The great hall of Kaer Morhen simmered with warmth as the last vestiges of the winter's chill faded into the stone walls. A hearty meal had just concluded, and flickering torchlight cast long shadows across the faces gathered there—weathered hunters, apprentices, and ghostly memories of those who had come before. Among those present, Geralt's gaze settled on the young boy named Lambert. The boy's eyes, bright yet tinged with sorrow, revealed a story etched deeply into his soul, one that Geralt felt compelled to hear fully.
"Lambert," Geralt began, his voice steady but gentle. "I've seen much in my travels, but not all wounds are visible. Tell me what weighs on you."
Lambert swallowed hard, then confessed in a voice barely above a whisper, "I miss my mother terribly. She's been all I've had since my father..." His voice cracked, and he looked away. "He's an alcoholic. When he drinks, he... he beats her and me. Sometimes I think he doesn't even remember it when he's sober." The boy's hands clenched the edge of the bench as if anchoring himself. "I want to take her away, to keep her safe, but... I don't know how."
Geralt nodded slowly, understanding the desperation and determination in the boy's heart. "Tomorrow, at first light, prepare yourself. We leave to bring your mother here—to Kaer Morhen. She will help us in the keep, caring for the livestock and managing the kitchen. It will not be easy, but here, you will be safe. You understand?"
Lambert's eyes glistened with hope, and he murmured a quiet, "Yes, thank you, Master Geralt."
The next morning dawned crisp and clear, silver frost shimmering on the ground. Geralt mounted Viv, the magnificent wyvern whose scales shimmered with an iridescent sheen, and Lambert climbed astride beside him, nerves stiff but resolve fierce. With a powerful leap, Viv took to the air, wings beating a steady cadence as they rose into the jagged foothills of Mahakam.
The journey was arduous—mountain winds churned cold and sharp, and the thin air demanded steady lungs. Yet Viv carried them steadily, her keen eyes scanning the slopes for signs of danger. After several hours, the smoke from a modest homestead curled into the sky—a solitary beacon amid the wild.
Geralt landed gracefully, and Lambert hurried toward the figure standing near the hearth: his mother, Rina. Time and hardship had etched lines of worry upon her face, but her eyes brightened at the sight of her son. Tears spilled freely as they embraced, the cruel sorrows of their past momentarily forgotten beneath the warmth of reunion.
Rina's relief was palpable. "Thank you for finding me," she whispered. "For giving me hope."
Geralt smiled softly. "You will find safety with us. Kaer Morhen is a fortress—not just of stone, but of family."
Back at Kaer Morhen, winter's breath whispered over the mountains, blanketing the keep in pristine snow. The arrival of Rina brought comfort and renewal. Dawn to dusk, she tended to the animals—feeding goats and cows, ensuring warmth and health through vigilant care—and stoked the fires in the old stone kitchen, nourishing warriors and children alike.
Meanwhile, Geralt immersed himself in rigorous training. With Vesemir as his sparring partner, they engaged in duels forged of steel and wit—pure swordsmanship without reliance on magical signs. Blades sang and clashed beneath the icy sky, honed with ruthless precision.
But battle alone was not his focus. In quiet moments beside the hearth, he practiced healing magic under Visenna's watchful eye, mastering the intricate incantations essential for witcher endurance and care. His mana pool—vast and potent—allowed him to channel powerful signs.
Among these, Axii grew ever more formidable; after months of experimentation on the hunt, Geralt discovered he could hold control over monsters for up to ten minutes—long enough to avoid conflict or set advantageous terms. This ability granted him leverage in dangerous encounters, turning foes into pawns, battles into negotiations.
With Viv as his companion, Geralt soared to regions dense with monster activity. The wyvern's wings cut rippling shadows over remote valleys, where ancient beasts stirred beneath stone and soil. Together they faced griffins, chorts, and deadly relicts—each encounter a challenge to his mastery of sword and sign.
Often, the fights ended not in death but in bonds—monsters subdued, enchanted, and bound by the Master–Servant contract circle etched with ancient magic and sealed with blood. Geralt placed these creatures in a protective five-kilometer radius around Kaer Morhen, a living barrier against human enemies and rival monsters alike, safeguarding the keep's fragile peace.
After a year of relentless training, hunting, and bonding, Geralt's quest led him into the shadowed Kaedwen Mountains. Villagers spoke in hushed tones of a griffin pair that plagued their flocks—a male and a pregnant female fierce beyond reason, snatching goats despite their best efforts.
Geralt approached with caution, his knowledge and patience reinforced by hard experience. Drawing the highest-level Master–Servant contract circle with freshly skinned griffin hide, he prepared for the ritual—the blood seals, the runes glowing with the sweep of his blade's edge.
By the mountain's craggy edge, he faced the griffins. The male, towering and majestic, watched with wary eyes; the female, heavy with promise, circled close above the flock. Through careful negotiation of power and will—bolstered by Axii and Vesemir's support—Geralt subdued their rage, sealed their loyalty, and gained not only formidable mounts but guardians for his family and home.
Returning triumphant to Kaer Morhen, the gryphons soared overhead, shadowing the keep with their regal flight. In this new chapter, every witcher bore a mount: a symbol of bond, strength, and unity cultivated through trust and magic—a testament to the company's evolution from lone hunters to a formidable family standing against the darkness.
Winter had come down the spine of the Blue Mountains, tracing every ledge and lintel of Kaer Morhen with delicate ice. In the long hall, warmth bloomed from a pair of roaring hearths and the low chatter of a dozen small tasks. Rina's hands moved through the faint steam of a simmering pot; Visenna sorted bundled herbs over linen; Berengar sat cross-legged on the rushes, whittling a toy horse from alder wood. Lambert, five winters old and newly fed, rested his chin on the table and watched Berengar steal glances at him between curlings of pale shavings.
"Ears up, cub," Berengar said without looking up, voice warm and mild. "A horse is skittish if eyes go to the floor. See? Shoulders high, ears forward—like this."
"Like Viv?" Lambert asked, a spark in his voice. "Wyverns don't have ears."
"Ah," Berengar mused. "Then like Geralt when he spots a crumb someone missed sweeping."
From the hearth, Rina huffed out a laugh and shook her head. Lambert's smile flickered—there and gone—but Berengar caught the moment and slid the toy across the table. A neat little horse: round belly, carved mane, and four stout legs that stood firmly even on uneven board.
"It's not finished," Berengar said, placing the toy in the boy's open palm. "Neither are any of us. But it stands."
Lambert tried the legs on the table, then carefully on the stone. The horse wobbled but did not fall. "It stands," he whispered.
Rina's gaze softened, yet she did not come near. She had learned that rushing in pressed Lambert's breaths thin. The boy's fear—shriveled by hunger, sharpened by the memory of a heavy hand in a dark room—would not disappear because the walls were stout and the hearth warm. Safety, like a new word, required repeating.
Visenna lifted her eyes. "Letters, little wolf?"
Lambert nodded without looking away from the toy. Visenna set out a slate and a bit of chalk and drew two capitals: The slate's lightly scratched surface caught the light. Lambert mimicked her strokes, tongue between his teeth, the lines unsteady but true. When he misplaced the bar of the A, Berengar did not correct him; he simply turned the slate, aligning it to Lambert's hand, and let him try again.
"Where's mother?" Lambert asked, not looking up.
"In the kitchen," Berengar answered, as if answering a watchman's call. "Within reach but not at your back."
The boy glanced over his shoulder. Rina lifted the wooden spoon, offering a faint, grease-polished smile. "Onions," she said theatrically, pointing to her eyes. "They make rivers."
"Not always," Lambert replied with small, quiet logic. "Sometimes rivers come from other things."
Berengar did not flinch; Visenna did not interrupt. Rina crossed the hall with measured steps and crouched, enough distance that Lambert could see her hands, the spoon, the floor beyond.
"Letters first," she said softly, "and afterward I'll need a brave taster to tell me if the stew is good."
"I can be brave," Lambert said quickly, the too-swift declaration of someone who had learned to anticipate judgment. "I can be."
"You already are," Berengar said. "You're still here."
Lambert's throat bobbed, and he nodded, attacking the next letter as if it were a door he intended to hold open. When the shape satisfied him, he returned the slate to Visenna and scooted closer to Berengar, until his shoulder nearly touched the witcher's knee.
"What's that smell?" he asked.
"Resin," Berengar said, flicking a glance toward Visenna, who understood and rose to fetch the small box of wastes and ends. "When you carve, the wood remembers your hands. And when you sand, the wood becomes what you tell it it might be."
Lambert squinted. "Wood can't hear."
"Sometimes neither can people," Berengar said, warmth braided with humor. "We speak anyway."
The boy's attention returned to the horse. Berengar pressed a square of fine sandpaper into his hand. Together, they smoothed the edges in short, patient motions. The result was imperfect, charmingly so, and Lambert held the toy as if a final piece in some private puzzle had slid into place.That night, as wind worried the high shutters, Lambert woke from a soundless cry—the kind that contracts the whole body into a fist. Berengar had taken first watch and found the boy sitting up, eyes shined in the faint emberglow.
"What do you need?" Berengar asked, crouching to make himself smaller.
"Can you make the men outside go away?" The boy's voice was only air. "They were in the hall but you were gone and then they were outside the door, and then…" He gestured, hands uncertain.
"No men outside the door," Berengar said. "Only me. But I can put someone there who knows doors."
"Who?"
Berengar leaned back a little. "Your toy horse. He stands very well. He can stand at your door. If anyone comes to push, he'll refuse to move."
Lambert swallowed. "That's silly. It's not alive."
"Neither are doors," Berengar said. "But they still keep us. We can give things work. Helps them, helps us. Doors hold. Horses stand."
"Will you be there too?" Lambert asked.
"Yes," Berengar said simply. "I will sit by the hearth in the corridor and listen to the fire tell me when morning's near."
The boy nodded hard, knuckled at one eye the way children do when a deeper sob has been shamed into sleep. He passed Berengar the horse, who placed it solemnly by the jamb, legs set wide. Then Berengar sat outside with his back to the stones, the hush of the keep around him, and listened while the long hall returned to even breath.
By day, Kaer Morhen filled with rhythms that asked nothing and offered much in return. Rina's mornings began with the barn: checking the cows' hooves, the goats' stubborn gate, the pigs' appetite. She learned the names of those most inclined to bolt and found that the touch needed to calm a frightened animal was the same needed to steady a child. Her kitchen smelled of stewing bone marrow and cider-soaked onions, of cracked pepper and rosemary; more importantly, the kitchen sounded like kindness—the rough-edged music of women who know how to make a room heavy with safety.
Lambert helped where he could. He learned to sweep without raising dust. He learned to carry a small pail without sloshing. He learned that a knife is safer in two hands than in one, and that the first rule of fire is not to rush. When he forgot—he once reached too quickly over a steaming pot and hissed at the heat—Rina did not scold. She folded his hand in hers until the breath came back right.
Visenna taught letters and numbers between chores, wrapping lessons around usefulness. A for Aard—she drew the sign, then the letter's bones beside it; B for balm, which she let Lambert help grind, the pestle's rhythm steady as a mother's pulse. They labeled jars together: comfrey, marigold, chamomile. Rina practiced alongside him sometimes, struggling with the same loops and lines, and Lambert grinned when his mother got the C backward, as if the world had returned a minor favor.
"Alchemy," Visenna said one afternoon, presenting a shallow mortar and three dried leaves on a clean board. "Not the kind that swallows boys. The kind that helps. We never taste, we never rush, and we always tell what we're doing to someone we trust."
Berengar leaned in the doorway and watched them with an expression he rarely wore—a kind of stunned gratitude, as if he'd discovered a room in a house he thought he knew.
Lambert crushed the leaves carefully. "What is it?"
"Tea," Visenna said, deadpan. "For a mother who carries the world, and a boy who tries to stand it up when it tilts."
When the tea was ready, Lambert carried it like treasure and placed it before Rina. She sipped, made a show of considering, then nodded gravely. "I appoint you official taster," she said. "A noble office. No salary."
Lambert's mouth tilted. "That's okay. I get soup."
Outside, the winter burned blue in the high air and the training yard rang with steel. Vesemir sparred with Geralt in the afternoons, pure sword to sword—no Signs, no tricks, the old master drawing angles that still made Geralt sweat. Lambert would sit with Berengar on the steps and narrate, in the earnest manner of five-year-olds, how the blades were talking.
"That one says, 'Don't you dare.' And the other one says, 'I already did.'"
"Good ear," Berengar said. "Now watch their feet. Swords lie. Feet don't."
"Can I try?"
"When you're taller," Berengar said. "For now, we practice things that suit your size."
He taught Lambert the small arts first: how to make a proper knot; how to tuck a cloak so it doesn't catch; how to walk like a shadow without scaring a skittish goat. In the stable, he taught the boy to run a hand along a horse's flank, to show the animal his palm before he showed it his plan. Sometimes Lambert would bury his face in a warm neck and breathe until the jitter in his chest evened out.
"What about the monsters?" Lambert asked once, when the wind died and the keep felt like the inside of a shell. "Do we fight them?"
"We don't hunt what we don't understand," Berengar said. "And we don't understand anything we hate."
"I hate—" Lambert started, then stopped.
"You hate what happened," Berengar said gently. "That's different than hating a person. And different again than hating a thing the world has made."
"I don't want to be like him," the boy said, so soft it might have been the settling stones. "I don't want to get big and… and…"
"You won't," Berengar said. "You'll get big and you'll be exactly what you decide. I'll stand next to you while you decide it."
He didn't add that he'd also stand there when Lambert forgot, or failed, or raged; he didn't need to. Some oaths are best kept quiet because quiet is how they breathe.
Trust, once knotted, held. Yet it also tested. One afternoon, Rina found Lambert standing on a stool, reaching on tiptoe for a high shelf where Visenna kept tinctures. The glass clinked. Rina said his name once, then a second time, precisely the same, and the boy froze. His face crumpled not with guilt but with the panic of a remembered shout. He put the bottle down, hands up, and whispered, "Don't tell him—don't tell him I broke it—"
"You didn't," Rina said, moving the stool back to the table. "And if you had, we would have cleaned it together. We learn, we fix, we keep breathing."
He shook hard enough to rattle his small teeth. Berengar entered the kitchen at that moment, and Lambert spun, eyes wide. Berengar's hands stayed at his sides. He did not move closer. He did not ask what had happened. He crouched without lowering his gaze and spoke the first safe thing he could think to say.
"Horse needs a second coat of oil," he said. "Very boring. Up for it?"
The boy's breathing hitched, and then the shoulders released a fraction. "It's not boring."
"You'll say that for the first five minutes," Berengar said, easing the stool back beneath the trestle with his boot. "Then your arm will make noises."
Lambert made a face. "Arms don't make—"
"Mine do," Berengar said.
They oiled the toy horse at the bench, Rina's hands moving above them as she kneaded dough. The kitchen—bread, heat, the frequent, ordinary sound of a spoon clinking—held them without curling itself around their fear. When the horse shone, Lambert held it under lamplight and made it prance. He did not look toward the high shelf again.
Visenna expanded lessons as the thaw teased the eaves. She taught Lambert to trace the basic Signs not as weapons but as letters in a language the world understands: Aard to move a cup a hairbreadth; Igni to wake a wick he could have lit with flint; Quen to lay a hand's thickness of quiet between his skin and a cold wall. He was forbidden to play with any of it unsupervised; a rule said simply, and repeated often, became a boundary the boy learned to recognize from inside his own breath.
"Magic," Visenna told him, "is a promise to use what you have without pressing it against someone else's soft places."
"Like a spoon," Lambert said, frowning.
Visenna smiled. "Exactly like a spoon."
Sometimes Berengar watched from the doorway as Rina and Visenna bent over the same page with Lambert between them, their three heads close: two dark, one pale, lights painting their cheekbones. Those were the hours his chest filled with something he dared not name for fear it would scatter. It did not come all at once; it came in sequences, like letters that only spelled something if you did not rush them.
After the day's chores, Rina would walk the inner wall, breathing the kind of long breaths a person learns when she has been made to take too many short ones. Berengar found his steps matching hers more often than chance should allow. At first, they walked in silence. Then, bit by bit, they traded small histories—she of the market and the nights and the narrow rooms; he of the Path, the beast contracts, the lonely winter roads.
"He takes to you," Rina said once, looking not at Berengar but at the valley. "Lambert. He listens when you don't demand it."
Berengar coughed a laugh. "I don't know how to demand anything of anyone he doesn't offer freely."
"That's not true," she said. "You demand a great deal of yourself."
He had no ready answer to that, so he broke a small stick and flicked it into the snow. "He called me 'da' once. Didn't mean to. He just… it slipped."
Rina's mouth softened at the edges. "Did you correct him?"
"No," Berengar said quietly. "I said, 'Oh?' And he said, 'Oh,' and then we talked about goats."
"Goats are very forgiving," Rina said. "You can tell them anything."
"He tells me," Berengar said, and when he glanced at her he found not surprise but recognition. They stood that way for a few breaths longer than politeness demands, and in the keep's slow winter grammar another sentence began to write itself.
The first time Lambert took Berengar's hand of his own accord, it was because the courtyard was crowded with barrels and men and smells—not unsafe, but big—and the boy's eyes went glossy with the old fear that big places could turn suddenly into small fists. He did not look up; he simply slipped his hand into Berengar's and held. Berengar did not squeeze or swing or make anything of it. He walked and kept walking, letting Lambert decide when to let go. At the kitchen door the boy dropped his hand as if it had never happened and ran to see what Rina had pulled from the oven.
That night, Berengar sat long by the dying fire, fingers resting on his knees as if remembering the weight of a small hand. He did not tell anyone. Some oaths return in the language of touch.
Spring, when it came, did not crackle. It seeped. Drips at eaves, a loosening in the horses' backs, the first foolish fly. Kaer Morhen's fields grew scrubby green and then—almost overnight—burst their bounds with dandelions. Lambert made a crown for Rina from wiry stems and heavy flowers. He placed it on her hair with two hands, exacting in concentration, and whispered a blessing Visenna had taught him in the old tongue. Rina laughed without apology and wore the crooked thing while she stirred the pot. Berengar, passing the threshold with a stack of split logs, stopped as if he'd seen something sacred.
"You're staring," Rina said, without looking at him.
"I am," Berengar said, choosing honesty as his habit. "I'm very bad at pretending I'm not."
"And you are good at standing still," she said, voice shading toward a smile. "This house has not known much of that."
"What does this house… want?" he asked, immediately regretting the question for its clumsiness.
She spoke without rancor. "Quiet. Work that isn't punishment. A sleep that doesn't end because something started it. A man whose hand is for holding or lifting or carving or carrying and not for making a small thing smaller."
He swallowed and nodded. "I can do all of that. And I can fail it and try again."
She finally looked at him fully then, and the look said she knew the shape of men who promise and the shape of men who practice. She reached to adjust the dandelion crown—not her want, but the work she was made for—and let her knuckles brush her own cheek to hide the tremor.
In the training yard, Lambert began to stand differently. Not with bravado; with center. Berengar taught him to plant both feet and feel the ground return the favor. They used a wooden sword no heavier than a spoon and made a game of touching a target with the tip while never letting the elbow flare. When Lambert became frustrated, Berengar sometimes sat down right on the stone and sighed dramatically, instructing the clouds in loud tones: "The problem with children is they improve too quickly." The boy's laugh—sharp and sudden, like a bell—came as if he'd been permitted.
Visenna's alchemy lessons blossomed into little independence. She showed Lambert how to measure—not by guessing and not by greed. A pinch could be a lie if your fingers were wide. Under her care he made his first safe salve for scrapes. He brought it to Berengar as if he'd stolen the moon. Berengar scratched his forearm (and only pretended it required treatment) so the boy could anoint him.
"It's very serious medicine," Berengar said solemnly, biting the inside of his cheek to keep a straight face. "I will likely survive."
"You better," Lambert said, voice fierce as a winter candle. "Because I… I gave it to you."
"Then I have to," Berengar said, and let the words stand on their own feet.
They made a practice of small feasts that had nothing to do with calendars and everything to do with completing hard things. When Lambert read his first full sentence aloud from a crumbling field manual—"Check your knots before you trust them"—Rina kissed the top of his head in a way that made Visenna look away at once and Berengar cross his arms as if folding something back into his ribs.
That evening, in the quiet corner of the hall where the smoke stained the stones darkest, Rina and Berengar spoke not as caretaker and witcher but as two people who had lifted heavy things and were only now setting them down.
"I don't want to lose what we've built because I hold too tightly," Rina said, eyes on the banked coals.
"That is exactly how you keep it," Berengar said. "By holding in the right places. Not so tight it breaks. Not so loose it blows away."
"And you?" she asked softly. "What do you want?"
The question surprised him not for its boldness but for its timing. He had been building the answer plank by plank for months. "I want to stop sleeping with my boots on," he said, and then laughed at the shape of it. "I want a room where someone else has set a cup out already. I want to be there—here—on the mornings he learns a new letter and the evenings he pretends not to be tired."
She said nothing for so long he feared he had pressed too far. Then: "I want to ask for help and not count it."
"Done," he said, and meant it.
He did not touch her then. They were careful with touch the way a good mason is careful with mortar—too much and things slide, too little and they crack. He let the promise sit in the space between them, warm as bread.
When the first true spring rain broke and wrote its script across the courtyard stones, Lambert ran out into it screaming with laughter, palms out. Rina and Berengar stood in the archway and watched him be precisely the age he was, and neither of them tried to make him older or younger than that moment asked.
"Da!" Lambert cried suddenly, skidding to a stop, breath heaving. He had never said it with that exact intention, and both adults felt the air change around the word. He waited, trembling very slightly.
Berengar's eyes burned. He crouched until his knees protested and held out both hands. "Aye?"
"Look," Lambert said, turning his face into the rain as if into a blessing. "It doesn't hurt."
"No," Berengar said, the simplest truth. "It doesn't."
Rina reached out then and rested her palm on the nape of her son's neck, the same gesture she'd used to steady him above a boiling pot. With her other hand, she touched Berengar's sleeve—light, declarative. Not asking. Answering.
They made a family there, not by fiat but by repetition. Mornings were soup and letters and knots and the small duties that made a keep behave. Afternoons were wood walks and harmless scavenger hunts and listening for the return of wyvern wings on the wind. Evenings were reading aloud (sometimes Rina, sometimes Berengar, sometimes Lambert, proud of every wobbling word), and the quiet sound of a toy horse's four legs being set carefully by a door.
The boy still woke sometimes. When he did, it was not always Berengar who went. Sometimes Rina went, and sometimes Visenna did, with a cup of water and a story about the time she mistook parsley for lovage and made Geralt's dinner taste like a shoe. Sometimes he came out on his own, found Berengar's shoulder or Rina's lap, and fell asleep again there. The keep allowed such migration without commentary; it was all the better for it.
Berengar learned to repair more than gear. He learned to fix the hinge of a stable door so the creak no longer mimicked the voice that lived behind Lambert's nightmares. He learned to sand a splinter from a bench exactly where small hands liked to travel. He learned the alchemy of softening the world's sharpest corners without blunting its edges.
Rina learned the luxury of asking. She asked Berengar to split kindling when her wrists ached; she asked Visenna to check a rash on her knuckles; she asked Lambert to rinse his bowl and he did so without fear that he could fail hard enough to lose the room. She asked the keep to keep them and it did, because it had been empty long enough to know the worth of being full.
On a day when the clouds lay low enough to kick, Berengar found Rina at the wall, watching Lambert run with two other children in a game that involved a stick, three rules, and a lot of bad whistling. He stood beside her without announcing himself.
"You're standing still again," she murmured.
"So are you," he said.
She drew a long breath. "Do you still want what you said? The cup set out?"
"I want the cup with the cracked handle you insist is fine," he said, and she laughed with her whole mouth for the first time since he'd met her. He reached out then—finally—and took her hand, and she let him, and they stood like that long enough that the keep, which listened, recorded it as fact.
Lambert barreled into them moments later, damp and red-cheeked, breathless with the kind of simple joy that costs everything and then returns it with interest.
"Look," he demanded, holding up his wooden horse. "He stands."
"He does," Rina said, kissing his temple.
"He does," Berengar said, tapping one of the tiny legs with a fingernail. "But if he wobbles, we steady him."
"Together," Lambert said, as if correcting them from a higher vantage.
"Together," they answered, and meant it, and kept meaning it in all the years the keep's stones would remember.
That night Rina tucked the boy into his bed and set the horse by the door, as was now custom. Berengar took the stool in the corridor, back against the stone, listening to the slow tide of the hearth. After a while, Rina came out and sat on the step opposite, knees skimming his. She said nothing for a long time, and neither did he.
Finally, she leaned forward, elbows on knees, chin on fist, and looked at him as if the rest of the words he'd been whittling might now be placed. "Stay," she said.
"I have been," he answered, and smiled.
She did not kiss him there; they had a boy asleep a few feet away and this was not a story that hurried. But she reached out and threaded their fingers together while the toy horse kept his watch, and outside the rain polished the stones smooth.
In the years that followed, the keep would hold many things: oaths, failures, victories, the scrape of steel and the scratch of chalk; the smell of stew and the thump of a small body running simply because the hall was long and the lungs were strong. It would hold a mother who finally slept through the night and a witcher who finally took off his boots and a boy who learned to knot his own laces and un-knot a room by standing in it with a toy horse and a very serious brow.
And when the wind leaned against the shutters, the keep would answer in wood and stone and the deliberate steps of people who did not rush—the old language a safe house uses to tell its people they are home.