres, were stunning. She was an elding-scale, dusk blue from nose to tail, and when Sheala was in the sky she was fast and agile, as graceful as a bird. 

But elding-scales were lightweight dragons, crewed by no more than five or six, and Sheala was careful with her crew. Jaskier doubted that she’d have any openings any time soon. 

Still, he liked what it said about Burnetta that she’d chosen a smaller dragon like Sheala instead of one of the larger ones, like Vilgefortz or Philippa or Sabrina. Sheala and her crew would never see as much glory or war-prize gold as a larger dragon, but were just as important for the war effort; lightweights braved reconnaissance flights over enemy territory, carried vital messages, dropped spies and assassins behind enemy lines. They were useful. Needed. 

“What about you?” Burnetta said, turning the question back on Jaskier. “No Vilgefortz, but if you’ve got dreams of flying to glory at the head of some formation – ”

“Not glory,” said Jaskier. Glory was only really shared between a dragon and its captain. A good wing-man could expect to share some of the pride in a successful attack and of course received a portion of any prize money taken, but really no one remembered the names of the various ensigns and second lieutenants who scrambled over a dragon’s back flinging arrows around against a larger crew. 

Burnetta opened her mouth, a question in her eyes, and Jaskier hastily added, before their conversation could get entirely too personal, “If I could choose, I’d serve on Philippa.” 

The words were sincerely meant. Redania claimed six dragons of its own, more than any country in the Northern Alliance but for Temeria, which claimed nine, and Philippa was the best dragon among them. The Temerians could boast all they liked about their admittedly pretty fire-breather – Triss was lovely, and Jaskier liked seeing her fly just as much as anybody in the Corps – or about their pair of petalscales, about their sharp-toothed mountainback, much like the Kaedweni could bluster about their Eagle Eye or the Lyrians could brag about their brace of blackthorns and their smirking Greater Guivre, but none of the allied Northern Kingdoms could boast of a dragon like Philippa. None of their dragons could outfly her and perhaps only Vilgefortz, who had a few decades and a few tons on her, could outfight her.  

Jaskier had wanted to serve on her crew since he’d sworn his vows. 

Burnetta laughed again, bright, like Jaskier’d told her a particularly clever joke. “I’d sooner take one of those barghests Dal’s so afraid of to bed before I’d serve under old Dijks,” she said. “I think the barghest’d be less likely to get me killed!” 

“Captain Dijkstra doesn’t – he doesn’t get anybody killed,” Jaskier protested, twisting around to glare at Burnetta properly. “Philippa’s just out on the front more than most. The front’s dangerous for everyone.” 

Burnetta snorted. “And the fact that Dijkstra’s jealous of anybody Philippa so much as looks at has nothing to do with how quick she goes through crewmen, does it?” 

“Dragons and captains are always – odd, with each other,” Jaskier said. Everyone in the Corps – in any Corps, Redanian or otherwise – knew that. A captain was what elevated a dragon from a wild animal to a soldier. As fond as most dragons were of gold and jewels, they’d trade an entire hoard of treasure to secure the safety of their captain if they had to. 

And captains, too, were mad about their dragons. Not every captain was fortunate enough to raise their dragon from the egg – dragons lived longer than men, after all, and would usually accept a second, third or twelfth captain, in Vilgefortz’s case, if their first captain died – but many captains had, and such a bond ran deep. 

That Captain Dijkstra was – particular, perhaps, with the Corpsmen he accepted into Philippa’s crew – was not unusual. A dragon’s crew helped protect it in the air, helped keep it in fighting shape from the ground. A crewman that a captain couldn’t trust was dangerous for the captain, the crew and the dragon all. 

Burnetta, unbothered by Jaskier’s fierce glare, just shook her head. “‘Odd’s’ a word for it,” she said. “We’d heard about how odd Dijkstra is even in Midcopse. Is it true that he takes every meal with Philippa, even when they’re not in the field?” 

“How should I know?” Jaskier asked, keeping his tone light, even though his familiarity with old Bazyli, who was the head of the kitchen staff for the covert in Baldhorn, meant that Jaskier did know that while Dijkstra didn’t take every meal sitting at his dragon’s claw, he took enough of them with her for others to notice. “I’m still just a chorąży, like you.” 

Chorąży – ensign – was the polite term for what Jaskier and Burnetta were. In the Corps, which had never been known, as an organization, for its politeness, they were more commonly called bezskrzydły.

Wingless. 

“Ugh,” Burnetta said. “You’re no fun, Jask.” 

Jaskier clapped a hand to his chest, faking offense. “I’m great fun,” he said. “Ask anybody.” 

“Dalibor,” Burnetta called up through the fog, “is Jaskier any fun?”

From the mist there was only silence, until Dalibor broke it with a faint – and decidedly annoyed – grunt. 

“Alright, now, that’s cheating,” Jaskier said. “Dal’s not known how to have a good time since the end of the last Continental War. He’s biased.” 

“He’s not that biased,” Burnetta retorted. 

“He’s – ”

“Tryin’ to keep quiet, y’fool children,” Dalibor growled, reappearing out of the fog. Rather than turn his horse about to scold them, he’d merely stopped on the trail to let them catch up. When Jaskier drew closer, he saw that Dalibor was scowling ferociously. 

Jaskier winced. That look had only ever meant a lecture, in Jaskier’s experience. 

“Tell me,” Dalibor continued, still in a low, fierce growl, rather more intimidating than any wolf Jaskier’d ever come across. 

Ah, yes, Jaskier thought. Here’s the lecture. 

“What’s our mission?” Dalibor demanded. “Why’re we out here, facin’ wolves and worse, instead of helpin’ the war effort in Baldhorn?”

Jaskier thought about opening his mouth to ask if Dalibor’s question was a rhetorical one, but caught sight of the fire blazing in the older man’s eyes and – wisely, Jaskier hoped – decided to keep his mouth shut. 

Burnetta decided differently. “We – we’re helping the war effort, aren’t we?” she said, smiling a little, uncertain. “They’d hardly send us off otherwise.” 

Dalibor sneered. “The only way we’re helpin’ the war effort,” he said, low and angry, “is if we find a clutch of eggs to bring back to raise in the Corps. The only way, understand?” 

Cowed by his tone, Burnetta’s smile dropped and she nodded. Jaskier dipped his chin too, feeling rather like a schoolboy caught with his hand in the teacher’s desk.  

“We’re not gonna find any eggs if we can’t find any dragons,” Dal said. “And to find ‘em, we need to shaddup and pay attention. Listen to the wind. Look for signs. You think a dragon – a wild dragon, an enemy to men an' women all – ‘s just gonna fall outta the sky?”

Later – much later, when Jaskier finally managed to get some time to himself to think about all that had happened – Jaskier would think back on Dalibor’s words and wonder seriously, for the first time in his life, if any of the gods and goddesses that people worshiped across the Continent actually were real, and possibly had a sense of humor as well, because as the last word fell out of Dalibor’s mouth a distant roar split the air, as distinctive to any Corpsman as the high whine of an arrow in flight or the clear ring of steel on steel, and a dragon burst upwards out of the trees. 

It was a dragon. It could hardly be anything else, even a wyvern – the creature was far away, just a shape in the mist, but Jaskier still saw four great paws tucked close to the dragon’s body as it flew, its wide green wings billowing like sails to catch the wind. No wyvern flew like that. 

All three of them, Jaskier and Burnetta and Dalibor, stared at it, slack-jawed. 

It’s got to be a middleweight at least, Jaskier thought. From this far away it was impossible to gauge how big the dragon truly was, but it had to be at least seven or eight tons. The faint sound of its wings cracking against the air echoed behind Jaskier’s teeth.  

The shape of the dragon grew bigger, but none of them moved, transfixed. All of them had seen a dragon in flight before. Of course they had. Jaskier’d been watching Redania’s dragons drill in their formations since he’d been a boy. 

There was still something breathtaking about watching a dragon fly, no matter how many times Jaskier’d seen it. 

They’re just so – graceful, I think. Even the smallest dragon on the Continent weighed a good several hundred pounds. They should all be lumbering, slow, ponderous beasts, like the stories of giants and ogres. They should be mountains that moved. They shouldn't be able to fly at all.  

But in the sky dragons were fast and sleek, every part of their bodies turned towards keeping them in the air. They could dive like falcons and soar like eagles, hang suspended in the air like a damselfly. They could ride the currents of the air like a ship the currents of the sea. 

This dragon was no exception. As it flew nearer – though still well-above them, some eight or nine hundred feet up in the air – Jaskier could see that while its wings were green, its belly was more of a brownish, coppery sort of color, and its tail ended in a fan of webbed skin instead of the spikes common among Redanian breeds. It was a middleweight, perhaps a little bigger than Philippa but smaller than a Greater Guivre, and it had something clutched in its forepaws.

Dalibor recovered first, spinning his horse around and aiming it for the nearest line of trees. 

“Quickly, under cover,” he snapped. “I don’t think it's seen us yet.”

Jaskier blinked, still watching the dragon, and almost asked Dal why they’d need to get out of sight. None of them were afraid of dragons. They were in the wrong profession, if they were. 

Then he remembered that this was a wild dragon, not one raised in the Corps, and kicked his own horse after Dal’s. 

Corps dragons knew not to go for men or horses, not off of the battlefield anyway. They were raised from the egg to know what made an acceptable meal or not.

But wild dragons were another sort of animal entirely. There was a reason that Redania’d kept a few dragons on in its Corps after the end of the last Continental War, and it hadn’t just been to trot them out during parades or feast days. 

Wild dragons were dangerous. Before people had figured out the trick of raising them, wild dragons had done unimaginable damage to the fledgling human kingdoms. A good-sized dragon could eat an entire flock of sheep in under a week. A fire-breather could burn down a village before a brigade could fetch enough water to help. A single flick of a claw could usually kill an unarmored man and while Corps dragons preferred beef or fish to other meats, a wild dragon wouldn’t have much of an issue feasting on three Corpsmen and their horses. 

Jaskier’s horse darted after Dalibor’s, Burnetta coming closely – if reluctantly – behind, and within a handful of heartbeats the three of them were all ensconced beneath the thick, shaggy boughs of some of Kaedwen’s oldest pine trees. The limbs of the trees were so dense that Jaskier couldn’t see the sky. Rainwater still dripped down onto the back of Jaskier’s neck, but the trees slowed it to a trickle. The sounds of the dragon, the echo of its wings against the air, slowly faded away. 

Jaskier’s fingers tingled. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing up. Awe hammered against his ribs, persistent as drumbeats. 

“Boy,” Dailbor said, though his sharp tone stood at odds from the wonder on his face, too, “get the book.”

“Dal,” Jaskier replied, craning his neck back to watch the shadow of the dragon ripple between the pine needles, over the snow, “what on earth are you talking about?” 

Who could think about books at a time like this? How many people alive today could say they’d seen a wild dragon? There were hardly any left in Redania and the few that did remain knew better than to let themselves be seen. As soon as a Redanian – any Redanian, from the lowest plowman to a prince of the realm – saw a dragon in the forest without a captain to command it, the Corps were called in to deal with the beast. 

There was a tune in the back of his head again. He could hear the horns, the drums. Curiosity burned in his belly. 

“What d’ye mean, ‘what?’” Dalibor rumbled, swatting the tune aside. “You’re the one with the fancy book, aye?” 

Jaskier blinked again, the dragon’s outline still stamped behind his eyes. “The – oh. Yes, Dal, I’m the one with the ‘fancy book.’ Though it’s not a book, really, as much as it is a living document. More of a journal than a bestiary, you see, because I – ”

Dalibor cut Jaskier off with a wordless huff, holding a hand out impatiently. 

Jaskier sighed, but finally took his eyes off of the narrow streaks of sky he could see from beneath the trees and obeyed. His waxed canvas saddlebags were, fortunately, a bit more waterproof than his oilskin cloak. He’d still tucked his compendium away at the very bottom of his pack, wrapped in a blanket and one of Jaskier’s two spare shirts. He pulled it out carefully, but didn’t hand it off to Dalibor. Jaskier kept the book safe – or at least as safe as he could keep it – under the folds of his cloak. 

The old man huffed again, but dropped his hand. 

“You think you know what we just saw?” Burnetta asked, leaning over her horse’s neck to get a good look at Jaskier’s compendium. She had water dripping from every strand of hair. Jaskier leaned pointedly away, and ignored her when she started to pout at him. 

“Aye,” Dalibor grumbled. “Or at least I think I ken. Look for a ‘Cutter.’” 

Jaskier nodded. “Nation?” 

Dalibor shrugged. The old man knew everything there was to know about Redania’s dragons, knew quite a bit about the dragons of other nations, too, but as Jaskier’d learned when he’d first joined the Corps, there were dozens of dragon breeds, scores, and even if one looked rather like another each breed was unique. 

Jaskier shifted so that he was underneath a thick, heavy pine bough, as shielded as he could get from the rain, and opened his compendium. 

It wasn’t as grand or ornate as some of the compendiums on offer in the Royal Library of Tretogor or the universities of Oxenfurt. It couldn’t be – Jaskier had commissioned the compendium himself, and he was only on a cadet’s pay. 

Still, the book was bound in good, sturdy leather, its face and its spine unadorned but buffed smooth and soft. Jaskier’d chosen a dyed red leather for the cover, the cheapest he’d been able to find, and black vellum for the endpapers. The pages were simple parchment. The ink was black and plain, the handwriting copied out without much fuss or flourish. 

The illustrations, though, were where most of Jaskier’s money had gone. He’d skimped on heavy parchment or vellum pages, on tooled leather and golden embossings, because he’d dumped all of his coin into the hands of Oxenfurt’s best scholar-artists and had paid for accurate illustrations of all of the known breeds of dragon in the world. 

Jaskier ran his thumb over the illustration on the first page – a Cidaran Smok, painted yellow and gold, wings raised, smoke curling from his jaws – and smiled to himself. He loved this book. 

Dalibor cleared his throat again, clearly impatient. 

“Right,” Jaskier said, taking his hand off the painting of the Smok. “I’m looking for a ‘Cutter,’ you said?” 

“Aye,” said Dalibor. “Might be extinct, though.”

Jaskier began to thumb very carefully through the pages of his compendium. Half of his pages were normal parchment, plain and unadorned except for the names and illustrations of various dragon breeds, and half had been marked with a triangle of black ink in their corners. Every time he saw that smear of darkness, Jaskier's heart sank; the ink marked a breed of dragon that once roamed the Continent, but now had gone extinct. 

Jaskier counted those black corners as he went. He couldn’t help it. There were a lot of them, these days. The Cidaran Smok itself, one of the few fire-breathing heavyweights ever known to soar in the skies; extinct. The Cintrian lion’s-mane, a fish-eater with long, drooping whiskers like the wels it had once devoured; extinct. The Kaedwenti snow-hunter, fast and sleek and fond of hunting among avalanches; extinct. Mahakaman greatwyrms; the Toussantish sparker; the Red, the Green and the White Greaves; extinct, extinct, extinct. 

Every time Jaskier flipped through his book, those black-edged pages stirred up a strange feeling in his chest. Some kind of mingled grief and pity. Jaskier pushed it aside and kept turning pages. 

He had commissioned his compendium to be organized by size, not by the region in which a dragon was found or even by its scientific name – a wise decision on his part, he thought, since every fucking university on the Continent decided to name each dragon something different, depending on the dragon’s perceived qualities, the ego of the professor involved and the position of the moon – so he found the page that was labeled MOTTLED CUTTER, NAROKI in with the rest of the middleweight breeds, bracketed on one side by the king-of-night and on the other by the Northern eel-neck. The edges of the Mottled Cutter’s pages were a pale cream. Jaskier let out a little breath he hadn’t realized that he’d been holding. 

“You were right, Dal,” he said, searching the page. A drop of rain water dripped down onto the page, blurring the ink of the dragon’s name, so Jaskier hunched protectively over his book and hungrily searched the page. 

“Not extinct,” Jaskier reported. “Just naturally rare, looks like.” The Mottled Cutter inked onto the page, rendered in soft feathers of brown and green paint, was a handsome beast. It had a stout chest, a long tail and a horse-ish head that was crowned with two long white, curving horns. 

“Middleweights,” Jaskier continued. “Fast fliers.” Cutters were diving dragons, most likely, with chests that deep; the sort of dragon that spent half an hour or so rising up to some great height before plunging down on its enemy or its prey. “Natives of the Naroki Mountains. There’ve been a few recorded in the Koviri Aerial Corps.” 

Jaskier took great pains – and great expense, too, despite his rather pitiful chorąży pay – to keep his compendium updated with the names of serving dragons and their captains, but the space he’d had reserved for serving Mottled Cutters had only one name. Jaskier traced it with a thumbnail. 

Coën. The captain’s name had been – and maybe still was, for there was no date of death stamped next to the dragon’s name, though Jaskier knew that the Koviri Aerial Corps had disbanded some thirty years ago, after the Continental War had drawn to a close – Bauwens. 

Jaskier wondered when Bauwens and his dragon had started their service. If they’d fought in the Continental War like Dalibor had, or if their service had ended long before the great powers of the Continent had decided that the best use of everyone’s time, money and youth was in attempting to tear each other to bloody fucking pieces. When he had the time, Jaskier was fond of combing through old records in Tretogor or Oxenfurt, searching for older names to add to his book, but he’d pretty much exhausted all of the records in both Baldhorn, which kept a record of the serving Redanian dragons, and Tretogor. 

Next time I have leave, I’ll have to pay Oxenfurt a visit, Jaskier thought. Oxenfurt was the seat of all of the knowledge in the world. Though, now that Nilfgaard was on the move again, with more and more dragons and crews called to the front, Jaskier doubted that he’d get to raid Oxenfurt’s libraries any time soon. 

If we even survive this little expedition, he thought. Egg retrievals only very rarely met with success. Jaskier, Burnetta and Dalibor had been sent here because the Northern Realms were desperate, not because their superiors had thought they’d succeed. 

“Kovir?” Dalibor grunted, pulling Jaskier out of his daydreams of old leather and faded ink. The old man was frowning. It didn’t take a genius – or even a proper scholar, which Jaskier most decidedly was not – to figure out why. 

Jaskier had not, admittedly, been the most attentive student of geography. The teacher had been a truly awful old bint named Mistress Katarzyna, and she had despised Jaskier. Jaskier had returned the sentiment and had spent most of his geography lessons doodling in the margins of his textbooks instead of listening to her drone on and on, sketching dragons onto maps that should have, in Jaskier’s opinion, already had dragons on them. 

Despite all of that, though, Jaskier still understood what was bothering Dalibor, and frowned too. 

Burnetta looked between the two of them, her own brow furrowing. “The Naroki Mountains?” she said. “In… Poviss?” 

“Kovir, Poviss, it’s all the same,” Jaskier muttered, squinting down at his book. He liked the way that the artist had painted the Cutter’s mottled scales. A poorer hand might’ve made the soft feathers of different shades of green blend and blur into a muddy mess, but on the page this Cutter’s scales had a wonderful sort of depth to them, different shades of green layered carefully one on top of the other, dotted with brown, like a carpet of leaves at the bottom of the forest floor. “Both are on the opposite side of the Continent from here, though.” 

All three of them fell quiet, thinking hard. 

What’s a Koviri dragon doing at the arse end of Kaedwen? 

Dragons, of course, had wings. Even the largest heavyweight was faster in the sky than a horse was on the earth or a ship was out at sea. A distance of even a thousand miles could be covered in as little as a week, by a swift and well-fed dragon. 

But dragons are territorial, Jaskier thought. All of them were, from the largest scala-darach to the smallest and most retiring Brokilon brittlegill. Dragons liked to keep to their own hills, their own hollows, their own hoards. They did not, as a species, travel thousands of miles from their hatching-grounds and settle down somewhere new. 

Not unless they’re made to, anyway. 

Jasker had seen plenty of that. It was often humans making dragons move, after all. Of the six dragons in the Redanian Aerial Corps, only two were actually Redanian at all. Three others came from eggs that had been pilfered from the nest on a mission much like this one. Even Vilgefortz wasn’t Redanain by his hatching; he’d only agreed to take on a Redanian captain because King Vizimir had promised him a very nice cave and just about half of the Redanian royal treasury. 

There was once a proper Corps in Caingorn, Jaskier remembered. And one in Aedirn, too. Either of them could’ve bought or stolen a Koviri egg, I suppose. 

But that was a long time ago, and King Demevend sent the Allied Corps three eggs, not three fully-grown dragons. None of those eggs were Mottled Cutters. 

Jaskier’s compendium didn’t say that Mottled Cutters were a breed graced with any particular skill or prowess. They couldn’t breathe fire like an Addan Aenye or spit venom like a Guivre. They had no pouches of acid in their throats, no secondary set of gills that let them linger for days or weeks underneath the water. Dragons with particular skills like that were almost never traded between the kingdoms of the north.

But despite that, none of the eggs that Demevend had given the allied Corps had been Cutters. Jaskier would’ve recognized the name, if they had been. Every wingless cadet had passed the eggs’ identities – one Lesser Guivre, one eel-neck and one Sky Arrow – around half a hundred times, each boasting like they’d be the one to get the egg to hatch. 

So this Cutter – someone or something brought it here, Jaskier thought. But it’s not a Corps dragon. It couldn't be. The Corps of the North that had disbanded, like the Corps of Kovir, hadn't simply turned their dragons loose. 

They had killed their dragons. All of them, in some Corps, even the young. They had put down all of their grand old veterans and smashed all of their eggs. The devastation wrought by the Continental War had been too great, some had said. The dragons had done too much damage. 

Those purges were why Jaskier's book had so many blackened corners. 

Jaskier put that mingled grief and pity – that shame, for the dragons of Kovir had served their nation just as well as Philippa had ever served Redania, and hadn't deserved to die at the swords and spear-points of their captains, their crews – aside.

“Well,” Jaskier said, bracingly. He could feel water beginning to bead up around the mouth of his hood. “That’s a neat little mystery, to be sure. A western dragon at the eastern end of the world. A mystery best mulled over out of the weather, perhaps? Maybe with some very weak ale and some very stale bread?” 

Dalibor grunted, his beard twitching as he nodded, but Burnetta shook her head, scattering more raindrops. 

“We can’t stop now!” she disagreed, offended. “Not when we’ve just seen proof that there’s at least one wild dragon here. We should be off looking for its den!” 

“The boy’s got the right of it,” Dalibor said, peering mistrustfully up at the sky. “Night’ll be comin’ on. Looking for dragons in the dark is unwise.” 

“But –” Burnetta tried again, staring up at the mists, naked longing on her face. Jaskier wondered if she could hear music in her head too. 

Dalibor – and Jaskier, since Dalibor was in charge of their expedition – turned away. Dal’d said all that he’d needed to. 

Jaskier carefully closed his compendium, flicking a few stray drops of water away, and tucked it back underneath his cloak, flashing Burnetta an apologetic glance as he nudged his horse on after Dal. 

He understood her longing. Of course he did. It’d be hard for him not to understand – he’d been in the Corps for twelve or thirteen years now and still had no dragon to call his own. The thought of finally getting to lay his hand on an egg – to feel the warmth of one, to hear the little dragonling moving beneath the shell – made him want to charge madly off into the forest too, chasing the dragon up the mountain. 

But I’ll never get to fly on a dragon’s back if I’m dead, Jaskier reasoned. No, Dalibor had the right idea. Better to find a nice warm cave, to share a meal, and then to start again in the morning. 

Burnetta complained bitterly as they left the shadow of the trees and started down the trail again. Dalibor ignored her and Jaskier made soothing, sympathetic noises in all the right places. By the time they did find a suitable cave – well, a hollow in between two large rocks and the mountainside, just big enough for three sleeping rolls if they tethered their horses outside, which they did, and much too small for bears or wolves – Burnetta’d mostly stopped grumbling, though she was sullen and sulky throughout dinner. 

The day of rain meant that not even Dalibor, an accomplished traveler and woodsman, could scrounge up enough dry kindling to start a fire. They ate their dinner cold and turned towards each other to sleep. 

Used to the road by now, they all traded off watches in the night without needing to bicker about the schedule. Jaskier took first watch, since he struggled to wake after he’d fallen asleep. The warmth of his fellow Corpsmen was almost enough to banish the mountain chill. The horses whickering to each other outside set him at ease. 

Once again, Jaskier could hear a song somewhere in the bottom of his chest. The back of his head. He never let himself indulge in music while he was awake and on duty, not really. A Corpsman’s life was too dangerous to let himself get distracted by the melodies he wanted to write in the air. 

But here, tucked safely inside a warm-ish cave in the mountains, Jaskier let himself hear the music. 

A march of some sort, I think, Jaskier thought. Not the solemn, slow-paced stuff that followed kings around or boomed out the tragic tail of soldiers marching off into battle, ne’er to return, but an adventurous sort of tune. Something that bards in future years would adapt into a rousing tavern tune. 

The drums would start slow, steady, like the heartbeat of a mountain. A fiddle would pluck out a walking tune. A flute for the wind, some lighter percussion for the rain, a melody on the vielle for Burnetta’s enthusiasm, a plodding drumbeat for Dal, and then a great, soaring horn as the Mottled Cutter rose from the trees. 

I’d call it ‘The March of the Mottled’ or something equally ridiculous, Jaskier thought, peering out into the dark valley below. Mist still clung to the trees, but slivers of moonlight had broken through the clouds and shone silver across the snow. Or ‘The Cutter Triumphant.’ Everyone loves a good song like that.  

Jaskier never wrote his music down these days. Most of the spare paper Jaskier had went into notes for his compendium or kindling for a campfire, because really, a man could only eat so many stale, cold biscuits before he went mad. 

But even though he hadn’t written it down, hadn’t put the notes to meter or the words to any tune, Jaskier could still hear the song, even as Dalibor woke up to take over the watch. Even as Jaskier curled up in his own bedroll, tucked against Burnetta like kittens in a basket, and closed his eyes. He could hear that soaring horn. The laughter of that vielle. The music, as it always did, lulled him to sleep. 

Jaskier smiled tiredly into his bedroll. 

‘The Cutter Triumphant,’ he thought. I like the sound of that.  

---

Jaskier awoke some time later, confused. It wasn't morning yet. It couldn't be – Jaskier'd developed something of a sense for the morning, over the last month or so on the road, and he knew that it wasn't quite time to heave himself up and back into the saddle just yet. 

The cave he and his companions had chosen to shelter in for the night was only dimly-lit. Dalibor had let the fire burn very low during his watch. There were only coals left, now, and Jaskier could barely see Dalibor at his post through the dim red light. 

"Dal?" Jaskier asked softly, rubbing some of the sleep from his eyes. Beside him, Burnetta was still asleep. Jaskier's bedroll was warm. His watch was over and finished with, for the night – it would be easy to go back to sleep. 

But something had woken Jaskier up. 

Dalibor didn't turn around or answer. He had moved, during the night. Maybe that was what had woken Jaskier; usually whoever was on watch sat near the fire, their back to the flames, and kept watch over the mouth of whatever cave or hollow or sheltered cove beneath the trees they'd camped in for the night. That had been what Jaskier'd done, when it had been his turn on watch.

But Dalibor wasn't sitting beside the fire any more. He wasn't sitting at all. He was standing at the mouth of the cave, his broad back silhouetted against the pale stars, and his sword, usually tucked away against Dalibor's back, was in his hand. 

A frisson of unease – Jaskier refused to call it fear –went through Jaskier. 

"Dal?" he whispered, untangling himself from his bedroll. He didn't want to wake Burnetta if this – whatever this was, because Dalibor still hadn't turned out – turned out to be nothing but an old campaigner's paranoia. 

Still, Jaskier paused to scoop up his own sword too, just in case Dal wasn't being paranoid. Dalibor was an old campaigner, that was true, battle-scarred and superstitious and wary of everything, but Jaskier'd been in the Corps long enough to know that most old campaigners only made it to old age through luck or through skill.

Dalibor, in the month or so they'd all been traveling together, had not proven himself particularly lucky. 

How does that old saying go? Jaskier wondered, creeping towards the mouth of the cave. The fire had burned so low that his eyes were used to the darkness, and he could see out past Dalibor fairly well. The weight of his sword, the rough leather grip he'd wrapped around the hilt, was comforting. 

Something about a shadowed sundial telling the right time?  Or was it a sundial at midnight? Or –

"Quiet, boy," Dalibor murmured, his voice so low and soft that Jaskier felt it instead of heard it. "And keep back." 

Jaskier obeyed, staying a handspan behind Dalibor, who'd gone up to the very edge of the cave. Dal was a big man, well-muscled despite his advancing years, so Jaskier had to lean around him a bit to try and see out among the trees. 

Some time in the night, the valley had grown so cold that the fog had frozen, clinging to each bough and branch and individual needle like a sheet of poured glass. Without the fog – and with the moon, which still shone silver above them, and the snow, which glowed as if lit from beneath by some strange and otherworldly power – Jaskier had a fairly clean line of sight out into the trees. They were still some ten or twelve meters up off of the very bottom of the valley, where the River of White Stones was still flowing despite the frost, the sound of it bright and clear amidst the snowy silence. 

"I don't see anything, Dal," Jaskier murmured, just as quietly as Dalibor had. "What do you see?" 

All Jaskier saw was the forest. The trees were close enough together that their shadows were fairly deep, which was unfortunate, but still Jaskier could see no movement but for the swaying of the branches in the wind. 

"It's what I don't see," Dal said. "The horses're gone." 

That faint frisson of unease did bloom into fear, then. Jaskier craned his neck around Dal, leaning as far out into the mouth of the cave as he thought Dal would let him, and bit off a loud curse. 

The horses were gone. 

"Wolves, d'you think?" Jaskier hissed, his heart lurching in his chest. Without horses, he and his companions were trapped in Kaedwen. 

Melitele's tits, Jaskier thought. It took us a whole month to get here on horseback – if we're without horses, it'll be half a year back to Baldhorn or more. 

The three of them were able Corpsmen all. Jaskier had tripped over his sword once, but outside of that he'd done well enough to actually pass his tests at the end of his training and reach the rank of cadet. He could fight. 

But three Corpsmen, traveling across the Contintent on bloody foot, in wartime? he thought. We'll be dead before we even get back to Ard Carraigh. Bandits and highwaymen had left the three of them alone while they'd had horses, mistaking them, with their red Redanian uniforms and their swords, their sturdy mounts, as trained calvarymen, but on foot –

"They – they must've just wandered off," Jaskier whispered, swallowing his fear. Fear was not going to get his horse back. "Maybe Burnetta left a tie slack." 

"Our horses?" Dal hissed back. "Road-trained as they are? No, boy. They were taken." 

Fuck, thought Jaskier. He'd been afraid of that. Burnetta'd been known to leave her tether slack, a time or two, and all of the horses were usually tied off in one picket together. 

But Dalibor was right – their horses were used to life on the road, and had never wandered far even when the ties had been loose. They had never had any reason to; Jaskier and Dal saw to their feeding and care every night, and for long, ranging egg retrieval missions like this one, the Aerial Corps did try to equip its egg hunters with pliable, biddable horses. 

"Wolves?" Jaskier asked again. 

He wasn't sure what would be better, that a beast had taken the horses, or that a man had. He knew that no dragon could've taken the horses. Wild dragons would eat horses, but of all the breeds of dragon Jaskier had encountered since he'd joined the Corps, only the kings-of-night, like Philippa, were capable of flying so quietly that a man on watch wouldn't hear them descend from the sky. But a wolf –

If it was wolves, the horses are dead, Jaskier thought. I would've thought that the horses would've made a noise, if a beast had come upon them, but if the wolves were clever – 

If a wild animal had taken the horses, the horses were dead already. Beasts didn't keep prey around, after all; what they hunted, they killed and ate. 

A man, though. If a man had taken the horses, the horses might still be alive. That would be good, because it would mean that there was still a chance to find them and get them back. 

But that would also be bad, Jaskier thought, tightening his grip on his sword. Because it would mean that we're not alone out here. 

"Nay," Dalibor said. "Wolves don't cut a tether with a knife." 

Jaskier swallowed. 

A man, then. Or men. Or elves, I suppose.  

Kaedwen was a vast, wild kingdom. Elves were about as welcome in its cities and towns as they were in Redania – that was to say, hardly welcome at all, and usually driven off with torches and pitchforks – but out here in the wild forests, not even King Henselt could weed out every band of the Elder Folk. Back in the taverns of Ard Carraigh and even on the road here, before they'd descended into the valley, Jaskier had even been quietly pleased by that; in Jaskier's view the elves had just as much right to share the Continent as men and dwarves and halflings did, and did not deserve to be put to the sword or driven to the edges of the bloody world just because they'd been born with pointed ears instead of rounded ones.

I'm not sure what I did to have my horse stolen, though, if it was elves, Jaskier thought. He'd heard the stories of the elven raiding-bands that had once plagued Cintra and Cidaris and even parts of Temeria. He'd dismissed most of them as blatant fearmongering on the part of the Lioness of Cintra, whose hatred of nonhumans still drove her to slaughter about once every four or five years or so. 

But what if there's some truth to it all? Jaskier wondered, throat bobbing nervously. What if he and Burnetta and Dalibor had somehow crossed into some raider's or warlord's territory? 

He thought of the Mottled Cutter rising up above the trees and clutched his sword tighter. 

We were wondering what could've brought a Koviri dragon all the way out here to Kaedwen, he thought. A wild one might not come out here on its own, but the elves – the elves have captained dragons, too. 

It was in fact from the elves that the men of the Northern Realms had learned how to tame dragons. That was what Jaskier'd been taught in his classes, anyway. In the first wars between humans and elves, some elven princess had made a deal with a dragon to burn human villages out of her lands. She and her dragon had been so effective that of course humans had caught on and decided to try dragonriding out for themselves. 

Of course, it wasn't just elven raiders who had dragons. Anybody who was brave enough could, in theory, climb into a dragon’s nest and make off with an egg. Over the years some of the most infamous bandits across both the Northern and Southern Kingdoms had done their banditry from dragonback. Before Nilfgaard had decided to conquer anything that moved, dealing with outlaw dragon crews had been the Redanian Aerial Corps' primary duty. 

"We're bein' watched," Dal said softly, drawing Jaskier out of his thoughts. Jaskier gulped. He'd had enough time now – a good thirty seconds or so – that the initial flush of terror had given way to a duller sort of all-over fear. 

"By who?" Jaskier said. "Where?" 

"If I could see 'em, boy, we'd be at 'em already," Dal growled. 

"Elves?" Jaskier asked. 

Dalibor hesitated, then shook his head. "Nay," he said again. "Not by elves."

"Bandits?" 

"Black Ones, I think," said Dalibor. "Otherwise I'd see 'em, even in the shadow." 

Jaskier froze. 

Nilfgaardians?  

Just that afternoon he and Burnetta had been joking – joking! – about Nilfgaardian assassins. That was the sort of thing that happened to heroes in stories and ballads, after all. The brave knights went off on a quest to save the kingdom, fending off monsters and Black Ones and more, to return victorious and rich and adored. 

Burnetta said – she said that we wouldn't rate assassins,  Jaskier thought, dazed. We're not captains. We're nobodies. None of us have a dragon. We haven't even found any eggs! 

Jaskier didn't even know where a Nilfgaardian would have come from. He hadn't seen any sign of the Black Ones on their journey out from Baldhorn, and he had been looking. The Nilfgaardians were pressing closer and closer to the Northern Kingdoms, but they still hadn't crossed the Yelena River. Jaskier was good about getting news, whenever their little band had stopped in a tavern for a bed or a wash or a warm meal. Last he'd heard, Nazair was still holding out against the Empire, and Cintra beyond it stood ready to break the Black Ones on their mountains and their Lioness's teeth.

Dalibor had good instincts, though. If he thought it was Nilfgaard – 

"We can't stay here," Jaskier whispered, searching the trees even though he knew he wouldn't see anything. If Dal couldn't see anything – if their horses had vanished without a trace – 

"Nay," said Dalibor, again. "Too easy to get penned in and stuck, like fish in a barrel. Wake the lass. We'll use the dark. Try to get back up the trail a'ways, see if some height can – "

Dalibor did not get to tell Jaskier what some height could do. The great, big old bear of a man, battle-scarred and sturdy, a veteran of the Aerial Corps, leaned out of the mouth of the cave a little, searching for any sign of whoever it was who'd stolen the horses, and caught an arrow in the eye.

Jaskier heard it before he saw it hit. The arrow hissed as it cut through the air. Dalibor didn't even have time to blink. One moment he was talking to Jaskier, making a plan, and the next he was listing to the side, an arrow blooming from the side of his face. Jaskier hadn't even seen where the arrow had come from. It had just appeared, whistling from the dark, and brought Dalibor down. 

Instinct saved Jaskier's life. As soon as he saw Dal tip over, Jaskier was leaping back with a cry of surprise. A second arrow, either fired to make sure Dal went down or to pick off anybody standing too close behind him, flitted past and made a sharp crack sound as it struck the wall of the cave behind Jaskier. Warmth blossomed on the shell of Jaskier's ear. He barely noticed. 

We're under attack,  he thought. 

Jaskier'd had thirteen years of instruction to prepare him for this sort of thing. Granted, most of that instruction had been to prepare Jaskier for fighting for his life on dragonback, which was not the same as dodging arrows in a dark forest at the arse end of the Continent, but the instincts his instructors had pounded into Jaskier's head, his body, were the same. 

We need cover, he thought. For now Dalibor's body was blocking the cave and, hopefully, whoever'd fired the arrow's line of sight. The fire was low and set back from the mouth of the cave. Jaskier should be hidden. If whoever's shot Dal was also whoever had stolen their horses, then they knew that Jaskier and Burnetta were both in the cave. 

We need cover, but we can't stay here.  

"Burnetta," Jaskier shouted behind him, drawing his sword. He kept his attention fixed on the mouth of the cave. "Burnetta, get up. We're under attack!" 

Burnetta was a heavy sleeper most of the time, but she must have heard the note of true alarm in Jaskier's voice, because she was up and at his side in seconds, her own sword drawn. 

"Attack?" she said. In the dim light, her eyes were wild and her hair was in disarray. She wasn't wearing her boots. "Jask, what – " 

"Dal's dead," said Jaskier, tightly. The shock of it – how quickly Dalibor had fallen – would set in if Jaskier let it, and even though he was just a bezskrzydły ensign who hadn't gone to the front or seen a proper fight or even been picked to serve on a dragon's crew, Jaskier knew that if he let shock take over, if he slowed down or stopped or panicked at all, he would die. 

I don't want to die.

"We've lost the horses, too," Jaskier said, pushing his shock and his grief – Jaskier and Dal hadn't been friends, the old man was – had been – too prickly for that, but Jaskier hadn't wanted him dead – aside. "We're going to have to run for it." 

Running for it was, probably, a spectacularly bad idea. The enemy – enemies, maybe – was out there in the forest somewhere. Waiting, most like, to pick Jaskier and Burnetta off like they'd done Dalibor. 

But the other option was waiting here. Maybe there was only one enemy out there, one lone Nilfgaardian or elf or bandit, who wouldn't risk their own life charging into a cave, but Jaskier wasn't about to bet his life on that. 

I don't want to bet Burnetta's life, either. That was half-idealism and half-pragmatism; of course Jaskier didn't want Burnetta to die either, because she was his friend, or at least had been friendly, but they'd a better chance at making it out of here if they were both alive. 

"Dal wanted to get back up the trail," Jaskier said. "Get some height, find out what happened. The moon's out, but if we can get up above the trees – "

If they could get back up above the trees, it'd be a damn sight harder for them to be ambushed. They wouldn't have horses still, but at least they'd be able to see their attacker coming up the bloody hill. 

That's our best chance,  Jaskier thought, a little wildly. Our only chance, maybe. 

There was no time to think about anything else. 

"But if they're out there – " Burnetta began to protest, but she was already reaching for her pack, which had been stowed between Jaskier's and Dalibor's against the wall of the cave, away from the fire. 

Dal's body lay in the mouth of the cave. 

"They're definitely out there," Jaskier said, grimly. "But if we go fast, maybe – the moon's not on our side, but even the best Nilf archer can only shoot one arrow at a time, right?" 

Burnetta, sword drawn, looked at Jaskier with wild terror for a moment – she was wingless too, and had only a few years in the Corps to Jaskier's thirteen – and then seemed to reach the same conclusion he had. Her face hardened. The terror in her eyes became something else. Not courage, like the songs said. She wasn't the warrior-maiden the bards liked to sing of down in Cintra. She was, barefoot and in her rumpled clothes, barely even a proper soldier. 

But the look in her eyes then was grim and flinty, hard as stone. 

I probably look the same way, Jaskier thought. We're going to live, or we're going to die. There's no room for anything else. 

"Get your boots," Jaskier said. "You'll freeze in the snow otherwise." 

Burnetta did as she was told. Jaskier grabbed his own pack and thought briefly about grabbing Dal's, but without a horse it'd be too much to carry both. 

Jaskier did feel a little bit better with his pack secured around his shoulders. Like a proper Corpsman. Not that feeling like a proper Corpsman was going to help much in the dark, with enemies in the valley, but – 

But I'll take what I can get, Jaskier thought. "Ready?" he asked Burnetta, who'd tugged her boots on and raised her sword again, that stony look still in her face. "Back up the trail?" she asked.

Jaskier nodded. "As far as we can make it," he said. "Stay close, yeah?" 

Burnetta nodded, and then there was no point int waiting for anything else. Jaskier said a quick prayer, a quicker apology and planted his boot on Dalibor's back. Whoever was in the valley'd had plenty of time to notch another arrow, after all. 

"Run, Burnetta!" Jaskier said, and shoved Dalibor's body out of the mouth of the cave with all of the force he could muster.

A handful of arrows came whistling through the night, shrieking death, and tore into Dalibor's body. Jaskier fled. 

The brightness of the moon made it so that Jaskier couldn't hide from his attackers, but it also made it so that he could see where he was going, more or less. The cave they'd sheltered in for the night was set back off the trail a little ways, surrounded by rocks and trees, and thanks to the moonlight and the reflection coming up off the ice and the snow, Jaskier could see where to go to get some cover, where to step to avoid tripping over a stray root or rock. 

Part of every Corpsman's training included daily runs. Sometimes these runs were over flat fields or the winding trails around Baldhorn and other times they were brutal trips up and down every gods-damned hillock in middle Redania; Jaskier, like most of his fellows, had always moaned and groaned and cursed those runs as cruelty for cruelty's sake, but that training paid off now. Jaskier'd not done one of those bloody hill runs in a month or more – there'd been no sergeant making him, out on the road – but his body remembered enough that he didn't immediately fall flat on his face or burn out thirty steps from the mouth of the cave. 

Jaskier ran for his life. Burnetta was behind him, their footsteps crunching in the snow, but the noise was alright. They weren't trying to be subtle; they were just trying to get away.

More arrows screamed through the darkness. They crashed into the bark of the trees or buried themselves up to their fletching in the snow. A few came close enough that Jaskier felt the air stir as they passed. None hit, though, neither Jaskier nor Burnetta; he heard Burnetta swear, crying out for some crone or maiden to protect her, but didn't hear her scream or fall.

Jaskier's legs burned. His heart raced. His sword flashed in his hand. But every step he took was a victory, getting him farther and farther away from his attackers, and if he and Burnetta made it just a little bit further, they might have enough sight to see where their enemies were, and how to get away from them – 

Then Jaskier and Burnetta broke out into open trail, the steep path rising back up the way they'd come just that afternoon, and Jaskier realized his mistake. 

Dalibor had been killed by an arrow shot from down in the valley. The horse tracks, too, had led down that way, which had left Jaskier and Dal both thinking that their foes lay below them.

To be fair, there were enemies down in the valley. The arrows still whistling past from behind were proof of that. 

But there were also enemies – Nilfgaardians, three of them, all on horseback, their armor black and stark against the white snow, their heads crowned in feathers, their bows drawn, arrowheads shining bright – on the trail ahead. 

An ambush!

Jaskier had no time to think, and that was, he'd think later, what saved his life and Burnetta's too. He saw the horses, the helmets, the arrows, with no path either forward or backward, and took the only path that was left.

"Fuck!" Jaskier shouted, turned to catch Burnetta by her arm, and threw them both off of the trail.

If they'd been ambushed higher up on the path, the fall would have likely killed them. The trail was only a horse-track cut into the side of a mountain; on one side was the hard wall of the mountain itself and on the other, that steep scree of rocks and snow and stubborn, clinging trees. 

But here the scree was steep, not a sheer drop away down into the valley. Jaskier managed to keep his feet for a second, maybe too, Burnetta crashing along behind him, and then gravity caught him and he was tumbling among the stones end over end. He did the sensible thing and let go of his sword – it'd be a shame to impale himself, after throwing himself down a mountain to escape some Nilfgaardians – and continued to fall. Above him – below him – he couldn't fucking tell which was which – he heard a great confusion of shouting. Burnetta shrieking curses. The scream of a horse, the whistle of more arrows in flight, a heavy, curious thudding sound, like rocks tumbling or thunder in the sky, something that might have been a dragon's deep roar, so loud and close that it made the very air quiver, the stones and the snow around Jaskier all trembling with the force of it –

And then Jaskier bounced, especially hard, against the jut of a sharp, unfriendly rock, still sliding down towards the bottom of the valley, and heard nothing at all.