She walked towards the exit, escorted on both sides. With her head proudly raised. Heavy boots thudded, mail shirts clanked and weapons jingled.
After a dozen paces she looked back for the first time. After the next few the second time. Why, I’ll never, ever see them again. The thought flashed with terrifying and cool clarity beneath her crown. Neither Geralt nor Yennefer. Never.
That awareness immediately, all at once, wiped away the mask of feigned courage. Ciri’s face contorted and grimaced, her eyes filled with tears and her nose ran. The girl fought with all her strength, but in vain. A wave of tears breached the dam of pretence.
The Nilfgaardians with salamanders on their cloaks looked at her in silence and amazement. Some of them had seen her on the bloody staircase, all of them had seen her in conversation with the emperor. The witcher girl with a sword, the unvanquished witcher girl, arrogantly challenging the imperator to his face. And now they were surprised to see a snivelling, sobbing child.
She was aware of it. Their eyes burned her like fire, pricked her like pins. She fought, but ineffectively. The more powerfully she held back her tears, the more powerfully they exploded.
She slowed down and then stopped. The escort also stopped. But only for a moment. On the growling command of an officer iron hands grasped her by the upper arms and wrists. Ciri, sobbing and swallowing back tears, looked back for the last time. Then they dragged her. She didn’t resist, but sobbed louder and louder and more and more despairingly.
They were stopped by Emperor Emhyr var Emreis, that dark-haired man with a face which awoke strange, vague memories in her. They released her when he gave a curt order. Ciri sniffed and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Seeing him approaching, she stopped sobbing and raised her head haughtily. But now – she was aware of it – it just looked ridiculous.
Emhyr looked at her for a long while. Without a word. Then he approached her. And held out a hand. Ciri, who always reacted to gestures like that by pulling away involuntarily, now, to her great amazement, didn’t react. To her even greater amazement she found his touch wasn’t unpleasant at all.
He touched her hair, as though counting the snow-white streaks. He touched her cheek, disfigured by the scar. Then he hugged her and stroked her head and back. And she, overwhelmed by weeping, let him, although she held her arms as stiffly as a scarecrow.
‘It’s a strange thing, destiny,’ she heard him whisper. ‘Farewell, my daughter.’
*
‘What did he say?’
Ciri’s face grimaced slightly.
‘He said: va faill, luned. In the Elder Speech: farewell, girl.’
‘I know,’ Yennefer nodded. ‘What then?’
‘Then . . . Then he let me go, turned around and walked away. He shouted some orders. And everybody went. They passed me, utterly indifferently, with stamping, thudding and the clanking of armour echoing down the corridor. They mounted their horses and rode away, I heard the neighing and tramping of hooves. I’ll never understand that. For if I were to wonder—’
‘Ciri.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t wonder about it.’
*
‘Stygga Castle,’ repeated Philippa Eilhart, looking at Fringilla Vigo from under her eyelashes. Fringilla didn’t blush. During the past three months she had managed to manufacture a magical cream which made the blood vessels contract. Thanks to the cream she didn’t blush, no matter how embarrassed she was.
‘Vilgefortz’s hide-out was in Stygga Castle,’ confirmed Assire var Anahid. ‘In Ebbing, above a mountain lake, whose name my informer, a simple soldier, was unable to recall.’
‘You said: “was”—’ Francesca Findabair observed.
‘Was,’ Philippa interrupted in mid-sentence. ‘Because Vilgefortz is dead, my dear ladies. He and his accomplices, the entire gang, are no more. That favour was done for us by no other than our good friend the Witcher, Geralt of Rivia. Whom we didn’t appreciate. None of us. About whom we were mistaken. All of us. Some of us less seriously, others more.’
All the sorceresses looked at Fringilla in unison, but the cream really did act effectively. Assire var Anahid sighed. Philippa tapped her hand on the table.
‘Although the multitude of activities connected to the war and the preparations for the peace negotiations excuse us,’ she said dryly, ‘we ought to admit that the fact of being thoroughly outmanoeuvred in the case of Vilgefortz is a defeat for the lodge. That must never happen to us again, my dear ladies.’
The lodge – with the exception of the ashen-pale Fringilla Vigo – nodded.
‘Right now,’ continued Philippa, ‘the Witcher Geralt is somewhere in Ebbing. Along with Yennefer and Ciri, whom he freed. We ought to ponder over how to find them—’
‘And that castle?’ Sabrina Glevissig interrupted. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something, Philippa?’
‘No, no I haven’t. The legend, if it should arise, ought to have a single, faithful version. Thus I’d like to ask you to do it, Sabrina. Take Keira and Triss with you. Sort out the matter. So that no trace remains.’
*
The roar of the explosion was heard as far away as in Maecht, and the flash – since it took place at night – was visible even in Metinna and Geso. The series of further tectonic shocks were perceptible even further away. At the remotest ends of the world.
Congreve, Estella or Stella, the daughter of Baron Otto de Congreve, espoused to the Count of Liddertal, managed his estates extremely judiciously following his early death, owing to which she amassed a considerable fortune. Enjoying the great estimation of Emperor Emhyr var Emreis (q.v.), she was a greatly important personage at his court. Although she held no position, it was known that the emperor was always in the habit of gracing her voice and opinion with his attention and consideration. Owing to her great affection for the young Empress Cirilla Fiona (see also), whom she loved like her own daughter, she was jokingly called the ‘empress mother’. Having survived both the emperor and the empress, she died in 1331, and her immense estate was left in her will to distant relatives, a side branch of the Liddertals called the White Liddertals. They, however, being careless and giddy—headed people, utterly squandered it.
Effenberg and Talbot,
Encyclopaedia Maxima Mundi, vol. III
CHAPTER TEN
The man stealing up to the camp, to give him his due, was as spry and cunning as a fox. He changed his position so swiftly, and moved so agilely and quietly, that he could have sneaked up on anyone. Anyone. But not Boreas Mun. Boreas Mun had too much experience in the matter of stalking.
‘Come out, fellow!’ he called, trying hard to colour his voice with self-assured and confident arrogance. ‘Those tricks of yours are in vain. I see you. You’re over there.’
One of the megaliths, a ridge of which bristled on the hillside, twitched against the deep blue, starry sky. It moved. And assumed human form.
Boreas turned some meat roasting on a spit, for he could smell burning. He laid his hand on his bow’s riser, pretending to be leaning carelessly.
‘My belongings are meagre.’ He wove a gruff, metallic thread of warning into his apparently calm tone. ‘There are a few of them. But I’m attached to them. I shall defend them to the death.’
‘I’m no bandit,’ said the man, who had pretended to be a menhir, in a deep voice. ‘I’m a pilgrim.’
The pilgrim was tall and powerfully built, easily measuring seven feet, and in order to balance him on a weighing scales Boreas would have bet anything that a weight of at least five-and-twenty stone would have been required. His pilgrim’s staff, a pole as thick as a cart shaft, looked like a walking cane in his hand. Boreas Mun was indeed amazed how such a huge clodhopper was able to steal up so agilely. He was also somewhat alarmed. His bow, a composite seventy-pounder, with which he could down an elk at four dozen paces, suddenly seemed a small, fragile child’s toy.
‘I’m a pilgrim,’ repeated the powerful man. ‘I mean no—’
‘And the other man,’ Boreas interrupted sharply. ‘Let him come out too.’
‘What oth—?’ stammered the pilgrim and broke off, seeing a slender silhouette, noiseless as a shadow, emerging from the gloom on the other side. This time Boreas Mun wasn’t at all amazed. The other man – his way of moving immediately betrayed it to the tracker’s trained eye – was an elf. And it is no disgrace to be sneaked up on by an elf.
‘I ask for forgiveness,’ said the elf in a strangely un-elven, slightly husky voice. ‘I hid from both of you gentlemen not from evil intentions, but from fear. I’d turn that spit over.’
‘Indeed,’ said the pilgrim, leaning on his staff and sniffing audibly. ‘The meat’s cooked more than enough on that side.’
Boreas turned the spit, sighed and cleared his throat. And sighed again.
‘Sit you down, gentlemen,’ he decided. ‘And wait. The animal will be done any minute. Ha, verily, he’s a fool who denies meat to travellers on the road.’
The fat dribbled onto the fire with a hiss, the fire flared up. It became brighter.
The pilgrim was wearing a felt hat with a broad brim, whose shadow quite effectively covered his face. A turban made from colourful cloth, not covering his face, served as headgear for the elf. When they saw his face in the glare of the campfire, both men – Boreas and the pilgrim – shuddered. But didn’t utter so much as a gasp, not even a soft one, at the sight of the face, once no doubt elfinly beautiful, now disfigured by a hideous scar running diagonally across his forehead, brow, nose and cheek to his chin.
Boreas Mun cleared his throat and turned the spit again.
‘This sweet fragrance lured you to my campfire,’ he stated rather than asked. ‘Didn’t it, gentlemen?’
‘Indeed.’ The pilgrim tipped the brim of his hat and his voice changed a little. ‘I smelled out the roast from far away, with all due modesty. But I remained cautious. They were roasting a woman on a campfire I approached two days ago.’
‘That’s true,’ confirmed the elf. ‘I was there the next morning, I saw human bones in the ashes.’
‘The next morning,’ the pilgrim repeated in a slow, drawling voice, and Boreas would have bet anything that a nasty smile had appeared on the face concealed by the shadow of the hat. ‘Have you been tracking me in secret for long, Master Elf?’
‘Aye.’
‘And what stopped you revealing yourself?’
‘Good sense.’
‘The Elskerdeg pass—’ Boreas Mun turned the spit and interrupted the awkward silence ‘—is a place that doesn’t enjoy the best of reputations. I’ve also seen bones on campfires, skeletons on stakes. Men hanged from trees. This place is full of the savage followers of cruel cults. And creatures just waiting to eat you. According to hearsay.’
‘It’s not hearsay,’ the elf corrected him. ‘It’s the truth. And the further into the mountains towards the east, the worse it’ll be.’
‘Are you gentlemen also travelling eastwards? Beyond Elskerdeg? To Zerrikania? Or perhaps even further, to Hakland?’
Neither the pilgrim nor the elf replied. Boreas hadn’t really expected an answer. Firstly, the question had been indiscreet. Secondly, it had been stupid. From where they were it was only possible to go back or eastwards. Through Elskerdeg. Where he too was headed.
‘Roast’s ready.’ Boreas opened a butterfly knife with a deft flourish, meant to impress. ‘Go ahead, gentlemen. Help yourselves.’
The pilgrim had a cutlass, and the elf a dagger, which also didn’t resemble a kitchen knife at all. But all three blades, sharpened for more menacing purposes, served to carve meat that day. For some time all that could be heard was crunching and munching. And the sizzling of chewed bones thrown into the embers.
The pilgrim belched in a dignified manner.
‘Strange little creature,’ he said, examining the shoulder blade which he had gnawed clean and licked until it looked as though it had been kept for three days in an anthill. ‘It tasted a bit like goat, and it was as tender as coney . . . I don’t recall eating anything like that.’
‘It was a skrekk,’ said the elf, crunching the gristle with a crack. ‘Neither do I recall eating it at any time.’
Boreas cleared his throat quietly. The barely audible note of sarcastic merriment in the elf’s voice proved he knew that the roast came from an enormous rat with bloodshot eyes and huge teeth, only the tail of which measured three ells. The tracker had by no means hunted the gigantic rodent. He had shot it in self-defence, but had decided to roast it. He was a sensible and clear-headed man. He wouldn’t have eaten a rat scavenging on rubbish heaps and eating scraps. But it was a good three hundred miles from the narrow passage of the Elskerdeg pass to the nearest community capable of generating waste. The rat – or, as the elf had said, skrekk – must have been clean and healthy. It hadn’t had any contact with civilisation. So there was nothing it could have been soiled by or infected with.
Soon the last, smallest bone, chewed and sucked clean, landed in the embers. The moon rose over the jagged range of the Fiery Mountains. The wind fed the fire and sparks shot up, dying out and fading amidst the countless twinkling stars.
‘Long on the road, gentlemen?’ Boreas Mun risked another none-too-discreet question, ‘Here, in the Wildernesses? Left the Solveiga Gate behind you long since, if you’ll pardon my asking?’
‘Long since, long since,’ said the pilgrim, ‘is a relative thing. I passed through Solveiga the second day after the September full moon.’
‘Me on the sixth day,’ said the elf.
‘Ha,’ continued Boreas Mun, encouraged by the reaction. ‘It’s a wonder we’ve only met up now, because I also walked that way, or actually rode, for I still had a horse then.’
He fell silent, driving away the unpleasant thoughts and recollections linked to the horse and its loss. He was sure his accidental companions must also have had similar adventures. If they’d been walking the whole time they never would have caught up with him here, near Elskerdeg.
‘I venture, thus,’ he continued, ‘that you set off right after the war, after the Peace of Cintra was concluded, gentlemen. It’s none of my business, naturally, but I dare suppose that you were not pleased by the order and vision of the world created and established in Cintra.’
The lengthy silence that fell by the campfire was interrupted by distant howling. A wolf, probably. Although in the vicinity of the Elskerdeg pass you could never be certain.
‘If I’m to be frank,’ the elf spoke up unexpectedly, ‘I didn’t have the grounds to be pleased with the world and its image following the Peace of Cintra. Not to mention the new order.’
‘In my case it was similar,’ said the pilgrim, crossing his powerful forearms on his chest. ‘Though I came to realise it, as a friend said, post factum.’
Silence reigned for a long time. Even whatever had been howling on the pass was silent.
‘At first,’ continued the pilgrim – although Boreas and the elf had been ready to bet he would not – ‘At first, everything indicated that the Peace of Cintra would bring favourable changes, would create quite a tolerable world order. If not for everyone, then at least for me . . .’
‘If my memory serves me—’ Boreas cleared his throat ‘—the kings arrived in Cintra in April?’
‘The second of April, to be precise,’ the pilgrim corrected him. ‘It was, I recall, a full moon.’
*
Along the walls, positioned below the dark beams supporting a small gallery, hung rows of shields with colourful representations of the heraldic emblems and coats of arms of the Cintran nobility. A first glance revealed the differences between the now somewhat faded arms of the ancient families and those of families ennobled more recently during the reigns of Dagorad and Calanthe. The newer ones had vivid and not yet cracked paint, and no peppering of woodworm holes was visible on them.
Whereas the escutcheons of the more recently ennobled Nilfgaardian families, rewarded during the capture of the castle an
d the five-year imperial administration, had the most vivid colours.
When we regain Cintra, thought King Foltest, it will be necessary to make sure the Cintrans don’t destroy those shields in a fervour of revival. Politics is one thing, the hall’s decor another. Changes in regimes cannot be a justification for vandalism.
So everything began here, thought Dijkstra, looking around the great hall. The celebrated betrothal banquet, during which the Steel Urcheon appeared and demanded the hand of Princess Pavetta . . . And Queen Calanthe engaged the Witcher . . .
How bizarre are the twists of human fate, thought the spy, surprising himself at the banality of his own musings.
Five years ago, thought Queen Meve, five years ago, the brain of Calanthe, the Lioness of the blood of the Cerbins, splashed onto the floor of the courtyard, this very courtyard I can see from the windows. Calanthe, whose proud portrait we saw in the corridor, was the penultimate living carrier of the royal blood. After her daughter, Pavetta, drowned, the only one left was her granddaughter. Cirilla. Unless the news that Cirilla is also dead is true.
‘Please.’ Cyrus Engelkind Hemmelfart, the Hierarch of Novigrad, accepted on grounds of age, position and universal respect per acclamationem as the chairman of the meeting, beckoned with a trembling hand. ‘Please take your seats.’
They found their chairs, which were marked by mahogany plaques, and sat down at the round table. Meve, Queen of Rivia and Lyria. Foltest, King of Temeria, and his vassal, King Venzlav of Brugge. Demavend, King of Aedirn. Henselt, King of Kaedwen. King Ethain of Cidaris. Young King Kistrin of Verden. Duke Nitert, head of the Redanian Regency Council. And Count Dijkstra.
We must rid ourselves of that spy, remove him from the conference table, thought the hierarch. King Henselt and King Foltest, why, even young Kistrin, have taken the liberty of making sour remarks, so at any moment there’ll be a démarche from the Nilfgaardian representatives. Sigismund Dijkstra is a man of unseemly breeding, and furthermore a person with a dirty past and bad reputation, a persona turpis. One cannot let the presence of a persona turpis infect the atmosphere of the negotiations.
The Saga of the Witcher Page 195