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 I will be publishing this story on Royal Road /profile/349358

94. Chapter 94

I don't ever remember being so stunned.

It was so big. So huge that I couldn't get my head round the story that I had just heard. There was so much going on in that speech as well as the story. It felt as though I had been sat at this bench for hours so that my back ached, my neck was sore and my legs were stiff. But at the same time as that, it was as though I had only been sat there for a few moments.

Lord Voorhis was trying to capture my attention but I ignored him.

I wanted to sit there for a lot longer. I wanted to analyse and think about all the things that I had just heard. I wanted to weigh it all to try and find which bits were actual history. Which bits were dramatic insertions to capture the imagination of the listeners and which bits had been set aside and emphasised for the learning part of the saga.

Because it was built around learning. You could feel the lessons in the piece. I've had the benefit of some time since then to think about what I had been told as well as some time in a darkened room to sort things out. But at the time, there was just so much there. So much to take in.

It really was a lot like a spell.

One of the first thoughts that went through my head, maybe halfway through the telling of the tale, was that if the priests of the Eternal Flame had half the oratory skills that that large, bearded, hairy man had, then the church would have spread across the continent by now.

I felt like I was reeling amongst it all and that I was still under the spell of what was happening. Under an enchantment that had been woven by the tale teller. I could almost smell the salty sea air. I could feel the terror of the Skelligans as they shivered in their homes. Too close to the fire for safety but not nearly close enough for comfort. I could well imagine the grief of the assembly at the harbour as they watched this strange vessel sail through the waters. There was just so much going on there that I didn't want to break the spell yet.

But Lord Voorhis was insistent.

"Lord Frederick."

I took a deep breath. It felt as though it was a long way back from wherever the Skald had sent me and even worse than that, I didn't really want to come back. I looked at the table behind me and saw a goblet, a quick search led me to a jug of something and I poured myself a cup of whatever it was and drank it. To this day I have no idea what it was.

"Lord Frederick?"

"Fuck me sideways." I muttered.

"Not quite my response." Kerrass was sat next to me. His brow was furrowed in intense concentration. His eyes were darting this way and that as he thought, furiously, about what he had just heard. He didn't seem as deeply affected as me but at the same time... I suppose that it was a professional reaction. He had been told about this vast, supernatural effect and now he was turning it over in his mind so that he could try and figure it out.

"Lord Frederick I really must insist that we move on."

I was still ignoring him though. I wasn't being rude, not intentionally anyway. It was more that I needed room to think. To collect myself. Fatigue, hunger, sickness and the shock of being in a place utterly alien to my experiences was taking it's toll. It seemed as though I had been transported to another world, one with it's own rules that I did not understand.

"Where..." I began again. "What?..."

"Lord Frederick..."

"Leave the lad alone." A big Skelligan had come over and seemed to be getting in the way of Lord Voorhis.

"Aye, the lad's obviously had a hellish crossing." Another Skelligan turned up to leap to my defense.

"I just..." I stood up. "I need some air."

There are several side doors out of the hall on the top of Kaer Trolde and one of them led me out onto this kind of courtyard place. It was oddly tranquil which was another opportunity for me to see the dichotomy in the Skelligan people. On the one hand we had the hard drinking, hard fighting, hard living warriors of Skellige. Brutal men and tough women who had carved out an existence from one of the more savage places on the continent. A place of sharp stone and storm-tossed seas. But it was balanced by a fierce sense of the beauty of life and that was nowhere more evident than in the garden at Kaer Trolde.

It was still a working place though. Large men in formidable armour stood as look out. A cold wind blew across the stone which leant the place an even stronger air of beauty carved out of wilderness.

I rushed to the wall and leant over the side, taking deep breaths until my head stopped spinning and my lungs could be cleared of the smoky atmosphere of the hall inside.

Which was when I realised that I was awfully high up and my head swam. I turned and let myself slump against the wall, my legs sliding out in front of me. I cradled my head in my hands.

"You gonna be alright?" Kerrass wondered walking up.

"Holy fucking flame."

"It was a good story." He agreed, I got the feeling that he was enjoying himself at my expense.

"How...?"

"How true was all of that?" Kerrass finished for me.

"Yeah."

"A lot of it is true." Lord Voorhis walked up. "Lord Frederick I must..."

"Look, Morvran." Kerrass began. Lord Voorhis stiffened at the informal use of his name. "It was a shitty crossing. Freddie hasn't eaten anything, or drunk anything really in a few days and he's just sat in a stuffy, smoky hall and listened to a rather evocative piece. He might be a scholar but occasionally, he has the soul of a poet and it's hit him like a stone from a trebuchet. So you can wait for an hour or so until he's collected his wits."

"I..." Lord Voorhis' mouth snapped shut with an audible click. "I apologise Lord Frederick. I am unused to these... circumstances." He sighed, unclipped his scabbarded sword from his belt and sat next to me, stretching his legs out.

"Why don't you tell us what the problem is Lord Voorhis?" Kerrass began. A serving person, a man who was dressed in a simply white tunic with a plain leather belt approached with a tray of three tankards as well as a bag of bread loaves and a large bowl of soup. "Goddess but I love Skelligan beer," Kerrass went on. Some bread was passed down to me as Kerrass handed a tankard each to Voorhis and myself before the server moved on.

"I really just..." Voorhis sighed and drained a significant amount of his tankard. "I just don't know how to deal with her. Her father was not a nice man and we spent our lives on opposite sides of a lot of political divides. It was one of the reasons we got on with each other so well. I was used to the way he thought and acted but his daughter?"

He shook his head. I had ripped off a chunk of the loaf of bread and was devouring it. You know that sensation of when your body is just sucking up the food. Your first meal with real food in it rather than trail rations after a long journey. Your first bowl of soup after recovering from illness. It's that feeling, where your body just devours what you give it and then yells at you for not giving it any more.

The bread was delicious. It was a fruit bread. Soft and nutty as well. I wondered if I could get some more.

"I just don't understand the way she thinks." Voorhis moaned. "She's amazing at court. She has this ability to cut through the bullshit faster than anyone I've ever known. Not that she's impolite but two minutes into a debate or an audience and she already knows what's happening, what needs to be done about it and what the repercussions are. Then it's a matter of her remaining patient long enough to get the job done without offending people.

"She's good at this. Shockingly good at this. So good that we have a real possibility of making lasting peace on the continent. Leaving aside her stubborn refusal to accept courtship from anyone which, at the moment, I agree with, she's an amazing ruler. But then she also goes off on tangents. Random crazes that no-one, least of all me, understands."

"Just to check," I could almost feel my brain starting to work again. Fresh air and sustenance was working wonders. "But you are talking about the Empress right?"

He glared at me. "I also struggle with her more Northern sense of humour." He warned. "A trait of hers that you seem to share Lord Frederick."

"I've been told worse things Lord Voorhis." I responded round a mouthful of bread. "So what the fuck is happening?"

Voorhis threw his hands up in the air. "You fucking tell me." He hissed bitterly. "All the Skelligans will say is that "The time of the Skeleton Ship is upon them" which is the first time I've fucking heard of it. Her Imperial majesty gets told of this and then she insists on coming north. We ask her why and she tell us that she wants to board the ship."

He went to take another drink from his tankard before realising that it was already empty, he frowned and set it aside.

"We all get here which is when I finally find out what that means. I listen to a similar story to what you've just heard which is when I find out that she essentially intends to commit suicide."

He turned on me accusingly. "Did you know what it means?"

"What means?"

"What it means to board the Skeleton Ship?"

"Of course not." I swallowed the last of the bread. "I didn't even hear about the Skeleton ship until after Queen Cerys had ascended to the throne and started inviting other people to the festival."

"Some festival if even half of that was true." Kerrass put in. He also had a piece of bread and was using it to scoop something out of a small bowl that he was shoving into his mouth. He realised that we were looking. "What?" he asked with his mouth full.

"You like Skelligan cooking as well do you?" I teased him.

He answered with a hearty belch.

"Are you two done joking around?" Lord Voorhis snapped which was when I began to realise just how close he was to losing his mind.

"How serious is this Lord Voorhis?" I asked him.

"Pretty serious." He sighed. "She says she wants to board the Skeleton Ship. She won't say why or even why she's so obsessed with it. There's no getting away from the fact that she's been struggling since... Forgive me...Since your sister disappeared. She's had fits of temper and listlessness that I hadn't seen in her character before but frankly it's nothing compared to her predecessors. The rest of the Empire wouldn't even blink if she ordered a few beheadings but it's like she's been withdrawing from us. She's tired and has been having trouble sleeping and we knew that she was unhappy but we thought that it was normal grief. As well as all of that, being the head of state is fucking hard work. I know. But she won't delegate either. She has lost something I think and doesn't know, or doesn't want to get it back. And now she wants to do something that everyone, everyone agrees would be fatal. And she knows that."

"And you want me to stop her."

"I've tried everything else. Queen Cerys has talked to her. The local chief druid Ermion who she's known since childhood has tried to talk her out of it. Lord Emhyr has been written and we're hoping for a response, even if he doesn't show up himself. Her mother is here and storming around the place. But she just stands there, folds her arms and insists that she's going to go through with it."

"And what do you think I'm going to do that's so different from everyone else?"

"I've tried everything else."

"How serious is it?" I asked.

"She's pretty fucking serious."

"How real is the story?" Kerrass wondered. "How much time do we have before..."

"It doesn't matter." Lord Voorhis. "She's not kept it secret. Coming here...Ok. Skellige is an important part of the Empire. We can't afford to be strangers because if Queen Cerys decides to unleash the raiders on our shipping then she can cripple commerce. We would have to conquer Skellige properly. I've read the reports on how much that would cost us in the conquering and then in moving forward. We would have to do it, literally, island by island over hostile ground against men that know the terrain and where numbers mean almost nothing. That's not to talk about the naval cost in mounting an invasion. We did well when the Wild Hunt were doing their thing but we won't be able to do that again.

"We can turn this into a state visit. If we go to Novigrad after this and then march South we can make Toussaint by Winter and then back to the Capital by spring so she can celebrate the anniversary of her crowning in the capital.

"But in the meantime, she has no heir and the noble houses of Nilfgaard are tearing themselves apart in putting things together to name the next heir for when she does something stupid. Everyone knows that boarding the Skeleton Ship means probable death for the boarder so the entirety of the south think she's a dead woman walking. Why should they do what she's ordered if the next Emperor might be one of their own? Then..."

"Right." I cut him off. "So politically then..."

"Politically, this could damage the Empire, which includes the North now, in such a way that we might never recover. Worse than if her father had kept power and been forced to send out the knives again. Which he was about to have to do."

I sighed. "How certain is it that she would die if she climbed aboard the ship?"

"Lord Frederick..." His voice was a warning. This was a man on the edge.

"No, hold on. She's the lady of time and space. Powerful people are scared of her. I know this because I'm marrying one of them."

"And those self-same people are afraid for her. Her mothers here. Lady Eilhart has been here."

"Not the wisest person to try and talk the Empress down if I'm any judge," Kerrass commented.

"Lady Merigold is still here." Lord Voorhis ignored Kerrass. "No-one, knows anyone, ever, who survived going aboard that ship."

I sighed again and rested my head on the stone of the wall.

"She will say that Legends have to come from somewhere." I muttered.

"And she has. Many times."

"Alright." I said climbing to my feet. "Let's go and get yelled at. You coming Kerrass?"

"You go." Kerrass told me. "I want to hear that story again. Get a different perspective."

"Alright. Providing I don't get executed, I will see you later."

"She won't execute you Freddie." Kerrass told me.

The expression on Lord Voorhis' face was not reassuring.

As I said before. Kaer Trolde is a fascinating place. It actually takes you deep into the mountain and I only saw the very surface of it. I strongly suspect that if you go deep enough, you would discover that it would take you back down to secret levels so that even if you lay siege to the keep itself, they would still be able to feed themselves by fishing from the sea and for the important people to escape.

I was led through the back of the banqueting hall, trying to look sidelong at Lord Voorhis. I was struggling to get my brain to work but also wondering at the wisdom of that. The logical arguments had probably been used so maybe I needed to stick with the illogical and emotional arguments.

"How bad is it really?" I asked him.

He blew out a breath. "You remember that crossbow you gave her?"

"I do."

"Yesterday she chased me out of her rooms at the point of that thing. It's not funny."

I snorted. "It's a little funny."

"It's not." He was getting angry again.

"Lord Voorhis. The most powerful man in the Empire being forced out of the Empress' presence by threat of crossbow bolt. Arguably the most terrifying man on the continent and he fled from a young woman in a temper. I know she was in a temper because she could have had you thrown out by the guards. You have to admit that that image is a little funny."

He stared at me for a long time. His eyes seeming to boggle out of his skull. Then he smirked.

"There you go." I told him. "It is a little funny isn't it."

A bark of laughter escaped from his mouth.

"And then you have to go and ask a relatively minor lord of the north. A younger son, that you don't know, of a house that you hadn't heard of five years previously. To come here and talk some sense into the Empress of half the known world."

He laughed then.

"You must be fucking desperate."

He sighed, his laughter fading. "I am desperate."

"How long before the Skeleton Ship arrives?" I asked.

"I don't know. According to Head Druid Ermion the seas are rebelling early. The storm clouds are gathering and the sea is emptying of fish. It's colder here than it's supposed to be for this stage of early autumn. In Nilfgaard there would still be crops in the field ripening and I understand that the same is in the North but here it's getting colder. Apparently that is not unusual. The signs together suggest that the big freeze is a week away from really digging in. After that the seas will freeze and the ship will be sighted on the horizon."

"You want to be away from here before that though right."

"Lord Frederick, with all due respect, I didn't want to be here in the first place. The charms of the strong women who make a game of conquering men in the same way that men in the south make a game of conquering women soon wears thin."

I felt my mouth turn upwards. "But it is fun though right?"

He sighed. "Not really. My tastes like elsewhere."

"Really?"

"Do not pursue it Lord Frederick. But back to your original question. Being honest with each other. I will be happy if we could just guarantee that I will still have an Empress when all this is over. I've worked too hard to lose her now."

Something in the way he said that caught at my mind after the earlier conversation about being pursued by strong women.

"Lord Voorhis, do you have a little thing for the Empress?" My sense of mischief had not been dulled yet. Alcohol, fatigue, hunger and being in a strange place seems to combine to have an interesting effect on my sense of humour.

He shook his head and stared off to one side for a moment. "It sometimes astonishes me." he began. "It astonishes me how different you northerners are. You really do not understand how this works. She is my Empress. I love her because she is my Empress. She is the divine light of the Holy sun made manifest on the Continent and she is my Empress. Of course I love her. Do you think I would be this fucking terrified if I didn't. And I know, I know, you mean to insinuate that I love her in the way a man loves a woman but in this case, it is the same thing. She is my Empress and I love her.

"And she is alien to my understanding. She is more intelligent than just about anyone I know. She can cut through to the heart of the matter faster and better than even her father could. She can make intuitive leaps that baffle me but, at the same time, she is also as direct and brutal as any northerner can be. All of that wrapped in the skin of a beautiful young woman. Of course I love her.

"She is my Empress."

I stared at him for a long time. "I'm sorry." I said.

"It's alright. You do not understand. You are not Nilfgaardian. I do not mean to insult you in saying that. But it is true. You do not hold your rulers in as much reverence as we do."

I felt my mouth begin to smile. "Do your people not conspire against each other as easy as breathing?"

"Not really. Not since the coup against Emperor Emhyr's father. That was the first time it happened really. But now, everyone can argue about who has the truest claim. But for the vast majority of Nilgaardians. They would not dream of it. She was properly annointed, enthroned and crowned. She is the Empress and she delivered the North to us, including Skellige. Her father might have conquered but she was the one who truly brought them into line. If she dies here,without naming an heir, it will mean war. A war that will, this time, swallow the world"

I nodded.

"Who else is here?"

"The lady Yennefer is here."

I laughed. "Oh good. And you think I'm going to succeed where Yennefer has failed."

"I hope so. If you don't then I don't know what I'm going to do."

"No pressure then."

His mouth twitched towards a smile again. "Absolutely none."

We started walking again. "The most terrifying man on the face of the continent?" He asked.

"Arguably so." I told him.

We came to a pair of huge wooden doors. Beautifully carved and ornamented, they stood as high as the corridor itself. Massively heavy looking they were bound with hinges of iron, the wood so old as to appear black. The corridor itself was surprisingly well lit. Much airier and well ventilated than I had though it would be. But regardless, two sets of guards stood next to the doors themselves. Huge men both. The one pair, Nilfgaardian soldiers in their full segmented armour. The black, featureless armour of the Imperial Guard. They had swords drawn and huge shields ready. Standing next to each man was a Skelligan warrior and where the Nilfgaardians wore black and were full, featureless figures, menacing in their anonymity, the Skelligans were bright and colourful. Massively bearded with long hair streaming down their backs. They wore large metal helms that were polished to a bright sheen that reflected the firelight from the torches. Huge shoulders, draped in fur, one I thought was bear hide, the other was from a seal if I am any judge. Hardened plates of metal wrapped in ornamented Leather made up their suits of armour, over the top of which was a woolen scarf in the An Craite colours. Huge round shields with a similarly polished centre boss, the wood of the shield covered in leather, painted, again, in the colours of the An Craite clan. In their hands were large, hook bladed axes.

Even though they were more colourful and shiny than their Nilfgaardian counterparts, the Skelligan royal guard were no less anonymous in their finery. I could not see either man's eyes, both were huge and their hair and beard colourings were not unusual enough to spark notice. Putting the two sets of guards next to each other, I could not have told you which was the more intimidating.

They say that the best guards don't need to do anything. All they have to do is to stand there and anyone who might have been contemplating attacking their charges would take one look at the guards and lose their courage. I can't answer to that. I have never spoken to any of these men on a social level. But I will admit that I was shitting myself already.

"Lord Frederick." I looked at Lord Voorhis, "Make this happen Lord Frederick and I will..." He took a shuddering breath. "I. Will. Owe. You." It looked as though it cost him everything he had to say that. I don't think it had really hit home to me how frightened this man was until he told me that.

A favour with the head of Imperial Confidential Agencies. I might get him to write it up so I can hang it on my wall.

"If she has me killed." I told him, trying to keep the tone light. "Tell my family that I love them."

"If she has you killed," Voorhis found his humour. Possibly appreciating my attempt to lighten the humour. "Then I would strongly suspect that I will be joining you on the block."

"Well, at least I will have company."

Lord Voorhis nodded to the guards and one of the Nilfgaardians opened the door.

The royal chambers of Kaer Trolde were oddly disappointing. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this. It was like the kind of meeting room that Father used to keep, modern and sparse. There was a large table off to one side surrounded by chairs. A few more comfortable looking chairs were near the hearth and there was a desk as well with several more chairs arranged around the place. Shelves along the wall were full of orderly looking papers and scrolls with another set of shelves that were kept for books. Another door in the back of the room led to what I guessed would be some sleeping chambers.

There were several things that suggested that it was the chambers of the queen. First was the standing suit of the Queen's battle armour on one side. A huge, ornate and detailed piece of artistry that dazzled the eye but also looked as though it was hard worn. There were also two portrait style tapestrys. One over the fireplace and one on the opposite wall. The one over the fireplace was of the Queen herself but the other one portrayed a large bearded man. The hair and beard were red with slight hints of grey so judging by the colours that he wore, I guessed that this would be the fabled father of the Queen, Jarl Crach an Craite himself.

There was also a large two-handed axe above the fire-place. I wish I had the time to look at the room and give you a better description of the place but frankly I was too overwhelmed by the people that I saw there.

I would be a fool if I tried to pretend that I didn't know how much my life has changed since I set out and started writing about Kerrass in particular and Witchers in general. When I first set out I was a relatively minor student, younger son of a minor family that had been out of favour with the royal court of Redania for years. But every so often it is thrown into stark relief and I am left feeling dizzy by all of the things that have happened and by how far I have come.

To be clear, I am not just talking about my pending marriage, nor am I talking about my Proffesorship of Oxenfurt or my friendship with Kerrass. But suddenly, my family are in favour of not only the royal court but the Imperial court as well. So as a result I have met some of the most important figures of recent history. I have met those men and women who have shaped our world and made it into the place it is. I already knew Professor Dandelion but also his friend and business partner Zoltan Chivay. The pair of them are so known to me that it does not occur to me that they are also well aware of the most important people in the land.

Then I met the Kingslayer. That might have been taken for a fluke but then I was taken to Toussaint and I met a significant portion of the Lodge of Sorceresses, Lord Geralt and the Empress of Nilfgaard. I had other things on my mind at the time including my pending nuptials, family reunion and catastrophe so I was able to fall back on formal training. But it should never be claimed that I wasn't star struck.

Then we went on our way again.

Before we came to Skellige. Summoned by the most powerful man in the Empire and I wasn't joking when I said that he was the most terrifying man there. He gave me a problem, told me that he expected me to solve it and almost literally threw me to the wolves.

The doors opened without a sound on well-oiled hinges and I was faced with the throng. Lord Voorhis moved up next to me as I struggled to take it all in.

"Lord Frederick von Coulthard, Professor of Oxenfurt would like to discuss some matters of import with the Empress." he intoned with all the formal vibrancy that he could muster in his voice.

The Empress sighed, almost imperceptibly before nodding. "Give us the room." She said quietly and people started to file past us. Some looked shocked that I had the pull to have this done. Others even looked pleased to see me but most were impassive.

Who was there?

Literally the names of legend.

And they filed out of the room for me. I have never felt so small in my entire life and I have stood before an angry dragon.

One of the things that got to me was just how angry the room was. The air was almost vibrating with intense emotion and all of it turned on me. Three occupants of the room could burn me to a crisp or freeze me into a statue. Another could declare war and bring the, not inconsiderable, might of the Skelligan fleet down on merchantile shipping with a particular focus on my families goods. That's after they had me strung from the ramparts to freeze to death in the coming cold or be pecked to death by the crows.

And none of that includes the Empress herself who was almost blazing with rage.

The first to move was The High Druid Ermion. Some call him Mousesack but I notice that they never do that to his face. Ermion looks like the storybook ideal of the old, wise man. He's almost like a collection of individual features that have been thrown together. All of which would be remarkable on a person if taken by themselves but because they're all together on the same person they meld together into one overall picture. His long beard is grey and reaches easily to his navel. He strokes it when he thinks as well which adds to the almost storybook impression of him. His fingers are long and clever although they are beginning to gnarl with age. He has a long pronounced nose that makes you think of some kind of bird of prey and his eyes are dark and glitter beneath big, bushy grey eyebrows. His eyes are just as capable of being gentle with kindness, creased with laughter and terrifying in their anger.

He habitually wears a tall black hat, kept rigid by branches of wood and bits of antler that are tied to the outside of the hat and I understand that it is kind of like his badge of office as High Druid of the Skelligan circle of Druids. He is also a mage which, I understand, is not an automatic thing to happen when you're a druid. He was wearing a furred overcoat which I took to be either sheep skin or wolf fur over several heavy woollen layers of clothing, presumably to keep him warm. He wore a sash in red and black chequered pattern and similarly patterned woollen trousers under his over robe. He also had stout boots. He is getting old now and occasionally leans on a twisted staff from which dangle bits of bone, teeth and other charms which I strongly suspect are there for effect rather than any kind of magical or spiritual effect. He is a heavy set man, built to be a warrior if I am any judge, and I sometimes wonder what it was that drove him towards Druidism as a practise. I suspect that his magical talents might have something to do with it though.

I have since found him to be a man of astonishing wisdom and a breadth of knowledge that would intimidate some professors I know. He has a temper on him when he encounters stubbornness but I have found him a man of genial company.

But as I entered the royal chambers his eyes were blazing with anger, pain and something else that I could not identify. He was the first to break the tableau and stalked towards the door, brushing past me without a word.

There was another druid with him. A much shorter, heavily built man with massively muscled arms which seemed to stretch the lining of his robes. He astonished me by being clean shaven on his chin despite a pair of large sideburns. Around Skellige I was used to men being bearded thickly so to see someone clean shaven was strange. He had a soft cap on his head with flaps that could have been tied down to cover his ears. His skin was darker as well. I would have described it as being weather-beaten if I'm honest as there were huge crags in his skin and he seemed well worn. He seemed to be constantly scanning around him in the same way that soldiers do when they're in hostile territory or that sailors do when they sense a threat on the horizon. His entire body language was about deferring to Ermion though and I guessed him to be some kind of subordinate or aid to the older man's memory. He carried a sickle on his belt and the normal herbalism tools.

Another word here about druids.

All of the accusations that you might hear, about how The Church of the Eternal Fire stole a lot of their identity from other religions. How they stole festivals and made them their own, how they stole teachings and titles and lessons. All of those accusations are absolutely true.

What isn't true is that they stole those things from Kreve, or Melitele or any of the smaller cults and religions that are around the place. The place they stole those things from was the practise of Druidism.

Notice that I didn't call it the religion of Druidism although it's very close to that. I'm not an expert and so, I'm not going to claim to be an expert on what Druidism actually is. I can tell you that all of the books that you might read on the subject are almost universally rubbish. This is because Druidism is an aural tradition.

Yes, a lot like the Skelligans are. This is why the Druids have made the islands of Skellige one of their headquarters and the circle of druids on Skellige is probably the most pre-eminent organisation of druids in the North.

For those of my readers who are less familiar with what actually happens in Druidism. No, they don't sacrifice animals or take part in blood sacrifices or naked orgies. Sorry to disappoint. They are an order of men who are devoted to the preservation of what they call "The natural order". They are kind of like the male counterpart to Melitele and Freya but what they actually do is to represent the natural world in courts and councils all over the world. They are the people that will point out when a river is being overfished and warn when that the salmon will soon learn to go somewhere else to spawn if people keep over fishing it. They warn about the deforestation and cities being built in the most fertile areas of land. They seem to spend all of their time warning people of the long term consequences of their actions but because those consequences aren't going to happen for another couple of hundred years, they keep getting brushed off as being unimportant.

At some point in the future, there may come a time when the natural order rebels and the resulting disasters will happen. We will turn to the Gods and the Kings and the rulers and say "Why did no-one warn us?" and the druids will respond with a short sharp, "We did,"

I don't know why early followers of the Eternal Flame started to steal and make use of the practises of the Eternal Flame. I can say that it wasn't really the earliest cultists. It was later when it started to expand beyond the confines of Novigrad that those corruptions started to take place and the practise of burning a Yule log, as an example, started to become a thing that followers of the Eternal Flame used to do.

But anyway, I bring this up, not to start an argument on the subject. There are many well researched and far more formal books and essays on the topic floating around. But the reason I brought this up is because the title of the Chief Druid of a Druid's circle is "Hierophant".

I suspect that the Church of the Eternal Fire took this title when the organisation started to grow a bit more and they needed separate leaders of the church when it became implausible to run the entirety of the religion out of one place. They needed a title that the populace would respect and so they took on the title that they were already using when referring to druids.

The next two people to walk past me were Lady Yennefer, formerly of Vengerberg and she had her head together with her friend Lady Triss Merigold, advisor to the Throne of Kovir and Poviss.

I have never met Lady Merigold on a personal basis and I did not that time either. What little part of the two women's conversation I caught was that Lady Merigold was intending to gate back to Kovir and Poviss almost directly but would attempt to come back for the height of the festival. So I apologise if this comes across as being a little superficial.

To say that Lady Merigold is a beautiful woman is redundant. The same as it is for all Sorceresses really. The two of them are very different in appearance in that Lady Merigold seems a little brighter and softer. Although her cheekbones are as well defined as you might imagine, her mouth is a little more generous and her chin a little more rounded than Lady Yennefer's is. She has blue-green eyes which I understand can shift from one to the other depending on her mood but again, I can't answer for that. She was wearing her ruddy, chestnut coloured hair tied back from her face when I saw her and she wore a large, thick looking, fur lined light turquoise dress that ran from her neck down so that it swished around her ankles. She had a small pendant round her neck and some pearl ear-rings. Again, like a lot of Sorceresses I have seen, she is absurdly slim and the dress was cut to her figure in a way that left little to the imagination as to what her shape was despite there being no flesh on display. There was a slit in the dress but I caught sight of high topped boots under the skirts and I guessed that she could run, rider or even fight in that thing. The overall impression that I got from Lady Merigold was that she was worried. A bit sad and if you held a dagger to my throat then I would have guessed that she had been there to act as some kind of peace keeper. To get between hot headed tempers and do her best to calm folk down. That would certainly track with what I have heard of the woman.

Her companion I know a little better although to call us friends would be pushing it. I sometimes wonder if Lady Yennefer has any friends really. She would be easy to feel sorry for in this regard if she wouldn't be mortally offended at the offer of pity. But she has a reputation for using her friends to get what she wants over and above their wellbeing. She would argue that she had no other choice to do other than what she had to do and maybe she is right. I have not sat down with her and gone through the events in any kind of detail. I am not her chronicler and as such it is not my place to comment or record.

I have a working relationship with Lady Yennefer as I am working with her on both the book regarding Jack and his ilk and I am also working with her on the consultations regarding founding a new Witcher School. From these two avenues I find her to be absolutely professional, if unsmiling and cheerless while she is doing so. Fiercely intelligent and utterly charming when she wants to be but there is always a palpable aura of menace about her. As though she could explode and tear your face off at any moment. I have wondered if she does this deliberately.

She's also the kind of person where you find yourself remembering her differently from what she actually looks like. She's actually a relatively small person which she makes up for by wearing higher heels and platforms in her boots. I understand that the technical term is "petite" but I wouldn't dare describe her as such. But when you think of her you imagine her as being taller and larger and much much more terrifying than she actually is in person.

We all know what she looks like. Professor Dandelion has waxed lyrical about her appearance on many different occasions. Raven dark hair, violet eyes, slim waist, pointed chin. Again, like her friend, of course she is beautiful but where Lady Merigold is beautiful like a spring morning, Lady Yennifer is beautiful like a storm cloud is beautiful. Like lightening in the sky and the shine of light on the edge of a sword.

Yes, she frightens me. But I don't think that that speaks any the less of me as I'm pretty sure she terrifies everyone she meets. Including the man with whom she shares a home with in Toussaint.

She was also wearing thick and warm clothing. Her habitual colours are black and white with the odd piece of silver jewellery. Long, thick black skirts but without a slit this time. They are more voluminous by design which adds to the feeling that she is a moving storm-cloud. She was wearing a fur lined jacket and waistcoat as well as gloves. As form fitting as her friend's clothes but the bulk was enough to make it seem less alluring somehow.

She was also shaking with barely restrained emotion. Lady Yennefer does not shout. She speaks quietly and carefully and every word can cut you like the sharpest razor blade, but her eyes were blazing. She touched my arm in passing as a greeting but I did not have time to notice if she tried to give me some form of message with her eyes.

I recognised the personal secretary to the Empress as well. It shames me a little that, at the time of writing, I can't remember his name but the entire world should be grateful that he exists and has the abilities that he does. He was once described to me as a kind of memory machine. One of those clockwork things that you can find in Gnomish shops in places like Oxenfurt and Novigrad only instead of being made and designed around motion, he is built around memory.

His job is to remember the Empress' calendar for the day, who she has appointments with and who she is meeting with at any given time. If she wants something to eat then it is he that orders the food. If she is too angry for receiving someone, or too upset or too...anything to be able to properly do her job and deal with whatever it is that's in front of her. It's this man's job to stand in front of you and say "The Empress is not receiving people at present, would you care to make an appointment."

If the hardest job in governing the Empire is the Empress then the second hardest job is the position of private secretary. He is an immovable wall between his mistress and people that she doesn't want to see but can fade into the background in just about all other situations. It has been said that if something happened to him then the Empire would collapse and I believe it.

He is a tall man in his early twenties. His hair was retreating from his face which was leading to a pronounced widows peak. He has a sharp nose and equally sharp eyes which always seem to be focused on a point just in front of him that no-one else can see. His hair is long and he wears it in a tight braid down his back. Why he doesn't just have it cut off is beyond me. On those rare social occasions when the Empress has sent him away on the grounds that she is a firm believer that everyone (other than her) needs to get drunk every so often, he is known to be charming, modest and humorous. He can tell some hair raising stories about the things that he has seen, even in the relatively short time that he has been with the Empress, although he protects the identity of the people he's talking about with ease.

He wears a robe most days and he must have a collection of several dozen of them, all of them a kind of uniform grey. He habitually wears riding boots in case his mistress decides that she needs to go for a ride at any given time. He also wears a sword and a long fighting knife. He is rumoured to be an expert in the use of either although no-one has ever seen him practise or train. He is utterly devoted to the Empress and anyone doubting that would find it useful to know that he carries several methods with which to end his own life should anyone try and kidnap him or coerce him in any way.

His concession to the fact that he was now in colder climate was the fact that he was wearing a fur mantle around his shoulders. He checked with his mistress before he left and only moved to walk past me and out of the doors when she nodded. I know that he prides himself on showing absolutely no surprise at the situations that he finds himself in and no emotion either when he's working. He's the one that would have to examine the formal declaration of war for spelling mistakes before the Empress signs it, so this is the kind of position where such measures of calm are needed. But his movements seemed a little, crooked to me. A little hurried and abrupt. But again, I didn't have time to analyse what was happening there.

Another Sorceress walked past me. I struggle to talk about Lady Philippa Eilhart for a variety of reasons. To me she is like the boogeyman. When religious people tell you to be afraid of Sorcerers and Sorceresses, the person that they describe and tell you to be afraid of is Lady Eilhart. This is especially true in Redania where the King, and the head of the church of the Eternal Fire, hated her with unbridled passion. There were several years where you couldn't move in Redania for seeing a portrait of this woman on door-frames and fence-posts with descriptions of increasingly lavish rewards for information that would lead to the death or the capture of this one Sorceress.

Sooner or later, that kind of thing can get to you. In the same way that I was forced to overcome my in built prejudices around Elves, I was taught to hate Lady Eilhart and Sorceresses in general and needed to overcome that. Most of that was obviously false but in examining my own behaviour and the things that have happened over the years, I must admit that some of this societal conditioning has gotten through to me.

Because I am afraid of Philippa Eilhart. When my mind conjures images of terrifying magic users who will do anything, cross any line and commit despicable acts for their own purposes, the face I put on those sentiments is Lady Eilhart's. When my mind threw up my worst nightmares so that Jack could examine my greatest fears, the person that I imagined as a traitor and murderer who killed my friends and loved ones? That person was Lady Eilhart.

And it's nonsense.

In the same way that I had been trained and conditioned to distrust and look down on Elves as a race, I had been trained and conditioned to distrust and fear Lady Eilhart.

Knowing why it happened is not helpful. I am aware that King Radovid resented Lady Eilhart's stewardship over him when he was growing up. I know that he blamed Lady Eilhart for the death of his father King Vizimir, the truth of which is now impossible to prove. I know that she was blamed by many for some of the less popular decrees by Kind Radovid's father and that when he died, she headed up the regency council and proceeded to make herself more unpopular. I also know that the Head of the Church hated her because of her political status. The head of the church was jealous of the fact that she had so much sway over royalty, a position that he felt that the church, and therefore himself, should hold rather than some "upstart, disrespectful, rude, heathen Sorceress". So she became the figurehead for Sorceress decadence that began even before King Radovid took the throne. I imagine that if you asked her about her biggest mistakes, she might even admit that one of those mistakes was to discount the threat that the Church of the Eternal Flame presented.

So I know why I feel the way I do about Lady Eilhart. I also know, from her own mouth, that this reputation is something that she has, herself, worked towards furthering. She likes being feared and finds it useful. But to be absolutely fair to her. I have not seen her doing anything sinister. I have seen her getting angry. She absolutely believes in the pre-eminence of mages and also believes that Sorceresses are better than their male counterparts. She also bitterly resents any intrusion of outside organisations in matters of magic. Matters that she sees as belonging solely to the Lodge of Sorceresses which she is the founding member of and, arguably, it's leader.

She has softened a bit since I first met her. When I first knew her I described her as looking like a statue. All cold, hard and unapproachable. Obviously she is insanely beautiful but I didn't, and don't, find her attractive. She gives the impression of a woman who has let her hair down a bit both literally and figuratively. Her formerly tight braids had been brushed out and now her hair had been piled up on top of her head in an ornate hairstyle. She is the kind of woman that doesn't do anything without a reason though and I wondered if the odd strand of hair tumbling loose was intentional. Like the small nod and smile of greeting that she offered me as she passed me on the way out.

She continues to insist on wearing the low cut dresses and bodices that Sorceresses were once famous for which displayed a, to me, excessive amount of flesh. Especially given the climate. In Lady Eilhart's case I am fully aware that this is a manipulation. She does it to distract those men that might want to talk to her as, if half the rumours are true, she generally prefers the romantic company of women to men. I also thought I could see a faint light around her which suggested that she was using a spell to keep herself warm given the cold and her... shall we say... reduced outfit.

I understand that I'm doing a lot of talking about the people in the room but I think it's kind of important. When people like this gather into one place, history happens. There's no getting away from that. History was happening in that room and we should let the record show who was actually there.

So let's talk about Queen Cerys of Skellige. After the Empress, the woman with the most young boy crushes on the face of the planet and like the Empress she projects an air of regality that many men would struggle to summon in the same situation. There was no mistaking her for a common member of the crowd. No mistaking her for a common Skelligan woman.

Although saying that there was such a thing as a "common" Skelligan woman is a bit of a misnomer.

But she dressed like them.

I have no doubt that she has a crown somewhere as well as the posh and ornamental armour that stood in the corner of the room on a stand. She will have a shining sword or an equally beautiful axe as well as a bow that has been carved into strange, aesthetically pleasing shapes. She will have beautiful boots and equally ornate capes that would picker her out from the crowd and I would also be willing to bet that she has a room somewhere where all of those things are stored. I suspect that this room is close to her chambers so that when the occasion dictates that she looks like the Queen that her people expect her to be, she can send her servants (the Skelligans refer to who I think of as servants, as thralls. Just another little note on the language of those islander people) to fetch the required item.

But as I say, she needs none of these things. I knew who she was the instant that I walked into the room. She wears her hair pulled back from her face with a couple of strips of leather. It is a, for the islands, a fairly standard mix between red and dark blonde although her colouring was more towards her father's red hair than her mother's blonde colourings. She has brown eyes which, at the time, were buried under furrowed brows. Apparently this is a common expression for her to be wearing as she is always thinking about what comes next and what needs to be done at any given time. She's the kind of person that's always thinking two steps ahead and I understand that her people make it their mission to try and get her to live in the moment.

She is held responsible for bringing the Skelligan isles into the modern world and is also the reason that Skellige declared an alliance with the Empire rather than allowing themselves to be conquered by it. She has made the reforms to the Skelligan economy, has taught her people to farm as well as raid but has not let up on making sure that the Skelligans rule the seas. The Skelligans were sceptical about her but more recently, I think that they are proud of their unconventional Queen.

She was wearing a Long, quilted, red arming jacket and I wondered at the fact that it was of almost exactly the right shade to match her hair. There was thick steel arm guards on each wrist and over her shoulders as well as a wide, thick leather belt around her midriff. She also wore a sash of An Craite tartan around herself and the woollen cape that seemed to be trendy in these parts as a guarding against the cold. At her side was a long, thin sword. Kind of like a sabre. And there was a long knife which the Skelligans describe as a "Dirk".

Is she beautiful?

What a stupid question.

She is a Warrior Queen. She's another one of those women who does not care how tall you are or how strong you are. If she decides to take you down then she will take you down and be damned what you think. I think she's very attractive, if out of reach, but she doesn't fall into any of the conventions of what modern "society" think of as being beautiful. She wears no make-up and she is as weather beaten as any of her warriors. My peers would probably describe her as "Handsome" but I think that this falls short of what she actually looks like.

The Queen glanced over at The Empress. She was stood a little to one side when I walked in, her arms were folded, her head tilted to one side as though she was watching and listening carefully to everything that was happening. That would track with what I know of her character and her way of working. Eventually she seemed to decide that she wasn't going to get any kind of response. There was a difference to the way that she was watching the Empress as well.

Where other people look at the Empress with deference and respect I got a sense of something else from Queen Cerys although I couldn't tell you what it was for the life of me. When she realised that she wasn't going to get anything from the Empress she shook her head and rubbed at her fore-head before leaving. I got the sense that she appraised me as she moved past me, a glance up and down as I was assessed and much later I wondered if I was found wanting. But she moved past me and closed the door behind me so that I was left alone with the Empress.

I was still stood next to the door and I hadn't really looked anywhere other than at the Empress since I entered.

What can I say about Empress Cirilla that has not already been written or said by many. Including myself. She's the Empress and every time I think that I have a grip on what kind of person she is. What she might do or how she might behave. She runs off in a completely different direction. How she was dressed now was just a perfect example of this. She wasn't wearing some kind of ornate, Imperial dress. Nor was she wearing Imperial black formal wear. She didn't wear the outfit that she supposedly wears when she wants to ape her father. Nor did she wear any kind of armour like the Skelligans did. She was dressed in a pair of leather trousers and worn leather boots, a White shirt with an over shirt of dark red wool. She was also wearing a some fur shoulder guards and I wondered whether it was her wearing these things that had started the fashion that seemed to prevalent in these parts.

She looked different to how I was expecting her to look. When I had first seen her in Toussaint, she had looked calm and collected. She looked as though she commanded the room and everyone in it. The world bowed down to her. I have since checked back in my notes and I described her as moving with speed but without haste. As though she knew that she had things to do but at the same time, knew that everyone would wait until she arrived. She dressed, at the time, as though she did not need to tell everyone who she was. She wore simple clothing. Clothing that would have been appropriate whether she was going out on a ride or standing to debate high matters in a court room. Minimal jewellery. She had looked elegant, calm and utterly in control.

She had dominated the room in Toussaint. Nobles from all over the continent, all over the world really, had been in that room and she had looked around with her startling green eyes and every man there knew that this was not a woman that could be crossed. You might try to get one over on this woman but that, even if you thought that you had won, it would turn out that she had anticipated you. That her plans had been far more advanced than you could possibly have foreseen and that you have lost. Lost without an arrow being fired or a sword being swung.

This was not the same woman that I saw when I was shown into the royal quarters of Kaer Trolde. This woman in front of me was wild and unkempt. Not physically. You can't look particularly unkempt, dirty or untidy when you travel with a small army of maids, tailors, cobblers and all of the other mysterious things that women do to make themselves look perfect.

But she looked wild. She was distracted. Rather than the kind of focus that she used to have where her eyes would train themselves on a person and bore into them like some kind of gnomic drill. She wasn't meeting anyone's eyes. Her gaze was darting around, looking at anyone but at the person in front of her who was talking, or yelling, at her.

She was fidgeting. The utter stillness of body and mind that she had commanded before where, if you weren't careful, it would have been easy to mistake her for some kind of statue, was gone. In it's place was a nervous energy. She was playing with the edges of her clothes. Fiddling with the rings on her fingers and adjusting the belts and straps that she had around herself. She no longer looked like an Empress. She looked like a lost woman, a drowning woman who couldn't possibly find her way to shore and was now waiting for her strength to give out so that she could just get on with the business of drowning. Not that she was intending to give up fighting. But that she so desperately wanted to.

She was stood with her hands on her hips and she was glaring at me, her bright green eyes glittering at me in a way that nailed me to the floor and I finally understood what it was that had terrified Lord Voorhis so much. The Empire no longer had an Empress.

"WHAT?" She demanded.

I gave up.

I have talked about this moment before but now I have a bit more of an insight into what happens in my brain. This is the point where I get so overwhelmed by other things that my brain shuts down and just starts saying the first thing that comes to my mind.

Since the adventures with the Cult of the First born I have been trying to work on my anger problem. The overwhelming rage that I feel at any one moment regarding the loss of my sister as well as the many other problems that I see in the world, real or/and imagined. With the help of Kerrass and Ariadne I have been doing my best to take that rage and anger, focus it, change it and channel it into something useful.

Kerrass' methods have been about channelling the energy that I get from the anger into useful things. Fencing masters, including Kerrass, will teach you that the loss of temper will result in death but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't get angry. The technique is in using that anger as a focus, as a drive but never as a goad. He has been teaching me to use that energy in a fight before disposing of it afterwards in more healthy ways.

Is it working? Yes and no. When it works the way it is meant to, I become a better fighter. But when it doesn't, I become worse. I become reckless and too aggressive without paying attention to my own defences.

Ariadne on the other hand is teaching me that there is no shame in feeling anger. That there is no problem with anger or rage or upset. That it doesn't make me less of a man to weep tears of rage or of sadness. She will sit and listen to what I have to say, laugh, console and gently chide when I am being unfair about things or being unfair to myself. But she never tries to tell me that I shouldn't be angry.

I am still learning the trick to this.

I have also explored the possibility that I might, on some level, be a Baresark. During some of the time later where I had nothing to do on the islands of Skellige, I spent some time with those people that might be able to tell me more about that side of my character. I hope to go into it later on as it was an interesting episode. But what they told me is that everyone comes to it from different directions. Some people teach themselves to be a berserker whereas other people become so as a form of self-defence. But again, over and over, they told me that to be a berserker is not anything that I should be afraid of. That anyone should be afraid of. They taught me that it is like knowledge. The acquiring of knowledge in and of itself is not evil or dangerous. It is only what you do with that knowledge that can be dangerous.

But in that moment. In that room with the Empress, the woman who had once told me, ordered me in fact, to think of her as another sister. It was all just a bit too much.

Three days ago I was in Novigrad, resigned to waiting for another couple of days for one of the families merchant vessels to turn up to take us to Skellige. But then I had been picked up by one of the fastest ships on the ocean, taken to Skellige at a speed that my body did not agree with. I had been sick, dehydrated and hungry before being fed unfamiliar food and strong alcohol. Then I had been overwhelmed by the place that I was in, told that it was up to me to save the empire from disaster and ruin, been told a remarkable story that I didn't really understand and hadn't really processed yet, moved through the castle of Kaer Trolde. Been confronted with some of the most powerful people in the Empire and now the most powerful person in the Empire was yelling at me.

So the thinking part of my brain just shut down. That part of me that carefully thinks through options, consequences and long term results. It just gave up, threw it's metaphorical hands up in the air and walked away from the table.

Kerrass argues that if I could harness this and do it at will, then I would be an infinitely better spear man and fighter in general. If I could change from one state to the next, then I would be a fighter to be feared. I'm not sure I want to be able to do that though. It does run in line with the problems I had at Oxenfurt when I tried to learn to fence when my masters kept telling me that my brain kept getting in the way of my ability to fight.

But the other time it tends to come up is in those social situations. It's worked out fairly well for me so far when my body, mouth and sense of humour just start acting of their own accord without asking for permission from my brain.

It happened when I saw the corpse of Tom the Troll and I made a joke. A stupid, thoughtless joke in the face of the horror that was before me. It happened again when I started telling Ariadne, in detail, what would happen if she declared herself as the Spider Queen of Angral. It also happened when I asked Maleficent where her staff went when she transformed between her dragon form and her human form.

It happened again here.

"WHAT?" Demanded the Empress.

I felt my jaw work a few times as I tried to work out what to say but my mind had gone blank. Everything that Lord Voorhis had told me. Everything that I had come up with on the way from listening to the story, every logical argument that I had reasoned out and the brief outline of a strategy that I had formed in an effort to prevent the Empress from killing herself just leapt out of my ears and vanished.

Instead, I just stood there and gaped at her for a moment.

Then I spoke.

"Have you lost your FUCKING MIND?" I bellowed back at her. She opened her mouth to respond but wherever I was, my body was clearly not paying attention. I held up my hand. "I don't want to hear it." I told her as I started looking around the room. I found what I was looking for off in the corner. A glass bottle with an amber looking liquid in it as well as some small leather cups.

"That looks promising." I said aloud as I walked over to the small table. "At least that way, when you have me killed I can say that I drank from the Queen's private stash."

I stomped over to the table, picked up one of the bottles at random and unstopped it. Sniffed it, which caught me in a conflict between how amazing it smelt but also about how the smell reached down my throat and reminded me how little I had had to eat over the last few days.

"Flame but that smells good."

I poured myself a generous measure, considered it for a moment before some part of me decided that I was in it now and I should just enjoy the journey. I tipped my head back and drank the measure off at a swallow.

It was surprisingly smooth.

From a logical standpoint I can look back at this instance as well as the instance with Ariadne in particular and say why it works.

Sometimes.

The reason that it works is that it is the unexpected thing. The behaviour that no-one expects. Ariadne did not expect this little human upstart, which is all she though I was at the time, to stand up to her and tell her what is what and to do so in a well thought out manner.

I don't know why The Empress didn't just have me killed but I suspect it was for the same reason. She didn't expect me to start yelling at her. She probably expected some kind of logical reasoned, scholarly argument followed by a gentle play on her heart-strings. But instead she got a full frontal assault followed by an almost instantaneous withdrawal.

I poured myself another cup full, drank a bit more and topped my cup up, before turning back round to face her. I hadn't seen it before but she looked awful. Pale and tired with the huge black bags under her eyes.

"I mean seriously." I told her. "Have your brains dribbled out of your ears? I have been wandering around the continent telling people how clever the Empress is, how good and how noble she is and about how she is the best hope for us all. Then I come here and find that you're about to throw your life away on a fucking whim."

"It's not a whim." She snapped back, "It's not a whim."

"Then what the fuck is it Ciri?"

She bridled at that.

"That's, Your Majesty for such as you." She snarled.

"No it isn't. You ordered me to call you Ciri when we're in private. You insisted on it. You even made it a decree as I recall so I'm going to call you Ciri in the here and now. It also comes with the fact that I can call you fucking stupid as well. Which you are."

"How dare you..."

"You're seriously going to hide behind your rank with me. Seriously? You can do that with all of the other folks. You can order Queens and Sorceresses and Druids around. You can demand that they obey you and bow and scrape and call you "Imperial Majesty" but that's because they all care about things like that."

"Are you saying that I don't."

"Obviously not other wise you wouldn't be taking such a foolish option. Here." I told her. I threw my belt dagger at her feet. "If you want to kill yourself, use that. I sharpen it every day so it should be good and sharp enough so that you won't feel it."

"It won't kill me." She told me. "Whatever's on that ship. It won't kill me."

"Which is exactly what every other mad, selfish fucker who has ever attempted to climb aboard has ever said. "They won't kill me," they say, "because I'm special"."

"I am special."

"Yes you are." I growled. "Yes you fucking are and the reason that you are special is that if anything happens to you, the world will destroy itself and your people will drown in an ocean of blood as everyone, and I do mean everyone, will tear your Empire apart and fight over the scraps until there's no-one left."

"I am the Lady of Time and Space." She hissed. "And you have no idea what that means. I carry the elder blood in my veins. I can move through space and time. I have seen and done things that you could not possibly even dream of." Her own voice was rising now. "I have spoken with people that you would consider Gods and walked through worlds where I was the only living thing. They will speak to me."

"Or they will kill you." I bellowed. "Or they will kill you. You are the only one that can hold this together. The only one and everyone knows it. EVERYONE knows it. I've read your list of titles. If you write them all down in the proper script of the Heraldic colleges, they actively cover more than one piece of paper. You could oust Queen Cerys if you wanted to and declare yourself Queen. The North love you because you talk like they do and because you're the heir of the Queen of Cintra. Queen Calanthe, that great martyr to the cause and you're her Grand-daughter. The South loves you because you are the daughter of that most terrifying of men, the White Flame Dancing on the Graves of his Enemies. You could hardly avoid being loved after one so feared. You are young, you are beautiful, you are a child of the great houses, you are charming and the Emperor declared that you were his heir. What with everything that has happened, the Emperor has been preparing the South for your arrival for years and now you're finally here. The one person that can combine the North and South."

"There are others who could..."

"Who?"

"I haven't got time to..."

"Then fucking make time. I get that you've been going through this with everyone for fucking days. I understand that you are tired and you want to be left alone but who would replace you. Voorhis? Voorhis is a good man and would make a passable Emperor but the North hate and fear him and the South just hates him for not pressuring you into doing things that they want. Any of the Northern Client Kings are not strong enough. Their neighbours would descend into war as they all, and I do mean all, try to erase their defeat at the hands of Nilfgaard in the blood of their neighbours. The same will be said about any of the other noble houses of the South. Each one of them will claim that they have a better claim than the next and each one of them will go to war over it. If you die then the Entire continent will dissolve into a thousand little civil wars."

"All of this I've heard before and none of it is convincing. First of all. I won't die. I am more powerful than those things on the boat and if they even try to stop me then I will destroy them. Second of all, I am well aware that there is a lack of clear progression so I have put clear orders in place as to what should happen in the event of anything happening to me. Thirdly, I think you're being pessimistic as to what would happen but fourthly, I have to know. I have to know that..."

"Ok, First of all... How do you know that. I would remind you that when those dice roll on the back of the skeleton ship, people don't choke to death. They don't drown or bleed or explode. They just die. Secondly, if you disappear, either through death or by vanishing, your orders aren't worth the paper that they were written on. I give it a week, at most before someone is using them to wipe their arse with. Thirdly, I am a historian and over and over again people have proved me..."

"BUT I HAVE TO KNOW." She all but screamed it.

"HAVE TO KNOW WHAT?" I demanded. "What could possibly be more important than the safety of your people?"

She clammed up and turned away.

I went and walked back over to where the drinks were stored. This time I selected a different bottle. The liquid inside was a deeper, more ruddy colour which actually turned out to be much lighter in texture and flavour.

"Flame curse me for a fool Ciri but help me understand. I seem to say it over and over again to people in different walks of life but, use me. I'm a historian. Why are you doing this? Why are you risking everything that so many people have risked so much to build? Many of whom paid the ultimate price to get things to a point where peace is actually a lasting possibility. You're scaring folk Ciri."

I took a drink.

"Fucking hell. Lord Voorhis is scared and I didn't think that that was possible. He's so scared that he's scaring me. Lord Voorhis, scariest man in history after your father and now you're scaring him. How is that possible?"

She sighed and I began to groan. The Empress was coming back. I had nearly gotten through to her but then she had dodged it and her defences were going back up. I groaned inwardly and finished my drink in case I never got the chance for another one. "My turn for a kicking now I suspect." I told myself.

I was not wrong.

"One of the first things that my father told me," she began, "was that the interesting thing about being Emperor is never having having to explain yourself to anyone. It is still true. I do not have to explain myself to you. Not to you and not to anyone."

"Ciri."

"Your Majesty." She snarled. "I am your Empress now and you will refer to me as such or so help me I will have you torn apart on the wheel."

"YOUR MAJESTY THEN." I screamed at her. "You owe..."

"I OWE YOU NOTHING. I DON'T OWE YOU A DAMN THING." The walls seemed to shake with the force of her rage. Looking back I should have seen the other things in her voice as well but I was too far gone to see it.

"Ciri..."

"No. Fuck you Frederick. You've had your turn and I was pretty fucking gracious in letting you get that much in. Anyone else, anyone else including my father, would have had you drawn, castrated and quartered for talking to me the way you just have. Father would have made your death last for weeks. You dare come here and lecture me about responsibility. You dare talk to me about preserving my own state for all the people that choose to live in my empire."

"That's..."

"BE SILENT." She thundered, her eyes blazing. "You go running off round the country on your little errands and it seems to me that you have lost sight of your own duties. Duties that you're lucky enough to have align with your own interests. How long ago was that book supposed to be published? The one on Jack? How long has your betrothal been dragging on now. Countess de Angral would be well within her rights to throw you over in favour of the next most eligible suitor. Where's my recommendation on the new Witcher school? But instead you run around, circumventing the law, screaming at feudal lords about their duties and running off into the wilds.

"And in all of that time, you have forgotten that you answer to me. I have to tell you nothing. I will tell you nothing. I owe you nothing."

My thinking brain was starting to come back now. I was still angry but there was the beginning of a thought process there at the very least.

"What about your subjects then?" I wondered. "Hmmm? What about them? What about the farmer that's going to be left, weeping, as he tries to keep his guts inside his own stomach? What about the knight who's had his face carved in due to the impact of a mace? What about the hundreds, the thousands of women and children who are going to be waiting for people to come home."

"They are my people Frederick. Not yours and do not think I see what you say as anything other than the cheap, manipulative ploy that it is. Tugging on my heart-strings like that."

She stalked up to me and suddenly I was on the defensive. I was afraid. I had trained with this woman in Toussaint and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop her if she chose to just cut my heart out with a rusty eating knife.

"What do you care Frederick? Who are you working for?" She wondered, her green eyes staring at me. They seemed to cut through my face and into the depths of me.

Her eyes were bloodshot.

"Majesty I..." I shook my head. I was wrong, there was something else going on here that I did not yet understand.

"Don't you Majesty me. I've met you on less than a handful of occasions. All of those occasions because I knew and loved your sister and she vouched for you."

I shuddered as she said that. I'll leave it to you to guess which point set me off.

"So who do you think you are to come barging in here like you own the place? Who do you think you are to question my decisions? Who do you think you are to..."

"Majesty..." I had begun to shake. It would not be unfair to say that I was trembling.

"For the love of the Universe." She snapped, throwing her hands up in the air. "Stop fucking talking. You've had your speeches where I've stood still and listened to you go on and on and on to the same tune as just about every fucker who has walked through my door since I arrived in Skellige. We're not that close Frederick. So who sent you? Why did Voorhis think that it was a good idea to send for you? Do you work for him?"

"May I answer?" I hissed. Despite the fact that The Empress is a little shorter than I am physically, I was feeling a little overwhelmed.

She said nothing and I took that for permission.

"Just because we're all saying the same thing, you think that we're lying to you. You make it sound like, because everyone is singing the same tune that must mean that we're all in cahoots against you. Or could it be because we're all fucking terrified. For you, about you and what will happen if this all goes the way we fear.

"You're the only one. The only one who doesn't see this ending in disaster. Let's say you don't die. What happens when the ship sails off with you still aboard? What happens when the ship simply vanishes."

"I am the lady of time and space and..."

"What does that even mean?"

"It means that I will survive. I have to survive."

"Why do you believe that?" I stared at her for a long moment. My trembling was subsiding a little. "Is it because you always have? Is that it?"

She drew her lips back from her teeth in a snarl but I kept going.

"There are two quotes." I told her. " The first is that just because something has always been correct does not mean that it will be correct tomorrow. The other quote is that "If a thing can go wrong, it will go wrong." Kerrass has shown me that that second one is true on many different occasions. So many different occasions. So what makes you think that your importance will mean that you survive. Is it because destiny, or fate or whatever the fuck has made sure that you will survive so far? What makes you think that you will do so this time? What makes you think that Destiny, fate, the stars, the tapestry or whatever isn't done with you, doesn't need you any more? What if you're role in the world is done and now you're just like everyone else."

"I can protect myself..." She began.

"How? You can teleport? According to the story the victims of the ship don't bleed, they don't choke, clutch their hearts or anything else that you can just teleport away from. They just die in an instant. They just stop. How do you teleport away from that?"

"I've had enough of this. I don't have to listen to..."

"Fine." I yelled. "Fucking kill yourself then." I turned for the door before a thought occurred and I turned. "I haven't answered your question. Why do I care? Who sent me? My sister did. Francesca sent me."

I might as well have slapped her.

She flushed bright red with emotion. I was guessing that it was rage or shock but it could have gone either way. It was particularly shocking for her as she is naturally pale of complexion made even more so by her ash grey-blonde hair.

I was not in a much better state myself.

"My sister loved you." I spat at her. "My sister raved about you in her letters. She said that you were a good person. That you loved life and loved your people. She was glad and proud to serve you. She was proud to be your friend and did everything in her power to help you do what you have to do. She loved you Majesty. She would have died for you."

I brushed my own tears from my face angrily.

"Damn it." I muttered as my rage left me abruptly. There was a chair nearby and I sat down in it as I was no longer confident that my legs would support me. I desperately wanted to be sick and my head was spinning.

"Why am I here?" I felt almost disconnected. "I was coming to Skellige to follow a lead. To speak to the druids to find out some information about who might have taken Frannie from us both. Who might have taken Frannie from the world as I think we can both agree that the world is a darker place without her. Why am I in this room? Because Lord Voorhis told me that you were intending to kill yourself."

"I'm not going to kill myself... I'm not going to die."

"Maybe not. But are you honestly going to tell me that you don't want it. A little bit?" I risked looking at her but she had turned away. "I'll ask you a different question then. How long has it been since you actually did any ruling, any proper governing and making decisions?"

She didn't say anything and I saw that I was right but I decided that the coffin needed another nail.

"If this thing doesn't kill you. How long before you find something else that does?"

She spun back to face me. "I do not have a death wish."

"Really? Then why are you doing this? What could possibly be worth risking your life, the lives of your subjects north and south and the very existence of the Empire? What could be worth it?"

She looked me straight in the eyes then. Straight into them, the same trick that Ariadne has some times where she looks and feels as though she's staring straight into my soul. "Certainty." She told me.

"Certainty about what?"

She shook her head and her face crumpled, suddenly reminding me of Francesca so much that my chest hurt as she covered her face with my hands.

"Why am I here?" I asked her. "Why did I come here and yell and scream and risk my life?"

She looked up at me questioningly.

"Yes, I risk my life." I told her. "I am under no illusions about what would happen if you decided that I was being really offensive. No illusions at all. I would be a blot on the side of the wall. A shadow that Queen Cerys would bring guests around to see. "There is Lord Frederick the upstart," she will say. "He pissed off the Empress and she scorched his remains into the wall."

She sniffed but I thought I could see some humour in there somewhere.

"When I left Toussaint," I began. "I was a lost man. Kerrass literally had to kick the shite out of me to make my brain start working again. I was desperate, flailing around in an effort to try and find something, anything to hold onto. In the middle of all of that you came to see me you remember?"

"I remember," she whispered.

"You came to see me and you spoke about how much you cared for Francesca. You told me stories of your time together and just having that insight into her life. A part of her life that I knew nothing about, it was... special. I will never forget that. I remember thinking that the Empress of, essentially, the world had come to see me and take care of me and look after me. Me. I remember wondering why. Why would this woman come. This powerful, intelligent, charming, beautiful, mercurial woman. Why would she come and see me? You told me that you wanted to think of me as your brother. You said that you had never had a brother and from everything that Francesca had told you, if you were to have a brother then you would want it to be someone like me."

I realised that my face was wet. Sometimes it's like this when you're working at the big questions about emotions and memories. Your body decides that it knows the answer and provides it with the things that it thinks that you need. Things like tears, tight throats, sweat, adrenaline... Sometimes it is right and knows these things before even you do.

"So you told me to think of you as a sister. There were even decrees issued to say that I was your brother, along with Emma, Sam and Mark, without the blood bond so that there was no way that I would be in the line of succession.

"Thank the Flame for that by the way.

"Emma tells me that you're involved in planning my wedding. That they've arranged dates so that you can be there at the ceremony. That you've made suggestions and had input, the same way that a sister would. I understand that you, the other members of the Lodge and some others are organising Ariadne's hen party and the mind boggles as to what a dozen Sorceresses are going to do when they get together for some girl time."

"Especially when said girls include a Dragon, a pair of Elves and a Vampire." She smiled, I also noticed that her cheeks were wet as well."

"And the Empress of the known world. Let's not forget that."

"Let's not."

We chuckled through the tears a bit. I sudden had a flash of Voorhis, Madame Yennefer, Lady Eilhart and the rest leaning up against the door with their ears plastered to the wood, trying to listen to what was going on inside like children outside their parent's bedrooms. I had the image and laughed which meant that I had to tell the Empress about the image. She laughed for a long time.

"Goddess Freddie but I can't remember laughing that much in a while." There were a few more tears after that.

I noticed that I had become "Freddie" again. I felt as though we were getting to the heart of the matter. Time for some truth and honesty. Similar to the outbreak of temper that had started this entire thing off. I needed to stop thinking with my brain and start talking. It was not easy.

Nor should it be.

"The hardest thing The very hardest thing about the position that I find myself in now is that I don't... How do I treat you like a sister? How do I mock you and tease you and pick on you? All of these things are things that, as a brother, I use to hide my affection for you. How do I do that? I have no idea. To me you are the figure of legend, the figure of story and I have to reconcile that with the woman in front of me with tears streaming down her face for a reason or reasons that I cannot imagine. It was so very hard for me to try and stop thinking of you as THE EMPRESS," I threw my arms wide to emphasise it. "To not think of you as The Lion cub of Cintra during the second Continental war when I told my sister stories of your adventures in order to get her to sleep at night. How do I reconcile the two things together?

"I'm literally a nobody. I owe Kerrass everything. Without him, would I be sat here now? I doubt it. I started writing about Witchers as a way to make my name and. hopefully, as a way to meet girls."

"Be careful what you wish for." She commented.

"And how. But I had no ambition for anything else and yet, here I am. Screaming at an Empress. A woman who once told me to treat her like my sister. Ok, so truth now. Honesty?"

She nodded. "Yes please."

"I was coming here anyway. Lord Voorhis brought me here with speed so that I had to leave half my goods behind and in doing so, I have properly made myself sick. He told me what you planned to do and why it was dangerous. I felt a chill then, a dagger of fear that was driven into my heart which was when I realised that I had managed to start thinking of you as a person rather than the Empress. That I had started to think of you as my sister. And I came here and yelled in anger. I came here and pleaded in fear.

"Everything I said to you is true. Everything I told you about what will happen if we lose you or if something happens to you. All of that is true. But it's not why I don't want you to try and step aboard that Ghost Ship."

I took a deep breath. I felt the truth coming upon me then. I had not known it when I walked into the room and it had only come to me a few moments before.

"I want to see you at my wedding." I told her. "I want to see you standing with Emma and Mark and Sam and Laurelen too. I want to meet my adopted nephews and nieces when you have them and I want to properly interrogate the man, or woman, that you choose to be yours to make sure that they deserves you. Because honestly, he won't. But most of all..."

I felt the tears and I closed my eyes. I remembered what Tulip had said about those that we have lost never really leaving us if we remember them properly.

"Most of all." I sobbed. "I don't want to lose another sister. Please don't... I miss her so much and I don't want to..."

At some point her hand had covered her mouth as the tears ran down her own face.

Then she hugged me. It did not help my sense of disconnection that I was hugging the Empress of the continent, despite our tears.

We sat there for quite a while. I didn't time it.

"Flame but I feel fucking awful." I told her. She smirked and pulled away, wiping her tears on the back of her sleeve.

"You look awful." She told me. "When was the last time you ate something?"

"Kerrass found me some bread earlier but beyond that... It was Novigrad I think."

"The crossing was that tough?"

"The worst sea journey I've taken. Bar none. You know you're lucky?"

"Really." She was walking back over towards the drinks table.

"Yeah. You can just teleport anywhere you like at any point."

"True," She poured herself a generous measure. "Cerys is not going to thank me for the amount we're drinking."

"I'll find a way to make it up to her. You know, after I've spent a bunch of time in a nice, cool, quiet, dark room where no-one is going to bother me for a few...you know... days.

She handed me a cup. "Drink this, it'll put hairs on your chest."

"Oh good, I could do with another one."

It was a simple joke but sometimes the simplest jokes are the best ones to use to get through to people. She laughed and pulled a chair over to sit opposite me, rolling the cup between her hands, staring down into it. I don't know what she saw there but she frowned at it. Then she shook herself, like a cat waking up after a snooze.

"So did I overhear that right? What brings you to Skellige? We were expecting you a few days ago."

"Well, you can read about the delay after I've finished writing it up. Suffice to say that I met a Unicorn."

"A real one or a fake?" I was surprised that she didn't seem that surprised.

"Pretty sure that it was a real one. Kerrass knows her quite well."

"I thought that they didn't come here any more." She took a drink and moved back to the drinks table. This time returning with the bottle. "Saves me having to go back," she explained when she saw my eyebrows rise.

I thought it politic not to comment.

"Apparently she's been here for some years. Travels with a Cat Witcher called Schrodinger. She came here by accident and the two fell in together."

"Schrodinger. Cat Witcher," she mused as she poured some more spirits into her cup. "Yes, he's one of the few Witchers that we can't keep track of."

"There's a magical effect somewhere."

"Heh. That'll please Philippa." It took me a moment to realise that she was talking about Madame Eilhart. "But what was it that brought you to Skellige?"

"Two things. The first was that I've always wanted to see the Skeleton Ship. Ever since I first heard about it and the effect that it has on shipping in the area. But the other thing is that Kerrass and I wanted to speak to the druids."

"Why?" I really was a little put off with the amount that she was drinking without any apparent adverse effects.

"You will have read about the Cult of the First-born?"

"In the north, Yes?" I nodded in response. "I had heard. I understand that it's well in hand now although I'm told that I will need to keep an eye on it. You know, in case the churches of Kreve and the Eternal Flame start fighting over the privilege of setting fire to heretics. I also heard that it got quite tough."

"It did."

"And that you upset a lot of people due to your defence of an Elf and a "Jump up"?"

"Jump up?" I had not heart the term.

"What hoighty toighty idiots call people that have been elevated to the nobility by way of battlefield promotions."

"Oh, Sir Rickard."

"That's the very animal. You want some more?" She waggled the bottle at me. "It's unlikely that you will get a chance to drink the royal mead again any time soon. Cerys is rather cross with me as it is."

"How much do you want to wager that that bad mood will evaporate once you formally declare that you want nothing to do with the Skeleton ship, other than to see it float off into the night? I'd better not though, I'm feeling rather ill."

"It's good for you. Made from honey. I once found a bee in a cup that I was served at the highest table. A sign of good luck apparently."

The sensible thing to do would have been to turn the offer down. I was tired, sick, sore and emotionally wrung out. But then I thought, how often am I going to get the opportunity to get boozy with the Empress. Yes, I'm writing a memoir at the moment, but it might come up in the future.

I allowed myself to be persuaded and held the cup out. She poured me rather more than I was expecting and it was not lost on me that her hands didn't shake and she did not spill a drop.

"So, yes. I upset some people but that...What was it you called him?"

"Jolly Jump Up is the term apparently."

"Yes, well, without him and his men, many of whom died for me, Kerrass and I would not have made it back to safety and the cult would have dug in and gone to ground. The Elves in question did the same while challenging some of my preconceptions about their race. Then when we got back, people were looking for someone to blame and Rickard had not made himself very popular."

"Why not? I mean I know, but I was hoping for a different perspective."

"He is supremely confident in his own skills and the skills of his men. He knows exactly what they are capable of and he won't take it when people challenge him on that. He refused to join the official chain of command as he technically worked for Emma and his mission was to protect me. So he told them all to fuck off whenever they ordered him to do something. They wanted to try him for desertion when he had actually just done as he was originally ordered in following me when I left the castle. A man named Kristoff wanted to order him around a bit and exert some authority but then Rickard had left. He's a good man but at the end of the day, to the other knights and nobles, he just isn't one of them and they hate him for it."

"The other knights. Including your brother?"

"My brother was trying to be diplomatic."

"So, yes. It was including your brother."

I said nothing.

"The Elves?"

"Oh. After days of fighting and dying for our cause, the same nobles that disliked Rickard and tried to hang him out to dry, just wanted to ignore the sacrifices of the Elves. They were turned away from food supplies, blankets and healing supplies and essentially barred from the castle under threat of being run off. I didn't react too well to that as I recall."

"You did not." She smiled. "I received several letters demanding your censure and arrest from various places including the Church of the Eternal Flame as well as several other nobles and knights of the North for your behaviour."

"Oh good." I muttered.

"The Church of the Eternal Flame is debating the subject, on the one hand you are a proud follower of the Eternal Flame and unearthed the largest nest of dangerous heretics that the North has seen in years, if not decades. But on the other hand, your staunch defence of non-humans has set you against the modernists."

"My feeling was that the modernists hate me because I'm Mark's brother. What with Mark trying to take the church back to it's more traditional values."

"Correct." The way she said it made me feel as though I was back at University and I had just said something clever in a seminar. "But your stance for the non-humans has not made you popular."

I looked her straight in the eyes.

"Darn." I said.

She laughed as I had wanted her to.

"On the other hand, the southern Lords think that you've done well. So on the one hand, some of the Northerners who have had problems with Elves and are now demanding your head while the Southern Lords are threatening repercussions if you aren't promoted."

"Which way are you leaning? Speaking as an interested party of course."

"Oh of course. I was going to be gentle, but then you walked in here and started yelling at me."

"So anyway, to get us back on track." I said quickly in an effort to divert the topic. "During the entire thing we had something of an... episode where we were told that the magic that was used to take Francesca was ancient and alien."

She nodded thoughtfully.

"We reasoned that if the traditional magic users of the world..."

"The Lodge,"

"Yes, if they didn't know what it was after Toussaint, then we needed to explore other options and the druids were the first thoughts that came to mind. We've got some other irons in the fire. Kerrass wants to take me somewhere to consult something when we leave Skellige and Ariadne says that she has an avenue that she is exploring with a view to us looking at that over the winter."

The Empress nodded but I got the sense that I was losing her again as she stared into her drinking cup.

"Ciri?" I asked her. "Sorry, am I allowed to call you Ciri again? Or are we back to Majesty?"

"Ciri is fine when there's no-one present. You were the one that pointed that out to me as I recall."

"Yes well. As I recall it, that was during a period when I had my head jammed up my own arse."

She laughed and I let her subside back into silence before I spoke again.

"What happened Ciri? What's going on here?"

She looked up sharply, her eyes glittering strangely. Echoes of an old anger shone out at me as she set her cup aside. Then she looked back at me for a long moment. A very long moment before she leant back, stretching her legs out in front of her and raised her arms above her head, yawning hugely.

"How much do you know about the Ghost Ship?"

"Just what little Lord Voorhis told me. That and one listen through of the saga from one of the masters outside."

She nodded. "So not very much then."

"Sounds about right."

She stared into space for a long time which was when I realised that I was using the old interview techniques that Kerrass had once shown me. I was waiting for her to fill the silence that I was leaving for her.

"I've known about the Skeleton Ship for many years. Grandmother Calanthe had me share my upbringing between Skellige and Cintra so I've been here many many times, Cerys and her brother were as close to me at the time as if they were my own siblings and one of my regrets is that we grew apart over the years, At one point Hjalmar even proposed marriage to me. We were far too young to understand how dangerous that was but there we go. Grandmother was furious but by that point, I had seen the Ghost Ship twice.

"You can only really see it when it travels through the harbour. There is a cold that comes off it that can shatter bone in other times so you can only really see it in the distance."

Her voice had taken on a similar kind of resonance to the Saga master and I could hear echoes of his voice in her words.

"You can only see it as a rough shape, a speck really, with the even smaller speck of the Albatross flying above it. But then when it comes into harbour it's like, it's like the dead themselves are reaching out to you. The last time I saw the ship... I haven't had time to see it since I became Empress. But the last time I saw it was after my mother had died and as that great, dark shape sailed through the harbour it was almost as though I could feel her standing next to me. I wept for days, one of the few times that neither Crach nor my Grandmother yelled at me for tears. Normally they would tell me that Queens don't shed tears and that I needed to be strong, but in this instance, They wrapped me warm and held me tight.

"I often wondered what Grandmother saw and felt when she saw the Ghost Ship."

She shook herself again, just like a cat might after waking up.

"You haven't seen it yet so there is absolutely no way that you can possibly know how profound the experience is. It's like... You've been in some pretty hairy situations now haven't you. Fleeing from the cult, the business over in Angral that brought you and Ariadne together. I'm not thinking about the stuff that happened in Toussaint because that was all happening so fast that it got a bit silly. But when you and Kerrass killed that priest...

"Which is another thing that we might have to talk about by the way," She said it with a smile though which left me feeling a little better.

"I shall look forward to it."

"Mmm," she commented with some amusement in her eyes and pursed lips before carrying on.

"But there's a catharsis afterwards isn't there. There's a moment when you realise that you've survived and that you're happy that you've survived. This is sometimes interchangeable with a sense of loss. You've called it "reaction" in some of your writings which is absolutely true. It is a reaction to the same thing. But there is a moment where you remember that you're alive and feel glad about that. You weep for those you've lost and tears, that you haven't known that you are holding in, suddenly start coming out of you as there's no holding back. It's like your life is affirmed in the most powerful way while also being so sad for those that have been lost."

"I often find the process of Catharsis incredibly depressing." I commented.

"That's because you have trained yourself to be apart from it all. To watch and to see the negatives as well as the positive. Instead of being happy with your survival, you see the mistreatment of the Elves. On the one hand it is the mark of a good man to wish that you had done more but on the other..."

She shrugged.

"But even then... You get combat nightmares don't you? I think I read that somewhere."

"I do. Normally for a few days afterwards where I dream about the fight or the circumstances and my brain runs through all the ways that it could have gone wrong."

"But then there's a night where you sleep without dreams isn't there."

I couldn't help but grin. "Yes there is, and it feels glorious."

"And then you go and get drunk, possibly get laid and things don't you?"

"We do."

"The passage of the Ghost Ship, the Skeleton Ship I should say, is like that. It's like a reminder that you've survived along with the reminder of everything that you've lost."

She drifted off, back to staring into space.

"Majesty...Ciri. With all due respect. I'm sure that was the answer to a question, just not an answer to mine."

She smiled and nodded to concede the point before peering into her cup.

"I'm gonna need more alcohol for this conversation."

"How can you drink that stuff? I'm already a little drunk and you've had a lot more than me."

"Mead and it's variations is an interesting drink. You have to build up a tolerance for it as, for some reason, it doesn't seem to work like beer or wine."

"Well, you learn something new every day."

"Are you alright. You're looking a little pasty."

"Nothing that a week off wouldn't fix."

"Do you want to carry this on later?" She looked a little hopeful.

"Answer me honestly. Would you be this eager to talk if we put this off until later or would we end up screaming at each other again?"

She considered this.

"Not an unfair comment."

She took another drink.

"There are two things to say." She told me. I got the feeling that she was rushing on ahead before she lost her nerve. "The first is that I had not realised how much I depended on your sister until she was gone." She didn't look at me. "The second is that, without her, this is just no fun any more."

She sobbed.

"I used to have so much fun with it." She told me. "I used to take such delight in bringing pompous ass-hats in to see me, pretending to be all weak and female, letting them drone on and on and on before skewering them with a point of logic or a question that they just hadn't considered. Or I would drive home a point that they thought they would get away with given that I am a weak woman rather than a proper male Emperor. I used to enjoy the endless discussions about what I should wear with the barbed insults and veiled threats that could be made with the colour of the dress that I was wearing or a piece of ornamentation. I used to take so much pleasure in seeing small people brought down to the size that they actually are rather than the puffed up self-important ignorant cocks that they think they are.

"I liked confounding people with things that they thought I had forgotten. I enjoyed getting into the nitty gritty of running an empire and wondering where this had gone, or that had gone, or why this person wasn't paying enough tax or why this person was paying too much. I could reward my loyal friends and punish the backstabbing men who thought to rob me and the rest of my subjects in order to line their own pockets. I enjoyed having people like Philippa trying to tell me what to do and just taking the time, every so often, to remind her that she works for me, not the other way round.

"Not that I ever had to do that too much. She actually talks a lot of sense most of the time but she has this overwhelming sense that magical talent should make a person a higher class of citizen. Last time she was making those arguments I threatened that anyone with a magical talent would be conscripted into service of the Empire and the crown. That they would be paid a stipend in order to live but that their lives would be subject to the Imperial whim."

She laughed at the memory and I laughed with her. As I say, Lady Eilhart is a scary woman and it is occasionally pleasant to imagine people like that being taken down a peg or two.

"I take it she didn't like that." I commented.

"I thought that her head was going to explode." The sight of an Empress giggling like a little girl is not something you ever forget. Then she sighed. Like the air being let out of a bag, or the sound that you make when you finish a delicious meal but realise that you're still hungry.

"But I don't laugh about it any more. It isn't fun. There's still plenty of egos that need deflating. Still plenty of dipshits who want to get one over on me because I don't have testicles between my legs. But I just don't care. I don't give a crap. My Empire is full of things that need doing. I know that they need doing and the only one that can do anything about them is me. That I have to buckle down and get to it. That no-one else is going to do it for me. That I have to do it.

"Did you know there's a famine in Aedirn at the moment?" She asked suddenly.

"I did not." I admitted.

"Northern Aedirn is still being squabbled over by Kaedwen and the remains of Aedirn. The truth is that it's Aedirn's breadbasket. The rest of it's industry had been destroyed because Demavend wasn't properly supported by his lords. So Nilfgaard rolled over it and destroyed and looted everything. Then when we retreated, Kaedwen did the same. Back and forth it went, all the time the Aedirnians just waited for Demavend to crack so that they could take over and claim the throne without realising that it was Demavend's genius that kept them in power for so long."

"I thought Demavend was a drunk and an idiot."

"He was. But he only became that when it became clear to him that the lords weren't going to lift a finger to help him and that the country's destruction and conquering by Nilfgaard was inevitable. But now they're back to fighting over the only fertile, well farmed bit of Aedirn and so Aedirn is starving.

"I really should do something about that but what do I do. I try and come up with a scheme. Just something small. Something as easy as securing the Princess Dorn's Kingdom was. A nice military movement that would have all the other folks quaking in their boots. But I just can't seem to summon up the wherewithal to do it. I just can't seem to... think."

She was turning in on herself now. She had screwed up her eyes, tears of bitter frustration standing out in her eyes and she had her head in her hands.

"So why was it fun before?" I prompted. Just occasionally you need to give the person that you're talking to a little push to get her to move forward.

"Your sister. You're sister made it fun. She had this trick of sitting just out of sight of the idiot that was trying to manipulate me and pulling faces. We would get together in my quarters, or hers depending on who had the most petitioners waiting outside our doors."

"I had heard that you generally prefer simple sleeping quarters. Things that are cut off from everything else with just a simple bed."

"Generally yes. I hate these huge, oversized beds that are too soft to sleep in. I have these nightmares where I feel as though I'm drowning when I sleep in one of those. After the years on the road I just want a nice simple bed with a straw mattress. A hearth is nice but other than that..."

"So, you and my sister..."

"Ah yes. She would help me to laugh at all the ridiculous things that I had seen. All the stupid, stupid bits of nonsense that people tried to feed me about stupid, stupid things. She could make a joke about any of them and brought a smile to my face. Every. Single Time. She made it fun. She made me laugh. When I needed it most, she could take the worst days. The very worst days and make me laugh."

She sobbed again.

"Oh, I miss her. And I'm sorry, I know that I can't possibly miss her as much as you do but..."

"Hey... Let's not go there. If we spend all day arguing about who has the toughest time then we'll still be here in a year."

"I suppose. I am sorry though."

"That still doesn't explain to me what's going..."

"I know, I know and I'm getting to it. Here's the problem with being me. How do I know whether I'm doing the right thing or not?"

"What?"

"Seriously. That thing with Aedirn. Who is going to tell me whether I'm doing the right thing. Who can confirm for me whether I'm doing evil or good? It used to be Francesca but now?"

She shook her head.

"I know about leadership. I've read all the books and I've seen it all happen. I know about things like "Expect hight standards and meet them yourself." I've heard of "Punish privately, praise publicly." But how do I know I've done the right thing?"

"No-one ever knows..." I began.

"Yes, but not everyone's the Empress." She snapped, her mood changing again like lightening. "Not everyone could declare war on Zerrikania or Ofieri for that matter. It was Francesca that kept me honest, she kept me on the straight line. But now... Who do I confide in? Mother and Father?" she eyed me sidelong. "Geralt and Yennefer I mean."

"Yes, I got that."

"They tell me that so long as I'm true to myself then it's fine. But they still want to order me round. They still struggle to see me as anything other than a lost little girl that needs rescuing."

"Are they wrong?"

I was glad to see some fire in the gaze she levelled at me there. She ignored the comment.

"The other members of the lodge are the same. They want to guide me towards their own ends. Not one of them wants to advise me without having their own agenda which they try and bend me towards. Even Triss is now telling me to do things in order to help Kovir and Povis, despite the fact that I dwarf them militarily, as well as financially now and that they depend on me for food. If I wanted to conquer them I could do it by just, not feeding them but Triss keeps wanting me to treat with them as an equal. She even wants me to marry the King despite the fact that he would expect to rule over me which the Southern Lords will not accept. I just don't know what I'm doing and I don't know what's right.

"The religious leaders want me to expel all other religions other than them. Lord Voorhis, though possibly my most faithful vassal is just someone I find I can't trust as technically, he's also my heir. Who do I listen to?"

"Empress, Ciri..."

"I told you that Ciri is fine."

"Yes, but I feel it's important to hedge my bets. You're still not telling me what's really going on. I don't believe that you're not passionate about the work that you're doing. You've spent this time talking to me about the things that face you and your subjects with clear thought processes in place. You know how you feel about the different things, you know about the crisis in Aedirn and I be that if I sat down with you and a map, you could tell me what's going on in any individual area. You're passionate and you care. Your tears themselves prove that. So what's going on?"

She looked at me for a long time. I felt my eyelids wanting to droop towards being closed. My stomach was churning and I felt the beginnings of a headache.

"I think I made the wrong choice." She whispered, her eyes shone with unshed tears.

"What choice Ciri?" I whispered back.

She almost groaned. I suppose I had realised what I was doing some time before. I was being a Witcher. I was trying to get to the bottom of a situation and I was employing all the tricks and skills that I had seen Kerrass use in order to confront someone who knew something. We had used the same techniques against Maleficent in order to get to the truth about the Pricness Dorn. We had used those techniques in miniature many times, in order to get to the bottom of what was going on with my family specifically, when I talked to my sister or Mark in his office.

I was manipulating the Empress but now I was doing it for a different reason. It was clear now that this person was desperately unhappy. Not a good place to be given that she was essentially the ruler of the continent. Unhappy rulers tend to become tyrants, go mad or become neglectful. It seemed that Ciri was falling into the third category, if she wasn't there already, and she needed to be taken out of that.

This entire technique always makes me feel a little sick when I am using it to force information out of people. When it's something that they want to tell me or want to communicate then that's fine but when it's a case of forcing someone to give me the information then I hate it. Making them betray a trust or betray a rule, a law or a moral. That shit is awful and leaves me wanting a bath.

I wanted a bath anyway but this was making it worse.

The problem here was that I'm not even sure that Ciri knew what the problem was. Not really. Or at least, she had never thought it through herself. Not properly. Not out in the open where she could examine it from all angles.

So I was dragging a secret from her. A secret that she didn't want to tell me, that she possibly didn't know but that, at the same time, was possibly driving her towards madness.

No pressure at all Freddie, no pressure at all.

Lord Voorhis and I were going to have some serious words when all of this was done. Presuming I survived of course.

"What choice Ciri?" I asked again. A little more forcefully as I got the sense that she was drifting away a little.

She took a moment to get herself back under control. The flush retreated from her cheeks and she swallowed back the tears.

"Did you know?" She began before swallowing a couple of times and starting again. "Did you know how I came to the throne?"

"I read Professor Dandelion's account of the matter." I told her. "I heard that your Father Emhyr hired your other Father to track you down in order to make that happen. I understand that there was a conversation behind closed doors that no-one else was party to and that neither you, nor your father ever spoke of what was said."

"It's close. Geralt was hired to bring me to the Emperor. At first I was furious about that. That he had needed hiring to come and find me and then to find out that he had been hired by the Emperor, my father. A man who, the last time I saw him, had wanted to marry me in order to further his own line."

She shuddered. As well she might.

"Is it possible to loathe a man as well as to respect him at the same time?" She wondered.

"I would say so."

"But I was so angry with the pair of them when Geralt took me into the palace at Temeria to present me to the Emperor my father. I wanted nothing more to claw both their eyes out. But my father had changed. Not his politics, methods or his ruthlessness but some have suggested, including Lord Voorhis, that he had fallen in love with the woman who was supposed to be my double. That that love had changed him in some way."

"I'm not sure I believe that." I told her. "But who knows. They say love can change a person."

"Your intended certainly claims so." Her sudden burst of sly humour was startling. It always surprises me how quickly her mood can change from one thing to the next without warning.

"I love Ariadne a great deal." I responded with some asperity. "But she also told me that vampires emotions work differently than human ones do. That love is like an overwhelming passion for them that they cannot contain."

"That would track with what she told me."

"What did she tell you?" I couldn't help myself.

"That she has to physically restrain herself from tearing all your clothes off and having her way with you whenever she sees you."

"Interesting." I said shifting in my seat a little uncomfortably. "But I'm not sure I can imagine your father doing that, so stop trying to change the subject."

She sighed and subsided a little bit. "But he called me in to the room and told me that he intended to retire. That the only person that he could trust to hand the Empire over to, was me. He told me that I was not his only option. He told me that there were other people he could choose as his heir, also that he could just carry on doing the job himself. But that that ran the risk of leading to catastrophe and was therefore to be avoided. But that he wanted me to do it."

She pinched the bridge of her nose and I guessed that I wasn't the only one of us that was coming down with a headache.

"I was in the middle of some stuff at the time." She went on. "Believe it or not, I was in the middle of saving the world, or at least this version of it. An uncle of mine had died and I was grieving, I wanted vengeance for him and some other friends that had lost their lives in their efforts to keep me safe. I did everything that I had to do, we fought off the wild hunt and I managed to stop the Eternal Frost from encroaching too far into our world and then... it was all over.

"I was sat, over on Hindersfjall to the west and it occurred to me that it was all over. I could stop running. The Wild Hunt were dead along with their desire to use me as some kind of Brood mare for whomever wore the crown of their people at the time."

She shuddered at the thought. I had no idea what she was talking about but I thought that we had got to the point where I just needed to step back and let her do the talking.

"So there I was. Sat in the snow, there was a form of the Conjunction of the Spheres happening and monsters were leaping out of portals but the Nilfgaardiansa and the Sklligans seemed to have it under control. So I just found a little cave to wait it out. I was very tired. Not tired as in wanting to sleep, but tired as in the fact that I was so weary. It was the conclusion of so much that I had wanted to do. So much that I had wanted to work towards that I was just feeling...empty.

So I was sat in my little cave. I knew that Geralt and Yennefer would be looking for me. Them and Avallac'h who was my tutor in saving the world. Also the Emperor and others but I just wanted this moment to myself.

It occurred to me then that I was away. That I could do anything that I wanted to do. There are small boats all around Skellige and I had learned to sail one when I was much younger so I could just wait, teleport through the search parties, find myself a boat and sail off. I could do anything. Go south and become a bandit again. I could go north and be a Witcher. Find a ship to take me overseas. Travel. Learn. Study. Find a lover. Find a whole heap of Lovers, a veritable fuck-pile of lovers that I could use till I was sore from it."

Not the sort of conversation that you ever expect to have with your ruler.

"I sat in that cave for a long time. I don't really know how long though. Days maybe. But then it came to me that I could do none of those things. One lesson that had been given to me early was the idea of service. Grandmother Calanthe had done her job too well in instilling that quality to me. I lived to serve those lesser than me and now I was free to do what I wanted.

"That thing that I always wanted to be was to be a Witcher.

"Ever since I first knew that I was tied by destiny to Geralt, I had started to read up on the subject. After the massacre of Cintra I remember being alone, frightened and lost. At the whims of those stronger than me so that when my training began I took to it with a vengeance. All of this so that I could be strong. The Witchers are no less insistent that they learn to use their weapons in the service of others, so the lesson was reinforced.

"I was young and naïve, so I saw the Witchers as travelling knight Errants, righting wrongs and protecting people. I learned the truth of course but that basic desire to be a Witcher never really left me. I wanted to travel. I wanted to help people. When I left my cave I set out to find Geralt and Yennefer and told them that I would be a travelling Witcher. I told them that I had had my fill of politics and magic and world saving. That I wanted a fight that I could understand. Me, a sword, a monster, payment. Even the nasty side of life as a Witcher didn't seem too bad to me then and as for being recognised. I reasoned that hair dye is an easy thing to find. I think they understood, Geralt and Yennefer between them although I think Yennefer disapproved.

"I sometimes find it hard to tell though. She seems to disapprove of everything before later telling me that I made the right choice.

"But my father, the Emperor, is a sly old dog. He had known exactly how to get inside my skull. Exactly how to get inside my heart and mind. In one ten minute chat, he had told me of all the things that I could do to help people. He told me about all the good I could do. About the evil that I could prevent. But most of all, he told me about how I would feel. That feeling of knowing that I could have done something and yet, that I did nothing. That I could have saved those people had I been Empress.

"I was still travelling with Geralt and Yennefer at the time. I still needed training as I would be the first to admit that my swordsmanship was lacking a little. I made up for it with my teleporting skills and magic but those things can become crutches if you let them and the sword is vital. I still got too distracted by small things and was lacking in focus. This was made worse by my father the Emperor's invitation."

She poured herself a large drink, having finished the last one.

"My teleporting doesn't turn up on the magical scale unless you know what you're looking for. I can teleport through wards and things easily because I don't use gates so I soon learned that Yennefer couldn't pick up on my teleporting unless she was looking for it. I went out for a walk one day and teleported to the Imperial palace. My father was still in Vizima at the time. It was late and he was eating alone. I know him better now and I guess that he was missing my stepmother who was still away down south, under guard for her own protection.

"He didn't seem surprised to see me as I recall.

"I asked him what it would look like. How it would work with my taking up my post as his heir and why should I do what he told me?

"He passed me the letter that he was reading. It was some kind of intelligence report on some small matter. He asked me what I thought he should do. I read the paper and I gave him my opinion. He didn't react at all. Instead he asked me whether or not I could live with myself knowing that such decisions get made every day and that the people that make them are...?" She raised her eyebrows in the question to see if I knew the answer.

"Someone else." I whispered and she nodded sadly.

"He was right. I could not. I could not live with knowing that I could be at the mercy of someone else. That the people around me would be at the mercy of someone else. I made my decision that day. That very night even."

I know a person caught up in a memory when I see one. She sat for a long time, staring at a thing that only she could see. "Even then," she whispered. "It took me an age to tell people what was going to happen. The first that Geralt knew about it was when Lord Voorhis turned up with my contingent of royal guard to take me off to begin my training.

"Training." She harrumphed. "It was more a case of learning. That horrid kind of book learning as to what kinds of colours different people wear and what kinds of imports and exports the different duchies and different county's had. Let alone what the different countries had. I hated it but I also understood why it was absolutely necessary. Much to my astonishment my father, the Emperor..."

"You always do that." I interrupted.

"Do what?"

"Point out which father you're talking about. Your father the Emperor or your father the Witcher."

"Yes well, sometimes people get confused."

"Sorry. You were saying? You were astonished?"

"Yes. My father turned out to be quite a good teacher. He just explained why it was important and let me get on with it. He turned out to be a fairly good storyteller and could recount an instance, from his own memory, where the person or piece of land had tried to get one over on the Imperial court. About how all of the other members of the Civil Service had completely missed the problem until it had actively arrived on the Emperor's desk itself for checking and he had had to point out the error, or the sabotage depending on your point of view.

"He told me that it was like a puzzle, or some kind of grand tapestry or piece of artwork where everyone was so focused on completing their bit that they weren't paying attention to what everyone else was doing. They're also all trying to keep all the expensive materials for themselves rather than letting others get any of the glory. Continuing the tapestry metaphor, the man working on the corner wants to keep all the gold thread for himself as he has this idea for doing his bit. But the man down at the bottom needs that gold thread to finish his bit because the gold thread is stronger and as a result is required to keep the entire tapestry together in the first place."

"So the Emperor is really an overseer, making sure that all the bits come together and no one bit is better off than all of the other bits."

"Precisely. Which is why all of this knowledge was vitally important. If duller than dishwater. That didn't stop me hating it though. Then gradually, I started to take over governing from him. Bit by bit and piece by piece I started to take over.

"I enjoyed it too. With the help of your sister to keep things light as well as some other women who could keep me serious when I needed to focus. Even better than that, I was good at it too."

"So what happened? You talk as though it was something that has passed. As though you are no longer good at it."

"Because I'm not." She sighed in frustration. "I don't know when it started. I don't know when it began to go wrong. I started off with these big ideas and all of these things that I could do. I could do it all. I gave orders and signed laws and stood astride the world and laughed as I set about making the world a better place than the state in which I found it.

"But now?" She shook her head.

"What's the comment. That a bad leader isn't a bad leader because they make shitty decisions. A bad leader is a bad leader because they make no decisions. That's how it started. People came to me with things and I just didn't know the answer. I didn't know what to do and worse, I realised that I didn't really care that much. Saying that I had lost the fun of it is only part of it but the greater part is also true. I'm just...

"It's relentless. It never stops. There's a famine in Aedirn, an outbreak of the plague, which some people are worried might be another case of Catriona, in Lyria. Toussaint is increasing it's prices on all the wine it's sending out in order to keep up with the Duchess' spending on the new Knights Errant.

"Not that she's being unfair, the new prices are more than worth it. Competition between the different vineyards has been enough to keep prices low for decades so that the prices have remained the same for years despite the rising costs for everything else on the continent. So a price rise is actually well within reasonable limits but can you tell the other lords that?

"And who can I talk to about this? Everyone has an agenda. Advisors often give contradictory advice which is so painfully obviously mired in self interest that it's untrue. But who do I trust. Who can I talk it through with without being led astray. Who do I trust?"

She suddenly raised her eyes to look at me. Skewering me with her Emerald gaze.

"And it never stops. It never stops. So a little while ago, I was sitting before my dresser while someone was doing my hair and I remember thinking to myself. I wouldn't have to do this shite if I was a Witcher. If I was still a Witcher, I could rise when I like, eat when and what I like. Life would be simple and direct and... Oh so free.

"That was how it started. Now, I'm sitting in my throne room, or in my study or receiving room or wherever. Trying to read correspondence, trying to make decisions and things. But in the meantime. All I can think about is that I would rather be on the road. Riding up to villages. Asking if they need anything. Asking if I can do anything for them or if there is a monster that they need me to fight. Some coin and then I can move on."

She closed her eyes. "Oh, I want it so badly right now that I can almost taste it. The smell of rain on the wind. That same wind echoing in my ears and I pull my woollen cloak that little bit tighter around me to keep in the warmth. To preserve that little bubble of cosy heat that keeps the chill at bay. Then the smell of a camp-fire. The sounds of wind in the trees and the songs of birds above me. The simple meal in my stomach. Maybe some clay baked rabbit with some wild onions and garlic. A slightly stale piece of bread from the last village to dip into the gravy and a skin of wine. Cheap and coarse with nothing to recommend it other than the fact that it has alcohol in it.

"I want to be that now. So badly. So very badly and now that I sit here. Looking at the desperation in the eyes of people like Lord Voorhis and the other advisers. They want their Empress back. They need their Empress back. I know it. I know it in my soul. But I can't just... I don't know that I'm doing the right thing any more. I just don't know. I used to have so much faith. So much confidence but now?" She shook her head. "So what do I do now?"

She looked at me sharply.

"That question wasn't rhetorical Freddie. What do I do?"

I had to jerk myself into a state of wakefulness. I was dangerously close to falling asleep. Her voice was musical and just sitting there was so relaxing. I stared at her for a while.

"You once asked me to treat you like my sister right?" I asked her.

"I did."

"Then I'm going to ask a couple of questions, you ready?"

She squared her shoulders, took another long drink and drew herself up before nodding. "I'm ready."

"When was the last time you had a break?"

"A what?"

"When was the last time you took your horse out riding. Went hunting with those hunting falcons that my sister gave you. Or the hounds that the Imperial kennels boast about. When did you last get drunk with someone?"

"Who could I possibly drink with?"

"Whomever you choose." I told her. "Pick someone. Ban them from talking about politics and have at it. What do you like to do for fun?"

"Fun?" She was stricken by the question. Utterly dumbfounded. "Fun." She said again as though it was some kind of alien concept.

"I thought so." I told her. You might be the Empress but you're also human."

"An Empress must be more than human." She snapped back immediately. So fast that I wondered if it was a learned response. A calculated statement that she had been taught over time. Something her father had taught her perhaps. "An Empress must be the ideal." She went on. "An Empress must be the very personification of everything else that the Empire might want and need out of their lives. I must be the very pinnacle because I am."

She subsided. "Look," She went on in a more normal tone of voice. "I understand what you're saying but in Nilfgaard...Right, look."

She stood up and started moving around. I recognised the gesture, she wanted to get the blood moving round herself again.

"In the north, the monarchs are chosen by their bloodline so that in the North, they are described as having been "chosen by divine providence" aren't they?"

"Yes. Often by whichever local religion is fashionable."

"So to the North, Kings are chosen by Gods. But in the South, the Emperor is literally the head of the church. The personification of the divine sun on earth. I am that part of the sun that is sent to the continent in order to teach and to govern because Nilfgaard believes that it is required. They need to be looked after by the sun. They need to be looked after by God and I am that thing. I can't go around drinking, having affairs and carrying on. I am the Empress."

There is an element of my character that I am not entirely proud of. Even though we were being diverted, I couldn't help myself and threw myself into the debate. A proper debate on any subject is one of those things that I just can't help but enjoy. In an ideal world we would be able to debate everything in a friendly fashion. You think we should do one thing, they think we should do another thing and both sides learn from the other's point of view. Wars start because, as a society, we haven't mastered this technique yet.

I enjoy a good debate. It's my preferred way of learning things now, a way of challenging my own views and ideals in the fire of what the other person thinks. It's almost like a way of examining your own thoughts through the eyes of someone else.

Unfortunately, it's not always the best way forward as not everyone gets the same amount of enjoyment out of a good argument as I do and it can offend people when I just throw myself into these things.

"But," I said with a smile, feeling myself almost rising to the moment, waking up as I went. "You are the Empress. You are the thing that everyone looks towards. Everything you do is a statement. When you change clothes, you set fashions. What you eat starts to be eaten on tables all over the Empire. In the North, women are starting to wear clothing that would traditionally have been considered masculine. Leggings, riding coats and boots have become fashionable except in moments of high society. Your refusal to ride side-saddle means that other, and I use the term with some care, "ladies" feel that they can point out that it is perfectly ladylike to ride a horse astride the beast and that they can do that because the Empress does it."

"So? The Sorceresses have been doing that for years."

"Yes, but the average woman doesn't aspire to be a Sorceress. They know that Sorceresses are born, not made whereas women all over the world from the lowliest pig-farmers daughter to the daughter of the highest lady in the land, dream of catching the eye of a King, or Emperor, as they walk by."

"But that just proves my point. I am the ideal. I am that dreamed about example. I can't afford to be taking time off."

"But what does your enjoying your down time say to others? Does it say that you are weak and in need of respite as you fear. Or does it tell people that the opportunity to rest a little bit in the company of friends is a necessary and vital part of their well-being. In fact, could you use that as an opportunity to emphasise to industrial owners and land owners that their workers need time off to, you know, live."

"It's possible certainly." She commented with a shrug.

Have you ever tried to teach anyone anything? I have. I've delivered a few lectures now in Oxenfurt as well as taking a number of different Seminars. Often when I'm in the local area and the faculty want me to talk on a number of prospects. But every so often you come across someone who doesn't want to learn. Someone who will just, not be convinced by anything that you do, or say. Nothing can get through to them no matter how many times you turn the language round in your head. No matter how often you say the words in a different order or put them together in a different way.

It's very easy, as a teacher, to do one of two things. Neither is correct. The first is to blame the person that you are trying to teach. You hear about it far too often where people are described as being too ignorant, too lazy and too stupid to learn what you are trying to teach them. This is wrong because it's making assumptions about the pupil or student in question. In my experience, only the very worst teachers and lecturers do this but it is a very easy trap to fall into as a teacher.

The next one is to blame yourself. If the student doesn't want to learn then it must be something that you, the teacher, are doing wrong. I had to be chastised against doing this. I argued, "But if a student doesn't want to learn then it's my job to make the lesson more interesting right?" No. This would only be a factor if the majority, or all, of the students don't want to learn. But if it's just one or two out of a group then there is something else going on.

It might be something more fundamental. Indeed, it often is something more fundamental. It might be that the student is struggling with their love lives. There might be a problem at home. They might be stressed about their student fees. Any or all of the matters might conspire to be giving someone a bad day. The truly great teachers are those that find ways to help the student with those problems before helping them learn.

I am not a great teacher. I haven't been doing it long enough. If you want an example of a great teacher then here is one.

I once talked about a professor of Oxenfurt that went out of his way to argue about everything that I had found. He threw out theories and false facts that were tailor made and designed to shoot down my own observations and to ridicule my findings. He sat on my viva board when they were vetting my doctor's thesis and I was astonished when he voted to credit me and give me the title of Professor because he had disagreed with everything I said.

We will never be friends but we do correspond occasionally when I have nothing better to do. It turns out that he had recognised my urge to argue with everything that moved and had used that trait of mine in order to force me to think through my statements more clearly. He dismissed my theories to force me to examine them. He dismissed my evidence so that I would go through it in more detail and he criticised my findings in order to force me to make sure that my case was absolutely rock solid.

I hated him. But he might have taught me as much as Kerrass has. Not in the field that I work, but more about what it means to be a scholar and how to be a good one as I am undoubtedly a better scholar now than I ever was before him.

But that was what I was facing now. The Empress had lost her drive to be Empress, her ambition for the Empire and the determination to succeed. I couldn't talk about social reform to her without addressing the route cause of the problem. She was tired, that was part of it. She had taken too much onto her own shoulders. That was part of it too.

It was also clear that she was lonely.

"What happened to the rest of your companions?" I asked, suddenly realising that the pair of us had sat in silence for a long time now.

"What?" She seemed startled as well.

"Frannie wasn't alone. Weren't there other women who looked after you, that followed you around and did their best to make you smile? Lord Voorhis wanted to train them in the use of the crossbow that I gave you and they were going to form a distinct core of people that were going to be around you as your defence. I remember that you used to insist that they keep up with you. Which is why Francesca went from being a delicate wall-flower to being a formidable warrior woman when she came to court."

"Yes there were..." She petered off and a tear rolled down her cheek. "Yes there were. It ummm... Dammit." She scrubbed at a tear that rolled gently down her cheek. "I never get used to thinking about it. As it turned out. Francesca was the glue that held them all together. She was the one that made it an adventure for them. She was the one who led them around, arm in arm, laughing at all the stupid courtiers that tried to seduce them in order to get to me. She was far from the most senior of the ladies but she was the leader amongst them. She could make anything fun and none of us knew it until she was gone. She was the heart of it all really. Then she was gone and the fun had gone out of it. Not just from me but from all of us.

"One girl was seduced into spying on me for one of the rival houses and I was forced to have her executed. Another fell in love with a Northern Lord and I wasn't harsh enough to insist that she stay. Another seemed to miss Francesca more than I did and would spend her days in tears.

"We turned inwards. Instead of a group of young women, setting out to make the world a better place. We became a group of individuals. It's my fault too. The betrayals and the losses hurt me more than I expected them to and I could no longer bring myself to … It's fucking stupid I know but I didn't want to let anyone else get close. I haven't been able to shake the suspicion that what happened to Francesca was my fault. That in some way, what happened was because she was close to me and that I brought it on her. I encouraged the others to leave because I wanted them to be safe. I didn't want to be worrying about them all the time."

So she was broken hearted as well as lonely. The loss of a friend can do that just as easily as the loss of a romantic love.

"So I have women now," she hadn't stopped talking. "but am not really close to any of them. I struggle to trust any of them or let them get near me. I just can't..."

"What about friends?" I asked her. "Who are your friends?"

"Oh I have friends." She told me. "But how many of them can just drop everything to come and see me. Of those, how many will treat me as an equal, rather than some impossibly high social structure?"

"Ariadne." I said promptly. "I know that I am biased but there is no-one truer. Plus she can gate to you wherever you are at a moments notice."

"I suppose..." But again, she wasn't convinced.

"Any of the other members of the Lodge?" I prompted.

"Most of them are too locked into their own ambitions. Philippa wants to make magic users pre-eminant. She wants me to make them all Lords and ladies with feudal rights and privileges. Yennefer, I love her but she still thinks of me as a daughter first. She knows that and tried not to interfere but that doesn't stop her from doing it. Triss is the same and struggles with the fact that she represents a Kingdom now when I want a friend, not an ambassador. Keira is too flighty and locked into her research and desire for luxury. Ida and Francesca remind me of my time with the Aen Aelle and keep looking at me as though they're expecting me to change my mind and kill them all. Fringilla is absent a lot of the time, Margarita is too locked up in the education of others that she finds it all a bit too frustrating and Maleficant?"

She shrugged. "Maleficant is nomadic. She would come to me if she had nothing better to do but she is a solitary creature."

"Emma, who would come with Laurelen."

"Too attached with scandal." She said. "Emma is auditing the treasury for me at the moment and so the politics of that is dangerous. And her relationship with Laurelen, although personally I can sympathise as...well... both Emma and Laurelen are more than attractive, the more conservative lords of the North would think they were leading me astray."

"Since when have you cared what Lords think?"

She wouldn't meet my gaze.

"What about the Princess Dorn?" I asked. "Or Queen Cerys. Strong female rulers. They must have some idea what you are going through."

"All representatives of their nation. How can I trust them? How can I know that they're not just getting close to me so that they can represent their countries?"

"Trust takes time. But you know that."

I carefully didn't tell her that the reason that she didn't trust them is because she didn't want to trust them. My little image of the Empress' knitting circle of powerful women putting the world to rights over tea and cake was vanishing in the mist.

She sighed. "I do know that. I do. But I just can't bring myself to start."

I nodded and echoed her sigh with one of my own. "What happened to you Ciri? When I met you you were a dynamic, aggressive, ambitious woman. You had goals, passions and things that you wanted to do But now you seem as though you're wandering through your life as though you don't want to be here."

She looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes.

"You don't need to answer that." I told her. "I know the answer. You don't know. Just to be clear, that's not a criticism."

She hung her head.

"Can you remember when it started to go wrong?" I asked as gently as I could manage. I got the feeling that she had had enough of people yelling at her about picking herself up and moving on with life. The problem was that she didn't really want to.

"I don't really know." She claimed but I thought that that might have been an untruth. Not that she was lying to me, but that she was lying to herself or that she wasn't really willing to confront that truth yet.

"Was it when Frannie disappeared?" I prompted.

"Yes..." She began as though she was a drowning person leaping for a rescue rope or a life belt. But then she realised what was happening and subsided. "No." She decided. "No it wasn't that. That was part of it but it started afterwards. I couldn't tell you where or when it started

We sat in silence for a long time. I was watching her. She was sat on her little chair leaning forward, resting her elbows on her knees and staring into space.

When did I become an Imperial Councillor?

"Lets change the subject for a while." I told her. "Why the ship? Leaving aside what I think you should do or shouldn't do. Leaving aside why it might be right, wrong or the other. Ignoring the odds of survival. Why do you want to board the Skeleton ship? What's in it for you?"

She took a long deep breath. "Certainty," She told me before raising her gaze to meet mine.

"Can you be more specific?" I asked, forcing my mouth into a tired smile. I levered myself to my feet and forced my legs to move. I needed fuel and found it on the table in the form of an apple. "I would remind her majesty, that I arrived in Skellige earlier today and that I have no idea what, why or how the Skeleton ship. What does it do? Why are so many people so desperate to climb aboard given that so few survive? The Skald outside claimed that none had survived in his living memory and he was far from young"

"Wouldn't you climb aboard?"

"I have no idea. What's in it for me?"

"An answer. As I say, certainty."

She took a deep breath and as I watched her, the ghost of pain started to leave her eyes. She started to relax a bit now that she felt as though she was on firmer ground.

"If you study it properly." She told me leaning back and stretching. "As in, you listen to more than one version of the story..."

"Which, in my understanding, is the only way to study such things in Skellige."

"Quite so. You will find that those people who have made it back from the deck of the ship alive, have all become legendary heroes. The founder of the An Craite clan, supposedly did it."

"As well as the first real Skelligan naval navigator and various famous warriors and builders."

"Correct which is why the vast majority of people that climb aboard want to do so. They are hoping that they will become strong. They will become heroes of legend who will write their names across the stars so that they will be talked about for years, if not centuries to come."

"Ok, sounds a little shallow to me. The best stories always seem to be about men that did it for themselves rather than taking their strength and power from others."

"And you would be right. If you look a bit deeper you will find that what actually happens is that the person climbs aboard with a question in mind, a question that they need answering."

"So that navigator asked how he could steer ships to the continent and come back safely?"

"Yes, and the founder of Clan An Craite asked how he could set about building the most defensible castle on the islands. The man-breaker asked what the secret was to combat."

She stopped and closed her eyes and when she opened them again it was as though she was looking at something a long way off, or a long time ago.

"They play dice for the lives of the boarders." She said. In the same sing-song voice kind of voice that the Skald had used. Her voice was higher, less vibrant and less hypnotic but it certainly had the same cadence that the other man had had. It still had that weight that meant that it would be remembered. "Some say that they dice for the boarder's souls but how can you tell.

"They say that the robed figure is death. That he is the reaper of souls. Some call him the ferryman who carries the dead from one state to the next, who guides them on their way. For the Church of the Eternal Fire, he is the tender of the flame and the scatterer of ashes so that when people die and their souls are burnt in the light of the Eternal Flame, it is he that takes the ashes and fertilises his garden with them so that the dead can be reborn.

"To the church of the Sky-Father he is the horseman. He carries the dead from those places where they fell in battle and takes them off to the Sky-Father's halls among the stars.

"For the Nilfgaardians and their cult of the Sun, he is the sunset and the lord of Winter, the end of the harvest and the cycle of seasons. Where the cold is part of the ending of all things. For how can new things come into the world without the old things having died. How can a new day begin without the last one having ended.

"The stories of him go on and on. Some say that the druids have the truest opinion of him. That he is simply death, that when a creature has lived their span or when the body can no longer support life, he arrives to carry the soul away to wherever it goes next. He is the harvester. He is not cruel, or kind. He cannot be reasoned with. He cannot be bought or bribed. He is patient for he knows that all must bow before him in the end. King, Emperor or lowly street-sweeper. Sooner or later they'll be dancing with the reaper.

"She is different though. Far more mysterious and she does not exist in myth, song or religion. No-one knows who she is but all claim to know her. As though they have met her before. We all love her but do not lust after her. We want to join her for a drink. Fight beside her in battle. Climb beside her, run beside her. Some claim that the ankh round her neck means that she is life because she always loses to death and she never complains because she knows that he will take all from her in the end. No-one knows who she is.

"But,

"Every so often, when she really decides to play rather than to just throw the dice for the sake of it, she will win.

"Who is she? It is impossible to know. But when she does win, Death backs down from her. As though he knows his place. He bows deeply before he gazes into the eyes of the person that she has just won, and now it is his turn to shrug.

"Only one man has ever spoken about what he saw on that day. Only one person and he was far from a poet, far from a thinker and he said that Death's face is that of a skull. When he shrugs, the survivor thought he saw something in the depths of the skull's sockets and the thing that he saw was like the flaring of a star before it dies. The woman smiled and asked him what question he wanted answering and like a fool, he told her. She laughed at him. He said it was a gentle, almost mocking sound. A teasing sound. Like a sister would tease a younger brother. She wondered if he would pay the price for that knowledge. But what that price was, the survivor would never say.

"That man was Svein the Manbreaker. A man so strong that he could lift a troll above his head and break the creature over his knee. But he never said anything more about what he saw or heard aboard the deck of the Skeleton Ship. He would simply tell his brothers, and his lord, that he lacked the words to speak it and begged that they would never ask such questions again.

"They honoured his request. He never married, nor fathered sons. What secret he was given, went with him to the grave."

When the Empress finished I found that I was sat on a bench watching her. She was not a Skald but she had some of that power.

"So..." I coughed and had to clear my throat. It felt like a form of sacrilege to break the silence that followed her little speech. "So. What question do you want to ask?"

"Can't you guess?" She smiled, a little slyly. In doing so I saw a ghost of the woman that I had once shared a meal with in Toussaint.

"You want to know whether or not you made the right choice that day. Whether you did the right thing in choosing to be Empress over being a Witcher."

She shook her head. Not in denial but more in defiance. "Is that so wrong?"

"The answer to that question in return for an unknown price and probably your life? Especially when you already know the answer."

"What?"

"I'm sorry Ciri. I'm trying really hard not to be critical. I don't know what's going through your head and I don't know what it feels like to go through what you're going through. Ever since Francesca disappeared I've had people coming up to me to tell me that they know what I'm going through and every time someone tells me that I want to punch them in the face."

She smirked and I guessed that I had hit the nail on the head a bit.

"How could they possibly know what it's like?" She asked with a slight smile. "To have your younger sister taken from you. A younger sister who you acknowledge is a better person than you. More intelligent, more charming, better looking, more graceful, more loving. Stronger and kinder than you in every way and then for her to be taken away. How can they know what it's like to lose her to deep and sinister magics that no-one else can quantify and that, to this day, no sign of her has ever been found? How can they know?" She finished with a small amount of smugness.

I answered with my own smile.

"Similarly, how can they know what it's like to spend most of your entire life on the run. Running from dryads. Running from unhappy betrothals and a formidable Grandmother."

"Grandmother Calanthe was a great woman and Queen." The Empress protested.

"Yes, but you can't tell me that life in her castle was entirely pleasant all the time."

She said nothing.

"Then you were running from the Nilfgaardians and the man with the raven helmet if Dandelion is to be believed."

Ciri's eyes glittered in memory.

"Then you had to run from judgemental Witchers. Elves, the power growing in your own head, Elves again, Sorceresses and Sorcerers who wanted to use you for their own ends. Elves, yet again. Thief-takers and bounty Hunters. Ancient Elves, your own past, Unicorns and then the Wild Hunt itself. Your own father, the Lodge of Sorceresses and the mob. And that's if only half the stories about you are true. How can they know what it's like? To stop, to choose a role for yourself that you wonder if you are suited for and to then cram all of that learning into your skull, only to be placed on the highest pedestal in the land for all to look at. This before they all turn to you with one voice and say, "Well?" Only for them to be disgusted when you answer with "Well what?""

Her gaze sank again.

"You lost your friends. You lost your sense of being and sense of self and then you lost your confidence. How can they know what it's like" I finished. "You don't need to board the ship Ciri. You know the answer to your question."

"Do I?" Her eyes flashed with an echo of her older anger. "But even if I do, or think I do. It's not an answer that I want. I want the certainty. I want to know that this answer or that answer is the right answer. I want to know. And before you get all high and mighty, ask yourself what question you want the answer to. What question would you pay any price for? Perhaps the location and identity of your sister's kidnappers? Not a lead. Not another link in the chain. But their actual location and their actual identity as well as all their motives and methods. What price wouldn't you pay?"

She was not wrong. The temptation was definitely there. But it was a temptation that was easy to ignore.

"I would not break Ariadne's heart." I told her. "I want to know, yes. I am desperate to know, yes. But I would not put my family through that. I would not force them to go through that. I love them too much and I hope they love me the same."

I hardened my heart a little.

"I would not be so selfish." I finished, but it was not the winning card that I had hoped it would be.

"Who would mourn me?" She wondered.

I laughed bitterly. "You're joking right. The Empire would..."

"No, I don't mean, who would mourn me. Not mourning the Empress, who would mourn me? Ciri, the woman."

"I would." I told her. "I dare say that all the people that were in here earlier would. I know that because they were in here trying to talk you out of risking your life. How about Lord Geralt. Yennefer. Emma would weep as well. Those ladies who you gave the strength to carry on like Princess Dorn, she would definitely mourn. There are plenty of people who would mourn you Ciri. But, if you can't trust that, then trust that I would.

"I would mourn the woman that came to try and console me in my grief before my departure from Toussaint, the woman that sat and told me stories about my sister when my brain was trying to destroy itself. I would mourn the woman that told me to be her brother and who has already become part of my family enough that she is involved in my wedding celebration and not just as a guest. I would miss you. I would weep."

You've never known guilt until you've made a woman cry by being kind to her.

"You know the answer to your own question." I repeated. Trying to make my voice gentler than I had last time. "Don't you?"

She wouldn't look at me, so again, I knew that I was right.

"There is no certainty here." I went on. "There is no certainty to be had. If you had chosen differently, you would now be a Witcher on the road. You would have slain many monsters and you would be enjoying life on the path. But then, one day, you would have come to a village that is being terrorised by Necromorphs or something similar. They're a mining town, working the local silver mine that the lord of, I don't know, let's call it Aedirn, is using that Silver to rebuild after the war efforts but also to keep himself and his young wife in the manner that they have become accustomed to. Importing food from Lyria, wine from Toussaint and silks from Novigrad. So that the rebuilding has all but stopped, but the lord and his guards cannot allow the villagers to leave.

"Oh, yeah, forgot to mention his guards. Guards that need to be maintained in order to protect the Lord's income because otherwise his neighbours might be tempted to take the silver for themselves, let alone other bandits. But their other function is to keep the villagers and miners subdued in order to make sure that the mine continues to be worked.

"But these same guards are useless when it comes to hunting Necromorphs. Indeed, more money is being wasted in hiring and equipping new guards to replace those that have been torn apart by Alghouls. So the village steals a bit of silver from the mine and hires you. You do the job but it is plain to see that the Lord will want to know where the villagers got the money to hire a Witcher and absolutely intends to flog and torture his way through his population until he finds the thieves. That he will probably try to confiscate the silver that they gave you because he's the lord of the local area and he can do what he wants.

"Or at least he thinks he can. You can probably escape fairly easily but you are also aware that the Lord will take that out on the villagers too. He's not a bad man really, he just has his priorities the wrong way round and has been brought up and trained that this is the way that the world works.

"So you'll look at this situation and think to yourself. "Why isn't the King, Duke, Baron or whatever dealing with this little upstart?"

"Then you will think "Because the Emperor doesn't care enough."

"Then, after a while another thought will occur. You will think... "I could have been Empress and I could have done something about that."

"You will suddenly be reminded of all of the other little injustices that you see on the road. Every tear in a woman's eyes. Every peasant driven to cannibalism because of starvation. Every child that is sent into the woods to "collect mushrooms" to stave off the overall hunger of the family. Every dead Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Dryad or Gnome that is burnt in ignorance. You will remember them all and think "If I was Empress, I could have done something about that."

"Then you will start to feel that lack and recriminate yourself for not doing something about that. You would begin to hate yourself for not being the Empress and you would be wondering whether you should have chosen a different path.

"Fuck, maybe you would even be here, now, determined to climb aboard the Skeleton Ship in order to ask the woman whether you should have been the Empress."

She still wouldn't look at me. She still wouldn't argue with me. So I was still right.

I realised that I was stiff and rubbed the back of my neck before I carried on.

"You know all of this as well but I shall say it. Uncertainty is good. Especially in moral situations. It makes you question yourself. It makes you examine what you have done in an effort to be better. Doubt and uncertainty and a determination to do better next time are what makes us better people in the long run. It makes me a better scholar. It makes Kerrass a better Witcher when he has to look at what happened in the past and set about thinking how he's going to do things differently in the future. It will make you a better Empress if you let it. But you can't let it cripple you.

"I don't believe that you no longer care about what happens to your people. I don't believe it. You would not know about that situation in Aedirn, or the potential outbreak of plague or that people are questioning the rising price of Toussaint wine. You wouldn't know about these things and you wouldn't be upset about the fact that you haven't been able to think about anything to do about them if you didn't care. But you've paralysed yourself with doubt and uncertainty and the desire to be certain when that is impossible. You can never know whether we are doing the right thing. We can't. It's what makes us human."

She nodded. It seemed as though that nod cost her everything that she had. As though it had come from a long distance and took the effort of everything she had.

"Majesty." I said, deliberately using the title and drawing it out, tasting each syllable as I did so. "As we speak, Imperial forces are protecting the Brokilon forest from encroaching foresters meaning that, for the first time in centuries, a villager can walk the paths near the trees without fear of being shot by a dryad's arrows from the undergrowth. My understanding that the tree planting efforts mean that some men of the surrounding villagers have even been graced with the sight of a dryad and some hope that their sons might even be working alongside the dryads in the future.

"Although personally I think that this is optimistic.

"Under your decree. Non-humans all over the continent can walk the roads in peace, knowing that they will not be dragged in front of a magistrates court and persecuted in an effort to cover up other crimes, or for the crime of simply not being human.

"By your order, the churches of the Eternal Fire and the church of Kreve the sky-father can no longer persecute village herbalists and healers on the suspicion of being a Witch. Accusations of religious crimes must now be proven before civilian courts before sentence must be passed."

She was nodding now. It was a slow thing but I was relentless.

"The Elves of Dol Blathanna have a hard border that they can defend with the backing of the full might of the Nilfgaardian army and their territory is expanding due to the Aedirnian crown being unable to govern what they have. Humans and Elves live in harmony in that place now. It might be harmony at the point of an Imperial sword but from such beginnings, mighty things can grow.

"What else?" I pretended to be reaching for an answer but the truth was that I was making a ploy.

"Magic users all over the land, no longer live in fear." I went on. "From village witches that know a little bit about something and can predict the weather with some degree of accuracy down to the mightiest Sorceress can walk without fear of persecution and even better than that. Those same magic users stand and work among society without fear. Towards the betterment of that self same society.

"What else?" She wasn't quite ready yet.

"The Imperial messenger service has shrunk the world." I told her. "Now a message can be carried from the southern tip of the Empire to the Northern tip of Kaedwen within a couple of weeks. Fast horses, hard riders and the symbol of the Empress' authority gives them free passage under the knowledge that, if anyone attacks an Imperial messenger then the full weight of Imperial wrath will come crashing down on their heads.

"What else?" She was staring off into space. "What else Ciri?" I asked her.

It took her a moment. Then she cleared her throat. "The isles of Skellige are now part of the Empire. No longer do Skelligan raiders pillage and plunder shipping and the coasts of our land mass." Her eyes glinted. "While still providing enough of a focus to keep our captains on their toes."

"What else?" I prompted.

"Witchers have gained the status of Guildmasters. They are now protected from persecution."

"What else?"

"The amount of corruption in the Imperial Tax system has been reduced so that our annual tax income has increased by over 75%. Enough to mean that we do not have to raise taxes again for several years to come."

"What else?"

"We have begun a building program in some of the harder hit parts of the North, using the increased tax revenue in order to give people jobs after all of the losses in the recent wars."

"Good. What else?"

"Banditry is down. Imperial patrols have caught and hung vast numbers of bandits meaning that our roads and highways are safer than they have been for years."

"Good. What else?"

"Peace." She said. "Raids and skirmishes? Yes. But otherwise there is peace in my lands since my coronation. Princess Dorn and her people remain independent. Kaedwen has not taken advantage of Aedirn's weakened state, nor has it sought reprisals on Redania's actions in the war."

"No small achievement." I told her. "All of these things and your reign is only seven months old."

"Well, I was making the decisions for a few months before that." She commented slyly.

"True." I smiled back. "But think about what you can do tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that. How many more problems can you fix and how many problems can you fix after that?"

She was nodding now.

"I think you're tired Ciri." I told her. "I think you're tired and you've taken on so much onto yourself that you can barely stand. I think you've forgotten how to delegate, if you ever knew how to do it in the first place, and you are reluctant to learn because you don't know who to trust. Which means that you're lonely. You need a friend. More than that, you need friends, plural. Yes, it might be awkward at first. Yes, you might miss them when their other duties take them elsewhere. You might be afraid for them and it might make them targets but the good ones will know, understand and then, not care. Yes, some of them might remember you when you were substantially younger and talk down to you a bit. But you can soon teach them the errors of their ways. You can start with me if you like."

She laughed suddenly. "You are my brother Lord Frederick." But then she sighed, but I was reassured. For just that moment, the Empress had been back in the room.

"What should I do now?" She asked.

"Well, I'm not your advisor." She laughed.

"Then what the fuck have you been doing for the last hour or so?"

"Fair point. But I think that the other problem is that you've lost your confidence. So be a bit easier on yourself. You've made many big changes so you can afford to rest a bit. You have a, flame willing, long reign ahead of you. You can make some more big decisions later. For now, call Lord Voorhis back in and tell him that he can stop worrying."

She nodded.

"And mean it Ciri. Tell him that you're not jumping on the back of a ghost ship."

She nodded.

"How did your father tell you to make decisions?" I asked.

"He told me to listen to the advice of the best and most knowledgeable people and to then make a decision."

"So pick a small one. Pick something that you can do something about and then do it. I don't know, decide what you want for lunch, or dinner or whatever. Then make a choice about policy but then, go and listen to the bards sing. Have a drink, you've earned it. Then tomorrow? Do something else. You're going to be here for the festival anyway so take this time to collect yourself, enjoy the holiday such as it is. It's a festival after all so use it to reconnect with old friends and take the time to remember who you are."

She nodded and climbed to her feet. She was wobbly, possibly a little bit drunk but you could see her mind working. She was a ghost of her former self, the woman that, at the stroke of a pen, had destroyed the knights errant of Toussaint, but she was there. She looked around, decided that she wasn't quite ready and so took another long drink from one of the Queen's drinks bottles before grimacing at the taste.

"Phooey." She said. "I don't know how they drink that crap." Before taking another slug of it. Squaring her shoulders and marched to the door.

"Lord Voorhis." She called before turning back. The door opened instantly and Lord Voorhis entered. I got the sense of other people in the corridor outside kind of scampering out of the way to avoid being seen.

"Queen Cerys too please." The Empress added. Because, much to my joy, she was the Empress again. Wobbly and shaky but she was the Empress again.

Queen Cerys also came in to stand next to Lord Voorhis.

"Queen Cerys, I'm afraid that my adopted brother and friend, Lord Frederick have done rather a lot of damage to your drinks table. I hope that you will forgive us."

Something in the Queen's eyes flickered. I don't know what it was though as I didn't and don't know her well enough.

"Of course, majesty." The woman said.

"With your permission, We would like to ask to be allowed to stay here during the time of the Skeleton Ship. We remember that time fondly from our childhood and would like to witness it again, from wherever you deem it safe and fitting." Note the royal we had come back.

I might have been imagining it but I thought I saw Lord Voorhis' eyes widen and a whoop coming from the corridor outside.

"Of course, Majesty." Queen Cerys said again.

"Lord Voorhis?" The Empress turned her attention to him.

"My Empress?"

"We will be staying here to witness the passing of the Skeleton ship through the harbour of Kaer Trolde. After that, we wish to see the state of affairs in Aedirn so that we might take steps to correcting the situation in the Pontar delta."

"Yes, Imperial Majesty."

"Kindly ensure that we have enough escort to ensure that there will be no difficulties."

"Yes, Imperial Majesty. Thank you Imperial Majesty."

"Then I think I would like some lunch. After lunch I will wish to discuss what we can do about this outbreak of plague. I would like to see Druid Ermion if he's available as well as Lady Eilhart and have my personal Surgeon attend to discuss the matter."

"Yes Imperial Majesty."

"Lady Yennefer?" The Empress raised her voice a little. Yennefer had slipped into the room unnoticed and now stood forward. "Lord Frederick is rather ill having over-exerted himself. Would you see to it that he gets some rest as he has quite a bit to do."

"Gladly your Majesty," Yennefer smiled slightly. "Come along Freddie."

The small, dark haired Sorceress led me through the labyrinthine fortress before we came to a quiet corridor. She caught hold of my arm and held on until we stopped. Very carefully, she checked one way, then the other. Then abruptly she threw her arms around me and hugged me.

Hard.

"Thank you Lord Frederick." She whispered.

Gratitude from Lady Yennefer. Will wonders never cease.