Yennefer could hardly bring herself to pay attention as she sat in the carriage which was carrying her, instead of to her court, away from it. The path to Lyria was one that was expected to be extremely boring, weighed down with nothing but the company of Queen Kalis and her newborn daughter, without even a name. Her dæmon had one, Haieron, but she had not been given one yet. Tzivah wasn't doing any better, as Timaran was trying too hard to not converse with a dæmon he considered beneath him.
You'd think after thirty years of this we'd be used to royal snobbery, Tzivah grumbled mentally as the two felt themselves rumbling along. He flapped his wings and went out the carriage window, finding himself a perch atop the carriage. He ruffled his feathers to preen, but always kept one eye on the road ahead.
Nothing will ever get us used to royal snobbery. Yennefer did her best to contain the smirk that threatened to spread across her face as she bantered mentally.
"I know what they say. 'Poor Queen Kalis, another girl,'" the queen began, unprompted. She sighed overdramatically and put a finger on her baby's dæmon, who was in the shape of a newborn kitten, hardly able or willing to move. "I mean, I'm just a womb to him. No more than a fleshy contraption for squeezing out heirs. Bastard cares more about his hounds than he does me." Kalis then began to bounce the baby slightly before extending her arms in Yennefer's direction. "Take her."
Unable to deny even such an informal request, Yennefer shifted the baby into her own arms, trying to find the most comfortable way to hold her. Timaran took the chance to come over and gently lift the baby's dæmon from her chest, returning to his cushioned seat and giving the kitten a tongue bath.
Yen felt the familiar sensation behind her eyes that meant that Tzivah was using her sight fully, though only for a few moments. They took in the feature of the all-but-newborn, the soft cheeks and unmarred skin. "As soon as I've delivered Your Majesty safely back to court, I'm afraid I must return to Aedirn."
The queen let out a longing sigh. "I envy you. Truly. A king's mage. How splendid." Even as she spoke the words, her child began to cry. Yen assumed it must be that the baby was lonely, without her dæmon to cling to or her mother to soothe her. "Oh!" Kalis seemed surprised, almost as if she'd forgotten the baby were hers. Without a word, she retrieved the baby from Yennefer's arms, leaving the mage once again free of touch.
"Come now, we've been traveling together for days." Kalis gave Yennefer a curious, perhaps even nosy, look. "Speak freely."
Yennefer looked out the window of the carriage. "I love that I traded everything to get my seat at court. I love that I believed that it would all be worth it, that this would be my legacy. The greatest mage to have ever graced a court." Her gaze drifted lazily back into the carriage, the opposite wall instead. "And I really, really love that instead, I've gotten to spend the last three decades cleaning up stupid political messes. Glorified royal arse wiper."
And I love that we gave up being a person for a straight spine and the privilege to say "Yes, your highness" whenever a king needs his back scratched.
Yen knew that Tzivah resented never settling — what dæmon wouldn't, denied the opportunity to truly fill their role. She resented it nearly as much, but there was also a great use in the freedom of change. She hoped that would outweigh the price, eventually.
"I have it far worse," Queen Kalis responded. "People look at you for who you are, not for what you can give them. You made the right choice, giving all that nonsense up." She raised her daughter up, looking with great care at her features. "To this baby, I am the whole world." The baby lowered back to her mother's lap. "If only it weren't so boring."
Boring — only a noble could call the world they lived in boring. The world wasn't boring for people like Yennefer, for people like her parents. It wasn't happy, there was not a day that went by that they could say they were bored. Stifled, yes. Oppressed by the structures of the society they lived in, obviously. Bored indicated a lack of purpose, a lack of enrichment. A poor man always has a purpose: survive.
Before Yennefer was given the chance to properly respond, she was taken out of her melancholy by Tzivah. Attackers. Several, possibly assassins.
The sorceress moved to her feet moments before the cries of the guards and horses outside reached her ears. Queen Kalis shrieked, getting up and holding her baby close. Timaran held his child close, Haeiron having changed into the shape of a small, crying mouselet that needed to be handled with great care.
Gazing out and through Tzivah's eyes, she saw a krallach, a cockroach hound, twisted and ugly, rip one of the guards apart. Another guard was cut at the neck, and his blood sprayed through the small window of the carriage over Yennefer's face. The blood was still warm, even having traveled through the chill of the air.
After several moments, the carriage's rocking stopped, and so did the sounds of conflict outside. Yennefer pushed open the door of the compartment and stepped out. The stench of fresh blood hardening on snow filled her nostrils. Tzivah had a poor sense of smell, being a bird, so it hadn't bothered him yet.
Yennefer exited the carriage first, Tzivah coming to rest perched upon her shoulder. The redness staining an otherwise beautiful landscape was almost overwhelming to look at. Viscera laid out by the ambushers in their strike against the guards.
Into view came the attacker. Assassin, Yennefer had decided, as he had a horrible creature at his side. If her instincts were right, this wasn't a random attack. It was calculated to kill Kalis, probably for the crime of having another girl. His dæmon wasn't visible — probably for the best, along the lines of not letting your features be identifiable. Assassins were so often those with small dæmons who could hide.
"Go!" Yennefer shouted. Tzivah led the way into the twisting portal Yennefer created, with Timaran and Kalis not far behind.
The sorceress and the queen alike fell onto desert bluffs. It was barren, the air dry and dead. Yennefer came in behind her charge, just in time to hear her empty her guts. She coughed, the effort of casting weighing on her chest. She watched as Kalis lifted her baby, trying to calm her. It was only now that Yen realized the baby was crying, but she wasn't surprised. She would have cried, too, if she wasn't fighting for her life.
"I'll have that brigand's head on a pike outside the King's castle before nightfall," Kalis spat, "How dare he?"
So it hasn't occurred to her yet. Tzivah didn't reply. Yennefer had to be matter-of-fact. She was supposed to protect Kalis, and it didn't matter that she was a spoiled bitch. "That was an assassin, not a brigand."
"What are you saying?" Kalis looked over towards Yennefer. The sorceress wondered if she was truly ignorant of the reality, or if she was resisting what they both already knew.
"He was paid to kill you."
Kalis looked shocked, startled as she still bounced her daughter in her arms. "What? Why?"
"It appears you've run out of chances to provide your King a male heir." Yennefer resented the words even as she spoke them. It was disgusting, the way a sovereign would try to kill his wife because he'd rather have someone else. He'd rather lock someone in a dungeon than try to understand them.
"No, he wouldn't." A moment passed. "Oh, that prick!"
"Run!" Tzivah shouted, invoking as much of their shared energy as possible to begin opening the portal himself. Yennefer once again tried to hold back the assassin, but running was more important than trying to use her magic on him. If he got away from her, Kalis was as good as dead.
Once through the portal, she felt her lungs betraying her. So many rapid portals stretched her power and pressured her in a way she rarely felt pressured babysitting for vapid nobles. She made it through, then rushed quickly to Kalis's side. Rain poured around them; they were in the alley of some city. Somewhere cold and unforgiving, without the proper crowds to notice them. If it was day, the sun would not betray that fact.
"We're being tracked," she exclaimed, starting to reach for Kalis and tugging off some of what she wore. A necklace, a brooch, a sash. "Think! What did the king give you that could be traced?"
At the same time, Kalis tried to find items herself. She had little time to look before once again screaming, pointing towards the creature that hunted her as it appeared.
Yennefer felt a particular muscle in her back twitch, and she tried to straighten up. She put herself between Kalis and the hunter once again, pulling reserves of strength she didn't know that she had. Tzivah gave Yennefer the energy he had to give, losing height in his flight and almost colliding with Timaran as he fell to the ground.
A primal scream burst from her lungs, resonating through the air. Every time she stopped the beast from approaching, she felt herself growing closer and closer to it. Or more specifically, it growing closer and closer to her.
Finally releasing it, she ran at top speed and made her way through the portal. She collapsed to the ground, trying not to heave. The strain on her own body and on Tzivah's weighed on her mind, and she heard Kalis emptying her stomach nearby, as well as the sounds of both Haeiron and Kalis's baby sobbing.
"Get up, you useless witch," Kalis spat as Yennefer propped herself off of the ground. "How could you not foresee this? You were supposed to protect me."
There once again was the spite and bile Yennefer had learned to expect from royalty and entitled nobles. The resentment for her not being perfect, forgetting any service done by her before that point. Wondering why she can ever not know every petty concern they have ever dealt with.
We have to take the assassin by surprise. Portal out, then return.
She'll die.
Tzivah didn't have a response to that, but Yennefer knew they didn't truly care. It was their charge and their duty regardless of personal feelings towards them.
A new portal swirled, and Yennefer dove through, landing in a field of bright wildflowers. She heard shrieks behind her, but she was blessed with silence as she arrived. For the first time in a little while, she had true silence. Tzivah settled next to her among the flowers.
"We don't have long," she reminded him, counting the seconds she'd been away from Kalis.
Tzivah craned his head, looking around at the scenery around them. "It's beautiful."
In the moment that Timaran and Kalis were mutually destroyed by their assassin, Yennefer re-emerged on the mesa. Tzivah descended first, talons wrapping as gently as possible around Haieron's limp, once again kitten form. He then rose again, trying to maintain speed as much as possible. Yen reached down and pulled the infant from the ground, pulling her up to her chest.
The last of the portals she could manage for the time being opened before her. As her feet lifted off the ground, she felt a horrid pain in her left shoulder. Her feet crashed into a churning ocean wave, and she quickly lost her footing in the churning shallows. She fell forward into the spray. Cold covered every inch of her.
Above, only a couple feet up, Tzivah surveyed the scene. Yennefer refused to pay attention as he saw how the blade pierced through. She ignored his feelings when Haieron vanished from his grip. For one of the only times in her life, she would not listen when Tzivah told her that the baby in her arms was growing cold even as she pulled her from the surf.
Yennefer reached the bank. Her fingers stung with the cold and lack of energy from the amount of magic she'd used. Despite this, she channeled the last remnants of her energy to try and cast a simple healing spell. Nothing happened, and the chaos dispersed into the air around her.
"I know how much you wanted to save her." Tzivah was not natural at comforting, but Yennefer was the other part of himself. He knew her like no one else could.
Yennefer made it to the dry part of the beach, letting the corpse of the little girl fall onto the sand. She turned over and sat, propping her legs up. Tzivah landed next to her on the beach, pressing into her side lightly. He became a panther, settling his head on Yen's lap. She was covered in blood, soaked with seawater, and her dress was ragged from the wear of the fighting.
Seagulls cawed loudly overhead as Yennefer finally let her breath rest. Tzivah commented bitterly, "Which one of us are you here for?"
Yennefer turned towards the cold, still baby. Her dead lips were already colored blue. "I'm sorry you didn't have a life. But if truth be told, you're not missing much."
Moments from her life flashed through her mind. "I know it's easy for me to say with warm breath in my lungs, and you with nothing." She remembered when she had tried to slit her wrists, the scars one of the only traits she kept from her pre-ascension self. A reminder of her weakness.
"Still... what would you have had? Parents? Well, they're the ones who wrote your last act, so not much lost there." She thought of her step-father, who had sold her for less than half the price of a pig. "Friends? Most likely fair weather." She was a fine example of that. None of her so-called friends still cared to think of her. "Lovers? Fun for a bit, I'll admit, but all eventually disappoint." Istredd, who sold her greatest secret to Stregobor.
Tzivah dug his nose into her, an echoing purr rumbling through his chest and into hers. It helped, and one of her hands went through his soft black fur.
Resentment threatened to overwhelm everything else she was feeling. "And let's face it, you're a girl. Your mother was right about one thing. We're just vessels." Designed to bring life, and destroyed for doing it. Given the chance to do great things, and willing to trade them away for trifles. "And even when we're told we're special, as I was, as you would've been, we're still just vessels for them to take and take until we're empty and alone." A sigh took the last of the breath she could give to her resentment. "So, count yourself lucky. You've cheated the game and won without even knowing it."
"I don't think they won anything. Haeiron was cheated out of settling. She was cheated out of getting that choice for herself. She might have done great things for Lyria, and now we'll never know." Tzivah spoke from his place as a comfort, trying to nuzzle his head against her.
Yennefer turned, with her dæmon still clamoring over her back, to bury the baby. She scooped handfuls of sand over her body. "It doesn't matter. She doesn't feel anything, Haeiron doesn't even exist except as Dust now. One of Kalis's other daughters will rule, or Lyria will have a new queen. It doesn't matter."
Tzivah turned back to his peregrine form and began to scratch letters into the sand next to the tiny grave. Then he returned to Yennefer's shoulder as she stood, looking at the small resting place amidst the vastness of the world.
"Let's go."