A Scholar's travels with a Witcher

They’re not bad. To my eyes, they are the plans of men that have spent a long time looking at old maps, or maps that have been drawn from memory but when we cross-reference the maps that were drawn against what was done in the field, we find the kind of confusion and problems born from the fact that these two things do not always meet up.

Having said all of that, the plans are good and I would refer Lord Coulthard to those plans when he sets about rebuilding his lands. After all, just because they were the plans of madmen and traitors, doesn’t mean that all of the plans are bad.

They are constructed according to a simple theory. The purpose of fortification and entrenchment is to make it so that attackers find moving and attacking difficult and time-consuming while the defenders can move where they need to be and, well, defend, quickly and easily. It’s about making the defence efficient and forcing the attackers to be inefficient.

And, in theory, these plans were quite effective.

Or at least, they would have been if they had been implemented using the actual real, witnessed experience of the area rather than someone’s memory.

Also, if they had had more time to take the necessary steps.

So that was the end of day one of the Rebellion.

I was captured in the early hours of the following morning and although we can’t be sure as to how that was managed, it remains all but certain that when it was clear that I was going to avoid conventional tracking methods and when Ariadne had finished with her immediate duties, she was ordered to bring me to heel. Therefore it is all but certain that I was bitten by a spider whose venom was a paralytic of some kind.

A couple of the early conscripts can verify that I was carried back into the castle, tied face down over an empty saddle. The following is from one of the castle blacksmiths.

Coulthard castle had several and although there was plenty of cross training meaning that the Armourer could still put a shoe on a horse should the need arise, and the farrier could still hammer a sword together, there was a swordsmith, an armourer, a smith down by the stables who made horse kit and then a couple of other men who had some general kind of training that could move from one to the other as needed. Men who could make nails and buckles and pans and brackets and things.

It sometimes boggles the mind as to just how much small things can turn out to have vast and intricate thought put into them.

They had been priority targets for the infiltrating force and they were captured as a matter of urgency.

Well sir, as I told the Imperial man, they put me to work right quick. I was drunk of course and I think they expected that a bit but it didn’t stop them from being angry with it. Held my head in the horse trough until I was sober enough to hold metal and hammer at it if you follow me.

That wasn’t the sobering thing though. The sobering thing was watching all of those soldiers bringing in all of those captives. Watching men that I had been drinking with only minutes or hours beforehand, being murdered or killed. I’ve seen war, I mean we all have haven’t we sir?. There is not a smith for leagues around that hasn’t been conscripted by one side or the other to hammer shitty metal into even shittier blades. But there was a joy to this savagery. They enjoyed it. They called us traitors and the only reason that they didn’t flog me was because one of those big knights ordered them not to.

I wanted to rebel. I told that black one that asked me all the questions that I wanted to rebel and I think he believed me. But they had a blade at my wife’s throat is the thing. If I was more sober, or more drunk, then I might have fought or reacted quicker.

Sorry m’lord. I know that you don’t fault me it’s just… I find I want to tell people you know? I feel like such a coward and…

Sorry M’lord. I will try and stop apologising.

The sky to the east was getting lighter when they brought you in. I hadn’t seen any of the other of the gentry yet. Not your lady sir, nor either of the Lady’s Coulthard. I saw a couple of the guests but none of the really important people. There were clouds overhead though which kind of deadened the air. So there was no sunrise, just a kind of slow realisation that it was getting lighter.

I saw you then as they brought you in. I’ve seen you looking worse. I have, I’m pretty sure. But you looked pretty bad. You were bloody and your face was beginning to bruise up something proper. They brought you in quickly, tied to the horse and I don’t mind admitting that I wept to see it, sir. I don’t mind admitting that. We all know about the things you managed to do in the North and we hoped you know? We hoped that you would escape and bring help.

No, I’m sorry sir. It was a fool’s hope but we had it nonetheless.

So I wept and the big knight stood over me and threatened to strike me wife with his huge gauntleted fist if I didn’t get back to work and I went back to hammering.

Couldn’t even begin to tell you what it was they had me working on. Probably some kind of ridiculously huge plate for armour given the size of some of the men.

But they brought you up, right to the entrance of the keep and one of the riders went inside. They pulled you off the horse and dumped you in the mud where you tried to move or something and one of them kicked you to keep you quiet. Or docile or something. I thought that was a bit harsh to tell the truth sir as it was quite clear to me that you were basically insensible but…

Anyway, the kicker regretted it for a few seconds as your brother Sam… I still struggle not to call him Lord Kalayn, came out and saw it. He looked calm as he did it but he just walked up to the man that he had seen kicking you and rammed a dagger into his belly.

The thrust was hard and powerful. Just this short hard stab before he tried to rip the blade upwards. The fucker groaned horribly and your brother heaved him off.

Your brother looked calm as he cleaned his dagger on the dying man’s cloak before he pointed at two men to carry you into the keep.

I didn’t see you again until we were liberated. To be honest M’lord I was overjoyed that time. We had long thought you had died.

Glad to see that the fuckers couldn’t bring you down, sir.

History will remember the second day of the rebellion for one reason though. And that reason is that this was the day that the Rebellion was properly declared openly.

History liked to debate these things because as historians, largely, we have nothing better to do. When did the rebellion start? I mean arguably, it started from the moment Redania fell. There are many moments where the rebellion could have started. The moment that Phineas first made contact with Sam. The moment that Sir Aleksy mentions when Ariadne had been proven to be dominated and therefore, the other rebels started to look around each other and begin to believe that this was going to happen.

Lots of debates are taking place and many historians are going to make themselves relatively wealthy by arguing about it in lecture halls and in print.

You have to understand the difference between wealthy and rich though. Historians are never rich. And we tend to consider being “wealthy” as having enough money to not have to worry about where the funds are going to come from the next time we are on a big research project.

However, there are two main schools of thought as to when the Rebellion properly started.

The first school of thought is that the rebellion properly “began” when Sam walked into the feasting hall and declared that he was rebelling.

The second school of thought was when an armoured knight rode up to the gates of Oxenfurt while wearing and carrying the new colours of Redania and ordered them to open the gates of Oxenfurt.

Before that moment, people didn’t really know what was happening. They had seen fires burning in the distance. There were rumours and eyewitness tales of soldiers and armoured men crossing the countryside this way and that way. There had even been sightings of armoured knights carrying flaming brands as they hunted for fugitives and they rounded up the people in the nearby villages for conscription and, it would turn out later, sacrifice.

But there came that moment that Dorthan wrote about when a Knight, a herald really, rode up to the gates of Oxenfurt, planted his flag in the mud and declared that Queen Adda was rebelling against the Imperials.

As you will have read, the argument as to whether or not Adda was rebelling is another one of those puzzles that will be argued about for years to come and I’m not jumping into that debate too much again.

What Dorthan wrote is largely accurate about this event and although he might have overstated the effect that it was going to have on Oxenfurt on a sociological scale, it is also true that I have not spent much time there as a non-human so my experience is not necessarily the best one.

I have not been back to Oxenfurt yet, but I very much doubt that I will be able to go back and experience the city in the same way that I used to. A fact that leaves me feeling a little sad if we’re all being honest with each other. To my eyes and the eyes of some people that I trust, what Dorthan feared has not come to pass although it would have done if there had been any kind of long-term occupation or if the Rebellion hadn’t been squashed as relatively quickly.

But that visit by the armoured Knight cannot be discounted for just how important it was. Up until that point the rebellion had not been declared before hostile figures. It had been declared before people already in the Rebellion’s power, or with people that were hoped to be on the side of the Rebellion, but not an opposition. From that moment, the rebellion knew that there was no getting around the fact that Nilfgaard and the Empress would hear.

And hear they did.

Riders and messengers set out from Oxenfurt that very morning. Most headed South to Vizima and the Empiress but others went North to Novigrad where they found a city being torn apart from within and to Crow’s Perch and the nearest feudal master.

Those messengers were ahead of Padraig’s party as Chireadean had been diverted by the need to drop off Chireadean’s wife and the group’s concerns about secrecy and not knowing who to trust.

That didn’t discount what Padraig and the others had to tell the Imperial party given that they had come from the castle and had eye-witness accounts of what had happened there.

The small trickling of refugees that were fleeing Oxenfurt became a river at that point. The work that the Knight had begun on the bridge on the Eastern part of Oxenfurt started well. Non-humans and a lot of people who saw and felt the same thing that Dorthan had seen and felt had learnt from the last war and had already been preparing since the first alarms had started to be sounded in the earlier parts of the morning. So many were already prepared to depart.

Unfortunately, we have no idea who that Knight was that carried the declaration that the people of Oxenfurt should open their gates and it is all but certain that, like the other augmented Knights that took the field against Imperial Forces, he did not survive to be taken captive. There is little chance that they would have been allowed to survive much longer anyway.

Whoever he was though, he did his work well.

After that event, things continued around Oxenfurt and Coulthard Castle. The locals were rounded up, earthworks were prepared and the people were divided into two camps. The first was those camps that the rebellion thought of as being useful. The other was those people that they thought of as being “disposable”.

In doing so, they made the same mistake that military leaders have made since time began. What they thought of as being useful and what was actually useful were two completely separate things. As a result, a lot of the people in the disposable area were farmers and field workers.

I don’t want to discount what was happening there, but it is also true that it just… continued. The rebellion was digging in and consolidating. As well they might.

The Oxenfurt guard commander held a council and although everyone agreed that they wanted to fight, they also knew that they couldn’t hold against sustained attack. They determined that they would close the eastern gate and keep it closed for a day “for the form of the thing” but after that, if a large armed force turned up at the gate, then they needed to come to terms and surrender.

I will leave other people to analyse that decision as I cannot claim to be neutral. Fortunately, the decision about what to do regarding those counsellors has been taken out of my hands. They were relieved of their duties and new people were elected from the guilds and University before I was given my position. For now, I intend to leave it at that and see how things go.

I think… I think I cannot afford to be too conciliatory. I wish that the city that I love had held out. But I understand why they did not. The garrison of Oxenfurt is, as Dorthan said, not military and things could have gone very bleak there if they had elected to fight.

But I wish that they had fought.

We have no idea how things would have turned out and the probability is that it would have gone badly. But I wish they had fought.

The forces in the field were still consolidating. It was a process that was far slower than they were happy with. Sir Aleksy described it as being better than they feared but not as fast as they had hoped.

And Noivgard essentially fell in the early evening of that day.

With a city that size, it is worth saying that the full situation was more complicated than that small statement suggests. What was happening was that there were lots of conflicting orders flying around and many people simply didn’t know who was in charge. So many many people became traitors by accident as they simply followed their chain of command.

My friend, the gate guard, was one of these.

I didn’t know what to think. We heard that there was fighting going on around the docks and we just thought it was some kind of riot. They happen from time to time. A bunch of sailors come off a ship after being marooned by a calm or as we thought were more likely in this case, the storm had been so violently unpleasant that they had lost a mast or something and had had to limp into port. They get shafted out of their money and decide to take their anger and frustration on whoever’s passing or the nearest tavern or whorehouse.

It happens, the guard moves in, batters everyone into unconsciousness and sorts it out when they figure out who’s in charge. Often there’s a nice mass hanging and people are more careful about such things when they come into port next time.

Reports were confused though. All we knew was that it was our job to guard the gate and that’s what we did. We stood there, messengers had been sent to call up the off-shifts and they turned up looking sleepy and grumpy at having been called out of bed and told to get to work. We made jokes about how it must have been some people being grumpy at the fact that the wedding was delayed and that they didn’t get to take advantage of everything. We heard sounds of fighting but nothing happened to us.

Then a message came to our Watch Commander by way of a Knight that I didn’t know or recognise. I liked him though. One of those natural leader types. The kind of man that when he tells you to do something you find yourself doing it automatically if you know what I mean.

Some Knights, you do what they say because you fear them. Some, you do it because you obey the rank, not the man and some Knights you follow because to do otherwise was unthinkable.

He was one of those last. I liked him but he turned up and handed over a new letter to the Watch Commander who read it, sighed and looked at all of us.

“It was an honour serving with you lads,” he told us and then he just walked off up the street. He was all but whistling as he went.

Haven’t found out what happened to him after that.

So then, we all had a meeting with this new Knight. Turned out he was going to be in charge of the gate. Told us all that there were going to be changes and that some of us might be transferred to wall duty and some new lads might come in.

“Politics was happening,” he said. It seemed to be one of his repeated lines that he would say over and over again. “Politics is happening,” and that would be the explanation as to why any number of things was going on. Apparently, there were a new governor and he wanted to make some changes that no one else had thought of. He wanted to shuffle people around regular so that we could all get used to different gates and things. So that we all had an understanding of what life was like with it all.

Can’t say I agreed. I was quite happy with my life at that gate. I had a side-woman in one of the locals that I liked and she was always up for a quick boff round the back alley. Just deciding if I wanted to do something about that before I got her pregnant. Or me other girl found out.

She was after a leg up and a gate guard gets paid enough that she wouldn’t have to…

Oh, fuck it.

She died in some of the fighting or the other.

So the new Knight told us all that there was a new Lord Mayor and that he was the new boss. I didn’t mind, he seemed like a good one as I say. Later that day, a new set of uniforms came down and later still, there was a new flag up over the gate.

I remember looking at that. We had been on duty all night and I were tired but I remember looking up at that in the slightly damp and grey light of the morning and looking at that flag. The new Knight who had gone off for a meeting somewhere or other? Well, his words kept echoing around inside my skull, over and over and over again.

“Politics is happening,” he would say. Well, it was then that I knew what he meant.

There have been a couple of moments over time where I’ve wondered what I should have done and that was one. It was the same question that I think we all asked ourselves. Should we stay or should we go? I remembered the other times when this kind of thing had happened. When the order came down and we switched from Novigrad uniforms to Redanian uniforms. And then we were wearing Redanian uniforms but with a Nilfgaard flag stitched on the arms. And now this.

I remember the day when some Knights came down with a priest of the Eternal Flame who came along the line of us when we were on parade. He picked something like one in four of us and declared that we had been seen consorting with magic users. They came again when they declared that we had been seen consorting with non-humans. I was terrified both times. The first was because I had bought some lucky heather from one of those hedge witches while out on patrol.

I mean, she’d leapt out at me and scared the crap out of me. Put the fear of the frost into me if you hear what I’m saying. So I bought it for a copper coin and it has brought me good luck.

And then there was that Elven whore that I like. I don’t know, sometimes you want them slim and shapely you know what I mean?

It were all nonsense. They took one man because he had a huge beard that he’d been growing for as long as I’d known him. They said it was evidence of dwarven blood.

Heh.

That was the thing of this time. It was so routine. If someone hadn’t eventually turned up and told me that we were rebelling against the Empire, I really would have believed it was just another day.

Just another day.

Not all of it was as bloodless as that. Several small fortresses remained loyal to the Nilfgaardian flag. The Imperial compound was not one of those because the head of Imperial Intelligence was one of the rebels. He let some of those killers in and by the time the soldiers had realised what was happening, a good portion of them were dead.

But there were some bastions. A barracks that had dared to question the orders that were given. A group of soldiers that were not on duty commandeered an inn and fought back. There were a couple of mansions that housed Nilfgaardians who had decent guards, either from the Nilfgaardian military in the case of the ambassador or the form of very expensive mercenaries in the case of a couple of the merchants.

One of those men agreed to come out of Coulthard castle and speak with me. He had heard of me and liked what he had heard when it came to my understanding of the mercenary’s trade.

He will never do that job again. He lost his right arm and his left eye during the fighting.

It was just supposed to be an easy job. Just an easy job.

I see you laughing there and yeah, it’s never just an easy job is it? It’s never that easy. Well, sometimes it is just an easy job. Guarding the Nilfgaardian merchant Lord. It’s not as looked down on in the South as it is up here. The boss (Freddie: name removed) was a good sort, paid plentiful and on time which is more than some do. But he once claimed that it’s because the Imperial treasury is more careful about taxes and as such, so the richer we get, the richer the Imperial treasury is.

But he paid well and I quite fancied some well-paid guard duty in the richest city in the North. Good food and beautiful women along with the best shopping and all of the other things that a man could want. Wish the prices were a bit cheaper but that’s what you get if you want quality.

I’ve served in other rebellions though and it was nothing like this. This was different. And it wasn’t that complicated to see what was different about it.

This was more organised.

I’ve been in the South as a mercenary. Course I have. That was where the money was at one point with all of the Rebellions going on. Never fought on the side of the Rebellion though, the Imperial response was always, ALWAYS harsh and brutal. I guarded wagon trains and yeah, I saw some fighting. The difference? Those rebels were always idealistic young idiots led by people that should know better. They thought that the “rightness of their cause” would carry the day against trained knights and man-at-arms that were used to dealing with this kind of nonsense. So that’s what I think of when people talk about Rebellion.

A horde of young men.

This was a marching block of soldiers. They weren’t wearing a uniform although I saw a couple of priests with them. We had heard sounds of fighting in the lower city, and plumes of smoke around the docks. We thought it was one of those riots that happen from time to time when sailors come in and get rowdy. So we thought that these soldiers were just on their way down to the docks to help keep order.

Instead, they just marched up and attacked us.

There was a dozen of us on guard with eight off duty and they turned up with fifty soldiers. They just marched up and started swinging. My arm was lopped off before I realised we were being attacked and I fell. I flailed around with the shock and pain of it I think and I must have hit one with my shield or something because he turned around and kicked the side of my head. Fair kicked my eye out didn’t he, fucker.

I’ve been hurt before. I have. I’ve lost a couple of fingers and there was a time with a punctured lung where I didn’t think I was going to survive that.

But I tell you, the agony of losing that eye and the smashed bones around it. In the immediacy of the moment. I didn’t WANT to survive that.

So, before anyone wants to try and claim that the rebellion was bloodless in Novigrad. It was not. Lots of people caught on the wrong side were just killed outright. Still more were killed for the crime of guarding the wrong piece of real estate.

The rebellion was after money. They needed the funds to be able to finance the ongoing thing. Money for troops, money for provision and equipment. Some unfair souls will point out that the more that the rebellion would be able to liberate off of other people, the less the rebels themselves would need to invest in the coming in the days and weeks.

There were also just some places that could not help but be caught up in events. Whenever there is fighting in the streets, there are always some people that want to take advantage of that kind of thing. Things got bleak if you were a woman walking the streets. The Passiflora was burnt to the ground when it became clear that the women had scattered and fled. Several shops, blacksmiths and armourers were looted into nothingness with the workers and smiths there being conscripted into the armed forces.

After the fall of Novigrad. Nothing much happened for some time. Through the efforts of various people and the incompetence of various other people, the rebellion caught everyone completely by surprise.

Although Greater Redania is more aware of the possibilities of a Winter War than they had been once upon a time, they were still unprepared for this. So any Imperial troops that might have come from the North, or come over the passes from Kaedwen, were simply not ready. It takes time to gather troops and set out on a war footing. Not to mention that, as had been proven, not everyone could be trusted. So there was a period of witch-hunting going on in the North of Redania. A much more traditional civil war kind of situation. Where people would declare the other a traitor and weapons would be drawn.

Often without cause, it must be said. Men who had been loyal all their lives were declared traitors to assuage old grudges or for the simple crime of being in the way of ambitious men.

That is not in my remit though. My remit is about what was going on around the front.

The Rebellion in Novigrad had been almost completely successful. They had taken the city and were flying their banners from the walls. Some curiosities were spotted around this though. Mostly around the role of the church during the Rebellion.

When Radovid was at the height of his power and the Witch-hunters all but held Novigrad in his name, as well as the flags of Redania flying from every tower, there were also the banners of the Eternal Flame.

This didn’t happen this time.

We know because we have numerous eyewitness accounts that say that many of the rebel groups had priests that rode alongside them. We know that men were wearing the cassocks of the Eternal Flame. Soldiers that carried the symbol of that flame on their shields and even the old banner of the Witch-hunters was flown above some armed forces.

The church though, the main body of the church did not react. Cathedral Island is one of the few parts of Novigrad that was utterly unaffected by the brief civil war as the gates at that end of the city were simply closed and lined with church soldiers. They had plenty of supplies in the tunnels and catacombs under the island and as such, they simply ignored what was going on.

I have many questions regarding this period. Not least of which is… Did they know how Sam was going to retake the North? Did they know that the intention was to harness the powers of the Vampires and the other monsters? Did they know about the magical rituals and horrors that were being performed in the basements beneath Coulthard Castle? Did they know?

Did they care?

Many swear that they did not and of those rebels that survived. Not one of them can tell me what happened to those soldiers and followers that harnessed their religion to the horrors that were committed in the name of Redania and against the black ones.

The optimistic might say that those treacherous holy men are now martyrs. That they died as part of the first waves against the Black ones.

The more pessimistic say that those men simply set aside their robes and their banners, tossed them on fires or buried them in pits against the next time that all of this nonsense kicks off and then they slithered back into the holes that they first came out of.

The new Duke in me says that it is possibly a mix of the two. What I can say for certain to all within reading distance of me is that the Hierophant has just publicly condemned the rebellion after it had been declared what had happened in the depths of Coulthard castle. He has done so in the strongest possible language and as such, his will is beyond contestation.

So know that. The most powerful church leader in the area, the direct conduit between mankind and the power of the Eternal Flame has condemned you and cast you out of the warmth of the glow of the fire into the cold.

You might call him heretical which is funny to me because this is the man that gets to decide what heresy is.

As for those forces that were in the more central deployments and at Coulthard Castle. As I say, they were consolidating. No one had come down from the North which meant that those central forces could help to secure the positions that needed securing. The rebellion was now confident, or as confident as they could be, that the war front was going to be along the Pontar River. They were literally having a rematch against their oldest foe on their oldest battlefields. They were not stupid though, they kept lookouts and extensive networks of messengers should those Northern forces seek to fight against the Rebellion.

But they moved to the river and started to fortify it. The major crossing points were taken and secured. The work that had begun in Coulthard lands spread up the Pontar river as far as Flotsam itself which was taken in a matter of hours as that place is barely fortified and the troops just walked in.

So they were fortified and confident of their position.

I turn again to Sir Polmert to explain the strategy of this.

Deployment is a matter of geography, just as much as it is a matter of troops on the field. Facing an enemy is more than just figuring out when and where to charge.

Now it is elementary to know that an army marches on its stomach. But an army also needs latrines, which means that the new latrines need to be dug on a regular basis, proper hygiene needs to be observed with regards to drainage, and the rations need to be properly prepared otherwise the matter is such that the troops will simply catch dysentery or some other kind of horrific disease and the army will fall apart.

But again, everyone knows this. Everyone knows that an army needs arrowheads and sword blades and wood and horseshoes and nails and all of the small things. But after that, people think along the lines of “hold the high ground and stand between an enemy and what they want.”

But it’s much more complicated than that. The truth is something that only the greatest strategists know. Men like Natalis, Coehoorn and Radvoid knew this. People like to put Foltest in this group of military thinkers but that is not the case. He depended far too much on the strength and quality of his men to carry the day. He understood the principles, but eventually, he would argue that his men would be able to take the difference to victory.

By far the most important factor when deciding things is geography. Now I’m not talking about battlefield deployment. This is far more simple than that. This is a question that needs to be decided by the people that look at the big maps and decide where the army goes.

Tactics wins battles, strategy wins wars.

The understanding of that truth is why the North now flies the banners of Nilfgaard above their castles.

Why do I say all of this?

Because your brother understood this truth very well.

The geography of Southern Redania is such that it is very easy to defend from the South but almost impossible to defend from the North. The area North of Novigrad is where the farms of Redania are which feeds all of their people. That’s why there are big, wide, well-maintained roads that travel between the cities there so that no merchant is ever tempted to take his wagon train across the fields and ruin a crop.

The placement of roads is such that armies can be directed according to the movement of those roads and can go where Radovid…

Yes yes, I know you weren’t asking about that.

But from the South, the countryside is dominated by the Pontar. Even if you try and suggest that Novigrad is a separate state from Redania, which would be tricky given the end of the war and Radovid’s presence and power in it, the real fortress wall is the Pontar River and it is an incredibly strong wall.

The river is wide enough in most places that no siege engine could fire across it. There are only small parts of it that a good archer could make that shot let alone do so accurately with enough energy in the bow to actually kill someone. It is too wide for some kind of pontoon bridge and is too fast flowing for the building of a new bridge. Let alone the problem that it is all but impossible to do such a thing with subtlety so the workers would get about halfway across and presuming that the river and the rain didn’t wash away all your work, you would then have to deal with the archers and crossbowmen, let alone the catapults and trebuchets that have had time to properly sight their engines while an attacker was busy building a bridge.

So there are only a few crossings. The bridges of Oxenfurt, the east and west banks, and the ruined bridges directly south of Novigrad. I notice that no one has bothered to try and repair that bridge in the meantime. The other bridges that used to exist were knocked down, by Radovid and the people of Novigrad to help with this defence. The only reason that they left the ones that they did was so that they could leave one place for the enemy to concentrate their forces. The “open gate” tactic is a classic for a reason.

(Freddie: This has been pointed out to me and I intend to rectify this)

After Oxenfurt the river does narrow and it would be much easier to put a barge or something to cross troops, but not enough and not fast enough to make a massive difference. People would soon realise what was happening and there would be an answering force there to meet you.

You could also float the barges, or the pontoons for a bridge, up or down the river, to your chosen site of crossing, but if you tried that you would need to come along the river one way or the other.

Now that is possible, but the rebels held Novigrad and the other two major crossings. So to get down the river, you would need to make it past those places without being seen. The same if you intended to land troops by boat.

The other end of the place would be Flotsam. Flotsam is big enough and the river is wide enough that you could float troops through there, but after Flotsam, although the river is wide enough for purpose, the banks are not. Those woods are famed for their Endrega populations and further up, the river banks become rocky and… or… are too distant to be useful.

So naturally, the rebels sent a force to occupy Flotsam. They dumped a load of shit in the water. They installed river chains so that men couldn’t sail down it and then that was that.

As well as all of this, the land to the South of the Pontar, the Temerian bank of the river is, essentially, marshland. Not a nice place to marshall an army. Pure water would need to be shipped in by the barrel, the act of purifying the water that was there would be colossal. Same with fresh food and vegetables as the farms of Velen were stripped bare and are only just showing the first signs of proper recovery.

The Baroness can barely feed her OWN people let alone an army that would be camping there.

So it is an ideal situation for the defending. Your brother knew this, or at least had an advisor that told him that. So in the time immediately after the fall of Novigrad and your castle, he moved to secure those crossings.

And he did a good job of it too.

Ok, I’m done for the day. I always struggle with it when people praise Sam.

-

I am happy to say that I have made a couple of appointments and done so formally. This ranges from the obvious ones where I have formally named Lady Tamara Strenger as the Baroness of Velen. She is confirmed in that role and I am looking forward to working with her in bettering that place and fortifying it against probable incursions from the Cidaris and Vergen alliance.

This was the easiest appointment to make. Crow’s Perch was a place where her Father was Lord and she inherited it when her parents left. She doesn’t have a great deal to say about her parents that is nice and she is declaring loudly that if people want to discuss marriage with her, then they can do so through me, her feudal master.

From my end, I would heartily recommend speaking to the lady first before you bring the matter to me. I think that Lady Strenger and I have a good understanding of each other. I don’t think she would protest if I told you that she has a rather stricter interpretation of the teachings of The Eternal Flame than I am strictly comfortable with but her devotion to the people living in her lands cannot be questioned.

It is also my distinct pleasure to inform people that I have named and confirmed Lord Francis Kolrab as the Lord Mayor of Novigrad. He will be governing the city with my blessing and will be answering to me accordingly. He will be dealing with all terrestrial matters such as trade and law keeping while the Hierarch will continue to serve as master of all things spiritual, specifically on the Temple Isle. It took us a long time to get there and find a candidate that pleased everyone but I think we got there in the end.

Lord Helfdan is keen to return to Ard Skellige and to take up the duties that he has been assigned there as he feels that he has neglected those duties for too long. There will be a short handover period and then Lord Kolrab will take up his duties. I wish him all the best in the pursuit of them.

The matter of the master of Flotsam is still being decided. As Lord Polmert pointed out, Flotsam is an important strategic position and we must be careful there. The master must be a Temerian but also must be willing to work within the greater framework that is being established around Flotsam.

Speaking personally. I have Knighted Padraig and he will be the new Captain of my castle guard. He has taken Rickard’s surname of Greencloak to honour the man and has promised that he will secure Coulthard lands and ensure that my troops will work towards the security of the local area along with the guards in Novigrad and Lady Strenger’s forces. He grinned nastily when I spoke about Flotsam.

That took some time as he rather needed to be persuaded. I wanted someone that I could trust who had the military experience and would be able to think around the problem.

He didn’t want the job and the matter got quite heated at various times.

“I won’t be knighted sir, I won’t do it. Catch me being a fucking knight and all of that lah de dah nonsense with a coat of arms and a fucking huge horse that I’ve got to ride on the back of. I won’t do it Milord, I won’t.”

Carys and I exchanged glances and she rolled her eyes.

“Pat,” I began, rubbing my eyes. “I need the best. I need someone I can trust. I need someone that knows me and knows my lands. I need someone that the people in those lands can trust. I need someone of the world. You tell me someone who would be better fitted for the job than you and I’ll hire them right now.”

“But sir…” He began, I might tease him but he was in real distress. “Surely someone from the South, you’ll have a Nilfgaardian Captain General type who will command the guards and the soldiers that you’re going to be raising.”

“Yes, I will,” I told him. “And I am still deciding who that is going to be. That man is going to be standing over me and behind me. His job is going to be to make sure that I don’t rebel. I’m going to make sure that he and I have a good working relationship but I am under no illusions, he is there to keep an eye on us for people like Lord Voorhis.

“But he is a commander of the Ducal Forces. I need someone who commands my forces. The Coulthard forces. The men and…”

Carys cleared her throat pointedly.

“Yes, I was going to say women as well. The men and women of Coulthard and Angral. Angraal has its own troops now, but I need someone that’s mine. I want you. That’s it.”

The big Skelligan collapsed into a chair in front of my desk. I rose and poured him a drink which he took and drank at a swallow.

I can do that kind of thing nowadays. My balance is coming back, even if my stamina is not.

“Let me ask you this instead?” I began. “If it’s someone else. If I choose someone else that will be wearing Coulthard colours and throwing orders around, would you follow them? Or would you still want to follow Rickard? Would you resent them for not being Rickard?”

“That’s a low fucking blow, m’lord.”

“I know. But I know that you feel that way because I feel that way. Whoever is going to take Rickard’s place, I am going to resent and hate for not being Rickard. I will think it’s an insult to his memory. Which is another reason it has to be you.”

He grinned, the Skelligan in him spotting the joke.

“Because it’s alright if I insult his memory.”

We both laughed as Carys rolled her eyes at both of us this time.

He sighed and it was at that moment that I knew I had him.

“I’ll never be a proper Knight sir. Not a proper Knight.”

“Are you telling me that Rickard was?”

“Sure he was,” Padraig grunted. “He was a grand one at that. He never saw it though but the rest of us could.”

Carys poured us all some more drinks.

“Lord Jon knighted him for the same reason that he himself was knighted,” I said. I had spoken to Constable about Rickard. The older general had gotten a serious look on his face before he sighed.

“He should have died in battle,” he told me and then he told me the story I told Padraig.

“‘There are some men that are bigger than their station,’ the Constable told me. ‘Some men are born noble and should have been born in a pig-sty. They don’t deserve anything more than that. They deserve to be the ones that society looks down on and casts aside. Then there are other men like Ricky, who were born to common whores on the streets of Vizima and then should have been born into the nobility. What a leader of men he could have been had he just been born noble’.”

“Yeah, that sounds like the poor fucker.” Padraig gazed into his drink morosely.

“He didn’t think he was a proper Knight,” I told the big Skelligan. “I don’t think I’m a proper Duke. And between us, we’re going to keep these people safe. Because if we don’t, who else is going to do it?”

He laughed at that.

“What do we need to do to secure Coulthard lands?” I asked him. I started by listing some problems that I had seen and he came up with solutions to them. Then he suggested his own share of problems and said what needed to be done. Every so often he just needed prompting with the simple question of “What would Rickard do?” and then he would be off.

It was late when we were finished. I had notes, my secretary had notes and Carys had curled up on a blanket before going to sleep. When we were done with work, we drank heavily and talked about Rickard.

“There’s going to be a monument,” I said. “Big ass lump of stone somewhere and we’re going to put the names on it. Not the men that died in the fighting, but those victims that didn’t stand a chance. The people that were drinking at the feast, those that were sacrificed to feed the rituals and those that bled to make those augmented fuckers stronger. Rickard’s name will be on that stone.”

“Make it one amongst many,” Padraig told me. “He would not want to stand out.”

“No,” I agreed. “No, he would not. I wanted to have him remembered in the family crypt as he was a better brother than some of my brothers were but apparently, I’m not allowed.”

Padraig just looked at me.

“He would want a hillside,” he told me. “A hillside overlooking a little village or a road or something. In amongst some trees. He would not like a crypt or a grave site. I never heard of him wanting to be burned or anything. I think he liked the Elven way of doing it or the soldier's way. That his belongings would be shared out amongst his friends and that then we would get drunk and tell stories about him. He would want something peaceful.”

“Choose a hillside,” I told him. “I will have something done.”

Padraig nodded and we lapsed into silence for a while.

“I think…” I began. “I think he was a great man.”

Padraig chuckled.

“He would have hated to hear you say that.”

“He would.” I laughed in response.

“I agree though.” Padraig didn’t try to hide the tears on his face. “He used to say the same about you sometimes, when he’d been drinking.”

He turned to me, the tear tracks standing out on his face.

“I agreed with him too.”

I nodded acceptance of that.

“I miss him,” I said, staring out over the rise to the campfires of the castle workers.

By the time we were done hashing things out, we also agreed that Carys would also be knighted. It is not a completely foreign or alien process to knight either Elves or women, but it is bound to have some people protesting it. I’m kind of looking forward to those protests, to be honest, but Padraig, now Sir Padraig, pointed out that the commander of a Duke’s personal guard was nearly always a knight of some kind and as she was the best person for the job, then I needed to knight her.

I don’t think that he was threatening to resign his own posting if she didn’t get the nod but I was happy to do it. I think Carys enjoyed the small ceremony that we did. She rolled her eyes through the entire thing and told us both in detail just what she thought of this “foolish D’hoine ceremony” but I think she was pleased. She was certainly pleased with the sword that I presented her from Eibear Hattori’s forge.

That had taken some work to arrange. He had come to measure her, pretending to be a tailor to get all of the points correct for her new uniform and all of the dresses that she would need to wear now that she was married to a knight of the realm. She had looked a bit confused about how detailed his inspection of her dominant hand was but she had accepted it without comment.

Her look of surprised delight could not be faked though and Padraig promises me that she was surprised. So Sir Carys of the Pontar Valley is now the commander of my personal guard. I told her that she is allowed to hand-choose two dozen people to protect me and that she can protect me according to her own remit on the understanding that she doesn’t interfere with my own duties, the duties of her husband and so that the protection can fade into the background when matters of state require privacy.

The look of careful consideration on her face was…

Terrifying. The word was terrifying.

I have also declared that Father Anchor will remain with me as my confessor. He will not be my religious advisor but he will remain my confessor. He insisted on that distinction because he wanted the separation.

“The differences are important,” he told me when he had recovered from his shock at the elevation. “As your confessor, my responsibility is for the status of your soul and your spiritual well-being. I cannot be responsible for decisions that will be made regarding church policy and balancing that with trade and military requirements. Nor the balance needed between what the Priestesses of Melitele might need and declare as well as the priesthoods of Kreve and the Great Sun. That matter needs to be between you and them. Not you and me.”

I accepted his point as well as took on the fact that my council was getting bigger every time I thought about it. So now I needed advisors from most of the great religions on the continent? That was… staggering.

Tulip took Father Anchor’s promotion in stride and kind of nodded as though it was what he deserved. She has fitted in with the local community well and has formed a firm friendship with Laurelen and Carys which I am pleased about.

It remains to be seen what the greater religious community will think about that appointment but I like Father Anchor. He keeps me honest, keeping my feet to the coals when I am in danger of disappearing up my own ass. His interpretations of scripture are traditionalist enough that I find that I like them. He is kind, caring and loving of his wife and those are the kinds of things that I need when it comes to religious guidance.

So… back to the reason I’m here in the first place.

And no, I still haven’t heard back from Kerrass.

As I say, there was a good week while the rebellion did nothing but dig in, literally and figuratively. Events in the regency court in Tretogor were confused. The court was woefully undermanned as many dignitaries had been coming south for the wedding, or were actively involved in the rebellion themselves, urging the Queen and others to openly support the rebellion in the name of the dead King.

In Vizima, The Empress convened her military court and locked herself in Queen Anais’ study. The study that had once been used by Foltest and later used by the Emperor was the most secure building in the Temerian royal palace and as such, no one was allowed in there. Food and drink were left at the door before one of the Imperial Guard would open the door, thank the servant and take the food in.

Many people were in and out of that room at various stages. Lord Helfdan, as the Admiral of the Imperial and Skelligan fleets. Queen Cerys, Queen Anais, Lords Natalis and Roche from Temeria were also in there. I understand that Lady Eilhart and Yennefer were in the room at various stages. Knight Commander Syanna and Lady Vivienne de Launfal were also there. Of course, Lord Voorhis was there as well as the general of the Imperial Guard and the General of the sixth Nilfgaardian army who was bottling up Cidaris and Vergen from the South.

There were plenty of people coming and going so that list is far from exhaustive. It is also true to say that the Empress regularly came out to receive messages and news of what was going on in the Pontar region around Coulthard Castle and many of those declarations were made public so that the court could be aware of what was happening. There were many public and private debates about what the Imperial, Temerian and Skelligan responses should be as they were the three powers that could feasibly make a response and there were many orders given about troop movements.

Regiments were broken away, and Elements of the Sixth Imperial were broken off to travel North to scout things out and figure out what was actually going on. The Lodge of Sorceresses and the Council of Mages collaborated in scrying out what was happening in the countryside and the news was bleak. Not least because Ariadne, later aided by Laurelen, had done their jobs well and the movements of the countryside were well masked from scrying.

More and more of the rebels were marshalling in and around the Pontar valley itself. Troops were being disembarked in Novigrad where they were being equipped with arms and equipment that were liberated/confiscated from the shops and locals. It is also worth stating that there were quite a large number of men who joined up with the rebel forces because their food had been confiscated and they needed to be fed. They also wanted to prevent their families from being victimised as traitors.

There is no real way of telling which men were real rebels and which were there just to ensure that they remained safe. Short of having a mage go down the line and read everyone’s mind which would be impossibly expensive and time-consuming.

The standing armed forces of the rebellions, which you can take to be the professional soldiers and guards from the rebellious lords, focused on the two major crossing points. The one south of Novigrad proper and at Oxenfurt. Oxenfurt was garrisoned and work had begun to turn the university into a proper fortress.

One of the amusing things that came out was that a lot of people hated Emma for being Emma. I mean they claimed that it was because of her business practises and so on, but most of them just resented her for being…

That’s an old argument.

But while they hated her, they could not deny that a lot of the work that she had done and financed in the city actually made their lives a lot easier. The proper extensions of the docks meant that building materials and other supplies could be offloaded all the easier. So they hated it but they could not destroy it as they wanted it.

So they fortified those two crossing points and had cavalry patrols roving up and down the river ready for any kind of amphibious action that would carry troops across the water.

In the meantime, Coulthard castle was churning out the altered, augmented soldiers.

“Dumber than pig dribble,” Sir Aleksi called them. “But by the Flame, those bastards could fight.”

He looked sad after he told me that.

“But if someone had told me how your brother made them, I would have told him where he could stick his damn rebellion before I tried to stick my sword in him.”

There is not much that’s provable about that process and I can’t add much to it. Sir Aleksy only found out about it all later when he was told what was going on. He didn’t believe it at first and I’m told that it was this that broke him later.

What we know is that one of the wagons that came with Sam’s troops from Kalayn lands contained the apparatus that he used to convert a normal living soldier into the huge grotesquely muscled, lightning-fast warriors that they became. None of them survived to see the end of the rebellion but numerous reports suggest that one of the effects of the process removed the imagination of those men as well as their abilities towards creative and critical thinking. They could still be intelligent but there was just something that wasn’t quite right about them.

We know that at first, they were volunteers that went into the process but later as the situation became more desperate for the rebels, men were being rounded up and taken into the basement.

We also know that the process had started since long before the rebellion was formally declared. So once again, I have asked that the Witchers make another trip up to Kalayn lands to check the castle out and make sure that there won’t be any surprises waiting for… whoever it is that ends up living there and what they end up doing.

]I have yet to decide on that matter. I mean… they are my lands now and my castle. At some point, I shall have to go. I don’t want to live there though, or sleep in that castle again. My memories of those places have since twisted in my head so that they are now something that they were not previously.

As to what was happening in Coulthard Castle itself?

I asked for, and received, Laurelen’s permission to interview her. She did not have much to offer that was contrary to what I had already written. She was permitted in no meetings and she knew that Emma was too busy with her work of saving everyone and everything to pay much attention to that. Not to mention that any interview of my sister would be an arduous process for everyone involved.

But here it is. Life in Coulthard Castle at the beginning of the rebellion from another perspective.

I am ashamed to say, ashamed to admit, that they broke me at the first pass.

I folded like freshly cleaned laundry. All they had to do was to put some Dimertium on my wrists and hold a blade to my throat while telling me about all of the things that they were going to do to your sister and me and I’m afraid that was it. I was blubbering and begging for mercy.

I’ve fought in two wars exchanging spell-fire with my opposite numbers in Nilfgaard. I was not on Sodden Hill as my expertise was not all that relevant. I mean, you can’t be a mage and not know how to throw a lightning bolt or a fireball, but at the same time, my specialities are in healing and… we would call it utility magic. So I served with the surgeons with Marti in that first war. In the second I fought. I had learned the necessary skills and I was better at fighting having seen how much my lack of knowledge left me disadvantaged.

I hid beneath Novigrad and when it came time to make our exit I led one of the groups from our hiding places to the docks and afterwards, when I found I could not go with the others, I travelled, by myself to come and find your sister.

And all the time I did not know whether she returned my feelings or what was going to happen. And then… After that, there was the fear of discovery. There was the glorious moment where Emma saw me, recognised me and I knew that she felt the same way… After the first moment that I kissed her and then… Then came the fear of discovery. Your Father and his general disapproval of everything. Your Mother and her religious longings. Your older brothers, Edmund with his… And Mark with his equal religious fervour. Not only that but in the knowledge that if I was found then then I could bring down your entire family. Including the woman that I love.

I was afraid of that for so long. I’m still afraid of that even now. Even when the Empress of the continent knows and has ordered that it is alright for me to love her. But there was always that fear and I stood up to it. I faced it and I did not back down.

So I had thought that I was not without courage, but at that moment, the thought of your sister’s pain and… the sheer helplessness of the Dimertium…

I just couldn’t face it. I couldn’t…

I’m sorry. There are many more apologies left in me but here is another one. I am sorry. I failed all of you.

Emma was harder than me, but not by much. Similar to what happened with you, Ariadne was ordered to cause me pain and although Emma herself had already been through some stuff, they took me to see her… it must have been the morning after the Equinox. She was in chains, tied to a wall and her dress was torn and her face was bloody. She promises me that they didn’t do… anything to her other than beat her a bit… her words there. But they took me in and again, all they had to do was take a red hot poker and push it into my arm and I was screaming. Emma was screaming and…

Emma folded as well.

Emma was taken to the study where she got to work doing… well… Sam told her to dissolve the company to finance the war effort and now we know that she was doing precisely the opposite. I was so proud of her when I found out that that’s what she had been doing.

Just as I’m so proud of you now.

But after that, I was permitted to see her once a day in the morning. I would be taken from my room…

Yes, sorry Freddie, but I had a room of my own, kind of tells you just how completely they broke me.

… and they would take me to the study where I would often find Emma already at work in the clothes that she had been wearing the day before. If we were lucky we would be able to tell each other that everything was alright and that we would have a quick hug.

But she started retreating into her own head that time when your brother brought you into the room. I think that was the moment that broke her. I mean, we can guess and whatever but that was brutal.

No, don’t blame yourself, or Ariadne, blame Sam. He did it. He ordered those things to be done and it was your pain, and mine that broke your sister.

And she will recover.

She will Freddie, I promise.

But I’m supposed to be telling you what life was like in the castle and what happened. I know that you spent your time moving between your cell and your brother’s study. But I had more free rein. I was followed by a guard who had orders to kill me at any moment if I started to act up but I was well shackled by this point. Your survival and Emma’s survival meant that they had me and I think that they knew it too. But it was a reminder, a constant reminder of what was happening.

I didn’t see your brother and Ella the Elf descend into the basement. I had heard that among the first things that were ordered was the emptying of the lower basements. Emma had taken me down there once and I remember vast caverns of rooms where the tables, chairs and assorted detritus were arranged. We had hoped that we could find a place to retreat to down there, but it was just… kind of dusty and a bit sad. The general feel of the place meant that it soon quenched our ardour and as a result, we never went down there again.

We used her rooms when we thought we could get away with it and there is many a meadow or wooded glade near the castle that saw things that would make you blush.

Just like you are doing now in fact.

But they cleared the place out so that in the early hours of the morning. After the tables and chairs and Goddess only knows what else was cleared out of there. Ella and your brother took some things from one of the wagons that had been brought into the castle courtyard and descended into the depths.

As I say, I didn’t see it myself but I was told that your brother had to be carried out of that room. That he looked pale, skeletal even. That you could see the veins standing out against his skin. That he was gasping for breath and sweating profusely.

I wish I could tell you to speak to the person who saw that, but she died later. One amongst the many I’m afraid.

But I was brought to see to him. I was already broken and I had not slept or eaten anything since the feast at that time so my sense of time was a little hazy. This will have been shortly after it all went bad. Your brother was suffering from Massive blood loss.

I asked why Ariadne couldn’t help him and Kristoff told me that she was otherwise engaged.

I came to hate that metallic, echoing voice of Kristoff. You could hear it in the depths of that helm that he wore. Low and rumbling, echoing off the metal so that it sets your teeth on edge.

It was clear what was wrong with your brother and there is little that magic can do in that case. But yes, massive blood loss. He had lost so much blood that I didn’t know how he could possibly still be alive. I healed the damage that I could, on pain of Emma’s well-being and then I told him how to recover the blood that he had lost. I told him that I could mix him a tonic to help but he waved that away telling me that Ella was twice the alchemist that I was.

Which was true by the way. It hurts to say it now, but it was true.

I hated that Elven bitch. You gave her every opportunity to redeem herself after the North. So did Chireadean and yet she was still here. Without her, none of your brother’s plans could have come to fruition. He would not have survived the process if she had refused to help, but she did it anyway. I hate her so much that I worry that I’m going to look at other Elves and judge them in the same way that I am clearly judging her. I know that at the end, she helped you escape and it is true that without her, you would not have been able to help Kerrass slay your brother but to me?

Too little too late.

I hated that Elven Bitch and come to that, I hate her still.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry but you didn’t see what she did. You didn’t hear it. Does one act of redemption counter all of that evil? Does the fact that she has been tortured for her knowledge and her skill for decades, if not longer excuse her?

I don’t know. All I know is that I saw her…

Goddess Freddie but they killed so many people.

Your brother gave the orders but she worked the machines. He would just stand there, even if he turned up at all and all the while, people would go into that room and corpses would come out. All to fuel that damn…

I’m sorry.

They kept the captives in pens. They built cages out in the courtyards. The more important captives were given individual rooms or cells. They would be the men or women that might have been usable as hostages or might have been able to earn the rebellion some kind of ransom or something. There were also some VIPs that came. Men and women that Sam had asked for. Old friends and lovers that he had liked or thought needed to be protected or something. But I didn’t know them and I rather hated them too. I read your account of how Bronwen died and about how she tried to kill your brother at the last.

And I hate myself for hating her. She was biding her time, looking for the out and at the last, when she knew she was there to die, she acted and it still killed her.

There is so much hate.

Far too much of it.

During that first day, workers were hammering away. Hammering at metal and wood. You could hear it throughout the castle. I think you were still unconscious or something but there was just that constant noise. That and people shouting.

There was the sound of whips.

But then they started to bring in the captives. People from the local villages and then from further afield. Not just humans but all races. I saw Elves… So many Elves on Coulthard lands now. So many since your efforts in the North that kicked Emma into action. Elves, dwarves, we have halfling farmers now that look after the crops. They were there.

All ages too, old, young.

Children Freddie. Children.

They herded them into basements, offices, and guest rooms and eventually, when there was not enough room then, they herded them into cages and enclosures in the castle courtyards as well.

They fed them and fed them well. They wanted their victims to be healthy.

Full of blood.

Then they started to feed them into the machines. Not just machines, the machines were just a means to an end. That end was extracting as much blood from those prisoners as they could. The rituals were fuelled by blood and pain. I don’t know what the formula was but it was something like three or four dead people to every man that they enhanced into horrific proportions. Some of them even got bigger than that. Men like Kristoff who is… was sorry… all but fused into his armour. Not needing to eat or sleep or do any of the things that a man… a real man would need to do to survive. That process was harder and fewer people survived that. I think that there were about a dozen of those but I can’t be sure.

I didn’t count.

I’ve not seen anything like it. I hear stories about what it was like in the prisoner pens in Novigrad. When the witch hunters were herding together everyone had even a hint of magical talent. It sounds the same. But every so often, I wonder if your brother’s cages were worse.

Why?

Because in the cages of the Eternal Flame, all of them knew that sooner or later a Witch-Hunter was going to come down those stairs and take them to the place of their execution.

In Coulthard castle, your Brother gave them hope.

If they made themselves useful. If they dug the ditches or they cooked the food or they built the wall, worked the forges, did good work, cleaned up the shit, fetched and carried and…

And yes. When they gave themselves to their captors appreciatively. Then they might survive.

But even then, they were not safe. The rituals still needed feeding. The potions that Ella was brewing to help fortify your brother still needed their raw materials and eventually, there would be an urgent need and the attendants… I think you called them “critics” who would just turn up and grab the nearest captive and cart them off screaming that they had been promised that they would survive.

I would listen to that. I would listen to the awful screams that would come up the stairs that led down to the basements. I would hear them and I could feel, even through the dimertium that shackled me, I could feel the magic of the ritual growing. I could FEEL it, Freddie.

Day after day I watched as people were taken down into the basement and there they were killed. They died horribly and another heavily muscled… thing would emerge. I won’t call them men because no man would do the things that they did.

No real man anyway.

Day after day I watched it happen and I did nothing to stop it.

What could I have done? I don’t know. Something. ANYTHING but I did nothing. I told myself that I was waiting for the opportune moment. I told myself that if I acted out then they would hurt or kill Emma but that was a lie and we both know it.

Sam needed Emma to generate the wealth that he needed. Without her, the trading company was just so much nonsense. I was the guarantee against HER good behaviour, not the other way round and if I was dead, she could do anything she wanted.

I am so proud of her for what she did.

And you fought. You fought too and I did nothing.

Nothing.

I was the castle Doctor. When soldiers or the more important hostages hurt themselves or got sick as part of the captivity. Some of them were still hurt from that first night and I was busiest after that. But gradually it was you and the things that they did to you. You and your scribe. Johann.

And that was it. That was what life was like In Coulthard Castle. Knowing that I was only there to keep Emma at her desk. Knowing that if I had any courage at all I would have ended my own existence so that she would have been free to do the same. I could have done what you did and attacked my guards. Even when I knew that they would probably prevent me from going too far. I could have done something though. I could have done something.

I know why I didn’t, but I could have done something.

Some of those people, some of those captives hated me. They saw me working for the enemy and they called me a traitor and collaborator and worse. They were right, Freddie. They were right and now I’m a peer of the realm.

Doesn’t seem fair.

She wept for a long time after that. I am more reliable now when I try to climb to my feet from a kneeling position so I held her as she sobbed and then we talked for a long time before I let her go back to Novigrad where Emma is waiting for her.

I told her that it was ok and that we all did what we had to do to survive. I told her that I felt that I could have done more too and that I hated myself for losing my temper. That if I had been able to restrain myself then I would have been stronger when the time came to fight back. I told her that I bitterly regretted not going with Padraig, Carys and Chireadean and that then I could have gone back to the castle in a moment of triumph. I told her all of those things and I meant them.

It’s true. All of it.

But at that moment, I could not have done anything other than what I have done.

It is also easy to tell ourselves things that we could have done with the benefit of hindsight. We can easily see things that we did that could have gone better. Yes, I could have gone with Carys and the rest, but if I had done that, would I have been more easily tracked by our enemies? It’s almost certain that Ariadne found me. In doing so would it have meant that in going with the others, she would still have found me and therefore the others too?

Would I have been more closely guarded in the basement if I had been healthy? And therefore would I have been unable to break free? Would Sam have neutralised me, rather than dismissing me so that I could sneak up behind him and give Kerrass the opening that he needed to finish the thing?

There is no knowing. But I do know the same self-loathing that Laurelen talks about. My self-loathing comes from the fact that I should have seen Sam for who he really was. I should have listened to all of the people that told me about him over time. There are so many of them and I ignored all of them. I refused to see what was right in front of my eyes.

For other reasons, I recently reread the chapters regarding meeting Kerrass’ Goddess, the Morrigan and she told me that this was my weakness. In fact, as I look back on my travels, I wonder why I did not see it before. So many people have been telling me that Sam was a bad man but I refused to see it. I refused to listen and this is what he did.

Why? Because he was my brother.

I remembered the little boy who I had had to help with his poetry studies.

And even that turned out to be a lie.

I will never stop hating myself for that mistake.

Time for another break I think.

.

So the two sides in the rebellion came apart from each other.

At one point during our travels, I think it was in our first year travelling together, long before friendship had been achieved, sometime after Tom the Troll but long before Amber’s crossing. We travelled along the road with a mercenary. He and Kerrass seemed to have something of an understanding and it was nice to have someone else to talk to. He made some observations about combat. I’m paraphrasing here because I didn’t entirely believe him at the time and I didn’t write it down. I even forgot about that man until these events reminded me of him.

He said that in combat, you can always tell the people who are more experienced by how close they stay to a fight.

“You watch them. Next tavern brawl you see, you watch ‘em. The first stage of a fight is when people run away from each other. It all kicks off, a glass is thrown, a tray is kicked over, a beer is thrown and there might be a first shove or a punch thrown. Then the combatants back away from each other. It’s only a short thing but they back away from each other. Those that know what they’re doing might lift their fists to protect their heads but they sort of dance away from each other.

“The less charitable might suggest that they’re doing this so that their friends can get in the way and try to stop the fight and they can claim that they were going to properly beat the senses out of the other guy if their mates hadn’t stopped them. But it takes some time to get yourself into a proper mindset to fight.

“It takes time to psych yourself up.

“Experienced men? Well, they stay close to you. They follow you and stay eye to eye. They know that when the fists and kicks and things start flying, you need to stay inside the range.

“It’s the same with armies. There might be an early couple of skirmishes where one side or the other might look victorious. Then both sides stop and wait to see what the other is going to do. Scouts go out and watch. One side might dig in because both sides are secretly hoping that the other side is going to attack their defensive position. There is a pause and then…

“Some fucker on a big horse gives a little wave and a horn sounds and then they come together.”

I haven’t thought about that mercenary for years. I think he was Skelligan originally because I can hear his words in that accent.

But that’s certainly what the two sides of this rebellion did.

The Imperials were going to be the attackers. They needed to because to do otherwise was to look weak. The rebellion knew that they were outnumbered but they had an incredible defensive position and every day that they existed was a victory over the Imperials and showed the continent that the Imperials were not invulnerable.

And someone broke.

His name was Count Henri Bernier of Temeria. I can name him with impunity because he died and was posthumously tried for treason. That treason was a matter of record and his actions led to the first battle of the Pontar crossing and the utter defeat of Temerian forces.

Count Bernier was one of those lords that tried to leverage control over Temeria in the aftermath of King Foltest’s death. For the uninitiated, after Foltest was assassinated there was a period of time where, given the nature of the succession, Temeria had no real ruler. Constable Natalis did his best to keep control and ready the Kingdom for the attack that he was pretty sure was coming.

Oh, if only he could have known the truth.

His main opponents in all of this were the various Lords. Barons, Counts, Viscounts and the like. They all got together and started to shout about who had the better claim and as always happens when this kind of thing takes place, people started drawing swords and promising violence on the poor people that only had the misfortune to be born in the wrong place.

All the while, Lady La Valette was trying to exert her will over the situation and have one of her children placed on the throne with herself and her eldest son to be placed on the council as some form of regent.

It was a brief and bloody time in Temeria and it is worth remembering that the younger of the two La Valette children did not survive it.

The entire thing didn’t have time to explode into full-on civil war because the treachery of the then Lodge of Sorceresses was brought to light and Nilfgaard invaded. Before thinking that this was all for the best though, that entire process is also why Temeria posed absolutely no obstacle to the invading forces.

Count Bernier was neither a young man whose military ambitions were stymied by the peace or all the civil unrest of the succession, nor was he an old man that was trying to take Temeria back to some kind of, half-remembered glory days of his youth or his grandparents' times. He was a man of middle age who had served in all three of the continental wars with a certain amount of heroism, if not any kind of sound military sense.

In the first war, he served at the battlefield of Sodden Hill and is reported to have led at least one charge into the hearts of the enemy where he survived by some miracle. He also fought at Brenna in a slightly more senior position and there are numerous accounts of him riding to and from behind the lines, and in front of the lines, exhorting the infantry onto further feats of heroism.

Witnesses declare that those shouts were quite charismatic to listen to, even if the unfair noticed that he didn’t actually take any time to stand in the ranks with the men. I know this to be unfair because, again, he did lead divisions of the Temerian Knights in some of their charges and as such, bears a certain amount of the responsibility for driving the enemy off on that particularly unpleasant day.

However, through all of that, he didn’t seem to be too much of a favourite of King Foltest. There might be any number of reasons for that, not least would be the suggestion that he was quite a devout man and as such, resented the King's lack of Piety. There is also a suggestion that he had something of a crush on Lady Merigold and was resentful of the fact that, at the time she was sharing her bed with a “filthy mutant freak” in the personage of Lord Geralt.

It is also entirely possible, although again, cannot be proven, that although he himself was married with several children, one of his sons was of marriageable age of then Princess Adda but she amused herself by spurning the son and so… angered the Father.

Whichever is true, he fell out of favour at court. He did not join those others that tried to defend La Valette castle against Foltest, nor did he send any troops to help with Foltest’s “dynastic adventures.” He was sulking in his home castle when Nilfgaard invaded and he led his troops away and to safety. Theirs was not a big enough force to warrant hunting down and destroying, but at the same time, it was a significant force.

After the peace was signed and Queen Adda ascended the throne with her regency council, Count Bernier’s surviving forces provided a significant backbone of the Temerian armed forces. He made a big, courtly, public, magnanimous gesture when he tried to make them a “gift” to the young Queen.

Who told him that it was no gift to render unto his Queen, that which was owed.

This was one of the earliest incidents that are used to demonstrate the steel that runs down the backbone of Queen Anais.

He joined the political factions of Temeria and was one of the largest, more militant ones. He would cite his military experience and his success record as reasons why he should be promoted and put in charge of the Temerian soldiery. He was one of those kinds of men that would often point out the common birth of Lords Natalis and Roche and would question their rights and their abilities to sit on the Regency council in the places that they occupied. As a result, he was extremely popular amongst the old money, and military types while being vastly unpopular amongst the new blood, younger family types that supported Queen Anais as some kind of semi-religious, romantic figure.

When the Rebellion happened and those first messages came south, letting everyone know about what was happening, it would seem that he rather thought that his time had finally come.

While the Empress was gathering all of her advisors into one room to decide what to do, it would seem that Count Bernier was rather offended that he wasn’t invited because he was a renowned military man and blah blah blah.

There was even some concern at one point as to whether or not the Empress was actually going to do anything. The answer to that was obviously “Of course, she’s going to do something”. Empires don’t survive if anyone thinks that they can just rebel and decide to not be in the Empire any more. The reason that he wasn’t invited was that the chamber contained those rarified figures as the Commander in Chief of the Temerian Military, and second, and the head of Temerian Intelligence. Along with the Admiral of the Imperial Navy who was in the area to do with the wedding, the head of Imperial Intelligence and the Empress’ chief Military advisor a Lord General Franz Martinand. The Queen of Skellige came later.

So it wasn’t that he wasn’t invited, it was just that things were in the very early planning stages and as such, men of his rank were not yet needed.

So he determined that he was going to take matters into his own hands. We can’t prove it but it also seems likely that he was also having ideas about proving himself to the Queen, taking more land for Temeria and all of the stuff that came later. He was trying to get a jumping head start as there were already whispers going on about what the rebellion could mean for the future of Temeria and whether those lands that had been caught up in the rebellion could be taken for Temeria. I would imagine that Count Bernier told himself “Fortune favours the bold” and he acted.

He gathered a few like-minded friends along with their men and started the invasion early. The marshalling of his troops happened quickly as he was local and no one thought that this was unusual as everyone was marshalling. He managed to put together a sizeable force from the people within his little political and military faction and marched North to attack the trade crossing South of Novigrad.

Where he got absolutely murdered.

I am fortunate in the account of that battle because my friend Aleksy was part of that battle and watched as the Temerian Forces got destroyed

Oh, Frederick old boy, it was absolutely gorgeous. I’ve fought in a number of actions and battles before this one but I struggle to think of one that went quite as well as that one did.

We knew he was coming of course. We had scouts out and we could see the signs of his travels. We had scouts and spies and informants on the other side of the river and as soon as his force started to gather and march forward we knew that he was coming and we knew where he was going.

The only piece of sense that he showed was that he came at the crossing rather than trying to attack Oxenfurt. Your brother’s forces commanded there and the bridge crossing was much narrower so every inch of that bridge was covered by arrows, crossbow bolts and siege weapons. Even on approach, you would be lashed about with rocks, boulders and all of the other horrors that could be concocted. And that was before you got to the walls and the gates where the horror would have just continued.

The trade crossing is thicker, wider and has cover. The opposing banks are no place to site war engines. And it would mean that he wouldn’t be caught up in a lengthy siege. So he attacked in the right place. If he took the crossing, then he could have gone anywhere.

But we knew where he was. We were still cautious, we made sure that there wasn’t another branch of an army heading towards Oxenfurt or using his attack as a shield so that they could build a bridge or row across in boats, but it was soon clear that his attack was the only attack that was coming.

So we all rode there, formed up ourselves and watched as he ordered his army on the opposite bank and then they all just stood there in our mutual defensive deployments and watched.

I don’t know what he was playing at but it looked to me as though he was waiting for us to attack him. So we waited and he waited and then it started to get dark. We lit torches and things to make sure that he wasn’t going to try and get across at night which would have been dicey anyway, but we were not so confident that he knew that. So we waited for a little bit more, set some watches and then waited for dawn, quietly laughing at the stupid fool as his army mouldered in the late autumn rains.

I know that you’re not a fan of our late king, Old Cock, but one thing that even you have to agree on is that he was a military genius. Defending on our bank, we had a higher, better-drained bank, but on the Southern Shore, you were waiting in Velen. In the swamp. He was there for a couple of days and I do not doubt that that was enough time for the swamp smell and the insects to start getting into everyone’s armour and make it all unpleasant.

I don’t know about the politics of the situation, but it was inevitable that he was going to have to attack.

And attack he did. As textbook a thing as ever I have seen. He led his men into an attack, infantry first to take the crossing, form a beachhead and then he would follow with his knights to clear the space. He was Temerian so he had the same weakness that those Toussaint folk of yours have where they are so very certain of the invulnerability of charging Knights that they don’t see the issues involved with that.

We defended the crossing for a bit before falling back in good order. He saw it as a retreat and attacked hard, as we had expected and wanted. As he attacked, we rained arrows and bolts on him from our infantry but when he got to the other bank, our trap was ready for him. As he emerged, we charged and penned him in. All of our army was fighting against the relatively few numbers that he had managed to get across.

Slaughter isn’t the word for it.

Aleksy shook his head and smiled at the memory for a long moment.

I don’t know about your level of education on these kinds of things me old mucker, but there are some truths that we all know about.

A new army is like a newly forged blade. When you gather a group of men together and take them into combat, there is absolutely no way of knowing how they are going to react. The best-trained, best-equipped men… veterans of multiple combats can shatter and break. Just as how a smith is never sure until he takes the new blade and tests it against the training dummy. A new blade will either strike true or it will break.

It doesn’t matter if the smith worked carefully, followed the techniques as passed down to him by his master from his master and so on to the first smiths. It doesn’t matter if the ore was true and the tools were well made. There is always the danger that during the heat, or during the hammering, something will go wrong and the blade can shatter at the first blow.

And sometimes the opposite is true. A blade forged by an apprentice from the offcuts of the master can hold an edge for years of combat.

I mean… I am forced to admit that I don’t know if any of that is true, old boy, but that’s how it was taught to me by me tutor.

So there we were. A brand new rebellion. We had come together from all the different parts of Redania. Veterans stood alongside green troops. Some of us were in old armour and some of us were in makeshift armour that we had put together from pans and folded blankets. We had no idea how we were going to react to that first action. Absolutely no idea.

We were as prepared as we were going to be. We had the terrain for it, the morale for it and many of us had the training for it.

But until you fight your opponent, you just don’t know. We were nervous. Of course, we were. We were nervous, completely unsure about what was going to happen.

And then, in the moment. Our enemy had arrived where we knew he was going to arrive. He had attacked in the only way that he could, in a way that we knew he was going to attack. And we defended according to our own tactics and strategy and it all came together in the way that it should.

Oh, my friend. It was glorious. That feeling of righteousness as we watched them trying to flee back over the crossing and we chased them. We knew that we could do it. We told ourselves that the Eternal Flame blessed our cause. We cheered for the King and for the Queen. For the first time in a long time, cries of “LONG LIVE RADOVID” were heard on a battlefield.

We had beaten them. We had shown the rest of the North that it could be done. That they had nothing to fear and that this was our moment. This was the moment that we could take it to our enemies and this was the proof that our cause was just.

I can still feel that feeling now if I close my eyes. Just for a moment. I can still hear those cries and those cheers echoing inside my helmet as I lifted my visor and held my own mace aloft with my voice joining those of my comrades.

Eternal Flame… it was beautiful.

It sounds so foolish here in my comfortable little cell in the Imperial Compound. But in the heat of that moment… my heart pounded for the joy of it.

The account is as accurate as an eye-witness account could be. It misses some of the detail of the matter but that is largely how the battle went.

The Temerian forces lined up on one side of the crossing, the rebellious forces lined up on the other side of the crossing and then they both waited. We can’t get any accounts from the Temerian side because those men that might have been part of the thinking and command structure of that battle are either dead or desperately attempting to pretend that they had nothing to do with it, or that they were just following their feudal orders and had no choice but to obey.

Anyone that was in the command tent and didn’t try and talk the entire matter out, shared Lord Bernier’s guilt it would seem.

The assessment of the matter seems to be that Count Bernier was trying to make a name for himself and although he might have been a talented unit leader or company commander, he had no idea what to do when he was commanding a large-scale engagement. There is going to be more military assessment and analysis of what he did, but in short, he attacked a well-sited military defensive position from a place of weakness. The forces were roughly even, if not Bernier had the advantage, and if they had met on an open field then the action might have gone the other way, but the weakness of the terrain and the fact that Bernier had no choice other than to attack without his forces succumbing to sickness, meant that he was doomed before the first order was given.

I suspect that he was fortunate enough to have died on the field. He tried to be a “lead from the front” kind of military commander in the same way that Foltest had been. He led a charge across the river to find himself hemmed in on all sides. The Temerians couldn’t break out and bring their cavalry to bear. All they could do was just stand there and withstand charge after charge from the Rebellious Redanians.

He died there, somewhere. His body was found, his armour crushed so that he fair exploded out of each end. His still recognisable breastplate was sent back to Vizima by way of the defeated army. The rebels refused to look after the Temerian wounded so the Temerians had to carry the wounded back with them.

Through the marshlands of Velen.

Baroness Strenger took in the wounded but refused to accept responsibility for any of the actions. She made the surviving nobles swear oaths that she would not be implicated and rode to Vizima with them to hand them over along with her own commanders and the Nilfgaardian scouting officers that were using Crow’s Peak as a site for being able to watch the Rebels efforts.

The reception of this loss was received as though it was the disaster that it was back in Vizima.

Why was it such a disaster?

Aleksy’s declaration is true. I have had the same lesson from a tutor about a new army being an armed force that needs to be properly forged. There are numerous military treatises on the subject of the first battle needing to result in a victory. That first victory is important. The first action is a vital one and cannot be discounted. Count Bernier had given the rebels their first victory. Sam had declared that his plan revolved around proving to the world that the Imperial war machine was not as invulnerable as everyone thought it was. That was a central part of his schemes. It was a piece of strategy that the Empress and her advisors had predicted and were working to make sure that they could overwhelm the rebellion with overwhelming force.

But Count Bernier was lacking in patience and as such, he ignored the orders that he had been given and rode out to meet the enemy. There is even analysis which suggests that he honestly expected the Rebellion to cross the river to attack him. Otherwise, why else would he have waited to attack?

“If you are going to attack, then fucking well get on with it.” Was one military assessment.

But Bernier didn’t. He waited. No more reinforcements were coming. There were no more men or supplies. He was never going to be stronger than he already was. But he waited.

More charitable accounts were suggesting that people deserted him. That he was expecting friends and colleagues to come and reinforce him but chickened out of it when it became clear that the political wind was turning against him. Men who stayed at court and listened to the assessment of Bernier and realised that to ride after him was political and literal suicide.

Or they were secret enemies that were hanging Bernier out to dry.

We will never know, because any that might have fallen into that category are now swearing that they had nothing to do with it and would never have discounted the Empress and the Queen’s orders in such a way.

So regardless of anything else, Bernier had he survived, was in real danger when he would have returned. But that wasn’t the thing that really caused him to be destroyed…

The thing that tipped him over the edge from being a man who would have been exiled, fined and otherwise punished, to be the man whose wife and children were promptly arrested and executed….

His wife was beheaded, and his eldest son who had followed his father in the adventure had been one of those that had returned, was tortured and had his tongue pulled out before he was locked in a cage to die of exposure. His younger son was still on his family’s lands and was arrested before a merciful Queen Anais decided that he would be beheaded.

I understand that some other sons died in the earlier wars while his two daughters were married to Bernier’s cronies. As they are legally no longer his daughters I understand that they will survive, but they and their husbands will be watched closely.

The line of Bernier is to be expunged, his medals and belongings will be sold and I understand that his lands will be divided up between more loyal lords.

There was briefly an argument to say that his lands should be added to lands that I would be overseeing but they are in the middle of Temeria which would make things problematic.

But that thing that turned him into a man guilty of treason was that his forces carried Nilfgaardian colours. Meaning that they marched on behalf of the Empress.

Again, I am trying really hard to be charitable to what was happening here but the fact that this action almost certainly made my rescue and the destruction of the rebellion either delayed, or certainly more difficult, makes that really hard.

But I am a historian and it is my duty to…

Fuck it.

People are trying to say that it was a tactic. That it was an attempt to intimidate the enemy into falling back and surrendering before it was all over. If this was the case I can easily imagine the officers and Knights of the army congratulating each other and telling themselves that they were being very clever.

But according to Aleksy, all that meant was that to the rebels, they had fought the Imperials and won. Which meant, in turn, that it had proven all of the former military of Redania right. If Radovid had been allowed to survive then Redania would have held the Pontar crossings against the Imperial Invaders. Meaning that those conspirators that arranged the death of Radovid were traitors looking to secure their own power, rather than men and women who were trying to end a dangerous conflict before it took more lives.

My time in the castle as a prisoner becomes increasingly blurred and hazy in my memory. According to my doctors, this is only natural and the blame for this can be laid at the feet of many things. Not only the horrific events but also the malnutrition, the infections in my bloodstream and the pulsating magic in the air. But it seems to me that I remember a time when the conspirators were walking around with smug expressions. They were grinning at each other and smiling, laughing and joking.

I now wonder if this was the moment where all of that lines up. It would certainly track that this was the case.

So ends the account of the Battle of the Crossing. If there is any benefit to what happened there, it was that it made the Rebellion overconfident. But that is a small victory when it comes to the fact that so many good, decent men of Temeria lost their lives to the ambition of one overconfident Lord of Temeria.

-

I wasn’t going to talk about this here. I didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it but, again, it’s the kind of thing where I’m not sure that I can avoid talking about it.

Whether I want to or not, it is clear that my life is now a public one. I will never again be able to wander down the street for an ale in Oxenfurt and expect to be able to eat a Pork Bun on one of the benches outside and watch the pretty girls walk by.

I will never be able to stay in a quiet inn and enjoy a bowl of the common pot stew. I will never sleep outside, nor will I be able to slip into a place quietly and unobtrusively. I am an important man, a powerful man and with that, comes certain expectations and responsibilities. I am a public figure and so, these things are of interest.

I know this because many of you have written to me regarding the growing gulf between Kerrass and me. I have been told that I need to be patient and that Kerrass went through his own things in the aftermath of the Rebellion.

I agree.

I have been told that I need to be understanding and that I need to expect that Kerrass will come to me in his own time.

That is where you start to lose me. I have been waiting for Kerrass to come to me in his own time for months now. And in those times when we have previously been estranged, he has only come back because he had someone yell at him first.

He is my friend. Dearer to me than my brothers. More responsible for me being the man that I am today than my parents, my tutors and everything else in between put together. We have shared everything that two men can share except for women and only then because neither of our tastes ran in that direction.

Since I woke up in a surgeon’s tent. Since I was captive in the cathedral on temple isle, a patient and later guest in the Rosemary & Thyme, lifted to power in Vizima and now a lord of Redania and the greater Nilfgaardian Empire a short ride away from Oxenfurt.

Ever since then, I have wanted two people.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to sit and talk with my sister. I wanted, and still want, to bury my face in her shoulder and for the two of us to mourn our family and everything that has happened. That time will come when everything is rebuilt. I want to get drunk with friends and spend time that is not…

But I have wanted two people. One is the woman that I love, Ariadne. I want to see her smile, hear her laugh and I desperately, desperately want to hold her hand.

The other is Kerrass.

I needed my friend through all of that. I needed his strength so that I could lean on him, get his advice and borrow his strength. And I wanted to be there for him in return. That is friendship. I wanted to offer my advice. I wanted to make him laugh and help lift him out of his pits of despair and depression. I wanted to be there for my friend and I wanted him to be there for me. We have been there for each other through the darkest times and I needed my friend now as well.

And he wasn’t there.

I had asked for him. I had written numerous times. I had sent messages and I was not alone in doing so. But he had gone into the wild. At first, he had been hunting the last of the feral vampires that were no longer in the control of Ariadne after she had been freed from Sam’s influence. Then he was in the business of hunting down the Necrophages and corpse eaters that always accompany the armies as they travel this way and that. And then he had just… not been there.

Finally, with a certain amount of encouragement, or goading depending on your point of view, I had sent for Kerrass in my official capacity.

And finally, escorted by troops, all but a prisoner…

Kerrass came.

I was in a meeting at the time. And to be honest, I couldn’t tell you what the meeting was for. After a while, I have found that all of these meetings that I am involved in can seem to be ever so important at the time. Real life and death kinds of crises and then, a day later, you struggle to remember what the meeting was about. I was managing to exert some strength by the simple virtue of the fact that I could not go to anyone when a meeting was required, people had to come to me.

There is a simple domination trick where people exert their power over you by making you go to them. I had been summoned, or invited, on several different occasions by several different men who were trying to exert influence over the new Duke. Suggesting that I could ride out to meet them and take part in activities for which I am obviously unsuited.

But my capacity as a well-known crippled man, despite my slow progress towards recovery, meant that this was impossible. And every time someone tried to do that kind of thing, it was recorded as an insult to me and there were various mechanisms by which my allies were taking the offending people to task.

I do not enjoy the process. I want to be friendly to everyone and make people happy. I also know that this is a quick route to being regarded as weak and as such, I need to be strong and gain their respect before I allow myself to be friendly.

But I was in one of those meetings. Probably discussing something like where the new watch towers were going to be built or which particular road was going to be repaired first. That kind of thing.

And then my secretary, the little Yukki-Onna approached me with a note. People never come in and tell me something, they always come in and hand me a note.

I read the note to say that Kerrass was outside. I nodded, thanked her and handed the paper back. I sometimes wonder what she does with all of the pieces of paper that used to have something written on them. Maybe she burns them.

I finished the meeting so that I didn’t insult the people that I was speaking to and then when they had all left, I took a deep breath and nodded to the guard.

Kerrass pushed through the entrance to my pavilion and stood there.

It was an interesting moment. On the one hand, I was still so very pleased to see him alive. I still have a very vivid memory of the wet cracking sound that was made as Ariadne took hold of his head and twisted it to one side. I remember the red liquid leaking out of his mouth and the light fading from his eyes as he just lay there.

And here he was… alive.

For just a moment, my heart swelled. Tears returned to my eyes and my breath shortened. I do not weep as often now as the work has taken the place of all of that emotion. There are still moments, but they are becoming fewer. But suddenly as I sat behind my desk looking up at my dearest friend, all of that fear and hurt and joy and relief came rushing back. I wanted to leap to my feet and wrap my arms around him in a hug.

Or throttle him, the line between the two was not large.

He looked the same as he ever did. In his brown leather armour with the metal sewn into the more vulnerable areas. He was wearing his heavy weather coat and I could see the belts that crisscrossed his chest that were providing the basis for his sword harness and the potion bottles that he would be carrying with him.

I rather thought that his coat and armour might be on the newer side of things but I couldn’t tell for certain. The first thought that crossed my mind was that he looked good.

And then I realised that he did not look good at all.

He looked… drawn. Paler, thinner and more hollow-eyed. He was… jittery. His eyes were everywhere, checking the corners of the pavilion and seeing if there was anyone else in the place with us. He was on edge and I could see his hands clenching and unclenching.

My first urge was to check with him that he was alright. I wanted to tell him to set down and take it easy. I wanted to demand to know why he hadn’t been taking care of himself. I wanted to send for a Doctor, a Sorceress or someone with an alchemy kit so that we could arrange for him to take his potions and help him recover from whatever it was that he was going through.

I was worried for my friend. Glad to see him. Happy to see him and just wished that I could get up and show him that. My mouth opened with all of those emotions, along with those words of frustration and even anger that it had taken so long and my official order to get him to come at all. My mind fought with my heart to get the first words out before Kerrass beat me to it.

“Well?” he demanded. “You summoned me.”

The cold fury in his voice rocked my back in my chair as though he had slapped me.

“Of all people,” he hissed. “Of all people, of all of the lords of the land. You should know what that means to me. You summoned me as if I am some servant that is to be pushed around and ordered around to meet your whims and… whatever the fuck it is that you want.”

I stared at him. I swear to the Eternal Flame that it was as though my Father was in the room and I felt as though I was about eight years old having to explain myself to someone who was raging at me unfairly.

“Well?” he demanded. “You summoned me so here I am. What is it that you would wish for, Oh Lord Freddie the magnificent? Do you want me to fetch you something to eat and drink? Would you like a fresh pillow for your back or would you like me to wipe your arse for you? I draw the line at sucking your dick for you but I suppose you might want me to summon some whore to see to your needs?”

The sheer shock of it all had driven me back into my seat.

“I…” I tried.

He put his hands on his hips and just stood there. Frustration and anger radiated out from him.

At the time I didn’t see it. I couldn’t register it and I still don’t know for certain what was going on in his head. But I remember his eyes.

With the logic of distance and having talked it out with various people I can only say this.

Kerrass was angry, frustrated and hurt that I had summoned him to a place that he didn’t want to go. There was hate in him.

But it looked as though his eyes were screaming. As though they were looking out of another man’s body and desperately horrified at what they were seeing.

“For the Goddess’ sake Freddie….” He began.

For a moment, a chill ran down my spine. The flames in the fire bowl that keep my pavilion warm in the spring rains seemed to roar up a little higher, glowing a little brighter and as they did so, I swear that the shadows lengthened.

“You of all people should know what it means to summon a Witcher,” he raged, I don’t think he noticed the fire. “You are not entitled to my time. You are not entitled to the sword or the work of a Witcher just because you are a Duke now. I go where I will. I work where I will and I will NOT bow to the whims of such as you. How dare you? I deserve better than this at your hands, you greedy, entitled little…”

From somewhere, I have no idea where my own fury was kindled.

“Fuck you,” I told him and for all I know, not only was I yelling at Kerrass, but I was yelling at my Father too.

“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. How dare I? How dare you? You arrogant piece of shit. You promised me Kerrass. You promised me that you would return and that we would talk. You promised me that you would come back and you never did. We are supposed to be friends and this is how you greet me?

“You promised that you were going to stand by me. You promised that you were going to be there for me. You told me you were going to come back Kerrass. Where the fuck have you been? Why didn’t you come back?”

I swear that I heard a woman’s voice laughing. “You tell the fucker,” she said, laughing harshly.

“All I wanted was my friend,” I told him. “That’s all. All I wanted. But you fuck off. You ignore every message. You don’t come and see me. You literally go in completely the other direction. You’ve been hunting fucking ghouls. Ghouls Kerrass. Soldiers can hunt ghouls if they’re careful. Yes, the Vampires needed hunting. But they can be hunted by any fucking Witcher and there were several in the area. Whereas you could have been my friend. I needed my FRIEND Kerrass. Where the fuck were you?”

“Don’t you speak to me like I’m some servant.” He snarled at me. Angry enough that my secretary opened the flap that separated my area from hers and checked what was happening.

“I’M NOT SPEAKING TO YOU LIKE A SERVANT. I’M SPEAKING TO YOU LIKE A FRIEND THAT’S BEEN AN ASSHOLE.” I screamed at him.

That seemed to rock him a bit.

“Flame Kerrass. I love you like a brother. I wanted you to stand next to me on my wedding day. Where were you? When everyone around me wants something I needed someone to rely on. I needed my friend. I needed you Kerrass where the fuck were you?”

“I do not answer to you.” He said again. He fed it with his anger. “I go where I will, I do what I will and as I recall, you promised that you would do as you’re told and not question…”

“That agreement was made between a lost little boy and a Witcher that was heartsick and dying. We were different people then Kerrass. That was before we were friends and have I ever, ever let you down? We both know that I haven’t. I needed you Kerrass and you fuck off. You left me. You didn’t come back. Where were you? You say that you deserve better from me. I DESERVE BETTER FROM YOU.”

He had nothing to say about that. The feeling of his eyes screaming at me continued.

“When I was free, I sent word,” I told him. “When I was recovering, I sent word. When my future was being decided, I sent word. When I was elevated, I sent word. I wanted you next to me Kerrass. This is not a reward, it is a duty and yes it comes with some perks along with the responsibilities and I wanted to share those things with my best friend and you stayed away. Sleeping Beauty sent for you, she loves you Kerrass and I know what happened because the messenger came into my tent and told me that you took the letter from the young woman that loves you and was telling you that she loved you and that she wanted to seduce you on my wedding night and see what the two of you would make of each other. You took that letter and you threw it on the fire.”

He stared at me, his eyes boggling at me.

“WE NEEDED YOU KERRASS.” I wanted to roar it but my voice cracked at the end. “We needed you and you turned your back on us. I need you. I need my friend. This is the hardest thing I’m ever going to do, possibly the most important thing I’m ever going to do and I wanted my friend next to me. I sent word to you that I needed you and you THREW IT IN MY FACE.”

I realised that my face was wet and I wiped my face angrily.

“You’re giving up Kerrass,” I told him. “You’re my friend, I love you and I care about you more than I care for myself and sometimes it is a friend’s duty to say the unpleasant thing. You are burning your life down around you. Friends, loved ones. You’re driving us all away and I don’t know why. I can’t make you tell me. But I deserve better from you than just being driven away, Kerrass. You say that you deserve better from me. I deserve better from you. You are giving up, the same way that you swore that you wouldn’t and I will not stand for it. I won’t let you do it Kerrass. I will not let you kill yourself.

“So yes. I summoned you. I need you and it is the only way I could get hold of you. Fuck you if you can’t see that.”

He stood there, staring down at me where I met his gaze.

I broke first and turned away wiping my sleeve across my face.

“Fuck.” I muttered.

“I don’t have to stay here and listen to this,” he turned to leave.

“Yes, you do,” I insisted, struggling to try and get to my feet, absolutely intending to go after him.

“No, I don’t.” He turned and snarled, his anger pushing me back. Once again, I thought I saw fangs. “No, I don’t. You have summoned me, Lord, and unless you have a task for me or unless you intend to throw me in the dungeon I am going to leave. And if you try to take me to the dungeon, then I will fight. I notice that you don’t trust me enough to have weapons with me in your august presence, Lord of ruins.” He gave a parody of a bow.

Once again, I thought I was looking at someone else wearing my friend’s face.

“I mean, honestly Freddie, I’ve seen better pigsties than that castle that you are supposed to live in. Your people are living in poverty and your lands are piss, shit and mud. You deserve to be left with the monsters and I would not stay here for one moment longer than I have to. I will leave you to your stinking, rotten, remains of tyranny so that you can Lord it over the ruins and the dead that you hold so dear over…”

“ENOUGH.” I roared it. “Fine, if you want to drive me away then fine. You want a job, then I will give you a job. Find her for me Kerrass. You owe us both that much at least. Find her for me, come back and guide me to her. I will pay you whatever sum is reasonable and you can jam the money and our friendship up your ass as far as I’m concerned. Find her.”

“You would find better whores…” He tried.

“Say no more words,” I ordered him. “Say nothing more. Take the job and that job can be the last business between us. I will pay you and when we come back, there can either be a final parting or you can be my friend.”

I stared at him for a long moment before I could no longer hold in a sob.

“I just want my friend back Kerrass,” I told him. “My friend and my love. Come back Kerrass, let us help you and…”

“I don’t need your help.” He snarled. “I don’t want your help. I survived for decades without you and I will survive decades more after you are dead and buried. I will find your bitch for you Lord Coulthard and then I will leave the two of you behind me.”

“Who are you lying to Kerrass?” I asked him, but he was gone and I finished the thought by myself.

I have not heard from Kerrass since then. I still have word of him travelling this way and that way across my lands and in the neighbouring ones. He asks for signs of Ariadne’s passing so he seems to be hunting for her in earnest.

I am now convinced that what I saw in him was his self-loathing coming back to the fore. I don’t know why it has come back but as time passes, my sadness fades and my anger at him grows. We are all waiting for him to come back but I fear that this time he has gone too far.

I think he is deliberately trying to drive me away from him. Me and the others that love him. I don’t know why. I am afraid. I think he is in the process of giving up and this time, he does not want my help.

I hope that he finds Ariadne first and that I get to see him again to talk to him properly.

I hope…

I hope for many things.