‘Would you like to explain?’
‘What’s there to explain? I had enough time in Toussaint to read closely what I’d written.’
‘And?’
‘I’m going to write it again. Anew.’
‘I understand.’ Geralt nodded. ‘In short, you turned out to be as poor a writer as you were a favourite. Or to put it more bluntly: you make a fucking mess of whatever you touch. Well, but even if you have the chance to improve and rewrite your Half a Century, you haven’t got a fucking prayer with Duchess Anarietta. Ugh, the lover driven away in disgrace. Yes, yes, no point making faces! You weren’t meant to be ducal consort in Toussaint, Dandelion.’
‘We shall see about that.’
‘Don’t count on me. I don’t mean to be there to see it.’
‘And no one’s asking you to. I tell you though, Little Weasel has a good and understanding little heart. In truth, she got somewhat carried away when she caught me with young Nique, the baron’s daughter . . . But now she’s sure to have cooled off. Understood that a man isn’t created for monogamy. She’s forgiven me and is no doubt waiting—’
‘You’re hopelessly stupid,’ stated Geralt, and Ciri confirmed she thought the same with an energetic nod of her head.
‘I’m not going to discuss it with you,’ Dandelion sulked. ‘Particularly since it’s an intimate matter. I tell you one more time: Little Weasel will forgive me. I’ll write a suitable ballad or sonnet, send it to her, and she’ll . . .’
‘Have mercy, Dandelion.’
‘Oh, there’s really no point talking to you. Let’s ride on! Gallop, Pegasus! Gallop, you white-legged flyer!’
They rode on.
It was May.
*
‘Because of you,’ the Witcher said reproachfully, ‘because of you, O my banished lover, I also had to flee from Toussaint like some outlaw or exile. I didn’t even manage to meet up with . . .’
‘Fringilla Vigo? You wouldn’t have seen her. She left soon after you set off in January. She simply vanished.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about her.’ Geralt cleared his throat, seeing Ciri prick up her ears in interest. ‘I wanted to meet Reynart. And introduce him to Ciri . . .’
Dandelion fixed his eyes on Pegasus’s mane.
‘Reynart de Bois-Fresnes,’ he mumbled, ‘fell in a skirmish with marauders on the Cervantes pass sometime at the end of February, in the vicinity of the Vedette watchtower. Anarietta honoured him with a posthumous medal—’
‘Shut up, Dandelion.’
Dandelion shut up, admirably obedient.
*
May marched on and matured. The vivid yellow of dandelions disappeared from the meadows, replaced by the downy, grubby, fleeting white of their parachutes.
It was green and very warm. The air, if it wasn’t freshened by brief storms, was thick, hot and as sticky as mead.
*
They crossed the Yaruga on the twenty-sixth of May over a very new, very white bridge smelling of resin. The remains of the old bridge – black, scorched, charred timbers – could be seen in the water and on the bank.
Ciri became anxious.
Geralt knew. He knew her intentions, knew about her plans, about the agreement with Yennefer. He was ready. But in spite of that the thought of parting stung him painfully. As though a nasty little scorpion had been sleeping in his chest, within him, behind his ribcage and had now suddenly come awake.
*
A spreading oak tree stood – as it had for at least a hundred years, actually – at the crossroads outside the village of Koprzywnica, beyond the ruins of the burnt-down inn. Now, in the spring, it was laden with tiny buds of blossom. People from the whole region, even the remote Spalla, were accustomed to using the huge and quite low boughs of the oak to hang up slats and boards bearing all sorts of information. For that reason, the oak tree that served for communication between people was called the Tree of Tidings of Good and Evil.
‘Ciri, start on that side,’ ordered Geralt, dismounting. ‘Dandelion, have a look on this side.’
The planks on the boughs swayed in the wind, clattering against each other.
Searches for missing and separated families usually dominated after a war. There were plenty of declarations of the following kind: COME BACK, I FORGIVE YOU, plenty of offers of erotic massage and similar services in the neighbouring towns and villages, and plenty of announcements and advertisements. There were love letters, there were denunciations signed by well-meaning people, and poison pen letters. There were also boards expressing the philosophical views of their authors – the vast majority of them moronically nonsensical or repulsively obscene.
‘Ha!’ called Dandelion. ‘A witcher is urgently sought in Rastburg Castle. They write that good pay, luxurious accommodation and extraordinarily tasty board are guaranteed. Will you avail yourself of it, Geralt?’
‘Absolutely not.’
Ciri found the information they were looking for.
And then announced to the Witcher what he had been expecting for a long time.
*
‘I’m going to Vengerberg, Geralt,’ she repeated. ‘Don’t make faces like that. You know I have to, don’t you? Yennefer’s summoned me. She’s waiting for me there.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re going to Rivia, to that rendezvous you’re still keeping a secret—’
‘A surprise,’ he interrupted. ‘It’s a surprise, not a secret.’
‘Very well, a surprise. I, meanwhile, will sort out what I need to in Vengerberg, pick up Yennefer and we’ll both be in Rivia in six days. Don’t make faces, please. And let’s not part like it was forever. It’s just six days! Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, Ciri.’
‘Rivia, in six days,’ she repeated once more, reining Kelpie around.
She galloped away at once. She was out of sight very quickly, and Geralt felt as though a cold, awful clawed hand was squeezing his stomach.
‘Six days,’ Dandelion repeated pensively. ‘From here to Vengerberg and back to Rivia . . . All together it’ll be close to two hundred and fifty miles . . . It’s impossible, Geralt. Indeed, on that devilish mare, on which the girl can travel at the speed of a courier, three times quicker than us, theoretically, very theoretically, she could cover such a distance in six days. But even the devilish mare has to rest. And that mysterious matter that Ciri has to take care of will also take some time. And thus it’s impossible . . .’
‘Nothing is impossible—’ the Witcher pursed his lips ‘—for Ciri.’
‘Can it be—?’
‘She’s not the girl you knew,’ Geralt interrupted him harshly. ‘Not any longer.’
Dandelion was silent for a long time.
‘I have a strange feeling . . .’
‘Be quiet. Don’t say anything. I beg you.’
*
May was over. The new moon was coming, the old moon was waning. It was very thin. They rode towards the mountains, barely visible on the horizon.
*
It was a typical landscape after a war. All of a sudden, graves and burial mounds had sprung up among the fields; skulls and skeletons lay white amidst the lush, spring grass. Corpses hung on roadside trees, and wolves sat beside the roads, waiting for the miserable travellers to weaken.
Grass no longer grew on the black patches of land where fires had passed through.
The villages and settlements, of which only charred chimneys remained, resounded with the banging of hammers and the rasping of saws. Near the ruins, peasant women dug holes in the scorched earth with hoes. Some of them, stumbling, were pulling harrows and ploughs and the webbing harnesses bit into their gaunt shoulders. Children hunted for grubs and worms in the newly ploughed furrows.
‘I have a vague feeling that something’s not as it should be here,’ said Dandelion, ‘Something’s missing . . . Do you have that impression, Geralt?’
‘Eh?’
‘Something’s not normal here.’
‘Nothing’s normal
here, Dandelion. Nothing.’
*
During the warm, black and windless night, lit up by distant flashes of lightning and restless growls of thunder, Geralt and Dandelion saw from their camp the horizon in the west blooming with the red glow of fire. It wasn’t far and the wind that blew up brought the smell of smoke. The wind also brought snatches of sound. They heard – like it or not – the howling of people being murdered, the wailing of women, and the brash and triumphant yelling of bandits.
Dandelion said nothing, glancing fearfully at the Witcher every now and then.
But the Witcher didn’t even twitch, didn’t even turn his head around. And his face seemed to be cast in bronze.
They continued on their journey the next morning. They didn’t even look at the thin trail of smoke rising above some trees.
And later they chanced upon a column of settlers.
*
They were walking in a long line. Slowly. Carrying small bundles. They walked in complete silence. Men, boys, women and children. They walked without grumbling, without tears, without a word of complaint. Without screams, without any desperate wailing.
But there were screams and despair in their eyes. In the empty eyes of people who had been damaged. Robbed, beaten, driven away.
‘Who are they?’ Dandelion ignored the hostility visible in the eyes of the officer supervising the march. ‘Who are you driving like this?’
‘They’re Nilfgaardians,’ snapped a sub-lieutenant from the height of his saddle. He was a ruddy-faced stripling, of no more than eighteen summers. ‘Nilfgaardian settlers. They appeared in our lands like cockroaches! And we’ll sweep them away like cockroaches. So was it decided in Cintra and so was it written in the peace treaty.’
He leaned over and spat.
‘And if it was up to me,’ he continued, looking defiantly at Dandelion and the Witcher, ‘I wouldn’t let them get out of here alive, the rats.’
‘And if it depended on me,’ said a non-commissioned officer with a grey moustache in a slow, drawling voice, looking at his commander with a gaze strangely devoid of respect, ‘I’d leave them in peace on their farms. I wouldn’t drive good farmers from the land. I’d be glad that agriculture was prospering. That there’s something to eat.’
‘You’re as thick as pig shit, Sergeant,’ snapped the sub-lieutenant. ‘It’s Nilfgaard! It’s not our language, not our culture, not our blood. We’d be glad of the agriculture and nursing a viper in our bosom. Traitors, ready to stab us in the back. Perhaps you think there’ll be harmony with the Black Cloaks forever. No, they can go back where they came from . . . Hey, soldiers! That one has a cart! Get it off him, at the double!’
The order was carried out extremely zealously. With the use not only of heels and fists, but truncheons too.
Dandelion gave a slight cough.
‘What, something not to your liking, perhaps?’ The youthful sub-lieutenant glared at him. ‘Perhaps you’re a Nilfgaard-lover?’
‘Heaven forbid,’ Dandelion swallowed.
Many of the empty-eyed women and girls walking like automatons had torn garments, swollen and bruised faces, and thighs and calves marked by trickles of dried blood. Many of them had to be supported as they walked. Dandelion looked at Geralt’s face and began to be afraid.
‘Time we were going,’ he mumbled. ‘Farewell, gentlemen.’
The sub-lieutenant didn’t even turn his head around, preoccupied with checking that none of the settlers were carrying luggage larger than the Peace of Cintra had determined.
The column of settlers walked on.
They heard the high-pitched, desperate screams of a woman in great pain.
‘Geralt, no,’ groaned Dandelion. ‘Don’t do anything, I beg you . . . Don’t get involved . . .’
The Witcher turned his face towards him, and Dandelion didn’t recognise it.
‘Get involved?’ he repeated. ‘Intervene? Rescue somebody? Risk my neck for some noble principles or ideas? Oh, no, Dandelion. Not any longer.’
*
One night, a restless night lit up by distant flashes of lightning, a dream woke the Witcher again. He wasn’t certain this time, either, if he hadn’t gone straight from one nightmare to another.
Once again, a pulsating brightness that frightened the horses rose above the remains of the campfire. Once again, there was a great castle, black colonnades, and a table with women sitting around it in the brightness.
Two of the women weren’t sitting but standing. One in black and white and the other in black and grey.
It was Yennefer and Ciri.
The Witcher groaned in his sleep.
*
Yennefer was right to quite categorically advise Ciri against wearing male clothing. Dressed like a boy, Ciri would have felt foolish, here, now, in the hall among these elegant women sparkling with jewellery. She was pleased she’d agreed to dress in a combination of black and grey. It flattered her when she felt approving looks on her puffed, paned sleeves and high waist, on the velvet ribbon bearing the small rose-shaped diamond brooch.
‘Please come closer.’
Ciri shuddered a little. Not just at the sound of that voice. Yennefer, it turned out, had been right in one more thing – she had advised against a plunging neckline. Ciri, however, had insisted and now had the impression the draught was literally raging over her chest, and her whole front, almost to her navel, was covered in gooseflesh.
‘Come closer,’ repeated the dark-haired, dark-eyed woman whom Ciri knew and remembered from the Isle of Thanedd. And although Yennefer had told her whom she would meet in Montecalvo, had described them all and taught her all of their names, Ciri at once began to entitle her ‘Madam Owl’ in her thoughts.
‘Welcome to the Montecalvo Lodge,’ said Madam Owl. ‘Miss Ciri.’
Ciri bowed as Yennefer had instructed, politely, but more in the male fashion, without a ladylike curtsey, without a modest and submissive lowering of her eyes. She responded with a smile to Triss Merigold’s sincere and pleasant smile, and with a somewhat lower nod of the head to Margarita Laux-Antille’s friendly look. She endured the remaining eight pairs of eyes, although they pierced like gimlets. Stabbed like spear blades.
‘Please be seated,’ beckoned Madam Owl with a truly regal gesture. ‘No, not you, Yennefer! Just her. You, Yennefer, are not an invited guest, but a felon, summoned to be judged and punished. You will stand until the Lodge decides on your fate.’
Protocol was over for Ciri in a flash.
‘In that case I shall also stand,’ she said, not at all quietly. ‘I’m no guest either. I was also summoned to be informed about my fate. That’s the first thing. And the second is that Yennefer’s fate is my fate. What applies to her applies to me. We cannot be rent asunder. With all due respect.’
Margarita Laux-Antille smiled, looking her in the eyes. The modest, elegant woman with the slightly aquiline nose, who could only be the Nilfgaardian, Assire var Anahid, nodded, and tapped her fingers lightly on the table.
‘Philippa,’ said a woman with her neck wrapped in a silver fox-fur boa. ‘We don’t have to be so uncompromising, it seems to me. At least not today, not right now. This is the Lodge’s round table. We sit at it as equals. Even if we are to be judged. I think we can all agree about what we should—’
She didn’t finish, but swept her eyes over the remaining sorceresses. They, meanwhile, expressed their agreement by nodding: Margarita, Assire, Triss, Sabrina Glevissig, Keira Metz, and the two beautiful elf women. Only the other Nilfgaardian, the raven-haired Fringilla Vigo, sat motionless, very pale, not wresting her eyes from Yennefer.
‘Let it be so.’ Philippa Eilhart waved a ringed hand. ‘Sit down, both of you. Despite my opposition. But the Lodge’s unity comes before everything. The Lodge’s interests before everything. And above everything. The Lodge is everything, the rest nothing. I hope you understand, Ciri?’
‘Very well.’ Ciri had no intention of lowering her gaze. ‘Particularly since I am t
hat nothing.’
Francesca Findabair, the stunning elf woman, gave a peal of resonant laughter.
‘Congratulations, Yennefer,’ she said in her hypnotically melodic voice. ‘I recognise an outstanding hallmark, the purity of the gold. I recognise the school.’
‘It isn’t difficult to recognise.’ Yennefer swept a passionate look around her. ‘For it’s the school of Tissaia de Vries.’
‘Tissaia de Vries is dead,’ Madam Owl said calmly. ‘She’s not present at this table. Tissaia de Vries died, and the matter has been grieved and mourned. It was simultaneously a landmark and a turning point. For a new time has dawned, a new era has come, and great changes are coming. And fate has assigned you an important role in these transformations, Ciri; you who once were Cirilla of Cintra. You probably already know what role.’
‘I know,’ she snapped, not reacting to Yennefer’s restraining hiss. ‘Vilgefortz explained it to me! While preparing to stick a glass syringe between my legs. If that’s supposed to be my destiny, then I – respectfully – decline.’
Philippa’s dark eyes flashed with a cold anger. But it was Sheala de Tancarville who spoke.
‘You still have much to learn, child,’ she said, wrapping the silver fox-fur boa around her neck. ‘You will have to unlearn many things, I see and hear, by your own efforts or with someone’s help. You have lately come into possession, it can be gathered, of much evil knowledge. You have also certainly endured evil, experienced evil. Now, in your childish rage, you refuse to notice the good, you deny the good and good intentions. You bristle like a hedgehog, unable to recognise precisely those who are concerned with your good. You snort and bare your claws like a wild kitten, without leaving us a choice: you need to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck. And we shall do that, child, without a second thought. For we are older than you, we’re wiser, we know everything about what has been and what is, and we know much about what will be. We shall take you by the scruff of the neck, kitty, so you may one day soon, sit here among us at this table, as an experienced and wise she-cat. As one of us. No! Not a word! Don’t you dare open your mouth when Sheala de Tancarville is speaking!’
The voice of the Koviran sorceress, sharp and piercing like a knife scraping against iron, suddenly hung in mid-air over the table. Not only Ciri cowered; the other witches of the Lodge shuddered slightly and drew their heads into their shoulders. Well, perhaps with the exception of Philippa, Francesca and Assire. And Yennefer.
The Saga of the Witcher Page 203