Changed to M because this chapter got bloody.
Yennefer knew something was wrong long before Ciri appeared in the courtyard with an unsteady Geralt leaning on her, his blood smearing both their sides. She had always been connected to him, but that connection had only gotten stronger as the cares of court had faded and her walls against him had crumbled away.
"Get him inside, lay him down. I must see how bad the damage is," she said curtly. She'd already stripped their bed and lined it with new linen, unwilling to combat an infection on top of whatever horrors Geralt was about to face. He looked far too pale and the spear of a centipede's barbed mandible was protruding from between his ribs, lodged deep enough that she could see it shift as he struggled to breathe.
Ciri, if possible, was paler than Geralt as she blinked him into the bedroom in a flash of green and numbly helped him lay down, her fingers slipping from his body as though she couldn't quite bear to let him go completely. Yennefer cupped her face for the briefest of moments, forcing Ciri's fear-struck eyes up to look into her own.
"Listen to me, ugly one. He will not die. Go and bring Eskel back, have him brew swallow and golden oriel. There are herbs in the garden."
Ciri looked at Yennefer for only a moment before she nodded and disappeared. Yennefer dropped her hand, gazing into empty space for a heartbeat before turning to Geralt. She'd already changed into a simple shirt, vest, and trousers, rolling the sleeves up and tying the front of her hair back to be ready for whatever mess this would make. She'd had Geralt's blood on her hands before. She knew what a massacre's worth of blood could coat the place where a life was being saved.
"Lie still, try to breathe shallow," Yennefer coaxed, standing over him and sparking a purple glow between her fingers. She hovered her hand over his chest, just barely skimming his armor as she sought the fine weave of muscle and nerve and vein that formed his body. Under her hand his lungs struggled and pain receptors flared, tissue torn cruelly by serrated barbs burning from poison and gushing little spurts of blood into his lung.
The wound was deep. Very deep. She lay her palm with a feather's touch against his side and he hissed, his spine arching as his muscles contracted, trying to worm away from the pain. His eyes closed tightly and he worked his jaw, his teeth grinding. Yennefer took his hand in her free one, the noise he made piercing her heart.
"Hush," she tried to soothe. "Hush, my love lie still. It's punctured your lung, there's poison leeching from the pores...I must remove it but I need to be sure it will not sever an artery on the way out."
It took a surge of effort on Geralt's part but he managed to quiet, gripping Yennefer's hand in a painful clasp and breathing shallow and harsh through his nose as he tried to manage the pain.
Yennefer let him hold her hand and probed deeper, her eyes flashing violet as she felt around the wound, threading tendrils of magic down around the mandible and into the horribly torn tissues beyond, numbing some of the pain to give him the chance to compartmentalize it and actually draw enough oxygen to stay conscious.
"I can remove it," she said after a moment, finding no arteries in danger. "But we must wait until Eskel returns with the swallow. Else you will be unable to breathe long enough for the wound to close."
Geralt groaned, turning his head into her hand as she stroked his hair and tried to soothe him. She kept one hand by the wound, numbing as much as she could. She couldn't start trying to heal with the mandible still in place. That would only cause more damage as the muscles and lung moved around it.
She was worried about his lung. Blood would froth from the wound the moment the mandible was free and he was already coughing weakly, nearly blacking out from the pain as blood trickled from the side of his mouth and the invasive spine grated against a rib. Her lips trembled as she pressed them together and her eyes sought his face.
"I know, my love. Soon." She reached up her free hand, smoothing it along his brow. "Sleep," she whispered, her eyes flaring with power as she forced him into unconsciousness. She ran her hand slowly down the side of his face and brushed his throat as his eyes rolled back in his head and he sighed, the sound giving her chills. It was a very final sound, and she would have feared that he'd left her only she could hear his heart still pumping deep inside, swathed in its cradle of metal and muscle and bone, unaware yet of the poison slowly seeping into it.
She kept him under, listening to that unsteady beat and feeling his ribs shudder with every labored breath. It was only her constant flow of magic that kept the pain numbed and the blood from flooding his lung and drowning him. She could only keep this up for so long.
"Hurry," she murmured, looking into Geralt's slack face, at the blood and centipede gore streaking him, at the sweat and the way his brow was twisted in pain even in his sleep. She'd never wanted to see that again. "Hurry, Eskel."
The process of extracting the mandible was horrible and gruelingly bloody. In order to get him to swallow without choking further, Yennefer had to draw Geralt out of his rest, and he was struggling mightily to focus through the burning in his blood.
The poison was still leeching into his system, and though he was equipped to handle high toxicity levels Yennefer knew by the darkness coloring around his eyes and the steadily graying veins near the surface of his skin that he was reaching the fringe of his limits. They fed him the golden oriel first, hoping it would be general enough to take the edge off. A specific anti-venom would have been better but no such thing existed since centipede venom killed a human in two minutes and nobody cared enough about Witchers to spend time and money in order to invent a cure just for them.
The swallow came next, and Geralt's body shuddered against it, though he did manage to get it down. "How long will it take his body to metabolize it?" Yennefer asked, steadying Geralt and focusing on numbing deeper, trying to contain the burning enough that Geralt could lay still and keep from jostling the barb around more.
"A few minutes," Eskel said hollowly, his eyes fixed on Geralt. Ciri was standing next to him, visibly wanting to go to Geralt but not wanting to hinder Yennefer's progress on him.
"When it's active, you'll need to hold him down. I do not have time to numb the area without magic and when I remove it I will be using my healing energy to keep the blood from suffocating him. I won't be able to keep the pain at bay at the same time. He will need my magic and the potion working together if he is going to survive this," Yenenfer said, looking at both Witchers with an expression of finality. The fear sat on each of them like a cloak but nobody voiced it and nobody protested.
They would do what they had to.
"Now," Eskel said softly, his hands bracing Geralt's shoulders as Ciri leaned hard on his legs.
Yennefer didn't hesitate. She gripped the mandible and pulled it free in one tug, her eyes burning violet as Geralt gave a wrenching roar of pain. His muscles all clenched at once and then suddenly he was limp, passed out from the overwhelm. Yennefer threw the mandible to the ground, the spell already on her lips as she pressed her palm into the hole, his blood surging hot around her hand.
His breathing was ragged and shallow, his face white as his hair around the veins running black beneath it. Blood gurgled in the back of his mouth and Ciri pushed on his legs, helping Eskel roll him onto his good side without even needing to communicate about it. Yennefer finished her spell and her hands flew to his head, turning it gently and placing a hand on his throat and then his chest to help him cough up the blood and mucus so he wouldn't choke on it. His body shuddered and there was blood everywhere but after a few moments of struggle he hacked up the last of the irritants in his lung and lay still.
He was still far too pale, and Yennefer didn't dare relax. The sheets were smeared with gore and Geralt was filthy, still very much at risk of infection if they didn't get him cleaned up.
"Eskel, help me undress him. Ciri, run a bath."
Both jumped to obey. Eskel made quick work of Geralt's armor and lifted the unconscious witcher, Geralt's once white head falling back limply before Yennefer's hand flew up to steady it. He looked horrible, and the unsteady, too fast nature of his heart's cadence worried her deeply.
"Get him into the bath, help Ciri clean him up," Yennefer commanded. "I will get rid of this and prepare bandages."
Eskel nodded and carried his brother out.
Ciri was just throwing the last of the herbs into the bath when Eskel carried Geralt into the room, and she reached out to help him lower his unconscious body into the water. It was warm, heated with Ciri's own magic and churning with herbs that would help kill bacteria and numb pain.
"I'll get in with him, hold him up. You fetch the cloth and help me wash him," Eskel offered, already stripping his jacket and sword belt off. Ciri nodded, having shed most of her battle gear and changed shirts while she was waiting to try and be as sanitary as possible. It was difficult, seeing him like this. He was so, so pale and his eyes were sunken, like he'd been dead for two days already. It scared her.
Eskel got gingerly into the tub, sitting down behind Geralt and wrapping an arm carefully around his chest, keeping him comfortably upright and his wound from becoming submerged completely. His bloodied head rest against Eskel's shoulder, unsteady breathing brushing across Eskel's neck in too short and too shallow puffs.
Together, Ciri and Eskel slowly washed the blood and dirt and poison from Geralt's skin.
By the end of it he seemed to be breathing a little easier and the wound in his side didn't look so raggedly toxic. Ciri had taken great pains to cleanse it thoroughly, and though she'd seen and inflicted much worse injuries it still took something visceral out of her when she thumbed back a layer of torn flesh and realized the hard, warm thing that pressed into her thumb was her father's exposed rib. She'd paled so badly she felt light headed and she had to stop, gripping the side of the tub and staring at him for a long several moments before Eskel's touch on her wrist and his concerned voice finally broke through.
The swallow had stopped the worst of the bleeding and kept Geralt from suffocating, but the surface injury was dire and more complex than a potion could instantly mend. There were grooves dug cruelly into his rib where the mandible had pulled free and the muscle was torn terribly. The golden oriel didn't seem to be working as well as she'd hoped either. He was still far too pale and when she washed the sweat from his chest she could feel his heartbeat far too rapid beneath.
"He's tough, he'll make it. He's survived a lot worse—just pick a scar, especially the one on his throat. He was luckier than anyone has a right to be on that one," Eskel assured, seeing the shocked expression on Ciri's face and trying to console himself too. He and Geralt had gone through the trails together. That made them more than brothers, and even if that wasn't enough Geralt and Lambert were the only family he had left. Vesimir's passing and the fall of Kaer Morhen had left him feeling more alone than he'd ever wanted to admit.
"It's not the wound that worries me, it's the venom," Ciri admitted, wringing out the last cloth and rinsing her hands in the remains of the bath water as Eskel carried Geralt out of it. "He's far too pale, and his heart is working too hard."
Eskel bent gingerly, laying Geralt on a clean blanket and wrapping him up before taking a moment to hop into a clean pair of trousers. He sighed, bending to gently work at drying around Geralt's wound. The other witcher was still deeply unconscious. "I know, I can hear it," he said grimly, resting his hand against Geralt's chest and glancing over him with those sharp eyes. He didn't like what he was seeing. "Probably a reaction to all the potions and the venom. It's going to be a rough detox." He finished drying Geralt and Ciri helped him get Geralt partially dressed.
"I'll sew him up," Eskel offered, glancing at Ciri with concern in his yellow eyes. "You go ahead and get cleaned up. Isn't good to leave that junk on your skin."
Ciri's expression was torn, a hint of guilt darkening her concern.
"It's alright, you can take first watch over him when we take him back to Yennefer."
She pressed her lips together but finally nodded, pulling her shirt over her head. Eskel turned away and focused on the wound, noting that Geralt would need a few layers of stitches. He sighed through his nose, retrieving the needle and thread. "Sorry brother," he muttered before he got to work.
An hour and a half since the extraction, Geralt was bathed, bandaged, and resting in his own bed. Yennefer had changed the sheets again, taking the soiled ones out back with instructions to the groundskeeper to burn them. She'd begun cleaning up the rest of the room when Eskel returned, and she'd been far more concerned about Geralt than the blood on the floor where it had dripped from his side on the way in.
"Lay him down, let me look," she said, re-assessing the damage after she'd thoroughly scrubbed her hands and arms and changed out of her bloodied clothes. Those had gone on the burn pile as well.
Her brow furrowed as she placed a hand on his forehead. He was too warm. Feverish. She swore softly and swept her hair over her shoulder, laying her ear against his chest. She closed her eyes and listened carefully for several harsh breaths, her expression tight when she lifted her head again.
"The poison, it's really getting to him, isn't it?" Ciri asked from her spot by the doorway, her arms folded and her brow furrowed as she looked on. "Even with the oriel—I thought he'd be doing better than this."
"As did I," Yennefer admitted, carding his hair back from his forehead. "But the toxicity in his blood is also very high at present. He will need to wait it out. Adding anything else to his system, even white honey right now I fear would be too much."
Her voice was very soft and Ciri didn't like it. Didn't like seeing any of this because if Yennefer was worried and showing it then things were dire. She went forward and sat next to Yennefer, taking her hand and clasping it as they both looked on.
Geralt's condition did not improve over night. He was still feverish and muttering, twitching lightly by dawn. His heart had worked too quickly and too hard all night, and the darkness in his veins had only paled because his skin had become flushed with fever. The wound site seemed irritated, though Yennefer could find no sign of infection. She was at a loss, her magic scanning telling her something was still deeply wrong but unable to pinpoint what it was. Her heart was tearing, and it manifested in a smoldering anger.
She'd never been a healer. She couldn't bear children and she wasn't made to sustain life through her magic either, it seemed. Not even the life of the man dearest her supposedly icy heart.
It wasn't until she returned to the room for the sixth time that morning with fresh water that she noticed something laying dark and ragged near the unicorn's hoof. Slowly, glancing over at the bed where Ciri had fallen asleep with her head on Geralt's shoulder and her hand resting on his arm, she knelt and picked it up. Her nose wrinkled when she realized it was the mandible, sticky with Geralt's blood and other fluids.
She took it outside and was just about to discard it when something caught her eye. Frowning, she turned it in the early light and examined it more closely. What she found made her blood run cold.
The poisoned tip was missing.