A Scholar's travels with a Witcher

by Spike368

Sent out to gather the knowledge of the real world. A young scholar from the University of Oxenfurt finds a wounded Witcher on the steps to the inn where he was staying. So he starts gathering the material for his journals. Rated T for language

138. Chapter 138

I wish I could tell you, dear reader whoever you are, that I reacted to the revelation that I had been the one leaking the information to the enemy, well. Not only that, but I had been doing so in the worst, most boring, stereotypical way that a person can imagine. I wish I could say that I took that well.

I literally spilled my guts out to a pretty woman on the pillow. The sheer fact of that alone was mortifying. I mean… what? What kind of idiot lies on the bed and tries to show off to a beautiful woman by spilling the deepest secrets that he could be aware of.

As it turns out, it's this kind of idiot.

I wish I could tell you that I rose to the occasion with grace, dignity and dynamism. I could probably even get away with doing that, after all, the only people that know the truth were in the room at the time and one of the benefits of being a known chronicler and historian is that my words are generally known to be reliable.

But I did not do those things.

What I did was to kind of fold in on myself while the activity carried on around me. I didn't quite curl up into a ball, but I did shuffle backwards until I found my back against something solid enough that it would support my weight, and then I started to stare into space.

I didn't register it. I didn't see it or watch anything that happened so I can't swear to this. I am told what happened from the people that were there at the time. Syanna took charge. She ordered Anne to be moved into one of the smaller guest rooms on our corridor. It might even have been the one that Sam had been using.

When some Knight bent to do that, it turned out that, in flying through the air and through several pieces of furniture, a vase and a picture, Anne had been quite badly injured.

Funny that.

She wasn't dangerously hurt, but certainly to the level of some cracked ribs and something that was called "impact damage" to the back of the head. Ariadne was mortified and after checking that I wasn't physically hurt, she worked with Laurelen to heal Anne's injuries.

In the meantime, Syanna refused to allow anyone to leave. The Knight who had threatened Ariadne with a sword was tasked with clearing up the broken furniture and crockery. Apparently, Kerrass was astonished that he bent to the task without complaint. A couple of the other guarding Knights stripped the furniture and things out of the newly designated prison cell and there was some clattering from down the corridor.

After that? When Ariadne and Laurelen were satisfied that she could be moved, Kerrass helped Anne into the room in question. By this point, Ariadne wasn't looking at me. Emma would tell me that her eyes would move towards me and then she would seem to tear them away.

I was dimly aware of some orders being given. Syanna telling people that no-one in or out, that kind of thing before she came over to me.

"Freddie?"

The whistling in my ears stopped as suddenly as it started.

I looked up at her. She had stopped being Syanna at some point and had become the Knight Commander.

"I presume I'm fired." I said.

"What? Whatever for?"

"I am the leak." I said. "I've been giving information to our enemies."

"Freddie." Mark said. "We have all sat and gossiped with her. We have all told her things. It wasn't just you."

"Me too." Emma admitted. "As we sit here and talk about all of this, I am currently thinking about what kind of information she might have been able to pass on about our trading concerns."

"And I did not guard my speech in front of her." Kerrass added as he came back into the room where he nodded towards Syanna.

Syanna took the nod.

"Freddie…" She began. "I can't claim to know how you feel right now. No-one can. You've been made a fool of by someone with a pretty face. Join the club. You are not alone. We are all prone to being lonely, scared and unhappy. For my mind, they chose exactly the right way to get to you.

"But right now, I don't care how badly you are feeling. I just don't. The reason for that is that I do not have the time. I was not joking before. When you are done with your immediate work, I am going to commission you to write a book on practical courtly methods for the aspiring Knight. I am going to make the Knights read it. I am also going to get you to write a book on investigation technique. The way that you have been able to put yourself in the mind of our enemies recently has been really impressive.

"But where I know more than you is in the subject of interrogating prisoners. You know about interviewing people, this is different. This is going to be an interrogation. And we do not have time to fuck about. Torture is pointless, I could persuade Lady Vigo to tear the matter out of the courtesan's mind, but I would first need to persuade my sister that such a thing would be necessary and Madame La Comtesse du Angral is having a bizarre reaction where she has come over all protective of our prisoner.

"But we need to know what she knows, turn her to our cause if possible and we need to do that. Right. Fucking. Now. Because the instant that it gets out of these rooms that we've turned her then what she knows will be useless and her little boy will, at best, get his throat slit."

She was kind enough to leave out what the worst was. I have no doubt that that would involve fingers, ears and toes.

"This is what I know about." She said. "Or at least, what Colonel Duberton taught me about. But this is not really a hard case. She will say nothing to anyone for fear of her son's life. Except to you I think."

"Why do you think that?"

"She's upset about this. If she was a professional agent, she wouldn't have even blinked. It's just the cost of doing business that sooner or later, you are going to get caught. But here, she is mortified about the fact that she has betrayed you all. My guess is that she was turned after she was made part of your group. She is ashamed and that tells me something. I am not sure what, but it tells me something.

"I need you to sack up a bit. Set aside your nonsense for a few days more and help me nail these bastards to a fucking wall. After that, I will hire the entire Belles to look after you and suck your dick constantly while you fall apart. But for right now? Feel like a fool later. I need Lord Frederick."

I nodded. As pep talks go it lacked a certain something but it worked.

I climbed to my feet and stretched. I felt stiff and strange but the stretch overbalanced me a little and I staggered. I forced myself over to the table where I poured myself some watered wine and drank it off.

"Ok." I said. "What do you want me to do?"

"We need to turn her to our side." Syanna said. "That's the best course. We need to know what she knows. And we don't have a lot of time. If I go in there, or anyone else goes in there and tries to get her to talk, she's going to dig in. She won't answer all of the questions because she will claim, correctly, that if she speaks then they're going to kill her son. I will argue, also correctly, that unless we can get these bastards then her son is dead anyway. She's going to refuse to speak, she's going to refuse to act.

"Now I know how to break her. It's simply a case of coaching the matter in terms of rescuing her son. The faster she helps us, the less trouble she herself will be in. But she doesn't trust me. And why should she, I am the person who she has been forced to be afraid of. She has been told that if she speaks to me then her son is dead. She will see what I am trying to say but she has no reason to trust me.

"But you? You're the one who made her speak up in the first place. Guilt of how she had behaved towards you is why she owned up. So if you go in there and tell her that we need to know how to rescue her son then, then you can convince her that we will follow through with that."

"Will we?" I asked bitterly, before I could stop myself.

Her face reddened and her eyes flashed. "You are hurt Freddie." She hissed between clenched teeth. "Otherwise I would rip your balls off for that."

She took a breath.

"Of course we'll rescue her kid, we'll do it today. I can't wait. An honest to the Prophet bad guy that I can hit, arrest and take to trial. I am positively moist at the prospect. But it needs to be soon if that boy is going to be alive. And for that, I need you."

I nodded and climbed to my feet. I nodded and almost groaned in relief when I felt my mind starting to work on the problem. There is a constant fear at the moment when I am being overwhelmed by… whatever in the moment. There is almost a fear that I will lose the ability to think. That might sound irrational, but it's a real fear for me sometimes. That loss, the inability to sift and analyse information is vital to… well me being me. It is something that I have always had but now, when I sometimes lose myself. I lose it and there is always a fear, just a small one, that it will never come back.

But there and then, that my mind was coming back, meant that I was ok.

For now at least.

I moved through the corridor. There were guards on the bedroom door now. I noticed as I just walked in. I noticed, but ignored the fact that the guards checked with Syanna who was behind me as to whether or not I was allowed.

There were still guards in there, working. Taking ornaments and containers out and stacking them in the corridor. In the middle of the room was a table and a set of a few chairs.

Anne was sat on the bed with her head in her hands, sobbing her lungs out. To my further astonishment, Ariadne was sitting next to her doing her best to comfort the woman. I have seen Ariadne unhappy before, I have seen her in a rage and upset. But she looked stricken here.

I took a breath and walked over to the two women.

It took another deep breath to be able to kneel in front of them and take Anne's hands in my own.

She looked at me, tears shining in her eyes. "Oh Prophet Freddie, I am so sorry. I know how much…"

"Stop it." I said as gently as I could.

It was not perfect and it certainly came out harsher than I wanted it to. Just as I had seen her eyes I was struck by a memory. I had been looking into those eyes from almost this exact angle when she had been naked and on top of me. I had seen that wonderful kind of fear that comes into a person's face in the extremes of pleasure and for a moment, I could see her like that.

I would never see that expression on her face again and for a moment, my heart broke.

I swallowed and tried to think of Ariadne who was sat nearby, watching my face.

"You don't need to apologise to me." I forced myself to say. After that, the words started to come much easier. "Your son was in danger and you did what you thought you had to."

"I did," She wiped her hands across her face. "But that doesn't stop…"

"Please Anne." I told her, feeling as though I was getting to firmer ground. "We don't have time."

"What?"

I straightened and walked over to the table and sat down. There was already paper, ink and quill there.

"Anne," I said carefully as I pulled up a chair. "I am hurt. I am upset, angry and I do feel awful. But you were doing your best to help your son and keep him safe. I cannot blame you for that, although I will admit that I will struggle to trust you again. But I cannot blame you for it. If you want to talk about it, if it would honestly feel better to have me rant, scream and weep at you, then we can do that later. We don't have time for that kind of thing right now."

"But…"

"If we are going to rescue your son, we need to know as much as you can tell us." I told her. "We need to know where you meet the men that take him. We need to know how they let you know that he was taken. How do you report to them and so on. The more you tell us, the more likely it is that we can get your son out of their hands and back into your arms safe and sound."

'But… But they will…"

"You are going to object." I told her. "This is not a new story. They have told you all the terrible things that they are going to do to your son. They will have threatened you with what happens if you go to the guard, or the Knights Francesca, or tell your boss at the Belles who, I understand, many fear more than they do the Duchess. They will have told you that they have agents everywhere and that those agents will tell them if you betray them."

She nodded and I hated myself for a moment. I had her and I knew it. She knew it too and somewhere in the room, Syanna was watching with a smirk of amusement. I hated her too.

"Well, one of two things is true there." I told her. "The first is that they will soon find out that you have been caught and they will act accordingly. That makes it necessary that we work fast. The second is that they are lying, they don't have the agents that they told you they have and that they are waiting for your daily visit. In which case… we still need to do this quickly."

"But I have wronged you…" She said. "You want me to tell you about them and what I saw. Is that it? Is that the bargain that you would strike?"

"I will not deny," I began. 'That the thought had crossed my mind." I told her. "But the truth is that we will take at least one of your son's kidnappers alive and we can question them if you don't want to talk. That might leave you in a bit more legal jeopardy but the Duchess is understanding lady and she will take into account the fact that you were afraid for your son's life, especially given how she has just adopted a daughter of her own. Your help will be invaluable of course."

"But…" She looked panicky.

"You are next about to object, wondering what happens if they see us coming. You are afraid that they will kill your son before we get a chance to save him."

She stared at me and I knew I was right.

"Anne, the woman on your left is an Elder Vampire, somewhere north of Nine hundred years old. She is also one of three Sorceresses in Toussaint, another of whom is my sister's wife. The third can possibly be persuaded to lend a hand as well. My best friend is a Witcher. Sir Guillaume, one of, if not the foremost Knights of the Realm, will come and the Knights of Saint Francesca will also help out if they are able. You will be astonished at the amount of righteous violence that is about to be unleashed on your behalf."

She looked over to Syanna who nodded.

"Why would you do this? Any of you. I have…"

"You are a wronged woman." Syanna said. "Even if you had killed someone, or worse, because they held your son hostage, we would still do our best to ensure your son's safety. And when it is decided on what to do with you, because that conversation is going to happen, we will also take the fact that you acted under duress into account. But

also, we will rescue your son because it is the right thing to do. I am literally shivering with anticipation."

"Why?" Anne asked us.

I laughed, I couldn't help it. "Because this is Toussaint." I told her.

It all came together fairly quickly after that. Once that first seal had been broken, she just started speaking and it was almost more difficult to get her to stop. She kept enough back so that she still had something to trade with after her son had been rescued, but I rather thought that was redundant. Once her son was rescued we would get what we needed.

I could not help but imagine the way this would have gone under Radovid with the famous Redanian secret police. Anne would have gone to the torturer and the boy would have been thrown out, if they had bothered rescuing him in the first place.

There is a reason why the thought of Toussaint is so attractive to us all. It is the world as it should be, as it is supposed to be and the rest of us are cheapened with the fact that we don't live up to the ideals of a place like that.

Anne told us how it all worked. She would go into town and do her shopping. There was a house that overlooked the marketplace that had a window facing down. When the people that had her son were confident that there was no-one following her, they would hang a blue rag from the window which was when she would go to one of the taverns just off the square. A place called "Poor man's rest." It was not a big establishment and it's main selling point was that it had a view of the harbour. That, and the beer was cheap and it was on one of the access roads to the market place itself. It did most of its business from the market stall holders who would send for a sack of ale or wine to wet their throats after a hard day's selling.

She would buy a small ale and sit and watch the docks for a while until a carriage would arrive. The carriage would be black and shuttered and she would get inside. She could not see out but she knew that they always took a different route to the place where she was going.

There would be two men driving the carriage and one inside.

They would take her to a house. She thought it was near to the docks but could not be sure as she was always emptied out into a courtyard that had no view. After some leading questions from Kerrass she told us that the house itself blocked the view of the palace so it was reasoned that the house faced towards the harbour and down the hill. She had not obscured this fact, it was simply a case that she hadn't thought like that.

There she would be met by more men who would ask her questions about her day, about the plans of the family and anything that she could glean about the workings of the investigation. If the questioners were pleased with the reports then her son would be produced and they could spend some time together.

Her son appeared to be clean, healthy and relatively well fed, often in the company of some kind of noble looking woman who seemed to act as part nanny, part governess, part private tutor. Anne would have assumed that this was some kind of servant figure. She was often in the background during those meetings, listening in on things and just, generally, being in the background. Her son wanted to go home and wept when it came time for her to leave, having to be pried away from his mother by the Governess woman.

Anne would get back aboard the carriage and then it would drive to drop her off in the same part of town where she was picked up. After that, it would take her a little while of walking around to recover from the heartache of either seeing her son, or not seeing her son as it could go either way. Then she would "fix her face" as she said and returned to the palace.

And yes, apparently this was a daily ritual although it didn't take place at a fixed time.

I didn't stay in the room and listen to all of that for long, I couldn't bear it. I kept looking over at the weeping, broken woman and wanting to reach over and comfort her. And worse than that, every so often, she would look up at me with her huge, gorgeous eyes and I found myself wanting to take her in my arms and kiss the problems away. That was when the images that those eyes conjured were not even more erotic than that.

In the end I made an excuse about getting some rest and left, eliciting a promise that someone would come and get me so that I could be a part of the rescue. I shared Syanna's longing for someone righteous to hit in the face, or the balls, whichever. It would feel good to have a real enemy.

After leaving the room I realised that I really was exhausted physically and mentally, so I decided to give some truth to the lie and go to bed to get some rest.

My room was quiet and had a strange hollow feeling. The servants had already been through it so there was a fire flickering in the hearth and the linens had been changed. Given that it was winter, how they managed to find fresh flowers to put in one of the pots I will never know. The clothes that had been set out for laundry were pressed and laid out.

It felt empty.

I didn't want to sleep too deeply, even though I was approaching that stage of fatigue that Emma calls "falling down tired", I wanted to be relatively alert when the call came. I made do with leaving my boots and outerwear nearby. I had been dressed in some courtly clothes for the morning's announcements and I left those out for cleaning while I changed into some "work" clothing. I didn't put my armour on but instead, left it in a place where I could easily reach it and get into it as fast as possible. Almost exactly the same way that I would arrange matters if I was camping by the side of the road.

I sharpened and oiled my spear, dagger and two combat knives and left them out as well. I didn't bother with the eating knife. Not because it didn't need sharpening. Eating Knives always need sharpening. They are just too small to be used for reasonable combat. But instead, because I realised that I was procrastinating. I was putting off going to bed.

Taking a deep breath I moved to the bed and forced myself to lie down on it in the universal pose of "I don't really want to sleep, but here we go." Lying on my back, feet stretched out and hands folded over my belly. I must have slept eventually but it was the kind of uncomfortable doze that I didn't really feel as though I had slept, and would later not remember sleeping. But time had passed so I must have slept at some point. Mostly though, I just lay there, massively uncomfortable, and stared at the ceiling of the beds canopy.

I know I was awake when someone opened the door slowly. It had that sound that meant the person opening it was trying to be quiet. You know the sound, the one that actually sounds louder than if they had just opened the door normally.

"I'm awake." I said to the ceiling before I tried to straighten. "Is it time?"

Ariadne was next to me in a heartbeat, gently pushing me back down to the bed. "No," She said, "it is not time yet."

I looked at her and frowned. "Are you alright?" I wondered.

"That's funny." She said with absolutely no humour at all as she looked around the room before moving off to collect a chair. "I actually came here to check on you. To make sure that you are alright."

"I'm tired." I told her. "And I can't sleep."

She picked up a heavy arm chair with one hand and carried it over to the bed. I had been right, she was upset. She would never use such an absent minded display of strength normally for fear of widening the gap between us.

"You miss her." She said as she settled the chair down. "Anne I mean."

She was right. That was what had been missing in the room and it was why I was so uncomfortable. Even when I was just coming into the family apartments, she would follow me into the room. I was used to her soft and gentle presence and now, the bed seemed large, cavernous and far too big. It was cold and… empty.

"Yes." I admitted. "I am sorry, but yes I do."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

I looked over at her sharply. She has one piece of easily recognisable body language which is that she draws herself in when she is upset. A protective gesture, wanting to protect her torso from being injured.

"I do." I admitted. "But only if it's not some kind of self-flagellating act on your part."

She smiled a little. "We are coming to know each other well Freddie." She told me.

I nodded and turned so that I was staring at the ceiling again.

"I do believe that I hate her." She went on softly. "It is a strange feeling for me. I have disliked people in the past and there have been, and still are, people that I would gladly murder. You have been very wise in not telling me about some of your adventures until after the fact as otherwise the world would have relearned what it is to anger me."

"Which is why I don't tell you about it until they are over." I told her. "Preemptively acting as you would want to, and as I want to to be fair, is dangerous."

"I know, it is a lesson that I learned long ago. But the truth is that I have never hated any of them. Disliked? Oh yes. Strongly even. I have been angry to a spitting rage. But Hate? I have never hated anyone before. Because if it had ever gotten to that stage in the past, I am powerful enough to simply kill them. They would not be a threat to me."

I listened to the rustling of fabric as she adjusted herself in the seat.

"But this woman? I do believe I hate her and I worry that it's… I feel that I am lessened by it."

"Why?"

She sighed. "I am not sure. I need to think about this a lot more. Jealousy is certainly part of it I think. But… That is unfair."

I could not contain a sigh and a yawn. I have no idea where it came from but it was there without warning.

"I'm sorry," She said. "You should be getting some rest." More rustling of cloth as she climbed to her feet.

"I am." I told her, reaching out for her. "I'm not going to sleep. I might even ask if I can change quarters given everything that has happened." I sighed again. "You and I have not spent enough time talking recently. Please stay."

She settled back down much to my relief.

"Why do you think you're being unfair?" I prompted.

"Everything she did, she did for the right reasons." Ariadne began. "She betrayed us because her son was in danger. I absolutely believe that. When the son is safe and in her arms again, we are going to find out that she was targeted because she was already here. She was not an enemy agent when she came to us, of this I am certain, but she was targeted because she was already here. So in another way, this is all our fault."

"Blaming ourselves is a dangerous hole to fall down." I told her. "Also, you promised that this wasn't about self-flagellation."

"I did and I meant it, I'm just trying to work it all out. So she betrayed us because we were just customers to her and that was her son. We might have been customers that she liked, was even friends with on some level, but that doesn't change the fact that we were customers. So if we she was going to choose customers over the life of her son, which would any of us choose?"

I said nothing. It didn't seem like the right juncture for me to start speaking just yet.

"So I don't hate her for that. It was the wrong choice but, if she was threatened that there were other agents that would betray her if she came clean and told everyone that was happening early on…"

"Which is the give away that there isn't." I said. "If there were other agents that would report on her if something went wrong, why would those agents not give the bad guys the information that they wanted. If there was an agent here that would know if she owned up to us, or if there was another agent that would inform if she owned up to the Knight Commander, then why would she be needed?"

"Because she is disposable." Ariadne responded.

"And is therefore less likely to be trusted. You will have checked to see if she was an agent, the place where you gained her recommendation is known for its discretion and secrecy and Syanna wouldn't have allowed Anne to get anywhere near us if there were any concerns. So we didn't trust her, it was only when she passed all those tests that we started to open up. So I agree that she was not an agent when she first came here."

"She was also not thinking rationally." Ariadne argued. "Her son was in danger, how would any of us be able to think clearly and clinically if someone we love is in danger."

The way she said it made me think that there was something there. But, again, I decided that this was not the time to be pursuing that kind of discussion.

"So no, that is not why I hate her. I'm pretty sure that I do hate her. I would dearly love to grab her by the head and spend some time figuring out exactly how much force it would take to push her head through a wall."

She paused and I continued to look at the ceiling. I could easily imagine her slightly furrowed brow as she spent her time trying to think it all through.

"Jealousy is the other reason." Ariadne declared. "She had everything that I want. Literally everything. She had your confidence and trust…"

A dagger of ice slid into my heart and I fought the lump in my throat down and closed my eyes against the tears that also threatened. Ariadne didn't seem to notice.

"... She had your affection and your body. She was able to wrap her arms around you in the night when you were troubled and sooth you when you needed it. She was able to kiss away your pains and your troubles and sing softly to you when your dreams were turning into Nightmares. And yes, it is true, I am also jealous of the fact that she got to enjoy your carnal skills when I have not been able to do that yet. I have lain awake at night, even though it has only started to happen recently and I have been able to hear the pair of you."

"Oh?" The desperate discomfort drove the pain down for a while.

"Oh yes." She failed to take the hint. "Vampiric senses are much sharper than humans. I am interested to see how you manipulate my sense of touch when it comes to my turn to share your bed."

I diplomatically said nothing.

"But I have been able to hear you. I have been able to hear the genuine sounds of her pleasure, things that she was just as surprised at as anyone, and I have not been able to help myself as my imagination has put me in her place instead of now, when I can only imagine what she must have been feeling in that moment. And then in the morning I have seen the way that you walk and have noticed the slight shifting of your posture as you have relaxed slightly but importantly. I have seen how you have felt more… at peace after a night of passion with a beautiful woman and I have felt jealous of the fact that it was not me that provided that peace and release for you, as well as the fact that I have not felt my own…"

"Release?" I suggested.

"Lessening of tension." Ariadne corrected. "And then I can smell her on you."

It really was a lot of work to fight down my own embarrassment.

"But…" Ariadne went on. "I knew that was going to happen. All of it. It was what I hired her for after all. You needed someone to take care of you. A nurse would have been too… distant, too clinical. You needed care, affection… Love. And it was not something that I could provide you with so it was only natural that I find you someone who could give you these things when they were beyond my reach.

"So… if anything, I should be grateful to her for the fact that she has been able to give you those things while I am unable to. So I don't think I hate her for that.

"So is it the fact that I trusted her maybe? I had paid her and I had given her… or rather loaned her the most important thing, the most precious thing in my existence. I do not own you but, I rather like to think that you belong to me. To give her that, to let her anywhere near that… I know that there have been other women since we have known each other. I have known about all of that and I know about your valiant efforts to maintain your own… chastity in the face of some… occasionally really quite tempting... Well… temptation. I have not been bothered by this. As I have admitted, more than once, I have looked for and received my own measure of sexual gratification in the past while waiting for you to…"

"Come to my senses?" I suggested with a slight smile.

"Exactly." She admitted.

"Ok." I said. "But here, it was not some seductress that managed to get past my defences. Nor was it some Goddess where I couldn't help it, Marion where I needed her help, or anyone else. And I repeat that there have only been two women that have known me since we became engaged. The Goddess and now Anne."

She snorted. "More fool you, I would be willing to wager that the women of Skellige could have taught you a thing or two."

"Probably. But in this case… Those other women… Marion, Saffron, the many and various ladies in the many and various houses of pleasure that Kerrass has taken me to. Those were women that you had nothing to do with. Whereas this one… You were the one that pushed me towards her. You deliberately put her in my way and stood over the pair of us until we…"

I paused. Not wanting to say the words. But Ariadne was too clever for that.

"Loved each other?"

"Yes." I admitted.

"I am not threatened by your love for her Freddie. Nor am I threatened by the love that you still hold in your heart for Marion, the affection for Saffron or the Love that you hold for the girls in Oxenfurt. I meant what I said to Anne about you when we were first discussing her coming to work with you and what her duties were going to be. I am well aware that you cannot take a woman to bed, or allow yourself to be vulnerable with one with that degree of intimacy unless there is a certain amount of Love there. You cannot help it and indeed it speaks well of you… In my opinion. There is a time for sexual intimacy without that and there is a time for it with."

"I have tried it without." I commented. "I found the experience to be fun but unsatisfying."

"Precisely. I knew that you were going to fall in love with her a little and although I hated every moment of it, I knew that it was coming.

"I am wondering if it's the betrayal of trust."

"It's definitely the betrayal of trust for me." I said. "You are right in everything that you have said. I agree with the assessment that she wasn't an enemy agent when she first came here. But in allowing her to get close to me, I had to trust her. I have to trust all the ladies that I allow to get close to me. Some of those women have had unfair advantages in getting me to trust them. Marion is the only one that I think I would have loved anyway without that, but the others… The Goddess was… too overwhelming to be denied. Saffron was a Succubus and I knew enough about Succubi to be able to trust her, even without the power of her pheromones."

"And her shape. Don't forget her shape." Ariadne said.

For a moment, the image of Saffron pulling me along a forest path with a wicked smile and a sway of hips was almost too much for me and I had to force the image down.

"But trust." I tried again. "I need that trust. I need it. I need to be able to trust the person that I am with. There are shortcuts of course. With the courtesans and similar that I have been involved with, there is the trust that my money will be paid and that if they hurt me then the house will cast them out or worse. There was no benefit to Saffron or Marion hurting me. The Goddess… Well… That is as perfect an example of what happens when I can't, or don't trust my partner not to hurt me.

"But, she has betrayed that trust."

I sighed and shook my head as I, again, had to force the tears down.

"Why is that trust so important to you Freddie?" Ariadne asked. THere was an edge to the question that I couldn't identify at the time and that I haven't asked her about since. Looking back, it suggested that she already knew the answer, or could easily guess what it was. I wonder, now, if the reason why she asked me that question in the there and then of the thing was because she was trying to get me to talk about it with her. If this was her method of getting people to talk, just as Kerrass' method is to appear disinterested and get people to talk anyway.

In all truth, it was not really something that I had entirely thought through myself. Examining it all through Ariadne's eyes might be of benefit.

"I've talked to you about my romantic past haven't I?" I wondered aloud.

"A little." She said. "As well as the things that I have been able to gleant from what you've written over the years."

"Then I apologise if this hurts you a little. I promise that I'm not doing it for that purpose."

"It's alright." She said as she arranged herself into a general kind of attitude of someone who is listening and taking mental notes. It's one of her favourite postures. "All of this happened to you a long time ago and there's nothing that can be done to change it now."

It took me some time to actually start talking. I spent a bit of time staring at the ceiling of the bed canopy.

"I was a disaster, romantically I mean, before I met Kerrass. I don't know why and I have long ago decided to stop probing the question. In light of modern thinking and some of the people that I've met since then, you included, I suspect it was a bit because I was an ass. Before I went to University, in that period where I worked in Redanian Logistics and intelligence, and after when I was still living at home. I just could not make it work.

"Father would arrange introductions to ladies, perfectly beautiful and wonderful women that I liked an awful lot and that I would have been glad to get to know better and glad to woo and marry. None of them were as beautiful as you mind,"

"Thank you."

"But there were not a small number of beauties there. There were also plenty of women that made me laugh and that I enjoyed the company of, to the point where, even if desire had not been kindled, I rather thought we could make each other happy in other ways. But it never got anywhere. There was always a problem. There would be another suitor that would swoop in at the last moment in order to interrupt my suit or their father would cut off negotiations or something.

"For the longest time... There is still part of me that likes to believe this and for all I know it is also true to a certain extent, I used to believe that it was my Father's fault and the fact that I was a younger son. I could easily imagine Edmund having no difficulty getting a wife on the grounds that he would inherit Father's title, lands and money, but I was a younger son and what would I show for it.

"Looking at it now, I had plenty of reasons that a young lady might marry me on her father's orders. Not least because my father would look well on the matter and that was no small a deal. He would be able to help out with trade or monetary matters for the father of the bride. So a younger daughter, married to a younger son. That kind of thing is more common than a lot of us would like to think.

"But Father was far from popular and we knew that too. The nobility hated him and it was easy to see that. He was a difficult man to like as well so it was easy to believe that he would alienate the people that needed to like him.

"I also used to blame the fact that I wasn't that attractive to look at. People are very kind now and say that, again since Kerrass, I have grown into my body a little more as well as gaining a certain amount of physical confidence around my movements that has made me more attractive.

"All of those things might still be true, but I am also left wondering as to whether there might have been another reason. A friend once told me that I sometimes came off as being a little too desperate to be attractive. That I was so miserable and that, in looking at me, it was as though I had already had my heart broken and was just looking for someone to do the actual… breaking of the heart for me. He said that I was so longing for love that I drove it away."

"It's possible." Ariadne said. "I cannot speak for most of that as I find you more than attractive to my eyes but what I first loved about you was your mind and your humour that went with that. You were not desperate with me."

"And that kind of proves the point. I was terrified of you. I didn't see you as someone that I was trying to court in those early days. I saw you as someone that I was just trying to survive the meeting with."

She chuckled at that. No matter how true it was.

"So when I eventually managed to run away from home, away from the constant torment, and it was a torment of constantly being sent off to suit eligible women only to be turned down time after time… I made it to Oxenfurt. Emma and… I think Mark and a little bit of mother arranged for my fees to be paid and an allowance to be sent. It wasn't the first thing that I did. It was not on the first night or anything like that. I think the first social thing I did was to go out and get drunk with a group of the other guys that had just got to the University. I think I spent a good week of time just being drunk and attending lectures. But it was shortly after that that I remember realising that… I remember realising that I had money, that I was by myself and that there was nothing to stop me from going and getting laid.

"And I did. I asked around, a little too discretely for my own good. Meaning that all my friends were quick to figure out what I was doing and one of the locals was good enough to take me under their wing. They took me to a place and I lost my virginity. Looking back, I still don't know if it was the right thing to do. I go back and forward on it. On the one hand, it meant that I wasn't disappointing a loved one or a girlfriend. She could teach me a few things so that when I did end up in the bed chamber with someone that I cared about, I wouldn't completely disappoint her.

"And yes, after this experience, I did go out and get some books so that I would know more about what to do when I found someone who would let me explore them properly."

"I am particularly looking forward to it when that time comes between the two of us." There was a smile in Ariadne's voice there.

"But here's the girl I normally leave out." I said. "And as I'm in the process of baring my soul here, I should say that I've not told many people these events other than those friends that were there to help me at the time. And, to make matters worse, I have changed events, lied about them and told the story in various ways in order to not appear as weak and pathetic as I actually was at the time. It is also true that I have melded two women into one person when I talk about them in many ways. That is… I suspect, unfair to both."

And that applies to you too dear reader. These days, even despite everything else that has come since then, are among the worst in my memory. Everyone has their heart broken at some stage. Everyone. A friend of mine once said that it is a necessary part of the evolution of a man, or a woman, to be truly and utterly fucked up by the person that they love. It's just one of those rites of passage that makes a person grow up to be "a normal and worthwhile member of society." He claimed that it was this experience that forces someone to have perspective on everything else that might be happening throughout the rest of the world. I am sorry if you feel as though I have misled you, but it would not be unfair to suggest that I have misled myself.

It is also true that when you compare what I went through to what I have been through since (torture, illness, injuries, horror and so on.) that this is not all that bad. Odd how it's the formative experiences that stick out so much.

"It is true that the first, great, unrequited love of my life was Dr Shani. She was very good to me all things considered and could have, very easily, torn my heart apart. As unrequited loves go, she could have been a lot crueller but the truth of the matter is that I was far too young for her. In experience as well as age. I am glad for her and Rickard as I rather think they both need someone to care for and have found that in each other a little bit.

"After that comes the romantic horror. Some of it is even funny looking back. There was one girl who I found myself falling in with. We were working together on some project or another. We talked, we laughed, we joked and were developing a relationship as friends. I spoke to my more experienced friends and they suggested asking her for a drink. One day after we had finished working on a project I did exactly that, I screwed up my courage and asked her for a drink. I will never forget it, we were standing in the sunlight after the workshop and I turned to her, looking gorgeous in the light green dress that female medical students wear in the summer. An outfit that benefits from girls with long legs if you know what I mean. She was laughing and smiling in the sunshine and I asked her if she wanted to go for a drink.

"She laughed in delight and said. "That would be wonderful, I could just do with a nice cider. Where were you thinking?" I was dizzy with delight and couldn't think of an answer which is when she dashed my hopes forever when she said "I'll just get a message to my boyfriend and get him to meet me there."

"I was crushed. The situation was made worse by the fact that, when he did arrive, it was clear that the two of them were hopelessly in love and that it would be cruel of me to even try to get between them.

"Pretty much the same thing happened with the next lady I fell for. She was taller, cooler, more noble as in the social caste noble. I rather thought that Father would approve. We struck up the beginnings of a friendship and I invited her for a drink. I still didn't know what to do to progress things from that point. I used to assume that there was some kind of lesson that I was missing that meant that I could progress things from "Would you like a drink?" to "Would you go to bed with me?""

Ariadne laughed at that.

"I realised my error when she met my friend though. A calm and polite interest in me changed into all but panting when she saw his broad shoulders, proper beard and shining blue eyes. Of course, now I know that those two were meant for each other but at the time, I was more than a little bit crushed.

"Then there was the other girl. She lived in the same halls as I did in my first year. Startlingly beautiful girl, mischievous grin, sparkling eyes, wicked sense of humour. I was helpless. We were walking home from class one day as we had suddenly developed a habit of doing. I hadn't thought of her in a romantic way as she was betrothed to a Knight in the army who was bigger than me. I had met him, he was a decent enough fellow, seemed a little cool to her in my opinion, but as we were walking home she started to tell me about all of the things that she was unhappy about in her relationship with him. Neither of them were noble born but like me had got to the point by being really clever and having rich parents.

"I had that happy problem of being really perceptive when it came to other people's romantic lives so I calmly and carefully asked her if she had told her fiancee about the problems that she was having. I told her, not incorrectly, that men are stupid and ignorant and that if she wanted to fix the problem then she needed to tell her fiancee that and then see if he was willing to fix the problems. She grinned at me, hugged me, thanked me for the insight and skipped off.

"I mentioned the incident to my now, loved up, friends and the girl, who I was still a little in love with, who was sitting on my best friend's lap laughed at me.

""So she's been meeting you to walk too and from class with you?" She wondered.

""Yes." I replied.

""And she was telling you all the problems in her existing love affair?"

""Yes."

""Freddie." She was laughing unhelpfully. "She wanted you to ask her for a drink so that she could sob on your shoulder and see if you would be better for her. She had a crush on you and wanted to see if it had legs and whether or not you were interested in her."

They laughed at me as I re-examined all my interactions with her in a new light."

"What happened to that couple?" Ariadne wondered.

"What? Oh. She did as I advised and took her grievances to her Knightly fiancee. He listened, considered and thought about it. Admitted that there were problems, admitted that there were problems that he had with her as well but that he wanted to fix them. She agreed and last I heard, they got married. She stopped walking to class with me shortly after that."

Ariadne considered this story for a while. "You are right." She said in a deathly serious tone. "It is pretty funny, although I cannot deny that I am glad for your romantic mishaps as it means that you are free to love me instead."

"That is some consolation." I admitted.

"Only some?" She teased before turning serious again. "Who broke your heart Freddie?"

I took a deep breath. Weird how after all these years it still comes back to haunt us.

"It was actually two women." I told her. Two women, one who started the job by being casually cruel, although there is a different interpretation that suggests that I just misread the entire affair, and then another to shatter me into little pieces that she walked all over for no reason that I ever found out."

"Tell me." She said, gently.

"The first was, to all intents and purposes, my lucky escape. I was drinking with some friends one night when I had gone along with them for a reason that I cannot actually remember. I do know that it was to a bar that I would not normally have gone to, not because it was awful but because they had a certain kind of minstrel there that I did not enjoy."

"What kind of music?"

"Is it important?"

"When I hire a Minstrel to play for you, I want to make sure that I get the right kind without offending your delicate sensibilities."

I chuckled. "I like harmonies where the main melody is still obvious. That bar liked this, almost random, clashing sound of music where I could not find the melody in the middle of it, no matter how hard I looked. To me, it was just noise and what made it worse was the fact that everyone else there was nodding along with the band's efforts, tapping their feet and shaking their heads to the sounds as though there was some kind of magic to the sounds. It left me feeling as though I was missing out on something.

"As I remember it though, a friend of a friend had a lover that was part of the band, I think she played a flute of some kind, and we were all dragged along to listen to that nonsense. I was alright, I found it amusing for a while, my friend would owe me a favour and the wine was reasonably good, but that soon turned into boredom.

"I was at the bar when she came over. And if I'm honest, I can still remember what she looked like as she came. She was… Oddly, she reminded me of Saffron quite a lot, or rather Saffron reminded me of her. She smiled like a hunter and I was her target. That makes it sound more poetic than it actually was. I hadn't been laid in a while, there were some girls that I had one or two night stands with. Some friends with occasional benefits stuff where I got to practise my practical knowledge of female anatomy. But I had never found either kind of situation particularly fulfilling.

"And then she was there. Of the two women, she is the one I find it hardest to remember. I find myself wondering if I had imagined it or if I had got something wrong.

"The charitable interpretation of events is that, to her, I was another notch on her bed-post. I know that she was as bored of the music as I was and had decided to go and see if she could find some toy to amuse herself. But that's unfair to her really. As I say, the charitable interpretation is that I was a diversion, little more than that. Someone and something to have some fun with for a few days before she would move on. Friends warned me about her as this was her habit, to pick someone, use them up and then move on. But me being me, I fell in love with her didn't I. Or close enough that I didn't know the difference.

"I knew very little about her really. We didn't really talk very much if you know what I mean."

"I know what you mean Freddie."

"She was the daughter of a townsman who had made it big in some way and she had managed to get into the university on some level. I have no idea what it was. Some people have suggested that she found the sudden freedoms that she was offered to be intoxicating to the point of madness. Suddenly she was in charge of her own funds and her own destiny and she went mad with it. She was a hedonist and she wanted everything. Drink, sex and later she turned to drugs to get that high. This wasn't helped by the fact that she was painfully beautiful.

"I fell for her, really hard, despite the advice of all my friends that I was making a mistake. That it would end badly and all of that. But I refused to believe it. I was in love, she laughed at all my jokes, listened when I moaned about my family and, the sex was amazing."

I realised what I was saying a little late but fortunately, Ariadne saw the funny side and laughed at me.

"And then she moved on. I walked into a pub to meet her one night to find her sitting astride a mercenary of some kind having wine poured into her cleavage which the mercenary lapped up to her amusement. I was devastated. She wondered why I was so upset. I never spoke to her again.

"I will admit that one of the main reasons that I never spoke to her again was because every time I was anywhere near her, one of my friends would firmly take me by the arm and move me on. Other than one memorable occasion when a very attractive minstrel friend of us all saw her making eyes at me with a calculating expression on her face. The theory at the time was that she had heard about who I really was and wondered if she could make some money by having my bastard or trapping me into a marriage of some kind. But the minstrel in question firmly took my hand, put it on her chest and kissed me soundly. When I came round she grinned at me and told me "That'll teach the bitch."

"As memories of my university life go, that was quite a good one. I was too stunned to make anything of it and it was over, really before I knew what was happening.

"She is the girl that got into drugs. She had been gorgeous when she was younger but after a while, the near constant drink, drugs and sex damaged her in some way. Her body could no longer cope with the abuse and it started to give out. Coupling that with the fact that her father disowned her and refused to pay for her medical treatments. She married a soldier, had his baby before she cuckolded him and he threw her out. I don't often get news of her now and I sometimes wonder if she's still alive. I know that she occasionally contacts old friends out of the blue and asks for money. There is something of an alliance amongst that circle that says that they will help her, food, clothes, shelter and so on. But that they won't give her money because she will spend it on drugs and alcohol and other ways to damage herself.

"But that incident broke me. It shouldn't. As I say, it was the world's most predictable heart-break. There have been other occasions when I have been quite happy to be a notch on some woman's bed post, including women who were more hedonistic than she was. Including the minstrel that I have just mentioned. But for some reason, that one got to me. Something about the way that she listened to me, or pretended to, got it's hooks into my soul. I thought it was more than it was and as such, she broke my heart."

I looked sideways at Ariadne, wondering if I should risk the next part. But as has happened so often, my mouth just decided that I was going to keep speaking.

"I will not lie, I still have nightmares about walking through that door and seeing her there like that, laughing with wine spilling over her tits with another man's mouth suckling it all up."

Ariadne didn't blink. After everything, I wondered why she might have been put off by that. "Understandable." She said. "It was a traumatic moment. Trauma doesn't have to come from a near-death experience or combat. It can come from all kinds of places. So that was the first woman, who was the second?"

I took a deep breath.

"She was worse. Largely because she was better in almost every way."

I sighed and straightened from the bed to pour myself a drink. A dim part of me wondered when the plan was going to come to fruiting and whether or not someone could come in to say that the rescue was going to be underway in order to save me from this conversation.

"They are still working out the details, Freddie." Ariadne told me. "This sort of thing seems to thrive on the details"

I lay back and sighed.

"I was very fragile after that. So fragile that I eschewed female company other than those established friends. One of those friends called me "Saddle shy." She said that it was like I had hurt myself falling off a horse and didn't want to get back in the saddle. As I recall, I told her that calling any woman a horse, or a saddle that I needed to get back into was a little insulting which made them all laugh and say things like "And that's why we love you."

"There were various well meaning attempts to "get me back in the saddle" as it were. Men introducing me to girls they had met in the bar who talked me up to the point where there was absolutely no way that I could live up to the expectations that these poor girls had of me. My female friends tried to introduce me to their friends and room-mates. But nothing came of that either. Nothing quite as embarrassing as when your friends push you together with someone that you don't know in the hopes that the two of you hit it off in a romantic way. The pair of you are just watching everyone who are hiding round the corner with a series of whispers."

I sighed. "I'm dodging the subject aren't I."

"Yes you are." Ariadne told me, "but you are working up to it so I will let you off."

"In the end, it was Shani who came to my rescue. To this day, I have no idea if she was trying to set me up with her, or if it was just a well-meaning favour for a friend. She was everything you are not. You are tall, slender, pale, dark haired and serious with occasional flashes of sharp humour. She was short, blond, made of curves and constantly laughing at things.

"She was a new medical student that Shani had taken under her wing given that she was extremely talented. But, apparently, she came from a wealthy family and, like me, she had all but run away to learn things. Her parents wanted to encourage her learning of healing by having her spend time with the local herb-woman. But this wasn't enough for the clever young girl. Shani had decided that this young woman had too much talent to be wasted and was doing everything within her, then, rather limited power to keep her in the university. One of her methods was to get me to show her round.

"As I say, within moments of meeting her, she had made me laugh as she mocked some of the more stuck up people in town. Moments after that, I had made her laugh with some of the stories about the escapades of myself and my friends. Including the various horrors that my love life had entailed. We laughed through the entire day and then later I took her to the bar to meet my friends and they all fell in love with her instantly.

"Apparently, she loved me from the moment that we met but I didn't see it. I was still saddle shy and oblivious, refusing to see what a girl, especially one as wonderful as that, would see in me. My friends teased me about it mercilessly as they tried to persuade me to ask her out.

"It took me three weeks to pluck up the courage. Matters were not helped by the fact that I had seen several other men try to ask her out only to be eviscerated in turn. She would later tell me that she had already decided that I was the one for her and had considered herself taken from day one.

"When I finally screwed up my courage to approach her with a bunch of flowers and ask her if she wanted to go for a walk by the river with me… Another moment that I will never forget… She looked at the flowers and rose to her feet before looking up at me. As I say, she was rather short. Then she grinned. "Fucking finally." She swore, knocked the flowers aside and pounced on me to the cheering of our mutual circle of friends."

Even now, all these fucking years later. This story still brings a tear to my eye. I am several years older than I was at the time. So much more experienced in both the world and in matters of the heart and the bed chamber. I am in love with, and engaged to be married to a lady that is stimulating in mind and soul as well as being, objectively, far more beautiful than this girl was at the time. But damn me if it doesn't still hurt like a motherfucker.

"It was brilliant." I said. "Amazing even. I was surprised to find out that I was the more experienced sexual partner. Not because of a judgement on her behalf but rather because I had been so used to being the innocent one in the pairing that it seemed strange. She wasn't a physical virgin due to an accident when she had learned to ride which was not uncommon in those of us that don't have to work in the fields, but also are not wealthy and powerful enough to ensure that a virginity is a more valuable commodity than charm, intelligence or an education.

"It certainly didn't bother me although I took care to hire a prostitute to take me through some things to help our first time be as magical as I could make it. According to the girl's feedback. It was all wonderful until it came time to actually… inserting the peg in the hole. Apparently that was uncomfortable and hurt, still, but she said I was very gentle all things considered. And things certainly improved during the second attempt and by the third she was much happier with things."

Ariadne listened to all of that with a smile.

"We loved, we laughed, we talked. We had a great time. It wasn't perfect and looking back, that was almost certainly my fault. I kept waiting for her to betray me."

"Only natural after your previous experience."

"That's what my friend said. I know it upset her occasionally but the truth was that… The most magical part of things, or rather one of the most magical parts of things, was learning to trust her. As time went by, my body and mind learned to relax around her. I began to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't going to come round a corner to find her being all over some dipshit of a mercenary. Or snogging a friend or the latest pretty bard to decide that he wanted to recapture his youth by playing in some of the student pubs and sleeping with the medical staff.

"She was a good woman and I enjoyed her company immensely. Enough so that I met her parents when they came to town. Nice people. It got to the point where people would talk about us in the same breath. They would say Freddie and… her. (Freddie: Yes. I am protecting her name. For all that she broke my heart, she doesn't deserve to have me dragging her name through the mud.)"

"What happened?"

"You see, that's the worst of it. About seven months into the whole thing. When my young and romantic heart was dreaming about things like engagement rings and thinking about trying to introduce her to my family. One day, she just met me from one of my classes and told me that she didn't want to see me any more. She would be open to the idea of remaining friends but that she no longer wanted it to be a romantic thing.

"And then she just walked away as I stood there, for far too long, gaping after her. She was as benevolent as she could be and it was a little off-putting as to how much planning she had put into it. She had arranged it so that there would be friends nearby to catch me. She chose to do it on a day when I had nothing coming up for a few days so I could just allow myself to wallow in misery and then she just… walked away.

"It was not a good night, and not a good time. I wept, drank, screamed and shouted along with the best traditions of having your heart broken. But over and over again there were two different refrains. The first was "Why?" But the second was "You promised."

"That was what broke my heart the most. She had promised that she wouldn't do this. That I could trust her not to break my heart. But she did it anyway."

"Did you ever find out why?" Ariadne asked gently.

"No. There were lots of theories of course. And years later I was conscious enough to realise… What could she say that I would be happy with? If she had told me that she just didn't love me any more then I would have wasted time trying to tell her that I could change. That I would change and that I would fix whatever it was that she was unhappy about. If she had told me that she had met someone else then I would have demanded to know who it was and why they were better than me. No way that ends well.

"The one that I consoled myself with for… well… for years. Was that her parents had found out about who my parents were and decided that no daughter of theirs would be allowed to marry into that family. Or that they had managed to find her a better husband than me in the long run which, to be fair to them at the time, would not have been hard. That explanation meant that I could keep blaming Father and my family ties as a whole.

"But that was the thing that broke me. I was just learning to trust her. Still, even after several months of learning to trust her. A process that I loved, was still loving and enjoying as it went on. It was the most joyful thing in the world. Every time when I would think that she was making eyes at someone else or leaning into some other man, entirely figments of my own imagination I might add, when she would turn to me and wink before blowing me a kiss. Every single time that happened, I was overjoyed with it. The relief and the… euphoria that came with that. Knowing that this woman. This magnificent woman was allowing me to kiss her, touch her and laugh with her. That enormous privilege was intoxicating and relearning that privilege, every time, was worth every second.

"And then she broke her promise, and in doing so, she broke my heart."

"Do you still blame her?"

"Yes and no. Nowadays, I remember the hurt. I still feel the hurt and it can still upset me if I'm not careful. I would still like to know why it all happened. But that heart-break was one of the things that gave me the kick up the backside that I needed to get me out of the city and on the road to meet Kerrass. Seeing her walking through the streets of Oxenfurt, arm in arm with another one of her girl-friends that I had known fairly well once. They were laughing without a care in the world. They waved at me, happily. As though everything was alright. That drove home the necessity of finding something that could get me out of the city. So without her, at that time and place, I would not have been on the road to meet Kerrass. I certainly wouldn't have met you."

"But it still hurts?" Ariadne wondered.

"Yes." I told her. "It still hurts."

"How interesting." She said. "It also puts your behaviour with me into context. You were learning to trust me. You are still learning to trust me."

"It also suggests that, you being a vampire, means that I can take into account that you are not going to behave like anyone else. But yes. Being afraid of you meant that you were able to circumvent a lot of the trust issues. I was too busy learning to trust the fact that you weren't going to rip my throat out and eat my spleen to worry about whether or not you were going to break my heart."

"Ew no." Ariadne shuddered. "Spleen is far too bitter. You were still struggling to trust the other thing as well weren't you."

"Partially. But the other factor was… You were trying to arrange marriage. That was one step further than any of the steps that I had been along up until that point. I was being pursued rather than being the pursuer. With you, the trust is going to be different in that I am going to be learning to trust that you won't betray me after we're married. I'm going to be looking for paramours and strapping stable-boys and…"

She laughed for a moment.

"You laugh, but that was not entirely a joke." I told her.

"I know. Just as you also know that that would never happen. You fascinate me Freddie. Not Guillaume, Helfdan, Rickard or any of the other wonderful men that I have met since you and Kerrass released me. I love you. Although I am pleased to learn that it was not just your issues with my being a vampire that caused you to distrust me."

"That was certainly part of it."

"Yes." I wasn't looking at her, but I could feel the smile. "So the reason why this is affecting you so much is because Anne… Cut through your trust. You found yourself loving her a little bit and then…"

"She side-stepped the trust issues. She was hired, yes. But I didn't think you could fake that level of kindness and care. It just doesn't seem possible for a woman to be that wonderful but also being that…"

"Treacherous?"

"And I know, I know that it was because they had her son. I know that and it's the best reason for it. But I trusted her. I did. I let my guard down and I trusted her."

"At least part of that was her job Freddie. Even if she hadn't been a traitor. It was, at least partially, her job to get you to trust her and to let your guard down. That's what she does."

"I know that, but… But I was… She is not the first professional woman that I have been with. Nor is she the first that works at her kind of level. Kerrass once paid for me to have the royal treatment and those women were almost beautiful enough to stop my heart."

"And I am not?" She teased.

"Ariadne…"

"There are some differences though." She said. "The first is that you have been ill. It might not seem like a lot. But it really is. You have been vulnerable. The second is… I have taught you that you can trust. It is part of the reason why I am so angry. I have taught you to trust and I all but through her into your path. You are tired… The work that you are doing with Kerrass and the other Knights is amazing. Outstanding and I am so proud of you. But you are still tired. You are still sick and you are still vulnerable. Kerrass is, and has been, right when he says that it's occasionally necessary to live a little and one of those ways is to know the erotic company of the gender of choice. You have deliberately deprived yourself of that. Another of the reasons for which I think so highly of you. But in doing that, you have left yourself vulnerable to feminine based seduction.

"So you were vulnerable, sick, tired, randy to all hell and there she was. A beautiful woman that the other women in your life are all but throwing at you. Of course you trusted her and of course, it went badly. It is not your fault."

I nodded. "Easy to say here in cold blood though isn't it."

"It is."

There was a pause. Something felt unsaid.

"I must ask Freddie." She began. She was speaking in the quiet voice that she uses when she is slightly nervous about the question. "Has this damaged your trust in me? I brought her to you. I told you to love her and to let her in. Has this damaged your trust of me, or your ability to trust in general?"

I considered this for a moment. It felt like the kind of question that deserved some space to breathe.

"I charge you to be honest with me Freddie. I need truth in this."

I continued to stare at the ceiling. It seemed like a natural place to let my eyes rest on.

"I don't know." I decided after a while. "Is that an acceptable answer?"

"Always."

"Then I don't know. Gut answer? Yes. Yes it has hurt me. Time will tell on that matter, as will the question as to how much it has hurt me."

I literally chewed the problem around.

"I…. ummm…. I also know that the problem is with me, not with you. This is not your fault. It is a problem in me and I am going to need to work on it as much as anything. I can't promise that that will happen quickly. But I can promise that it is not your fault."

She let out a small burst of breath. "It kind of feels like it is. As I say, I brought her to you. When you were uncomfortable with the idea, I pushed the concept onto you. I encouraged you to let go of your inhibitions and to let go."

"Yes you did. And all things being equal. That was what I needed at the time. It was a solution that no one else offered. That no-one else would even have dreamed of. Sir Walther said that that's what was needed, you couldn't provide that concept which would have been ideal. I wasn't really in a position to take that comfort elsewhere. So, it was a solution, you offered it and all things being equal, if everything else had gone to plan… It would have worked as well. The fact that it didn't work, is neither your fault, nor your doing."

I still didn't want to look at her. I could tell that she was in some form of distress because I could hear her breathing as she sucked down air. I was getting better at learning her tells. Hands clenched and heavy breathing meant extreme's of emotion and an effort to control herself. It didn't always work of course.

"Truth be told." I went on. "I am currently in the process of deciding who's fault it is and who I get to blame."

"Have you come to any conclusions?" She wondered.

"I am not there yet." I decided. "I desperately want to blame her."

"I can sympathise with that."

"I want to blame her so badly. I want to call her a mercenary and yell and scream and shout and do all kinds of things. I want to demand her head and I want to… But that would be wrong. It would be harsh and unpleasant and… I don't really think she deserves it. And despite everything else… She did help me."

"I wanted to be the one that helped you though." Just the slightest hint of a wail and a complaint in that voice. When she is being careful with her emotions, Ariadne can make Kerrass look and sound expressive.

"I know." I told her, reaching out a hand which she took. If you held a dagger to my throat I wouldn't be able to tell you who was giving whom the strength

"I wanted to be the one who held on to you and I wanted to be the one that comforted you in the depths of the night."

"I know." I told you.

"And I… And I… I wanted to be the one who was there for you when you climbed out of your hole, I wanted to love you and share in that exaltation. I wanted it so badly. Freddie, you have had your trust damaged and I am grateful that you trusted me with that honesty. But it is only fair that I trust you with that.

"The night that you came home and you were awake and powerful. When you came back, the night that Lady de Launfal died. You walked in and you were as alive as I've seen you. As alive as you have been since long before we came to Toussaint. Since long before the Goddess or even… in fact, I don't think I've seen you that… alive and sure of yourself since you stood up to your brother in Redania, before that even.

"But I saw you there and then. In that moment… You had met the problem, Kerrass had rebuilt you and you were confident, strong and powerful. You were wobbly, shaky, like a new-born horse where you can still see the power in their legs that will one day carry a Knight to victory in the tourney fields. I could almost see everything inside you waking up and coming back to normal. I could see the emotions and the triumph and the strength returning to you, visibly, before my very eyes and I knew what you wanted. I knew what you needed. Oh so very human of you. You had triumphed, not over the enemy or the bad people but over that element of yourself that you had been fighting with. And when humans win, they want to celebrate. More so with you because you had been skating towards the edge of death and there is nothing more human than a need to affirm life in the face of that.

"I wanted to be that, I wanted to feel that. Instead, I gave you to Anne and she betrayed you, she betrayed me. She took everything that I wanted and… I don't know if I can forgive her that. She literally did the thing that I was paying her to do and I hate her for it. How does that make sense?"

I smiled. "It is very human of you."

She laughed. "I suppose that is something that your race and mine have in common. A refusal to see sense. Even when your mind and your education are telling you one thing, there is a steadfast refusal to see it as anything other than a betrayal. Logic be damned."

"Logic is not really as exciting though is it?"

She laughed. "I am really looking forward to the point when logic and passion combine when it comes to my relationship with you Freddie."

"I know." I told her. "I feel the same."

We sat in silence for a bit longer. Then she grunted.

"That's another reason I have to hate her though."

"What's that?"

"Now, I am going to have to work even harder to overcome the problems that you have with trusting beautiful women, all because Anne betrayed us."

"No she didn't." I decided. "Well…. She did but that doesn't make her bad. It means that we were low down on her list of priorities and loyalties. And to be fair, neither of us have children, unless there's something that you haven't been telling me."

"No." She answered with the edge of a smile in her voice. "I do not have children. I have not met anyone I would be comfortable with, to try and grow a life. I have some ideas as to how we might pursue matters, but we are not there yet. I kind of want to enjoy married life for a while before we start trying to have children."

"I agree. But that also means that we don't really get the right to judge Anne. Yes, she betrayed us. Yes, there are lots of other things that she could have done in order to make the situation better. She could have trusted us to rescue her child. She could have trusted us so that we could have fed our enemies false information. She could have stood up to her blackmailers. She could have done all of those things. But I cannot imagine what it must have been like to have been standing there when the single most important person in my existence has a dagger to their throat."

"How do you think you would react?" She wondered. "If someone held a dagger to the single most important person in your existence?"

"This will make you blush," I considered, "or it might insult you. But it rather occurs to me that if anyone held a dagger to your neck then they would deserve everything that they got."

She laughed, plainly delighted.

"But that's the other matter." I went on. "There is a big difference from you, a grown woman, a sorceress and a vampire. Powerful, confident and sure of yourself. Versus a child of… however few years. Alone, scared and utterly unable to fight back. I am angry with Anne, but I cannot hate her. This is one of those points where I am wrong to be angry. I know why, but this was not her fault. It was the fault of the people that took her son and when we go to rescue him, I am going to take great delight in smashing some faces in. And when it is done, I will speak to the Duchess on Anne's behalf.

"And I might bring some pressure to bear to say that we find somewhere for her in Angral. As close or as far away from me as you are comfortable with. I would not want her close to me anyway. Trust, or lack of it, there might lead to some other problems."

"I will admit." Ariadne took a breath. Definitely distressed. "That I would not love the idea. I would feel the need to compete with her."

"You know that you don't, right? That you would win every time."

"Yes Freddie, I know that." She squeezed my hand. "But I would still want to, and others would know the history apart from anything else. I suppose." She took a deep breath. "I suppose that we could find her a husband. There would be many more people in the North that would be willing to look past her history in order to take her in."

"She could start her own enterprise."

"No." Ariadne shook her head. "No she couldn't. She has betrayed the secrets of a client. Who would ever trust her, or take her in again?"

"True. I suppose your plan is the best then."

"Finding her someone to marry. It would not be difficult, I suspect. The Duchess of Angraal could do with a new Lady's maid, someone who was a bit more aware of the erotic side of life. In that position, she would quickly attract a merchant or some other…noble man of the court."

A thought tickled my brain, but I could not quite nail it down. As I tried to focus on it, it just seemed to slip away from me as it just… slipped through my fingers. There was something there though.

I shook my head to clear it.

"Still," I tried, "One thing at a time, first we must rescue the boy. Then we must convince Anne to tell us everything she knows."

"Which will not be hard," Ariadne guessed. "The question is more, how much did she know?"

"We will also take captives if I know anything about how Syanna will be thinking and they can be questioned as well."

We sat for a while longer, just holding hands.

"I shall order you some food." Ariadne decided. "Something with meat, bread and cheese in order to get you ready. Then, you and I shall go and help them with the planning of this encounter. I will admit to agreeing with you that the urge to pound some people in the face is awfully seductive right now. And I rather feel as though I owe it to Anne, in some way, to ensure that her son is returned to her, safely."

The planning itself was going about as well as could be expected. The addition of Ariadne made certain problems all but vanish into the aether, which was good.

The problem as I understood matters, was that no-one knew exactly where the boy was being held. There were several houses that could be candidates for where it could all be happening from the details that Anne had been able to give us, but they were unreliable at best. There were also the, almost certain, factors that the purpose of having Anne go down and wander around was to make sure that she wasn't being followed. We all thought that the spies that Anne was worried about were exaggerated. After all, if someone was there to report on Anne turning herself in, then there were already far more trusted agents that could inform on what was going on.

So Anne had to go down there, by herself, and wander around in order to wait to be contacted. Then she would go to the inn, be taken into the carriage as expected so that we could then track her, find the house, surround it and then take everything out accordingly. The priorities were the rescue of the boy, the taking of captives and ensuring that no-one escaped to warn their masters.

A tall order. But again, the presence of Ariadne made that somewhat easier. An agent with the ability to turn herself invisibile can make all kinds of problems just vanish. She would go with Anne to the market and relay locations and things. The carriage journey was a problem but Damien was confident that his people could track a carriage of that type through the streets.

The biggest worry was whether or not Anne could keep her cool. In theory this was a lady that had managed to keep her cool in a group of potentially hostile people so that she could continue to gain information from all of them. But there was a big difference between being able to do all of that and doing it so that you could rescue your child.

It was a point, well made, that the one was just risking her own life where the other was rescuing her son's life. That was the kind of thing that could make people a little unreasonable.

She seemed game though. Guillaume commented that she was Toussaint enough to want to rescue her son from the bad people and would take great delight in being part of that rescue. But that was the biggest question, would she hold? Was there some signal that she could give to those people that would, undoubtedly, be watching so that they would know that she was compromised?

I rather thought that there would be a signal. Something that she would have been told to do if she had been caught. But Anne was not stupid enough to use it. If she used that signal then both she, and her son, were dead and it was not much of a leap of logic to understand that.

There was a, very, brief conversation about whether or not it would have been possible to do the job without Anne's participation. The long and short of it was that it could be done. It certainly could be done. But in doing so, it was also almost certain that the little boy would not survive the event.

We had to try to rescue that little boy. The part of Toussaint romanticism that we all wanted to abide by was coming to the fore again.

So it was set. We would all head down into the city as we were all but certain that the house where the boy was being kept and where the meeting would take place was almost certainly down in the city itself. There was some feeling that it might be along the shores of the river where it was becoming fashionable to build townhouse, warehouse combination, for some of the merchants that wanted to stay in Toussaint to oversee their interests.

Kerrass, Guillaume and I left early. That would be another tricky point. If there was suddenly a large scale movement of armed men and women that were heading down into the city itself, then that would be spotted. And we would need a large number of people to be able to pull off the complete surrounding and assaulting of one of those buildings.

There was still enough there that people built those things to last, but also in order to defend themselves should it become necessary. These buildings were first formed to protect the Elves from the invading humans, and later, to protect the settling humans from the encroaching bandits and monsters.

So we were inventing reasons for us to head down into the city. We still had time. Anne's timing for heading down into the city was flexible enough to be able to move around the needs of maintaining her cover. There were a lot of logistics involved in that part of the plan. Coming up with excuses to move troops to this gate or to guard that warehouse. Another troop of men went down to escort one of the Ducal tax inspectors who were going to meet some merchant who was disembarking.

Kerrass, Guillaume and I had a ready made excuse that we were going to go back into town to go over some of the previous scenes of the crime. We had views of visiting the Lodgings of the Late Lady de Launfal, the place where she was murdered, the site where Flower of the Night was killed as well as having another go at reconstructing the last moments of the Huntsman's daughter that was killed. Between the three of us, we thought that there was enough there to be able to waste enough time for everything to kick off. We would be summoned by Ariadne's spells. We also thought it would be a good time for us to be able to bounce some of our ideas of Kerrass while we went in order to get another perspective on the entire thing.

Kerrass though, was not very helpful in that direction.

"How are you doing Freddie?" He asked while we bought some roast pork buns from a street vendor who was turning an entire pig on a spit. The meat just looked so simple and tasty after all of the rich foods that Toussaint was feeding us that neither of us have been able to resist going over and ordering from him. The vendor was even a little bemused at the look of joy that crossed my face when I asked for apple sauce and he could provide although he was a bit more dismayed when Kerrass asked for the crackling as part of his hot pork sandwich.

Guillaume did not partake. Indeed, the poor man positively turned his nose up at the food. Instead, he offered to go into one of the taverns to get us some skins of drinking wine to quench our thirst.

"I'm as fine as you could expect." I told him. "It's been a rough few days."

"Yes, but as it has been a rough few days. How are you holding up."

I looked at him out of the corner of my eyes as I extracted a large chunk of the meaty goodness from the bread that was being used as a plate.

"You're distracting me." I decided.

"Oh, and why do you think I would be doing that?"

"So that I don't check on how you are doing. Don't kid yourself Kerrass. I know you as well as anyone does now and don't think I haven't noticed how well you have been dodging the questions every time Guillaume and I try and talk about the case, or this aspect of it or that aspect of it. I've seen it, Kerrass and I am far from fooled."

He said nothing and chose that moment to take a large bite of food himself, wiping the gravy from his chin with a thumb.

"You just don't seem to care, Kerrass. And I don't buy that, not for an instant. You hate these fucks as much as anyone and you love pointing out the flaws in other people's theories. Especially if they're my theories."

"You have been doing a lot better since…"

"Don't give me that crap." I told him. "Even if I was bang on the money about everything, I would still expect you to be looking for the holes in my arguments. It makes you happy to puncture my arrogant self-importance and you cannot pretend any different."

He shrugged and admitted my assessment to be correct with a grimace and a nod.

"Come on Kerrass. Time to 'fess up. What's going on?"

"Truth time?"

Why does everyone always ask that? When is it a good occasion for people to lie to me?

I might be being a bit naive there. But they had hit a nerve given recent past.

"Of course."

"I really don't care." He admitted around a mouthful of meat and gravy. "I just don't. I've tried really hard to give a shit about Anne and her predicament. It's a shit one to be fair and I can summon a bit of sympathy if I try really hard, but honestly? I just don't give a crap. The best that it can offer me right now is a chance to bust some heads. An opportunity to take out some frustrations on some well deserving shits who would take a little boy hostage in order to keep the mother in line.

"It's the right thing to do on several levels." He went on. "Not least because when all of this is over and we move on then there are only two options. The first is that she is kept on the hook for the providing of information on her clients. Which means that eventually, she will get caught and whatsername… Madam of the Belles, strikes me as a far less forgiving person than you are, which means that Anne would not survive. Or, given that she has seen multiple faces, neither her son, nor herself was likely to survive.

"So yes. Undoubtedly, we are doing the right thing. But Freddie, I just don't care."

I said nothing. What could I have said?

"As I say, the best thing I can hope to come of this entire thing is that I get to bust some heads. Some real, unambiguous violence which I can employ against some real bastards. A sentiment that seems to be going around. But I don't care. I really don't."

"Why not?" I felt that I needed to prompt him along in his line of reasoning so that he didn't get stuck on that single point.

"Because this is not the avenue that I want to pursue. I want to go after Alain. You know that, I know that. I want to hound him. I want to chase him and torment him until he admits what's going on. I want to make his life a living hell until he owns up and when he eventually draws his sword, which he will, fucks like him always do, then I will cut the little puke's dick off and anyone that gets in the way will suffer a similar fate. I've tried really hard to care about all of this. I really have Freddie and I'm sorry. But I just don't care. Jack? Not Jack. One man or many. I don't care. I want Alain."

"I know." I was trying to find a way in so that I could comfort him in some way. But that wasn't what was wanted, or particularly needed now. I had opened the box and the contents of Kerrass' brain were spilling out.

"This has crystallised for me. I know why you don't want me to challenge him. I know all the logical arguments and I know all the reasons. You are right. I am not the swordsman that I was a year ago. I am getting better but even magical healing is only so good and cannot replace long term conditioning and bone deep muscle memory…

(Freddie: I later checked as to why this was a thing. So here goes. Kerrass' arms had been shattered by a war-hammer. This was not just a case of a simple clean break. There were bone fragments and that part of the arm was like Jelly. That physical trauma was not helped by the fact that we then had lots of open country to cross including land that was far from entirely stable. The constant jarring of the injury would go on to cause… and I have to check the notes that Ariadne gave me to make sure that I get this right, Considerable damage to the nervous, skeletal and blood delivery systems. And the forced changes of behaviour had also had an influence on the… apparently this is a real term, "Limbic system" although I cannot swear that I am spelling that correctly.

When we had returned to civilization, the healing draughts that Kerrass could brew for himself as well as the magical healing that could be provided by Ariadne, Laurelen and other medical professionals, accelerated the healing of all of those factors. But even though the limbs were much more capable, some bits of the muscles were completely new and were meshed together with the old. Same with the blood vessels (I know what they are) and the nervous systems. So in the same way that it had been an arm, it was now a fully functional arm again. But in it being rebuilt and re… grown. Some of it had grown back different to how Kerrass was used to it behaving. So in the heat of a fight, it meant that his arms wouldn't behave the way he expected them to.

To you or I, that would not make much of a difference. But to a highly trained, refined and experienced person like Kerrass who needed his body to act in exactly the way that he wanted it to, that meant that he needed his limbs to relearn what it was that they used to be able to do. To the naked eye or the untrained observer, which would be most of us including me, there would be no difference. But Kerrass would be able to feel the difference. And would complain about it.

Constantly)

"... So I know that there's a chance that he might be better than me, even as he won't be quite as experienced. But I want the bastard and when it's done, When it's over. Then I might be able to move on and care about things like Jack again. But right now, she is dead and he is still alive and I want to choke the life from his smug little face. I want to watch him go purple, then red, then blue. I want to watch the blood vessels explode in his eyes and his tongue loll out of his mouth. I want him to shit himself as he feels the fear of knowing. Of knowing that he's about to die and then I'm going to whisper her name in his ear so that he knows exactly why I'm doing that to him.

"I promised that I would allow Toussaint to have it's justice on him and I will abide by that. I will be the hangman if it comes to it and I will arrange the rope so that his neck doesn't break from the drop so the bastard dies slow. If I am the headsman then I will do that willingly although I might take more than a single swing to get his head off if you know what I mean.

"If they want him drawn, quartered, garrotted, pressed, drowned, torn apart. And of those things. I will do them happily so that I can whisper her name into his ear before he dies. I almost hope that they exile him so that I can come upon him in some lonely place. Some mountain pass where there will be no-one around to see him die. Where he cannot appeal to the crowds for mercy. I will be there and I will be the last thing he sees. I want the bastard Freddie. I want him to feel afraid, as terrified as she must have felt when she knew that those guards were coming for her. I want the bastard and I will do it alone if necessary. I will do it. If it turns out, after all this, that he has nothing to do with Jack, then I will still kill him. I will do it alone if I have to."

He stopped with a crash, breathing heavily.

"I thought you said you didn't love her." I said carefully. I was instantly sorry for it and Kerrass looked at me with murder in his eyes. Very carefully, I put my food on a nearby tabletop before turning back to Kerrass and taking his food to place it next to mine before turning back and hugging my friend as he silently sobbed and howled his sudden and unexpected grief into my chest.

"You will not do it alone." I told him. "Just as I came with you to avenge Saffron, Sally and Pula. I will come with you to avenge her too."

He nodded and pulled away.

Guillaume cleared his throat loudly to announce his presence before putting the skins of ale next to the remains of our food. He had a plate of cooked meats and ate it with his back to Kerrass so that the Witcher could come to his senses all the quicker.

In doing so, he also made sure that none of the people passing by would see Kerrass' distress.

It's the little things that make a friendship.

Kerrass calmed himself a little while later. Taking the time to have some more food and something to drink.

"Don't get me wrong." He told us both. "I am here for the pair of you and for everything that is about to happen and will happen. I will back you up to the end. But know that if anyone comes between me and the man that I am going to kill, then that person will answer to my blade."

It was on the tip of my tongue to make a joke. Something about Toussaint being catching. But one look at Kerrass' shining Witcher eyes was more than enough to convince me that such words would be… unwise.

We spent some time burning daylight in the most frustrating ways possible. The scene where Lady de Launfal had been found was far too busy for us to spend much time waiting. None of us were particularly invested in pretending to investigate a scene which we were already more than convinced had shown us everything that we needed to see. We had more luck burning some time in the Lady's former residence.

"Lord Palmerin had had the good grace to arrange for all the furniture and belongings to be covered in sheets and things in order to prevent damage and to preserve the scene should we need it again. Guillaume told us that his Uncle planned to sell the place as soon as possible. It was well known that a house like this, as close to the palace as it was, would be able to gather a pretty amount of money in rents, but Palmerin clearly didn't want anything to do with it.

Guillaume respected his Uncle's opinion. It was during that conversation that we learned that Lord Palmerin had made Guillaume his heir. There were no other children for a plethora of reasons and Guillaume was as close to being his Uncle's son as he could imagine. They certainly loved each other as such.

"Guillaume intended to turn the matter over to his wife who would know where to find a decent estate manager to look after everything. He expected to be busy with the Knights for the immediate future and should he survive, he would keep working until he felt his skills beginning to decay beyond the point of uselessness. A point in time that he expected to take place when he was around thirty. Then he would see where his life lay. In the meantime, he was looking forward to working for the realm and having children with his wife.

Kerrass had recovered enough of his humour to assist me in teasing the poor Knight during that part of the conversation.

We were there when Ariadne contacted us to tell us that Anne was heading into town. So we were back to waiting again.

And don't worry. This is not going to devolve into another essay about what it's like to be waiting for the action to start. This was a much more… waiting type of waiting. We stood around, made small talk, kicked the walls and things. I amused myself by inspecting the Lady's collection of sexual paraphernalia, taking items out (I was wearing gloves) and demanding to find out whether or not Guillaume knew what it was for.

Kerrass ruined that game for us though as rather than being part of the conversation where we came up with increasingly inventive uses for the item in question, he simply told us what it was for, resulting in occasional disgusted noises and the odd curious, contemplative expression.

The step by step commentary from Ariadne prevented much other contemplation and thinking that I would normally take the time to do in these kinds of situations. It seemed that Ariadne's methods of dealing with her guilt for whatever had happened between her and Anne was to ensure that the two of them would become firm friends. She had spent her time during the planning stage reassuring the, obviously terrified, courtesan that nothing would be allowed to happen to her son or to herself. Not while she, Ariadne, was looking out for them both. Much to my astonishment, it seemed to be working as well. Anne's remarkable ability to forget the feral… well… creature that had hoisted her up by the throat and began to squeeze the life out of her was astonishing. I'm not sure I could do the same in her place.

But then again, I am not the one who has had their child taken from them so again, maybe our two sets of life experiences are so different as to make it inconsequential.

The three of us listened as Anne took the time to walk down the path from the palace. She stopped to look out at the view and to accept a flower from one of the local gardeners. Apparently this was something that she did every day and I was astonished at myself in that I had to briefly squash a surge of resentment and jealousy as we did so.

She came down the path and over the bridge where she was saluted by a Knight of Saint Francesca, flirted briefly with a passing merchant and bought some sugared almonds from a market stall.

She would chew on the candied nuts for a little while before she was greeted by a group of what Ariadne struggled to call anything other than "Urchins". A group of cheeky street kids, lacking the back breaking poverty of their northern brethren, the malnutrition and the disease. These were the children of craftsmen, merchants and minor noblemen who had run out of things to entertain themselves with in the home and so had been turfed out onto the streets.

They greeted Anne with a cheer and wave. Ariadne told us that they asked after her son and that she greeted many of them by name. The excuse she was using as to why her son hadn't been out to play recently was because he had caught a winter chill that he had not quite been able to get rid of.

The candied nuts were passed over to one of the older girls who acted as referee and proper distributor for the treats and Anne walked on. She was well known and seemingly well liked. Greeting many of the passers by by name and with small words of gossip. She stopped at a dressmaker to check up on a couple of items that she had ordered using Ariadne's payments and then proceeded to the market.

I might have been angry that this was all taking so much time, but it also seemed that Anne shared my views. She wanted to get down into the market and get the entire business running along the way they wanted it to. It was actually Ariadne that forced the other woman to slow the entire pace of the thing down to ensure that anyone watching would not get suspicious.

When she got to the market, she proceeded round the stalls. She stopped to talk with another one of the "working girls" who was on a similar kind of errand. The fresh air and seeing the sights kind of errand rather than the "giving information to the enemy" kind of errand. This woman was obviously a bit more known to Anne as the woman asked about Anne's health and the health of the child. We found out that Anne would normally leave the child with a tutor during the day and with an "Aunt" while she was working overnight.

Guillaume made a small note of this as we all, almost at the same time, realised that we had no idea how or when the boy had been taken.

Anne bought a small meat pie from one of the vendors that she seemed to know fairly well and was eating it at a beauty spot that looked out over the harbour when Ariadne noticed the cloth in the window. It was a red house on the corner and again, Guillaume made a note of it so that we could later enquire as to who was giving the signal.

Then Anne went to the tavern where she bought a small cup of wine and sat, again, looking out over the harbour.

Ariadne's commentary of the tavern was not complimentary. Little more than a few planks nailed over a barrel and a stacked set of logs that had been made up in a tiny corner of a basement room. Ariadne was unable to have any wine herself but she said that, from the taste of it, it didn't look that drinkable. This was a place for workers, market men and haulers to grab a quick swallow of wine before returning to work. Despite the small area and the lack of quality in the produce, they seemed to be doing a roaring trade.

I went back there later for a "scientific" survey of the place and decided that, although the wine was less than entirely quality. It achieved two things. The first was that it certainly quenched a thirst and it was certainly very cheap. I can also admit that I have drank far worse in my travels with Kerrass and been grateful for it.

The carriage turned up shortly after that. Ariadne reported that Anne did not even have time to finish her small cup of wine before it was on the scene for Anne to climb into.

Guillaume made another note. Why he thought he had to be quiet given that Ariadne was talking to me telepathically and that there was no way at all that anyone could hear us was besides the point. The note read "They were expecting her. Where was the carriage waiting?"

Both of which were very valid questions.

Ariadne's commentary kept moving. Again, it was apparently a very nice carriage. She said that it was definitely the kind of thing that was built to carry passengers rather than any kind of covered wagon that was converted. She said that she could see the joins where the roof and the walls of the carriage could be lifted off so that a couple could go travelling through the countryside.

She imagined a noble couple. Him, a Knight, resplendent in his armour while she would be unable to ride and would follow along in the carriage. It was the kind of image that suggested romance and, almost, abuse at the same time. I can only speak for myself. But if I was riding with a woman that I cared about. I would want to be with her. Either in the carriage, or riding next to her. But then again, I'm old fashioned like that.

We started to move then. A very confused and hesitant sounding Captain de La Tour started issuing orders through Ariadne. The Carriage was in sight now and Ariadne issued the orders for us all to start moving and homing in on it. Timing here was crucial. If we turned up too early, then we ran the risk of being spotted. But if we were too late. Then Anne would need to improvise. Which she might not be able to do given the stress and strain of the circumstances.

They seemed to ride around many of the different areas. The only possible reason that they would want to do that was to throw Anne off the scent as to where the building was. It seemed a little fruitless to me. One way or another, Anne was completely in their power and they had to know that. So if she betrayed them then they would have the hostage.

Kerrass teased me about that. He said that I wasn't thinking like a guilty person.

Guillaume added an interesting insight when he said that not all evil people feel guilty.

Kerrass and I looked at each other. "Now that's a thought that's going to fester." He joked. I said nothing.

We started to move over towards where the carriage was. The earlier guesses were correct. It was down towards the warehouse district where some of the newer houses had been built. I didn't like them. They were large, ostentatious displays of money over taste. People that had the money and wanted to buy all of the THINGS because the palaces and houses of the rich people that they visited had all of the THINGS in them as well.

There was a row of them. All built to take advantage of the view of the harbour. There was the odd, slightly smaller house that were much more pleasant to look at which Guillaume told us was because they had been built as summer houses away from the heat of the city where people could swim and boat in the wider area of the river before the harbour expanded. Those houses now looked relatively small and poor next to the ostentatious and rather tasteless wealth that was on display in some of the other buildings.

Kerrass gave me a small taste of truth when he pointed out that my reactions to these people was almost certainly going to be the same reactions that people had to my Father buying Coulthard castle.

That was not a pleasant insight.

Naturally, the guard had an outpost there and we martialled in that building. It was uncomfortably like that meeting that we had held the evening of the Fishmarket. Where the briefing was held and everyone stood around looking nervous.

It was different. There was less sullen hatred in the room. More expectant quiet. De La Tour was there and was, by default, in charge of the mission. It was reasoned that if Syanna had wandered off to get into her full harness to lead this kind of excursion then someone would almost certainly notice and give the game away. And, because it was within city limits. It was not untrue to say that this was more Damien's beat than it was Syanna's. He knew the land. He knew the people and the buildings. So he knew the terrain.

He was standing, frowning into space with his head on one side as he listened to Ariadne's commentary. He seemed to have a habit of tugging on his moustache when he was nervous and waiting for something. He looked up sharply.

"Right. It's the dark red house and warehouse, three buildings further down the banks of the river. Snipers, get up the hill and see if you can get a good shot into any of the windows. Breaching teams I need you next to the gate and I want a net (not an actual net) around the back entrances. It's one of everyone's favourite merchant houses. A house built on top of a warehouse so they don't have to pay the tax on the goods coming through the warehouse. (Apparently because a warehouse makes it commercial goods in Toussaint whereas a house makes it residential and therefore personal and nontaxable. Both Damien and Syanna were working on that problem.

"Guillaume, you and your team go through the back of the warehouse. We don't know what's in there, if anything. The customs agents haven't got back to us yet and we don't really have time to waste. Signal is a whistle blast. Two blasts means that the child is sighted. One blast means that he is not and is therefore probably still in the building. So keep an ear out. Regardless, attack when the whistle blows. The aim is for prisoners and evidence, but if it's a choice between your life and the life of some kind of scum sucking mollusc of a child thieving kidnapper then you put the bastard down. Clear?"

The sounds of affirmative from the Knights and the guards warmed my heart.

"Positions then. Go fast. Go hard. Good hunting."

And then it was on.

Guillaume led Kerrass and I along with a couple of crossbowmen that raced off to climb some of the nearby houses to get to their vantage points. I saw one swarming up a vine on the outside of a mansion with a speed and an ease that was… intimidating. We also had a couple of shield men with us. When I say that you might be imagining the large round shields of the Skelligan raiders, designed to protect the men standing next to you as much as it's designed to protect yourself. Or you might think of the Kite shields of Temeria and Redania. These were nothing of the kind. Small, round, metallic bucklers that were held in the fist. The men had short swords in their other hand with wicked quillons that pointed up from the crossguard position which I was quick to take as being designed to catch blades.

Their faces had a hard and brutal look that made me feel glad that they were on my side.

We moved quickly, moving at a low crouch in the, probably, mistaken feeling that moving at that kind of bent crouch would help us to go unseen. Guillaume led us unerringly, seeming to know exactly where he was going. He had left his shield behind as it would hinder speed rather than help it and instead, had a smaller blade for "closer work" as he put it.

We came to the corner of a house where Guillaume pulled us up.

"The house is just down there, two houses further down." It was not lost on me that he was mostly talking to Kerrass and I. ""Open ground between her and there so stay behind me so that if any quick arrows or bolts are going to glance off my armour first. Weapons out and ready. As the man said, do not be afraid to spike them."

And then it was back to waiting. One of the shield men skirted round as he thought he could see somewhere with a better vantage point as he walked out in the open with that particular brand of stealth called "hiding in plain sight". He got a look at the house and came back.

"There is an archer up in the back windows but there is no way that he can get a decent shot off." Was the formal report. "Angle is too awkward for a bow that size. Stupid fucker would have been better off with a crossbow."

"Probably couldn't afford one," said the other shield man.

"And he looked as though he was asleep."

The two men sniggered.

"Quiet." Guillaume said. "Is the window climbable?"

The shield man considered.

"If I had a …"

But he was interrupted by a whistle.

"No time for it." Guillaume quickly said, "Take him if you think it's doable. Follow me." He came round the corner with a bellow of "FOR SAINT FRANCESCA."

A second whistle blast blew out as we ran. I wasn't really listening because by then, I felt the release of the fear and the tension. That explosive surge through the blood that sent energy to the legs and speed to the arms. Sometimes I scream when it happens, other times I do not. This time, I decided that I would save my breath.

Guillaume ran quickly, shouting out the warning on behalf of Saint Francesca while he ran. As the guard had said, there was an archer and he fired down at us but he panicked and the arrow went wide. I had time to hear one of the guards snigger.

We reached the back door. Kerrass gestured Guillaume aside from where the Knight was about to throw his shoulder into the wooden structure. The first of the two guards spun to put his back to the wall and held his small shield in both hands on his knee. The other man ran forward, jumped up and used the shield as a catapult to aid in his leap up to the window that was a little way up. We heard a cry of surprise and fear but didn't have time for anything else.

Kerrass gestured towards the door, a concussive blast, fuelled by a Witcher's rage cause the thing to explode into splinters which I had to turn away from for fear that they would get in my face.

Guillaume led us inside.

We were in a large open area. Above us was the building which our companion had burst into, I guessed to it being offices of the warehouse part of the building. The main residence was ahead of us and we knew that there would be the garden courtyard beyond that where Ariadne, Anne and hopefully the child would be. But I didn't have time for that.

The open, warehouse area was empty. The building above us was supported by large stone pillars that braced the ceiling with a series of archways. It was roomy, bright and dry. Ideal for storing whatever it was you wanted to store. But there was nothing here, no boxes, no barrels or bales of cloth. I didn't have time to think about that too much as the back door of the residence had opened and there were some guards moving towards us.

THere was a flight of wooden stairs off to the right and Guillaume gestured. "Go and help your friend. These paltry fools will not be an obstacle."

I raised my eyebrows at that, there were Eight men running towards us before spreading out to begin to encircle us. Nasty ratio numbers, even given that we numbered a Witcher and a Knight.

Kerrass and Guillaume exchanged glances before drawing weapons and charging into the middle of them. What's a poor scholar such as myself to do but follow.

I leapt forwards as best as I could, keeping to Kerrass' left according to long, old habit. A swordsman came at me. I had time to be surprised at the fact that he seemed to be well groomed, hair clean and with all of his teeth even as he grinned at me, expecting an easy target.

I always love the ones that expect an easy target.

He struck with a nice big forearm strike which I blocked and pushed round in a circle towards his feet. He realised that his weapon was being trapped and went to step back.

The man had training.

But he had come too close with his first strike when he was expecting an easy kill. I followed him, faster than he was expecting given that he was still expecting a spear fighter which he assumed meant that I would want to keep him at range. Instead I followed him, slid my hands along the spear pole to make room and rammed the pommel of the spear into his face.

I ruined his perfect teeth for him. He fell. I had a quick look around to see that no-one was about to stab me in the back and felt I had enough time to stamp on the side of his knee and kick his sword away. He howled in pain but I didn't have time for that as another man had seen me.

He was trying to back away from the fight with Guillaume and Kerrass which was not going well for his side. This was obvious given that the Knight and the Witcher were easily holding their own against three men each. Easily enough that they were able to rain blows on men that were engaging the other. So this man's idea was to escape out the back. He had realised that I was in the way and decided that he would kill me and then get out.

He had a lighter sword and a dagger in his off-hand and the way he held them said that he knew what he was doing with them. He advanced on me cautiously before trying for a lunge. I parried and he was quick rough to try for another. I parried this one as well.

A movement over the swordsman's shoulder caught my eye. One of the fighters who was engaging Guillaume had realised that I might be an easier kill and was moving to support his friend.

Which, in turn meant that I didn't have time to play with this swordsman. I had managed to keep my eyes on his as I parried a third lunge which he did his best to push the spear away in order to follow through with his off hand dagger. But his sword was not strong enough for that and it gave me a straight line lunge into his throat.

Another man, killed because he didn't know how to fight a man with a spear.

The man behind him was a shield fighter. He had been engaging Kerrass, I think, but had wanted to move up to support his friend. He had seen his nearly three to one odds vanish in a blur of blades and blood and he was angry. Beyond him I thought I could see at least two more, probably three of his mates down and he wanted blood.

He was not so far gone as to be stupid, he came at me shield first and I backed off to give myself some room. I could see Kerrass behind him dispatch another foe and had looked around to find another opponent.

I turned so that Kerrass would be in position. Shield man had forgotten, or no longer cared, that the Witcher was there. He struck at me, stabbing forward from behind the shield. I parried with an old quarterstaff maneuver and pushed his sword across his shield, aiming to move up his now unprotected right side.

It's the first, most basic way to attack a decent shield man. Good shield fighters know this which is why the counter for this trick is one of the first things taught to shield fighters after everything else. He turned to follow me, stepping back at the same time so that he could get a nice, hard back hand swing at my back as I went past him.

It was automatic for him I think. The kind of thing that was ingrained into muscle memory. He didn't even really think about it. Unfortunately for him, the counter turned him further so that he had his back to Kerrass. Who decapitated him.

The dead man wore a very surprised expression as his head sailed through the air.

Kerrass kept moving forward. In turning to get the shield man in the back, he had left himself exposed and so he dived forward into a roll taking him out of range of the swinging sword of another attacker. I didn't have time to see who it was really. I just parried the blow, pushing the sword off to one side which caused the man to stagger.

Into Guillaume who pushed him back with a shoulder before taking the time to back hand him across the face.

I didn't have time to see what happened. I was in the middle of the remaining melee now. A man with a short axe had taken hold of my spear and was trying to push it out of the way, or at least hold it so that I couldn't bring it to bear as he came down it's length. I did as Letho had trained me all that time ago and I drew my belly dagger and hacked at his hand. He let go of the spear with a howl of pain and anger before an odd confused expression came over his face. He started to sway as if he was drunk.

Guillaume hit him with the pommel of his sword and he collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.

And it was over. We didn't have long to survey our handiwork although I could tell that Guillaume was pleased. I got the feeling that he too had been looking forward to some unambiguous violence.

But we could hear shouts of combat from the main house.

"Come on." Guillaume shouted.

I turned, just in time to check and see the two shield men coming down from the warehouse building, one was supporting the other who had a bloody cloth pressed to his side. The uninjured guard waved me on as Guillaume led us into the house.

Straight into the arms of a man who was running away from the combat at the front of the house. He staggered backwards in surprise at our appearance before lunging forward clumsily. Guillaume literally side-stepped the lunge, caught the weapon hand with his left and pulled the unfortunate soul into a huge blow from the pommel of Guillaume's sword. Again, the man crumpled into a heap as we stepped over him.

It wasn't until then that I realized that we were in a kitchen.

He led us into the building. It was quick work now. We didn't have time to fuck about. It was about speed, brutality and doing for the other guy before he did for us.

Past the Kitchen there was a set of stairs leading up. There was still sounds of combat coming from the front of the building. Guillaume went that way. Through some kind of unspoken agreement, Kerrass led me up the stairs. It was a small flight, thin and plain in a way that said that whoever was in charge of the building didn't think that they were all that important. That they didn't need decorating because such a thing would be wasteful.

They were servant's stairs. Even for servant's stairs though, they seemed a little decrepit and underused. If Servants have anything that they can call their own, I have found that they will often find a way to take pride in it. Meaning that those parts of the building are often impeccably clean but there was dust on the ledges and grime on the windows. I didn't really notice these things at the time. I just kind of… absorbed them. I did not have time to think about them.

The stairs turned back on themselves and I had enough time to register a whistling noise before Kerrass pushed me back against the wall.

A crossbow bold whizzed past my ear to strike the wall behind me with a thunk. Again, there was not time to register the fact that Kerras had just saved my life, again. It was the kind of thing that would come back to me in Nightmares for the next couple of days.

Kerrass was off and moving again, almost before we heard the bolt strike the wall. The man at the top of the stairs was still frantically trying to reload the crossbow, when he should have taken the time to draw a sword or something. So Kerrass just ignored him and pushed him aside.

I kicked him in the balls as I ran past. He doubled over, around the pain as men all over the continent do when they experience that particular kind of agony. I grabbed him by the belt and sent him tumbling down the stairs behind us.

I have no idea what happened to him.

We came through a doorway into an upper landing. This was much more the kind of decorations and stylings that I would expect from some kind of manor house where rich merchants live. The wall hangings were lavish, the candle sconces in the walls were golden.

It was still grimy though. Grimy in a way that no real resident of a place like this would allow to take place.

A man had been waiting to ambush us as Kerrass came through the door. He had swung in a huge vertical slice as Kerrass had come through the door. At some point, Kerrass had put his magical shield up and there was a flash of golden light that blinded me for a second. As I came out I saw that Kerrass had got inside the reach of the attacker's sword and the two men were struggling. I had no doubt that Kerrass would win out eventually, but I didn't have time for that.

"Hey," I shouted.

The enemy fighter looked up for a second as I distracted him, giving me a clean shot to ram the but of my spear into his face.

I heard a noise behind me and something in me twitched. In the same way that I would react if a Wraith or a Whight appeared behind me, I dived forward and rolled, thus missing the huge sword strike that would have bitten deep into my neck if I had remained where I was.

Kerrass had finished off his opponent, turned and ran my attacker through.

We were in a corridor with doors coming off to either side. Behind me, I had registered that that was where the stairs leading up from the front of the house were. So I went further into the house. There couldn't be much more to this building. It wasn't that large. It was just a manor house.

I wanted to go into one of the doors on either side. But a swordsman came out of one of the doors and charged down the corridor to meet me. He was screaming. For all I know, I was screaming too as I leapt to meet him.

This man had a brain though. A brain that I was lacking. I was fighting with a spear in a corridor. There was no room for fancy movements, twists or pirouettes. All I could do was lunge. He saw that and as he closed, he held his sword across, holding the blade with a gloved hand. I saw what he meant to do but I was committed.

He got his blade under the spear head and lifted so that he could get inside my guard. He kept pushing the sword up to keep my spear out of the way as his other hand went for the dagger at his belt.

It was a close run thing as to who would get there first.

I won. More by luck, I think, than anything else. Plus I had seen it coming and I rather think that the other guy didn't expect me to have that capability. Or that he had expected me to depend on my spear in the heat of the moment. Or that he hadn't seen that I had a dagger on my belt, primed and ready to be drawn by my dominant hand. Or I could use the dagger with my dominant hand rather than with my off hand.

For whatever reason, I got my dagger out and rammed it into his belly. I heard him groan as he dropped his sword and Knife to hold onto my wrist. The dreadful fear that I had seen in other men, born of wondering whether it would be better to keep the blade in his guts or to pull it out. He looked up at me and I saw the dawning horror of that knowledge that he was going to die and that it was going to hurt. Belly wounds always take the longest, and hurt the most.

"I'm sorry." I told him.

Kerrass grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pulled me away. Remembering that I was in the middle of a fight and that the man that I had just killed, even if he hadn't died yet, would have done the same thing to me, I tore the dagger free and we moved on.

The first room that we opened was a bedroom. The second was half a bedroom, half a nursery. Other than the fact that it was also clearly a nursery constructed by someone who knew nothing at all about children. There was a woman trying to hide underneath the bed. Kerrass used one of his "signs" to calm her so that I could pull her out. She spent a bit of time shrieking at me. Long enough for us to decide that she wasn't immediately going to pull a knife out and attack us in the back.

There is a certain kind of hysterical shrieking that is impossible to fake.

Kerrass turned while I tied her wrists together with a torn piece of cloth from one of the sheets. I will admit that I was not gentle, but it was almost certain that Anne's son was kept in that room. If she thought about it, she could probably have gotten free from the bindings, but right then I didn't care. Speed was more important.

The next room was another bedroom. It had some more signs that it had been used at various stages but looked unoccupied to me so Kerrass burst into the last room.

We should have gone to that room first, but if we had, we would have left unopened doors to our back. Never a good idea.

We burst in and we found two men who were frantically trying to shovel papers and skins into an already overloaded hearth. One dropped his bundle and drew his sword.

Kerrass was in the room first and gestured. A huge blast of air sent that swordsman flying backwards so that he hit the wall with a wet snapping sound. He started to jerk around like a fish.

I got to the other man who was still trying to get the papers into the fire and hauled him back before using my spear to pull out the smouldering papers and stamping on them to get rid of the flames. The burner nearly got up, but Kerrass had his sword at the man's throat.

"You should know." Kerrass said in his "killer" voice. "I really want to kill you."

Satisfied that the papers were as safe as they were going to be, I checked on the other man who died just before I got to him. The impact into the wall had broken his neck. Contrary to popular belief, you don't always die immediately after having your neck broken.

"Hit him a bit hard there didn't you Kerrass?" I commented.

"I was angry." Kerrass said, not taking his eyes from his captive.

"Are you still angry?" I wondered. Knowing the answer but more to keep the captive quiet.

"Pretty fucking furious actually." He snarled. I couldn't tell if it was a pretense or not. Could have gone either way really.

The sounds of fighting were dying down now, so I bent to the papers that we had managed to salvage.

The first page wasn't that interesting. Something about some noble that I had never heard of and the fact that he was sleeping with one of the maids. On the list of things that I didn't really care about, this one was quite high. The next piece of paper… They all seemed rather jumbled up and out of order, whether by luck or by design I couldn't tell, was an estimate of how many Knights Syanna commanded and a projection of how many Knights they were going to have before they were done. There were predictions on the paper as to makeup of the group as well, how many noble born, how many common born… That kind of thing.

I started shuffling through the records a bit quicker taking in small details. It would not be a small job to go through all of this and find out exactly who knew what and when. It would almost have been better to stay and watch this house to see who came and went. We probably would have done that too if there wasn't a hostage that needed rescuing. Or if we had time to properly turn Anne into a double agent. Which I doubt we could have been able to do given the presence of her son as a hostage.

Kerrass hauled our captive off to a corner as I started to spread the papers out on the floor. They seemed to be written versions of reports that had come in. Properly recorded conversations that were taken down word for word and in doing so I learned a lot of pointless trivia. I started to wonder at the kind of mind that would tell their agents that no piece of information was too small. It is the correct thing to do after all. Speaking as a historian, this kind of thing is like Gold. You can reach huge conclusions from the smallest piece of information.

The Duchess was debating changing dress maker. The Church of the Prophet was talking about properly canonising Francesca to make her an actual saint rather than someone that everyone just "calls" saint. A minstrel had made a pass at seducing Madame Duberton, the Colonel of the Nilfgaardian forces wife, only to be astonished and offended when she rejected him, rather gently according to the report, before the Colonel hauled them off. Gave them a thrashing, broke the man's harp and threw him into the dung-heap for the insult.

The observer had thought the minstrel got off quite light all things considered.

The intelligence reports could be dealt with at leisure. I was looking for the big items. The things that we could use straight away. The thick, rich pieces of paper with proper calligraphy. Under normal circumstances, I would take a great delight in going through these papers to get at the information that was contained within. It was the kind of jigsaw puzzle that scholar's like me thrive on. Even if this information was about people that were still alive rather than the long dead.

But time was in short supply.

I found what I was looking for about a third of the way into the bundle. A big piece of paper, heavy, thick and creamy. The kind of thing that only trained scribes work with and only then if they have had specialised training in the matter. It was a glorious piece of paper. So heavy that it had struggled to catch and only the very edges of the paper were singed.

I read it and laughed. I bundled up the other pieces of paper and stacked them well out of the way of the fire. I could not bring myself to resist gloating a little and showed the paper to the captive.

"You should have burnt this one first." I told him. He actively shrank from me and I felt that sick pleasure that torturers and interrogators must feel. The one that gets off on knowing that people are afraid of you.

"What is it?" Kerrass asked. I showed him and his eyebrows raised. "Well that is interesting."

"Are you alright to guard him and make sure that those papers aren't touched by anyone other than…"

"Yes Yes Freddie. I know the drill. Go off and tell Damien that we've found something."

I grinned at him and all but ran out of the room.

The courtyard out the front of the house was a mess. It was once a garden, not a very large one, but there was a very expensive water fountain in the middle that wasn't currently working. If anything, there was a horse that was drinking out of it.

It was a place of paving stones and small hedges. There were hanging baskets and flower pots everywhere. They were empty of plants but by the looks of them, they were newly composted. There were walkways that were neatly tiled around the walls. The entrance to the courtyard was a pair of large wooden gates that were broken open with a small battering ram that the guard had let fall in front of the entrance. The carriage that had, presumably, brought Anne here was just inside the gates, it looked as though it was just in the process of being turned around when everything had kicked off.

The garden had been ruined by all the fighting though. There was, at a quick glance, four dead enemy guards and the others were in the process of being rounded up. Damien was supervising that. There were a couple of wounded on our side as well. Ariadne was working on them first before she moved onto the wounded on the side of the enemy.

I couldn't see Anne, or her son but the fact that the carriage was under guard gave me a bit of a clue as to where she might be.

Damien turned to me.

"A lot of guards for an empty warehouse." He told me.

"That would depend on what they were guarding." I told him, waving the piece of paper at him.

"What is it?"

I grinned. It felt good. I just showed him the piece of paper.

"Now that is interesting." He said.

"That's exactly what Kerrass said."

"And he was right."

He led me over to the group of captives.

"So," Damien began, nodding to one of the guards who hauled one of the captives to the feet. The captive was an older man and moved a little stiffly. He was utterly unhurt and I would have put a, not small, amount of money that he had done absolutely nothing to help his guards in the defence. He had just surrendered.

Every so often in this world, you just meet someone who makes your fists itch. He completed my assessment of his character shortly after he was hauled up to his feet.

"You will never get away with this." He said. If the situation hadn't been as critical as it actually was, I do believe that I would have laughed at him.

"Of course I will." Damien said, not unreasonably.

"These men are accredited and approved guards, hired by me in order to protect this place against all invaders. Your killing and maiming of them will…"

Damien hit him. It was a leisurely, back-handed kind of blow.

"Two of my men were killed." Damien said.

"Which would not have happened if you had not invaded this house illegally."

Damien hit him again.

"Normally I would agree with you." He told the captive in a reasonable tone of voice, quite at odds with the sudden, brutal violence of the situation. "Raiding a place is only, really, a valid technique if there is actively a life at risk. In which case it is entirely justified. In all other cases, it is much better to watch a place, gather information, infiltrate quietly and find evidence. Over and over again it has proven to be safer and more beneficial in the long run. Both for the people inside the building and the people actually doing the raiding. It's a simple equation. If we attack, you fight back and then it needs to be taken from there."

"Precisely. So my men who you have murdered…"

Damien pulled a dagger.

"You wouldn't dare." the Captive wanted it to sound defiant and powerful. He failed. I was standing behind Damien so I couldn't see his expression but from the look of fear on the captive's face, I would guess that his expression was murderous.

"But in this instance." Damien's voice was still fairly reasonable. "Where there was a young boy hostage. Forcing his mother to commit espionage against foreign nationals. Forcing a woman to commit treason because that's what it is. Treason that might be leading to the deaths of many people. That? That makes you treasonous as well. Would you like to know what happens to traitors in Toussaint? The Duchess gets all… irate when she talkies about traitors. Phrases like "Thrown to her hunting dogs" come to mind."

He turned to me. "Although to be fair, the Duchess doesn't have any hunting dogs at the moment but I'm sure a pack could be found."

"Whatsisname." I said. "The father of that girl who was killed might be able to help out with that."

Damien clicked his fingers. "You know something Lord Frederick. You might be right." He turned back to the captive. "And that's only the beginning of the Duchess' imagination when it comes to dealing with these kinds of matters.

"You…" The man swallowed. He was clearly unused to having none of the power. "You can't do that. You have no proof." He started to warm to his subject. "There were no captives here. The boy was taken in here because the mother was working. She was unable to properly see to the upbringing of such a fine young man and as such, she would have him stay here while she saw to it that her…" He smirked at me. "Her clients were properly taken care of. She was an unfit mother and the one thing that she did right was to give her to me so that we might take care of her."

"Her story is quite different." Damien said.

"Are you honestly going to take the word of a stupid whore over me?" He declared. "I am noble born and her word is dirt."

"If that is the tactic that you seek to take." Damien said. "Then we might. But in the meantime, we have questions that we are going to ask you, you will answer. Failure to do so will result in my pressing the case for treason. Have you ever seen a person pressed Lord Frederick?"

"I have actually." I said, pulling a face. "At the end, the head of the person being pressed, explodes like a grape. Except it does so with a crack as the entire skull shatters. The one that I saw was a mage in Novgrad. He was still screaming when the blood shot out of his nose in a fountain."

"His nose?"

"Yes. His head was on it's side you see."

"Sounds horrible."

"It was."

"Would you like to see it again? As the injured party, I am sure that the Duchess would be willing to fulfill your wishes on the matter."

"There is nothing to say or to admit to." The Captive tried again. "I am a merchant, nobly born of Toussaint. The boy was not a captive, I was in the process of adopting him as my son and heir given that his mother was incapable of protecting him or looking after him. She was an entirely willing factor in that matter. She was even grateful that I allowed her to come and visit as it would be well within my rights to deny her that permission. After all, she is a whore and any court of law would grant me custody based on that factor alone. So you have invaded my house, seemingly on the word of a whore who is using you to exact her revenge. Revenge that is utterly undeserved due to the fact that the boy is no longer her son. He is mine."

"Your house?" Damien wondered. "You weren't renting this from anyone or staying here with the permission of anyone in particular?

It is always interesting the way that, given enough time, people will happily hang themselves with their own mouth.

"My house." The man said. "Meaning you have invaded it without purpose or reason. I shall see you in court sir. At which time you shall answer before the rest of the nobility of Toussaint as to why you should feel free to invade a nobleman's home without permission or reason. Based purely on the word of some wretch of society."

Damien hit him again. There was a feeling to the way that he swung his fist that made me think that if I wrote, "He swung his fist happily" would not be far out of reach.

"I wonder how Sir Morgan the Black hand would feel about you claiming ownership of his property." Damien said, waving the deed of ownership into the face of the man who was still trying to reach for his outrage around the split lip.

"The fact that I have also found numerous reports of other spies that are in your employ might also count against you." I told him. "It might take me some time but I'm sure I can put it together. If Sir Morgan would be angry at the fact that you are claiming that you own his property, I would be willing to bet that he will be furious at the fact that you were running some kind of spy network out of it. After all, spying on foreign nationals is treason. And given that you were doing it in his house? That would also be treason. For him as well."

The man lay there, still where he had fallen from when Damien had hit him. His mouth opening and closing.

"Are you going to ask me what Proof I have?" I wondered.

Damien waved the title deed that I had found in his face.

"My advice?" I said. "Tell The Captain here everything. And if you're very lucky. He might be able to save your life."

I decided that that was a good enough line to end on and with a desire not to ruin it. I turned and walked away.

If this had been any other country on the continent, then I would have thought that the man would have confessed and told Damien everything. In any other country in the world even. But in this case? I just wasn't quite sure. People of Toussaint get funny about noble blood and obligations to your betters and there was never really any way to tell. The man was trying to intimate that there was noble blood in his veins or something similar and that kind of thing can do strange things to people if you let it.

Instead, I first made my way over to where Ariadne was working on the wounded. It would not do to let my skills go entirely to waste and it is always worthwhile to practice that kind of thing. I tried to remember when the last time was that I had actually managed to heal any wounded people, but I came up empty. I eventually decided to give it up as a bad job and just got on with things. Also, it gave me a kind of perverse pleasure to try and heal the people that had been fighting us a little earlier while chanting the field medic's motto "Red to red and white to white and everything will be alright."

I've seen grown men, hard men, towering slabs of muscle break down and cry and the sound of those words. Those same men that would charge into an enemy spear formation would fight claw and nail before breaking down and bawling their eyes out in terror at the prospect of going to see the surgeon.

And they are not alone. I'm the same and I make no pretense about it.

But I soon ran out of work. There's only so much cleaning of a wound that you can do before it can't be cleaned any further and you must consign the injured men's fate to the Gods. Also, even in the most brutal of battlefields, there are only so many limbs that need setting after being broken. Only so many wounds that can be stitched closed and only so many injuries that can be treated. Beyond that, all you can do for those kinds of people is pray that the Gods will intervene, or pray that there is someone with the ability to heal the injury with magic. Otherwise, the person in question is as good as dead.

I was stalling. I knew it too. I was putting off an unpleasant task. Ariadne, who was working next to me and putting my small skills to shame, told me off for it. She had made a special practice of healing magic since she had escaped from her confinement. She found it "fascinating" which was not the most inspiring of words that she could use when examining a man's injuries. But ever since that first combat in the throne room of Angraal and when she had been guided to helping me with my poisoning and the fact that I was in sincere danger of shitting out my own lungs, she had devoted herself to the subject. Then, when she had learned a lot of what there is to know on the matter, moaned about the fact that human medicinal knowledge did not go too far beyond that.

Why was she so interested? She had three explanations. One was sweet, another was kind of unnerving and the third made me howl with laughter. The first was that she wanted to know how we worked so that she would never have to risk losing me again.

As I say sweet.

The second was when she told someone that it is important to know how to put people back together after you have learned to take them apart.

That was the unnerving one.

The last one, the funny one, was when she said that it never stopped being amusing to frown in though, display her vampiric nature a little bit before sticking her tongue between her teeth while threading the needle. Then she would look up at the injured man, or woman, with fangs showing and eyes glowing and say "Now stay very still."

I'm told from those people that have had the chance to see Ariadne work, that her needlework is immaculate.

But she was dealing with most of the wounded. We had done well and there weren't many wounded that didn't need more than a limb setting or an injury stitching. Most of our opponents were either already dead or just a little dazed and so Ariadne looked up at me and gave me a significant look. It was the same look that men all over the continent know as that look that their loved ones give them when they have done something wrong. It doesn't matter what it is that has been done wrong. But a mistake has been made and the light of our lives needs to have it fixed as soon as possible.

"Ok, what did I do wrong?" I asked, looking down at the wound that I had just closed on one of the guardsman that had taken a cut across the bicep. The man had sworn at me while I worked before apologising afterwards and saying that he always does that when some poor fucker is having to stitch him up.

"She's in the wagon." Ariadne said, gesturing. "As is the son, so be gentle."

I straightened up and looked over at the, still, covered wagon. I suppose it made sense. Keeping them both in there meant that they were easy to guard and also, so that the little boy didn't need to see anything that might traumatise him for life. Not that I think that that ship hadn't already sailed given that he had been kidnapped and taken away from his mother but that was a completely different thought. And out of my hands.

I took my daggers from my belt and boot before handing them, along with my spear, to Ariadne. I don't know why I did that but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. And then I walked towards the covered wagon in much the same way as I imagine a man walks to his own execution.

I was not looking forward to this.

The guards stayed out of my way as I walked up to the wagon and I knocked on the door.

Again, I don't know why I did this but, again, it seemed like the right thing to do.

"Who is it?" Anne called in that distinct voice that happens when a person is desperately holding onto their self-control.

"Freddie." I told her. Another thing that I didn't know why I said it. Why the informal forms of my name, the one that I allow friends to use and the one which, up until a little while ago, I would have been quite happy for Anne to have used. "Can I come in?"

There was a brief pause.

"Please."

I opened the door and moved into the interior. The side I had entered had had it's curtains drawn, again I assumed, so that the little boy could not see the carnage that had been wrought by his rescuers. The other side was open though and it let the sounds of the harbour and the sunlight into the, otherwise, quite stuffy carriage.

Anne was dressed in the same way that any number of ladies might have been dressed to go to market. A simple dress of wool with an over cloak that kept her warm, and presumably dry. Her hair was done up in some kind of arrangement and the hood from her cloak was down. But even without the jewels and the makeup, she was still achingly beautiful. It was made even worse by the fact that she had obviously been crying. I could tell by the reddened cheeks and the flush from where she had done her best to scrub the tears out of her eyes.

I literally had to force my arms to stay still and at my side so that I didn't, automatically, take her in my arms and do my best to comfort her. That would not have helped anyone. Me, not least.

But apart from my own feelings, and hers which were just as relevant, there were also the feelings of the little boy who, by the looks of him, we could not have pried from his mother's side with the proverbial pry bar. He too looked as though he had been weeping but instead of relief or sadness or anything like that. He looked confused. I would have put him at about five, maybe six years old. He had old eyes that had probably seen more, and heard more, than people his age should probably have seen and heard and he shared the golden hair of his mother. That he was his mother's son was obvious in the shape of the face and expression that he wore. If he survived, then I rather think that he could cut a swathe through the women of Toussaint.

Then I realised what I was thinking and felt a wave of shame wash over me.

He watched me skeptically. He was dressed like someone's idea of a nobleman. Someone who had seen a picture of a young noble in a story book somewhere and had done their best to copy that. Unless I missed my guess, his tunic was made out of a set of old curtains, his bonnet… yes he was wearing a bonnet, was made out of the same material. He was barefoot but his trousers were made out of a cheap cream material that reminded me of a sheet. He was wrapped in a cape that was too large for him and, I rather thought, followed on the theme from being from some kind of bed clothes. I suspected a blanket of some kind. It was comical while also being so deeply tragic and my mood fell from one to the other without warning.

"Fabrice? This is Lord Frederick von Coulthard." Anne said to her son in the tone of voice of mothers everywhere. It was the same tone of voice where people remind their children to say please and thank you with the immortal phrase that I suspect will still be around long after we have all died "What do we say?"

"He is responsible for rescuing you." Shem finished.

I thought that was a bit much and was in the process of opening my mouth to say so when the little boy said something that I did not expect.

"Why don't you just FUCK OFF." He screamed the last at me.

I could have handled it better, as with so much in this particular part of my story. He said it with such insistence and otherwise utterly lacking in any kind of understanding in what he was saying. The outrage on his child's face was so at odds with what he had just said that I could not help it.

I laughed.

Anne's outraged squeak of "Fabrice." Made the matter worse and I was rapidly heading towards the realms of being helpless.

"STOP LAUGHING." The boy demanded and his voice carried such hurt that I felt instantly sorry.

"I am sorry Fabrice." I said as carefully as I could while doing my best to avoid the pitfalls of returning hilarity. "I should not have laughed. But I have just been in a fight and sometimes, after a fight, I laugh in relief."

"Go away." He said. "You killed my friends."

I raised my eyebrows at Anne in question.

"He's been here a while," She said quietly as she did her best to calm her son. "He thinks these people here were his friends because they all but let him run riot."

"I'm sorry." I said again.

"It's alright." She said before taking a deep breath and kissing her son's head.

I recognised a farewell when I saw it.

"What happens now?" She asked.

"Back to the palace I should think." I said. "There will be more questions."

"I know. And then a trial and an execution I suspect."

I looked at the child but he clearly didn't know what the word meant.

"Maybe not." I said.

"I have betrayed…" I waved her into silence.

"You had the best of reasons." I gestured at the boy who was burying his face in his mother's neck. He seemed to be able to sense that his mother was unhappy. "And I would like to think that that will make a difference. The Duchess is not unreasonable unless you make her unhappy."

Anne's mouth twisted into a parody of what her normal smile would be. I ached with a desire to take her into my arms and tell her that everything would be alright. It was so powerful that I had to turn away so as not to act on it and only turned back when I was sure that that feeling was suppressed.

When I turned back, Anne was looking at me with an odd look that nearly sent me back into a fury. Pity was the part of it that made me angry. But there was also grief there and an awful lot of guilt.

"I am sorry." She said. "I am truly sorry."

"I know." I said before taking a deep breath. "I will speak to the Duchess on your behalf and I have every reason to believe that you will be protected."

"I have a lot of people that I need protecting from. Madam Isabelle is going to be furious with me when this gets out. I sold the secrets that I learned in the bed chamber. No-one will ever trust me again and in the future, people will wonder why they should ever trust any of the girls from the Belles again. She is going to be so angry with me."

For another long moment there I thought she was going to burst into tears. Tears of fear and pain, also of loss. The women at the Belles had been her friends and her colleagues and now they would hate her. Again, the surge of affection and sympathy flooded through me, it was easier to suppress this time. But not by much.

"I do not think it will be unfair to suppose that you will need to find a new place of work."

"Let us be honest with one another here Fre… Lord Frederick. I will need to find another profession. I am done with that. For who will want to be with me in the future? I will need to travel somewhere which means to go North as I am known to the south. And then, what kind of work will I get? Any of the decent, famous houses will learn of my disgrace in short order. So I either turn into some kind of…" She glanced down at her son who was beginning to show the first signs that he might be about to fall asleep. "Street worker or worse. Or I find someone who will marry me. Who would marry such as I? None would ever trust me again."

Something tickled at the back of my mind. Something was there. Something that I had noticed before but hadn't acted on at the time. It was an intensely frustrating moment because I knew that there was a solution to the situation in the immediate surroundings but I had no idea what that solution was.

I forced myself to set it aside. I was getting better at setting these puzzles aside. It was easier to distract myself from the puzzle holes that I could fall down far too easily. The ones that led to madness.

"There is a lot to get through before we get there." I said. "The Duchess must be convinced to grant you clemency first as that is far from certain, although I do think that that particular cause is not as hopeless as you might think."

"You are going to want me to tell you everything that I know."

I nodded. "As well as some things that you might know but have possibly forgotten. There will be questions, a lot of them, there may even be magic involved to ensure that you are telling the truth. However, if you act in good faith then I don't see why people could be too angry with you. People will be angry. You mentioned Madame Isabelle in particular,"

Anne came very close to sobbing there. Very close, but then she swallowed it.

"But," I carried on. "If you can give us the information which we think you can, things that can lead certain villains into the hands of justice, then I rather think that the Duchess will be forgiving. She might even be grateful. After that?"

I shrugged.

"Ariadne once promised you that we would find a place for you in Angral should you become pregnant. I do not think it would take much persuasion for her to agree to some kind of similar arrangement although it would, now, need to be far away from our household."

"She hates me."

"A little." I admitted. "But one of the things that I have had to learn about loving a Vampire, and this Vampire in particular, is that they do not think the way that we do. They do not feel the way we do. She hates you, yes. But she feels guilty for that hate. She certainly feels guilty for attacking you when you admitted to your crimes. I imagine that she will go out of her way to become your friend. I understand that she regularly corresponds with Lady Marion of Dorne who I once loved, rather fiercely. There will also be an, I suspect, extremely embarrassing conversation about what I might enjoy in the bed chamber. I warn you about that, she will want to go into great detail in that regard. But she will examine her hatred and her jealousy of you in the same way that a jeweller might examine a new stone that has come into their possession. She will not be the person that has the difficulty with you coming North."

"It will be you."

"Yes." I admitted. "I trusted you. I let my guard down with you. You do not know, because you cannot possibly know, how much that meant to me, that I could do that with you."

"But I betrayed that trust." There were tears in her eyes again. "I know. I am so sorry. I know that you will say things like that I had the best possible reasons. And I do. I would do it again if I was in the same position because he's my son. So I do feel the guilt, but I cannot feel regret."

I nodded.

"He is your son." I said.

"He is my son." She agreed as she stroked the hair of her, now, sleeping child. "So I do not think you have it in you to find me a job as a courtesan in the North. Nor would I be able to start a new house in Angral or wherever. I am doubtful that there is call enough for the kinds of skills that I can offer."

"You might be surprised." I said. "What there won't be is the money to be able to afford the kinds of things that you offer. The women up there will assume that you are trying to steal their husbands and the men will seek to rescue you."

She smiled again. "Ugh. Rescuing me? How awful."

"Quite." I smiled back at her before, again, fighting down old emotions, and by old, I meant the day before yesterday. I would not be able to keep this up much longer.

"But there are merchants that will, as you guessed, need a good wife. A woman that knows about the finer things in life and who can decorate a house to lend an aura of class and taste that the man might lack. If we can't find you such in Angral, then I'm sure that Emma might know someone."

She nodded. "When compared with the prospect of having my neck stretched or any of the other things that the Duchy can do to traitors, I will take a loveless arranged marriage to an older man. For my son's sake if for no other."

I smiled as gently as I could manage. "I think we might be able to do something more than that. There are many young, charming and handsome young merchant sons who need the same as well."

"I know the type." Anne admitted with a small laugh, meaning that my comment was taken as the joke it was meant to be. "They will believe that they are the prophet's gift to women and will need to be taught just how little they know. I almost prefer the older, hopefully wiser, man that knows what he's doing over that."

She took another deep breath. "So you want to know what I know."

"I do. As I say, back up to the palace. If you permit, Emma, Laurelen and Mark will look after your son. They will be delighted to have a child to spoil mercilessly."

She chuckled at the thought before her face went blank.

"I do not need a hostage against my good behaviour."

I held my hands up in what I hoped was a placating manner. "I just thought that you might be happier with him being kept with people that you know."

She considered. "I suppose I would, at that. Thank you."

I nodded. "What do you know about Lord Morgan Tonlaire?"

"Who?"

My heart sank a little. "We have found a load of paperwork that tells us that he owns this house and the warehouse that is part of it."

"Does he have any other names?"

"He is known on the tournament fields as "Sir Morgan Blackhand"."

"Oh." She smiled as memories hit her. "He's a jouster. One of the Knights of the Old school."

"That's him."

"I can't tell you much. Some clients have moaned about him at various junctures. About how they didn't deserve to lose to such an older man. Long past his prime. They complained about how he should step aside and make room for the more modern man."

"I see. So you wouldn't have met him."

"No."

"Was his name ever mentioned while you were making your reports?"

"I don't think so."

I could not help but contain a sigh.

"I'm not being very helpful am I." She sighed a little sadly.

"That will not stop me from doing everything in my power to try and help you."

"That's ok."

"We will go up to the castle and go through things with you in detail though. We will need your entire story. THe day is getting on and we're due another attack from Jack tonight."

She shuddered.

(A/N: An abrupt ending to a slightly shorter chapter, but if I had kept going then the chapter would be twice the size. I hope that everyone is alright and that you all continue to stay safe out there. I know that with the rollout of the vaccine happening all over the world, it is awfully tantalising to think that everything is getting better. But it is in the closing stages of things when people begin to feel that they are safe, that people make mistakes.

Stay safe out there folks, let's not lose anyone in the closing weeks and months. And as always. Thanks for reading.)