Yenna

A Lie

Jaskier pauses at a patch of what he's pretty sure is false nightshade berries. Almost entirely definitely pretty sure.

"Hey, little Yenna!" he says, and points at them. "What would you say these look like?" Now, yes, it's Yenna, but, she's a farm brat, right? This kind of thing isn't even knowledge for them, they're basically born with it. And he has on a lot of good authorities that plants are "not that hard", and he usually gets it right himself, almost always, really...

Yenna stares at him.

"Well?"

She stares at where he's pointing. "Plants," she says finally.

"Right, yeah," Jaskier says. "What kind of plant, though?"

She looks between him and the maybe false nightshade.

"False nightshade, do you think?" he presses.

"I don't know."

"They look a lot like false nightshade, I think."

"Uh-huh," she says finally.

"So you agree?"

"I don't know," Yenna repeats.

"Really?" he says, a bit planatively. "I'm pretty sure..." False nightshade berries are delicious, is the thing, so he'd really like to eat some, but only so long as they're actually false nightshade and not, you know, going to kill you by being real nightshade.

"Why should I know if you don't know either!" she shouts, and then she flinches and curls in on herself, her eyes screwed shut.

"Right, alright, yeah," he stammers. "That's, yeah, good point, yeah." You'd think the part where he wasn't hitting her would mean she stopped standing like he was going to hit her but no, of course nothing is that easy with Yenna.

Well, he'll just have to wait for her to relax again as they walk.

"- naught but bad luck, to fuck with a puck! Lest your grandkid be born, a hairy young faun!" Jaskier sings, glancing over yet again to Yenna to see if she's in a better mood.

She glares back at him and spits suddenly, "I hate you and I hate your songs." Still cranky about the berries, then. She can really hold a grudge.

"That is hurtful, Yenna," he tells her. "Deeply hurtful. Well, if you're in the mood for critiquing..." And he starts in on his Sodden Hill work again, which he thinks is really coming together nicely.

Yenna does not seem to have anything to say about that. He has plenty of thoughts of his own, so when he finishes his current sketch he returns to the start and begins playing around with each verse, feeling out the way the words fit together and trying out different variations.

He's so caught up in whether or not he can get a bit of wordplay with saprophytic and sappic without spending too much space explaining it that he's completely forgotten she's there once again and is taken by surprise when she says suddenly, "Why do you hate mages so much?"

"I don't." When she doesn't respond, he says, "Why do you think I hate mages?"

"Your song's all about the dead ones," Yenna says.

So he is getting too blatant about that if even Yenna's noticed.

"Like you're only willing to say nice things because you're so glad they're dead. And you're mad your friend doesn't kill the one who has the same name as me."

"I hate Worse Yennefer because she is just a genuinely awful person with no redeeming traits whatsoever," Jaskier explains. "She doesn't even have any reason to be awful, she's just the sort who always got everything as soon as she wanted it. But mages are just, you know, people. Individuals. I would never hate someone for what they are, I hate people for who they are. The thing is, the living mages all say Worse Yennefer saved the day so I can't make any of them the hero of the hour. But! I can valorize dead people without any problem, you see. Worse Yennefer is many things but even she can't bully the dead into contradicting me." At least, so far as he knows. It's a gamble he's willing to take.