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For a princess, Renfri has remarkable control over a blade, almost better than anyone Geralt has ever known.
As the sun bleeds behind the cover of the trees, Renfri presses her knife, sharp and clearly well-favored, directly against his neck.
It’s not silver, but that hardly matters. Not when it's this close.
Geralt goes very still, suddenly extremely aware of the movement of his throat working as it swallows.
“If I cut you, will you bleed?” Renfri says, eyes steady on his.
“Yes” he rumbles “but that doesn’t make me human” he adds, because it’s true.
Almost everything bleeds something, in his experience.
There’s only the slightest twitch of her mouth before the tip jabs in and out, piercing the thinner, paler, skin by his windpipe in an instant. As quick as a scorpion, and only marginally less painful.
He doesn’t gasp, aware that the blade is still just against his flesh, even when her sharp teeth descend on the wound, biting him open and drinking him in.
As keenly as he feels the cold, hovering steel, he feels the solid warmth of her skin, smells her leathers and her hair.
He is achingly, impossibly hard, fisting his hands in the earth to keep from doing something stupid. Not that this isn't, by almost all metrics, thunderously stupid.
The movement of her lips on his neck, the way the wound hurts well means he doesn’t care.
Renfri sounds so happy, so pleased, that he’s proud through the pain.
When she pulls back, in the twilight, her eyes are as black as his can turn.
His blood is running down her chin, like she’s been guzzling wine from the bottle. Geralt wants to lick at the corners of her mouth, where the red is streaked, his mouth flooded with want.
“You don’t taste like any human I've known” she informs him, tongue darting out to touch the seams of her lips.
“Because my skin is actually clean” he says, just to be contrary. He’s right, for varying values of clean after long on the road, but so is she.
He’s had witcher blood in his mouth before, and human blood. It’s not the same. Darker, too.
Renfri hums, like she’s deciding how to call out the lie. Viper fast, she presses the tip of her knife to the hinge of his jaw and his mouth opens like a baby bird’s.
True to her name, the shrike put her tongue on his, giving him the taste of his blood back. He knows it well, but still sucks on her like it’s nourishing, intoxicating.
It probably is. He's never tested it.
It doesn't matter that his teeth are sharp too, that he could bite, not from the way her thumb is digging into the place she cut into his neck, keeping it from healing shut. Her strong one, she switched the hand on the knife like an artist.
Geralt would be useless anyway, has been from the moment she swung her leg over him, bracketing his hips and grinding down, held still be all that she is. That they are.
Renfri smells of earth and iron and he chases her taste behind his blood on her tongue. Her lips are still red when they pull back, but it’s from swelling, now. She looks like any other barmaid, now that he licked the stain away. Inside and out. She's lovely.
Renfri looks at him steadily, like she’s seeing him for the first time. He wonders what she thinks of the picture he makes, bloody and disheleved, hair pulled in every direction and chest washed in sweat and desire.
It's dark now, but she can see him as plainly as he can see her. It's unnatural. They were both made that way, this way. And what's done is done, says the blood sliding down his throat as she stares, weighing against some scale he can't fathom.
Geralt just waits. He feels infinitely patient. Even if he is hard enough to drive nails where she rests on him, hot and heavy, the cradle of her thighs bracketing his legs.
Her knife, still in her off hand, rests lightly at the base of his neck, lifting with his breathing from her knuckles on his chest. Not cutting, but it would take only the smallest change in the placement of her fingers.
Renfri doesn’t blink, doesn't close those dark, dark eyes, fixed on his as she raises the knife, switching to her strong hand with a twinkle of light on the blade.
Geralt stops breathing, just for a moment as she moves.
Her tongue darts out, red and dark, and she drags the blade down the part where it is thickest and flattest.
Geralt doesn't even get to see the blood well up, she has her tongue back in his open, gaping mouth too fast for that.
She doesn't taste human either, but whatever runs in Renfri’s veins is lighter, sweeter than witcher blood.
His skin buzzes alive with it, the way they’ve drunk each other deep. By now he's flat on his back, splayed out under her, hands trapped by one of hers.
It's sloppy, she’s distracted, and he could get loose easily, trained in the forms a thousand times as a boy. He just doesn’t want to.
When she pulls away, there's blood on her teeth but not her mouth. Geralt wonders which of them it belongs to. Her tongue felt whole as it slid past his lips, chin.
"You heal fast" he says, like an idiot, instantly regrets it.
"So do you" she says with something close to a smile, flicking her fingers against the side of his throat where his skin has already closed up. The pain is a blossom he aches for.
Geralt swallows again, jerkily bringing up his hands to her hips, scared to ask for more. Because he needs whatever she will give.
Renfri laughs, blade gleaming in her hand again. There's hardly any light, most of it hoarded greedily by the steel, but they can see each other plain.
She pulls off her jerkin in a single move with the ease of long practice and she’s beautiful, skin taut and tan, stretched over hard muscle and two small, perfect breasts.
No one he has ever seen naked before has ever seemed so lovely. And then she takes the knife, gripped lightly in strong, calloused hands, and drags it up her middle, from navel to breast bone.
The cut is straight, neat and shallow, the kind that stings and bleeds freely.
The kind that aches well, a throbbing release.
She doesn't have to pull Geralt's face to it, he goes willingly, lips open, dragging himself up from end to end.
"Healed already" he mumbles into the soft skin between her breasts, when he's dipped his head, where he suckled open mouthed kisses onto the cut, feeling nourished until it sealed.
In an instant, Renfri’s arms release him from where they were snaked around him and shove him back onto the damp earth.
Her fist drives the knife into the dark soil between his head and his splayed out hand, her face crashing into his face too brutally to call it kissing.
For a moment he is viscerally reminded of Kaer Morhen and games played with knife tips and fingers away from the instructor. Eskel, fearless, always won. His clever fingers were the first to ever make Geralt come from anything but his own hand.
Renfri’s teeth are on his lips, her nails raking great bleeding swipes down his chest and all he can taste is blood and dirt and her.
They should be swarmed by hungry animals, bear and wolves and hawks scenting the wounds that seem to portend a kill.
But there is no other predator but them, too scared by the tainted tang of it, their inhuman blood, no one to see but the flat eyes of the horse he's currently calling Roach, so used to brutality she merely stamps her feet to keep them warm.
Geralt drives up into the warm wet cradle between Renfri's legs, hands clamped on her hips and calling up bruises.
Her hands are strong enough to tear away bits of his flesh, and so are her teeth, and the taste is in both their mouths.
They are the same kind of monster, rutting on the forest floor like the creatures they are.
He has never felt more at home than now, her knife gleaming in the dark in the corner of his eyes.
The sound she makes as she peaks is so soft and sweet and unexpected that it guts him entirely.
They collapse, sticky and dirty and bloody and healing on the bed of leaves and earth together.
Renfri kisses a gouge on his chest, tongue darting out small and pink to lick its edge. Then she rests her head right by it, letting her breathing settle.
Geralt will never get rid of the taste of her. Doesn't want to.
Her fingers are drawing mostly nonsense on his skin, mapping him out, but sometimes she'll trace out a rune or design with real power.
Or just words. The kind that cut.
L-O-V-E-P-A-I-N-L-O-S-E-W-I-N. R-E-N-F-R-I.
The night goes on, and they lie there, curled close and comfortable.
"This time tomorrow, one of us will be in the ground" she says at last, turning those big dark eyes to look at nothing.
And Geralt had almost begun to doze.
He tries to answer, to say that doesn't have to be true. But it does of course.
They both know it in their bones. Two of a kind where life will only tolerate one.
"Not tonight" he says at last, the only thing he can manage.
"I suppose not" she says and kisses him again, reaching for the knife.