Year 1226-1228
The first winter after the worst fighting, Kaer Morhen began to fill with sounds it had not heard in generations: small footsteps skipping past the armory, a wooden spoon clattering on stone, a boy whispering a lesson to himself so the words would stick on the next try. The old keep, once a hollow instrument tuned only to steel, learned new notes—chalk on slate, giggles throttled into hiccups, the thunk of apples sorted into good, bruised, and sauce.
Vesemir took first watch over this new music. Geralt and the brothers ranged far on contract and caravan roads, listening for rumors that sounded like loss—burned hamlets, wagon camps dashed by raiders, places where grief had emptied rooms and left only children to hold the door. Each time they returned with one more life, the keep adjusted: another bowl on the trestle, another pallet near the hearth, another set of clothes cut down and hemmed in the sewing room Rina ran like an army.
Twenty-one children arrived in three years. Some came silent as snowfall, some fierce as bees defending a nest too small to save; all came with shoulders set for blows that did not fall here. The keep did not rush them. A routine greeted each child first: warm water, a shirt that fit, bread buttered thick, a place to sit without asking. That was the school's first lesson—safety taught as repetition.
The first winter brought seven. Tolla had a cough that sounded like defeat; Visenna treated it with steam, thyme, and the patient expectation that lungs could learn a better rhythm. Rook would not sleep unless his back was to stone; Berengar set a stool by the corridor and carved him a little badger that could "hold the wall" while Rook tried the bed. Elka had an arm too thin for the chores she insisted were hers; Rina rearranged the kitchen so "Elka's table" needed brave hands and clever eyes, not strength.
There were boys who had learned to flinch at their own names and girls who had learned to move like shadows even in sunlight. Geralt gave each the same three promises: no shouting, no strikes, no secrets kept from the people sworn to keep them. If a bowl broke, they swept the pieces together and learned why clay is fired. If a night terror woke the corridor, someone walked with the child—no questions, only bread and water and a story about the time the wind pushed the shutters so hard the keep mistook it for a giant's knock.
Every arrival was marked by a "Founders' Supper." The child chose the meal. If the dish was impossible, they made something that sounded like it: a "sea feast" became stewed trout and pickled lemon from the traders' road; a "city cake" became honeyed oat rounds with dried fruit on top like small stained-glass windows. It wasn't the food. It was the seat set in the middle of the table, the cup already at that place, the word welcome said aloud without a mirror of expectation.
By the second year, eight more children had turned the keep's echo into company. Lessons knit themselves into mornings. A bell called the hall to wash up; another bell called for letters. Visenna made letters out of things the hands already knew. A was the frame of a goat pen; B was the belly of a kettle; C was the moon when the night was only a bowl. Numbers came as measures: three scoops of oats, four turns of the crank, five steps from the stable to the feed barrel if a person had long legs like Eskel.
Swords did not greet small hands. Staves did, then broom handles, then wooden practice blades so light that a child could say "stop" and the blade would. "We learn where our feet go before the steel starts telling lies," Vesemir said, standing three paces behind a line of children showing him how still a body can be when it's allowed to decide.
The girls learned the same things as the boys—no lowered sights, no lowered stakes. They also took to the work of the apothecary with a zeal that surprised none and delighted all. Mira wrote labels that would shame a guild scribe; Sae could smell the difference between rosemary dried in the attic and rosemary dried by the hearth; Naya, strong-armed and soot-freckled, split roots with a little knife so cleanly that Visenna started saving the neat halves for lecture.
In the late autumn of the second year came what the keep would later call "the long thaw"—not of weather, but of shoulders. The children had learned the origins of a door: frame, hinge, weight, swing. Now, slowly, each tested another hinge. Rook asked if he could sleep without the badger watching. Elka asked if her table could be Mira's too. Tomas—silent as bark—asked if he could shadow Berengar to the forge without speaking, just to be where iron is taught not to lie.
The answer to each was the same: yes, and here is how we make the change stay.
Six children arrived the third year, the war's backwash depositing its last, worst ghosts. Fenn wore a bandit's cut coat; he had kept it not as a promise but as a proof—he was still here. Jory had learned to smile and make men drop their eyes and stop asking; the keep learned to give him a place to use that smile without spending it. Nessa refused to eat if the bread was sliced too thick; Visenna showed her the knife and the loaf and let her decide, and in time Nessa handed the knife to others when their hunger was too wild.
That winter, the school gathered in the hall for a "vow and stew" night. There were no contracts, no emblems, no forced sentences. Each child—oldest to youngest—stood by a stone warmed by fire and said a single sentence about what they wanted to learn next. Pip wanted to "run without being chased." Mira wanted to "read a page with no pictures and see a picture anyway." Bran wanted to "say sorry and mean it the first time."
The grown ones spoke last. Vesemir vowed to "make my back broad enough for mistakes." Visenna vowed to "count every dose twice and each child's breath once before I sleep." Geralt vowed to "leave and return without making leaving a second wound." Berengar vowed to "stay where staying holds better than any sword."
No one wrote any of it down. They didn't need to. The keep was listening.
Well before anyone whispered of trials, Visenna and Geralt designed a regimen of strengthening tonics and mana‑boost elixirs to raise resilience without poisoning childhood. No "Grasses," no needles, no feverish nights in the dark. These were day‑lit draughts, diluted and honest, brewed from herbs the children had ground with their own fists: celandine, marigold, cowbane's safer cousin in leaf, endriaga extract cut to a quarter measure, saffron honey as carrier, and a skein of evergreen resin to knit muscles without tearing them a second time.
A ritual wrapped each dose so the body could trust the bottle. First, a meal—never on an empty stomach. Then, water—room temperature, a clay cup each child had glazed in a spring class. Then the tonic—half a thimble at first, observed for an hour while the child read, or napped, or played with the wooden animals Berengar kept carving to find out which of them wanted to be horses and which wanted to be dogs. If a pulse ran too fast, a counter‑decoction was ready: dillseed, willow bark, a thumb of powdered frost nettle. No one hurried. No one made glory out of tolerating discomfort.
Mana support came gentler still: a tea the children called "ink water" because it stained the tongue purple if a person forgot to drink it slow—violetcap mushroom sliver, monk's‑hood resin refined thrice, crushed juniper for steadiness, and a breath‑measure taught by Visenna to "pour breath into the belly and pour warmth into the tea." Older apprentices got a quarter‑measure philter once a fortnight during study of Signs—not to amplify, but to steady; the lesson wasn't power, it was precision.
Consent wrapped every step. Older children signed their names in a ledger with a line under it for how the dose felt; those who could not write drew a symbol—a sun if warm, a rain drop if something felt off, a leaf if they felt "the same, but calmer." If a child wanted to skip a dose, they skipped. If a child wanted to "sit in the room but not drink," they sat. The point was never the potion. The point was that their bodies could hear themselves again.
Every day had a map. Morning: sweep, wash, letters. Mid‑morning: kitchen and stable chores. Noon: meal, three songs (one funny, one teaching, one quiet). Afternoon: staves, footwork, "long feet" for short legs, "short feet" for tall ones (so everyone learned to take the other's stride). Late afternoon: craft hour—mending, whittling, knot‑tying, path‑sketching from memory. Evening: reading circle; no one forced to speak; no one forced to listen if the day had been too loud.
Swords waited until the eldest children asked. Then, alone with Vesemir or Berengar, they learned that steel is a language, not a shout. "Make the blade whisper," Vesemir would say, standing behind a girl or a boy and placing their hands so the wrists had work and the shoulders did not try to do the wrists' job. "Steel likes truth. Don't lie with it; it remembers."
The girls wrote as many labels as the boys, and the boys stirred as many pots as the girls. No "for your kind." All "for the keep." And they learned the keep like a map through snow: which flagstones are honest, which stairs never squeak, which windows breathe a little if the wind has been drinking too much. Knowing a house is a skill. Living there is a craft.
Of the twenty‑one, a handful's small stories became everyone's.
— Elka, who could coax even the most stubborn goat to eat, became the keeper of the bells—two in the yard, one in the hall, soft‑rung when someone needed help without making the help into a spectacle.
— Mira, who wrote letters so neat they looked printed, taught three younger ones to label herbs with pictures and words: an eye for eyebright, a lung for lungwort, not because they didn't trust the letters, but because the pictures made everyone feel invited.
— Sae, whose hands shook when a door slammed, invented "door guardians"—little cloth ribbons that hung near the latch so the slam pulled air instead of fear. Berengar laughed and then tied one for his own door too.
— Tomas, who spoke maybe four words a day, learned to stand perfectly behind whoever needed him and hand them the right tool without being asked. "The keep has a shadow," Lembert said once, solemn as a priest. "And it likes us."
— Bran—too clever for his own boots—learned he could prank the house without scaring it; he made a frog jump from a bowl of potatoes once and apologized with a potato stew so good Rina officially appointed him "rain day cook."
— Naya, big and strong and not entirely sure the world took her seriously, forged her first good knife under Berengar's eye. She said she would only cut bread and root with it until Vesemir said "all right," and then she would cut anything that needed cutting.
They built a ritual the third spring called "the two‑hands"—one hand for asking, one hand for offering. A child lifted a hand to ask for a thing—a lesson, a tool, a five‑minute walk alone. The second hand, shown palm out, meant "I offer to come with, be near, do this with you." It was the opposite of command. It was the language of people who had learned to survive by making themselves small and were now learning to take up exactly the right amount of space.
Geralt and the brothers did not stop being witchers. They threaded contracts between lessons. When a hunt took days, they left at dawn after a breakfast Lembert had begun calling "leaving oats" because Rina sweetened them more on such mornings. Viv or another bonded wing kept watch high above the passes. The five‑kilometer ring of tamed, contracted creatures—wyverns, wolves tidy with their kills, one ornery leshen convinced to move east of the river and mind its own wood—kept human trouble from wandering too close.
Children helped with hunts without touching the kill. They sorted satchels, counted vials, braided girths so the horse wouldn't have to pick up anyone's slack. When Geralt returned, soot‑streaked and tired as old leather, a child brought the basin, a child brought the towel, and a child asked—every time—"Which story do you want to hear tonight?" so the keep was not just a place he came back to but a conversation he reentered.
By the close of the third year, the twenty‑one stood taller. The tonics had done their quiet work: fewer winter fevers, faster recoveries from scrapes, attention that could sit in a chair and not run down the corridor just to avoid a thought. Mana teas made the older ones' fingers tingle when they traced the basic Sign stances after dinner—sparks that felt like possibility, not orders.
No one said "Trial" in front of the small ones. The older ones said "Green Grasses" in a tone like speaking of a long walk they would not take this season. The keep prepared without forecasting doom. They built bodies and breath. They built a library of recipes and a cupboard of counter‑decoctions. They built ethics around the power—three rules written on a board near the apothecary, drawn in picture and word:
— Power is for protecting, not proving.
— A no that keeps a body safe is a holy word.
— The smallest person in the room has the biggest say about their own body.
When spring finally unlatched the windows for good and the mountain brook found its voice again, Vesemir walked the wall at dusk and counted—in his head, not his ledger—bowls, blankets, breaths. He pronounced the keep sound. Visenna, staring into the last of the fire, traced the year in reverse and declared the stockroom better at the end than at the beginning—a miracle no wizard would recognize and every mother would.
Geralt stood in the yard with Berengar and watched Lembert teach two littles how to run "long feet" without falling over their own laughter. "Year four?" Berengar asked.
"Year four," Geralt said. "We tackle what comes. Not before, not after."
"What if it's bigger than us?" Berengar asked, without fear, only honesty.
"Then we get bigger where it counts," Geralt said, watching Naya show Mira how to hold the new knife so it could not bite the hand that fed it. "Or we get smaller where bigness is a bluff."
The bells in the yard rang twice—help, but quiet. Tolla had dropped a bucket and splashed herself. Three children ran; not because anyone shouted, but because this is what family does when water decides it wants to be on the wrong side of a boot.
The twenty‑one would not always be twenty‑one. Some would leave and return with stories. Some would stay and become the keep's next pair of hands resting on a frightened child's shoulders. But for that winter and the next, they were one thing—a house full of people who had learned that learning is a kind of home, that strength can come in small sips, and that the bravest sentence a person can say at any age is this:
"I am here. I am held. I am learning."