WARNING: This fic was updated yesterday with a third chapter that you might have missed; if you haven't yet finished all parts of "The Lesser Kindness", click back a chapter and do so.

Summary: After their flight from the Temple of Melitele in Ellander, two travelers stop at an inn for the night, and stumble onto an adventure.

THE LAST ENEMY

1

1251, August
Twenty miles from the borders of Ellander
House of Respite

The flagons of beer jittered atop the serving platter as the innkeep handed it over to the witcher.

Inconvenienced by the platter, he set it down on the table and made off for a corner of the small, but lively alehouse, with a jug in either hand. The witcher avoided a drunken band of mercenaries at one table, gracefully turned away from a man pushing out from his bench, and stopped in front of his table.

Which was curiously empty.

"Geralt!" A voice shouted from somewhere to his left. "Over here!" Geralt turned, and saw his traveling companion, a brown-haired dandy dressed in the finest plum velvet, in deep conversation with another patron:

"Dandelion," groused Geralt as he strode over to the other table, "stop disturbing the other guests."

"I'm hardly disturbing him," replied Dandelion with a roguish grin, as he fluffed his feathered beret so that it sat just right on his head.

"You're disturbing everyone," the witcher deadpanned.

The other man, the one Dandelion was talking to, laughed. "Ah, I'm not bothered by him; so few talk to old men like me that I'd take the ramblings of a fool mummer."

"How dare you, sir!" Dandelion gasped in mock outrage, "I'll have you know I am a poet, a songster, a bard of bards. Not a mummer."

"Forgive me my insult, bard of bards; I did not know," the other man apologised insincerely, and then looked up at Geralt to make his acquaintance. Both men froze. Geralt cursed himself for not noticing the armour, but the greying hair and calm demeanour had thrown him off.

The man was handsome, in a rugged way, scar-marked as his face was, with hair once jet-black, but now closer to salt-and-pepper, with high cheekbones and a strong jaw obscured by a traveler's beard. His hair was cut and tied back in the Cintrian style, the shaved sides revealing ears that were only slightly pointed, but Geralt suspected this man was, like Yennefer, at least partially elven. Despite all that, his eyes were the key, for when Geralt looked into them, he saw his own eyes staring back.

Dandelion, seeing that both men had realised their shared affliction, laughed heartily. "Now, do you see why I 'disturbed' him, Geralt?"

The other witcher's eyes alighted with some unspoken recognition of the name, but as quickly as it came, it went, and he extended a hand to Geralt: "Harry. Bear School."

"Geralt. Wolf School," Geralt replied tersely, then stopped short, "I thought the Bear School had been..."

"Yes," answered Harry, running a hand through his graying hair, "I'm the last one."

"Ugh," moaned Dandelion.

Geralt narrowed his eyes at his poet friend. "What?"

"Short sentence. Short affirmative. Deadpan, serious, and terse," the bard mocked, "I swear you witchers are all the same brooding blowhards."

"No we're not," Geralt said.

Dandelion snorted in farcical contempt. "Fine. Let's prove it: Harry?"

"Yes?" answered the Bear School witcher.

"What's your opinion on sorceresses?" the bard asked with a sly look at Geralt, whose normally pale cheeks tinged ever so slightly with colour.

"Always avoid them," the other witcher said knowledgeably, to Dandelion's apparent glee, "unless you want to fall in love."

Dandelion positively cackled and Geralt felt somewhat as though someone was playing a particularly elaborate prank on him. The other witcher noticed:

"Ah, trouble with a sorceress, I take it?"

Geralt didn't respond; he merely sat and offered the other beer to Harry, after gulping down his own, much to Dandelion's annoyance:

"Wait, Geralt, that's my beer!" he exclaimed; the two witchers shrugged and continued drinking. "Brutes," the bard said acridly, before returning to the subject at hand: "Trouble doesn't even begin to describe it, Harry. This sorceress must be a banshee in disguise."

"Really? Doesn't sound all that different from some of the sorcerers and sorceresses I've met in my time."

"Ha! Do most sorceresses you meet destroy half of Rinde?"

Harry snorted in amusement. "That was you?"

"You know of it?"

"I stopped by a few weeks later and the townsfolk practically ran me out of town. Every time I'd been to Rinde before, they were the welcoming type of folk; I had wondered why they suddenly became hostile," answered the black-haired witcher. "So, what happened?"

Geralt nodded over to Dandelion. "He likes telling the story more than I do."

"Because, Geralt," condescended the bard, "you've the soul of a shoemaker, not a bard, and lack the subtle nuances of academia to be an accomplished story-teller. Now, Harry, how shall give it to you? In verse?"

"Plain speak, thank-you-very-much," deadpanned the other witcher before Dandelion could go any further.

Geralt laughed; this witcher might not be so bad, after all. Dandelion, on the other hand, appeared to be regretting his choice of companion for conversation. "Of course you haven't the ear for the fine arts. Haaa..." he exhaled noisily, "nevertheless, I shall endeavour to educate you."

"Go on, then, educate me."

And educate Dandelion did, launching into a long-winded explanation of the events that happened in Rinde; of himself and Geralt fishing and finding that lamp, of the djinn inside who attacked Dandelion, of Geralt's first meeting with Yennefer, and her conniving plan to trap the Djinn and use it for her own ends. Dandelion relished telling the part where Geralt had realised that he alone was the Djinn's master, and wished for something that saved both himself and the sorceress from the djinn before it killed them and took half the city with it.

Throughout this, Harry remained silent, attentive, and he looked even a little nostalgic, to Geralt's consternation. Once Dandelion had finished speaking, and preened as though awaiting applause, the other witcher turned to Geralt and asked a simple question:

"What did you wish for?" he asked simply.

Geralt opened his mouth to answer, but unsurprisingly, Dandelion was first to reply: "He wished to tether himself to her for all his life," the bard snickered. "I mean, I understand monogamy as a concept—not that I would ever do such a thing—but, really, Geralt? Binding yourself to her, of all people?"

The other witcher laughed, too, but it wasn't a mocking one like Geralt's loudmouthed friend. "Ah, is that coincidence, or irony?"

Geralt raised a brow. "Is what coincidence or irony?"

Harry's brows furrowed, then lightened. "Perhaps you two can tell me."

"Tell you what?" Dandelion asked, now interested.

"Shall I tell you a tale?" Harry asked. "Of the time a sorceress hired me to hunt down a djinn?"

Dandelion gasped with childlike fervour. "Well, now that is an interesting tale! I'm always in the mood to hear a story. Tell it, Master Witcher, and I'll decide afterward whether it's coincidence or irony."

Harry turned to Geralt, who had to admit that his interest had also been piqued. The white-haired witcher merely nodded, beckoning his brother in arms to tell his tale:

"Well," said the elder witcher, "I'd just finished a strange leshen contract in Cintra, and came through Cidaris and Temeria, looking for work. They turned me away Kerack, Cidaris, and Gors Velen. And I hadn't heard any rumours of prospects in Vizima, so I decided to turn North, perhaps to find something in Novigrad," he paused and laughed lightly to himself, perhaps over an old thought or joke, "But I ended up with much more than I could bargain for in Oxenfurt, where I'd heard an elven sorceress paying top coin for someone with a witcher's skill..."

Author's Note: Hey, Geralt and Dandelion! So, I lied to you about Geralt not appearing in this fic, but he won't play a major role in this fic. Why? Well, as you've noticed, this Chapter takes place in 1251, right around the time (though the timeline is super vague during The Last Wish and The Sword of Destiny) Geralt and Dandelion leave The Temple of Melitele, after Nenneke and Iola nurse Geralt back to health. So, that means this takes place after The Last Wish and Season of Storms, but before The Sword of Destiny and the rest of the saga. And, The Lesser Kindness took place in the 1050s, which is approximately 200 years earlier. Most of the action will take place then, rather than the 1200s and the Geralt, Harry, and Dandelion portions of this fic are meant to be a sort of framing story, in the way "The Voice of Reason" is in The Last Wish.

There are really no chapter notes for this, since it's mostly a setup chapter.

Next chapter will take us back to 1054, where Harry and an "elven sorceress" hunt down a djinn.

Thanks for reading,
Geist.