It wasn't the idiotic promise the bard had given that made Geralt suddenly loom closer to Jaskier, hedging him back somewhat against the wide, rough trunk of the tree-- though the still look on his face could have been anger as easily as it could have been its opposite. He wasn't angry; in fact the witcher had written off the words almost as quickly as they'd fallen from Jaskier's lips. Jaskier could promise the sun and the stars but that didn't mean Geralt felt any overwhelming need to jump as high as possible in order to try and pluck them down. No, the words didn't matter at all; what had struck him soundly was the voice that the bard had managed them in. Geralt hadn't truly noticed the friction of the skin that that Jaskier had sunk behind until it was drawn aside and his nostrils flared slightly as if catching a sea breeze through a cracked window in a cloistered room.

So he stepped into Jaskier's space as he watched the way the slanting sun caught the bard's face, the light blush on his cheeks that was either alcohol or shame. His fingers rose and hovered, knuckles just shy of touching the high, round slant of that pink skin-- and then fell. Geralt lifted his head and looked over the people milling about in their finery. "If she cared about you showing up looking like a preening swan then she would have told you. Where are your parents?"

Because if one had a boil then it should be lanced right away. Geralt had never been a man to put aside a cure out of fear of the remedy; now that Jaskier had brought him here (for a few 'tales of hunts'), he could deal with the more immediate consequences of his actions.