Jaskier pauses at a patch of what he's pretty sure is false nightshade berries. Almost entirely definitely pretty sure.
"Hey, little Yenna!" he says, and points at them. "What would you say these look like?" Now, yes, it's Yenna, but, she's a farm brat, right? This kind of thing isn't even knowledge for them, they're basically born with it. And he has on a lot of good authorities that plants are "not that hard", and he usually gets it right himself, almost always, really...
Yenna stares at him.
"Well?"
She stares at where he's pointing. "Plants," she says finally.
"Right, yeah," Jaskier says. "What kind of plant, though?"
She looks between him and the maybe false nightshade.
"False nightshade, do you think?" he presses.
"I don't know."
"They look a lot like false nightshade, I think."
"Uh-huh," she says finally.
"So you agree?"
"I don't know," Yenna repeats.
"Really?" he says, a bit plaintively. "I'm pretty sure…" False nightshade berries are delicious, is the thing, so he'd really like to eat some, but only so long as they're actually false nightshade and not, you know, going to kill you by being real nightshade.
"Why should I know if you don't know either!" she shouts, and then she flinches and curls in on herself, her eyes screwed shut.
"Right, alright, yeah," he stammers. "That's, yeah, good point, yeah." You'd think the part where he wasn't hitting her would mean she stopped standing like he was going to hit her but no, of course nothing is that easy with Yenna.
Well, he'll just have to wait for her to relax again as they walk.
"- naught but bad luck, to fuck with a puck! Lest your grandkid be born, a hairy young faun!" Jaskier sings, glancing over yet again to Yenna to see if she's in a better mood.
She glares back at him and spits suddenly, "I hate you and I hate your songs." Still cranky about the berries, then. She can really hold a grudge.
"That is hurtful, Yenna," he tells her. "Deeply hurtful. Well, if you're in the mood for critiquing…" And he starts in on his Sodden Hill work again, which he thinks is really coming together nicely.
Yenna does not seem to have anything to say about that. He has plenty of thoughts of his own, so when he finishes his current sketch he returns to the start and begins playing around with each verse, feeling out the way the words fit together and trying out different variations.
He's so caught up in whether or not he can get a bit of wordplay with saprophytic and sappic without spending too much space explaining it that he's completely forgotten she's there once again and is taken by surprise when she says suddenly, "Why do you hate mages so much?"
"I don't." When she doesn't respond, he says, "Why do you think I hate mages?"
"Your song's all about the dead ones," Yenna says.
So he is getting too blatant about that if even Yenna's noticed.
"Like you're only willing to say nice things because you're so glad they're dead. And you're mad your friend doesn't kill the one who has the same name as me."
"I hate Worse Yennefer because she is just a genuinely awful person with no redeeming traits whatsoever," Jaskier explains. "She doesn't even have any reason to be awful, she's just the sort who always got everything as soon as she wanted it. But mages are just, you know, people. Individuals. I would never hate someone for what they are, I hate people for who they are. The thing is, the living mages all say Worse Yennefer saved the day so I can't make any of them the hero of the hour. But! I can valorize dead people without any problem, you see. Worse Yennefer is many things but even she can't bully the dead into contradicting me." At least, so far as he knows. It's a gamble he's willing to take.
"Are all your songs lies?" Yenna doesn't even do him the credit of sounding disapproving.
"Oh, it's not even lying. The mages told me what happened and who did what, at least as much as the non-Yennefer survivors could work out. I'm not making anything up, I'm just choosing where the focus goes. Also, they're terrified of Worse Yennefer so you'll forgive me if I take their claims about her with a grain of salt."
Yenna snorts. "Mages aren't scared of anything."
"Yes, well, I might've agreed with you before I saw one of them, this perfectly nice woman Triss, falling into tears because she had no idea where Worse Yennefer had disappeared to. Which I completely sympathize with! The fact Worse Yennefer could be lurking absolutely anywhere is a chill down my spine as well, and unlike those poor mages who no doubt are harassed by her constantly, at least I'm blessed enough that our paths only ever cross when I'm traveling with Geralt." Ah, right, and there's still that plan to enact. "Say... Do you like songs to be true?" he asks.
She considers this. After a while, she says, "I guess."
"Would you like to help me find out some true things?"
She deliberates over this like he asked her the secret of life. Eventually, and without a trace of the enthusiasm he was aiming for, she replies, "Maybe."
"Great!" he says. "So, my witcher friend Geralt, from all those songs. I know he's around here." Details had been sparse beyond that he'd been in Sodden, but given Geralt certainly went nowhere near Cintra and generally avoided everything to do with armies, he had to have gone north, same as them. "I'm not sure exactly where, but we should cross paths with him before long."
Yenna does not look pleased about this at all.
"I assure you, he doesn't bite. You may have heard some talk of him being the Butcher of Blaviken -"
"I hadn't."
"Forget I said that, then!" Jaskier says quickly. "My point is, whatever bad things you've heard about him or witchers from other people isn't true. What I say about him is true, because I actually know him, and I say he's a hero and a friend of humanity. Alright?"
"Okay."
"Is that a I heard you say that okay or a I'm convinced okay?"
"I believe you," the girl says. "Witchers work for humans. Everybody knows that."
"Exactly, good. Now, the thing about Geralt is he'll butt in about the truth and people being wrong on all sorts of subjects, but you ask him anything about himself and he'll say any old thing to end the conversation. Very frustrating! But I've found he's not as good at making things up about himself, especially when you get him off-balance. So, my thinking is, if we say you're very sad and need to be distracted with stories about him, whatever comes out of his mouth next will probably be a real tale."
"Why would he do that?"
"Because he has the spine of a lamprey," Jaskier says.
"But those haven't got - oh."
"Exactly!" Jaskier says, clapping his hands. "Also, he can't handle children at all and we can use that. Now," Jaskier continues, "are you any good at crying? There is a lot I haven't gotten out of him and you can't just shove onion in your face, that doesn't fool him." Apparently the tears smell different, although given Geralt's bizarre and hypocritical relationship with the truth, Jaskier suspects Geralt smells the onion itself and just lied to Jaskier about the details.
"I don't think people like crying."
Jaskier nods. "People will do anything to make crying stop. So then I tell him that, as a child expert, I know you'll stop crying if he tells you something about his own childhood. You know, what was he getting up to at fourteen, back when he was a regular human kid himself just like you. It'll really humanize him, I think. I will even credit you," he continues generously. "You can be a character in the songs too! A nice little frame to connect however many stories we can wiggle out of him."
"Okay," she agrees.
This time, instead of trying to run for it Yenna wedges herself in the deepest corner of the stables. Jaskier finds her after hours and pries her loose, absolutely coated in muck.
"You want to go home," he reminds her. "Is a pile of horseshit home? No."
"I'm filthy," she observes.
"Yes, well, in their gracious wisdom the gods made water and man made soap," Jaskier says and dumps a bucket over her.
Gods above and below, children. Really makes Jaskier wish he'd run across Geralt already, because he could have used a witcher to track her down.