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Jan is, as far as he knows, the only one aware of this particular oddity of Kaer Morhen. There are, of course, quite a few oddities in this keep, not the least of which are the Witcher inhabitants themselves, but this particular oddity goes well beyond anything Jan has ever encountered. Were he a less practical man, it might have scared him away. But Jan has sworn his service to the White Wolf, and Jan does not break his word.
Besides, all things considered, ‘magical building that can rearrange and grow itself seemingly at will’ is certainly odd , but also quite useful for a man in Jan’s position.
Perhaps he should say something to the Witchers, but he’s honestly not sure if he’d be believed. There’s no such creature in any bestiaries in the library, after all. On the face of things, it sounds quite mad to even think such a thing as a keep able to be exactly what its inhabitants need exists.
Maybe - maybe - there’s a logical explanation. Jan has yet to find one, though, in the years he has served as steward of Kaer Morhen, and somehow ‘magic’ stands as the most logical explanation he can find.
He first thinks that something is off not long after his Julita is returned to him. They’re sharing a single room - the one Eskel gave Jan when he first came to beg for the Wolf’s aid. It’s a bit smaller than their little house they had before, but well-appointed and clean and filled with warm furs and heavy curtains around the bed and thick rugs. Jan would never dare dream of asking for better , not when the Wolf has already given him Julita back.
“Auntie Zofia has two rooms,” Julita informs him one day, maybe two months after the first of the servants are hired. She’s taken to trailing Letho around. By default, that means she’s spent time with Zofia. “And she’s only one person. Why don’t we have two rooms?”
She’s just a child, though, and Jan shushes her and reminds her to be grateful for what they have. And he is grateful, painfully so.
Early the next morning, he’s bent over the fireplace, stoking up the flames, when he hears a bit of a clatter and Julita gasps. He turns and cannot help but gasp himself. One of the tapestries has fallen off the wall, revealing a heavy wooden door.
“Look, a secret room!” Julita says, and opens the door before Jan can stop her. He’s not sure what, exactly, he fears - this keep certainly has no monsters within its walls - but fear that he lost her still shakes him sometimes.
Jan follows his daughter. The room is much the same as the one they’ve shared - a curtained bed, an oak wood chest at its foot, and a wardrobe tucked along one wall. Only the bed is a child’s bed, perfectly sized for Julita.
“A room for me!” Julita celebrates. “Right, Papa?”
Jan is, quite frankly, baffled . “Let me…let me discuss this with Eskel,” He says.
Eskel, when Jan finds him a few hours later, just shrugs. “Can’t say I knew there was a room there, but it’s possible that someone put up the tapestry to block drafts, if no one was using that room.”
It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Jan almost believes it, except -
Except the tapestry, he is quite positive, didn’t reach the floor and thus could not have hidden a door.
Had the next incident not happened so soon after, Jan would have been willing, though, to accept Eskel’s explanation. As it is -
Well, Jan had two weeks - two nerve-wracking weeks of waiting for the Wolf’s return from Leyda. He explored the keep from top to bottom in that time. Now, a few months later, he’s spent even more time mapping out the rooms and spaces available. He is fairly confident that he knows all the rooms on the sixth floor.
So when Inka, one of the seamstresses, asks him why he hadn’t mentioned the sitting room on the sixth floor with the lovely southern light, he’s honestly quite confused. The seamstresses have been using one of the rooms on the fourth floor, which is a bit small for their purposes and also a ways away from Mistress Aniela’s office. Mistress Aniela had, just two days ago, asked if there were better rooms on the upper floors, but Jan had not yet had time to take a second look.
“Show me,” Jan says, and Inka leads him upstairs and to a door Jan is quite sure he’s never seen, with a beautiful carved oak tree design.
There is nearly an entire wall of windows, which let in the sort of light that seamstresses need, and the room itself is plenty big for six or seven people to sit comfortably, even taking into account needing to add cabinets for supplies and space for baskets of items to be mended.
“Well,” Jan says, once he’s recovered enough to put together a coherent sentence, “this seems quite perfect. Yes, let’s move the sewing room here at once, if Mistress Aniela is amenable to such a change.”
Mistress Aniela is, of course, quite thrilled, as are the rest of the seamstresses. Jan, in a moment of free time, goes outside and walks around to the southern side of the keep to stare up at the row of windows on the sixth floor. He’s quite sure there were no such windows when he and the stonemason were in this exact spot just last week, discussing repairs that had to be done to the upper levels of the keep.
Jan feels quite mad for even considering what he’s about to do, but he’s not one to leave any stones unturned. So he sits down at his desk and pours over his ledgers and records and lists of jobs and people and things Kaer Morhen needs until he finds something that the keep genuinely needs, if he’s to bring it to his standards.
The most pressing issue - and there are many which need to be resolved, but this is the most urgent in that it is a matter of safety - is the need for a separate cellar for the Manticores’...unusual drinks. There’s a mostly empty cellar right next to the current drinks cellar, but Jan would prefer something a bit further away so that there’s no chance a new person might wander into the wrong room. And it wouldn’t hurt to give the Manticores some space to set up some of their distilling equipment. Jan has found said equipment in the most baffling of places: empty bedrooms, cupboards, stuffed inside one of the great ovens in the kitchens, tucked in haylofts, in the armory, and so on.
His request decided, Jan considers for a moment how one goes about asking a building for anything. Feeling a bit foolish, he decides just to say it. He’s in the privacy of his own office, at least.
“We could do with a cellar, with access from a larger salle or space in which the Manticores could set up their distilling equipment,” Jan says out loud. “If, of course, that pleases you.”
There is - predictably - no answer.
Jan isn’t quite sure how he’s going to figure out if the request worked or not - he certainly doesn’t have time to wander through the keep in hopes of finding a door he doesn’t recognize as one he’s seen before.
As it turns out, he doesn’t need to wander. Marlene pulls him aside just two days later and tells him that Dilan of the Manticores has found that one of the empty rooms between the kitchen and the greenhouses has a door that leads to its own little cellar. It is, they all agree, the perfect place for the Manticores to set up their distilling equipment. It even already has oak wood tables in it, all at the perfect height for the sorts of work distilling involves.
Jan carefully doesn’t think about what this means until much later, when he’s tucked away in his office and can close the door to the chaos that is Kaer Morhen.
“Well,” He says aloud. “I suppose I owe you a great deal of thanks. You’ve certainly made my job a bit easier. Thank you.”
There is, again, no answer. Jan resolves to just accept this as yet another strangeness in this new life of his.
He makes sure, though, to treat Kaer Morhen with the respect she deserves.
—-------------------
Inasmuch as a building can love its inhabitants, Kaer Morhen adores her people. She has loved them since her creation. She has protected her Witchers for centuries now, and will care for them until she is no more.
She tries, over the years, to make things easier for her Witchers. Adding a fireplace in a room that didn’t have one, or creating nooks and crannies for young trainees and older Witchers alike to find a moment of peace from their brothers. She makes sure the stables always have enough room for their horses. They never quite notice, her Witchers, but she knows they appreciate her nonetheless. They do their best to tend to her stonework and masonry, to keep her halls clean and her fires burning.
She has shed tears as her walls absorbed the sound of trainees screaming away their humanity, stone cracking as her heart shattered. She has mourned the Witchers who do not come home, their rooms empty now. She greets the ones who make it back with all the love she can show them. These are her Witchers, after all, and she will make sure they know they will be cared for.
When the other Witchers come, Kaer Morhen welcomes them too, for she knows that finally her Witchers are finding a life with a little less sorrow. She makes sure there are enough rooms, even if a few of the oldest Wolves scratch their heads and mutter under their breath about not remembering this particular corridor ever before. She slowly expands the armory, not quite expecting just how many strange weapons the Cranes would bring, or the space that the Vipers would need for their knives and daggers.
When the steward arrives, Kaer Morhen is suspicious. She isn’t used to having anyone besides her Witchers and trainees. But Jan spends more time exploring her vast space than anyone has in a very long time and he seems to appreciate her. He pats stone walls with gentle hands, jotting a note down to hire a stonemason. Good , Kaer Morhen thinks. Her Witchers may not be as affected by the cold, but now she has humans to protect too. He peeks in a few of the chimneys and swears - not as good as her Witchers - and jots another note about cleaning them.
The steward continues to be kind to Kaer Morhen. He finds rugs to soften her stone floors and tapestries to decorate her walls. He fills her halls with people who bring laughter and joy and the sort of fearless affection toward Witchers that they deserve.
Kaer Morhen decides her steward - for he is hers, now, hers to care for like she has cared for her Witchers - deserves to know her secret. For the first time in her history, she has someone who understands her.
She waits for the perfect moment. The steward has a child, a little girl who runs through Kaer Morhen’s halls without fear. When the girl asks for a room of her own, well -
A room is a simple thing, after all, for a being as powerful as Kaer Morhen.