Chapter 43: THE TRAINING BEGINS
The pendulum blade missed Ciri's head by inches.
She ducked, rolled, came up running—straight into a swinging log that caught her in the ribs and sent her sprawling. From my position on the fortress wall, I watched her hit the ground hard enough to drive the air from her lungs.
Get up. Get up.
She got up.
Vesemir called out corrections from the edge of the training course, his voice carrying the weight of centuries. "Anticipate, don't react! The blade tells you where it's going before it arrives!"
Ciri wiped blood from a scraped palm and faced the course again.
"She's stronger than she looks." Geralt stood beside me, arms crossed, watching with the focused attention of a man who'd survived this same course decades ago.
"I know. Doesn't make it easier to watch."
The training course was designed to kill. That was the point—Witcher candidates died here, their bodies broken by mechanisms that taught through pain or not at all. Ciri would never receive the mutations that had transformed Geralt and his brothers, but she would learn to move like them, fight like them, survive like them.
If the course didn't kill her first.
She ran again. Dodged the pendulum, ducked the log, leaped over the pit—and caught her foot on the landing. The fall was ugly, twisting, ending with her face-down in the dirt and not moving.
I was running before I knew I'd decided to move.
"Stay back, bard."
Vesemir's command stopped me at the course's edge. Ciri was pushing herself up, slowly, painfully. Her left arm hung at a wrong angle.
"She's hurt."
"She's learning." The old Witcher's voice was not unkind, but unyielding. "Pain is part of the lesson."
"Her arm is dislocated."
"I've trained boys with worse. She'll—"
"She's not a Witcher candidate. She doesn't heal like you do." I met his eyes. "Let me help her, or she'll be useless for days while her shoulder recovers."
Something shifted in Vesemir's expression. Calculation, perhaps. The acknowledgment of a variable he hadn't fully considered.
"Show me what you can do, then."
I climbed onto the course, navigating the obstacles with the careful attention of someone who'd spent years learning to survive alongside monsters. Ciri lay where she'd fallen, breathing in short gasps, face pale with shock.
"Hey." I knelt beside her. "I'm going to help. Just breathe."
I started singing.
The Healing Melody flowed out of me—Stage 3 power, refined through years of practice, channeled with precision into her damaged tissue. I felt her shoulder shifting, relocating itself as the magic accelerated natural healing. The bruises on her arms faded from purple to yellow to nothing.
Ciri's breathing steadied. Color returned to her face.
"That's—" She stared at her arm, rotating it experimentally. "How?"
"Gift," I said simply. "One of many."
I helped her stand. She was shaky but whole, and the look she gave me held something new—not just gratitude, but wonder.
The Witchers watched from the courtyard's edge.
Vesemir's expression was unreadable. Eskel's eyebrows had risen nearly to his hairline. Lambert—surprisingly—looked less hostile than he had since our arrival.
"So that's your gift, bard." Vesemir crossed his arms. "Useful."
"I can accelerate healing for minor injuries. More serious damage takes longer, costs more." I kept my voice matter-of-fact. "But yes. I can help her recover from training faster than natural healing would allow."
"Which means harder training." Lambert stepped forward, and for the first time, his expression wasn't mocking. "If he can patch her up after each session, we don't have to hold back as much."
"That's not—"
"He's right." Vesemir cut me off. "The mutations gave us accelerated healing. Without them, human candidates died as often from accumulated damage as from single accidents. If your songs can bridge that gap..."
The implication hung in the air. They could push Ciri harder. Train her more intensively. Transform her into something closer to a Witcher than any human had been before.
Is that what I want for her?
Is that what she needs to survive?
I looked at Ciri. She stood straight despite her recent injury, jaw set with determination that reminded me painfully of Calanthe.
"What do you want?" I asked her.
"I want to be strong." Her voice didn't waver. "Strong enough that no one can hurt the people I love ever again."
That night, Vesemir and I reached an agreement.
"She needs more than steel," he said, pouring us both mugs of something that smelled like it could strip paint. "The training will forge her body. You'll tend her soul."
"Meaning?"
"Be her warmth. Her comfort. The Witchers here—we've forgotten how to feel. The mutations stripped away more than our fear." He took a long drink. "Ciri needs someone who remembers what joy feels like. Someone who can teach her that strength doesn't require sacrificing humanity."
I thought about the Kowalczyk family, fleeing Nilfgaard all those years ago. About Sister Agata at the Temple of Melitele. About every person who'd trusted me with their pain and their hope.
"I can do that."
"Good." Vesemir set down his mug. "Then we understand each other."
Ciri found me in my chambers later, still moving stiffly despite the healing. She was supposed to be resting; instead, she stood in my doorway, wrapped in a blanket that was too big for her.
"Thank you for being here." Her voice was small. "I know you could have stayed somewhere safe. Let Geralt bring me alone."
"Where would I go?" I sat on my narrow bed, making room for her. "You're family. Family sticks together."
She sat beside me, leaning her weight against my shoulder. "My grandmother would have said that's sentimental nonsense."
"Your grandmother was a brilliant strategist and an absolute nightmare of a human being." I smiled when she laughed. "She loved you in her own way. But her way wasn't the only way."
Ciri was quiet for a moment. Then: "Will it always hurt this much? The training?"
"Probably. But it gets easier to bear." I put an arm around her shoulders. "And I'll always be here to help you heal."
She hugged me then—properly, fiercely, with the desperate strength of a child who'd lost too much.
"Always?" she whispered.
My throat tightened. "Always."
After she returned to her room, I began composing new songs. Lullabies for nightmares. Ballads about brave princesses. Music to make a broken girl feel whole.
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