Yenna

A Counter Plan

Facts about Yenna the Better Yennefer:

1) Yup, she did indeed stare at absolutely everything and everyone in the market. Yup, that's probably not a good sign of her mental ability, but it's not causing any problems for Jaskier so he can probably just ignore it.

2) You'd think someone staring at absolutely everything would have an opinion on those things, but you would be wrong! She has an opinion on none of them. Possibly also a bad sign, but it certainly speeds up buying things.

3) This includes food. How can it include food? Jaskier doesn't know, but his attempts to call Yenna's bluff by giving her a bite of the various questionable biscuits and even more questionable dried meat being sold only resulted in her stuffing it in her face without hesitation.

She doesn't even think about it. He hands her something and it goes in her mouth despite the scrap of supposed meat being visually indistinguishable from boot leather. He's not sure what would happen if it actually was. She does have the sense to not eat non-food, right? Kids put all sorts of stuff in their mouth but if it's not food they spit it out. That's...he's pretty sure that's how it works. Reasonably. Maybe he shouldn't hand her anything that he doesn't want swallowed.

Jaskier, because he is a normal person, cares what he's eating, but there really isn't much. The market is pretty much what you'd expect: tons and tons of clothing and trinkets that, if they weren't stolen off the back of a dead person, were more or less stolen off the back of some desperate refugee, but when it comes to things everyone needs like food, everything's marked up like they're for a royal table and it's whatever could be yanked from the ground yesterday or dug from the very bottom of a forgotten barrel.

Heavy or mildewed, truly an intractable choice. It's enough to make someone decide they're best off accepting an empty stomach until the next inn.

He looks over Yenna, still gamely chewing at the meat. Children are basically like packmules that can complain in your own language, aren't they? Pack-goats? So maybe a tenth of her own weight? Though all the animals he's seen had straight spines and he would guess that is probably is a factor in how much weight you can pile on a back.

The one thing he's willing to credit Worse Yennefer for is that, probably by sheer accident of spite, she did turn the invading army into ashes and now people won't be quite so desperate. Things should clear up as time passes and they put distance between themselves and the current mess.

Until then, boot leather, hard pears, and radishes it is.

That turns out to be a good decision because Yenna does not make for a speedy travel companion and there's no way they're reaching the next inn before sundown. Not that Jaskier is particularly complaining. A slow pace has some benefits, like letting one compose without running out of breath, and Yenna makes for an attentive audience, if one that offers little feedback.

She doesn't recognize anything he sings. He assumes there must be some songs she knows, you can't not know songs, but she just gets a hunted look when he asks if she has any requests so he tells her to never mind and hands her a radish, which she eats from roottip to the very top of the greens like a hungry calf. His songs are better, anyway.

It all seems to be going fine except the next morning there's no sign of the girl.

It takes maybe an hour of traveling further on the road before he finds signs of something blundering off the path and there she is curled up in the new cloak he got her behind a rock.

"What was the plan here?" he asks and she flails awake. She looks significantly more terrified than he intended and he sighs. "It's not safe to be walking at night."