A Scholar's travels with a Witcher

(A/N: It seems fitting that the Spelling/Grammar checker shits the bed on one of the last chapters. It would seem that my chapters are too long for the precious little thing to be able to cope with it. So I’ve made do with the onboard Google docs one. Far from perfect but please forgive the odd mistake. Thanks)

I don’t want to do this.

I wish I could tell you how long I have been sitting here staring at those words. That first sentence that I have written in Flame knows how long, before taking up a quill again to follow on from them.

I don’t want to do this, but the other day, Ariadne told me that I was being quite neglectful and that I should do as I promised. Given that at the moment, I would do anything at all to make that woman smile, I resolved to move to my new writing desk and take out my new quills that I must have someone else sharpen for me nowadays. I gathered some sheets of parchment and some blotting sand and unstoppered a small bottle of ink and then before I could stop myself, I had dipped the quill and written that first sentence.

I don’t want to do this and I am really tired.

These are not the first words I have written since you last heard from me. I regularly write letters and read reports as well as writing to the Empress regarding the progress of that small patch of her realm that I govern as well as responses to the questions from Lord Voorhis and people on both Regency councils of which I am a part. I maintain a lively correspondence with several people in the church hierarchy and powerful men and women elsewhere in the realms and I regularly read and write letters to the tutors that have been appointed for the young Count de Angraal.

But this is the first time that I have written here. At this desk. Those things are written in my office. A large room that I feel sure I have copied the layout from some other office that I have been in. In that room, I have a large desk although not as large as some would have had me make it. It is surrounded by chairs for people to sit in while we discuss various things that need to be discussed. There is a fireplace with several comfortable chairs and footstools arranged around it.

There is a large, dining-style table with chairs for other meetings. I have a drinks cabinet, and a platter of snacks for when people need them. I insist upon jugs of water and wine for the quenching of people’s thirst and a candle that is always burning with a small stack of tapers next to it for people to light their tobacco pipes.

I have never enjoyed the habit myself as I find it makes a room stuffy. My intolerance for that stuffiness has only grown since everything happened and after such a person has left, then shutters must be opened and I tend to need some time to do something else. But I will not put that on other people and if some people think more clearly with smoke moving through their lungs, then so be it.

I also have a prayer stand where I kneel and deliver my confessions to Father Anchor. Now Deacon Anchor. I am unsure where that puts him in the church hierarchy, but it seems to have been a political appointment more than a recognition of virtue, so certain members of the church hierarchy don’t get upset at his youth and lack of convention.

His wife finds this endlessly amusing.

But this, where I am writing to you now, is in a separate room in my still being rebuilt and renovated castle. This was supposed to be where I carried out my scholarly work. It is a place lined with shelves for scrolls and books. The desk is much larger as when it was put together, it was generally expected that I would want to spread the papers out and make a mess. There are other chairs for people who would come to discuss… whatever it was that I was working on at the time, but otherwise, it is just there for the work.

Those shelves stand empty. The desk is all but clear.

I feel cold.

But Ariadne is right. I was given a duty and I must fulfil that duty to the best of my abilities. After all, when an Empress writes to you to remind you of that element of your duty, you would do well to listen.

That is a literal thing by the way. She wrote to me. One of the obstacles to me writing about life at the moment is that everything must go through Intelligence, Ameiko and several other people before it gets to a publisher and when Intelligence read the letter from her Imperial Majesty, he was laughing from his belly and told me that I should publish it.

It was written in a flowing script, typical of one of her secretaries. Not the private secretary that all but runs her life in the same way that Ameiko runs mine, but one of the men and women who write those orders, laws and letters that she just casually tosses aside when the need strikes her. Someone notes it down in a similar shorthand to what I use and then a scribe writes it out using “The Empress’ script” which is the way it has been agreed by everyone that the Empress writes. This letter had been written and then given back to the Empress to check. She had then covered the paper in little annotations and comments.

Also doodles and smiley faces including one particularly graphic little sketch where she sketched a figure that was obviously meant to be Lord Voorhis being sodomised by a troll.

To our most trusty and well-loved brother and subject.

Lord Professor Sir Frederick von Coulthard, Duke of the Pontar delta, Lord Protector of Novigrad and the faith, Count of the Northern Forest, de Angral and Coulthard, Knight of the White Cliffs and the Western Downs of Toussaint. Regent of Angraal, Hersir of the Black Boar.

(Ciri: You almost have as many titles as me. We shall have to do something about that. Might have to amalgamate a few or something)

We send you greeting.

First, allow us to express our gratitude to you for the duties that you are performing in the Northern parts of our Realm. Every day we (Ciri: meaning the royal we) receive reports of the good work you are doing securing trade routes and ensuring that people feel safe. Also, your work on the Regency councils of Temeria and Redania has been invaluable.

(Ciri: We particularly enjoy the letters demanding your immediate resignation from both councils in disgrace followed by your immediate and painful execution)

However, despite our knowledge of the immediacy of some of your duties as well as the urgency of some of the others, we cannot help but notice that some of your other duties are somewhat neglected. We cannot help but notice that we are still lacking your opinions on some of the proposed changes to the reintroduction of Witchers onto the continent.

But also your account of the rebellion is incomplete.

(Ciri: I’m sorry Freddie, I know that this is painful and difficult, but the reason why we need your account of the aftermath of what happened is still the same reason that it was back when the order was first given. We must tell people what happened and what is still happening so that we can get… so that you can get the truth out there before the lies start to calcify in people’s memory. I am sorry.)

We must insist upon this matter sir.

(Ciri: If for no other reason than if you do this and finish it all off, then people will stop bothering ME about it.)

We look forward to reading your account of the matter.

From there the letter went on to other business that is not fit for public consumption.

She is right though. Not only did I promise her an account of what happened in the aftermath of my brother’s rebellion as well as some analysis of it all from the historian’s perspective, but I also promised all of you. And whatever else might be true, I still owe that to all of you.

So I apologise.

So here I am. Several months have passed since I last wrote to you and it will probably be some time from now that all of this will be published. So Flame only knows when you will read it. But I think it is safe to assume that it will be the height of summer, making it some three months since I last wrote to you.

The castle is still far from complete. The central core of the keep is rebuilt meaning that Ariadne and I have our quarters and the central offices of the vast bureaucracy that I now command have a headquarters. There is still a lot that needs to be built. We need further rooms for guests of high rank as it is almost certain that when the Empress comes North again she will want to spend at least one night at Coulthard Castle. There is also still a need for the chapel to be rebuilt properly from the mess that the rebellion made of it.

Not Sam’s fault this time. It seems that even he, at the height of his madness, didn’t desecrate that part of the keep, but some rebel knights sought refuge there and tried to hide behind church laws of sanctuary to get away with their treason. They took hostages with them and it got unpleasant.

I am having the workers concentrate on the important pieces though. We have the centre of our civic rule, even if our great hall is still lined with scaffolding and on those occasions where I must hold court, the petitioners have to yell over the sounds of chisels on stone. But after that, we need a place where we can defend.

Despite the imagery of Coulthard Castle being the centre of the rebellion, refortifying the place makes some people nervous. We need outer walls, we need siege engines, methods of provision and lines of logistics. It also needs to be a place where we can house and train troops, cavalry and infantry.

And there needs to be room for innovation.

I have seen the plans that the Dwarven and Temerian Architects have drawn up and they are deliberately leaving the room so that in the future, when new techniques and engines of war are produced, then Coulthard Castle can move with the times.

I doubt that the place will ever be finished, those men and dwarves will be tinkering with it until there is no need for fortresses like this one.

But I told them that I want at least a couple of outer walls properly rebuilt before they can move back to the keep and civic buildings. Even if walls are no longer the best at providing security in the future, there is nothing like the sight of a big thick wall to provide the feeling of safety.

They nodded sagely and went to work. My Imperial General currently in charge of building the First Northern Army has also seen the plans that they have in mind. At first, he was afraid, but then he remembered that this was his fortress. Then he smiled and started to add to the plans himself.

So that is where I write from. Like the last few efforts, this missive is being written as and when I get the chance. The Empress’ opinion notwithstanding, I still have many duties to take care of and although, now that I’ve started, I want to get the job done as quickly as possible, there are other things that are more urgent and take precedence.

So where did I leave you?

Much to my dismay, it would seem that there are two strands to this entire thing. There is the catching up of the reader with my public life. The lives of my friends and loved ones and the state of myself personally. That is the first strand and it is more than a little bit concerning to me, speaking as a scholar and historian, that this is by far the most popular strand. People want to know how I am doing, how Ariadne is doing, and Emma and Kerrass and Laurelen and so on.

People want to know about the marriage between Lord Helfdan and Queen Cerys as well as the budding romance between Knight Commander Syanna and Knight Captain de la Tour.

I wish I could communicate with you just how painful it all is. The short answer is that things are not going well. The long answer…

Well…

Ariadne and I spent a long time weeping in each other’s arms. A long time. We would get to the point that we would tire ourselves out before one of us would start again and then the other would try and give comfort before inevitably the tears would restart.

We were in the dark for a long time. Long enough that the glow from the webbing started to die out. I am pretty sure that one of the spiders was sent to check on us as I seem to recall some kind of skittering at one point but beyond that, my overwhelming memory of that time is of holding an incredibly frail… skeleton really as it shook and trembled with emotion and I was far from in a much better state.

I don’t know how long it took us to start to come out of it all, but I remember the moment when Ariadne shifted. She sort of twisted around in my arms and that brought her weight down onto my wooden hand.

“Your hand is hard,” she commented in surprise.

“Yes,” I agreed, feeling a little stupid. “The hand couldn’t be saved. Neither could my feet.”

“Oh, Freddie.” She tried to shift a little so that she could reassure me a little.

“We can’t stay,” I told her. “There are people waiting.”

“Freddie, I’m not sure I can…”

“Move?”

“No… I… I did so much. I killed so many… People won’t…”

I could feel her heading towards tears again and I stopped her.

“Our people, yours and mine,” I tightened my grip, “Our people are desperate to see you again. There is always a queue of people around the castle who know what you did for them and what you sacrificed. The people of Angral also miss their lady. I had the courts weigh the matter and they all agree that you were not at fault. Ariadne, listen to me.”

I took her head in my hands and tried to stare into her eyes.

“You do not belong down here in the dark. Neither of us does. Let me take you back up. We will help you to be strong again. I will marry you and we will love each other the way we always said we would. I love you. I need you.”

There was silence for a long while.

“Apart from anything else,” I tried for levity, “if we leave you down here too much longer then Maleficent will decide to dig you out herself.”

She gave a little bark of laughter, not quite a human sound.

“The new Count of Angraal asks for his Aunt Spider every day,” I told her, reaching for the most telling barb that I could. “Emma misses you and Laurelen wanted you to know how proud she was of just how much you fought.” It took me a moment to think of something else. “And the Lodge of …”

“I am afraid Freddie,” she told me in a wobbly voice.

“Of what?”

“That someone else will…”

She didn’t need to finish. I knew exactly what she was afraid of. She was afraid of being enslaved again and becoming an instrument of someone else’s will.

“Then come with me and help us make sure that that happens to no one else, ever again,” I told her. I didn’t want that to be the reason that she came back though. “Come with me because I love you and if you don’t, then I shall stay here with you until…”

“Until what, until you starve to death?” I thought I could hear some of her old humour. “I could make the spiders feed you.”

I tried to push that image down, along with my breakfast.

“If that’s what it takes to never be parted from you,” I told her, “Then bring on the goo, or whatever else it will be that they feed me with.”

“You would not enjoy that,” she told me. I could almost feel her preparing herself for an ordeal. “And we will do something about your hand.”

“I’m game,” I told her. “People keep promising that they’re going to figure something out but then they never do.”

She harrumphed.

“I don’t have the engagement ring any more,” she sobbed after a long moment. “I would have wanted to leave it for you or make some other… idiotic poetic gesture. But someone took it from me.”

I chuckled.

“Then I shall have another one made. I am a powerful man now. Duke of the Pontar no less,”

“Really?” I hoped that I wasn’t imagining the interest in her voice.

“Really, from Novigrad all the way to Dol Blathanna, Angral and Angraal are my vassals now, you are marrying up in the world. You should take my offer or someone else will have me married. There has, once again, been a suggestion that I am eligible enough to marry the Empress nowadays.”

“You would be better off with her.” She was in danger of sinking again.

“No,” I told her, “no I would not. I do not love her, I love you. I have always loved you. From the moment that I saw you in that dress in the courtyard of Angraal, no… before that. From the moment that I saw the hurt in your eyes when I accused you of slaughtering that village. Or before that, when I heard the fascination and interest in your voice. You are the woman for me, no other.

“I once joked that one day, one of us would try and give back the engagement ring and the other would finally take it. Well, I am telling you now, I will not take it back. I will marry you, even if I have to drag a priest down here to do the deed.”

She giggled at the image.

“And if this is to be my marriage bed then so be it,” I told her, making a play of prodding the stone floor. “I could get used to it, some blankets and so on.”

“Oh shush,” she told me.

We lapsed into silence for a long while.

“I am very weak, weaker than I was in the tower,” she whispered.

“Then I shall help you to be strong,” I told her.

And I did.

It was harder work than I could have imagined. Even with the help of the spiders. In the end, I was able to hold onto the back of one of the spiders that chittered at me in tones that I hoped were meant to be comforting. Ariadne needed to be trussed up back into her cocoon with suitable cushioning before she was dragged out by the spiders working together. They helped me lift her onto the back of one of the spiders before lots of little spiders ran over her and around the body of the larger spider, lashing her in place.

She probably made the climb faster than I did.

When we got to the top, I was better able to pick her up and carry her in her cocoon which helped to be honest. I had to force myself not to think of it as being “bridal fashion,” and even then, I was reminded that I was not long out of my sick bed myself. The journey that had taken me minutes before was enough that I had to stop several times for a rest.

We emerged into the sunlight and I saw that the sun was setting.

The first thing I did, the very first thing I did was to look for Kerrass.

I wanted his help to get Ariadne down the slope, help me get her cleaned up and dressed, the same as I had once done for the love of his life.

Of course, he wasn’t there. The two horses were still there, tied to a bush near where the stream was, but of the Witcher, there was no sign.

I remember hearing a whistling noise.

“Freddie?” Ariadne said quietly, everything from her was a whisper at that moment, “What’s wrong?”

I came back to myself with a thump.

“Nothing,” I told her and realised that I meant it. “I had expected Kerrass to be here to help me.”

“Ah,” she said. There was a wealth of understanding and emotion in that little syllable.

I took a deep breath and settled Ariadne in my arms a little bit firmer. “This is probably going to take a couple of trips and is unlikely to be dignified.”

“I understand,” she breathed the words.

And it did. I worked mechanically. I left Ariadne in the cave mouth, making sure that she was in the rays of the setting sun for warmth. First I carried the pack that I had prepared down to the water. I had wanted to use that pack when I found her, but it was clear that she was in no shape for the contents, first I needed to get her clean.

When I returned, I carried the still-cocooned figure of the woman I love down to the water before gathering some bushwork and setting a fire. I was in an odd position of kind of needing help but wanting to do it all alone.

Taking a small knife and without comment from her, I set about cutting the webbing away from her.

I don’t think she would be too angry with me if I told you that she looked awful. She was essentially a skeleton wrapped in skin.

The tattered remnants of the old dress that she had worn that night, all that time ago, the night that should have been our wedding night, were still hanging from her arms and shoulders. She was covered in old, dried blood, soot ash and other stains that I couldn’t identify and didn’t really want to.

It occurred to me then that this was not the way that I wanted to see her naked for the first time. I mean she wasn’t, but it was a technicality.

The corpse in front of me examined itself.

“I look awful,” she whimpered.

“You should have seen me when I got out of the castle.” I tried for levity.

“I did.”

I didn’t have words for that.

She made some movements towards helping me get it all off her before I carried her into the stream. It was bitterly cold but one of the few benefits of the wooden legs was that I could stand in it and not feel the cold. Ariadne did not complain.

Working together we got her as clean as we could. Then I took out a blanket and dried her off before producing a long, dark green dress. I helped her into the dress and then I had to take a break as I was feeling weak and out of breath.

“I can’t travel like this,” she declared after a while as she again examined herself and the fact that the dress hung off her frame. “I will frighten children.”

“And soldiers,” I agreed, again trying to put some levity in my voice. “But fortunately for us both, I am a scholar and a thinking person so one of the other things in that bag is a large, warm, voluminous travelling cloak. It might look a bit sinister in the dark but even so.”

I decided that my break was over and produced the garment in question, as well as some socks, gloves, some trews and soft riding boots.

I realised as I worked that she was trembling.

“I thought vampires didn’t feel the cold.” I joked.

“We don’t,” she told me, “we know it’s there but… Oh, Freddie. I love you.”

I stopped what I was doing and put my arm around her until the latest batch of sobbing was done. Including my own.

It took me an age to make camp, longer to take some supplies from Kerrass’ horse and make us up a stew. But in doing that, I found the letter that he left me.

It was not long.

“Freddie,” he wrote. “I cannot do this, I am sorry,” and that was it.

I balled it up and threw it in the fire.

Not how I had wanted a friendship to end.

Looking back, I remember feeling sad but kind of… unsurprised. I had not meant to and it was certainly not the intention, but I realised that I had said goodbye to Kerrass a few nights ago on the journey here. That feeling of general sadness has not gone away. I am angry as well. I needed my friend and he had deserted me out of some kind of misguided…

Dammit, I am still angry.

But he is gone now and the longer his absence goes, the less likely it will be that he comes back. And I find that I care less and less.

Ariadne and I sat in silence until the food was ready. I had to feed her and when I was done, I made her promise that she would still be there in the morning, but that I needed to sleep. She had me lay down next to her and we slept in each other’s arms. Again, it occurred to me that this was not the way I wanted our first night together to go.

I did not sleep well, needing to top the fire up several times to keep us warm. Every time, Ariadne would be deeply asleep and not stir.

In the morning we spoke as we waited for Carys to arrive. You couldn’t ride a horse out of the little ravine we were in, you could only lead it and Ariadne was not in a state to do that. And I didn’t want to leave her to fetch help.

So we sat for a long time, waiting.

Carys arrived with a dozen men and her weapons drawn, teeth bared like that cat that she often reminds me of. She saw the pair of us, visibly looked around for Kerrass and scowled. I could see the flash of anger shoot across her face.

All things being equal, I thought she did very well not to have an “I told you so moment.”

Ariadne pulled the hood closer around her face.

There was a delay there as Carys and Ariande had a long conversation. As far as I knew, the two women were not that well known to each other but Carys scowled at me a little before a screen was erected, made out of some tent poles and some blankets before the two women went back into the water and Carys was able to be more thorough with her examination on a female level that I was obviously uncomfortable with.

I took the time to have a look around for signs of Kerrass. More for something to do rather than anything else. I harboured a small hope that he might have been carried off by something to explain his absence or the brevity of his note. Alas, there were no signs of struggle.

I mean, I am no tracker, but Kerrass has taught me a thing or two over the years. And before all those people start… The same people that say that I am a better fighter… or was a better fighter than I think I was, There are more skills involved in tracking someone.

And much to my surprise, tracking Kerrass was actually not that hard. He had clearly waited for a while after tying up the horses before he left through some thick gorse bushes. The tracker with me widened the gap with a long knife and it was plain to see the parts of the undergrowth where a man had forced their way through. We even found some cut branches where Kerrass himself had been forced to cut his way through.

And we found some older cuts.

The story was not hard to deduce.

When Kerrass had first come here he had come in through this gap so he knew that it was here from when he was tracking Ariadne. Then, when he had brought us here, he had intended to leave us the horses and disappear through this gap. The tracker volunteered and went through the gap where he found a narrow, difficult-to-follow goat path but he didn’t go far.

My spirits sank even lower. Kerrass had planned this and had planned to leave us all at this juncture.

In the end, we left that place on the second day, Ariande was tied to a stretcher as we led the horses through the gap and then she was more able to ride in the saddle.

She was horrifically weak though. Far weaker than she had been when she had left her tower that first time. She was quiet too, spending a lot of time lost in her thoughts. We would sit together for an evening and talk in stilted phrases, not really knowing what to talk about.

It was painful going and over and over again I had to tell myself what I had been told. All I had to do was to love her and everything would be alright.

She did tell me that the reason for the weakness was that not only was she trying, and failing apparently, to return to a state of long-term vampire slumber…

They call it “torpor” apparently.

… which is a far from easy process in the first place. But she had been using so much magical power that she had damaged herself. Also, she had not been able to properly sustain herself which had led to more damage. She promised me, rather tearfully, that she would recover in time but she didn’t want to talk about all the things that she had been through and I promised that I would let her talk about it when she was ready.

All I wanted to do was to put my arms around her and tell her that everything was going to be okay, but sometimes, this made her feel uncomfortable. Sometimes she would accept the embrace and sometimes she would ask me not to.

She would weep at those times and more often than not, I would join her in those tears.

She didn’t eat for the first couple of days and then the following evening, she asked Carys and I to carry her away from the camp and to leave her there until she called for us. She also asked us to order the guards not to worry about what they saw in the undergrowth and that the camp was “well-guarded.”

She called for us an hour later and we found the remains of a spring boar next to her. She had taken to wearing the cloak that I had brought for her tightly around herself and with the hood down over her face so that we couldn’t see it. She was like that when we came back. The boar was stripped of everything, meat and offal were all gone, little to no blood around the place and all the bones were broken, brittle and hollow.

I said nothing as I helped Carys carry Ariadne back to the camp. Nor did I say anything the next night. Or the night after when the remains of a sheep were there instead of a boar. Or the night after when it was a cow calf.

The feeling of Ariadne moving away from me continued when Maleficent descended from the skies in a fury, stalking past to me bodily lift Ariadne into an embrace. The two of them sat together for a long time, talking in a language that I didn’t recognise and probably couldn’t reproduce with my limited human mouth.

I wept alone that night.

It was a forlorn procession and the only solace was the fact that, because we were heading back, work started to turn up again and I had something to do. I rode next to Ariadne and I tried to sit with her on an evening except when Maleficent banished me. But the truth was that I had little to do other than brood.

I thought about Kerrass and spent many fruitless hours trying to guess what was going through his mind. I alternated between anger and sadness that he didn’t trust me to talk through what was happening with him. I desperately wanted to discuss the whole situation regarding Ariadne with him, so…

I sunk into a bit of a depression myself and I have no idea how long it took us to get back to the castle.

But whatever else I can say about myself, my friends or the whole situation, my people did me proud that day and I try to tell them that whenever I can.

The state of the castle itself is vastly different from what it used to be. When you saw Coulthard Castle for the first time before, you would walk to it through relatively idyllic farming and hunting countryside. The road was well maintained to help with the movement of merchants and travellers so that Father could feel smug about things.

“It’s in the roads,” he would tell me. “There is no glory at all in being a builder of roads, but if you learn how to have good roads then merchants and travellers will bless your name whenever they come into your lands. If you want to know the quality of the man when you enter their territory, then examine the roads.”

I may say that this advice has rarely sent me the wrong way.

But as you approached Coulthard Castle, you would see people working in the fields and in their villages. I have said before that villagers are always working and the sounds of that work never stop. And that is the music that you would have heard as you approached Coulthard Castle. The repetitive nature of the hammer and the saw. The singing of the men in the fields and the sound of childish laughter as children played in the villages.

Coulthard Castle itself was built onto a large, rocky hill. It was sited well so that the siege engines of the day when it was built, could only approach one wall and that wall would only let you into the first courtyard. The other walls were protected by Catapult and well-drilled archers and arbalists. My Father ran practices and did his best to make sure that that part of the local area was impassable and as such, no siege engine could be grounded there.

The walls were protected by a large ditch all around which has a habit of smelling in the height of summer and the road goes up the hill, lined with pine trees. At the foot of that road was a large open area for the meetings of traders and the like.

The castle itself was divided into three sections, the outer courtyard was by far the largest and that was the courtyard for the horses. That was where the stables lived as well as all of the other hunting paraphernalia that Father wanted and needed. Our stables were extensive and well-equipped.

The second courtyard was the martial courtyard. There were smaller barracks in the keep and the other two courtyards for the men that guarded that particular bit, but otherwise, this was where the soldiers that kept us safe lived.

The third courtyard was for those places that the keep had needed in modern times but that hadn’t been taken into account when the keep was built. There was a bathhouse here and a small hospital that Father had built to house the veterans of the war who had come back wounded. Most of them did some work around the place and the building had been all but deserted except for the most extreme cases as Father, and later Emma had found those veterans who were missing bits of themselves, something to do within the company itself.

And then there was the keep.

As well as this, Sam had added a series of trenches and temporary earthworks and palisades. There were embankments and firing steps and all kinds of things. Mostly it was a maze that was there to distract and upset attackers while also giving a lot of his arrow fodder something to do and somewhere to stand and die.

One of the problems of having a traitor doing things is that you don’t like to give them credit where it is due. The science of siege work is large, complex and ever-evolving. When Coulthard Castle was first built, it all but bankrupted the person building it and as such, Father was able to buy it for a vastly reduced sum. Father renovated it and made it as modern and as military as he could. But the castle was still out of date. Over a couple of decades since then, military science has continued to evolve but castles remain stagnant. We pile things on top of them to try and keep up but sooner or later, the castle becomes a residence and administrative centre rather than anything else.

Sam knew this and his efforts towards fortifying the place and putting up earthworks. He hoped to reduce the threat from Imperial war engines, siege towers and the like. The closer range but more accurate versions of some of the catapults and things.

And whatever else can be said about Sam, and I can say a lot, his efforts did have that benefit and they worked. Some of those ideas have even been implemented in more places and on more fortresses than just mine.

At the moment, Coulthard Castle still looks like a blasted landscape. Open earthworks with men working on them. I am reassured that there will be grass and greenery where it will be safe to do so but in the end, at the moment, it looks like a hellscape.

I wanted Coulthard Castle to be a fortress again. Somewhere to protect the locals that they could be proud of.

Emma hired the best military architects from Temeria and the dwarves of Mahakam and the thing that they have built is not what I envisioned but it is terrifying to stand there and imagine.

The castle is no longer the kind of place that will dominate the skyline. There is an element of this but high towers are increasingly easy to batter down with magic and military science. So instead, the building of fortifications is about obscuring the view of the fortifications. The engineers talk about sight lines rather than ranges to target. They talk about hills and gullies as being more important than the walls and I can see the logic, even while my old-fashioned brain wants to see towers and walls with men standing on top of them.

Again, I stress that this is still a thing. Those things still exist, but there is less of an emphasis placed on them. Coulthard Castle is a place of hillocks and slopes. Earthworks that are better able to absorb catapult impacts and ballista strikes. And if you stood on the outside of it all, you would be forgiven for wondering if there was even still a castle there at all. It looks like a little fort with one, lone solitary tower.

That tower will be all that remains of the original keep. The place was battered with everything that had happened to it, combat and Sam’s remodelling. The Rage of a Dragon and a Vampire is… telling at the best of times. There are plans for the extension of the keep itself as in the future, Coulthard Castle is going to be an important civic centre. An army is going to run out of this place as well as my domain. And before long I would imagine that it will also be one of the Imperial Residences the next time The Empress comes north.

It is a blasted landscape now, the same as it was then. There were no more piles of bodies by then. No massed funeral pyres that were attended by priests and priestesses of all the religions who were there to see to the souls of those who had fallen. Ranks of religious people, organised into companies and regiments, the same as any army.

Nor are there stockpiles of weapons. Or magic users roaming around the place to ensure that the power that Sam had summoned had been dissipated by the efforts of the lodge. I was reassured that some people even meant that as truth.

What there was though, were a lot of people working. Dwarves and trolls working the walls, men digging the ditches and women seeing to the more practical needs of the place. Everyone was dirty, everyone was sweaty and everyone was working hard.

And no matter how much you try and no matter how much you might pay a weather mage to blow fresh air over the place, it is impossible to completely reduce the funk that always exists around a place where there have been mass graves with lime added to the bodies to prevent the spread of disease before the oil and the fire is applied.

There are still some scents of incense that I don’t think I will ever be able to smell again.

Father Anchor even went and found out what they were, the holy scents that had been taken apart to obscure the scent of the dead before advising people not to use those scents in my presence.

But that was the landscape that Ariadne rode back up to the castle in.

Maleficent had flapped off somewhere. I like Maleficent but it is occasionally worth remembering that she is still a dragon and therefore, she gets distracted by shiny objects, metaphorical and literally. She gave Ariadne into my keeping with a wink and a “good luck”.

“What do I do?” I asked the dragon who was rooting through a travel pack and casually disposing of everything that she didn’t need by tossing it over her shoulder.

“The same thing that you always do.” She told me, not looking at me. “The same thing that you whimper to yourself when you think no one can hear you. Just love her Fred, she will come right.”

“She doesn’t look right,”

She didn’t. I hadn’t seen her face since that first day. I had expected her to start wearing an illusion of herself, the same as she had when she had first emerged from her tower. The heavy travelling cloak had become her constant companion and she would not take it off for any reason. There were only two people for whom this rule seemed to be ignored which were Carys and Maleficent. Carys had sent forward an order for a tent to be brought, similar to my pavilion. Other than the excursions for Ariadne to go off and eat, she would go into the tent and not emerge. Carys would take the supplies that we had brought with us and she would bring the dirty clothes out before taking them off somewhere to get washed.

I had never imagined Carys doing laundry but I know for certainty that she did it now.

There were constantly large quantities of water carried into that small pavilion as well. The guards and things would carry it all there in buckets before Maleficent or Carys would carry them in along with a large wooden tub.

And then, Ariadne would emerge in the morning, often supported by Maleficent where she would climb onto a horse that Carys would have to hold for her so that it didn’t run off.

“She wants to wear her scars,” Maleficent told me. “She needs the reminder of everything that happened. If she just heals herself or projects that everything is fine, then she feels that she is dishonouring the people that she killed and was forced to kill.”

Then the hugely horned Sorceress would smile at me again.

“Don’t worry Fred, you did well finding her and bringing her out. She is on the mend, you just need to be patient.”

Then she leapt into the air and I could hear the beating of huge leathery wings.

Maleficent’s departure caused a bit of consternation for Ariadne. It would seem that in the same way that Kerrass had left me, Maleficent had left Ariadne, she alternated between anger and a great sadness that she could not explain. It got to the point where it was now me who had to lead her horse as Carys was becoming exhausted at the effort of leading the caravan and doing all of the things that Ariadne needed to feel safe.

We came to that place where we came over a rise and we could see the bones of what Coulthard Castle was going to become.

The road travels along the south of the Coulthard Castle hill before it sweeps North, passing Coulthard Castle on the Castle’s Western side before bending west again to get to Oxenfurt. We were just coming out of the trees with Coulthard Castle coming into sight that Ariadne broke.

“I can’t do this,” she moaned and all but fell off the horse.

I was there and caught her although there was some awkward fumbling to do so. I am faster at getting off my horse now, but there are still moments when I am awkward and I forget that I no longer have feet.

She was shaking violently.

“I can’t do this Freddie, I can’t face all of those people.

Sure enough, there were people among the hills and ditches who had realised that we were approaching. People were pointing and calling friends and family over.

I held her for a long moment and she clung to me in a way that was both reassuring in that I could still be her rock to lean on but also a little frightening in that she was so obviously still so terrified.

I didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

In the end, though, her trembling receded and in what I would later decide was a supreme act of bravery, she gestured for me to get on my horse before she climbed up in front of me so that she could remain inside my arms. I have learned to ride with one hand so the wooden hand and my left arm would normally rest in my lap. She pulled that into her own lap and rested her head against my chest.

We rode slowly and as we did so, it was far from the triumphant homecoming that I had once envisioned. The sun wasn’t shining and the sky was grey with drizzle. No trumpets were sounding and no men in bright armour to welcome us home with cheers and roars of approval. Instead, we trudged home, the mud sucking at the hooves of our horses as we walked them on. More and more of the workers in the castle were coming now and lining the roads. Some were leaning on their shovels or picks as they watched the long and slow procession as we walked up towards the inner walls, or what will eventually be the inner walls, and the keep.

We were sombre. How could we not be sombre with everything that happened I could feel Ariadne trembling in my arms, the occasional soft whimper escaping from the cloth-wrapped bundle that I was holding onto.

I could feel the lump in my throat and all the pain that was there. I was looking around and I could see all of my people and all of the things that had happened to them and it hurt me anew. Seeing it through Ariadne’s eyes in the slightly damp afternoon I could see what had happened to them all. What had happened to me?

It was enough to make me weep.

The number of people who were watching increased as those men and women who had first seen us closed up behind us. I could hear weeping coming from the crowd and we continued the slow procession through the maze of mounds and embankments that will one day hold siege engines and store-rooms.

We came to the Castle walls with the outer gate, much to everyone’s surprise as you wouldn’t have been able to tell from the planning, but the outer gate was by far the least damaged of the three gates. And given that it was the most recently built, it was also the most modern so the new architects of the castle had decided to all but leave it where it was and not change anything about it.

A man stepped out in front of our horses and he had a little girl with him. The man was weeping openly.

“Do you remember me?” He called out into the silence.

There is an odd quality to silence in the rain. You can hear the individual raindrops falling onto your saddle or your hooded head. The echo of raindrops into puddles and the like. But all of that conspires to make the world seem peaceful. And that day, it was not a heavy rainfall, it was a drizzle. A light series of droplets that…

Oh, fuck it…

“Do you remember me?” The man called out.

Ariadne seemed to shake herself from whatever thoughts that she had been engaging with. Her hooded face turned towards the man and she tapped me on the arm to get me to stop. When I did, she slipped from the saddle and there was a noticeable squelch as she hit the muddy floor.

I really must see if there is some way to make the mud firmer on the floor in and around the castle, improve drainage or something.

\

I dismounted as quickly as I could but by the time I had arranged myself properly…

There is always a danger in sucking mud that you could lose your false leg in a quagmire of mud.

…Ariadne had approached the man and his daughter. He towered over her as she looked up into his face. I have no idea if he could see what she looked like as she has been working hard to keep the horror of her face from the eyes of other people.

Including me.

But he seemed to nod as she looked at him.

Ariadne tilted her head to one side as she examined the man.

“I do remember you.” She said, “I killed your wife while you and your daughter watched. She had come out into the corridor from where you were hiding and one of the guards saw her, ordering me to hunt her down and kill her.”

There was a pause as Ariadne’s words came out and fell dead in the rain. Her voice was just that, dead sounding. She spoke as though she was just declaring the truth of how the world works.

The man nodded and opened his mouth to speak but Ariadne kept speaking.

“I would apologise to you,” she began. “But the words seem to be so small and insignificant in comparison to what I have taken from you. But I am sorry,” her voice trembled towards the end. “I am so so…”

She went to kneel before the man but he caught her.

“That is not how I remember it,” he told her firmly.

Another thing that rain does, is it steals a person’s tears.

“I didn’t even see it like that at the time,” he insisted. “I saw a weapon being used to kill my wife when she had no choice. But not just that, when the guard asked if there was anyone else in the room, if there was anyone else hiding in the room, you said no and left, closing the door behind you.

“I remember it so clearly, lady. With the blood of my wife dripping from your hands, you looked me in the eyes and at that time, your eyes were glowing with a red power and as I looked, I knew that I was dead and that my daughter was dead and I decided that I was at peace with that in that I could be with my wife. I was sad for my daughter but I knew. I covered my daughter’s eyes so that she wouldn’t have to see. And then I heard you tell that guard that there was no one else hiding in that room.”

I had reached Ariadne’s side by that point and I heard her murmured response.

“You weren’t hiding, you were standing in the open.”

“And because of you, my daughter will live to marry and have a future of her own.”

Ariadne sobbed as the big man fell to his knees.

“Do you remember me?” A woman called and Ariadne spun and a peasant girl stepped out of the crowd.

“I killed your man,” Ariadne said, her voice just this side of a wail.

“Yes you did,” she said. “He tried to shield me from the attention of one of those… muscled… things. They wanted to torture him and do… things to me in front of him before he died. You killed him quickly and in their anger, they didn’t see as I slipped away into the crowd. You watched me go as they beat you with sticks, I saw it.”

Another man stepped forward.

“I saw you stare at a wall and let us sneak past you as you turned around slowly.”

Someone else called out.

“I saw you leave a supply room open so that we could get food and blankets.

“I heard you announce yourself by screaming and because I knew you were coming, I could get my children and me to safety.

“You killed my husband cleanly.

“You ripped out my daughter’s heart rather than allow her to be passed around the guards.”

The awful gratitude from my people was like an assault. One by one they fell to their knees around her. And they were truly grateful. Grateful for things that no person should be grateful to another for. That sort of thing should never come up. I knew about a good chunk of them and was willing to teach her about them but my people had taken it upon themselves to tell Ariadne about how they felt about her.

They were proud of her and that pride finally broke her as she fell, openly sobbing.

Emma and Laurelen had been waiting. Emma had been at the castle to hold some trade meetings and meet with some of the suppliers who were seeing to it that the castle was still going to be built. They had received word of our approach and the pair of them had decided to wait. It was and is still hard for them although they are getting better, the more that the castle looks less and less like the Coulthard Castle of old and more and more like something new. But Emma still struggles with things that are anything other than trade conversations.

But they had heard the commotion and their guards pushed through the still-growing crowds so that the three women could have their little reunion.

There were tears then, many tears and Ariadne collapsed into Emma and Laurelen’s arms. All but having to be carried the rest of the way into the keep.

The people started to cheer and shout and scream.

I have heard some cheers in my life. I have heard the sound that a crowd makes as a hero knight vanquishes the villain on the tourney fields. I have heard the cheers that crowds make when popular people of the state return home. I remember the cheering soldiers as King Radovid arrived to inspect the logistics division and I remember the roars of the Skelligans as the story of the death of the Wave-Serpent was told.

This was different, it was more… raw and it left me feeling wholly inadequate. This was a scream of catharsis. Hundreds of throats screamed and howled and cheered and gave vent to all of that emotion that they had been holding in for weeks or even months until their throats were red raw with it. It was a scream of relief, of determination. Of grief and renewed purpose. It was…

Chilling. That is the word. It was chilling as I stood there and listened to it.

People clapped me on the shoulder and congratulated me, telling me that everything was going to be alright now and that the world was heading back in the right direction.

I wish that I could believe them.

Emma and Laurelen took Ariadne in hand and now, not only do I rarely see my sister, but I rarely see the woman that I love. I know that she needs time to heal and that every time she does see me, she tells me that she still loves me and she begs me to be patient, but even as I promise her everything that I can think of, my feeling of isolation is growing deeper.

And I hate myself for feeling this way. I want to be strong, I want to be stable and able to stand upright so that when the woman that I love and that I still love, as well as my sister and all the rest, need me, then I can be there for them and that I will not falter. But for now, I feel…

lonely.

-

The other strand of my accounts is that of the history of the matter which, to me, is the most important of the two strands. These are the things that will make a difference in everyone’s lives moving forward. These are the events and actions that have changed the lives of so many people in the Pontar regions and will continue to change those lives moving forward. It is important that these actions are documented and careful records need to be collected regarding what was happening at the time.

]

The doings of a Duke and his actions taken to stabilise a realm in the aftermath of a rebellion are far more important, historically speaking than the personal and private life of that same. And in the years to come, I do not doubt that people will skip over these bits to get to the important ones.

And the matter of my life is painful, so very painful.

So normally, I would be the one to get the unpleasant chore out of the way before I move on to the enjoyable part. When I first met her properly and the two of us shared a meal, the Empress commented that I was the kind of man that would eat the vegetables off my plate first before moving on to the meat, bread and gravy. But in this case, I think I will reverse my normal trend. As one strand has an ending in it, eventually, the Empress declared me the Duke of the Pontar. Whereas the trials of the other strand are still ongoing.

And will likely never stop.

The rebellion ended with less of a bang and more of a whimper. Astonishing, to me, a number of the rebels surrendered in the hopes of getting something out of a trial. Those prisoners would often then be marched past those parts of the castle where the fighting was still carrying on and the calls of “traitor” and less kind insults were being thrown around accordingly. I have no comment on the matter.

The Empress moved off to Novigrad to start organising the matter of those trials and the matters of execution. She conferred with the Hierarch of the Eternal Flame as well as Mother Superior Nenneke of Melitele, Lady Vigo and the Lord Commander of Kreve as to the formation of a cooperative inquisition in the matter of this rebellion. She added Knight Commander Syanna to this advisory council as an independent kind of “chairperson” and also as a woman with experience in the matters of hunting out the evidence and testimony needed for the coming legal battlefield.

In the end, of all people, Lord Palmerin was given the overall command of the matter of the gathering of testimony and evidence. What he and his fellows collected was a truly ridiculous amount of evidence that the judicial panels used to soundly thrash all of those conspirators and rebels who had thought that a trial might be the easy option.

It is this vast trove of information that I have used to form my image of what happened during the rebellion and the later stages of it.

The mass of what they collected is being put together and will be collected in a library that is being built near the site of the Battle of Oxenfurt. It will be maintained by students from the university who can monitor and keep the place as part of their pending degrees. Something that they can do for extra credit. Even then, I am expecting the place to be a hotbed of political intrigue and am wondering about the best way to defend it and keep people from going in and “editing” what is there to protect the names of friends and ancestors.

I am not sure I have the answer to that riddle yet.

But that is causing trouble for the future.

As I mentioned in an article previously, if you ask any general or politician about the hardest part of warfare, they would tell you that the aftermath is the hardest part. I refer you to my previous explanation as to why that might be the case but in the meantime, that was the situation that the Imperial-led alliance found itself in after the final fall of the Rebellion. Suddenly, General Voorhis was playing a politician more than he was being a general. He had to exercise influence and move people around. There was honour in that appointment and he was having to fight off those people that wanted to carve up the taken lands for themselves.

No sooner had the victory been declared than people started to produce the proverbial measuring string and wanted to declare where their equally proverbial furniture was going to go in the newly conquered territory.

Temeria wanted Novigrad as it was a centre of trade and commerce, as well as commanding an important harbour and containing one of the most holy sites in the North. The prestige of holding that place was not something that could be contained. They argued that the Redanians were at fault for not containing their own rebellion and as such, they had proven themselves to be unsuitable.

The Redanians wanted Novigrad back for the same reasons while the Imperials thought that they could trust neither “Temerian war-mongering” or “Redanian incompetence” to hold such a vital port and largely spent their time arguing so to the Empress’ face. It only took a sense of humour like Queen Cerys of Skellige to casually wonder whether the city should be ceded to the Skelligan crown as they had done a not inconsiderable amount to re take the place, to cause complete madness.

Oxenfurt was also a place of contention. The Temerians wanted it so that they could weaken the strength of that centre of learning, an ambition that is well documented, so that the Temerian military academy can be the most pre-eminent site of learning in the North. The Redanians wanted it back, both for the prestige of having “THE CITY OF OXENFURT” in their realm as well as the centre of learning, but it would also contain an important and strategic crossing between the Temerian territory of Velen and the Redanian territory of Coulthard County.

The Temerians argued that the Redanians just wanted to raid Temerian lands while the Redanins, in turn, claimed that the Temerians wanted the same, citing Count Bernier’s attempts at aggression.

Someone suggested that there could be some marriage arranged between the lady of Crow’s Perch and some Redanian Lord to provide a buffer zone between the two, but then it was argued that this would also mean that the territory would default back to Redania as both Temeria and Redania recognise the superiority of the male in the marriage when it comes to dynastic affairs.

Again, this is neither the time nor the place to re-litigate that old debate.

That did not go well for anyone either.

That does not include those people who were carving up Coulthard County, the formerly Kalayn lands, Angraal and all of the other places that I now have some measure of control over. All before the Empress had even begun to make any kinds of decisions regarding these matters.

When Lord Voorhis made this opinion felt, that the Empress would make those decisions in consultation with Queen Regent Adda and Queen Anais, he was told things like “Well that’s all well and good but the women will listen to the proper advice as it is given and if we have already made the decisions then…”

Lord Voorhis was generally of the opinion that such men had not met the Empress, Or Queen Anais or Queen Regent Adda for that matter and then he would try to move on the important things like being able to feed the assembled troops given that they were, by now, rapidly heading into Winter and the general mobilising of all of the armies meant that the harvest would be poor. The logistical problems were huge and that was what he wanted to deal with.

Things might have settled down for all of that but for the actions of one Lord Spatnuk of Kaedwen.

Lord Spatnuk was a Lord of Southern Kaedwen and his realm was relatively small. There had been the Kaedwenian factions that believed that the so-called “Pontar Valley '' belonged to him. Therefore his realm was quite small as he was supposed to be the Lord of the Valley. He was an angry man… I never met him, I can only speak from what I have been told. But he was angry because he considered himself Lord of the Pontar valley which included Dol Blathanna and the fortress city of Vergen.

But at the same time, Imperial Rule meant that Dol Blathanna belonged to the Elves and that the Pontar Valley, being the richest and most fertile land in the region, was needed to produce crops and therefore was under Imperial jurisdiction. This had been the Empress’ long-term solution to the localised famine. Any attack on the Pontar Valley was seen to be deliberately trying to starve out the locals and was therefore treason.

So Lord Spatnuk felt as though a lot of his power had been taken away from him. He was looking at his rents and his revenues and year on year they were falling and his long-term forecasts were such that if he didn’t do anything about it, he would not be able to maintain himself in those lifestyles that allowed him to think of himself as a powerful Lord.

He had heard about the problems in the West and had seen an opportunity that he could try and take advantage of. There were several things that he did that could be argued as being fairly wise. His standing army was one of the things that he would have to cut out if the current trend persisted so giving them something to do was a factor, as well as cutting their numbers without having to find them something else to do.

The bulk of his army was kept in reserve to try and take the Pontar Valley when the inevitable, in his mind, Imperial sanctions were lifted. But patience was not one of his virtues and so he decided to go the other way. He intended to advance down the Pontar to take Flotsam and use Flotsam as a bottleneck to prevent a counter-invasion. In the meantime, he knew that the Lord and Lady of Angraal were dead and that the young Lord of Angral was not secure in his seat. He intended to take Angraal on the pretext of “Providing protection for so young a man in the modern tumultuous climate”.

Although we don’t know, we have little doubt that at some point, the children of the Duke and Duchess would have found themselves either “sick” or otherwise married off to cronies of Lord Spatnuk.

Whatever else can be said of Lord Spatnuk, and I can write a lot, his plan made a lot of sense and worked well. He was able to all but sneak past Angraal by the river route and take Flotsam with little to no fuss. The Redanian Rebel garrison of Flotsam had already fled the Imperial wrath and as such, there was little to no resistance from the people of Flotsam. The Imperials had left little more than a few dozen men and they lost all but those commanded to carry word back to Imperial lines. Lord Spatnuk moved in, installed a crony to run the place and exterminate the Elven population, because of course they did, and then the main body of Spatnuk’s forces moved into Angraal.

That was a nasty winter campaign. Winter in Angraal is a cold thing. There is a lot of snow that can drift against the buildings of the place and as such, the greater share of the casualties were against the cold. The old Captain of Angraal led a dogged defence and his main strategy consisted of drawing Spatnunk’s forces out until they could not properly reach shelter and then just letting the winter do its work.

I do not doubt that Spatnuk believed it was all going very well despite the casualty rate as he was able to take and hold a lot of territory. But a lot of that territory was empty for the winter in the first place. The campaign was also brutal as Spatnuk’s soldiers were properly provisioned with food and water, but what they didn’t have was the shelter that was needed to survive.

So they would break into houses and turf the citizenry out into the cold where they would freeze to death.

As I say, it was a brutal campaign.

The Imperial contingent first knew that something was wrong when they received word that Flotsam had fallen and their response was total. Imperial troops had been attacked and that demanded a response. I mean yes, it was little more than half a company that had been given to garrison the small border town, and yes, they had fled when they had seen the enemy troops coming down the hill. But at the same time, such a thing cannot be stood for.

The Imperial army left Coulthard castle and moved towards the attack. Winter was properly setting in now and many of the mages went with them to keep the troops warm and the roads clear. A token garrison was left at Coulthard Castle to keep order and protect the various townsfolk that were around the place and starting to rebuild it.

Emma and Laurelen had already been interviewed by Imperial Intelligence and their stories had been confirmed by the evidence of some of Emma’s letters being recovered and the code that she wrote in being translated. Emma started the business of recovering the family business and setting things up so that we would still have a business and that the coming famine, that was all but certain, could be mitigated.

They moved into the residence in Novigrad city while I was moved into Temple Isle because it would be easier for me to both recover and to be guarded against those elements that might seek my death while blaming me for everything that had gone wrong since the beginning of the rebellion, regardless of whether you were an Imperial loyalist or a closeted rebel.

Apart from anything else, I was the last surviving male heir to the Coulthard fortune as well as a not small amount of territory around the continent. But my absence as well as my questionable legal status meant that the avenue was open.

Regarding my legal status, just quickly. There was little doubt as to my innocence in the matter of the rebellion. A person only had to look at me to see all of the things that I had been through. Despite the attention of the best healers on the continent, I was a wreck of a human being and my survival was still, at that time, far from certain. The decision was made to delay my trial until they had all of the information and therefore could prove my innocence definitively.

But my absence left the avenue open.

A Temerian Lord, a commander of Knights by the name of Baron Belleme was in the area of Coulthard Castle with a, not small, number of troops. He had been involved in the fighting and was now part of the general effort to police the many dispersed monsters that were still running and trying to escape as well as the bandits and other problems that always accompany the cessation of military activities.

It is also true that he was one of those men who was smarting at what happened to Count Bernier.

He realised that he had the strongest military force in the local area and decided that this meant that Coulthard Castle now belonged to him. Along with all of the lands and titles. He intended to argue that possession is nine-tenths of the law

Baron Belleme moved quickly. He secured the site of the castle, driving off the remaining Redanian troops and containing the Imperial ones with pretty words and flowery statements. They were prisoners and hostages, they knew it, the Temerians knew it, but there was enough legal cover that Baron Belleme could argue in court that he was just seeking to protect Coulthard County from any remaining threats that might still be in the area. He secured routes of supply to Oxenfurt and to river crossings which he could now contend with.

There was even a piece of analysis of his brief campaign that was written to contrast the two efforts to secure the castle and the lands around it.

“It was as though Baron Belleme wanted to show the rebels how it was done.”

That might be unfair to both sides but it remains true. Baron Belleme was a canny man and a canny commander of mobile troops. The Redanians were outraged and quickly responded to the matter, mounting a counterforce. The Imperials were out fighting their way past the Flotsam blockade and so the Redanians mounted an offensive to, in their words “retake Castle Coulthard for a loyal Redania”.

It was a mess. Arguably the cleanest part of it all was on the battlefield. Baron Belleme was a cavalry commander and he was good enough at that to know that he needed Logistical support, lines of advancement and retreat and so on. But he was a cavalryman enough to look down on the proper use of infantry. The Redanians were infantrymen through and through and had the scorn of the cavalry.

The two forces met three times in what is collectively known as “The Second Battle of Coulthard Castle.” This is a bit unfair as the “battle” took place on three separate occasions for a week while General Voorhis could send Imperial detachments back to retake the castle in the “Third battle of Coulthard Castle”. But that’s jumping ahead.

The commander of the Redanian forces never saw the battlefield. He was a bit more canny than his counterpart and knew that this was a battle that would be won in the courtroom. His name was Count de Buchon. I have met the man and he is one of those lords that now owes me fealty. He swears to me that his concerns were based purely on what he saw as an invasion by a hostile foreign force. His forces had fought to defend people from the rebellion and the cultists and his men were part of the retaking of the castle.

I also think that as well as that, he was watching to see which way the wind was blowing politically before he committed himself. He is an older man, admits that he hated my Father and had been given no reason at all to love my sister given her flagrant disdain of societal norms.

But I also don’t think that he was averse to the idea that he would be given Coulthard Castle and lands to administer in the aftermath.

He assigned command to the military end of his campaign to his second son while he rode to court to make his case.

The political matters are a matter of public record. The Temerians invaded. They argued that the land was not currently being governed. That the previous ruler of the conquered land had been an aggressor against the Temerian state and as such, their actions were entirely legal. He argued that Temeria was a sovereign state, separate from the Empire although allied with that same and he also argued that the common folk of Coulthard lands deserved strong protection. He petitioned Queen Anais to support him and argued that access to the major trade routes between Novigrad and the Eastern parts of the continent would bring in considerable tax revenue and as such, it would benefit the nation as a whole.

“It is a humanitarian issue really,” his representatives argued.

On the other end, Count de Buchon was in the Redanin court demanding to know what was going to be done about it. The hated Temerians had invaded Redanian soil. And although some members of the Coulthard family were still alive, the legality of their existence was still in question and as such, it was the duty of any strong Redanian noble to protect the borders of his neighbours while his neighbour was sick or otherwise unable to maintain those borders. He demanded of the Imperial Ambassador what the Empire intended to do about the entire thing and did his best to portray himself as the best alternative to having a stranger govern Redanian lands.

Given that this political fight was being fought in two separate courts of two separate nations, there was no negotiation, just a lot of shouting. Wars have begun that way and it nearly did this time. The Redanians hate Temeria for what they see as the selling out of Redania at the end of the last continental war. To the point that the Redanians hate Temeria more than they hate the conquering Imperials.

On the ground, it ran thusly. Baron Belleme and his cavalry advanced with every confidence while the young knight Buchon was a cautious and capable infantry commander. Again, the analysis of “This is how it’s done,” was made. There were several engagements before Sir Buchon, whose name I am obscuring, reached Coulthard castle without any decisive action being fought.

I am not as skilled at the tactics of the matter so I don’t feel as though I can comment. But I understand that a properly led and equipped infantry unit will hold back a cavalry charge. But at the same time, an infantry force will never force the cavalry to the point where they can be destroyed. The cavalry is always too mobile to make the entire thing possible.

So there were a few engagements with maybe a dozen dead on either side.

Sir Buchon took the castle with relatively little resistance, Baron Belleme being well aware that the castle was in no real shape to hold a siege after the last attempt and that if he tried to garrison a fortification, then he would lose the advantage of the cavalry.

Sir Buchon took the castle, knowing that it would give him a certain amount of legitimacy and it meant that he was, at least, Redanian meaning that he would be more likely to gather support from the locals.

There were two more “battles.” I put that in inverted commas because, in comparison to what had happened during the rebellion, it was just a rather nasty hissy fit with some pushing and shoving. The number of dead didn’t reach a hundred on either side and although I will admit that this is no consolation to those dead men or their families, the scale of the matter made everything seem a little petty.

The castle changed hands twice. Baron Belleme gained some reinforcement and went to take the castle. Buchon put up a token resistance before he retreated and was reinforced in turn. Belleme, the cavalryman, pursued only to find the reinforced Buchon waiting for him. That battle would have been nearly decisive if it had gotten that far. The two forces were lined up. There were some exchanges of arrows and crossbow bolts. There were certainly some skirmishes between companies but neither man was prepared to commit to a proper attack and neither army was properly trapped so that if it looked as though matters would come to a head, then it would be easy to retreat.

They camped there, in freezing temperatures, for several days losing men to the elements every day, only to hear that an Imperial division was coming back from the Flotsam meat grinder to re-secure Coulthard lands for the Imperial Flag.

Both Belleme and Buchon saw, correctly, what was going to happen and retreated home.

Or at least that was what officially happened.

It cannot be proved what happened. But we know that when the Imperial forces came back, they were attacked by several companies worth of soldiers and were compelled to retake the castle by force. Something that they did easily and the Imperial general in question was quite furious at the number of men that he lost. The attacking soldiers waved no flag and there was never anyone caught who could provide reputable proof as to who was responsible.

This is another ongoing problem. Redanians pointing at Temerians and vice versa. Will we ever know the answer?

I think we will, but it’s the kind of thing that is impossible to prove. One of those things where we know who our enemy is, or was, but our hands are tied without proof.

The fight for Novigrad was a political one. After all, the Empress herself was in Novigrad at the time and whatever else could be said about that, she was not going to be attacked. Anyone who tried to go after the Empress herself would see a green flash and know that their target had eluded them. Then there would be another flash as half a dozen scary men dressed in black would turn up with sharp blades in hand. One of them would say “Her Imperial Majesty is very upset” and then you would be in for a world of hurt.

The Temerians argued that Novigrad had been abused by the Redanians, its people had suffered under Redanian rule and as such, it was time for a new ruler of Novigrad. The Redanians argued that the rulership of Novigrad had actually been under the church and as such, should be given to them to properly control it

The people of Novigrad themselves argued that they had been independent before and would like to be independent again. And Queen Cerys argued that because her troop had retaken the city from the rebels, maybe it would be time for a different option. Give the port city to the Skelligans and they would keep it neutral between the two warring nations. That might have all got a bit bleak. As it was, the leader of the independent Novigrad movement was assassinated on his way to an audience with the Empress.

He sold himself to the people as a man of the people and he was walking up the streets with his guards on either side of him, to get to Temple Isle where the Empress was staying in the bishop’s quarters, and he was set upon.

He had a couple of guards and was later found in a back alley having been stabbed fifty-two times by various different daggers. It might say something about the attack that he didn’t die until the final strike, which was a throat cut. His pain must have been intense, but the locals claimed that they heard nothing.

His two guards were found floating in the harbour. It could be argued that he should have had more guards but that would have taken away from his image as a man of the people.

Just in case you think that the aggression only went one way with Temerians taking Coulthard County. There was an effort to take Velen for Redania. Looking at it from the outside, I wonder if it was an extension of the effort to retake Novigrad and the Pontar for Redanian interests. Had the invasion been successful, this would have been more evidence to those people who were trying to say that the Pontar would be better in Redanian hands, along with Novigrad. If the Redanian crown had controlled both banks of the river then they would have argued “Well, we hold everything on either side of the river and port, we might as well have the rights to the river and the port, before reducing troop numbers in Velen to the point that they could then be seen as being magnanimous in returning the territory to Temeria.

I don’t know if that’s the case but with all due respect to the people of Velen, the already swampy area was churned into mud the last time that armies marched through the place. And the only strategic value of the place is that it’s the buffer zone between Redania and Temeria that no one wants.

There is also the possibility that the attacking Redanians were sore from their defeats elsewhere. Whether they were nascent rebels who were angry that the rebellion had failed and wanted someone to hit has been suggested by several different figures, or that this was a counter-invasion given the invasion of Coulthard County by de Belleme. I can say with certainty that it was not a false flag operation by Temerian forces to reduce the number of powerful women around, although that sentiment against Baroness Strenger is around and remains quite disgusting.

Whatever the cause, a group of young knights were riled up by someone, and it is this “someone” that I don’t know who it is. Intelligence is working on it for me. But these young knights had been riled up by the rebellion and had been unable to “see much action”. They were spoiling for a fight and didn’t want to return home to the tedious lives that their parents had set out for them where they were married to plain wives, living in shacks and having to make their way.

So in looking for a fight, some enterprising soul found them one. They gathered or were given by their benefactor, a small army of soldiers who were exactly the kinds of soldiers that you would expect if you wanted to anger a countryside, and they invaded, making the river crossing and moving into the countryside.

Everything that you have heard about Velen is especially true in Winter. The salty air from the sea as well as the swampland conspire to make winter in Velen a damp kind of place. A far cry from the bitter cold that these young adventurers had been brought up on from the winter invasion of Kaedwen by their hero, the legendary King Radovid the Stern. So the knights found themselves a headquarters in the inn of the crossroads and sent out their men, the glorified bandits that they were, to take the area for the Queen of Redania.

Baroness Strenger reacted to this news properly, she had sent troops to the quelling of the Rebellion although she had not attended the matter herself. So she sent word to those troops to hurry home along with sending a messenger to Vizima to let the Regency council know of this new aggression from Redania.

An interesting thing happened then.

Tamara Strenger is an interesting lady who I consider a privilege to work with and to have in my realm. I doubt that we will ever be firm friends as we have little in common, we even disagree when it comes to the worship of the Eternal Flame. But I am proud to have her as one of my vassals and I will always know where I stand with her.

What I think happened was this.

Lady Stranger's realm is not rich and her seat of Crow’s Perch is not vast or luxurious. She likes it that way. But she eschews the trappings of a lot of nobility and one of the things she doesn’t have is a scribe or a secretary. She prefers to write all her letters and orders herself. But not being very good at penmanship, nor seeing the importance of proper calligraphy when she could be worshipping the Eternal Flame, or riding out amongst her people, or hunting down bandits and monsters or… I’m sure you get the idea. She tends to write quickly and brusquely to get the job done. So I do not doubt that the message she wrote was something like “Urgent, under attack by Redanian scum, send reinforcement.”

But when that message was received by Temerian courtiers who are not as familiar with the lady as I might be received that message, they saw a panicked scrawl as written by a lady in distress who didn’t have time to write the thing properly due to the pending attacks by the “Redanian scum” that the message spoke of.

Images of a demure and proper lady of the court being ravaged by Redanian soldiers will have rushed through their heads. They will have realised that the Baroness was not yet properly married and then men were sent to “rescue” her and “liberate” her lands from the Redanian menace.

So what these gallant men found was an angry woman, wrapped in warm clothing and armour with bushy hair when it wasn’t covered by a helm and a face that the lady herself describes as “handsome at best”. They expected her to gratefully hand over the fighting to their command and were appalled when she started telling them what to do.

Bearing in mind that these would have been the kinds of men that had been left behind to guard the palace rather than being sent up to be part of the fighting to quell the Rebellion. Left behind by Count Bernier, Lord Roche, Lord Natalis and Baron de Belleme in turn. So after all of that, these will have been the people that none of those other commanders, competent and incompetent alike, wanted to have in their corps.

So to hear Baroness Strenger describe it, she found herself in a three-way battle for her homeland between the Temerians, the Redanians and her own people.

It was a mess. Lines of communication and logistics were non-existent, uniforms and banners were often muddy and wet so that they couldn’t be read, so numerous actions were fought before the two sides discovered that they were actually on the same side after all.

For her part, Baroness Strenger fought a guerilla action against anyone she didn’t know and was remarkably ruthless for it. She was rebuked of course given the fact that some of the people her people shot out of the saddle were Temerian themselves, but she declared those men, just as much of an invader as the Redanians given that, as she said, many of them weren’t wearing uniforms.

And it was while this three-way war was going on in the middle of Velen, that the Cidaris/Vergen alliance mounted an attack. This is why the Empress, who has a fondness for the Strenger family and Velen in general for reasons that I do not understand, was able to declare these actions as treason.

Let this be a lesson to those readers that need it, when you weaken the realm, for whatever reason, in this case, sucking Tamara Strenger’s forces away from a contested border, even if that border is relatively quiet, then that is treason.

So Vergen now found itself under attack from Redanians, and Temerians and defended by an angry militia that didn’t know friend from foe, with an invading force coming in from the west. I think Baroness Strenger is right to be upset and angry. Because all of those forces, including the militia, thought they had the right to the peasants and the supplies that they had.

The invaders took the supplies because they needed them and they thought that depriving the people of Velen of those supplies made sound military sense. Which it is to be fair…

And still, it got worse.

A man by the name of Copeland decided that he would help Baroness Strenger, and marched his forces to meet the invading soldiers of Vergen/Cidaris. So now there was, yet another, armed military force moving through Velen. And when Lord Copeland failed to receive the gratitude that he thought he was owed by Baroness Strenger and the Temerian Crown, lost his temper a little.

According to people who know him, he had a little bit of a crush on Baroness Strenger. It was the kind of crush that can develop when you have only seen paintings of a person, or have heard rumours of them. He fell in love with the holy lady, formerly of the Witch-hunters, who was beset by enemies on all sides. He imagined a virginal saint, a lot like what the knights of Toussaint have made out of Francesca. As a result, he was unprepared for the bushy-haired, heavily armoured thing that emerged from the swamps of Velen, covered in slime and worse.

He demanded to meet the real Baroness Strenger. Refused to believe that this was the real one and drew his weapon in outrage that such a “thing” could take the place of…

And then his words were cut off as things became violent between his guards and hers.

Lord Copeland’s Mother protested to the Temerian court and eventually, the matter made its way to the Empress who lost her temper. A temper that she had already been holding onto with her teeth. She declared that she had more important things to do and ordered a division of the Imperial Guard to “deal with the matter”. Even the Empress will admit that this was a massive overreaction and that a Regiment would have done the job.

In short order, all the combatants were locked up, including Baroness Strenger, and the invaders were pushed back past the border. The Imperial Forces were brutal and uncompromising and it might be said that what remained of the villagers of Velen loved them for it.

The Empress, realising that she might have overcorrected a little, listened to the complaints before telling everyone off for being foolish. Those knights that survived were sent home and Lady Tamara was returned to her keep along with a few companies of Imperial troops to help her keep order. The threat was implicit, both to Lady Tamara and her nearest neighbours.

According to the Empress, it was around here that she began to realise that the problem was larger than just a rebellion and a rescue of her allies from within that Rebellion while also preventing catastrophic magical and alien powers from finding a toe-hold on the continent.

Lord Voorhis was summoned back from the field and returned to his post as head of Confidential Agencies or whatever they are calling his role nowadays. The pair of them consulted several other advisors. I don’t know them all but I know that they included the Hierarch of Novigrad and the Eternal Flame, the head of the local druid’s grove and a few other neutral parties. Notable in their lack of inclusion were representatives from Redania and Temeria. I know that Knight Commander Syanna offered a perspective.

Knowing the way these things work, I imagine the solution to the entire thing was suggested early, but also as is the way with these things, it took an age to dismiss all the alternatives to make sure that the first idea was the best. But just in case, The Empress declared that I was to be isolated to preserve my neutrality on all of these political matters.

Not that I could have done much, I was still locked up in Temple Isle, recovering from my various ordeals. It is not overselling to say that I was still close to death, despite my rescue.

Other things happened, of course, the continent doesn’t stand still after all. Emma’s efforts to neutralise the trading company to prevent it from falling into the Rebellion’s hands began to be reversed. Many of those merchants saw their opportunity and tried to challenge Emma’s declarations in court. Most felt some semblance of loyalty to Emma and the Coulthard Company, but there are always a couple that gets greedy… Merchants have that reputation for a reason after all. As it is, many of those judgements still need to come through. The courts are busy enough with all of the treason that has happened to get to the small doings of merchant families.

Emma has reassured me that we are not poor and are in no danger of running out of money, even despite my rebuilding projects. But she resents that people are taking advantage of her civic duty.

It might be the only time that I see the light and fire return to Emma’s eyes but I wish it wasn’t at the expense of everything else.

From there, the battlefield moved. The attacks that were made against Coulthard County, the raids against Flotsam, Velen, Angraal and so on became just that. A couple of dozen people… at most a company of men that would turn up and attack this place or that place. The false flag operation that I described earlier where the Lord has met the headsman and his widow has married one of the Imperial officers that are now attached to my lands.

She seems satisfied and he seems suitably chastened and pleased with his new wife.

But it was things like this that were typical of what was happening at that stage. Men would use it as an argument to try and say that the lands were not being governed and that therefore, it was the duty of neighbours to blah blah blah.

But the majority of the fighting was done in the courtrooms and back corridors of palaces. There was an interesting time when someone turned up to the hall of stone and declared that they had been named as Regent of Angraal and just moved into the palace. He was taking meetings and making decisions as to the young Lord and Lady children of Angraal as to who they would be betrothed to and what to do regarding trade.

He was only found out when the genuine bureaucrats were sent from the Imperial court to take stock of the situation in Angraal after the fighting around flotsam had been finished. We still don’t know who he was for real as the name he gave was false. Apparently, he was very charming and his decisions were quite beneficial, or would be if he had been given enough time.

The casualties of the rebellion were still mounting up though.

Quite accidentally, one of Queen Anais’ ladies walked into a group of people planning the invasion of Coulthard County and Oxenfurt. Assessment since then has said that the plan would almost certainly fail, but the plan was contrary to Imperial orders so… Heads rolled.

A group of Redanian courtiers produced a map as to how to properly defend Coulthard County from incursions from the south. Again, it was not a bad plan and Padraig has adapted some of those plans into his own and has extended the operation along the border. It was not lost on the Queen Regent that the plan also involved dividing up Coulthard's lands among the nobles who had come up with the plan. The plan was not illegal, even if it was conquering through a back door.

Temeria also tried legitimate means of conquest. One of the arguments made was that war reparations were due. After all, it was a Redanian rebellion carried out by Redanian troops and part of that effort was raiding across the river against Temerian sovereign citizens. Which is true. The effort demanded land in payment but instead, the Redanian court argued that it was a rebellion against legitimate Redanian rule as well. Therefore, the cost of the reparations would be levied against the estates of those nobles who rebelled.

That did still mean that we had to foot some of the bill, but as Sam made a big fuss about being Lord Kalayn rather than Lord Coulthard, Emma successfully argued that the payment should come out of the Kalayn estates. And as Sam was provably not part of those raids and that therefore his share would be relatively small, our share of those reparations was little more than a small pouch of coins.

I tried to suggest some cattle or something to help rebuild but it would seem that the people who were injured are not going to receive anything. I have tried to make it known that we would help and promptly got accused of trying to steal Temerian citizens.

A group of church knights of Kreve turned up at the manor of White Cliffs and started an Inquisition there. I can but suppose that they’ve started to feel left out after all of the bloodshed that the Eternal Flame inquisition had committed so they wanted to stomp around and burn people. Unfortunately, the people that they needed to burn had long since departed and had either died during the rebellion, died beforehand or are currently being hunted by various factors that work for the Empire. They were quickly declared renegade and Redanian troops saw them off.

There was another effort to take over Kalayn lands by that land’s local lordships. Some of them were still sore that so many of their scions had been killed as part of the purge of the first-born cults and others were angry about all of the things that had been done to them by the cult of the first-born and they saw a potential avenue of retribution in the disgrace of the erstwhile Lord Kalayn.

It was all a bit bleak and tumultuous and The Empress spent her time teleporting between Vizima and Ard Carraigh which was the site of the Redanian court at the time. She was tired and angry and also a little heartsick with everything that happened. One day, a proclamation was declared that the lands in question were under Imperial protection and were, essentially Imperial lands belonging to the Imperial throne until such a time as she decided who would be in charge of those lands.

What this changed was that people were now clamouring to have their people put forward as the protector of this place or that. There was a new glut of young knights and younger sons being sent out to make political alliances and marriages. Favours were traded and promises were made. To my knowledge, there were three assassinations, fourteen assaults, numerous raids and similar acts of sabotage that involved various people fighting over the influence needed to have their favourite candidate named into the positions in question.

I know for a fact that several people have tried to appeal to my “sense of decency” when it came to matters where men were promised the rights to Kalayn lands by this courtier or that courtier, and Lady Tamara has several accounts of similar things happening where her hand in marriage was promised and people became irate when she refused to follow through on it.

By this point, I know that the decision had been made about what to do about the various lands and what to do with me. Some people describe this period of politics as being “The Fix is in”. I don’t like that phrase. I prefer to think of it as being “The decision has been made” but the inertia of a courtroom is such that sometimes it takes time for everything to turn around and come into this new direction. Good rulers know this and take the time to properly steer it in the direction that they want it to go.

For her part, The Empress spent some time making sure that her decision was going to be accepted. This is a tricky balance and I am glad that I don’t have too much of a court to have to worry about this kind of thing. She knew what her decision was so now she had to arrange the matter so that the maximum number of people would accept that decision without complaint.

My trials at the hands of the Inquisitions of various churches were certainly part of this process. If the body of the churches agreed that I was innocent of all charges then people would not be able to complain on religious grounds that an obscene amount of power was going to be given to a heretic. The civil trial was also part of this. I don’t think anyone believed that I might have been guilty of anything and they would have been quite happy if I had just retired to a quiet life of lecturing at the university, or teaching Knights of Toussaint how to think like a courtier. But what the Empress was seeking to avoid was the arguments and the protests.

She was playing a game of “opposition research.” She knew that people would object and she had guessed what the basis of those objections was going to be, both the religious arguments and the criminal ones.

The rest she didn’t care about, or so she claims. I am not sure I agree. We have had this argument, she and I and I wonder where it will leave us.

There are always factions in a courtroom and those factions move around. My travels and the things that I have done have made me powerful friends over the years but they have also made me some powerful enemies. And these factions change according to what issue is being decided on any given day. A courtier, which is a catch-all term for anyone who might be attending court on any given day, might be arch-conservative on one issue while being an arch-liberal on another.

That’s a gross oversimplification but there it is.

So although the best, in her opinion, governance decision had been made, The Empress now had to sell it to the people involved. I understand that there were many meetings among many different people to ensure that the right people would agree to my appointments on various levels. We will see how all of that plays out of course as it is still moving around. Promises were made and people were overreaching on those promises.

As I wrote, one of the things that The Empress needed to make sure was that I would agree to the appointment, which was far from certain. I do not doubt that there was some planning that went into that too. Things that she could offer me to sweeten the pot and other things that she could use to goad me into that agreement.

And then the deed was done and I took over. There were times of recovery, because of course there were and then as my body struggled to recover, I was given my problem and how to solve it.

So that’s it, you’re up to date with the politics.

I am struggling to know how to end this all. Because this does all feel like an ending. Not the ending that I wanted but it is the ending that I am left with. I don’t want to write but now I am struggling to stop.

There is more politics to talk about but I am struggling to think about how I could write about that politics without giving away a lot of things that I shouldn’t be talking about and there is news about my own life and doings that are not fit for public consumption.

So I suppose that this is it. This is how it ends. Not with triumph but with the slow trudge into the next stage of my life, dragging my wooden legs behind me, causing gouges and scuffs in the ground.

This was not the way it was supposed to end. This leads me to a few things.

I still get plenty of letters regarding my travels with Kerrass. I am afraid that I do not have time to read them all by myself and given my position, I must confess that I now have a secretary specifically for that purpose. And it might be said that this secretary also works for Imperial Intelligence so those people that write to me with threats and promises of bodily harm should know that my mail is being read by important, far more paranoid and far more deadly people than myself.

But I think that it might cut some of this postal traffic if I just… answer some of these questions before I go.