One for sorrow.
His head throbbed, and he could feel the blood trickling down from the split in his scalp, staining his dark blond hair. He could hear water dripping and seeping from somewhere above, the only flickers of light came from the guttering torches well down the corridor, and the air itself smelled fetid, the stench of blood and death rising over the reek of shit and mold and rot. Wherever they had been thrown, it was well underground. From the cell across from his, he could hear unsteady, shallow breathing, abruptly broken as the other inmate shoved himself into a more upright position with a pained gasp. "You shouldn't aggravate those broken ribs. They're affecting your breathing enough without you puncturing a lung." He remarked, voice too quiet to carry to any with less sensitive ears.
"Yeah, well, you shouldn't have come looking for me, Phinn." The paler blond coughed, and spat blood.
"Fiyero… we need to look after each other. Sure as shit no one else will care, and there are few enough of us as is." He leaned on the barred door to watch his friend, eyes reflecting green in the shreds of torchlight.
"If you hadn't noticed, looking after each other ended with both of us caged. If you hadn't cared that I didn't show up at our usual rendezvous at the end of hunting season, you could be getting drunk in the presumed safety of our beloved Kaer Morhen, right now. You could have gone home."
"Yes, yes, and I'd be listening to Vesemir reminisce about the good days and Lambert bitch about anything that comes to mind. Wouldn't be the same without you, jackass. Besides, if I was there, who would remind you to be careful of the ribs those bastards kicked in?"
"Delphinium…. "Fiyero sighed. "We aren't the first witchers they've caught. I know some of the names carved into the wall. This does not bode well for our cha…" A door opened with a metallic clang at the far end of the corridor, and an additional torch lit the area, moving closer. Two sets of vertical pupils narrowed, and voices lowered even further. "I don't suppose you still have that knife you kept in your boot?"
"They didn't even leave me the boots, Fye. No belt, either. Tunic, trousers, medallion. You have anything?"
"Other than boot shaped bruises and these damned cracked ribs? No, not really." Fiyero glanced worriedly at the approaching light, then back at the other witcher. "While you were out, when they were locking us up, they referred to us as specimens. This does not provide me with warm fuzzy feelings about our future, Phinn."
"We're witchers, Fye, we're not supposed to have warm fuzzy feelings, no matter what I was saying to convince you into my bed last winter. We fight scary monsters for the benefit of people who hate us, all for a pittance of coins, and then we die violent, relatively untimely deaths. And the only ones who mourn us are other witchers"
"Doesn't mean I want to let some bastard wizard dissect me. I like living, Phinn, no matter how many stones get tossed at me or inns that turn me out. Going out in dragon's fire or manticore venom is one thing, but I am not going to surrender and let myself be cut to pieces without a fight. And I am not going to let you either." He forced himself to his feet, leaning heavily against the iron bars. "Promise you'll fight, when the time comes, when you get the chance."
"I promise, Fye, but I don't think they'll give us the chance."
"Maybe not now, but we'll get our chance, if I have to make one myself."
Ten years later.
The rubble filled streets posed little obstacle to the orphans' scramble back to the crumbling house that kept them. The matron had no pity for younglings lacking promptness, and once the gates shut at sundown, they stayed shut, and any stragglers could miss dinner and sleep out in the cold. That being well known, the bigger children had no qualms about shoving the smaller, slower ones out of the way.
"Move, whelp!" One of the bigger boys hipchecked the smallest inmate of the orphanage, uncaring of the fact the tiny elf was several stones lighter than he and nearly went flying at his shove. Dark, matted hair was pushed away from ever frightened grey eyes, before the tiny form picked herself back up off the stones with a ragged cough and scurried on, sliding around the door just as it slammed shut.
"Cutting it close enough, aren't you?" The matron glared at the last child to return, the elfchild's eyes alternating between fixed on bruised dirty toes and peering cautiously at her from a pinched, too skinny face. "I should put you right back out again, you're nothing but a waste of space and food. Filthy non humans like you are why this place is so full anyway. You're a worthless, ungrateful brat, is what you are. If you were bigger and prettier, I could sell you to the brothel, get money enough to feed my poor hungry orphan boys."
"I'm sorry matron, I'll try to do better." The timid form in ragged clothing whispered, cowering.
"See that you do, ugly little long eared brat"
That night, as the elfchild curled like a mouse in her favorite spot, hidden behind the cabinets where no one would take her slice of stale bread or add to her bruises, a stranger in a dark cloak came to talk with the matron. They were talking quiet, so she leaned closer, peeking out from under the cabinets molding as she pricked her ears to find out what was going on. "Twenty five boys, ages nine to twelve. At even a hundred orens a head, that's cheap going, master Faethor.
"Twenty five hundred orens for one experiment? Hardly cheap, mistress Danza. But I suppose you are correct as to the difficulty of acquiring them elsewhere. So many orphanages these days seem to concern themselves with the welfare of their charges, and might care to ask why I wanted so many, and what I wished to do with them. Luckily, you are more practical."
"Gotta feed the rest of the little darlings, don't I? And bread isn't cheap these days." She faked a sniff, even as the man started counting out coins onto the table.
"I suppose. I have a very high paying retainer interested in the results of my experiments. If it goes well, I may return to take more of your 'little darlings' off your hands."
The elf child gasped, inhaling the thick dust into her always weary lungs. She coughed, breath rasping harshly, and thumped her head on the bottom of the cabinet. As she curled there hacking, a strong fingered hand wrapped around her ankle and yanked. As her head smacked against the molding again, she tried pulling away, only to find herself inexorably tugged out into the light. "Well now, what do we have here?"
"You can have that one free. Consider her make-weight, save me feeding her miserable carcass."
"Hmm…" The blond man pushed his hood back with his free hand, and considered the small elf before him. She stared back up at him, a bruise already darkening across her cheekbone. He hauled her to her feet, watching her with a coldly measuring gaze. A long finger moved the matts of her hair away from her face, studying her too-angular features, large, frightened grey eyes, and ridiculously oversized pointed ears. She wheezed, trying to pull herself from his implacable grasp, and ended her struggle coughing desperately again, her lungs burning as they always did under exertion. "I suppose I could find some use for her. As an outlier for the specimen group if nothing else."