Chapter 33: THE LAST WISH — Part 1
The lake was beautiful and peaceful and about to ruin everything.
Geralt had been sleeping badly for weeks—insomnia that no meditation or potion could touch. When we'd heard about fishing in a quiet lake outside Rinde, he'd decided to try something different. Peaceful activity. Connection with nature.
What he fished up was an ancient jar sealed with symbols I didn't recognize.
"That's not fish," I observed helpfully.
"Your powers of observation continue to astound." He turned the jar over in his hands, examining the worn markings. "Old. Very old. The seal looks like Elder Speech."
"Maybe you shouldn't—"
He opened it.
The explosion of force threw us both backward. I hit the ground hard, air driven from my lungs, and watched something invisible spiral upward from the broken jar. Not visible, exactly—but present. A pressure against reality, a wrongness in the air that made my eyes water.
The djinn screamed.
The sound wasn't audible—it was felt, a vibration in my bones that spoke of ancient rage and captivity. The creature's fury lashed outward, seeking targets.
Geralt spoke. Words in Elder Speech, rough and unplanned—I recognized them as phrases of binding, commands that should have controlled the entity. But djinn magic didn't work like that. The words became wishes. The wishes became chains.
And the backlash tore through his throat.
Blood sprayed from Geralt's mouth. He collapsed, hands clutching his neck, making sounds that weren't words. The djinn spiraled higher, bound by the unintended wish but not contained, and then vanished in a direction that wasn't quite physical.
I scrambled to his side.
"Geralt! GERALT!"
His eyes were wide, panicked—Witchers didn't panic, but he was drowning in his own blood, throat torn by magic that shouldn't exist. I grabbed him, turned him on his side, started singing.
The Healing Melody poured out of me with everything I had. I pushed power into his damaged flesh, trying to close wounds that kept reopening. Blood slowed. Stopped. Started again.
It's not enough. Djinn wounds resist normal healing—even my kind of healing.
"I need to get you to help," I gasped. "A healer. A mage. Someone who can—"
He grabbed my wrist. Shook his head. Managed one word through the ruin of his throat: "...Yen..."
"What?"
He couldn't repeat it. But I understood anyway.
Yennefer. He knows she's here. Or he's delirious and speaking her name randomly.
I hauled him upright, got his arm over my shoulder, and started the longest walk of my life.
Rinde's streets blurred past in a haze of desperation.
I kept singing—soft, continuous, my voice the only thing holding Geralt together. People stared. Guards approached, then backed away when they saw the blood. Someone pointed toward an estate on the town's edge.
"Sorceress there," a fishmonger said. "Arrived last month. Don't go near her—she's trouble."
"She's exactly what I need."
The estate was beautiful and slightly wrong—angles that didn't quite match normal architecture, gardens that bloomed in patterns nature wouldn't choose. Magic saturated the property, thick enough to taste on my tongue.
I pounded on the door with my free hand, supporting Geralt with the other. His weight had grown heavier; his breathing had grown shallow.
"HELP! PLEASE! He's dying!"
The door opened.
Violet eyes met mine.
Yennefer of Vengerberg.
She was exactly as the show had portrayed her—raven hair, pale skin, a face that combined beauty with barely-concealed predatory intelligence. But television hadn't captured the presence. Power radiated from her like heat from a forge, chaos magic so dense it made my own abilities feel like a candle beside a bonfire.
Her gaze swept over Geralt—assessed the damage, calculated the cause—and then shifted to me.
"Djinn wound," she said. Not a question. "Recent. He spoke to it, didn't he? Bound himself without meaning to."
"Can you help him?"
"Interesting question." She stepped back, opening the door wider. "Bring him in. We'll negotiate his life."
I half-carried Geralt through the doorway, stepping over a threshold that tingled against my skin. The interior was as strange as the exterior—rooms that seemed larger than they should be, furniture arranged in patterns that served aesthetic rather than practical purposes.
We laid Geralt on a chaise that probably cost more than everything I owned. Yennefer circled him like a merchant examining livestock.
"The djinn is still bound to him," she murmured. "Three wishes. He's used one—the binding itself. Two remain." Her smile was sharp as broken glass. "Very valuable. Very dangerous. Very... opportune."
My hands were sticky with Geralt's blood. I wiped them on my doublet without thinking, ruining the fabric. "Can you save him or not?"
"I can. The question is whether I will."
"What do you want?"
"What everyone wants. Power. Freedom. Revenge on those who wronged me." She turned those violet eyes on me again, and something flickered in her expression—curiosity, assessment. "But that's not what interests me at the moment."
She stepped closer. Too close. I could smell her perfume—lilac and gooseberries, a combination that would haunt my dreams for years to come.
"You have an unusual resonance, bard. Your songs in the street—I heard them from here. They carry... weight. More than they should."
My stomach dropped. "I don't know what you mean."
"Don't insult us both." Her hand reached toward my face—I flinched, but she didn't touch me. Instead, her fingers traced the air around my head, as if reading something invisible. "You're not a mage. You don't use chaos. But there's power in you. Strange power. Something I've never encountered."
The hedge witch Mirena. She noticed too. And now Yennefer—who is a hundred times more perceptive.
"I have a gift," I said. "Songs that do more than entertain. It's not magic. Not exactly."
"Everything is magic. The only question is what kind." She lowered her hand, still studying me like a puzzle she intended to solve. "I'll save your Witcher. In exchange, you'll tell me what you are. Truthfully. Completely."
"I can't do that."
"Can't, or won't?"
"Both."
Yennefer's smile widened. Not warmly—dangerously. "Then we have a negotiation. And negotiations are my favorite kind of conversation."
Behind us, Geralt coughed blood. Time was running out.
I looked at the most powerful sorceress I'd ever met, at the woman who might become the love of my best friend's life, at the chaos mage who had somehow sensed the truth about me within minutes of meeting.
"What are you proposing?"
"Save your friend first. Talk after." She moved toward Geralt, hands already beginning to glow with chaos magic. "Consider this a demonstration of good faith. But bard—" She glanced back over her shoulder, violet eyes piercing. "—I will have my answers. One way or another."
She began working on Geralt, and I watched, helpless to assist, wondering how much of my carefully-constructed life was about to unravel.
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