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

125. Chapter 125

As it turns out though, one does not simply dine with the Duchess of Toussaint.

A small, informal dinner turned out to be six courses. Eight if you include the small table of nibbles and tiny pastries before hand as well as the platters of fruits and cheeses afterwards. I had forgotten about this side of Toussaint hospitality.

Also, a small intimate gathering of people contains at least thirty people. Don't ask me where they get this sense of scale but there you go. And this wasn't even our "official" welcoming banquet which would be taking place on the morrow. It was happening this way on the insistence that we would need time to settle in. A thing that had been agreed by both my sister and the Duchess' master of ceremonies. A Toussaint Banquet is not something that you can just go straight into unprepared after all.

But I had forgotten about the food of Toussaint. Rich in creams and cheese based sauces, delicately flavoured and so filling that you pushed one course away moments before another course turned up in front of you, covered in a wine based gravy that smelled so enticing that, despite already feeling as though you were about to explode, you simply had to take at least a small sample of so as to avoid being rude as well as in order to see if the food tastes as good as it smells.

It does. It always does.

Also, for an informal gathering, it also required my very best clothing. One of the dubious pleasures of the following day was going to be when the Ducal tailor would come to our rooms in order that Kerrass, Mark and myself should be fitted with clothing proper and appropriate to our station. We would need several changes of this kind of clothing during this visit to Toussaint in order to deal with all of the balls and banquets and Flame knows what else that we would be required to attend.

I was positively giddy with anticipation. But for now, I was dressed in my formal clothing with several other layers of padding underneath in order that I not become too cold. Kerrass, the ever present nurse-maid, inspected me during this entire process and sniffed before deciding that he was happy with the results.

His meeting had passed rather quickly with The Duchess. He gravely told us all what had happened while Emma and Laurelen were doing each other's hair, I scribbled some notes about something that had caught my attention during the day, Ariadne was taking care of her own ablutions but listening through the link that she shared with me. Mark had just changed his cassock for a fresh one and was standing in front of the fire.

The Duchess had taken the meeting with her sister, Captain De La Tour and Colonel Duberton of the 4th. There was also another knight who was invited to attend but had been late to the meeting for a reason that I was not party to. Syanna had been cross on the subject and from her dark mutterings, I rather thought that this knight was part of the rival faction to her and her sister.

But everyone had listened to what Kerrass had to say, asked a few questions, expressed their own dissappointment that the information Kerrass had gathered was not more defined or definitive. Something to which Kerrass agreed readily. Then Kerrass had left to allow the Duchess to discuss the new intelligence with her immediate advisors. I do not know what came of it, but Commander Syanna was still frowning in thought when she came to escort us all to dinner later.

The dinner started with a light kind of reception sort of affair which people seemed to kind of drift into. It was, for Toussaint, highly informal in that there was no receiving line. It was just people wandering in, taking a glass of wine and mingling informally. There was a minstrel off in the corner who was gently plucking away at a Lyre, seemingly oblivious to anything else other than the music that he was playing, his eyes were closed and I found myself wondering if he stroked his lover in the same way that he stroked that musical instrument. Eyes closed, head moving with the music as he gently stroked the strings. The music easily spreading out into the open silences.

Not that there were many of those really. As it does with this kind of thing, People started to talk and then when more people started to talk then the overall noise factors of the place started to become louder and louder. But there was a genteel kind of atmosphere about the place.

Emma tells me that the Lyre player was very good. Just playing the way he wanted with no real tune but clever harmonies as he just played away, letting the sound and the melody take him where it wanted.

The room itself was what I was told to be the Duchess' own dining room. So not the Throne room or the official Banquet hall which was much larger. Like the rest of th ecastle, it had an air of a place that had been quickly... stripped of it's decorations. If you looked at the walls too closely you could see damage in some of the wood panneling where an over enthusiastic person had accidentally gouged the wood to get the gold off.

It was now plain wood panneling. Torches and things on the wall to generate heat and light. Armour stands and weapons were regular things but also sprigs of winter plants such as holly and accompanying berries for a splash of colour. There were also a number of busts of various people that I took to be family members due to the striking resemblence to both the Duchess and her sister both.

I truly wish that I had been entirely healthy and on top of my game that night. I feel as though I missed a lot of the subtleties that I would enjoy in the middle of that throng. I might have learned things that would have stood me in good stead later. But I was still in a bewilderment of fear, sickness, left over feelings from earlier spikes in my nervous system. I was dreading the inevitable queue of people coming over to wish me well and to enquire after any progress regarding the search for my sister. I was nervous over the coming events, the conversation regarding my health and Ariadne's decision to choose a surrogate to help with my return to healing.

And then there were all the warnings about the potential enemy factions that were due to be coming after us. So, in being hyper-alert and hyper-aware of everything going on, I actually managed to miss a great deal so some of what happened that night had to be related to me later on.

For instance, I missed the fact that in that early part of the reception when it was mostly made up of people sitting around and talking, The Duchess and her sister spent a large amount of time talking with their heads together. That might not be too surprising but I also managed to miss the people that were watching the pair from the sidelines. Being nervous that the two sisters might have come together in some way that had not been previously contened with.

I also missed the fact that Mark was extremely popular with everyone, but that Emma was not. Mark was, to a certain extent, in as much trouble as I was. It appealed to the romantic nature of the people of Toussaint that here he was, one of the highest ranking people in the Church of the Eternal Flame. Dying of some unknown disease, but at the same time, continuing to soldier on and perform his duty as he saw fit. They admired him for that and there were no small number of enterprising noblewomen that were making their concern and admiration known to him, most ardently. Much to the disgust of some of their male escorts but even despite that, I rather think that Mark might have made a splash among some of the female population of Toussaint who all wanted to take care of him, should that have been his inclination.

I have never heard Mark pass comment on his romantic preferences but I do not doubt that he will have been gallant, courteous and blissfully unaware of all the attention that he was getting.

Emma on the other hand, was treated with an almost cold indifference until a certain event took place. When we were last here, the people of Toussaint did not care about the fact that Emma and Laurelen were lovers. They liked the romance of the entire thing and as such did not mind. But now, Emma more than Laurelen, seemed to be struggling with people not wanting to talk to her. Or pretending that they had not heard her. I'm told that she took it like an old hand though, as though she was used to it and had not expected anything else.

It continued until Commander Syanna and the Duchess broke apart their mini conference so that the Duchess could come and comandeer Emma, laughing at all the jokes and loudly telling everyone how Coulthard management had produced the best Kayalese wine for years. Indeed, a point was made that it would be this wine that people would be drinking tonight before it then went off to the vaults to be laid down to age and mature properly. The night's dishes had been chosen, specifically, to compliment the efforts of Lady Emma Coulthard on bringing the Kayalese vinyard out of the dire straights that it's previous owners had left it in.

As a reminder. The Kayalese vinyard was the one presided over by Sir Craythorne's family. In his disgrace there was no heir to the estate and so, as is proper for Toussaint law, the estate had reverted to the Duchy. It was part of the justice administered to Sir Craythorne that his family estate would then go on to be used in order to help create the new order of knights to take the place of the old Knight's Errant. The Manor house had been turned into a barracks and training building and the surrounding vinyards were turned over to the Coulthard family to administer in order to help finance the new order of knights.

It was part of why Mark was so popular in Toussaint that he had asked to continue using the old name for the wine rather than it be called the "Coulthard Vinyard" on the grounds that a dissappointing son should not be the reason why so old a lineage should be forgotten overnight. Thus showing mercy, one of the five knightly virtues of Toussaint.

And Emma had used the vinyard as she saw fit, produced the wine and done, to all purposes, an excellent job in administering the place. It would seem that this was the reason that people were unhappy with her. For doing too good a job maybe? For showing up those families that have been doing it for years? That is also a theory.

She was not without friends though. I was introduced to a young couple. A Lord Liam and Lady Matilda who, between them, seemed to have inherited and bought three of the larger vinyards in Toussaint. Especially prominent as all three were located relatively close to Beauclair itself. They were pleasant enough, although they seemed to have that energy that some couples have where they enjoy sniping at each other a little too much for my own comfort. I can't imagine wanting to spend the rest of my life with someone who entertains themselve by trying to make me bleed.

It must be working for them though as she was clearly, and rather heavily, pregnant. Emma was well aware of this and knew enough to state with some certainty that the baby was a couple of months off yet.

Laurelen was off spending time with Lady Vigo discussing various matters. They had a similar air about them that the Duchess and her sister had had when they were talking. So I was left wondering if they were discussing what Kerrass had found as well.

Ariadne was my guide during all of this. She had changed into one of her more subdued formal gowns which in this case was a muted, dark blue. The blend of her own stylistic choices of the darker colours but with the defined colours that were chosen from Toussaint. Long sleeved with a certain amount of lace at the wrists and at the neck. She wore her symbol of the Eternal Flame prominently and proudly as she guided me through the throng, making observations about what she was seeing and what was happening around us.

It was in this manner that I met Lady Duberton for the first time and the poor woman, who was clearly overwhelmed by all of this... Tousaintiness around her, latched onto the Northern visitors as though we were a piece of wood thrown to a drowning woman.

In her words, she absolutely loved Toussaint but she had a tendency to find it all a little overwhelming. Especially the people who she described as being "A bit full on." She would be travelling home for a while in the spring while her husband finished off his tour of duty and was looking forward to his return from that where she hoped to start a family.

She was not unusual in a Nilfgaardian woman in my experience. She did not chafe against all the controls that people place on her gender on the grounds that it was all she had ever known and all she had ever been taught to expect. She had been encouraged to widen her experience by her husband and had become a voracious reader of all things, to the point where she would be considered to be self-educated. She had lots of little fascinations that she would chase through the library.

She claimed to have dozens of books waiting for her at any one time but envied the discipline of those who she called "serious scholars" to be able to stay on one topic for extended periods of time. But that meant that she could discuss specific topics in great detail until it became clear that she had been distracted by another field of study.

She was also a little naive. She teased Ariadne for claiming to be a Vampire as it would seem that she didn't really believe that Vampires existed. She thought that Vampires were just some kind of made up northern superstition. So when she was confronted with an actual vampire or the very real victims of Vampire attacks in Toussaint, she had a strange reaction of not really believing them. Ariadne offered to demonstrate but Lady Duberton pointed out that such things would probably not be entirely welcome at the Duchess' table. Which they wouldn't, to be fair.

I liked her. She was charming, a little shy and a little too eager to defer to other people's opinions other than putting forward her own. She hid what she was thinking carefully and I suspect that if she put her mind to it, she would be a formidable card player. It took us a while to break through her reserve, but when we did, we found a considerable wit under there that enjoyed playing off her perceived naivete on those people that were more worldly in the room.

I also became reacquainted with Lord Marhsal Palmerin de Launfal. The uncle of our bodyguard.

Lord Palmerin and I had become acquainted when I had last come to Toussaint. I had protected his identity at the time because I didn't think that he deserved all the hate that was bearing down on his head. I could easily imagine that if I had identified him in my writing of that time and place, then his life would have been made incrimentally worse.

But he was one of the first people to come and see me during that short little reception before the meal itself actually started.

So who was he? Not an unfair question before I get on with talking about how and who he is now. Back when we were hunting down Jack, I described the disaster of the Fish Market where the man masquerading as Jack, or having taken on the aspects of Jack, however we want to say it. When Jack had goaded the Knight's Errant into attacking and disrupting the plan that had been in place in order to capture him properly. There had been one Knight Errant that had held his rank and stood firm. He had stood and screamed, ordered, yelled, begged and cajoled his fellow Knights Errant to maintain their files and stick to the plan and his efforts had been fruitless.

He had become a broken man that day and had gone from a strong, blustery and powerful man to being a shell of his former life. He had stood before the Empress and the Duchess and declared that the fault regarding the disaster lay solely with the Knights Errant and as the only surviving Knight without injury from that night, he had decided that it was his duty to take on the penalty for all of that horror upon himself.

The two powerful women had refused this interpretation of events and, backed up by Lord Geralt who is, I understand, a friend of Lord Palmerin from times gone by, as well as the other Witchers, Sam and the the other knights of the Imperial Guard, it had been declared that Lord Palemerin was without fault in the matter.

But all of those people had not taken into account the fact that Toussaint will be Toussaint and two things had happened. The first was that Lord Palmerin still believed that he was at fault here and he believed that he deserved to take the blame for everything that happened. His was the failure and therefore he deserved the punishment and if neither of his lieges would do that punishing for him, he resolved to do it to himself.

He was not aided in this matter by the rest of Toussaint society who took his lack of injury as being evidence of cowardice.

I shit you not.

So he was decried from tower to tower. Phrases were uttered like "Well... He's always been a bit funny hasn't he." and "He might have been the blade that tipped the difference." And "At least those other men had the balls to stand up."

As I say. Toussaint will be Toussaint. They were too used to the tales of the invulnerability of the Knights Errant. They could take it on board that a Knight could fail but nearly always, that failure would result in the death of the knight in question. Lord Palmerin had failed. Provably that was the case. So why had he come back. Why had he failed?

They were also too used to the legend that knights will perform their duties or die in the attempt. He had not when so many others had. The only possible explanation from their point of view was that he was a coward.

The matter was not helped by the fact that Lord Palmerin absolutely agreed with them.

In the immediate aftermath of the event he had spent a good amount of time trying to apologise to Emma, Sam, Mark and myself. When we all told him that he had nothing to apologise for, he spread his apologies to the surviving Witchers, Kerrass, Ariadne and Laurelen. Then when it became clear that no-one was accepting his apologies. Outsiders because we didn't believe that an apology was needed and the people of Toussaint because they didn't believe that an apology was enough, he set himself some penance.

He threw himself into the efforts to search Toussaint for any sign of my sister. When they found the petty Necromancer that had managed to animate a rabbit, it was Palmerin that kicked in the door. When they unearthed the bandit strongholds it was Palmerin that was first into the attack. When the Smuggler ring was broken, it was Palmerin...

I'm sure you get the idea.

It was clear to everyone that he was looking for a way to die so that he could wipe away his cowardice with his own blood. Unfortunately, the effort was futile because Lord Palmerin was also really really good with a blade. All that happened was that he got some more dents in his armour because it was implausible for him to actually allow someone to kill him. He just wanted to die in service to the Duchy.

Luckily, the Duchess had a great deal of affection for Lord Palmerin and summoned him back to Beauclair where she insisted that he preserve himself. She declared him the last true Knight Errant and told him to do his best to ensure that the future generations of knights would have his example to live up to.

It is my opinion that this was a mistake. It is still something of a topic of discussion in certain circles in Toussaint and I even managed to have the debate with the Duchess herself at one point. But I maintain that this was a mistake. This is because Lord Palmerin's reputation was already damaged. And in saying that he was the last true thing. Then the inference was that all knights Errant were like him. And as everyone thought that Palmerin was a coward, then everyone thought that the Duchess was calling the other Knights Errant cowards in return.

Lord Palmerin did not take this very well either. But he did his duty as he saw fit. He sold his armour and weapons, sending the proceeds to the poor houses and to the orphanage that exists just outside of Beauclair. Then he spent a bit of time stripping his family estate of all wealth so that he could live as an all but hermit. The buildings started to fall down and decay and the only reason that he devoted any time to the upkeep of the buildings were when his relatives would point out that he was leaving nothing for his next of kin to use upon his death.

At some stage in the middle of all of this his wife left him. I never had the chance to meet her properlyback then as she exiled herself to the estates after the disaster of the Fish-Market. She was a much injured woman anyway. I do not want to say that she was abused but she was certainly an unhappy woman. Lord Palmerin suffered from that sickness that afflicts a lot of the higher ranking Toussaint nobility which was that his first love was for Toussaint. His second love was for the Duchess, even though that love was an unromantic kind but more of a love of devotion or a love of a symbol. Which made his wife a distant third at best.

This was made worse by the fact that, at some point in their marriage, A Succubus had come to Toussaint and Lord Palmerin had been one of those men to fall under the spell of the Succubus. Through no fault of his own to be fair. Having been one of those men who have felt the full force of a Succubus' desire, if she had chosen him as a lover then there would have been very little that Lord Palmerin could have done about it.

But the good lady could only reconcile the fact that she was essentially a baby-making device for so long, given that her duties in that regard were long over. She was compensated by the family wealth and luxury so that when Lord Palmerin had started giving that away. Then her rage had driven her into the arms of a poet in Beauclair itself. When she was done with the poet, she moved on to an artist and on and on it went.

Lord Palmerin is up front and honest about these things. He is aware that what she was essentially doing was that every time she spent a fraction of his wealth, then she was doing it to drive a dagger into his heart. Every time she cuckolded him with the latest artistic pretty boy, allowing herself to become a notch on so many people's bed posts, she was doing it to get her vengeance upon him for years of neglect.

During one of his fits of self-flaggelation, he bought her a nice town house with plenty of room for entertaining, set her up with servants to see to her every need and want. He calls it his apology to her.

Needless to say that she hated him for this gesture.

That might sound like it was a lot, given that it all took place in a little under four or five months, but again, you are thinking like a member of the rest of the continent. These people are from Toussaint. They like to pack as much drama and scandal into as small a space as possible.

Lord Palmerin credits his recovery to two people.

The first person was Commander Syanna who staged a one woman siege of his manor house and hauled him out of it by his ear when he was feeling particularly lonely and determined in his self-pitying drunkenness. Her words.

He still hated her for everything that she had done during the lead up to the night of the Long Fangs, especially the death of his friend Lord Peyrac-Peyran. But in his drunken state, he was no match for her. She plunged his head into a horse trough repeatedly and often until he had sobered up enough to sit on his horse without falling off. Then she dragged him off to where the training had already began for the knights of Saint Francesca and she had him perform an inspection.

When he was done, he was shown to her office where she and Captain de La Tour were waiting for him. They asked him what needed to be done to improve things, to improve the training regime. Naturally he had some ideas and Commander Syanna enquired as to when he would want to start work.

The other person that helped save him was the same Succubus that had caused so much trouble in his marriage previously. She had gone off him when he was wallowing in his self-hatred. But when she heard that he was doing his best to recover, she had visited him and they had restarted their love affair. She moved in with him into his manor house and the two lived as a man and his favoured mistress. She had a way of turning up when he was home, but allowed him to go off and "work" which was when she would go off and have adventures of her own.

There was a lot of scandal about it but in the end, Lord Palmerin decided that there were two types of scandal. Scandals that he would care about and scandals that he would ignore. He examined the five virtues of knight hood and decided that he was breaking none of them. According to people that have known him the longest, he has never been happier.

I remembered him as a well muscled man with a thin, clean shaven face despite the large side-burns that men of Toussaint seem to favour. He shaved his head deciding that if he was going to go bald then he would be in control of the matter.

He seemed a lot thinner to me now, when he approached me in that small reception hall. I will freely admit that this might be due to the fact that he was not wearing his armour which can make even the thinnest and most wiry man appear big and muscled. Or maybe the muscles happen because you spend all your time in the armour. It's one of those tricky things to be able to tell.

He was still a broud shouldered man, somewhere in his fifties. When his face rests, it has taken on an air of sadness that he finds difficult to dismiss, meaning that when he is deep in thought, he tends to attract comments from others as to wondering what it was that he was so unhappy about. He was wearing a thick leather arming jacket that had been tailored a little to both appear a little more formal but also to fit his frame that little bit better. There were also a large pair of leather gloves tucked into his belt and another thick leather hood that had been pushed back so that it settled around his neck. His boots were worn and comfy looking. In a land where everything was a statement, he was just as at home here in court as he would have been in the training yard.

He had a large fighting dagger on one side and a long sword on the other. He had strapped it carefully so that it didn't trip him up but nor did it spin around and catch people out.

Of course, his clothing was plain leather. Another statement. In the same way that the knights of Saint Francesca wore their armour polished but unadorned, he was wearing his arming jacket. Well made, clean and cut to suit him, but without the vanity that would have led to the dyes and the colour coordination that many other people might have let themselves indulge in.

His sword was different as well. Gone was the jewelled pommel and golden wire wrapped blade. Now there was a simple leather wrap and a plain metal pommel that had been carved into the symbol of the cup of Toussaint.

The only colour on him was his coat of arms that he wore above his heart and the symbol of the knights of Saint Francesca on his back.

Believe me when I say that we will get back to that.

I found that I liked him more in this way. He had changed from the relaxed kind of ultra formality that he had worn like a shield. Now he just gave off the air of someone who doesn't give a damn. He had decided what was right and what was wrong and be damned to anyone that thinks differently.

This was most personified in the matter of his escort. He had brought the Succubus to dinner with the Duchess.

Lord Palmerin and his escort were already at the little reception when we arrived, myself in one of my better coats and with Ariadne on my arm. It was hard not to notice him but he did his best, standing at the back of the room while he waited for the other VIPs to get their opportunity to shake my hand and kiss Ariadne's knuckles. He did catch my eye at one point and gave just the hint of a wink before coming over to us when we found a moment of quiet.

"Lord Frederick." He said, cutting through the crowd with the experience of someone who has been to more of these than is reasonably appropriate. "Might I say that it is good to see you."

"Lord du Launfal." I said taking his hand and bowing slightly, as befitted someone of a higher rank than I. "Or is it Lord Marshall du Launfal now?"

He laughed. He seemed to do that much easier now. Something for which I was grateful. "Palmerin, please Lord Frederick. The knights of Saint Francesca are not overly given to displays of overt formality."

"Then I suspect that I should also insist on being called Freddie."

"And I shall ignore it. Just as, I suspect, you will ignore my insistence to be just, Palmerin to you."

"Well." I mused. "I will certainly struggle not to affix a "Lord" to the front of that."

"Then I will settle with Lord Frederick on formal occasions and Freddie in private. Is that more acceptable?"

"I think that that will do nicely Lord Palmerin." I said. "You remember my fiancee? Madame La Comtesse, Ariadne du Angral."

"I do not believe that I have ever had the pleasure." He said, bowing to Ariadne formally. Notably not pressing his lips to her knuckles. "You are a lucky man Lord Frederick."

"I would prefer to think of myself as a lucky woman Lord du Launfal." Ariadne said with just a touch of asperity.

"Forgive me," he bowed again. "I meant no offence."

"Then none taken. I worked hard to engage this man and I am always a little dismayed when that effort on my part is dismissed."

He laughed again. "I wanted to introduce my escort who has been simply dying to meet you." He turned and called "Darling?"

The woman dissentangled herself from the raw and bald hatred that was levelled at her by a significant chunk of the older women in the room and approached. She is a Succubus. What can I say. A little more dark skinned than the average skin tone of Toussaint, Large Blue eyes that seemed to wear an almost constant twinkle of amusement. Her hair was long, blonde and lustrous which, in this case, was pulled back in the current Toussaint fashion. Her horns came out of the back of her forehead and curved backwards gently. She wore a long gown with voluminous skirts in exactly the same shade of blue as her eyes.

It was cleverly done. Her hair was cut so that if you didn't know what you were looking for you would be prepared to swear that the horns were some part of a headdress. And the skirts were cut so that, unless you were quick, you would almost be left to assume that the occasional betrayal of the different shaped legs were a trick of the cloth.

Of course she was beautiful. Absurdly so but then, Succubus. She smiled easily as she approached. She had been in a conversation with Madame Duberton of all people and excused herself formally with a smile and a gentle pat on the arm.

"Now Tubbynubs." She said chidingly to Lord Palemerin. "What did we say about introducing me in formal situations? Such an interesting, fascinating and... important word."

Palmerin who, again, couldn't give a damn turned back to Ariadne and I. "I have the honour to present my Mistress Natanis." His eyes twinkled as he said it. "Mistress, it is my honour to present Lord Frederick von Coulthard, Proffessor of Oxenfurt university and his fiancee, Madame La Comtesse, Ariadne du Angral."

The Succubus' eye looked me up and down appraisingly as the introduction begun before Palmerin got to my name. Then her eyes widened and the air of mild temptation left her instantly.

"You're him," she said in a whisper.

"Oooookay." I said.

Natanis stared at me for a long moment before turning to Ariadne. "Madame La Comtesse," she curtsied formally and deeply. "I must crave your pardon for a moment as I must embrace your man. For although he does not know me, he did me a great service. I have learned that ladies of your station and," she smirked despite the formal tones of her speech, "...power do not always appreciate me showing my appreciation in this way to people that I care about or am grateful to. But I simply must. If it helps, I prefer my prey to be somewhat more aged in vintage and I am well sated at present by my Dear Tubbynubs here."

Ariadne smiled and pretended to consider a moment as the speech went on. "I think I can permit an embrace."

"I am grateful."

Then I got hugged by a Succubus. Hard. Almost hard enough to crack my ribs. "I might make an exception for one such as you though." she whispered fiercely in a way that, I won't lie, made my loins stir. "Thank you. From the bottom of this monster's heart. Thank you."

I was astonished to hear tears in her voice as she pulled back. "I read what you wrote about my sister. I had not expected such kindness."

The proverbial penny dropped. "You and Saffron... I did not know that Succubi had familial relationships?"

"We are all sisters. But the one you called Saffron and I... I loved her once."

Palmerin offered her a handkerchief and she blew her nose loudly before looking at me again. "You are sick." She declared.

"Just a cold. I am..."

"No," she shook her head sharply. "There is something deeper..." She lifted her hand and moved towards placing it on my chest. "Something here." She pulled back, just before contact was made. "I rather think that you would not sustain me much anyway Lord Frederick. Is there anything I can do to help you. Anything at all then please?"

"That would depend on what you can do?" Ariadne asked curiously.

The Succubus turned to Ariadne and her eyebrows rose. "You are trying to..." Then she grinned and took Ariadne's arm. "I think we should talk, oh terrifying one."

"Ariadne's eyebrows rose in amusement as this, rather formidable Succubus tugged her over into a corner where the two of them had their heads together for quite a while before dinner was called.

"Grateful to you Lord Frederick." Lord Palmerin said. "She was heart-broken when Saffron died. She was inconsolable for a long time and nearly charged off north to find out what happened. Then we heard that the matter had already been dealt with and Saffron had been avenged. When word reached us that it had been you and your Witcher that had done it, she demanded that I buy her everything that you have written. She wept when she read your account. And she cheered most bloodthirstily when you described the vengeance that you enacted."

He turned to me. "I know somehting of what you suffer." He told me. "I can see it in your eyes. It is the gaze of a good man who has gone through to much, who has seen too much but has forced themselves onwards to see more. To do more. Where... I don't want to say Lesser. But where other men," he smiled slightly. "Where more sensible men would set things aside and rest. Where they would say, "No more". Good men push on and hurt themselves more surely than any enemy might have managed. It is no shame to acknowledge that, nor is it a shame to allow others to take up the fight while you recover."

He sighed a little and a sadness swept across his expression. "Believe me when I say that the fight will still be there when you are ready."

We chatted for a while after that. He told me about the training of the knights that he had been overseeing. His reluctant pride in how Commander Syanna had stepped up to the fore in the command and administration of the knights. But his pride in what they had shaped towards the service of Toussaint. I promised that Ariadne and I would join him and Natanis for dinner at his manor house should we be able to find the time.

We did not discuss Jack or the events of that long ago night. Nor did we talk about Francesca. In regards to that matter, he had drunk the communion wine on the matter of "Saint" Francesca and felt awkward in discussing the saint with her brother. It was an awkwardness that I appreciated.

For all those other people that I met that night that I haven't name checked then I apologise. Lord Palmerin and his "Mistress" stood out for me, as did Lady Duberton but, as has been expressed by many, including me, I was not at my best.

It was one of those arrangements where we were sat at an open square of a series of tables. I was sat next to Ariadne on one side and to my right was Lord Palmerin. During the meal we were entertained by a juggler and some acrobats who were, undeniably skilled, but I lacked the porper depth to be able to properly appreciate them. They were certainly very good but I could not tell you how good. It struck me that I might have seen better in roadside caravans where men and women took more risks but the payoff was a more dazzling display.

Then there was poetry and music but the oooh'ing and aaah'ing meant that conversation was all but impossible. Which might have been part of the design after all. It would certainly be within the Duchess' abilities to craft an evening to ensure that we would not be able to discuss to much politics on the opening night.

The evening mostly devolved into a series of people coming up and wishing me well for my coming nuptials as well as small anecdotal stories about how good a person Francesca was. It was all fairly meant but I was left with the most distinct impression that no-one could really understand just how painful all of that was to me.

As I say, dinner was huge, rich and delicious. The courses interspersed with the entertainments and more wine than I was strictly comfortable with. Kerrass, the ever present nurse-maid took me in hand when he realised that I was falling asleep in my chair and said something to Ariadne who, in turn, said something to Emma who whispered something to the Duchess.

And just like that, the night was over. I climbed to my feet, made my respects to the Duchess and made it back to our suite of rooms where I had a little weep to myself for being so overwhelmed. I was warned that tomorrow would be a busy day though as that was when our official banquet was to be held and there was a list of "things that needed to be done in the meantime" to be done during the day.

Ariadne put me to bed that night. She stood over me while I drank some of the potion provided by Sir Walther and helped me change into my nightshirt. The potion was powerful stuff and we made a note that, in the future, should I need to use the stuff again, then I should get changed after taking it.

Ariadne sat on the bed and we talked a while before she left. She told me that she had some people that she needed to see in the nearby area and that she would be back in the morning. I remember asking if I should be concerned and she told me that I didn't need to worry. I distinctly remember her saying that if there was anything to worry about, then she would already be dead.

It was not an encouraging statement.

But regardless of my sudden worry for the woman that I love, I had the best, most restful, most dreamless night's sleep that I had had in months. If not years.

I was woken up disgustingly early though, so it might be that the good night's sleep is only good in my memory due to the fact that I had to be dragged from my bed, almost literally kicking and screaming.

Fortunately for everyone's sanity, including my own, Ariadne had brought some of her coffee with her as a gift for the Duchess. Therefore I was lifted from my dreamless slumber by the heady aroma of the strongest blend that she could manufacture. It was served with enough honey and milk in order to make it palatable to my undisciplined palate, but it acted in much the same way that a red hot pitch fork up the back-side would.

Breakfast had been served in our rooms that day as it was clear that we could look forward to a day of extensive activities. More than one of them seemed to be almost designed purely to aggravate me but I was a guest so...

The first of these activities was the arrival of the Duchess' own tailor. I hope that no-one gets offended when I describe him as a fussy, effeminate man with dark hair, moustache and a pair of magnifying glasses on his nose. He seemed to have several pairs of these that he used depending on what it was that he was trying to focus on. Immaculately dressed in colours that were so vibrant that they hurt the eyes a little bit. I have no idea as to his character as he barely exchanged any words with me. His conversation seemed to be purely spent with Ariadne who was also getting fitted and a few words exchanged with Emma. So Mark, who got to share my discomfort that day along with Kerrass, and I were simply told where to stand, how to stand and what to do while we were measured thoroughly.

No we didn't really get much of a choice in what we were going to wear on the grounds that we would be dressed according to the fashions and the requirements of the event that we were going to. So I was standing there being measured. Or I was sitting there and having some breakfast while giggling at Kerrass' discomfort and also admiring Ariadne as she took the fitting for her own garments.

The Tailor chatted amiably with Ariadne about Fabric choices and colour palettes but it soon became clear that the tailor would make his own mind up on such matters and that if we didn't like it then it wasn't us that were paying for it all therefore he didn't care that much.

The Duchess' own hair stylist was also in attendance who spent some time fussing over Emma, Laurelen and Ariadne as well before, much to my horror and disgust, I too had my hair cut and styled according to whatever it was that I was going to be doing over the course of the day. Apparently just cutting the ends of it with a pair of shears was not going to be good enough. There needed to be a style here.

I jest really. It was not as bad as I am making out. But there is certainly a small amount of truth in the fact that I was a little out of my depth in these things. When all was said and done and I had ended up having a little bit too much coffee while having my fill of the wonderful breakfast pastries that had been sent up by the Ducal kitchen. It was time to start the days... festivities.

Lady Syanna arrived to collect us and during the process we had all changed into our mourning guard. Black on black. At everyone's insistence, I did not wear my weapons. I had an eating knife and my combat dagger on my belt as overt weapons. And of course, my boot knife was in my boot. I actively can't wear boots now without there being a boot knife in the middle of it. Progress I suppose.

Each of our ensembles were completed by large thick black cloaks that came out of our luggage, something that I suspect had been forseen and we were led out into the morning sunshine. There was a bright, brittle feeling to the air of Beauclair that morning. The Sun was out and the stone of the building was shining but there was just an edge to it. I don't know how else to describe it. I assume that it's due to the difference in weather systems between where we were in the North versues where we were now. It felt as though the cold winter air was made out of a delicate crystal. That if I simply breathed on it then the entire thing would shatter into a million pieces. It was like the breath that you take in before the plunge.

But all of Toussaint seems to exist on that edge of things. As though they all know just how ridiculous the entirety of their way of life is. And they're just waiting for the world to jump up and tell them how stupid it all is. That they're waiting for it all to go wrong.

But still it doesn't.

We were escorted through the palace with Commander Syanna next to us who took us out to the courtyard where we were all piled into a pair of coaches. Kerrass, myself and Ariadne got into one while Mark, Lauarlen and Emma got into the front coach. One of the knights got in beside us while Commander Syanna herself got into the coach with Emma and we were taken off through the streets of Beauclair.

I felt like an outsider looking in. I was walled off from everything by the carage's doors and the cavalry escort that rode on either side of us. There weren't exactly troops lining the streets but that was what it felt like. It felt like I was being kept away from the real world. I didn't like it. I saw the taverns that I had gone drinking in, the street corners where I had stopped for something to eat and the art galleries that I had spent a bit of time in as we all waited for the news of the searches to come in.

But now I was seperate from all of those things. I was kept apart and it didn't feel right. People would stop in the streets to watch us go past. Some waved, others bowed, a few even managed to summon a cheer. But all of them watched as we went past.

We came out of the city and around to the beginnings of the Ducal gardens. That point of things where there are several paths that lead up and towards the palace itself through the rose gardens, through the water gardens, through the herb gardens that are arranged according to smell rather than for appearance or usefulness. Ariadne particularly didn't approve of this.

I had been here before but there was a new building there now. It must have been put together awfully quickly and cost a small fortune, even by Toussaint standards. It was made out of the same colour stone as all of the other buildings with the same styles of architecture involved. It was a nice building. I don't know how they achieved the feeling that the place was already aged. As though it had always been here despite the fact that I knew for a fact that it was a recent addition.

I began to have a slow, sinking feeling as we pulled to a stop outside the entrance to this building and we climbed from our carriages. I noticed that Syanna wouldn't meet our eyes and I felt myself take a deep breath. As though I was preparing myself for something.

Emma's face was stony.

Knights opened the main entrances to the building which was where the Duchess was waiting for us with a few other VIPs. I saw Lord de Launfall was there, without the Succubus, I saw that Captain De La Tour was there and I wondered if either he, or Syanna were aware that they instinctively moved to stand together.

We arranged ourselves as best we could to ensure that we were as comfortable as we could be and that our cloaks were all arranged properly for movement and that we could get to weapons if we need to. A factor that only Kerrass and I seemed to care about, and then we entered.

"Welcome." The Duchess began, dipping low in a curtsy. "When last you were here, grievous harm was done to your family. Grievous harm and we wish you to know that we share your grief, even as we cannot possibly understand it or come close to the depth of feeling that you must have in your soul."

The premonition of something awful was coming to me again, but the Duchess had not stopped speaking.

"Although we leave the ultimate assessment of blame to the historians that come after us, we must take on a certain amount of the fault onto our shoulders. So we want you to know just how sorry we are for your loss."

Please let that be all, please let that be all, please let that be all.

It wasn't.

"I do not use the terms "we" and "our" in the royal sense." The Duchess continued. "But rather I speak for the whole of Toussaint when I say these things. The whole of Toussaint grieves and we all feel that same loss."

We nodded and mumbled our way through some gratitude and other platitudes of understanding. I saw Syanna turn and mumble something to Captain De La Tour. I don't know what it was she said but his face went bleak. Not with anger but I suspect, with a certain amount of agreement.

"Since the loss of your Sister, the people of Toussaint have wanted to show you that they share your loss. They have tried to express their own grief and their own love and sorrow for one who was taken from the world far too early. We are a country of artists. Of sculptors and poets, musicians and painters. I do not believe that it will surprise you to know that many of these artists have devoted themselves to the subject of the Lady Francesca and onwards into her symbolic status of Saint Francesca. Those piece of artwork are collected here in this building and in the gardens of rememberance. Culminating in that place near the waterfall where she was last known to be alive. We invite you to come. See the paintings, read the poetry, listen to the music and know that you are not alone in your torment."

She curtsied again and I felt myself kind of... leave.

On one level I was touched and deeply moved by the outpouring of support and love directed towards us and Francesca. But the other part of me, the greater part of me I think, thought that this was grotesque and disgusting. They had made a tourist attraction out of my sister. A place where people could come and shed fake tears and be seen to be grieving before the masses.

I found it all profoundly insulting. The bobbing little man who introduced himself as the curator of the art exhibit, with his little magnifying glasses perched on the end of his nose. His pompous assertations about the techniques involved in the production of the artwork under his care. The protestations as to how honoured he was to have us there with him while the occasionally repeated assertation that the fees charged for people to come and tour the galleries and the gardens, waived for us of course went to good causes and for his own, small upkeep. An assertation that made me want to punch him in the head so hard that his face would explode out the back of his skull.

My hatred crystallised into a point when he, with reluctance so obvious that it was insulting, told us that if any of the paintings took our fancy then he would waive the cost of the painting and that we should consider it a gift with his compliments. Notice the singlular there.

"Wait," I said, the horror too much for me to stay silent. "These paintings are for sale?"

"Why yes." He said. "We need to pay for the upkeep of the building and the gardens of course. As well as my own small stipend."

I looked at his rich clothing, at his nose with the burst blood vessels of the regular drinker, the pot belly of a man who has never missed a meal and those meals are always large and expensive. I looked at these things and I resolved, on the spot, that if no other painting took my fancy then I would choose the largest painting with the largest price tag that I would find. I would take that painting, even if it was the most tasteless and gaudy thing in the hall and I would roll it up and keep it in the basement of Angral somwhere. Just so that I could keep this piece of human waste from proffiting off my sister even a little bit more.

I hated it all. I hated the wooden panneling. I hated the artists themselves who came to stand next to their own artwork as they stood there, quivering with pride that they got to display their works before the family of the subject. I could almost feel the animosity between them all as well. It was all too easy to imagine that they were just waiting until our backs were turned before they would start clawing each others eyes out in an effort to get ahead or to achieve some notoriety or to otherwise gain a patron. I noticed, for example, that they didn't really seem to care about what any of the family thought of the artwork, but that they fell over themselves to get into the Duchess' eyeline.

I hated the artwork too. Not because it was bad. Far from it. It was exquisite because of course it was. This was Toussaint we were talking about. It was beautiful and awful in equal measure. Because they had done a really good job. A fantasticly good job. I would, legitimately, have taken all the paintings if I could have done. Just because of how good they were and how much they reminded me of Francesca.

Flame but I missed her.

I heartily encourage you to go if you can. People still, occasionally, ask me some questions about what my sister was like. I find that I can no longer answer that question. I am not unbiased in the answering and I remember my sister very differently, I suspect, from how she actually was. But if you want to know, then she is there, in that room and in those inks, oils and canvasses.

I don't know how we got through it. I really don't. Courtier training can only account for so much. Ariadne didn't leave my side. Laurelen didn't leave Emma's side and Kerrass stationed himself near Mark so that at least he had someone to lean on when it got too much. More than once, Ariadne passed me a piece of cloth when I would be astonished by the fact that the tears were running down my face. Or other times when I would wonder why my vision was blurring and lift my hand to brush the dirt, or hair from my eye only to find the tears there, waiting for me.

It was awful.

Some particular paintings that stood out for me. The one titled "The first meeting of the Empress and the Saint." This was a large, almost comical painting that depicted the moment where Francesca had fixed Ciri's hair in some far away Nilfgaardian courtroom. The Empress had told me the story, back from when she was still finding her place in Nilfgaardian society and was still in the process of wearing dresses and ornate hair styles that her hair simply refused to obey. That one day, when the carefully arranged style had fallen apart, Francesca had sorted out the problem with a wooden stirer from a jug of Lemonade.

The painting depicted that moment with the Empress wearing a large dress, of Toussaint fashion, obviously hugely uncomfortable and frustrated. Francesca was standing on a stool behind the Empress, tongue clamped firmly between her teeth as she wrestled the ashen blonde hair into order. It was the expressions on both their faces that made the painting stay together.

There was also a much simpler painting that depicted Francesca, again in Toussaint fashions, holding her skirts up so that she could play a game of hopscotch with a group of street children. Again, her tongue clamped between her teeth. Leaving me wondering if tongue between teeth is a convention in some way because I certainly do not remember Francesca ever having that particular idiosyncracy. If she had ever had such a behaviour pattern then Mother, Father, her Governess or any number of tutors would have trained her out of it for it being "unladylike".

There was also a landscape painting of Toussaint that I quite liked. With a figure that I took to be Francesca resting against a tree with a book in her hand. She was sitting on a blanket and there was a bottle, a loaf of bread and some cheeses nearby.

I could go on and on, describing each painting but many of them blur together in my memory. But do not delude yourself into thinking that it was only pleasant pictures of Francesca that we saw.

We saw a painting called "Beauty Caged" which depicted Francesca in a cage in some awful dungeon. There were several different paintings along these lines. There were several paintings of Laughing Jack stood on rooftops and one, awful painting that made me so angry that I had to turn away, that depicted Laughing Jack carrying my unconscious sister in the same way that a husband carries his bride over the threshold.

I very nearly murdered that painter there. Even though I gather that that was exactly the response that the artists was after. Rage against the failure. That we could have allowed her to fall into the hands of such an animal.

There were paintings of us in there too. There was one painting called, "A family's grief," which showed Emma, Mark, Sam and I standing together in tears with the ghostly form of Francesca stood nearby watching us with sorrow. Another painting showed the moment where the Duchess had bowed to Mark after his displays of pity and mercy towards everyone after the destruction of Craythorne, again with an image of Francesca looking on approvingly.

This was a running theme as well. Things happening with Francesca watching, sadly, happily, laughing and in joy. Ariadne and I were the subject of one such picture. The two of us sharing a tender and chaste embrace with Francesca watching, an expression of joy and pride on her face.

The entire hall was dominated by one of those epic paintings that the people of Toussaint love so much. It was a painting of Beauclair. But in all the locations were the events that took place. Numerous streets were painted with Laughing Jack killing the men of the Knights Errant and the Imperial Guard. My pursuit of Jack through the streets, the disaster of the Fish market was especially well realised. The final capture of Jack by the Witchers in the Beauclair graveyard, the Death of Sir Thomas, the exile of Sir Crawthorne.

In the middle of the painting, which is, I understand, traditional for this kind of painting. The palace of Beauclair which showed Francesca leaving the palace and then beling clubbed unconscious on the path near the waterfall. It was an epic work, one of those pictures that draws you in with all of the detail to it. Everywhere you looked there was more detail, another story of what had happened over that series of nights.

You could see the littered streamers and remains of the coronation. The murder scenes where Jack's victims had been left abandoned by the neglect of the Knights Errant. It was a powerful work. Designed to have people, viewers and historians alike, pouring over it to catch every last detail. Every facet of it demanded to be discussed and gone over. For years to come.

Mark chose a painting of Francesca knelt in prayer. By far the simplest painting of the lot. It was little more than an outline of a figure in stark black lines. Upper body, head and hands clasped together in prayer were the only things shown. But even with that simplicity it was plain who the figure was.

There was a brief complaint by the curator as he tried to insist that he could only afford one painting to go to the family. Syanna nearly took his head off before Captain De La Tour calmed her. The Duchess merely asked the puffed up little pheasant of a man as to whether or not he wanted to keep the family away from the saint. Because if he did, then such knowledge and behaviour would surely become well known in time.

He subsided after that. Especially after that Duchess agreed that the Duchy would foot a portion of the costs.

Emma chose a formal picture of Francesca in all of her finery. It was so realistic that my sister almost seemed to step out of the canvas. I didn't think Emma went for that kind of thing and said so until Emma turned to me and told me that Francesca was laughing. That it was in the eyes.

It took me a moment to see what she was talking about but it was there.

It took me quite a long time to choose a picture. I wanted them all and I wanted none of them at the same time. I was drawn in and disgusted by it all. It was obscene and beautiful at the same time and I rather think, looking back, that I was overwhelmed by it.

But in the end I kept coming back to the same picture over and over again. It was the picture of Francesca caught in laughter at some kind of inconvenient moment. Those moments when it is impolite to laugh and as a result, the fit of the giggles just won't go away. Francesca was helpless with them, hand half lifted to her face in an effort to keep things back but even then, the shaking that had come over her along with the giggles meant that she couldn't hide it any further. Tears of laughter on her face, mirrored with tears of pain on my own. I swear, as the Flame is my witness, that I heard my sister laughing in delight when I saw that picture.

I asked Ariadne if we could hang it somewhere. Apparently, I said it in a child's voice. "Of course we can." She replied. "Oh my Love, of course we can."

She told me later that she wanted to hold me while I sobbed but then I turned away and I had my courtiers mask in place again. Tears still streaming down my face.

I don't know what the Duchess was expecting from all of this. I don't know how the artists expected us to respond and I don't know how the other courtiers and people wanted us to behave. I do know that we didn't respond in the same way that they expected. I do know that they were dissappointed in us. With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect that they wanted us to be flowery with our compliments and hug the artists and thank them for their hard work on our behalf.

But instead, we were a subdued, sullen and almost angry group of people. Mark, for one, didn't even bother wiping the tears from his face as the water ran down his face. I think that Emma had been kind of expecting this, or something like it on the grounds that she knew more about how Toussaint worked and had been down here before. But even she wore a bleak, remote kind of expression on her face.

When we had seen all that there was to see and our emotions were rubbed raw, we were led to the end of the building, I could not trust myself to speak so I suspect that I came off as being quite rude to the proprieter as we brushed past him on the way out without saying anything. But I don't care. I felt a sullen... disgust is the right word. He was profitting from our dead sister and our grief and right there I wanted to knock him to the ground and pound him and pound him and pound him until all the money that he had made from the exploitation of my grief came out.

The Duchess led us out into the garden silently. I did catch one exchange between the Duchess and her sister. A kind of "I told you so," expression from Syanna with a similar kind of. "I know, but others needed to see this." Which was when the truth of the entire situation hit me in the balls. I went very cold and very quiet for a long time. Which was fair enough, but it was also true that part of my job, as a noble and as a player and performer in these areas, is that I need to play the part that is assigned to me. So I resolved to do just that.

Outside the hall, there were a group of servants with waiting cups of brandy, in theory for warming us for the coming cold. I have no doubt that I doled out some more insults as I just drank the stuff at a swallow and asked if there was a refill available. The servant looked over my shoulder to where I am sure that he was checking with the Duchess before a bottle was produced and another, slightly more generoud measure was dished out.

Nor was I alone in drinking my brandy in such a way.

Then we were led up the hill to observe some of the more... Outdoor presentations which were... something else again.

I have never seen an ice sculpture exhibit before and I dread to think how difficult it was to get the ice all the way from... wherever it was to here in one piece before the artists started carving it. I almost felt that it was obscene the expense that was gone to to make this whole thing a, well, a thing. All of the artists were carving their own particular block of ice along the same theme which was the theme of Francesca. Although I was alarmed how many of them depicted wings.

This was the exhibit that was most removed from the woman herself, Or so I felt. Because they were working quickly and with no reference material, there was a rushed feeling to the artwork. But that meant that some of the carvings were a little too abstract for my taste. And it was only when I asked the artist in question as to how the thing applied to Francesca that the image became clear. I also felt that the artists were more engaged in their work than the men and women in the painting hall. They were so absorbed that they almost seemed to resent the interruption whenever one of us asked the questions.

The poetry tent was next. An established canvas structure with a trestle table full of fruits and nibbles assembled on it. There was a small, raised platform where poet after poet would climb up on the platform and give voice to their own lines and verse about the incredible loss that everyone felt at the loss of Francesca. Some of the verse was of heart-rending quality. Sufficient to reduce me to tears and expose my heart in my chest for all to see. But other poets and poetry was so painfully bad that I winced and almost laughed at several of the rhyming couplets. Coulthard and Francesca are not the easiest words in the continent to rhyme so if you are not absolutely sure of your decision, then my advice is to move on. The Duchess sensed the change in the mood of her guests and we were moved on.

I won't go over everything that I saw that day but some of the highlights include some of the winter wine that had been brewed that now bore Francesca's name. It had been brewed from the vinyards of Corvo Bianco which means that they also bore the seal of Lady Yennefer and Lord Geralt. The man attending the bottles was a tall fussy gentleman with lenses perched on the end of his nose and a ledger book that he was reading while we were not at his table directly.

He struck me as a happy man who took pride in his work. I chatted with him briefly and it seemed that he and an older woman that cooked for the vinyard had come up with the wine. He had much to say on the subject of his master and mistress but most notably he told me that he enjoyed working for two people who knew enough to get out of the way and let the proffessionals do their own work. The wine was delicious and I told him so.

I also saw a new kind of flower that had been bred in the memorial greenhouse of Peyrac-Peyran. It seemed that there had been some form of competition with only the most beautiful of all the flowers being judged worthy enough to be allowed to bear the name of Francesca. I am not able to carry out enough of a comment on the aesthetic quality of a plant, other than to say that it was, indeed, very beautiful. Ariadne enquire more about it and asked if she might take some seedlings for... planting in her home garden so that I might enjoy them at home. She very nearly admitted that she wanted to study them to see if they had any medicinal properties but she managed to remain diplomatic.

There were also several statues that seemed to have either informed or been informed by some of the paintings that we had seen earlier. The one about Francesca being at prayer seemed to be a theme that the artists liked a lot. As did something about Francesca in torment. I turned away from all of these particular statues in disgust. I understand that artists find their inspiration in lots of different places, but I found such glorification of people suffering to be tastless. If you absolutely must glorify my sister and raise her up into being an almost semi-divine figure, then kindly do that. But do not fetishize all the things that she went through, nor all the things that those of us who love her have been through in the mean time.

There is nothing sexy about being kidnapped and taken into torment.

We stopped for lunch in another little pavilion, maybe an hour or so after midday. It was surprisingly warm in the tent as we were served various, undoubtedly delicious foods. I tasted none of them. Nor did I particularly take in the music that was being played by the attending musicians. Much to the distress of the composer that was conducting them. Ariadne, who was much more awake to the nuances of what was going on around us told us later that the composer who was conducting the musicians came to check with the Duchess that everything was alright. When the Duchess confirmed that it was and that we were all just a little overwhelmed, the small man nodded his understanding and moved off.

I know that the piece of music was good though. I heard it played many different times and it never ceases to amaze. I heard it properly for the first time later and recognised it despite not really having listened to it previously.

When the light luncheon was done. A meal which none of us really ate that much of, we started to climb the path towards the castle. I shivered. We were heading to the waterfall where Francesca had been taken and I pulled my thick cloak that much closer about myself. There was a singer somewhere, her words floating down towards us on the light breeze. The tune was full of sorrow and although I could not hear the words, I felt that they were meant for me. There was more people in the party now. People had joined us and were following behind us and as we came up to that waterfall where we had found the rock with the smear of Francesca's blood on the side, there were more people waiting for us there.

I promised myself then that if they made us take part in some kind of ceremony then I was literally going to murder someone. I didn't know who, but I was going to find the person responsible for all of this and then I was going to kill them.

We came to the waterfall and there was a large covered statue there and as we stood in front of it. Mark, Emma and I, someone pulled the cloth away.

Out of some reflex Emma turned away. Mark sobbed. I brushed the tears from my cheeks with a gesture of almost anger.

The painting showed Francesca in a virginal robe or dress, holding her hands wide in supplication, welcome, prayer, whatever you want to call it. She was staring towards us as if, I swear to the flame, as if she was beckoning the three of us in to be embraced.

She had wings.

It was, and is, a remarkable statue. At the same time, it was the religious figure, Saint Francesca in all her glory. But it was also our sister. Frannie. Even from the cold marble, I could see the humour in her eyes and the dry turn to the corner of her mouth that betrayed a humour that was just desperate to emerge from her.

"Oh Freddie." She seemed to say. "Oh Freddie," And I desperately wanted that statue to come alive and hug me for real.

Emma turned back towards the statue. I don't know if she had seen it before and knew what to expect but was still blown away by it, or if she had never seen it before.

Mark's lips moved in a whisper of prayer.

I recognised the statue. It was this statue that had been taken as the symbol for the Knights of Saint Francesca. This statue, in Silhouette, would be emblazoned on banners and on armour from now until the order of knights themselves moved on into legend and whatever comes next. It was fitting, it was honest and it was disgusting in equal measure.

I took a step forward and found myself reaching up towards her face before I pulled back. It seemed, unholy to touch her. As though I would blemish that perfect face or that in touching it and feeling the cold stone beneath my fingers, I would be reminded that she wasn't real. That Francesca was gone and that this statue was all that was left. I just stood there, looking up into her face for the longest time.

Mark broke the tableau. When he finished his prayer, he pulled Emma into an Embrace before tugging at my shoulder and pulling me in in the same way. I very nearly fought him. It was a wrench to tear my eyes away from that statue but I had lost track of how long I had stood there and how long I was in danger of continuing to stand there. I resolved there and then that I would come back here and spend some time with that statue.

The three of us stood together for a long while as we, all three of us fought for control of ourselves. Physically and mentally.

"Flame preserve me." Mark muttered.

"I hope something will." Emma sobbed quietly.

I said nothing. The expression on the statue was still in front of my eyes.

"Flame but we need to get out of here." Mark said.

We finally pulled ourselves apart and looked around us. Straight into the eyes of all the people of Toussaint that were watching us. Tears streaming down their cheeks. Only Commander Syanna would not meet our eyes.

I literally saw one man, one of the artists from the painting hall trying to surreptitiously sketch something on a pad and as I looked around I saw one of the poet's lips moving. Someone else reached for their own notepad and I shook my head.

I could already see the painting. Mark, Emma and I, stood in front of the statue that would seem to be reaching towards us to comfort us in our grief. It would be called something like "A families pain." Or "a families loss."

I wanted to vomit.

The Duchess nodded and turned away from us towards her people. "That ends the ceremony. I am sure that the Coulthard family are very tired. You may express your condolences at a later date. Knight Commander? Captain of the Guard?"

"Your Grace?" Syanna stepped forward smartly, Captain De La Tour just a step behind her.

"See to it that our guests may return to their quarters without interruption."

Captain De La Tour bowed. "Yes your grace."

"With Pleasure." Syanna hissed.

They did too. We were all but hussled along and I saw more than one, doubtlessly well meaning but utterly unwelcome, courtier unceremoniously barged out of the way to make way for our passing. Syanna grinned nastily as it was done.

We made it to our quarters and all but ran through the corridor, past the door and into privacy. Ariadne wrapped me in her arms, Laurelen did the same with Emma and Kerrass carefully steered Mark to a seat and poured him another drink.

"I'm sorry." Syanna said to us. "I'm truly sorry. I tried to tell her... But..." She just shook her head. "I'm sorry."

She left before someone could throw something at her.

I don't think you could have had a more profound effect on us if you had smashed us in the face with a hammer. That was literally how I felt. I felt dazed, confused and utterly, utterly raw.

Numb might be a word for it but I don't think that is quite right. If there is a place between being overwhelmed by something and being numbed by something then that was how I think we felt. Ariadne held me for a long time but I felt oddly calm. There were a lot of things swirling round my head. Not least of which was fatigue but also sadness, anger, frustration and outrage. I felt like I had come through an ordeal.

Part of me wondered why I wasn't weeping any more. I had been really struggling to hold it in throughtout the entire affair but now, I did not really feel the need. It seemed pointless in some way.

I wondered, almost clinicly if the tears would come later, when all was said and done, would the tears come afterwards.

It was more than possible I suppose. I rather thought that there would even be shouting.

But then I realised that I hadn't put my arms round Ariadne, instead, she had just clung on to me while I held my hands down by my sides with fists clenched. Slowly, I managed to reach up and hug her back, I suddenly felt as though I needed to comfort her.

"I'm so sorry." She muttered when she felt me react. "...Flame, but that must have been awful."

"It was." I told her, "but it's done now."

"Say the word Freddie." She told me. "Say the word and I will take you away from this place. Far away. You and me, we can go anywhere and I will take care of you." Her voice sounded oddly stricken and I wondered why she was so affected by it all. I felt her own tears on the side of my face and I stroked her back. But my treacherous thoughts rose to the surface.

"Did you just..." The words caught and I cleared my throat. "Did you just have to try and remember how to curse and blaspheme in the name of the Holy Fire."

I pulled back from her to discover, once again, that Vampires can indeed weep. I don't know why that always surprises me, but it does.

"What?" She wiped her eyes with a cloth that she pulled from a sleeve.

"You paused before you said "Flame" back then." I teased gently.

"I... I thought that that's what you do." She stammered out. "Did I do it wrong?"

"No," Mark said from where he was sitting with his head in one hand while he held the cup that Kerrass had poured for him "No you did it right." He was dragging his hand across his face and scalp repeatedly

"Did I offend you?" Ariadne asked the Cardinal of the flame.

"No." He said. "I know the difference between blasphemy and a prayer. And this deserves a prayer or two."

"Mark," I said gently disentangling myself from Ariadne. "Mark, your hands are shaking. You might wanna put the cup of wine down before you..."

Mark looked at his hand that was now trembling violently. There was a moment where he just stared as his hand shook. And then he went still.

"Fuck." I heard myself say.

Mark is not a well man and he has lost a lot of his weight and bulk since he started to get sick. But he is still a big man. If he and Sam had swapped placed and Sam had gone into the church and Mark had become a warrior then he would have been a terrifying figure on the battlefield. My brother was hugely strong when he was younger and he still has much of that strength now although he lacks the stamina to make full use of it. Physically powerful and although it is easy to forget about it under the layers of Eternal Flame robes, rank and ceremony, he can occasionally have a temper.

In some ways, Mark and I share a number of different character traits.

Mark hurled the cup that was still full of liquid at the nearest of the Knights that were inside the room. Because of course they had followed us inside. In order to keep us safe. I had been surprised at how quickly they had just fallen into the background and that I no longer really registered their presence. But Mark had not forgotten. He looked up, his pain naked in his face and found his target, hurled the cup at the nearest one and then he was out of his chair so fast that it was almost impossible to react.

I moved, trying to catch him. The knight had lifted his shield to block the cup. The other knights were also moving on the periphery of my vision. I didn't see what Emma and Laurelen were doing and Ariadne was behind me.

But it was Kerrass that caught him. Kerrass was closer, catching Mark by the wrist and spinning him to the ground. A table went flying, glass broke and someone, I think it was Emma, screamed briefly.

Kerrass twisted so that he was underneath Mark. Mark lashed out and caught Kerrass in the face. Not hard, but enough to shock the Witcher.

The door sprang open and there was the sound of crashing armour.

"Get back." I think it was Syanna that gave the order.

Kerrass had wrapped himself round Mark now, restraining Mark's arms with his legs. Looking for all the world like a limpet grasping hold of something. Kerrass was trying to free a hand and I guessed what he was trying to do. I grabbed one of Mark's arms and almost lay across my brother in restraint. There was a struggle, I was bruised at some point and we think that I must have been kicked or taken a knee in the ribs.

But in the middle of all of that, Kerrass got a hand free made a gesture before Mark's eyes and mercifully, Mark went limp.

Kerrass pulled himself free and between the two of us we got Mark to a seated position so that he leant against a chair. Gradually, Mark seemed to fold in on himself as he pulled his knees up to his chest, and covered his face with his hands and shook with silent sobs.

The sudden exertion was suddenly too much for me as well and I sat, slumped next to my brother. Even Kerrass was breathing hard.

Mark reached out and pulled me into a hug. "I'm sorry." He whispered, over and over again. I told him that it was alright, also, over and over again.

Emma was sobbing and the room settled into that tableau for a while.

Silence descended after a while.

"Emma." It was Ariadne's voice and I looked up. Ariadne had moved to stand in front of my sister. Laurelen was holding Emma but there was some interessting body language there. It was as though Emma didn't want to be held and Laurelen had just wrapped her arms round her.

"Emma," Ariadne said again. "Did you know that that was going to happen?" There was little inflection about the question. I don't know if there was anger or sadness of what there.

"That's enough." Laurelen snarled. "That's unfair."

"Is it?" Ariande remained calm. "The two of you have been down to Toussaint regularly. A display like that doesn't happen over night. Freddie and Mark could have been warned, they oculd have been prepared. I love you like you were my own sister Emma but... I have to know. Did you know that this was going to happen?"

Emma looked up in horror. "No. Of course not. How could I have known? How could you ask me that? I knew about the statue but not the glorification. How could you?"

I tried to climb to my feet as I suddenly felt the need to get between my sister and the woman that I love.

"How could you believe that I would be party to that kind of horror?" Emma wailed. "She staggered backwards from Ariadne as though she had been struck. "She was my sister too, how could... Oh Flaaame."

She wailed and tottered backwards.

Ariadne caught her and held her close. "I'm sorry." She said. "I had to know. I had to ask."

After a moment or two of Emma sobbing as Ariadne held her while Laurelen struggled to decide whether to embrace or continue to be angry, Ariadne reached out and pulled Laurelen into the hug.

At some point in the middle of all of this, The extra knights from the corridor outside were taken back outside and the doors were closed again.

I spent a lot of time staring into space as numbness and fatigue had their way with me for a while and my eyes burned.

Finally, and mercifully, the tears came and I wept silently. Mark had come back to himself enough that the two of us sat there with arms round each other and we wept.

Kerrass moved awkwardly. He poured us all drinks and made sure that we all had at least a cup in our hands. Although I noticed that he took Mark's cup away when the contents had been drunk. Emma and Ariadne had sat together on a couch and Laurelen had moved to a window. After his small round of playing at being a servant before Kerrass stood, staring into the fire.

"I've not been to Toussaint often." Kerrass said after a while. "But at the same time, I rather think it was..." He shifted his weight. "I thought that was a bit extreme. I can understand wanting to honour you all, honour Francesca but that was... That was awful."

It says something that even Kerrass was struggling.

"I mean why put you all through that again. Why do that? I get being a guest of honour. I get a private viewing of some choice pieces or two. I get a banquet but that was almost..." He spat into the flame. "Goddess, but that was grief and guilt almost sexualised. They took an almost erotic pleasure in showing you all of that. People actually came to watch how you would react to everything that they had done. And then they got so angry the more you got upset."

I took a deep breath and looked over at Emma who was now sobbing gently into Ariadne's shoulder.

"That wasn't for us." I told Kerrass, remembering my realisation from earlier. "We were players in that. That was for the people watching, not for us."

I checked on Mark who looked as though he was beginning to nod off. I squeezed his shoulder and slumped against his side. My legs felt stiff and painful and I massaged them a bit before putting my arm back round Mark. He squeezed my hand to show me that he was awake and aware of what was going on. Doing better than I would have been had our circumstances been traded.

Emma looked at me, eyes bloodshot in that special state of someone who has wept all the tears that she has to give. I met her gaze for a long time, trying to communicate that I was there and that I was on her side.

"I don't understand." Kerrass had watched me move.

"I don't know all the ins and outs." I said, struggling to make my head work. Ariadne had caught Laurelen's gaze and brought her back over to hold onto Emma. The three women sat on the couch and just held each other, Ariadne doing her best to care for and comfort both of the other women. "But I would guess that you are right." I went on. "Toussaint is fetishising Francesca and her loss. They are beating themselves up for it but also glorying in the pain and the grief and the anger at what happened afterwards.

"Francesca is becoming a figure of myth for them. A holy woman. I wonder if people are already beginning to question her existence and say that Francesca is really all the women that Toussaint have lost, let down or betrayed over time. Some ideal woman that never existed and that, at some point in a nebulous future, the term "Francesca" will become a term for a woman in peril that needs rescuing. Then it will turn into a piece of slang as well. Something where people who want rescuing from something relatively mundane. It will become a term for a drama Queen who wants someone to sweep in and sort it all out for them. "Oh you don't want to spend time with them," they'll say. "They're a real Francesca"."

I tried to shake myself clear of that train of thought.

"I think," Emma began, taking up the thread as she began to recover her composure, "that the Duchess was showing those people, reminding them, that Francesca was a woman. That grief is not to be glorified. I'm just guessing. But I think she wants people to start getting past this. Reminding people that Francesca was a woman. A woman with a family and friends and people that loved her. That the knights Errant and the people of Toussaint failed her as well as their own people and resisting that all being turned into some poetry and then forgotten about.

"She is reminding her people of the human cost." Emma went on. "She wants her people to move forward while remembering the best of the past. Not allowing this all to be dismissed as a poetic incident." Her lip curled into a sneer as she said that.

"She's afraid that Francesca will become another Heron for knights to swear by." Emma went on. "So she wants to remind them that she was real, that we exist, and that Toussaint failed us. You watch as she, and her faction at court, fall over themselves to make it up to us. To apologise for the hurt that was done to us, thus putting the artists and the romantics in their place. So that they glorify the right things and elevate the right values. So Francesca becomes a warning of what's at stake, not something to be aspired to or a romantic ideal."

"So what do we do now?" Laurelen asked. "And just to be clear Love," She said to Emma especially "I hate this part of your life. I hate that you have to think like this to survive."

I answered. "We play their game for a bit. We are on the Duchess' side after all. But you will need to do it Emma. I don't think I can summon the energy and it will kind of go against Mark's image of benevolent and kindly churchman."

Emma nodded her agreement. "Try to look distraught will you all?"

"I think I can manage that." Mark muttered from behind where he had covered his face with his hands. I had slumped next to him. Exhausted again, just concentrating on breathing in and out

Emma turned to one of the remaining guards. "We wish to see Commander Syanna if you please."

He nodded and went to the door where he poked his head out and exchanged words with the guards on our door.

Syanna was not far away and she came in with a couple of other knights. They crashed to attention.

"Lord Commander." Emma snarled with more than a little venom. Syanna stood like a drill Sergeant reporting in to a superior officer. She had expected this and was also playing her part.

"Lord Commander, you will kindly convey, to the Duchess and her court, our families distress and outrage that our grief for our dearly missed sister should be made a spectacle of. Our pain at the loss of Francesca is not a subject of amusement, or to be made light of. They should know that we consider it the blackest insult that people seek to make a profit from her loss. She deserved better at the hands of Toussaint then and she deserves better at the hands of Toussaint now."

I took a breath. My sister took to these lessons better than I did and it was interesting to watch her work.

"We demand an apology. Not for ourselves, but on the behalf of Francesca and all the lost and forgotten women that were taken from under the noses of those that were neglectful of their duties. And on behalf of the good and noble men and women, including those of the Knights Errant, that gave their lives in an effort to right that wrong. I notice that none of those murdered women, or fallen knights, Witchers and soldiers were immortalised in oils or marble.

"Otherwise we must be forced to consider the honour that we are being shown a sham and we will leave as soon as we have recovered from our grief, shock and outrage."

Emma considered what she had said and nodded. She had grown tired and was leaning back. "For the public message at least. Do you have all that Commander?"

"Yes." Syanna nodded. Something came across her face, a look of almost hunger and I got the impression that she was looking forward to the coming moment. "Might I ask how long it will take for my lords and ladies to recover?"

"Oh at least a day." I muttered to her from my slumped position next to Mark.

"At least." Mark commented from where he was still on the floor. "More like two."

"And when you tell her that in private later." Emma continued with a little more humourous anger. "Could you also inform your sister that we are not play pieces to be disposed of so lightly. That display today was fucking shameful and I, for one, would have no objection to spending the rest of my winter in Angral, or preparing for my brother's wedding. Or in Nilfgaard where I will be sure to tell the Empress just how insulted we all were with the way we were treated here today."

"I will tell her." Syanna said before her words became more formal again. "If anyone challenges your words. I hope that you will allow the Knights of Francesca to answer for it."

"We will consider it." Emma told her.

Syanna's eyes blazed as she turned and left.

The energy left me after that, drained out of the souls of my feet and I slumped backwards onto the couch. Each of us had had the... the healing that we had done, the movement away from our grief and pain at the loss of our sister stripped away so that the wound had come back to be raw and harsh again. I can't speak for anyone else but I was desperately clawing for that state of mind again, that state of being able to function and think and move and speak.

The brief flurry of activity with Mark, not unjustifiably, losing his temper had given me a spurt of free energy that I had used. I have come to think of it as being like a bank. I had borrowed extra energy in the same way that I would borrow money from a bank. But now that the crisis was over, the bank was demanding repayment of that energy with a, not small amount of interest as well.

So I sat on that couch and stared into space for a while. Emma recovered first and started to bustle round. She organised another round of baths for us all and Mark, sensibly, went off to bed for a nap as he had been left exhausted by all of it. I was not far behind him if I was honest with myself and I might have been better off going for a small nap myself. But moving seemed to require more... coordination, energy and drive than I could generally gather together.

Ariadne left at one point, sort of midafternoon as she had an appointment to see some people. I have no idea who it was although I would learn later that night. After Mark had been put to bed, Kerrass bullied me into having another bath on the grounds that the cold sweat of action had settled over me and I smelled awful. I was also persuaded to take some medicine. But all of that meant that I wasn't in the receiving area when Syanna came back with a much more gleeful expression on her face to tell us all that the Duchess would apologise to us all formally at the banquet that evening.

Apparently, there had been some consternation at our behaviour during the walk and more than a few people had been grievously insulted by the way that we had behaved. But our outrage, for reasons unknown to me, seemed to trump theirs. Something to do with their outrage being to do with their own artistic endeavours while ours was to do with honest grief regarding the loss of a family member.

Now that we are all somewhat more distant from that time and place, I am comfortable in saying what it was. It was a moment of culture clash. The people of Toussaint are romantics. Nothing wrong with that. But they see everything as a story and every story needs a hero, every story needs a villain and, ideally, every story needs a damsel in distress to be rescued by the hero. The people, and the artists of Toussaint had considered themselves fortunate that here, they had a genuine and honest damsel in distress. She had been beautiful, intelligent and charming and then she had been taken from them.

They couldn't understand why we, her family, didn't glorify that loss. Why we didn't see it that way. To them she was a symbol and if any family of Toussaint had lost a daughter in that way, the family would have been pleased at the adulation.

But we are not of that place.

I had a bath and sat in private for a while. I had the urge to write away my fury. I took several quills and a pot of ink as well as numerous sheets of paper and started writing exactly why I was so angry. I wrote and wrote and wrote in a fury, flame knows how much as I tried to articulate why I was so angry and why I was so upset until, in the early part of the evening, I looked up to see that the shadows were lengthening and the sky was getting dark. I had filled several sheets, used a significant part of the ink that was in the pot and split several quills. And I had not said even a fraction of all the things that I wanted to say.

Then I read through it all and realised that it was all pointless, self-pitying, self-raging nonsense and I threw it all on the fire. It was not a good moment for me.

Fortunately, Ariadne sensed my distress through the link that we share and was able to come in and comfort me for a while as I wept.

So, in short, I had exhausted myself when I should have been resting before the banquet that was to be for our reception later that night.

I emerged from my rooms to find that Emma had taken certain matters in hand. The Tailor had turned up and had brought several outfits for the evening for us to choose from. Emma had dismissed all of them out of hand and told the tailor to go back and come up with something that properly reflected a family in mourning and something that represented the dignity of such a situation of rememberance.

In the end she decided that she was satiefied with a plain black dress of modest cut. Ariadne dressed in something similar, still subdued but with a bit more ornamentation which was meant to signify that she was not part of the family yet. Laurelen went for the same. Mark decided that he was going to wear his most austere, dark cassock and Emma chose for me a simple pair of black trousers, a black tunic and a white shirt. She chose for me because I could barely keep my eyes open after everything and kept drifting off into my own thoughts. I got the distance sense that there were some exchanged looks over my head.

While we were waiting for those clothes to be made, the family had another little conference. I wish I could tell you what all of this was about but I was really struggling now. An image kept flashing up before my eyes and it was not the image that I would expect. It was not anything to do with any of the paintings or statues that I had seen over the course of the day. It was one moment. Just one moment that had been driven from my mind by everything else.

Sir Thomas. A young knight of the Imperial Guard that had had a crush on my sister while ignoring the fact that Sleeping Beauty was developing a crush on him on the grounds that he wasn't good enough for her. An accomplished swordsman, one of the youngest people to ever attend the Imperial war academy and the makings of a good friend. I remember his sardonic and self-effacing sense of humour.

But I had been looking for him in the hall of paintings and I had struggled to find even a reference to him. When I had, it had been in a small corner of the greater painting and I had only found him there because I had been looking for him. Sir Thomas had died in my arms during the great effort to capture Laughing Jack.

He had been caught out when I had chased after our quarry rather foolishly. In trying to intercept me, Thomas had come up against Jack. Jack had killed him, mostly I suspect to further enrage me. Sir Thomas, all of sixteen, had died hard and in pain and I had watched as the awful pain drove him to madness in the moments before life left his eyes.

I felt astonishingly guilty because of his death and I had promised myself, at the time that I would get in touch with Sir Thoma's family and pay my respects. But I never did so. Another broken promise. It was this that was haunting me while the family were making plans. I kept seeing that flash of his realisation of pain as it hit him in a wave, over and over again. I kept hearing his groan and the rattle of the last of his breath echoing in his throat.

"Freddie?" Emma shook me and I flinched backwards with a snarl on my lips. Realisation struck me that I she had been calling my name for some time.

"Fuck." I muttered, realising that I was trembling violently.

Ariadne moved over and took my hand and squeezed it gently. "Freddie, time to come back."

It took a minute, two minutes at the most before I sighed and leant back in the chair.

"I'm gonna need another bath." I said distinctly before letting some tears come out.

"Well that fucks that doesn't it." Kerrass said after pouring me another drink. He watered this one down though. "He's in no shape to go to dinner."

"Are any of us?" Mark wondered.

"Yes, but you or I are going to get angry or snap at someone. Freddie might run, screaming from the room or worse." Laurelen replied. "No offense Freddie."

"You should go." I told them. "You should go and apologise for me." I was struggling to pull together a thought process. "You should go,"

Emma saw what I was getting at. "This actually plays to our hand and the point that we were making. We've already established that Freddie is ill and that he has been distressed by recent events. If we work at it, we can even spin this to prove what we have already said in public."

"I feel faintly dirty for using Freddie like that." Mark said, rubbing at his temples. "It might backfire and give Freddie a reputation as a weakling."

"If it does then I shall call them out." Kerrass told us, grinning nastily. "I will probably lose that honour to the knights of Saint Francesca," We all shuddered to hear that name. "But at the end of the day, I will still get to tear a strip off the offending idiot. And Freddie really is in no state to be fighting right now. On any battleground."

"I want to stay with Freddie." Ariadne said. "But I suppose that I can't can I."

"Not really."

"I'll be fine." I insisted. "I need some rest and some time to collect thoughts. But if someone could come back and keep me company later I will appreciate it."

Politics is a dirty game sometimes. I have said before that I enjoy that game at times and this is true. When the people that I am playing against are definitely, unavoidably my enemy and deserve to be crushed while I know that I can just escape onto the road or go home again, secure in my knowledge that I don't need political power to be able to survive and make my living.

But I was not enjoying this. I was tired, still ill and if I really got what I wanted then I would be in some kind of fort made out of blankets with a good book and the company of friends. Ariadne's study pavilion would be a good start.

So Mark and Emma went down for dinner. The added bonus of my staying in the rooms was that the tailor didn't have to come up with a mourning suit for me as well as Emma and Mark. The clothes and the dresses that Emma was satisfied with were made out of black material with as little ornamentation as the tailor could be persuaded to be happy with. Just the cut and the cloth was the order. So Mark went in his most severe Cassock while Emma wore a simple dress. Laurelen and Ariadne were forced to wear subdued dresses from their own wardrobe but as both women had several dresses in their baggage that would suit, that was not too much of a hardship. As did Emma and Mark for that matter but Mark also had points to make.

Kerrass wore his normal clothes and his weapons. His decision was that he was "outraged" on our behalf and was going to follow us around, positively quivering with the desire to defend Emma's or my honour with his blade if necessary. That the knights of Saint Francesca would promptly demand the satisfaction for themselves on our behalf made the point moot. This was something that Emma and Kerrass had cooked up between them so I didn't get to see much of how that worked out.

So I didn't get to see the banquet where the Coulthard family were welcomed and feted by the greater people of Toussaint. That is a shame. I would dearly have loved to be there and from all the way back here, all that time later, I feel really sorry that I missed it. But I am also just as aware that I was in no state to be playing politics at one of the highest courts in the land. That would not have been good for anyone.

So I didn't see it. I didn't see the five of them walk into the banquet hall dressed in drab, austere colours while the rest of Toussaint looked on. I did not get to hear the minstrels and the bards come crashing to a halt in a discordant mess of broken tunes and flat keys. Nor did I get to see the stark contrast between it all.

Instead, I had to hear about it from Ariadne later. She had found it mildly amusing when she wasn't worrying about Mark's health or wishing she was back in our rooms taking care of me.

She told me about how the family, led by Mark and Emma walking arm in arm had marched up towards the dais and bowed formally before the Duchess who, in a perfectly choreographed piece of courtly play, rushed forward and raised Emma and then Mark up before declaring in a loud voice that it was Toussaint that should be bowing to the Coulthard family before she had demonstrated what she meant accordingly.

She told me about the look of naked and raw triumph in Knight Commander Syanna's eyes as she had stood beside her sister the Duchess and bowed as low as possible.

She told me about several things. She told me about how excellent the food was and how she struggled with just how subdued the courtroom seemed all the way through the thing. A mixture of amusement at the fact that everyone had so clearly been waiting to have a massive party and had been looking forward to telling tales and singing songs. About how people had wanted to express their undying sorrow at the loss of Francesca and now could not do so without promptly being asked, by Syanna if not from one of the family, what they, personally had done to ensure that nothing like what happened to Francesca would ever happen again.

But she was also dissappointed. She had wanted to see Toussaint at it's best again. She had enjoyed all the flowers and pagentry of the Empress' coronation and now that it looked increasingly like that sort of thing wasn't going to happen. She found that she was dissappointed.

But by the end of it all, there was no doubt as to which faction the Coulthard family was on the side of. Over and over again, both Mark and Emma were telling people that what had happened to Francesca was awful, but that what was really shameful was how easily it could have all been avoided. About how the deaths of all the other good and brave people had been painted over with cheap whitewash. About how good men and women had been cut down in their prime and that all of this pointed towards a very real and necessary need for change.

For herself, Ariadne rather thought that we were all kicking a people when they were already down and did not enjoy that. She absolutely saw the necessity, but there was comfort in the past and she could not share our anger that these people did not want to move into a frightening future when the past had given them so much comfort. She thought that what was happening was cruel and she was not wrong.

But then she saw the first person try to pick a fight with Emma by trying to insinuate that Francesca no longer belonged to the Coulthard family. That she was part of Toussaint now and that the people of Toussaint would mourn her the way that they saw fit. The crux of that particular incident resulted in the offending noble being slapped by Emma and the man was informed that one of the other knights would see him at dawn.

There was also a shouting match between another nobleman who tried to infer that the Coulthard family had insulted the Duchess by demanding an apology. He was in the middle of saying that it was Toussaint culture to celebrate those that had fallen and been lost and that it was not our place to criticise those people that would want to do that kind of thing.

This man was also given short shrift as Kerrass demanded to know, loudly, whether or not the Duchess had actually been offended. When it became clear that the Duchess was not then the man was trapped into suggesting that this meant that the Duchess did not represent her people. The Fury that accompanied that was such that the man had to snatch up his wife, who had seemed to enjoy her husband's dismfort, and leave before he himself was challenged to a duel.

Ariadne herself was having to field people asking after me and why I had not come down to dinner that night. More than one person had brought copies of my books for me to sign and wanted to debate the contents with me. Something that I would have been more than happy to partake in under normal circumstances. But in this case, Ariadne's feelings were that what they really wanted to do was to tell me, in detail, how much I had gotten wrong on various subjects.

She did correct several people on several topics however. She was astonished to find that there was something of an anti-Vampire bias in Toussaint. Not that there was no reason for this particular prejudice to take route, but that she had made no secret of who she was the previous time that she was here and had not seen so much of the unpleasantness.

So she was rather taken aback that it was now something of a thing. So as well as telling people why I was not able to come down to dinner, that being that I was exhausted from the years adventures, upset from what I had seen that day and generally furious with the sideshow that Toussaint had made out of my sister's kidnap, she was also forced to deny all the accusations about what it was actually like to be a Vampire.

Including having to prove that she was not a Bruxa and that she was not present during the night of the Long Fangs.

I suggested that the people that had spouted this nonsense to her were just trying to pick a fight. They had looked for a topic to stir up old hatred and prejucie and were now pushing those things in order to make waves and to make a point. She agreed and was able to keep her cool fairly easily. She would say, over and over again, that although there are many different kinds of Vampire it is not the same as saying that there are different kinds of human.

It is like saying that Humans are the same as Elves or Dwarves or Halflings because they all have two arms and two legs. But also saying that this would also be true if you expanded the definition to include other such bipeds as Trolls, Giants, Ghouls, Hags, Nekkers and all of the other things that walk on the continent with two arms, two legs and a head. Then the person that she was talking to would always get offended at being compared to a Necrophage or a troll before Ariadne would, sweetly, point out that this was exactly why she was so insulted by being compared to a Fleder.

"But I didn't compare you to a Fleder." The noble would say. "I compared you to a Bruxa."

Then she would pin them to the ground with her gaze and say. "What is the difference between you and an elf?

"Well... They're Elves aren't they."

"There you go then."

And on and on it went. Normally to be interrupted by some other knight, or Kerrass at a pinch, wandering over to Ariadne and enquiring as to whether this gentleman was bothering her or not. Ariadne would always say no before continuing her lecture on the differences between the different species of Vampire before her... Assailant seems like to strong a word, but her botherer would eventually get bored and wander off. Realising that he was not going to get rise out of this particular vampire after all.

She did not tell me, although Kerrass did, about the several brave and strapping young men who approached her in the guise of brave and strapping young men who tried to suggest that I was weak and cowardly for hiding in our rooms and that she would be better off with a "real man."

Kerrass' account of what happened after that was to say that Ariadne would then laugh as though the offending idiot was making some kind of a joke before saying "And when one of those comes along, I shall be sure to take that into account."

If the idiot proved to be at least slightly sensible and move the conversation onto a different topic, then that would be that. But then, if the idiot decided to upgrade himself from idiot to moron by listing my faults in detail than Ariadne would turn on the idiot and describe, in detail, all the things that she loved about me that were plainly not present in the idiot before her.

He wouldn't tell me what those things were though.

If the idiot went in the other direction and tried to suggest that Ariadne had insulted their precious honour, thus proving themselves to be beyond moron and well into imbecile territory, then Ariadne would say that if they were so concerned about their implied manhood then they should possibly take the matter up with Syanna.

Syanna had some of her sister's abilities in the courtroom despite the fact that her exile had left her out of practice. But what she had was centered around being able to monitor for problems that might come up. So whenever Ariadne was being hassled in such a way, she would always manage to arrange matters so that she would be nearby and easily able to intervenet, often with one of her largest and most imposing subordinates.

But there was music, dancing and enough food that even Mark, who's appetite remains undeminished despite his illness, was complaining about being stuffed when he came back up to bed. And enough wine that Kerrass himself was feeling a bit tipsy.

What did I do? I played cards with, and interviewed one of my bodyguards.

At first, I had tried doing some passive things. I tried doing some actual work rather than just writing for the sake of it, but this was unsatisfying and I couldn't get my head into the right frame of mind. One of the pictures would intrude on my mind or a snipped of the piece of music and, inevitably, that would lead my mind back to hearing Sir Thomas' death rattle and the awful pain that was in his eyes as he died. Or the sorrow in Princess Dorne's face when she tried to tell me that she could have tolerated being wooed by that young man.

So I gave up and moved back into the main room where I tried to have something to eat and have a read of something. I was not without things to read after all. And although the food was wonderful and proved a passable diversion for a little while, you can only eat so much food before you get full and then you are left with the fact that you are again, left with nothing to think about other than the things that you are trying to avoid thinking about.

So I tried to involve one of my guards in a conversation.

"Sir Guillaume." I began. "Perhaps you will join me."

At first he didn't want to. He wanted to stay separate from it all. Keeping himself aloof, the rigid adherence to duty. But I badgered him and badgered him and there was another guard in the room that was taking up the slack. So in the end he agreed, removing his helm and sitting across the table in front of me.

"I will not drink however." He declared. "I must be ready for anything."

I raised my eyebrow at that. My first respone was to ask what could possibly get through the castle guards, the walls and everything in between including his companions in order for it to become necessary for himself to draw his own weapon. The response was right on the tip of my tongue, but then the answer that came back was obvious. Such precautions had not protected Francesca had they and I instantly felt guilty.

"But some light conversation would surely be acceptable." I tried.

He blew out a breath unhappily. "So long as it's light conversation Lord Frederick."

He poured himself some milk.

"Why only light?" I enquired.

"I have no wish to be interrogated."

"Is that what I'm doing?"

"Or interviewed."

"Why not?"

He glared at me suspiciously. "You're interviewing me aren't you." It was not a question.

"Why so suspicious of that?"

He grimaced a little. "Lord Frederick, I am a simple man." He scratched his chin and thought about it for a long while. "The Commander has told you that your articles are required reading for members of the Knights of Francesca hasn't she."

"She has mentioned it."

"I remember a chapter that I found quite informative. It was a chapter during which you were working to end the corruption of the cult of the First-Born."

I nodded to show that I was keeping up with him.

"Specifically it was a chapter regarding the use of politicians and diplomats. Courtiers and beaurocrats."

"I remember." I told him. "I talked about that as we were infiltrating Lord Cavill's castle."

"You did. That chapter stuck with me. I remember it clearly." He was uncomfortable about something and... As it turned out. I was interviewing him. So I waited for the words to just come out of him. "I felt that you were calling me out a little there sir."

"You specifically?"

"I... I saw a lot of myself in Cavill's son. Not the evil, murderous barbarism. But the dependence on the force of arms. The arrogance that my skills and abilities have given me. I was also diverted by what Lord Kerrass said about what makes a good warrior but that's a discussion for a different time."

He didn't look at me, not wanting to meet my gaze. "But I would be the kind of man that would stand in the way of a courtier who I thought was insulting My Duchess or a lady, let alone my wife. And I would not know that I was making a fool of myself. Indeed, I had not registered that I have made a fool of myself in this way in the past."

"So why is that a problem now?"

"I don't want to make a fool of myself."

"I know that, but why is that a problem between you and I. Here and now. In this room?"

He thought about this for a while.

"My wife is a courtier you know." He said after while longer. "And she is so much smarter than me that it is a little ridiculous. I sometimes wonder what she could possibly see in me."

"I can relate to that." I commented.

He smiled a little, the first time I felt his guard starting to come down around me.

"She is one of the Lady's in waiting to Her Grace the Duchess. It is an honour and a privilidge that she takes very seriously. She is constantly bringing home papers and documents that she reads in order to keep the Duchess properly advised in this or that. I read them occasionally as my oath of discretion in these matters means that I would never give away the Duchess' privacy and I can't understand a word of what is written there. Even when my wife does her very best to try and educate me on the subject."

I sensed that he was building up to the point despite his desire to dance around things.

"You are cut from the same cloth as her, My Lord, and although I do not say that as an insult, I might have said it as such at some point or another in the past. My respect for courtiers, Diplomats and the like has gone up since I fell in love with and married one. As well as when I read your treatise on the matter."

He took a deep breath and plunged in.

"But I do not want to be made a fool of. Either now in front of your family and friends. Or in the future when you inevitably write something up about your time in Toussaint, but also, I do not wish to make a fool of the knightly order on whom my actions and words reflect."

I nodded at all of this. "So what you're telling me is that you don't want me to make a fool of you in my writing."

"Yes. I am sorry if this gives you any kind of offence."

"I am not offended." I told him, carefully hiding my smile."

He instantly sagged in relief. "That is good. Otherwise it would be my duty to hit myself in the face with a gauntlet."

We laughed together and I saw him begin to relax.

"I know my strengths and weaknesses." He said. "I am good with a blade, but I am not the best. My mind tends to drift. I am a romantic and although the love of a good woman has meant that I can keep my concentration far better than I used to, I am still occasionally vulnerable to that."

"Your wife being the lady who..."

"Who Lord Geralt helped me lift a curse from yes. So I can relate to your loving someone or something that doesn't look entirely human."

"Ah, but Ariadne does look entirely human. Except when she smiles openly or laughs uncontrollably, meaning that I can see that her teeth are rather more pointy than yours or mine are. The main difference is that your love looked more... and I mean no offence here, but your love looked more monstrous, but thought like a human. She looked more other I mean."

"Whereas yours thinks like a monster?"

"Sometimes." I admitted. Showing him that I was alright with him occasionally using language like that to express himself. "She surprises herself with things. She gets curious about things that we take for granted and her moral compass... What we are brought up to believe by our society are things that she could care less about. It is, confusing and invigorating in equal measure. I love her for it. The way we have to keep up with each other is... lovely."

"I never gave thought to what would come after." Guillaume admitted. "I elevated her onto a pedestal. She was so beautiful and I loved her so much that it did not occur to me to worry about what would happen afterwards. Marriage and the rest of it passed by in a blur." He laughed suddenly, something he seemed to do much easier now that he was becoming much more comfortable with me. "A very pleasurable and... fun blur to be sure. But then you still have that ahead of you I suppose."

"I do." I paused. "Is it worth it?" I was manipulating him. Putting him into a position where he felt as though he was superior to me in some way in order to get him to open up. But I also found that I was curious, we were not far off in age, both of us had come together with our loves, with supernatural shenanigans underfoot and surrounding the circumstances and... I found that I wanted to know.

He considered this as well. I have heard tales of this man. Of his impatience and his impetuousness. Someone seemed to have instilled a habit into him. That he was to stop, think and consider before he acted on any of his instincts. And before he spoke. I wondered who would take credit for that, whether it was his lady wife or his knight Commander.

But the new habit served him well.

"In all of our society," he began carefully. "We elevate the chase. All the stories and all of the poetry is about the lady waiting to be swept of her feet. Or about the male, pining away after some... object of our desires and our... well... our lusts. We think up new and more impressive ways to describe these feelings to overcome the... rather crude, feeling that we just want to take her into our arms and kiss her until the world goes away..."

He looked at me shyly. "Among other things. But that is what our culture elevates. We elevate the longing. That is the thing that, forgive me, the thing that you and your family have missed in all your... understandable grief and anger. We Long for things. Men that loved your sister longed for her and now that she is a tragic figure, we long for her even more. We long to rescue her and it is this longing that you see and are repulsed by. But now... There is almost safety in longing for Saint Francesca. Because we know that that longing is never going to be fulfilled. So we can long to rescue and long to love her without fear that that longing will be taken away, either by rejection or that feeling being requited. And the tragedy of that is... compelling to us.

"I remember that fear when I was courting my wife. When she was the lady of the tournament, she terrified me. I was aware that there was something wrong, some... thing that made her sad and put that haunted look in her eye. But I was also afraid of her too. You even said it yourself. In talking to her and trying to woo her, there are two fears."

"What if she says no." I answered.

"And what if she says yes." He responded. "I think that is a thing that our culture does miss out on. We miss out on the joy that happens after marrying the woman... the person that you love. The joys, the pleasures... and the trials that come with that. The story always ends in a marriage. It never says how wonderful, how terrifying, how joyous and how... hard the happily ever after bit is."

Then he looked at me. "But speaking as someone who got their happily ever after. Yes, it is worth it. And it is the most... enjoyable struggle that I have ever felt."

We laughed together for a while.

"Do you feel better?" He asked me after a moment.

"Compared to what?" I retorted automatically. "Sorry, that was unfair."

He smiled slightly before taking his gauntlet off so that he could scratch himself behind the ear. "When I'm feeling low, angry, tired or frustrated. I go and take it out on a practice dummy. Or occasionally, a willing friend. I get the wooden training swords out and then a group of us just work really hard on smacking the stuffing out of each other. I do that because it's what I was trained to do first. It's comforting almost. To go back to that most basic of things and just to let myself get on with it."

"What we do first, we do in a crisis." I answered.

"That's it, yes. So you're interviewing me. You're asking questions and getting to know me. This is what you're used to. This is what you are comfortable with. So, having retreated to what you know best. Do you feel better for it?"

I smiled. "You are cleverer than you give yourself credit for. Sir knight." I told him.

"Just as my wife says."

"Your wife sounds like a clever woman."

"She is at that." He laughed again. "Except she married me. So what does that say about her cleverness?"

"Beats me." I told him. "But I'm marrying a woman who's nine hundred years old. She's a Sorceress, a Vampire," He shuddered at that although I pretended not to notice. "She's ridiculously beautiful and utterly terrifying. She has terms for things that we don't have words for. Concepts that we humans have never even dreamed of. She's more charming tham me, smarter than me and more... She is more than me in just about every way. And yet she chose me?" I shook my head. "Boy, I dunno. I worry that she's going to wake up and get smart. Every single day."

"And every single day." He told me. "Every single day. If she's even half the lady that you describe or that I take her for. She will prove to you that she will never go away."

He smiled at a memory.

"That fear never goes away." He said. "That fear that she will just wake up and realise that she is making a terrible mistake. But I have been married for a little while now and there will come a time, for me it was about six months into marriage where I woke up next to the woman I love as the sun came in through the windows, She was lying on the bed next to me as we had gone to sleep in each other's arms the night before. The sun was glinting in her golden, dishevelled hair and I went to leave as was proper. But then she turned out to be not that asleep, grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into a hug and wouldn't let me go."

He smiled happily at the memory.

"That was a special moment Lord Frederick. And when that happens to you, as it will, then you will know that it doesn't matter what we think. But only what they think. That's what it's like."

Contrary to what he had said earlier, he added a small touch of wine to his drink.

"Now what do you want to ask me?" He said.

I considered this. This and many of the questions that occurred that I could have asked. That I could have put to him in that time and in that place.

"What do you make of all this?" I wondered. "From what I understand, you were as traditional a knight Errant as any in Toussaint. What do you make of all the change?"

He took a long breath. Again, taking the time to properly consider before he answered the question. Sir Guillaume de Launfal is a difficult man to dislike, he is open, honest and hard working. He is everything that we are taught to believe a man should be. Everything that a Knight should be. But he lacks the arrogance that often goes with that kind of thing. It was interesting to watch as his large, handsome and, above all, honest face, contorted with the effort to try and think about what he wanted to say.

As I hope is clear. I liked Sir Guillaume and I think he does himself a disservice when he describes himself as being stupid. I think he is, but he has no talent for those skills that we incorrectly assume show intelligence. That and he has never really been taught how to think. He hasn't been taught how to examine and consider and go through things in order to get to the anwers that he wants. He doesn't have a critical mind, he has a direct, action based mind. There is the problem, fix the problem, move on. He doesn't know how to examine the problem and think about how to fix the problem or even better, to decide whether the thing is a problem at all.

And he has never been taught how to hide his emotions. I met his wife later and as is the way with Toussaint women, of course she was beautiful, intelligent and everything that she was supposed to be. Everything that a Toussaint Lady was supposed to be I mean. Educated, charming, musical, graceful and well able to serve in the Duchess' absence should that be required. But she also has an almost sly sense of humour in the depths of her eyes, leaving me thinking that Guillaume is a very lucky man indeed.

She told me that she occasionally despairs of her husband while at the same time, utterly adoring him. She loved him for his help with the curse that she was under and that he is slavishly devoted to her happiness.

But his inability to hide his emotions is occasionally a problem in the circles that she moves in and she has to send him away or make up an errand for him to perform. But I think that this is part of the reason that she loves him so much. His bluff honesty and his utterly straightforward mind. Of course she knew how he felt about her. Long before he did if all things were truthful but at the same time, her curse prevented her from pursuing her own happiness.

But in that moment, while he sat and shifted his weight around in his seat while he tried to think about what he wanted to say to me, his discomfort was plain and, I hope he will forgive me, more than a little funny.

"I was not in Toussaint when your sister was kidnapped." He told me eventually. "I was far to the North in Ban Ard. My wife had never travelled you see, as her former curse made such things impossible but after our marriage, she begged leave to be allowed to go travelling. The Duchess gave leave and we were offered a post as an Ambassador. We would travel around and deal with her Grace's own requirements. We spent a winter in Oxenfurt and another further north in Kovir before coming back down through Kaedwen and, as I say, we were in Ban Ard at the time."

It would seem that whatever he had to say was not going to be entirely positive as he felt the need to work up to saying what he had to say.

"So as Ambassadors we stayed in our posts when the Empress was being crowned and it wasn't until some time had passed befor enews came out as to what had happened. By which time, the disaster of the Fish Market was already well into the past and there was nothing that could be done. We sent a letter in the next Diplomatic packet south to enquire as to our duties and what needed to happen and what the Duchess wanted us to do but that was the very least of what we could do.

"Mostly we just sat around and fretted as rumour and news came North. We heard about the awful events. I wept at the loss of your sister and my tears turned into tears of rage when I heard about all of those good and brave men that were killed at the fish market.

"As it turned out though, our request for instruction crossed with the Duchess' orders to come home. No sooner did we do that than we were on the road. Horse, cart for our belongings and onto the spring roads to catch a barge to port and then a ship to get into Beauclair harbour. Miles out of the way but by far the quickest route all things considered. Out to sea and then back up the river to get ther.

"I hated every moment of it as we got further and further away from my beloved Toussaint while at the same time, getting closer and closer to it. Then, we stopped off in port to change ships and were forced to spend a couple of nights in an inn while we waited for the ship to come in and be sorted out. Which was how I read your account of proceedings..."

He stopped suddenly, almost in the middle of a sentence and the memory of old pain crossed his big, honest face. The pause continued, it seemed like a pressure was growing.

"What do you want to say to me Sir Guillaume?" I asked gently.

He looked up at me as though I had startled him.

Then the air seemed to leave him. As though he was an inflated pig's bladder that I had struck with a pin.

"I say this with all due respect." He groaned. "And you should know that I hold you and your family in the highest regard, that I requested this detail and that I would happily and readily give my life should it become clear that it is a choice between my life and the lives of you or any of your family. You, all of you, have my utmost admiration and respect at all times."

I laughed and he seemed astonished. Even a flash of anger for a moment before he controlled the impulse.

"You mock me sir?" He demanded quietly.

"A little." I admitted. "A great scholar and gentleman once said. "It's lovely, but anything that a man said before the word "but" is said to make both people feel better and should therefore be ignored." There is a "but" coming isn't there."

Sir Guillaume saw the funny and smiled a little.

"Who was that gentleman?"

I sighed and shook my head. "I can't remember." I told him. "I can tell you exactly who happened on the field at Brenna, Sodden and in numerous other places like the battle of White Orchard, the fields of Velen, the battles of Vergen, both times. But could I tell you who was actually involved?"

He laughed, as I had wanted and intended.

"I make rhymes for them when it comes up in exam questions." I went on. Fortunately not something that I have to worry about any more. Now, should I return to the university which I absolutely intend to, I shall be the one to set the questions and I absolutely intend to leave off any questions that a person could learn by rote, just as I had to do it. That's not learning, that's rehersal."

He went on laughing. "I agree. A man can learn the sword movements, but it is in the application that a man becomes a swordsman."

"So there's a "but" coming isn't there?"

"There is."

"So... But."

"But..." He began again. "But I need you to know that I despise you and everything that you stand for."

I stared at him for a long moment.

"Hold that thought." I said before climbing to my feet and moving through to my room where I fetched several pieces of paper, a pot of ink and a quill that I had trimmed earlier in the day from when I was trying to write.

I arranged them opposite me, dipped my quill and sat prepared.

"Why?" I asked.

He took a deep breath. "Because I am the Toussaint that lost your sister." he shuddered after he said that and stared into space for a long while. "Might I trouble you to pour me some wine Lord Frederick?"

I poured.

"I am everything, everything that Toussaint was. You won't know because why would you. But Sir Crawthorne and I were childhood friends. We played together as children on the banks of the river. We concocted fantasies about rescuing fair maidens before we knew what they were, and we charged imaginary armies together, just the two of us against the horde and we were always, always victorious. It was he that that encouraged me to woo the lady that became my wife. We trained together. We went on quests together...

"I read what you wrote about his disgrace and I was appalled. I was incensed and furious. I cannot remember ever being so angry. And the reason that I was so angry is because, I could very easily see myself in Sir Crawthorne's place. That could have been me. It almost was. I believed in everything that he believed in. And everything I believed in, was what made Toussaint great."

He finished his cup and gestured. I poured him another.

"I believed and still believe that women are weak and need to be protected. That those women that have made names as warriors are rarities and exceptions that prove the rule. I believed that women should remain pure and virginal until their wedding day. I believed that men should as well but that's not what we're talking about. I believed that women need to step back and let the men do all the work.

"I was furious when the Duchess took her sister back after everything that Syanna had done and that she would be in charge of the new knights. I was angry that the Empress handed over the Kayalese winery to your family despite your family's inexperience with wine production and that it was a woman and a gay woman that was running it at that."

He actually shuddered.

"I believe that might makes right. I do. I really do. I worked hard at it and I made sure that I was the best at what I did. I was never as good as Crawthorne or Gregor who was Crawthorne before Crawthorne was. But I worked hard and I kept others down in order to elevate myself and my family so that we could continue the way that we were. That was how I remained strong. That was how I could protect our lands and our people by being better than everyone else. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book of the duelist or the fighter. Win the fight before the fight has even begun and if Crawthorne or Gregor or I came over the hill in all of our splendour to drive off the evildoers then they would know who we were and flee in fear.

"I read your account of the events and I found that I agreed with every step that my friend took in order to hunt Laughing Jack. I would have done exactly the same thing in his place, I suspect, despite hoping that I would have done better. He would have still been chosen because he was a better knight than I was. But I remember the cruelty of the gesture and the rage that was in your writing.

"I hated you then and I hate you still. You destroyed us all then and when The Empress destroyed the knight's Errant, I absolutely intended to come back to Toussaint and challenge Colonel Duberton to a duel in order to show how wrong the Empress and the Duchess was.

"I looked around Toussaint and I saw a place of beauty and harmony. I saw happy workers and beautiful lands. I saw proud men and beautiful women and a vibrant culture that had survived for centuries and would survive for centuries more. I could not understand why any of this could still be wrong. But you saw a culture on the verge of stagnation that was ridiculous in it's passions as we desperately try to hold onto the past. You saw laziness and falseness where I saw hard work and industry. You saw bullies where I saw proud and noble men. You saw abused women where I saw properly demure and …. Saint's balls I don't know what."

He shook his head and I was astonished to see tears standing in his eyes.

"What happened?" I asked gently.

He shrugged. "I'm wrong aren't I." He said simply. "I hate every second of every day that I wear this stupid armour and this plain sword. I hate that I bow and salute a woman that I despise and I hate that knighthood is no longer the right and priviledge of the noble. I respected Captain de La Tour and I accepted the pretty fiction that he was some noble's bastard to make myself feel better for the fact that he was knighted and given a position of responsibility.

"But now, I feel as though the position of Knight has been diluted. It is a privilidge and a responsibility of the nobility to be a knight and a commoner, some farmer's son has no right to wear the coat of arms and call themselves a knight. I hate it. I hate it and I can't see myself ever getting to a position of not hating it.

"But I'm wrong. Within six months of the Alba division's taking over of the security of Toussaint, the bandits that have plagued our Duchy have been wiped out. We were astonished when the number of reports of monsters and crimes that were taking place in Toussaint went up by a factor of ten within a fortnight of the regiment arriving. So much so that I, and people like me, thought that people must be making it up. But the Duchess ordered that each report be investigated and sure enough, there were few to no falsehoods there. So we started to ask why such things had never been reported before."

I knew, or could guess why but I left it to him to say.

"It was because the peasa... the common folk did not trust the Knights Errant to deal with the matter. Even though they had the right to report it. They just didn't trust the Knight's Errant to be bothered with it. As there was no fame or glory in the effort. Or, even if they did, they wouldn't get..."

He shut his eyes in shame.

"Beaten and raped for daring to suggest that another Knight had been acting improperly. We could not be wrong, we were the Knight's Errant."

He sighed again.

"So we were wrong. And I hate you because you were the people that showed us that. Your sister has turned the Kayalese winery into a force. Not the richest winery in Toussaint, but give it a few years under her guidance and it will be. And she knew nothing about running a winery before she took over. So how did she do it? She found a good and experienced man to run it for her. A commoner. And he runs it and has turned enough of a profit that they are equipping every knight that can't afford it from the best armour and weapon smiths in Toussaint. This stuff?"

He rapped his knuckles on his breast plate.

"This is the best armour that I have ever worn. Lighter and sturdier than I could believe.

"I hate it. I hate it all, but I am wrong and I know it. But by the Lady and the Heron and the cup, I hate it all. I would give anything to be able to return it all to the way it was. I would return us to the days of Glory, of shining Knights and tales of valour and romance on the lips of every man, woman and child within the Duchy. I swear that I would give anything or give up anything to go back to that."

"Would you give up your wife's love?" I asked.

He looked appalled.

"So not quite anything." I told him. Tears were running down his face and he looked in a dreadful state. "So if you hate it so much. Why do you do it? I wondered.

I had thought that he had looked appalled before. But I had been wrong. This was a whole new level of pain and anger.

"I am a Knight." He said as though that explained everything.

I smiled as gently as I could. I rather suspected that I was on the verge of having my head cut off.

"Pretend that I am all the things that you say I am." I said. "Pretend that I don't know anything about knighthood and tell it to me plain. What does that mean?"

He calmed down as he considered the question.

"The Empress was right." he began carefully. "Duty is not the first tenet of being a knight. It's not even one of the five major ones. But it is important. The short answer of why I do these things, these things that I despise, then the answer is that I am a knight of Toussaint and it is my duty to see it through with all of the grace that I can muster. If the Duchess orders that this is to take place then it is my Duty to carry out her wishes with all the Honour, Valour, Mercy, Charity and Wisdom that I can bring to bear."

I grinned at him.

"so if that is the short answer. What is the long answer?"

He grinned back, his earlier unhappiness banished. Forgotten in an instant.

"I met my uncle and he told me everything that had happened from his own point of view. You have met my uncle?"

"Lord Palmerin? I have had that honour."

"He was everything that I had been taught to believe was the best of Knighthood at that time and when he told me about what had happened. When he told me that you had actually been quite gentle in your accounts and the enormous shame that many of the other Knights that were my contemporaries had felt at what they had seen. The Imperial forces had arrived by then and I begged for, and received, leave to see things for myself. I went around Toussaint and I saw the way that the people reacted to the Soldiers of the 4th. I saw one group outside The Fox (Freddie: An inn in Toussaint) being brought a tray of drinks by the landlady. They insisted on paying but she refused and said that it was the best form of gratitude that she could muster. The men thanked her and moved on.

"I have gone on quests in that area many times and she never brought beer to me. At first I was angry but then I considered why? The answer is that she was not grateful to me. That I had demanded food and drink in order to speed me on my way and that she had not had the ability to refuse. If she had I would have beaten her for witholding what was rightfully mine."

I didn't believe him. I rather thought he was repeating things that were rote learned. That is what he should have done but I don't believe that he would have ever done it.

"I met the families of those people who Laughing Jack had taken. I met ther fathers, mothers, husbands and children. I was in disguise but they must have known who I was. But they told me of the cruelty that they had received at the hands of my childhood friend. How they had called the victims of Laughing Jack whores and been dismissive of their loss.

"I remember the two of us, Craythorne and I, reading stories about those early knights and how they would defend the honour of the lowliest whore up to the highest lady and I felt ashamed. Ashamed because I knew, I knew that if I had been there, I would even have thought the same thing. Even if I had not actually been as cruel as Crawthorne was, I would still have thought it, you know, up here?"

He gestured to his head.

"And an evil deed in thought is just as evil as the deed itself." He quoted from somewhere.

"My wife was working at the palace, doing her best to support the Duchess in putting the world to rights which meant that we could not see each other as much as I would prefer. I spent some time with my uncle, but his life was already becoming more and more difficult and I heard increasing things that disgusted and appalled me. People saying that things had gone too far and that the Duchess had lost her way. They talked about revolt and making the Duchess a figurehead while "wiser" heads ruled from behind the scenes. That the Empress had no right to do that which she had and that Toussaint should rebel and secede.

"I was disgusted. Both as a knight of Toussaint on the grounds that, regardless of whether I agree with the Duchess or not, she is the Duchess and it is our duty to do what she orders. And as a newly created man of the world. I have seen the armies of Nilfgaard and if they really wanted to, or if the Duchess asked for help in putting down a small and petty revellion, then the greater Nilfgaardian army wouldn't even notice us as we they rolled over us.

"And you can quote me on that."

"I will." I told him with a grin.

"Full plate and chain mail will not last in the mountain passes." Sir Guillaume went on. "Nor can our war steeds charge in those areas. So the only way to do it is to wait until they come down and charge. At which point the longbows and heavy crossbows fire. The pikemen raise their pikes and we fall from our steeds into the mud and the filth while the infantry arrive and stab us through our visors." He snorted at the thought before lapsing into an almost meditative state as he stared into the distance. I was just on the verge of speaking up and asking if he had anything else to stay when he started to speak.

"So I went to Lac Celvay. Have you been there?"

"I have not." I replied.

"I will take you there at some point. It is not the ruins of Elven cities, nor is it the fabled site of the Witch. Nor will you find our best food or wine nor see knights training. It is no temple or statue of Lebioda, nor does it have the historical significance of the Cave of the Spriggan. But it is a very spiritual place for me. It is said, although there is no historical proof of this, that this is where the Lady of the Lake first visited those first knights in order to give them the tenets of knighthood.

"There is no proof that this is true. There are many who claim to have encountered the Lady of the Lake there including Lord Geralt. And it is true that more people have visions of her presence there than anywhere else in Toussaint. So many of us Knights Errant, including me, believe that it is the site of the birth of knighthood and we find it a spiritual place.

"I went on retreat there and sat in meditation, waiting for a sign."

"Did one come?"

"Do they ever?"

"They do, sometimes. But just as often, the difference between a genuinely spiritual vision and one that is brought on by deprivation or self-delusion is often a very fine line indeed."

He laughed at that.

"Well I waited, not that long actually. I have always hated the "vigil" part of being a knight. I camped on the island that is in the centre of the lake for a day and a knight. Reading the stone tablets there that talk about the five main tenets of knighthood are and meditating on their meaning, or trying to anyway, I didn't get very far. I get bored easily you see and the thought that I kept coming back to, over and over again was that I wanted to get on with things. I wanted to be serving, I wanted to help."

"So, the morning of my first full day of what was supposed to be a week long vigil, I packed up my gear, ate a huge breakfast and marched up to the palace and offered my blade to Commander Syanna. She was already one of the leading minds in putting together the new form of knights."

"Her face must have been interesting to watch."

He guffawed loudly. "You have no idea. Especially as I made no attempt to conceal my distaste. I was actually offering to serve the new order of knights. I knew that she was involved, but I actually expected Captain De La Tour to be in charge, or my Uncle. But no, it had to be the Bitch usurper didn't it."

He grinned as he said it.

"But I had decided and I knelt to offer my sword despite an almost overwhelming desire to vomit."

He laughed again.

"I remember the gasps of the court. Former fellows of mine who thought I was being foolish. Men who thought I betrayed everything that I had believe in or been part of up until that point. Funny now but kind of mortifying at the time. I certainly learnt who my friends were after that."

He snorted.

"But The Commander took my oath and when her sister asked her why she accepted my oath when she had refused a number of others. Something of which I was ignorant. She said that it was because I hated her. And that that would keep her honest."

"A lot of people hate her."

"And with good reason Lord Frederick."

"Do you still hate her?"

"Yes. But in the same way that I hate you. I admire her as well. She swallows all the, frankly justifiable, anger that is levelled at her and turns it into an effort to make us all better. There is something in there to inspire loyalty. Captain De La Tour commands the palace and the Town guard and, so far, I am the first knight of the new order."

"You intend to win the inaugaral tournament then?"

He grinned hungrily. "I not only intend to, Lord Frederick. I will win it."

"I can guess, but how does your wife feel about all of this?"

"She made a point of walking out and embracing me as I rose from offering my sword to Commander Syanna, she embraced me and kissed me before the court and told me that she loved me, had always loved me but she had never been prouder of me than she was at that moment."

"Are you a Father yet?" I wondered after a moment of thought.

"No. Although our duties are keeping us apart in that direction. The Duchess has promised that if we can wait until after the new Knights of Saint Francesca are firmly ensconced, then my wife will be released from duty to be a wife and a mother. We will take up the matter then."

I nodded my acceptance of all of that. "So," I smiled a little. "You hate it. You hate it all, but how is it going? Will the new knights measure up?"

He laughed. I was glad to see that he was beginning to cheer up. Hurting him was hard, he was the kind of man that you just wanted to make happy, with his big, honest, expressive face. I don't know how old he is but I almost felt older than him. Leaving me feeling a little cruel with all the questioning that I had done.

"They will measure up." He said. "They will do Toussaint proud I think."

"Why?"

It was clearly not a question that he had previously considered. You could tell by the way that he blinked and stared at me as though I had just sprouted horns.

"The Commander has declared that the majority of the knights will be anonymous. We will know who they are and the Duchess will know who they are. But their visors will be down which means that they will become the office of knighthood, not the man, or woman, wearing the armour.

"Our skills at arms are approaching that of the rest of the Knights Errant, even at their peak. Because we do something that they did not. Which was that we work together. It is not a competition between us as to who can win the most renown or who can win the greater honour and glory. Because of that, if a knight is not up to the task but they know the person that is, or they know the skills required, then a message can be sent and a specialist will be called for. The way that Witchers are supposed to be used really. We realise that we are outclassed and call for a Professional."

"Kerrass will approve."

"Lord Geralt certainly did. The old Knights Errant were bound by tradition which means that we carried lance and sword into battle. But sometimes that is not good enough and a thing need a mace, a dagger, a short sword. Or sometimes, a knight would be dismissed because that person was not physically capable enough to wield the right weapons. But put a sabre, a rapier or..." He gestured at me, "or a spear into the hands of the right person and suddenly a knight doesn't know what to do."

He laughed at another memory.

"One of the early recruits followed my example, a young knight Errant decided that he would get fame and fortune in the knights of Francesca. He came into the Chapter house and took up his sword and shield, absolutely intending, I think, to show his worth. I was helping train those less experienced with a blade along with my uncle. It was my studies that were lacking, but I was still good enough with a blade to make a difference.

"So I put that young knight up against a peasant farmer's son. The peasant... and I know you don't like the word but I promise that you will like where this is going, the peasant had got into the chapter by being strong, agile, capable and clever enough. He was a younger brother of one of the women that Laughing Jack had killed and had felt it necessary to do his part. Admirable really, but the young knight wanted to teach him a lesson.

"The peasant was unarmoured and the knight wore his practice plate and wielded a training blade. The peasant would have been destroyed if I put a blade in his hand but I saw a way to teach both the young knight and the onlookers a lesson that they wouldn't forget. I put one of the training staffs into the hands of the peasant.

"The Commander had ordered training weapons of all sizes and shapes and quarterstaffs were among those ordered, both so that we could learn to use them but also so that we could train against them.

"Can you guess what happened?"

"The peasant trounced the knight." I said. "I will even go on to guess that the knight got angry and lost his temper and went on to leave the new order."

"Wrong actually." Sir Guillaume laughed at me. "The peasant did indeed trounce the knight with a display of skill with the staff sufficient that he was chosen to teach the rest of us how to use a staff, but the two have since become firm friends. When we take over the keeping of security of the realm from the 4th , they intend to travel together."

"That's nice." I said, and meant it. "That's really good actually. But let me return back to the original point. I have heard, and read, many times that a fighting force is only as good as their first conflict. That they are like a blade and untempered and that there is no telling, until the first blow is struck, exactly how well the blade will hold up to combat conditions. So, will the knights measure up? Or will they shatter against the first crisis?"

He smiled. I had made a mistake somewhere and he was going to expose it, making himself feel a bit better as part of that effort.

"You are not thinking like a citizen of Toussaint. You are right. We don't have a standing army. There is a palace guard and there is a town guard for moving drunks on, checking customs and things. We are protected by our neighbours and our political allies."

It sounded like a speech written for him. As though someone else had come up with all of these things and he had learnt to repeat them all verbatim. He proved this right almost immediately.

"Or at least, that's what my wife keeps telling me."

We both laughed.

"But the truth is still the same. We don't need an army. We need knights. Knights are trained to stand alone and work either in small groups or to work alone with only a squire to help them with basic needs. You might think of that as a master servant relationship but it's not. If a knight had to care for all his weapons, armour, horse, tack, provisions and camping equipment by himself, then he would never get anything done. So a squire is more like a support worker, often a trainee knight themselves.

"So the suggestion that the knights are going to behave the same as an army will. We are supposed to shatter. We are supposed to work separately and apart. We will depend on the bonds between small groups of men and friends and as an organisation as a whole.

"And when Toussaint calls, and it will, we will answer. We are hungry for it, we want it and we will prove all the nay-sayers wrong with how well we do. We will silence the critics and we will make Toussaint ring with trumpets and the sounds of our name. Does that answer your question Lord Frederick?"

I answered his own grin with one of my own. "It does." I told him. "And it does it well."

He nodded his satisfaction with that.

We sat in silence for a short while before a thought occurred to me.

"You don't really hate it all do you?" I asked him.

"Hmmm?" He had drifted off into a reverie of some kind. Possibly aided by the fact that he had been pressured into drinking when he was supposed to be on duty. Pressured, by me in fact.

"I am going to hazard a guess." I told him and leant forward. "You were not the greatest knight of the last days of the Knights Errant. Partly because of Sir Crawthorne, partly because you were in love and marrying your wife, but also because you were not that interested in it. I know who you are Sir Guillaume. Your greatest martial feats were performed in order to prove your adoration to the woman that was to become your wife which was also those times when you got in over your head to a rather comical degree."

His eyes sparkled with humour at the memory.

"And yet, you are determined to achieve that now. So here is my guess. I think that you are actually loving what is happening now. I think that the hate that you speak of is real. I think that there was genuine affection between you and Sir Crawthorne but I think that that respect, admiration and affection moved towards disgust.

"I think that you were a good knight trying to do your best. I think you were eductated by story books and were, more than a little disillusioned when you discovered that the reality of knighthood was not the same as what you had read... Once upon a time.

"I think that you told yourself that you adored the office of knighthood. I think you told yourself that over and over and over again until eventually you came to believe it. But I also think that there was a part of you underneath all fo that that was desperately unhappy.

"You were outraged when you heard about Crawthorne's disgrace. You were devestated by the loss of my sister. But I also think that that was because you missed that moment. The last true moment of what could be achieved as a knight.

"I think that you are more intelligent than you let on and more intelligent than even you believe. I think you have spent years looking out of your eyes at the... at the cult that the knights Errant had become and I think you were disgusted by it. I think you saw it for what it had become but you refused to let yourself see it. I notice that you took the first exit that you could by going travelling with your wife."

He actually had quite a good Gwent face.

"I think you're having the time of your life. I think you are devoted to making a new breed of knights into what you read about in your childhood. I will agree that you hate your commander, maybe you even hate me, but I think you agree with us. But you tell yourself that you hate it all because that is the behaviour that you had to pretend to from a young age. That was the behaviour you had to display in order to survive.

"Because after all, if everyone else likes it and you don't then that makes you wrong doesn't it.

"And I don't, not for one moment believe that you like your women meek and docile, otherwise you would not have married, and love the women that you did. Nor would you have allowed her to serve in a position higher than your own or allowed her to order you around

"But I think that the knight you were, was not as good as others because you didn't want it enough. But you want it now don't you. You are hungry for it. In exactly the same way that the rest of the knights of Francesca want it. So that they can prove that this new form of knighthood has worth.

"I think you are a good man Sir Guillaume. I think you have been a good man and a good knight for a long time. You have tried to play the game as Toussaint wanted you to play it for so long. But now you can play the game according to your own rules and I think that you have never felt more free in all of your life. Except maybe on your wedding night."

He laughed at that before considering what I was saying. "It is true that hating you, the Commander and what we are becoming is taking more and more effort as time goes on. I will allow that to be said. Craythorne worried me for a long time. He wanted to be the best. And then when he was, he didn't have anything to fight against. Except to be the best. He didn't want to elevate those under him and make the new-comers better as kngihts should. He wanted to stay on top of the pile."

He sighed unhappily. "That could have been me, so very easily. Our places could have been traded easily. But he set his sights too high romantically and his heart was broken. He wanted the Duchess you see. It's not like she spurned him. But I suspect, now I know her better through my own wife, she would have been too much for him and he would have been destroyed by that. He would not have been satisfied with being the consort as he preferred his women meek and willing. The Duchess is none of those things despite the front that she presents sometimes."

I nodded.

"But I'm right for the rest am I not?"

"Maybe. I am uncomfortable with a lot of what you have said which suggests that you might be. I do reject the idea that I am more intelligent than that though."

He laughed.

The conversation moved onto less threatening topics after that. We played Gwent. He was too good a player to be as stupid as he likes to think he is.

(A/N1: I know, I know. Still no resolution. It is still coming I promise. But I wanted to write another chapter about everyone's reintroduction to Toussaint before I got to that. Hopefully next chapter if that chapter doesn't grow out of all proportion, which it might. Thanks for reading.)

(A/N2: These storylines and themes are now set in advance so I no longer have the luxury of addressing current events in ongoing stories. But I do not write in an island. I would like to think that my writing makes my views on the subjects that are in the news rather plain, but just in case anyone is wondering about what I think of current events. Black lives matter. LGBTQ+ rights are important and need to be preserved and the Coronavirus is still a thing. I cannot claim to be an expert in any of those things as I am a straight, white cis-gendered male. But I would like to think that my brothers and sisters of all colors, faiths, sexual preferences and gender identities can think of me as a flawed friend trying to do better, if not an actual ally.

I, like many of my friends and family, although unfortunately not all, are working to educate ourselves in these matters. I know it's quick and easy for people like me to attach something like this to the end of things but if this is the least that I could do then I better fucking do it.

So please know that I love you all, even those who might object to these statements, and no matter what you are doing at the moment, whether you are isolating due to still living in a country where Coronavirus is still rampant. Or whether you are protesting in the streets. Please, above all, stay safe out there.)