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

168. Chapter 168

(Warning: Ok, shit is going to get horrific in this chapter. Scenes of torture, injury and recounted degradation. Also, contains some extremely negative comments about women. These things are spoken by bad people and couldn't be further from the opinions of the author.

As always, thanks for reading )

I must laugh or I will cry.

I write these words now by the grace of Queen Adda of the joint Kingdoms of Temeria and Redania. Some more titles go with both of those crowns but, as I don't have access to my reference library, I cannot immediately remember them all and in the grand scheme of things, I am not sure that it entirely matters.

Nor do I care.

I also write these words at the behest of those that are leading this rebellion of the North against the Southern invader. They aim to throw off the arms of the tyrant and to allow the North to be a free-thinking and self-governing realm once again.

I have to write that. A man is standing over me with an iron bar that he strikes me with every time I step out of line. They have this entire system set up where if I write something in my little shorthand, then my clerk reads it aloud for them. If they don't like it or don't agree with what I am writing or if I write anything that they don't like, they strike me and then flog him.

I must laugh or I will cry.

They found the lad a couple of days ago, or so they tell me. I call him lad but he's only a little younger than me…

Flame…

Flame curse me for a fool but how could I have got it all so wrong?

I know of course. I was blinded by love and affection and I didn't properly look and so I didn't see the rising tide before it drowned me.

So I write these words by the grace of Queen Adda of the joint Kingdoms of Temeria and Redania.

I am told that my diary has been published as I had wished it but at the same time, I do not know if that publishing made as much difference as I had hoped it would. There is no way of telling.

I write these words by the…

Damn it.

It's not that I don't believe that Queen Adda is capable of raising a banner of rebellion but… I just don't think she's that… I can absolutely believe that she has the ambition for it. There are enough records of that ambition to… Her ambition and her hatred of those that she would say was holding her back.

But whether she is involved in this madness?

I can, however, believe that she would play both sides. If she is in contact with this rebellion at all, I can easily believe that the contact is carried between proxies that she would be able to throw away when the full weight of the Imperial wrath, which is still bound to be coming, falls upon their heads. I would be willing to bet that similar letters are on their way to the Imperial court, wherever that is, that tell the Imperial court that she had nothing to do with what is happening and protest her innocence. That way, if the rebellion is successful then she can claim that she was on the rebellion's side but if it fails, as I don't see how it could not, then she can also claim that she was trapped by it.

Nevertheless. I have been told so much about what to write and so….

I write these words by the grace of Queen Adda of the joint Kingdoms of Temeria and Redania.

I must laugh or I will weep.

One of the problems with having a critic so close to hand is that… I am completely unable to tell this story the way that I want to tell it. I have been informed that I must tell the tale in a chronological format. Everything in me is rebelling at this. I want to give the context that comes from my writing these words by the grace of Queen Adda. But I cannot. Trying to do so earns another blow about the shoulders for me and a lash for my clerk who whimpers between words, as he reads what I am writing for the waiting captors.

I am, however, allowed to give a little context for the "historical purpose" of the thing. I at least got that much professional allowance for the thing. My argument is that context is vital for historical records but my comments fell on deaf ears.

I do not know how long it has been since the Autumn Equinox that was supposed to be my wedding day. No clue. I think that they are distorting my idea of time passing by bringing meals at odd times and not allowing me to see the sun as well. So my estimates range from a few days to maybe ten days but I doubt that upper estimate. I am exhausted as my sleep pattern has been disrupted, I am not eating properly and… as I say, I have been unable to see the sun.

I am kept in a basement cell in Coulthard castle. I am still allowed to call it that it, would seem. I spent a lot of time there while things proceeded and then I was cleaned, fed and well…

My critic has just reminded me about what I am allowed to say and not allowed to say.

I am kept in a cell in Coulthard castle. I spend my time in my cell or, as it would now appear, in my new office which is far less auspicious than the last one. My cell… I'm pretty sure, used to be a wine cellar that they have converted for the purpose. I sleep chained to the bed with a mask on my face and earplugs in my ear.

This does not obscure the screaming.

The cell is not dirty as it has not had the proper amount of time to become so, although it does now smell sharply of me, my vomit and my own stale urine.

My clothes are clean by virtue of a recent bath but otherwise…

I was taken from my cell this "morning" and brought here to my office. I am pretty sure that it used to be a servant's room. I have no idea where it is in the castle as I was carried, blindfolded and with pads over my ears.

There are no windows.

It was not a poor room but at the same time…

There is a fire in the hearth that gives the place a sweaty kind of feeling. In the room is my writing desk….

Not "mine" but a writing desk that was provided for me.

I am chained to that desk with the only free movement being with my arms. I am already missing two fingers from my left hand from an earlier attempt to coerce me into doing what they want, but that was more of a confirmation thing than anything else. A warning maybe. They were aware of my past experiences with pain and as such…

It was the torturer's equivalent of a handshake.

I must laugh or I will weep.

I write these words by the Grace of Her Majesty, Queen Adda.

Fuck…

I was describing the room.

The chair that I am tied to has a hole in the bottom that I relieve myself through. There is a conflict somewhere between the people that want me to be clean, healthy and presentable and those people that don't care about my well-being. But I piss and shit on the floor. I try and hold it in for as long as I can in the hope that I can convince people to take me to the garderobe or at least provide me with a chamber pot. But someone has ordered that I am not allowed to do these things.

I think I am being tortured and I think that the degradation is part of it. I think that they are going to degrade me at length and to the point of sickness and death before some benevolent soul is going to arrive to try and get me to do what they want. They needn't bother.

They already know my weakness. And I hate them too much for it.

The floor is plain stone. That doesn't help me identify where in the castle it is. I can tell that the rugs that would have covered the floor have been removed and the tapestries have likewise been taken down. It is hot in the room. The fire and the presence of large people and the lack of proper ventilation are plain in these matters and although my shirt was clean when I was brought in here, it was not long before it came away from my skin with difficulty. I can feel the sweaty slimy, sticky itchiness in my armpits.

I hope it makes someone angry.

I have just been struck again. I can skirt close to the line but not go too far over it.

They are aware that I and the other captive are going to soil themselves and probably bleed a bit in this room. Not to mention the sweat that is condensing on the cold stone walls before it runs down in small rivulets. There is straw on the floor and although it looks fresh at the moment, I wonder at what point someone will decide that the straw is filthy enough that it needs to be replaced.

Let's see… What else?

I am shivering in the heat. That is not a good sign.

In the room with me is my clerk. He is tied to a stool next to me. I finish writing on the small pieces of paper they have given me and then he reads what is written. If they are pleased with what he says then we go another minute or so without extra pain. If they are displeased then…

I get struck and he gets whipped.

He is weeping openly, the sobs echoing in my ears.

I came into the room all but clean, but he is filthy. He is naked and one of the things… One of the many things that I regret and hate myself for is that I chose this person.

He is only five years younger than me. His name is Johann and I would have someone remember that name for me as I think he is already sick. I cannot tell for sure in this firelight but he seems unhealthily pale and he is sweating.

Unfortunately, the thing that made him an excellent clerk and transcriber for an academic myself, makes him a poor ally when it comes to resisting our captors. His utter lack of imagination.

Lack of imagination, which we have both commented on, means that he is unable to come up with subterfuge. In academia, this means that he transcribes exactly what is written.

Exactly, without deviation.

But that also means that I can't send him messages in my shorthand as he just reads them out faithfully.

I tried early in our work this morning.

He was halfway through reading it aloud when he realised what he was saying.

They didn't beat me that time, they just flogged him with three strikes of the whip.

That lack of imagination is perfect for a historian or a clerk. It means that you recount what you see or hear exactly and without an attempt at subterfuge.

I don't know how they caught him. But catch him they did and given that he must have been working with Dorthan to get my diary transcribed, I have to assume that Dorthan has been caught too.

Johann cannot, or will not, tell me. Not that we have had time to talk to each other. He is clearly not allowed to speak other than that which he reads to me.

His left foot is swelling with a bruise and I wonder if his foot is broken. I can't tell. I have not seen him moving yet.

He is staring at me, his huge eyes shining in the reflected firelight.

Another man… Another boy that I might as well have killed myself.

I can see dirt smeared up his sweaty legs and an unidentifiable reddish-brown substance squishing between his toes. They flex every time he is struck and I can see it squeezing between them like mud.

I would be sick if I had anything to digest.

There are two critics. I am calling them that because it amuses me and I must laugh or I will weep. It amuses me because they hate it but given that they haven't beaten me for it yet, I must assume that this falls in the nebulous rules that I am allowed to follow and that they must enforce.

They are huge men.

Ridiculously huge. Heavily muscled and glowering. They too are shirtless and like Johann and myself, they are sweating freely. Their muscles fairly gleam in the firelight, looking almost too big for the skin to contain. The light is not perfect for this kind of thing and although I have protested that all this firelight is not good to write by, let alone to see by, or the danger if the fire catches to any of the paper. But even in this dim light, I can see the droplets of sweat running over the muscles. I wonder if I am imagining the stretch marks that I can see on the chest of the man leaning on the wall.

Heh, he has just twisted himself to try and examine himself as that last line was read aloud. Odd that that did not cause them to strike us.

All of that sweat means that the air is fairly pulsing with the smell of human. They say that if you live long enough in the stench, you get used to it. I wonder when that time will come and if it could hurry up and get here.

They stand there, glaring down at us. The one with the bar is spinning it in his hands so that it whistles in the air. Spinning it back and forward as though he is showing off how much skill and control he has over it.

Kerrass would say that any man that must rely on tricks is not a great fighter.

Poor Kerrass.

.

It turns out that if I stop writing for any length of time then the critics get upset,

The other critic is leaning against a wall looking bored. I cannot properly see either of them but they really do seem huge. Gregoire-sized huge. It is hard to tell but they appear to be well over seven feet tall each. Huge Pectoral and bicep muscles with veins standing out on their arms. There are other huge muscles as well, but I can't remember what they are all called.

Their heads look… big for their necks. Huge jawbones, brows and cheek muscles. The cheek skin seems stretched in some way and their brows shadow beady little eyes.

There are also three, smaller, pale clerks. Sitting at desks and wearing robes. They are visibly uncomfortable with what is going on nearby and they don't look at either Johann or me. They keep looking away but I can tell that they are sweating and one of them keeps licking his lips nervously.

How did I not see this? How could I not see this coming?

But I have my orders. I am to write. I am to make an account of what happened on the Night of the Equinox for that account to be added to the record. I am allowed to add in as much personal bias as I like. I can express my hatred and anger for what I have seen and done.

But I MUST tell things in the proper order and I am not allowed to make up events.

Her majesty needn't worry about that. There is enough horror in my account that I don't need to make things up.

I write these words by the grace of Her Majesty Adda, Queen of Temeria and Redania.

May the God save her soul.

It was my wedding day.

.

I have just had to stop because every time I think those words, I start to weep. Huge, wracking sobs shake my body and for a moment, I cannot see. The critic is upset. Because no amount of beating me, or flogging Johann can get me to come out of those moments any the quicker.

They have tried.

But it was my wedding day. It was supposed to be the happiest day of my life before an accident of nature, the largest storm in recent records, meant that it was delayed, although I wonder just how accidental that delay was.

I am certainly left wondering how things might have shaken out if the attempt at rebellion had begun with everyone there. I imagine that it would all have been over much quicker.

One way or another.

But it was my wedding day.

I am getting better at that, saying it and writing it. I am trying to fuel myself with rage. I have spent months trying to banish that feeling but now, I welcome it back like a warm blanket because if I shrug that blanket off, then all I am left with is pain, horror and a feeling of sorrow so large that it threatens to engulf me.

One of the critics has just laughed at that. I wonder if they are fanning my hate and my rage deliberately to keep me stable. I wonder if they are doing it to keep me writing. I don't know that they are clever enough for that. But I wonder if whoever sent them is clever enough.

It was my wedding day. I am told that the last thing that the public knows about that day from my pen, is that I had spent the day walking and talking with Ariadne. That was true.

So many coincidences.

We had spent the day together, enjoying the time spent in each other's company. Now, I think about those hours that we spent together in the same way that I think regarding the last few times that I saw Francesca. I want to dissect them in the cold darkness of the night while I question if there was something, anything that I could have seen or done to turn aside the calamity that has befallen us.

But there is a lesson that I have learned over the years which is that there is no setting aside the actions of madmen. And madmen were certainly involved in the planning of this.

There was going to be a dinner that night. Closest friends and family, the guests that were staying in, or working at the castle that night. There were various reasons for this. A bit of an outlet for the frustration that everyone was feeling. The sense of hanging tension was pervasive and the urge to blow off a bit of steam was strong. So Emma declared that we were going to have a dinner.

I wonder if someone suggested that to her. I will ask her if I ever get to see her again and if she is capable of answering.

My mind is wandering. I need to focus. Better to get the chore done quicker.

There was going to be a dinner and it was going to be a semi-formal occasion which is family noble speak for "it's a formal occasion Freddie, dress smartly."

However, I also knew that these things do not happen quickly. After leaving Ariadne by the corridors leading to the guest wing where she has rooms, I departed for my room where I ordered my bath and the presence of a servant to come and shave me.

I can do this chore myself with a good enough mirror and a sharp enough knife. But I never get quite as close as I do when someone professional does it.

.

Poor Kerrass.

While I waited for all of that to happen I worked on my diary. I read past entries and wrote down some other thoughts. Nothing too solid. Believe it or not, I have several diaries. One is the personal diary that was sent out to the publisher, but I also have other diaries and notebooks. One was to do with future academic work and the other is, essentially, a chore notebook where I write down the things that I need to remember or to remember to do.

The barber came and shaved me although we saved the haircut that needed and still needs doing until the wedding date was a little bit closer in certainty.

I bathed and dressed but I left out the stockings and the bonnet.

I knew what would happen next. The life of a nobleman in this situation is a lot like a soldier in that the entire directive is a "hurry up and wait" kind of situation.

So I was fully prepared for a long wait. I had been told to get ready, but the ladies of the castle were still going to take a small age to prepare themselves.

As I left my room, there is a moment, always a moment, but given the formality of the occasion, I could not take my more obvious weapons with me. I normally carry them everywhere, admittedly, my spear is in its broken-down state and stuffed in a bag while my dagger sits in its sheath across my belly.

I have tried adjusting my dagger harness so that I could carry it at my side and lend myself a more martial air. But it never works and sits awkwardly on my hip, getting in the way and needing more manipulation than if I just wore a sword. I have kept meaning to have a leatherworker make me a new harness for these occasions so that it could hang on my hip properly, much the same way that Lord Helfdan wears his hatchet. But there were always other things that needed doing.

I bitterly regret that small laziness now.

My mind is wandering again.

My missing fingers itch. My little finger and my ring finger on my left hand. It was agony at the time, but a surprisingly manageable one. Oddly, Sansum pulling my fingernails out was worse.

But there is a symbology in missing the ring finger on my left hand that I find distressing.

But I can feel them itching. I have known about "Phantom limb syndrome" as Shani once called it. But I did not know that I would be able to feel the sticky warmth that happens when your hands start to sweat.

.

The critics have just reminded me that I need to keep my mind on the job.

So, as I always do. I looked at my weapons for a moment as I propped my spear next to the door and hung the dagger harness on the back of the door.

I was still wearing my boots though and I had absolutely no guilt about putting my boot knife down the left-hand boot. In all truth, it would feel wrong if I didn't do that.

And with the eating knife at my back, I was armed for the feast.

I carried my diary with me along with a small pot of ink and a pre-trimmed quill. If it needed trimming again, my eating knife would do the job. I keep it much sharper than it strictly needs to be and since the cult in the north, I have worn out two eating knives with too much sharpening. Emma teases me about it and claims that my eating knife is…

Fuck you. You try and keep your mind on the… So Fuck you

.

I say it in writing as well as with my mouth so that you can know exactly how I feel you piece of filth.

Anyway.

So I left my room. I did not doubt that I could commandeer a little table in one of the waiting rooms while all of the guests assembled before dinner. And while we waited, I would be able to work on the diary which would have the bonus of distracting the people that might want to talk to me. Including Aunt Meredith and Aunt Claudette who were old cronies of Mothers who had been invited for reasons that I couldn't understand.

But they came with Uncles Alain and Wilhelm and those two men made no secret of their disdain for the written word and as such would avoid me.

It was not the first time that I have used this subterfuge against people that I don't like.

I knew that Sam would be at dinner, as would Rickard and Kerrass. So I was not without allies on the male side of things. But I have found that, even as the man getting married, it does not stop people who have long held positions of authority over you, from thinking that they still do.

So any excuse to ignore these people that I didn't like and didn't understand why they were there?

Emma invited them because she had to. I had asked her why they were invited and she didn't have more of an answer for me other than to say that.

She had to invite them.

I went, found an out-of-the-way table to sit at and got to work. Kerrass was one of the first ones down. He was looking forward to cutting a swathe through some of the various cousins and things and so was disappointed that these people did not seem particularly friendly towards him. I had told him that he might have better luck on the wedding day when people might be more receptive to all of the romance, but he had not reacted.

So he came and sat nearby, dressed in the tunic that he had made for him. It was cut to remind everyone who he was but still expensive and posh enough that he could get away with wearing it on semi-formal occasions. He too was not wearing any weapons given the circumstance and like me, he had developed a survival habit of carrying a book with him wherever he went so that he could sit, read the book and therefore pretend that he hadn't seen whoever it was that wanted to talk to him.

And his words were that "by talk to him, they meant to low-key insult him through their ignorance"

Poor Kerrass

It was supposed to be my wedding day.

.

So we waited, and Mark came down. He seemed to be doing fairly well all things considered but he is learning to conserve his strength. He recently told me,

"I only have so much social and intellectual capital left. I must invest it where it will do the most good."

He came down wearing some reduced version of his cardinal's robes. Just enough to remind everyone of his authority but not enough to make the entire dinner about him.

I wonder how he is doing now. I have a dreadful feeling that if he is still alive, then they will have kept his medicine from him.

He was doing quite well that night. Old intelligence and pride were flashing in his eyes and he spent that part of the evening skewering people that thought they knew more about scripture and philosophy than he did.

Sometimes that is fun to watch, but that night. I just wanted to get drunk and maybe weep myself to sleep. But I was not yet at the stage where it would be acceptable to start drinking and as such, I just needed to bide my time.

I am also left wondering if my friends stationed themselves around me in the same way that they would station themselves to protect me on the battlefield.

Certainly, I cannot remember anyone, particularly coming and talking to me. Rickard arrived and spoke to a couple of people that he remembered from his war days. I think he served with the sons of a couple of the guests during the war and had the occasion to save someone from bandits before he worked for us.

There was a similar feast happening outside with all of the workers and those servants that weren't taking part in the preparation of the meal.

I remember, distinctly, at one point that evening hearing someone whoop with laughter and a strain of music coming through the open shutters towards me. I remember looking up, smelling the roasting pork on the fresh air that drifted towards me and I remember wishing that I was out there enjoying myself rather than in here. I suddenly had a sense of claustrophobia in the room with all of these well-meaning relatives and old family friends. Many of whom I don't like and I wanted to be outside dancing a jig and wiping pork grease from my chin.

Or preferably to be drawing close to the moment where I should have been taking Ariadne's hand in mine as we moved to the marital suite.

That was what that day was like. I was constantly looking at the movement of the sun. By this point, with the sun sinking towards the horizon. I should have been enjoying the feast, stealing glances at the most beautiful woman in the world while doing my best not to insult people given that I was so distracted by the beauty of the woman next to me.

That was what should have happened.

It was supposed to be my wedding day.

They have just fed us. Johann and I. Not only that, but they seem encouraging of me to record the fact that they fed us. I was given a form of thick, salty porridge. There are lumps of things that I hope are bacon in them but…

I just hope that it's bacon. I'm eating them anyway, my body would rebel if I did not.

I at least was given a spoon to eat my food with. A spoon and a bowl but the critic was standing over me, spinning his metal rod around and around in his hands to remind me that he was there should I decide to try any mischief.

He needn't have bothered.

I am horrified to discover that my body is hungry. I didn't want the food, and I don't feel particularly hungry, but the moment that they put it there in front of me and suddenly… I was wolfing the stuff down. As though the decision to eat wasn't made by my conscious brain but was rather made by my body instead.

Also, what was I going to do with a thin wooden spoon? I am still tied to my chair, one of my hands is useless and even if I did try to use the spoon as some kind of club, dagger or another lever to pry my bonds off, then it would be more likely to snap rather than actually achieve anything.

But at least I was given a spoon.

Johann was brought a cup of thin, grey liquid. In the same way that I hope that the lumps of salty meat in my porridge were bits of bacon, I hope that what he was fed was some form of gruel or broth. Something that was going to do him some good.

Another critic walked up to Johann and then held the cup to the boy's lips. Johann opened his mouth in desperation as the third, the newer critic just started to tip the stuff into Johann's waiting mouth. Poor Johann. The liquid was steaming hot. I could see it, even from where I was sitting. It must have burned on the way down.

So I went to dinner on the night that I should have been married.

I took my diary with me in the vain hope that I would either be able to use it to fend off well-wishers who would be bound to be wondering why I wasn't more cheerful. Or to use as a prop when I explain why I wasn't more cheerful.

I mean, I would have thought that the answer was self-evident. I was supposed to be getting married that day, surrounded by friends and people that I love rather than being surrounded by distant relations. Distant both in terms of emotional intimacy and physical distance. Also, although I called them relations, there was more than one person there that Emma spoke with familiarly that I had absolutely no idea who they were.

So I was sat next to a woman called Aunt Coryn who I understand was some cousin or so of Fathers. I have no idea to what degree that she was removed. I remember looking over at where Ariadne was sitting and feeling a sense of longing. I ached to be next to that woman and I did not doubt that the coming meal was going to be excruciating.

I hadn't noticed who was missing from the table. I recriminate myself for that now in the same way that I…

I've said that before. One of the critics has just reminded me that I have previously likened this to Francesca's disappearance.

But I didn't see it.

So I sat at my assigned place and tucked my journal inside my doublet where it acted as a shield over my heart. I fixed the best smile on my face and spent some time speaking to Aunt Coryn about the state of things. I remember lying profusely and without pause for extended periods. I can't entirely remember what I said, just one of those times when I just let my mouth speak and assumed that it knew what it was doing.

I was trying to decide when it would be acceptable for me to start drinking heavily.

I have no idea who was sitting on the other side of me. Some lawyer I think. The man that had taken up the role of one of Father's solicitors after that man retired. I think we had met at some point before he realised that I had no interest in his profession and that my future lay elsewhere and I was therefore not going to be a client of his. I seem to remember him talking to the person on the other side of him with considerable animation.

I remember looking around at who was there. I was looking for some kind of escape from the horror that was a continuing discussion about my education with Aunt Coryn who was telling me, at the same time, that education was important but also that I should get out into the real world before I decided what I was going to do with my future.

I mean, it's not as if I've made a secret of my plans but… Some people won't take the message if you write that message on the side of a sledgehammer and insert it into their skull.

One of the critics found that funny. Flame but I hate critics.

I remember looking around. I saw Emma sitting at the head of the table. There was not supposed to be any kind of formality about who was sitting where but I took that as a kind of formal declaration of who was in charge here. She did well doing it as well. Reminding everyone, including Mother and those people that were flocking around Mark, exactly who was in charge. She seemed happy, relaxed and was doing well I thought.

Ariadne was sitting somewhere down the table. We were in the part of our game where we had to keep our distance from each other in case we both gave into the temptation to have Ariadne teleport us to a distant part of the Empire and fuck all of this nonsense.

She looked radiant in a blue dress. Long-sleeved, long skirt and a neckline that I understand is described as "Scoop-cut" whatever that means. She had a yellow sash around her middle and periodically she would catch my gaze and wink at me. I know her, or thought that I knew her well enough to know that…

Dammit

I thought that she was trying to cheer me up. I knew that she was…

Fuck…

I…

I thought that she was as miserable as I was. Of course, there is no way to know now. But I thought she was as miserable as I was and we were both trying to be there for the other. There was a danger that we were going to drag down the mood of the other person but if we could just keep the other person's mood up a bit, then we might be able to stave off the horror of permanent depression.

She reminded me of how she had looked at the Empress's coronation.

.

Dammit.

.

Anyway. I remember looking for Kerrass. He was…

This is not getting any easier.

Poor Kerrass

He was sitting amongst a group of ageing ladies. I am pretty confident that he just sat down and these women congregated around him. Attracted to the danger, the fact that he knew what they were talking about or some kind of combination of all of those things. He had one on either side of him and they were all but playing with his clothes.

He… He seemed to be taking that in good grace and was behaving gallantly in response but I wondered if I was imagining the kind of fixed stare expression that was on his face. Those women can get intense if you aren't careful around them.

I saw Rickard, he was having a similar kind of situation but people were looking at him and talking to him differently. They were sizing him up as potential material as a potential son-in-law. Not for the first time, I felt as though these things are often treated in the same way that others of us would treat buying a horse. They were all but examining his teeth and asking about his pedigree.

No matter how many times he tried to tell them that he was spoken for, engaged to be married and that he was happy with the choice, they didn't seem to be perturbed. He was a dashing, military man and to a certain kind of person, that is like catnip to a cat. One of them produced a pocket portrait of her daughter to show Rickard. I wondered what the portrait looked like. Rickard himself tried to show polite interest but he is not as good at hiding his feelings as others.

He tried to get firmer with the women as I watched to inform them that he was off the market but still.

I hope Rickard is alright. I have no idea what…

Fucking critics.

Rickard was wearing an outfit that I call "feast armour". It was the kind of armour that you wear to remind everyone that you are a military man and that you are a man of duty. It's little more than a shiny breastplate and a pair of greaves. He had to leave his sword behind as there were so many people there.

Mark was holding a bit of a court at another end of the room. Surrounded, again, by slightly older folk that wanted to prove that they knew what they knew and that they had not got it wrong. They were trying to disprove Mark's declaration that every person must dismiss the monster from their lives. And then his further declaration that Monsters are those that would extinguish the light. That being a monster is not a matter of a person's race. He pointed at Ariadne's baptism and confirmation in the worship of the Eternal Flame as evidence of his point.

He was enjoying himself.

Sir Froggart was, like Rickard, wearing some party armour and was talking with someone. Froggart treated this kind of thing as a kind of necessary evil. He hated getting all dressed up and would regularly claim that he was wasting time when he could have been doing something useful. Judging by his expression, his opinion of such matters had not changed since his retirement.

I sympathised.

I didn't see who was missing until he made his entrance.

We were all sitting down and having a relatively nice time. Although I was utterly miserable I was putting a brave face on it and it is sometimes true, not always, but sometimes true that if you fake a better mood than the one you are feeling, then a better mood will arrive when you are not looking.

Some good pre-dinner drinks were being served and the serving staff were coming round with the soup which was a delicious kind of parsnip soup with a creamy and spicy edge to it that just managed to tickle the tongue and had the added bonus that it distracted the other people that wanted to talk to me.

But it was halfway through that that Sam made his entrance.

.

Fuck.

.

I should have seen it. People have been trying to tell me about it for years now that I think about it. But I was blind, I was blind.

.

Sam walked in and the way he walked, he did so with a purpose.

He looked pale, I remember that.

I had no clue what was happening. A combination of everything that had happened and was not happening and that still might happen had fogged my mind and I wasn't thinking clearly. I suspect that if I survive all of this, I will hate myself for not thinking clearly.

I will tell myself that I had plenty of reasons not to be thinking clearly but deep down I will know that I should have seen it coming and that I should have done something about it.

Sam walked in, looking pale. He was sweating.

I was looking at him as he moved in and I registered movement. Everyone had turned to look at Sam as he made such an entrance that it drew everyone's eyes to him.

Everyone was looking at him. If anyone was doing something different. If Kerrass was looking because his medallion had jerked or if someone had seen something then…

I was certainly looking at Sam.

He was wearing all of his armour. Plate and Chain mail with a helmet in his hands and a sword on his hip. His surcoat was that of the Redanian military. The red was more subdued than the older flags. A deeper crimson rather than the bright and shiny red that Redania used to fly.

He left the main doors open. The door to the servant's area was already open and there were other doors there that were open as well. We could easily hear the revelry that was going on outside.

I was glad to see him. That's what I remember. I was glad to see him.

"There's my brother." I thought. "There's my friend. He will help to keep me safe in the middle of all of this. Another ally in the midst of… all of this.

Yes, he was armoured but I didn't see why that was strange. In the same way that I was carrying my journal as armour. The same way that Kerrass wore a tunic that was almost, but not quite like a Witcher's armour. And the way that Emma sat at the head of the table.

"He's telling us all who and what he is." I thought. "He's a soldier and he's telling us that he's a soldier and that we should treat him with respect because of it."

I was glad to see him.

In the time since all of this had happened. I have wondered at his behaviour. He came in alone and by himself but since then…

He was armoured and at the most, we had eating knives. He was wearing plate and chain and our best weapons were eating implements. He could walk through our attacks and not notice what was happening.

He walked to his place, holding his hands up high to respond to those people that shouted his name. He smiled and shouted greetings back before he stood at his place and raised his hands to ward off the jeering at his tardiness.

He had everyone's attention. Including mine.

I remember leaning back in my chair. I had a cup in my hand. The entire feeling of the place was that my brother was about to make some kind of speech and I was looking forward to what he was going to say.

He had all of our attention.

"Yes, I am late," he told us all. I wonder if I will ever forget those words.

Normally when I recount words, I am writing from notes made hurriedly in the aftermath or…

Well. But this time, I will never forget it. I looked at him and he took a drink from a goblet to wet his throat, his other hand holding up to beg for patience and also to hold attention.

I remember wondering when my brother had gotten so good at this.

He lowered his hand and stood there, sweating a little and he wiped his forehead on the back of his wrist.

I thought he was sweating in the heat.

"I wish I have more to say." He told us as he stood there for a long moment. "But when the time comes, there is nothing that can really conjure up the feeling of the moment is there."

There was some general laughter.

He nodded to everyone and then I wonder if I imagined that he looked me in the eyes.

"Sorry Freddie," He whispered.

Well… He mouthed it.

"On this night," he began formally. "I raise my standard in rebellion against the tyrannous South, against the hated Black Ones. I will not rest until the yoke of their tyranny has been thrown from our shoulders. I do so at the behest and with the knowledge and blessing of Queen Adda of Redania and Temeria."

His proclamation was met with silence.

Then he turned.

"It is time." He shouted before bringing his voice down to a quieter level. "Break that damn fool Witcher's neck."

There is much about that moment that I wonder if I imagined it. I wonder if I imagined the spittle that sprayed from my brother's lips as he said the word "fool". I wonder if I imagine the humming vibration that seemed to echo from my ears down into the hollow of my chest. I wonder if I imagined the rising laughter of panic in my throat.

I am confident I had my eyes on Sam as the laughter bubbled up. I remember thinking that this might be some kind of joke.

But I still imagine Ariadne rising to her feet with an expressionless face although I cannot swear that I actually saw it, I think I saw it. Or I register it on some underlying level that I cannot understand.

I once wrote that I had never seen a Vampire move when she meant it. I still have not seen a Vampire move. Not when she means it anyway.

She was on the other side of the room. Literally the other side of the room where she had been seated. Near the top of the tables given her rank as a Countess, a rank that she held in her own right.

And Kerrass is just a Witcher and a friend of the family.

Was…

Dammit.

But then she was there, standing next to Kerrass. She looked as though she was doing an annoying chore. No expression on her face. Nothing.

Her hands enveloped Kerrass' head. One hand cupped around his chin, covering his mouth while the other was cupping the back of his skull. Then she jerked and the snap was audible.

Or maybe I imagined that as well.

Kerrass fell. It is a lie that a broken neck kills instantly. He fell, his throat seemed to move, his mouth seemed to churn as he tried to say something. He must have bitten something when Ariadne grabbed his mouth because a small amount of blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. It seemed to me that I saw the glow in his eyes fade as he died.

I don't know who screamed first but a signal had been given. Armed men were rushing into the room then. Huge, muscled and armoured with great weapons that stood by the door.

Sam wasn't done.

"Collar the bitch." He ordered and Ariadne moved again.

It took me a moment to find her. I would like to flatter Laurelen that she was in shock at everything that had happened and was still happening. She hadn't even gotten out of her chair when Ariadne appeared next to her. As it was, I had to look for Ariadne.

Part of me had fled. I wasn't thinking clearly. I was just a man with two arms and legs. I still wanted to laugh. It was a joke. It had to be a joke.

Ariadne was fastening some kind of collar around Laurelen's throat. It was made out of a strange metal that had a rainbow sheen running over the surface.

It actually looked quite pretty but she screamed as the metal closed around her neck.

"TAKE THEM ALIVE," Sam screamed over the din.

It all went echoey. I had no idea what was happening.

I do not know who screamed first but that was the first breach in the damn.

I looked to my right and I saw the lawyer to the right of me gaping, his mouth working like a fish does when it is tossed onto the ground. He was pale and for some reason, he was tugging at the collar of his tunic while he stared at me, as though he was struggling to breathe. A black line had appeared on the top of his head and as his mouth worked, the line seemed to open and blood poured forth, horrible, thick, red blood that ran down his brow and dripped off his nose before he fell to his knees.

It was all happening so slowly but at the same time. I could not move.

I saw the armoured man who I take to be some form of early…

Fuck.

He looked the same size as the men guarding me as I write. He was huge and made huger by the armour that he was wearing. He had a heavy truncheon in his hand, the type that watchmen break up riots with. It looked like a toothpick in his hands and he had just slammed it onto the top of the head of the lawyer.

I find that I detest lawyers on principle but at the same time, I cannot remember ever meeting one that I dislike, practised charm and all that, but I wonder if that man had deserved to be struck like that.

The woman to the left screamed and I had time to turn my head and I saw another one of these huge…. Monsters of men as he grabbed her by the hair on her head. Her hands came up and tried to grab hold of her hands but the armoured man was far too strong for her.

He slammed her face first into the table and she stopped screaming.

I remember wanting to shout at the soldier that Sam had demanded that they take us all alive.

I looked for Kerrass. An automatic response. I always look for Kerrass in the middle of the violence. Like a drowning man looking for something to… to hang on to.

He was still dead, staring off to one side, still twitching in death.

I couldn't see Emma. I thought I saw Froggart being bundled to the floor.

Rickard was trying to get to me I think. He, at least, was trying to fight. He looked at me, his mouth was open and I think he was shouting as he swung the remains of his wooden chair at the nearest armoured man.

I remembered wondering why I couldn't hear him but all I could hear were the sounds of whooshing water.

The man that had clubbed the lawyer clapped his hand on my shoulder.

Kerrass was dead.

It felt like I was watching from behind my own eyes as I moved and acted.

I grabbed the bowl of soup that was half full and threw it in the face of the man attacking me. I think he screamed in reflex as his hand, the one that was reaching towards me, lifted to fend off the hot liquid.

I realised that I was still sitting which meant that my boot knife was closer to hand. I bent, which must have meant that a grasping hand missed me as it went over my head and I grabbed the dagger and drew it, standing at the same time.

Out of reflex, I looked for Kerrass and remembered again that he was dead.

He was dead and Ariadne had killed him.

There was reddish-black smoke in the room now that seemed to be sealing off the doors. I saw a woman run into one before she screamed and fell. I rose to my feet and the armoured man snarled as he went to grab me. I got his arm and pulled him into my dagger which reached for the gap under his helmet.

I think I killed him.

Another armoured gauntlet fell on my shoulders and I turned. I was angry now. I wanted to fight. I wanted to kill. I spun to attack but the attacker seemed calmer and just twisted his body so that my knife skittered off his armour. He reached for me before a blade hammered down onto the arm knocking it down.

"Go, Freddie," Rickard screamed at me. I had to read the words off his lips. He had cut through to get to me but he was not clear. Blood ran down his face. I could see his eyes staring, one was larger than the other and they were boggling at me.

He had a sword in one hand that I assume….

Assuming. Damn me.

I thought he had taken it from one of the attackers but he was holding it in one hand. It was a blade, far too heavy for one hand. The other hung limply and I could see blood running down the arm.

He spat more blood.

He turned me with the same arm that was holding the sword and pushed me towards the window.

I went.

Another attacker got in our way but Rickard moved past me and although he couldn't control his sword with enough fine care to kill a man in full armour, he battered him aside with rage.

I made it to the window. Little more than an opening that looked out over the courtyard.

It was quite a long way down. A window that was little more than a port for people to shoot out of in the event of an attack.

I was still unhurt and I tried, through some reflex to get Rickard to jump first.

He physically heaved me into place and pushed me. Using his shoulder to force me through.

My clothing ripped and I lost my dagger.

I screamed his name as I fell. No more than fifteen, twenty feet and as I landed I heard Rickard's voice screaming out the window.

"CARYS." He screamed. "CARYS."

I had landed badly. The shock and the inability to jump properly meant that I had twisted as I fell, the impact driving the air from my body. I turned on the ground and tried to get my legs under me.

Kerrass was dead and the woman that I loved had killed him.

I tried to find something, anything that would help me get my feet under me. I wanted to find a weapon. Anything. Something that I could use. I wanted to cut, bash and hurt. I wanted to kill.

But I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe.

Carys appeared because of course she did.

Carys would have been one of the revellers out in the courtyard. She and her husband were there and if they weren't on duty, they would have been drinking and having fun. How she heard Rickard I don't know. There has never been a study that I have trusted that has adequately addressed the difference between human senses and Elves. Some say that human hearing is better and others claim the other way round.

But hear she did and it was no time before thin hands were pulling at me as she heaved me to my feet.

I couldn't breathe.

"GET HIM AWAY," Rickard screamed from above us.

Padraig, the Skelligan fighter that has been Rickard's shadow since the battlefields of Temeria was there, his broadsword was dripping.

"WE HAVE HIM, SIR." He bellowed, his broad Skelligan brogue. There were tears in his voice. He almost never calls Rickard 'sir'.

I finally sucked down air.

"No." I managed to protest and I struggled in Carys' grip.

She slapped me.

We could hear Rickard scream. It sounded like he screamed in agony. Pain, rage and horror. There was triumph in that scream as well.

An armoured man was coming towards us now and Padraig stepped forward and swatted the huge man aside.

The big Skelligan was weeping as he killed.

Carys was hauling me.

We made it a few paces before Sam's voice came down.

"COME BACK FREDDIE." He called. "YOU ARE SAFE."

I didn't have the words to answer that and just…

The horror of it all overwhelmed me for a moment then.

Carys had to let go of me for a moment. Three armoured men were coming towards us. Padraig stepped towards them, tears streaming down his huge face. Carys drew her daggers and her lips peeled back from her teeth in the silent snarl that she has when there is hate in her eyes. As she joined her husband.

I would have joined them but I had lost my boot knife somewhere during the fall.

"TAKE MY BROTHER ALIVE," Sam ordered, his voice ringing out.

The order startled those armoured men and Padraig and Carys killed them for their hesitance.

And I stood in the courtyard of my family castle. Not only had I lost my boot knife, but my clothing was torn and one of my boots had come away in the window. I looked around and it was like looking upon the face of hell.

Armoured men were everywhere, running this way and that. Grappling with workers and servants. They had clubs and truncheons that they used to batter people into unconsciousness. But that didn't stop the blood from flowing.

People had knocked over fires and that fire was spreading. I saw that the gates were closed and everywhere, people were screaming.

I watched as a servant whose name I had never known, got his head kicked in. I am sure that the blow must have killed him. One of the eyes popped out of his skull, his nose impacted in and his cheekbone shattered.

And then the armoured warrior kicked him again.

I looked for Kerrass. Kerrass was always next to me in times like this. He would know what to do. He would be able to lead me to safety and refuge.

But Kerrass was dead. The woman I loved had killed him.

Today was supposed to be my wedding day.

I don't know who is reading this, or indeed if anyone is reading this, whether it's you Sam you unspeakable…

Fuck

Or whether it's one of your subordinate lackeys or whatever else might be happening.

But after writing those words, I am afraid to say that I went a bit mad and it is now, possibly a day later.

For just that moment, I could see Kerrass' face as the light left his eyes, the blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. I could hear women screaming and I would be prepared to swear on holy texts that I could pick out my sister's and my mother's voice in the middle of all that screaming.

Other images came back to me that I didn't have time to see at the time. I saw a very brave man who I did not recognise leap at Ariadne with an eating knife. I saw that blade shatter against her neck.

She was standing over Laurelen at the time who was still pawing at the collar that I can only assume was Dimertium. I saw Ariadne turn to look at her attacker, her face impassive and she did nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I saw many things. I remember almost slipping on something that I could only hope was the butter. I saw a candle being knocked over into the hair that a woman had tied up into an ornate construction and saw that flame begin to consume it.

I also remember the absurd parts of my brain that try to defend me from all of the horrors with humorous little pieces of nonsense.

As I say, the candles and things around the place were being knocked over and just for a flash…. And I don't know if this thought was something that occurred to me on the night itself or whether or not it happened in my dreams, but the thought that occurred was that Mother would get really angry if that caused the tablecloths to be damaged.

Let alone the food stains from where it went everywhere.

Or the blood.

Dear Flame, the blood. You never really get rid of the smell, not really. That smell that you want to describe but when it comes down to it, there is no real description other than to say that it smells like blood. And when it's all flying around with all of the violence, sooner or later it is inevitable that some of it gets in your mouth and that is also a taste that you will never forget.

So I went to pieces. I fell apart. I was sitting in my bonds at my desk and I started weeping. The critics… Our guards were not the most imaginative and as a result, they kind of lost their temper. They struck me to get me to carry on writing. When that didn't work, they flogged Johann. But now I was screaming at them. They were replaced in my mind by my various tormentors over the years.

Oddly, Sam was not one of them.

But I was screaming, hurling myself into my bonds and trying to get at them. Johann was having the skin flayed from his back. One of us had soiled ourselves and the smell of sharp urine and…

The sheer amount of filth on the floor was awful.

At some point, I blacked out. Whether from a blow to the head or from the emotional…

I could still hear the people screaming and smell the smoke of that night. The night that my home burned. Literally and figuratively, my home had been on fire and the smell of that was in my nose.

So I lost consciousness.

I woke in my cell to find Laurelen standing over me and as my eyes opened, two more critics were locking the collar back around her neck.

She seemed resigned, very tired. She looked like a person that has passed through pain and grief to whatever comes on the other side of that. Battlefield surgeons and plague doctors have that expression. I have seen Shani wear that expression on more than one occasion.

Her eyes were sunken under black shadows and what I could see was bloodshot. She was still wearing the gown that she had worn that night. It was filthy, stained with soot, ash, food…

And blood.

She looked… She looked broken.

"You are fine," She told me. She had seen the question in my eyes and had guessed at the response. Incorrectly as it happens.

"They broke your jaw and cracked your ribs. You have also suffered from a severe concussion which might have led to brain damage if I hadn't been here. You have lost blood and there is an infection in your body from where you lost those fingers. "

She gestured at my left hand. I checked, and I still had all of the others.

"They need to do something about your infection otherwise it will spread and kill you." She wasn't just talking to me now, but to our guards. "But I am under orders and I daren't…"

Tears formed in her eyes and in her voice.

She took a deep breath and her expression went neutral.

"I cannot do more." She said.

"Johann?" I formed the words through my dry and raspy throat.

"He's in a bad way." She told me.

"Finish your work and he will be healed." One of the guards lied. Astonishing how badly he did it as well.

I saw the knowledge of the lie on Laurelen's face.

I looked back at Laurelen.

"Emma?" I asked

"She's…"

She didn't get a chance to say any more before a gauntleted hand slapped her on the side of the head. Her eyes went glassy for a moment but then she collapsed. She staggered and caught herself on the wall as her legs went rubbery. She looked back at me for a moment and I could see that as Rickard's had been, one of her eye pupils was larger than the other.

She looked… defeated.

One of the guards caught her under the armpits and dragged her off. I could see one of her legs trying to get under her, scuffing through the straw.

She was barefoot and like I was and like Johann was, her feet were filthy.

By the time she was in the corridor outside my cell, I could see through the bars that she could probably walk by this point, but the guard didn't have the patience to let her and just dragged her away.

A huge man loomed over me.

He was dressed the same way that Sam had been on the night that…

That night. He had the surcoat of Redania on his tunic.

I used to say that Gregoire was the largest man that I have ever seen. Some kind of freak of genetics that says that his bones are stronger and his muscles bigger than just about anyone and everyone else that was in the rest of the world.

But this man was bigger. He lacked the oversized jaw and brows of the critics. That sense of disproportion was missing but he was still taller and broader and stronger than your average person.

Something was different.

"I should apologise." He told me, his voice was formal. "Your guards went too far. I have been briefed by your brother that you are susceptible to battlefield shock and we should have briefed your guards that this might cause a problem."

Not only was his voice formal, but it was also trained and educated.

"We have replaced your guards and we require you to get back to work." He told me as he turned to go.

"Who are you?" I asked but he ignored me.

"Why should I do this for you?" I demanded. "Why don't I stop?"

He paused and came back and stared down at me. I felt like I was looking at a Golem or some other kind of elemental construct. But then he sighed and scratched the side of his head.

"My understanding," he began, "is that you are aware of the penalties that will be imposed if you fail to carry out those tasks that are assigned to you."

I felt a sullen, pointless and empty rage as I remembered.

"Fuck you," I said.

He sighed.

"Further to this, your clerk is also injured. Although the guards are being punished for going too far, that does not change the fact that failure to work is only going to prolong his suffering."

I nodded.

"So you are going to heal him after this is done?"

"Yes." He told me.

He was not a good liar, but I could not do other than believe him.

So now I am back, tied to my chair and strapped to my desk. My missing fingers itch and it is made worse by the fact that I know that the injuries are infected. Men have died from less when the infection kicks in.

I remember Jack and I remember some of the visions that he gave me. I remember one of the dying people just wishing death would hurry up and take him so that he could stop being afraid.

The room feels a bit cleaner, there is fresh straw on the floor and there is no damp, or squishiness between my toes. Just crusted on filth.

That isn't going to be helping the infection.

Johann is opposite me, he looks at me with dead eyes even while I can see the sweat running down his face and see his chest moving.

The three of us fled the castle. I was… all but incoherent. I wanted to go back and get my spear. I wanted to carry that spear against my enemies but I also knew that to go back was to ensure my death and that Rickard's determination to get me out would have been in vain. I didn't know that he was dead and I still don't know…

I mean I've…

These new guards are just as hot on letting me know when I am heading towards forbidden topics.

I wanted to fight but I had nothing to fight with. I tried to lift one of the swords that the guards were carrying that Carys and Padraig had killed but I could barely lift the thing let alone be able to wield it properly.

Carys tugged me away and I went with her, the jerk on my arm causing me to drop the weapon.

Probably for the best.

We went surprisingly cautiously. I would have thought we would have been better off with some kind of headlong exodus. But we kept to what shadows there were. One of the benefits of the pavilions and tents and temporary structures was that there were plenty of ways to hide.

Carys and Padraig swapped. She led and Padraig stayed close to me. The two of them moved well and talked to each other with simple hand gestures. Twice she stopped us before heading out and returning with fresh blood on her daggers. She didn't need to be too quiet as people were shouting and screaming.

Some of those shouts were people calling my name.

Others were being ordered to find me quickly.

Various and imaginative punishments were suggested if I wasn't found.

We came up with two long coils of rope before we climbed up some stairs that led to the walls. Padraig led again and killed another.

The rope carried us over the wall and to the bottom. And that was how we escaped. The walls are all interconnected so that should an enemy take the courtyards, then defenders can still hold the walls, or vice versa and so we were able to make our way to the outside of the castle quite easily after that. Our enemy was still trying to contain everyone and it seemed that we had slipped through that net. I don't know if we did that at the point of Carys' daggers or by the edge of Padraig's sword.

I did nothing. I was, essentially senseless.

By this point, I had this feeling of being outside my body. I watched it walking, running, crouching and hiding from behind my own eyes. I was expressionless and I could just about hear what was going on around me as though it was coming through a tunnel.

I felt immensely tired and there was a sense of unreality. There was a part of me that was hoping that this was some kind of nightmare. As though I had eaten something that had gone rotten and I was now delirious.

We landed outside of the castle walls. There were horse patrols that were moving around the countryside, but they didn't know the landscape like the three of us and we were able to get to the tree line fairly easily.

I felt like I was walking through a Kingdom on fire.

The staggering thing for me was that it was almost exactly like the cult in the North and their visitations on the people nearby. Riders were running through the smoke and the flames and the darkness. They seemed to be calling out to me. Various people were screaming.

It was so alike that I wanted to laugh as we ran from tree trunk to tree trunk. I kept looking around for Kerrass with his broken arms tied to his chest and then I would remember that he was dead.

The differences though…

My vision did not swim. The screams that I could hear were perfectly ordinary human screams issued by perfectly normal human throats. The riders that went this way and that way calling my name were wearing proper armour and were riding proper, healthy, well-trained horses.

This was the worst nightmare. This was the way that everything went wrong. This had been what I was most afraid of when I ran through the woodland in the North. I could not have told you that at the time. But this fear, the fear that it would visit my homeland. The fear that Ariadne would turn against me and that I could not love her. It was the fulfilment of all of that and I was so terrified that I was essentially shut down.

Carys and Padraig, between them, had to move me around. They gave me orders and told me when to do things and what to do. I was entirely in my head at that point, watching my body move without having any real control over it, even as I told it to run, to stand and then to move on.

They steered me well. Carys had to shake me a couple of times to get me to listen to them and once I slumped against a tree trunk and had to be shaken into an attitude of usefulness.

I was astonished when it happened. It was as though I had fallen asleep and then Carys had to cover my mouth while I laughed at the absurdity of it.

The group of horsemen that we had been hiding to avoid moved on and we left with all the speed that stealth was allowing.

I didn't know where we were going, nor do I know what route we were taking to get there. However, when we got there, I saw a building on fire and I saw Carys beginning to despair.

It was a large building with a sign on the front and the glow from the flames illuminated a bright circle around it. We were in a village, not one of those hovels from the depths of Velen, but this place was well-built and well-made. People were looking out of windows and looking out of doorways to see what all of the fuss was about and to watch their tavern burn.

A squad of horsemen thundered through the town and all of those faces disappeared from view before, in ones and twos, they started to reappear.

We were in the tree line and the small part of me that was still able to think realised where we were.

This was one of the small towns around the place that serviced the many trade caravans that came through Coulthard lands. As such, there will be a smithy, a cooper and a wheel-wright somewhere around the place, as well as all of the other shops that provide the other things that a wagon train might need.

And it was the tavern that was burning. The place where people could get a good flagon of ale and a hunk of meat to chew on. Truly extravagant guests might be able to get a bath there and I know that there were a few rooms that could be hired should anyone want them.

The owner didn't make his bar staff sleep with any of the customers although if they did, he was alright with it and didn't take the money that they made.

This was Chireadean's tavern. He likes to joke that no matter what happens, he always likes the idea of having a little tavern of his own. A tavern with a buxom woman to keep him warm at night and a comfortable chair that he could sit in while he watches the world go by. When we were running through the undergrowth in the North, he would tick things off his fingers as to what he would do with such an inn. He would say that attractive women would drink at half price before giving the secret that all women are attractive to a randy old elf like him.

I have no idea how old Chireadean is or whether or not he is old for an elf.

It would seem that these new critics are more agreeable to the matter when I go off on tangents.

I know that he had multiple chess sets behind the bar. Spare, but incomplete Gwent decks and boards, Domino boxes and several lawn games that could be borrowed to take out and play on the green. His bow was somewhere in the corner and his Glaive had been fastened above the hearth.

He had found himself a buxom woman that liked her men thin and the pair had found enough affection with each other to call it love and had been married a couple of months after Chireadean had arrived in the local area. Survivors of that run from the North drank in his tavern for free.

Carys wept when she saw that it was on fire and Padraig was not doing much better. A lot of wounds had been healed in that tavern over the time since we got back from the North.

Carys asked a question but I didn't hear it. From the context, I suspect that she was wondering what we were supposed to do now. She repeated the question before Padraig shook his head and we pulled back from our vantage point. We waited for a moment and the two of them started to get into the thick of a discussion.

Then Carys heard something. I have no idea what she could hear over the fire consuming the tavern. Or the distant screams or the thunder of hooves going this way or that but she did.

She put her hands to her mouth to make some kind of trumpet and a birdcall came out.

One of those tricks that people seem to be able to do so easily that I have never been able to get the hang of.

Like whistling.

She listened again for a moment, waving Padraig into silence at one moment before she heard something else. She seized Padraig's hand and led us off into the darkness and led us to the first good news of the night.

Chireadean and his wife, and another Elf that had come with us out of the North that had been working with Chireadean were there waiting while Chireadean drank from a bottle and watched his tavern burn.

He looked relatively calm about it.

He was expecting us and rose to his feet, pulling us into the little hollow before embracing Carys first, taking Padraig's hand and then trying to hug me.

He looked confused when I didn't hug him back.

"He's insensible," Padraig told him. "We ain't got any fockin' idea what 'appened in the 'all tonight. But the Boss fair threw 'is lordship out a window to get him to safety."

Chireadean grunted and made me drink from his flask. It was strong, I can't say much else about it.

Chireadean's wife was weeping as she watched her home burn.

"They came through at nightfall." He said. "They ordered that all of the non-human filth and anyone that supported the Non-humans or the Nilfgaardians out to be tried for treason."

He chuckled.

"Not that anyone isn't guilty of that nowadays."

Then he spat.

"What happened to the tavern?" I asked in a small voice, Chireadean's brandy was making a difference.

"Well," Chireadean scratched his nose. "If I'm going to be turfed out of my tavern. Again. Then this time I'm going to be the one that burns the place down. Not some fascistic racist gob-shite of a soldier who just wants to watch the place burn."

He laughed at his joke. He looked resigned.

"What's going on?" He asked.

"I don't know," I told him, tears in my throat. "Kerrass is dead, Ariadne killed him."

Chireadean's face went still and his wife turned to us with a horrified expression.

"I think…" I tried. "I think it's a rebellion. I think… I think that… Flame…"

The tears threatened and I had to take a moment to swallow the lump in my throat.

"Her ladyship?" Chireadean asked me gently, that's what he calls Emma, or called I have no idea about the proper tense at the moment.

"I don't know," I replied. "Nor Mark or Laurelen or Mother. I think Sam's part of it in some way but I don't know… I just…"

Chireadean's face stiffened. I thought that he had forgiven Sam for the racism that the Elves encountered in the North but right then I wondered.

"Tonight was supposed to be my wedding night."

Luckily for all of us, I didn't wail it too loud.

That, and Carys was quick enough to cover my mouth with her hand.

They waited for a little while while I calmed down. I went catatonic for another little time after that. They did talk a bit about moving on but Chireadean, who seemed to be wise in this kind of thing said that they would have assumed that he fled with his wife and as such if anyone was looking for him then they would be tracking along the lines and the tracks that led away from the inn. They wouldn't think of looking for him closer to home as it were. The other Elf left during this conversation.

Chireadean told us that he wanted to watch his work of the last year burn.

He seemed to be quite enjoying it.

I will never understand Chireadean's humour. I hope he got away.

But still…

We were sitting just below the ridge line. Chireadean passed his bottle around for a while with his arm around his wife. She kept moaning at him about how she was sorry that everything had happened, about how she thought that they were safe and about how she had been certain that her neighbours were better than that.

Chreadean just held her and told her that neighbours will always be good people until the question of self-preservation presented itself. He tried telling her she should sell him out and see if she could get to safety with a vague promise that they could meet later. But she pointed out, correctly, that the horsemen were also demanding things from those that had consorted with traitors and non-humans.

Chireadean sniffed at that.

"Not that there are many people that could claim to not having consorted with Nilfgaard anymore."

"That's the point," I said from nowhere. I don't even remember formulating the thought. "They know that everyone has consorted with a Nilfgaardian by now so they also know that they can toss anyone they like to the wolves. Any person that speaks back to them, anyone they don't like. They can get rid of because they had their pans fixed by a Nilfgaardian peddler, or brought a drink from an elf or had their knives sharpened by a dwarf."

Chireadean grunted. Of course, he knew all that anyway.

We all watched as Chireadean's tavern started to collapse. I have been rather drunk in that place several times since Chireadean took it over. I had enjoyed him living there

"So what do we do now?" Chireadean's wife asked.

"I don't know," Chireadean said. "But personally speaking, I want to get you to safety and then I find, much to my astonishment, that I want some vengeance. I have been treated better by people when I have set up a home, but not often. If Lady Emma is alive then I cannot believe that she would be a party to this. I would see to her rescue and then if she's dead? There's some more vengeance to be had I think."

Carys murmured an agreement to that. Tears were running down her face as well as she watched the inn burn. Something in Chireadean's words seemed to have caught at her

"But what do we do?" Padraig was struggling a bit with, actually being in charge of it all.

"What happened Freddie?" Chireadean.

I told them mechanically. Both Chireadean and Padraig's faces were bleak when I finished speaking.

"I can't believe that Ariadne betrayed me." I whimpered.

Chireadean shook his head.

"She didn't Freddie."

My head jerked up "What?"

"I don't know what happened. I don't know if all of this," he waved his hands in the air, "is some form of political nonsense from the capitol, but Ariadne didn't betray you. It was your brother who betrayed you."

"What, but…"

Chireadean had gone back to looking at the fire of his home and when he turned back to me, the flames reflected off the skin of his nose and his cheekbones, making him look skeletal and spectral.

"I love you Freddie, You and… I love you and your sister is making the effort to be better, she really is. She still catches herself every so often but at least she cares. Mark's a decent sort as well, misguided and arrogant as only the best kind of priests can be but his heart's in the right place.

"Ariadne loves you. She might be an ancient… whatever, but she loves you and whatever else happened in that room. She didn't kill Kerrass and she didn't do… whatever that was with Laurelen. At best, she was forced to do something and that was what you saw. But your brother?"

His lips curled.

"Your brother is a fucking snake."

"Chireadean." His wife protested.

"I'm sorry love." He told her before turning back to me. "Freddie, I've read your diaries too and how many women, powerful women have to tell you that they don't trust your brother before you start to believe them rather than the face that he presents to you. You're his brother and he loves you and he treats you accordingly. But for anyone else? Anyone… Oh I don't know."

He petered out as another group of horsemen rode into the little village. They stopped and one of them shouted out.

"FRIENDS." He bellowed. "IT IS TO BE KNOWN THAT FREDERICK COULTHARD IS REQUIRED BY THE CASTLE. A REWARD IS TO BE OFFERED FOR HIS CAPTURE AND RETURN TO COULTHARD CASTLE ALIVE AND UNHURT. HIDING HIM OR HELPING HIM TO FLEE WILL BE SEEN AS TREASON AND PUNISHED ACCORDINGLY. IF HE CAN HEAR THIS, THEN COME HOME LORD COULTHARD. YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU HAVE SEEN AND YOUR SAFETY IS ASSURED."

They finished up and rode on.

We sat there for a long time I think. I still felt distant from the entire thing. It felt, uncomfortably like… That moment after you've kind of woken up, you are warm and comfortable and you are just kind of waiting for the rest of you to join you in consciousness.

So we sat and watched Chireadean's home burn. The ash from the fire and all of his belongings fell around us like a later autumn snowfall.

It was all strangely peaceful.

I watched as one of those snowflakes of ash fell onto my trousers. My stupid dark blue trousers with silver threading that will catch the firelight and glitter as I move. The ones with the leather inlay so that I can wear them and ride a horse without discomfort. Made that way to let people know that I am an active and healthy man. I am a noble that is not afraid to go from the courtroom to the stable at a moment's notice.

Exactly like a snowflake, it settled on the surface of the fabric for a long moment. It just sat there, perfectly preserved and then, just as the temperature of my skin would make the snowflake dissolve, the ash flake crumbled into dust. A little stain on my thigh, just above my knee.

If I had my hands free I would touch that place on my leg now. I can feel it itching.

I wonder why I remember that so clearly. That flake, and not any of the others that were tumbling down out of the trees at the same time.

The things that we remember.

And then the crossbeam of the house, the one that holds the entire thing up seemed to collapse into the rest of the building with a huge crash that sent a fountain of sparks up into the heavens. The sound shocked me from my reverie and I don't think I was alone in the sense of shock and surprise. I remember even being resentful that I had been startled out of that strange state of peace. And looking around at the other contemplative faces around me, I was not alone in that thinking.

Carys literally stretched as though she was waking up from a nap. Reminding me, not for the first time, of a cat.

If our enemy had come across us then, there and in that moment. They could have taken all of us without even thinking about it. They could possibly even have just asked and we would have gone with them.

The other thing that occurs now that I am… heh… safe, is that we had been lucky that we had had the torrential downpour of the previous times because otherwise, that fire could have spread and become dangerous.

"So what do we do?" Chireadean's wife… I think her name is Rose. Maybe Tulip or Blossom. Some kind of flowery name. I am doing her a disservice by not being able to remember her name.

No one seemed to have an answer for her.

Abruptly, I felt myself arrive back in my body. I have no other way of describing it other than that. It was as though there was a strange kind of whistling in my ears and then I was… I was just there in a way that I hadn't been.

"We do our duty," I told her.

"Fuckin' right," Padraig said, looking a little relieved.

Carys nodded, wiping the tears from her face with an angry, determined expression on her face.

"That's lovely and everything Freddie," Chireadean said reasonably, "but what is our duty here? In theory, my duty is to get my wife out of here and even though I have no doubt at all that Carys here would dearly like to murder a few of the cretins that took her home away from her, I doubt that there is much that the three of you could do, even if I joined you. You, Freddie, are, with all due respect, a little drunk, in shock, unarmed and unarmoured and it would seem that…"

He gestured down to the village, "that people are looking for you in particular. Carys and Pad here are unarmoured and have also had a bit of a skinful if I'm any judge and my wife…"

He wrapped his arm around her and kissed the top of her head.

"My wife is not a killer. It's one of the reasons that I like her so much."

"That's fine." I agreed, "And all those points are valid."

I took a deep breath and tried to think.

"What we need to do is get the word out that this has happened… Whatever this is."

"It looks like a rebellion to me," Chireadean said, turning back to the road. "I thought we had gotten past all of this nonsense."

"So we need to get word to our allies." I carried on.

"Which is great," Chireadean said. "Who are they then?"

I sighed, I wanted to punch the superior elf at the time. Looking back it is easy to see that he was just trying to protect his wife and deal with his anger and resentment.

"The Empress," I said. "I don't know what's happening. I wish I did but I don't. I don't know who to blame or what's going on. I saw Sam, or at least I think it was Sam, I…"

My hand rubbed my forehead before I shook my head violently.

"I can barely remember it now. I think it was Sam but… What I saw was someone that looked like Sam… but he didn't look like Sam. He was different. He moved stronger, he was more assured. Calmer, even.

"And my brother would never betray me."

Carys looked unhappy.

"And yet you think Ariadne would?" Chireadean challenged.

"No," I said. "No, you are right there. Ariadne would never betray me. I love her and she loves me."

Saying it aloud seemed to make it so. There was suddenly strength in my conviction about that. Ariadne had not betrayed me. I felt instantly better.

"But…" I went on. "I did see her kill Kerrass. She snapped his neck like it was nothing."

"There's always rumour." Padraig offered. "That she could be controlled or somethin'. Some kind of sick magic."

"That's true," I said. "So whether she's willing or not, she is an accomplice and a threat."

Chireadean nodded. "I'm happier with that idea." He seemed to realise what he had said. "Well… not happy but… Fuck…"

"I know what you meant," I told him. "So we need to get that warning out there. Ariadne is a threat and everyone should remember that she commands and can speak to Spiders."

I felt the urge to look around and see if there were any Spider webs around.

"So what do we do?" Carys prompted softly.

"We get the word out," I replied taking a deep breath. I suddenly knew what had to be done.

"They are looking for me so…"

I took out my diary. It was not as though I had suddenly remembered that I had it, It had just never left my doublet and it occurred to me that it might be useful.

"I've been keeping this since I got back from the South. I don't know, maybe there are clues in it."

I looked at my army. Two soldiers, an ex-soldier and a bar-maid.

"Carys," I said, handing my diary to her. "You remember Dorthan?"

She nodded.

"Take this to him and get him to make copies and send those copies to the winds, maybe there are clues or something in there that I missed or something. Tell him what happened…"

"He will never believe me." She told him.

"He knows you," I told her.

She made a noise of disagreement.

"Would you believe her?" Chireadean spoke up. "Lord Kalayn is committing treason, Countess Angral murdered a Witcher and helped them raise the banner of rebellion."

"I might," I said.

"It would take time," Chireadean argued. "This has to happen quickly. By the time Oxenfurt knows there's a rebellion on, they might be surrounded and the word can't get out."

"Fine." I snapped and ran down to the inn.

Was it foolish? Absolutely but I was tired, angry, and heartsick and right then, I just didn't think. I found a piece of wood that would act as charcoal and when I ran back I wrote a message inside the front of the diary while Carys raged at me.

I have no idea what the message said. I'm not even certain that I wrote anything but apparently, I did so…

I tried to put it into a few words as to what had happened and what the important threads were. And then I snapped the book closed and handed it to Carys.

"Once you've given him the book," I told her. "Head over the river to Crow's Perch. The Baroness there will give you horses and speed you on your way to Vizima where you can warn the Empress."

Carys looked sceptical but she nodded.

"I'll go with her," Padraig said. I have never been close to the Skelligan but something in the way that he said meant that he wouldn't be separated from his wife.

I wish I knew how he felt.

Sam once told me that you never give someone an order that you know is going to be disobeyed. So I nodded. It made sense anyway and I articulated that.

"The road to Oxenfurt is the most dangerous one anyway." I agreed. "They will assume that that's the road I will take so that area will be patrolled.

Carys nodded grimly.

"Chireadean? Circle round and head south I think?"

The Elf nodded.

"I will cross the river further south, steal a boat or something. I should be able to get behind the patrols that way. Will the Empress receive us though?"

"I mean, you were all getting drunk with her a little while ago at my party," I told him, also including Carys and Padraig. "She'll remember that."

Chireadean's wife looked at her husband a little wonderingly.

"What about you Freddie?" Chireadean said and as he looked at me, a dawning realisation seemed to come into his face. "You're going to do something foolishly noble aren't you."

"You make it sound so dirty." I was trying for a joke but I think it seemed more tired and desperate than all of that. "They are looking for me. So if I run, they will chase me and it will draw as many horsemen as I can manage away from the directions that you folk will be going. The closest way out of this is Oxenfurt. They know that I know that. So instead, I will head North towards Novigrad. I will go slowly and leave a nice big trail. I'm not in too much of a shape to do otherwise anyway."

Chireadean shook his head. "You're the one that people will believe. "You need to get out. This is like in the North when you…"

"No, it's not," I told him. "The Empress will believe the three of you." I shrugged towards Chireadean's wife. "I am not the only person who will be believed here. And these hunters are a massive difference from what we faced in the North. They will just run us down rather than falling for all of the tricks that we pulled in the North."

Padraig was nodding his agreement to that.

"I'm also the one most likely to survive being captured," I told them. "Two Elves and their well-known human spouses. If they're banking on the non-human hating sentiment to help them gather popular support then the four of you will just be killed."

Chireadean was unhappy.

Abruptly Carys stood up, nodding to herself. She walked up to me and gave me a fierce hug before she turned and jogged off into the night.

It took us all a moment to realise that she had gone.

Padraig quickly shook Chireadean's and my hand before running after her, leaving me with Chireadean and his wife.

She was gathering her skirts together to get ready to run.

"Stay alive," Chireadean told me. "You're a good man as humans go and I've rarely been happier than when I've been running a tavern on your lands."

"When this is all over," I told him. "We'll rebuild that tavern."

"I hope so." He told me. "It's the first home in a while that I feel like fighting for."

I gestured to his wife. "You have the best possible reason to do so."

She heard and smiled through her tears at me.

"Stay alive for it," Chireadean told me. "If you're not there to drink the first ale that I pour in my next tavern, I will be really cross with you."

I chuckled. "Call it the Scholar's Quill or something would you?"

"Nah," he chuckled. "I'll call it the Scholar's head. That way I can have a stylised head as the sign. And Punters always like taverns that are named after dismembered body parts."

"Might be a bit close to the bone," I commented. "If I don't survive this I mean."

He mused and lost his humour. "If you survive it will be the head. If not? It will be the Quill. Does that sound alright by you?"

I shook his hand. "I would be honoured Chireadean."

He nodded as well before taking his wife's hand, he headed into the night.

It wasn't long before I couldn't see him anymore.

The other bonus idea about allowing myself to be captured was that I would find out what was going on at the castle the quicker. One of those times when the need to know was stronger than the need to get things done. And my logic was correct despite all of that.

Not for the last time I checked for Kerrass to figure out which way to go. I knew he was dead but I still checked for him automatically. But of course, he was dead.

Sooner or later I would need to allow one of the patrols to spot me or find some other way to give the game away. I did wonder if I walked up to a spider's web and talked to it, whether or not Ariadne would receive word. But then they would know that I was trying to give the game away. So I headed North. There was a road somewhere to the North as well as part of the spider's web…

Heh.

… of roads that make up our lands. I felt sure that I would be able to see a patrol on the road at some point. As I moved, I felt the cold fury settle over my shoulders like an old warm blanket that you enjoy climbing under after a hard day.

By now, Ariadne and I should have been exploring that old question of ours. Just how close to humans were her erogenous zones and just how much practice would we have needed to learn how to pleasure each other? I was hoping that it would take a lot of practice. I wanted it to be one of those passtimes that is quick to learn but difficult to master. Something that requires constant practice to make sure that your skills don't rust.

I was not so optimistic to assume that I would gain my vengeance, but I did rather hope that I would be able to find some way to make my enemies pay.

At the time, I still didn't think it was Sam that was at the root of all of this.

I waited for a little while to allow the others to get well ahead of me and watched as the inn continued to burn for a while.

This was a mistake because what happened, in reality, was that this gave the despairing time to get into my head and my heart. I knew that, instead of sitting there, I should be getting up and moving on to do something else, anything else but I just couldn't face it.

I decided that I would let the grief and the anger and yes… I would let the despair have its way with me for an extended period. So I crouched there in the darkness, lit only by the light floating up out of the ruins of the tavern below me and I let that all hit me for a long reason.

The slightly false logic was that it would burn itself out and then let me function like a reasonable human being. Shows how much I know about this kind of thing but there you go.

So I allowed my legs to buckle underneath me and drew myself up into a ball as the wave of darkness and horror washed over me.

I was so… furious I suppose. I felt…

I couldn't believe that this was all happening. How could this be happening? And why was it happening? I was so utterly… I don't know what the answer was to it all. I was overwhelmed and that was part of it. I wanted to hide there in the darkness and for the rest of the world to go away.

I will not deny that I considered ending my own life. Not that I immediately had a method of doing that, as my boot knife was lost in the fight and flame only knows where my eating knife was. I supposed that I could run headlong into the fire but somehow, that was less than entirely appealing.

I went over the events leading up to this night over and over again, a thought process that was uncomfortably close to how I used to work at the issue of my sister's disappearance, just working the problem over and over again, but it didn't make any sense to me.

Chireadean had been right. That wasn't Ariadne that had done that. She would never… She would never have killed Kerrass. I knew that and I felt guilty for suspecting her. I felt guilty for giving in to the old primal fears that it seemed I still had about her in the bottom of my soul.

But I also couldn't believe that Sam could have done that either. He just wouldn't do that kind of thing. I could agree that Sam had his demons. His latent, societal racism is not the least but…

Why would he do this? What had I done to deserve this?

That was the question that jerked me out of the situation that I was in. There was no answer to that. Or if there was… then I wouldn't find it here.

Again, like earlier, I was suddenly calm to an extent that I found it worrying. I looked around and I saw what I was looking for. I wandered over and found a little spider's web that was covering a nearby log. Just a harvest spider, one of those that come out in the autumn. I walked up to it and bent low over the webbing before blowing on it gently to make sure that I could speak without disturbing the spider.

"I'm sorry," I told it. "I still love you, but I wish I understood what was happening."

I stood then and brushed myself off before I oriented myself to the tavern and started to run north.

Then I went back and did my best to obscure the tracks that the others had left on their departure, brushing pine leaves and things over it. I still don't know the wisdom of doing that but I hope that it made a difference.

Then I set off again.

It was oddly liberating to know that I didn't have to worry about catching the attention of anyone else. I could just put my head down and run for it. But despite that, there was a task that I had to perform. So I jogged gently until I came to a road. One of the roads that led towards Novigrad. I jogged along that road in the direction of the city until in the distance I could see a team of horsemen coming.

It was a close thing that I had to do then. Allow them to get close enough to see me but not so close that they would catch me. I jumped over the ditch beside the road and hid behind a tree. They had spotlight lanterns that they were shining into the trees on either side of the road.

I was still wearing my dinner finery with all of its stupid noble patternings and given that there was an utter lack of camouflage, I stayed close to the road and quite naturally, they saw me.

I tried not to crow with triumph as I turned and ran into the woods.

Behind me, I could hear people yelling and shouting. Someone appealed to me that I was quite safe and had nothing to fear…

Incidentally, my missing fingers would beg to differ in that regard.

… and then I heard someone sound a horn.

The woodland around the family estate is not the primaeval forest of the Nilfgaardian Black Forest. It has been farmed for timber too much as well as being shuffled around so that we could plant orchards. Villagers kept their pigs in this woodland and it was well-ordered.

But to a horseman? That doesn't make it any the less deadly.

Because nor was it the carefully cultivated trees of the hunting grounds that are carefully prepared to allow the passage of horsemen.

There were still hanging branches, still exposed roots that would trip a charging horse and I still intended to make use of all of those things.

And whatever else had happened, running through the trees of the Black Forest as well as the woodland of Northern Redania meant that I was experienced with this kind of thing.

And these horsemen weren't.

It was something of a trial to keep them from giving up and falling back.

I reasoned that I needed my strength and stole an apple from one of the trees, it was bitter and not quite ripe but the sudden thought occurred that if Kerrass and I had been running through the trees at this time of the year, then Cavil would never have caught us.

I laughed at the thought.

At some point, it occurred to me to realise that I was losing my mind.

My equipment wasn't the best for running through the trees though, and nor was I in the best shape to be doing it for long I forced myself to rest. The idea was to make them hunt me and so draw more of them after me so that Chireadean and the others could get away.

From the sounds of things behind me, they had my trail now and would catch up with me eventually. They had the advantage of horses anyway.

I was a bit disadvantaged by my boots. These were not my travelling boots and as such, were not made for running through the undergrowth. I could feel them beginning to give in areas that we didn't want them to give but I couldn't do anything about that.

It was warm enough so I got rid of my doublet thinking that a woollen shirt would attract the gaze far less than a rich-looking doublet and I knew that there was a farmhouse nearby. My sense of geography was pretty good for the local area and I stole a blanket from one of the lines outside the house. There was a working knife that was used to trim something, long and sharp with a slight curve and I stole that as well. I do not doubt that the people there would have helped me if I asked them but I didn't want to endanger them if I could get away with it. So I fashioned the darker blanket into a poncho by simple virtue of tearing a hole in the middle and putting my head through it before tying it down with my belt. The knife was wickedly sharp and long enough to act as a decent dagger, even if it didn't have a good enough point for the stabbing.

I also found a hoe and giggled. No matter how far away I got from it, no matter how much Kerrass had tried to train me out of the effort, I still ended up working with things that looked like a quarterstaff.

At some point, I must have decided that I wanted one of the bastards. I wanted to kill one of them. It was far from a logical desire but at the same time, I wanted them.

I jogged on for a bit longer and found a tree that I could climb to watch the search for a bit to see if my desire for vengeance was even remotely practical.

.

No, I'm not going to tell you which house it was that I stole those things from. Yes, I did steal them and no, you will not be able to…

Fuck you.

The critics are upset by this.

Yes, I can call them critics again. They are angry and are trying to be reasonable.

I wonder if Johann will be ok. He is looking at me with huge eyes. I rather think that he has given up. I cannot blame him.

.

And I have just realised that in saying that. I have given my captors more ammunition to keep me in line. Fine… you know what? That works both ways.

I am not writing another word until Johann has had some proper healing and has some proper food in him. Put that in the account fuckpigs and see if it…

What are you going to do? Torture us both some more? You just wait. You have ordered Johann to say exactly what I write. You can't kill him or torture him too much because if he dies or becomes incapable, no one can read my shorthand. I certainly can't work the way I do without using that shorthand so… You need us both.

You just wait, I can have Johann here saying all kinds of things that you are not going to like. Summon Laurelen back. Fuck, get Ariadne down here to…

Interesting. Fascinating as she would say. These men are terrified of…

You can hit me all you like. That's still not going to change what I saw in your eyes you wretched pieces of human waste.

Fetch a healer and see to Johann's back before infection sets in and he…

And that was the break for the day. One of the critics went off and took my ultimatum to whoever was in charge when they realised that things had gotten to that point. They came back and agreed with each other that that was it and I was informed that Johann would be properly taken care of.

I asked them what guarantees I had that that would be the case and they replied, rather stupidly, that I would have to trust them.

I told them that I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them and that was considerably less than it had been given my newly injured state.

So I was taken back to my cell and told to wait.

That was an interesting moment for me. It was the first real test since I was taken anyway, to see how my captors and whatever faction that they serve…

I write captors but we all know who we are talking about really don't we?

… To see how much they really value me. How important these words really are. It would cost them nothing. Absolutely nothing to slit my throat and then make their own accounts. Have their story told the way that they want it to be told?

In all truth, I'm not sure that I believe the reasons that they have given as to why they haven't done that.

But that was an interesting moment for me.

I was not afraid for myself. Not really. That part, at least, I did believe. I didn't think that they were just going to kill me. But Johann. I was playing games with someone else's life and although I had every faith that I would be alright and allowed to live. There was nothing to say that Johann would, and I was playing a game with his life.

It occurred to me then, in the depths of the presumed night, that this is what generals and politicians do. They risk the lives of other people for their own ends.

I hate that part of me now. I hate that I do that and I hate that I know how to do that. If I ever get out of here, I will become a hermit. Living in the far-off corners of the continent so that I will never endanger or have to confound anyone ever again.

Then again, I wonder if that would even be possible now.

Much later, food was brought. The food was, at least fairly good quality and not seeing a reason to stint myself, I ate it all and did my best to rest because I almost certainly needed my strength.

I didn't sleep well of course. My legs are full of jittery energy. I want to dance around and run and jump and…

So I lay on my back. My left hand is tucked into something on my shirt so I don't roll over and accidentally lie on the stumps of my fingers. They throb incessantly now. I wish I could believe that this meant that they were healing but I know enough to know that they should have stopped throbbing by now. By now, I should have moved on to itching.

Either that or they really have messed with my sense and perception of time. I wonder how long it has been since my wedding day.

I need to stop thinking of it as that. It was the Autumn Equinox.

This morning… I assume it's morning… I was taken back to the workroom. Again, there is fresh straw on the floor and Johann was waiting for me. He looks better. Not completely cured, but better nonetheless. I think he has been allowed a bath, has had something proper to eat and he is wearing a loose shirt now. I can see the bandages around him including his back.

He thanked me and I feel awful because of it. If it wasn't for me, he wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. I risked his life to prove a point and to test my fragile place in the world. It turns out that if I put my foot down to exert my influence, then the chances are good that things will happen to keep me alive and enable Johann to survive. I hate it. I hate that I did that and I hope he is aware of just how awful I feel because of that.

But he looks at me with huge eyes that remind me of some kind of puppy dog as tears of gratitude form in the corners of his gaze and I feel as though I have just kicked him and he is grateful to me for stopping.

Now though, I have no excuse other than to carry on writing.

I wonder if it has been a day since I was last in this room. It feels like it, an evening meal followed by a period of sleep and then a return to work. It feels like the end of a day and the start of a new one.

But I also wonder if the effort to give me what I want is in the effort to bring me on the side. There has been much written on the mindset of a captive and over and over again it has been proven that the best way to bring a captive onside is to ingratiate them with you. To make them your friend and instil confidence in them. There is a name for it. Rapport building maybe? Is that what they are trying to do to me?

There is no solution to that question.

So I killed a man.

I picked my target from the top of my tree. They were fanning out to find signs of me. They had torches out, and lanterns and things. The thought that occurred to me was that they were trying to drive me in one direction and I scanned the opposite horizon to see if there were any other torches or signs of flames out there that might give away another group of horsemen.

There was no way of telling for sure though. Novigrad is in that direction and they burn enough fuel to illuminate the night sky.

.

I have tried to tell the critics that nothing interesting happened to me during my flight but it seems that someone has insisted. I need to recount the entire thing.

I identified some of the wings of the formation and moved my way over in that direction before climbing another tree to check my bearings. I was on the course though and I waited for the horseman to come closer. He was being cautious. He had a long spear in one hand that he was using to poke into nearby bushes and shadows and on the other hand he was carrying a torch.

I decided that I was lucky and that the holy flame was sending me a message.

When he was nice and close I jumped down and he turned, startled. I swung the hoe that I had stolen from the farm yard to make use of one of Kerrass' oldest pieces of advice.

Poor Kerrass.

That advice was that I slammed the metal part of the hoe into the horse's mouth as hard as I could.

Sure enough, as Kerrass predicted, the horse reared and threw its rider.

Unlike Kerrass though, I did not have time to wait. The hoe broke and I had the splintered end in one hand. The rider was trying to get up. I wasn't lucky enough that the horse fell on top of him, but I drove the jagged, splintered end of the wooden handle towards the rider's face.

He was a big man, they all seem to be big men, guards, soldiers and riders. Something to think about there. But even despite that, the sight of a strange man coming out of the darkness and knocking him off his horse had stunned him.

Automatically, he lifted his hands to protect himself and I barrelled him over. His neck, which I had intended to cut, was well protected from the slash of my knife. I would have needed more of a point to make that work. Fortunately, though, the area around the groin was less protected.

I slashed and the hot red blood fountained into the night. Utterly ruining my clothes and the blanket that I had stolen. It never ceases to surprise me, the amount of pressure that comes out of that artery at the top of the inner thigh.

He died fairly quickly as all things are considered.

I don't feel the least bit of guilt for that. I am entirely comfortable with calling it murder as well. The bastard, along with all of the other bastards, had it coming.

I would make some empty threats but there hardly seems any point.

I killed him and it was only afterwards that I was surprised that he had made no shout of alarm. Nor had he sounded the horn that was hanging from his belt.

I dashed into the bushes for a moment and listened to see if anyone was coming. The urge is to freeze and listen first but then it occurred that if I did that, then I would be standing in the open and listening which seemed… problematic to me. But no one had heard.

I returned to the dead man and searched him quickly. The spear was of a nice length and I kept it. A bit more made for the stabbing rather than the additional slashing blade that Kerrass had given me.

Poor Kerrass.

But it would do. There were some small rations in a bag and I took his dagger as well as his fighting knife. There was nothing in any of the other bags. A whetstone, some spare nails as cavalry always carry extra nails. Nothing to identify him.

I now had a replacement boot knife and I cannot even begin to tell you how much better I felt. It is the little things that provide us with some idea of security.

I had a brief thought about whether or not to take the horse. I approached it to see if it would even let me anywhere near me and it chose for me. Whatever else can be written about the man that I had killed, the horse was well trained and as I approached, while it was still complaining a bit, it lashed out to kick me.

I didn't have a good opinion of the people chasing me as it was and I decided that if I did catch the horse and convince it to let me ride it, then there was a very real danger that I would escape. I needed to keep in sight of my enemy.

I took a couple of moments to make a decision but then I bent and scooped up the hunting horn before lifting it to my lips and sounding it a couple of times before suddenly stopping in the middle of a call.

I told myself that that would give them something to think about and I jogged off.

I did my best to find a hiding spot and waited to be able to listen. I wanted to see if I could learn anything about whether or not they had found Chireadean or Carys.

I didn't know enough. I wanted to know things. I wanted to know whether they got away, even if it was at risk to me. I wanted to know what was going on at the castle and now that I am separated, I wonder if the reason that I allowed myself to be captured was so that I could find out.

One of the things that can be said about being taken prisoner and spending a lot of time locked up is that you have plenty of time for introspection.

After blowing the horn I waited in my hiding spot to see if the net would pass over me and to make sure that they took the bait. Needless to say that they did. And I jogged North. Not bothering to hide my tracks as I ran through the undergrowth. It was almost counter to the instincts that Kerrass had trained into me and sometimes I found myself having to force my way into leaving a prominent footprint or breaking off a branch or scraping my shoes on an exposed tree root or something. Strange how these things become automatic. I was automatically avoiding leaving trails. But I wanted the bastards to chase me.

And chase me they did. Their insistence on staying on horseback and wearing all of their armour counted against them. I don't know if I'm better at this stuff now than I was when I was struggling with the visions that Jack provided for me, but I remember thinking that if I really had been thrown out of Toussaint at the point of a sword, and this was the quality of person chasing me, I would probably have done a lot better than I was afraid of doing.

A lot of stuff has happened since then of course.

Including the pursuit in the North.

As I moved, I remembered some of the wisdom that Kerrass and Rickard had told me about cavalrymen. There is a certain amount of status to being a horseback soldier. So the horse riders know this and this means that they are reluctant to get down from their living and breathing status symbol.

Heh. The critics are not happy with this line of reasoning. They seem upset and it's making them uncomfortable. I wonder if they are feeling a bit as though I am getting uncomfortably close to the truth.

To be fair, there are other more practical reasons. Once you have got down from your horse you need to get back up into the saddle and sometimes, that is easier said than done. Also, with all of a cavalryman's equipment, that stuff is built to be carried on horseback so a person on foot is then vulnerable to attacks from people like me who know how to take advantage of it.

There was a feeling in the air of a card player wanting to hold onto his hand of cards and not give the game away. Or that people were trying to conserve their strength so that they weren't betraying their presence to outsiders.

I don't know for sure what happened after that, but I suspect that someone at the castle got fed up with having to deal with all of the nonsense and started to take steps and actually use some of the resources that they had available to them.

I wish I could tell you that I was brought down by a load of horsemen. I wish I could write that I took some of the bastards down with me and that they had to really work at it to take me alive. I do think, from the feeling of my ribs, that a few of them might have taken the opportunity to stick the boot in a couple of times but… on balance… I think that I would have done the same.

My body count for that night was two, and maybe an injury or two but I wouldn't swear to it. Small, disappointingly small.

What brought me low?

I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure that it was a spider bite.

I was hiding in a ditch somewhere by the side of a road. One of those water run-off ditches that are always filthy and kind of stink in the summer. I had laid down in it and my feet and knees were in the water. In all honesty, I was beginning to wonder what I was going to have to do with these people to get myself captured.

I mean, using myself as a decoy was all well and good but if you want people to actually chase you then sooner or later, they need to have something to chase and I was beginning to get concerned that I wasn't being that thing for them.

I remember that I was lying there, watching a group of horsemen trot past and in my disdain and hatred, I was criticising them. If I was looking for a fugitive then I would have some of the outriders looking into the ditch by the side of the road. But these people were just riding through and letting the entire thing pass by.

I don't want to be fair to these people. I want to hate them and tell the world that I hate them. But to be fair, I have no idea what their orders were and for all, I know they weren't part of the search patterns.

But I was lying there, wondering if I could isolate someone else and kill them as an extra piece of bait. But then I felt a tickle on the back of my hand. I had to force myself not to move because…

Another piece of Kerrass' wisdom, may the flame guide him home. The eye of a man is drawn more by movement than by colour or object. "Move slowly Freddie." He would say. "Move slowly."

The Critics are becoming frustrated with my lack of progress and have informed me that I am expected to finish my work sooner rather than later.

I felt a tickle. I didn't even dare turn my head. I didn't want to be taken here, lying in the ditch. When I was taken I wanted to take some of the bastards with me. I wanted to fight someone and to make them regret fucking with me and mine. And if I was lying in a ditch when they found me…

It would take time to get myself up to my feet and then some more time to get up the slope and be able to do something worthwhile. So now wasn't the time for that.

After the tickle. I felt a sharp, stabbing kind of feeling that was incredibly painful. I mean… Apparently, the most painful experience in the world is childbirth and obviously, I have no context for that. But it was like when you catch yourself on a hooked thorn in the undergrowth. I'm thinking of a rose thorn or something that is hooked. So that when your immediate instinct is to pull but that only makes the problem worse. That kind of situation.

So it hurt, I flinched and that made the pain increase.

Shortly after that, my hand started to feel numb. Shortly after that, my arm started to feel numb and I could feel that warm numbness travelling up my arm.

I looked down then and although I don't know for sure as my vision was beginning to swim. I am sure that I saw a spider there. It was a black, chitinous spider, about the size of my hand with a large… back and long spindly legs. I have trained myself to anthropomorphise spiders given that I am going to be marrying…

That I was going to be marrying…

Fuck…

.

I swear, I swear that I looked at that spider and it seemed to look apologetic.

My vision swam and it felt as though I was falling.

I woke up in a cell. A much less pleasant cell than the one I'm currently staying in and I woke up with the cold slap of water.

It took them more than one bucket of it as well which I am oddly proud of. I was dreaming. I have no idea what I was dreaming about but the dream violently shifted. So suddenly, the people and the creatures in my dream were drenched in water and were moving around, complaining about the shock of it.

Then the acrid smell of something that I would rather not think about arrived in my nose like a dagger being lanced up into my brain and I was dragged to wakefulness.

This did not complete the cure however and there was another moment where I could feel my head wanting to nod off and my eyes wanting to close.

Another bucket was thrown over me. Once again, the stench of acrid urine hit me in the nostrils. With the smell as though a person hasn't drunk enough water recently.

I wanted to throw up but there was nothing there.

"Careful." Someone said, It was a man's voice because of course it was a man's voice. "He's been poisoned so it's not his fault that he can't wake up."

"I'll wake him up." Said someone else.

"You'll hit him so hard that he won't wake up." Another voice said.

"No, I won't…" There was a sense of people turning to look at him.

"Well alright, I might but he killed Dag."

"Dag was foolish enough to…"

"That's enough." Said another voice. More authoritative. "He needs to be awake and he needs to be presentable. His lordship is going to be displeased if we hurt his brother."

I took that in and my heart sank. Now, I not only wanted to vomit, but I wanted to weep as well.

But the heart is indomitable and I still refused to believe it. Maybe Sam was being coerced in some way. Maybe there was a good explanation for whatever it was. There had to be. My Brother would never do that kind of thing, he wouldn't. It was impossible. I loved my brother and he loved me.

There had to be a good explanation, there had to be. There had to be a logical explanation for the things that I saw there…

"What if he doesn't comply?" A scary voice said. I was now blinking to try and get the horrible-smelling water out of my eyes. The voice was scary because it seemed less human. Calmer, flatter, less emotion in the depths of it.

In charge voice seemed to consider this.

"The plans say that he must be able to function as a man. But other than that… We have a pet healing mage now so… I suppose we can go to some lengths. But you can't cut much off. Nothing visible and nothing that can't be explained away as a battlefield injury."

I opened my bleary eyes and peered at the indistinct figures in front of me. They were all big, all of them armoured and the only reason I knew which one was in charge was that another one of them was leaning in his ear and telling him something.

"I am informed…" The in-charge voice said. "That he also needs his right hand, and his face and needs to be relatively healthy. But that doesn't say anything about his left hand or his feet. And as I say, nothing permanent."

One of the other figures laughed as the man in charge left.

Do I need to go through the torture?

No, Johann, that was a question for the…

So they took their time to wake me up.

Now that I am down here and it has taken us a couple of days I wonder if the torture was an exertion of dominance. I wonder if it was to set up the contrast so that later when I met with… my captors, they would come off as reasonable and understanding in contrast. Same as he was last time, the presence of Father Jerome's teachings was my companion during the process and there were several things about it that that vision noticed.

They didn't ask me any questions.

The process was unrefined. It was definitely more a process about dominance than anything else. It was to let me know that these guards were in charge and that there was nothing that I could do to stop it.

I tried to be angry. I tried to tease them and make jokes. I tried to scream but whatever else they were, they didn't react to any of my comments. One of them commented a couple of times that what was happening was my fault, that I deserved it and that this was his vengeance for a friend of his that I had killed.

I was beaten and I don't know if it was here that my ribs were injured or if it was when they picked me up. I also lost a couple of teeth and bit my tongue and the insides of my mouth a couple of times.

As I have already written, I lost the little finger and the ring finger on my left hand.

In truth, it was not as painful as I thought it was going to be. They did both fingers, knuckle by knuckle with a pair of shears, similar to the ones that Mother used to use to trim her rose bushes.

In all truth, they weren't very good at the torturing. Knowing what I know, this was the equivalent of a handshake. If the process was going to turn into real torture, or if it still might head in that direction, then the real torturer hasn't arrived yet or is otherwise busy.

They beat me unconscious several times and I would wake up with a stinking headache to be informed that I had been healed before the entire thing started again.

It is an odd sensation to have had a rib broken, to have it healed, only to have it broken again at a future date. There is a strange kind of disconnect where your brain thinks "But that rib has already been broken?"But now it's being broken again?

Then it just seemed to stop.

I woke up in my bed in that place that I now consider "my" cell. There was an odd kind of feeling about myself. I was in no pain but I was aware that pain was happening. I knew that there were still things going on around me that hurt but at the same time, I couldn't feel it. But it was not the same thing as feeling numb. I didn't feel numb.

It was almost as if parts of me had just turned off. Whatever thing it is in your body that tells you that you're in pain, that was no longer there.

It was an intensely uncomfortable feeling.

But I woke up and found that I wasn't bound. I checked around myself and discovered that I still had all my arms and legs but that my body didn't want to move too quickly.

For one glorious, terrifying moment, I wondered if all of this was a dream. Glorious because it would be very easy to call this room a hospital room that I had been kept in to keep myself from going mad. But also, was it all some fever dream brought on by… I don't know. Some kind of particularly violent street food?

The terror came from the possibility that this entire thing was brought on by the actions of some enemy. That I had been fed by hallucinogens or some other chemical. Was this a vision of the Goddess, the Schattenmann maybe or maybe it was left over from my captivity in the North?

Or maybe, and this was the real, primal fear that lurks at the bottom of all of my fears from now until the end of time. Maybe these were the images and dreams that I had been given by the beast of Amber's crossing. That is a terror that is going to be with me from now until the day that I die I think. That day may be a lot closer than I had initially thought given all of the stuff that is going to happen.

Alas that this was not the case. I was not imagining this. It came home for me when I was in the middle of the entire process that you always go through when you wake up from some form of unconsciousness at the hands of an enemy.

You count your limbs, then, if you're a man, you check for the presence of your genitals and then you do the other checks. You test your breathing, your face, and your eyesight and then you start checking your fingers and toes.

Of all of the parts of me that were hurting but not hurting, my missing fingers were amongst the top contenders for that. I could feel them NOT throbbing.

I took the time to examine them and saw the manner of my death as red lines were already running under the skin of my hands.

I lay back and stared at the ceiling.

I was wearing a reasonable shirt. It was clean and the blankets underneath my body were clean and tidy. They had taken the drawstrings out of the shirt at both the neck and the wrists so it hung loosely on me. I decided that I needed to piss and did so in the pot that was there for that purpose. There was no blood which meant that I wasn't that injured internally.

Which was frankly a shock.

The floor was cold stone and the place had the look of the family dungeons.

Father had converted them into a wine cellar. If there was a need to keep prisoners then he would do so according to his feudal duties, but he always saw it as foolish to have your prisoners underneath where you are sleeping. Instead, if the castle had to keep prisoners, they were kept in one of the guardhouses and as soon as possible, they were transferred to the prisons in Oxenfurt.

I was also wearing some light trousers. However, I was barefoot.

I lay there for a while longer before a woman came to the door. She didn't look at me and I thought that I recognised her as one of the castle servants.

She was wearing a small dress, much smaller than the kinds of clothes that Emma requires the servants to wear. The skirt was high up the thigh and low cut at the neckline. Her head had been completely shaven and she looked exhausted. It was her face that I thought I recognised but everything else was different, the way she moved, the way she behaved.

She looked like a frightened animal.

She came in with a tray of food. There was bread and a bowl of soup. The kind of soup that is almost worth calling a stew with bits of meat and vegetable floating around the liquid broth.

I tried to talk to her as she lay the food out but she flinched away from me as if she was afraid. When I persisted, it seemed that her hands started to shake, she all but let the food fall and then she ran from me. Literally ran.

She was weeping as she ran.

I felt sick.

My body had different ideas though and remembered Kerrass' teachings that if you have the opportunity to take on food and work your strength up, then you should take that opportunity.

Then I remembered that Kerrass was dead. Odd how the brain works.

I keep waiting for the critics to stop me from writing or to tell me what to write. I can see them shifting their weight in some form of discomfort. Sometimes they get visibly angry, especially when I talk about the various qualities or lack of quality to the people that were chasing me. Sometimes they get uncomfortable at the fact that I am telling them truths that they don't want to hear.

Specifically when I am calling out the attitudes of the cavalrymen. I don't know whether the critics are infantry or cavalry but I remember them shifting their weight when what became a thing.

But they absolutely do not seem to care when it comes to things that might paint what is happening in an ugly light. When I talk about torture or interrogations or the state of the female servers that are coming and looking after us…

They just don't care.

I went to throw the soup back out the door and onto whoever it was that was watching. But, I smelt the stuff and it smelt genuinely delicious. I had no idea how long it had been since I had last eaten something and before I knew it, my body was telling me that I was just going to have a mouthful and then it was almost finished.

Fuck it. I needed my strength.

And it also occurred to me that the woman that had brought it to me might be punished if I complained about anything.

I stacked the bowl and the plate neatly.

Then I went back to wait.

Being a prisoner gives you a lot of time to think. I thought about Carys and how far she had managed to get. And I thought about Chireadean and his wife. The difference between the two teams was that I was much more confident that Carys would get through. Chireadean would be slowed down by his wife. He would also, and I mean no disrespect to Chireadean but he's a survivor. I think he would be much more willing to prioritise his wife's safety and take his time.

Carys and Padraig were killers though.

I also tried to consider whether or not I had done everything that I could. I was now at the stage of going over the immediately past events to see if there was something that I could have done differently. I played out events backwards.

How did the thought process go?

I wondered when Ariadne had been suborned. After Chireadean had given me that feeling that Ariadne was being controlled it started to become obvious that she had been. What was impossible to be able to tell though, was when that happened.

My logical brain decided that she had been suborned when we were all waiting for the women to come down to dinner.

Why Kerrass first? Kerrass and Laurelen were the first targets.

Then I realised that such thinking was pointless. There was no way of knowing what the right way around these things was. There was no way of knowing so all I was doing was guessing.

But I couldn't stop thinking my way around it.

Looking back I realised that I was panicking. I tried to calm my breathing and rested my head on the stone.

And that was how I was when they came for me.

They were oddly polite.

These guards were not the massive constructs that I had seen beforehand and during the hunt. These men were no critics. They were perfectly normally proportioned human guards. That did not inspire hope in me though. They were still wearing chain mail and were armed with truncheons that they held in experienced-looking grips.

And there were three of them.

And they had manacles.

I remembered Kerrass' wisdom. Play for time. If they are going to hang you, then ask for a glass of water. Anything could happen while they are fetching you the water.

I asked them where they were taking me. They said nothing but as I say, they were not impolite. They had a strange kind of respectful boredom about them that I kind of associate with professional men around the world. They had a job to do. Thinking that I wondered if I knew any of them.

I did not.

In the end, they gave me the old ultimatum that if I didn't do what I was told then I would be made to obey.

So I rose and allowed my hands to be bound behind me before they blindfolded me and put a sack over my head.

I don't know why. Redundancy maybe?

They led me out. One in front I think with another one behind me. There was another one that had his hand on my shoulder, not as any kind of means of controlling me. It was more a case of making sure that I didn't hurt myself. It was that one that would warn me in advance of steps or when I needed to jerk from side to side. He warned me of corners and the like.

The attention was impersonal and without cruelty. Their job was to take me from one place and deliver me to the next.

I counted though and they led me on a circuitous path, presumably to confuse me and turn me around. I know that it was an odd route because we turned left four times before we turned Right three times and then Left again before we turned Right once, Left three times and then Right four times.

I had to stifle the urge not to laugh.

So I was still in my Father's castle, not some strange other place. Otherwise, why bother trying to confuse me?

After those shenanigans, they seemed to take me on a fairly straightforward route through the castle. There was a point when I realised that we were heading towards Father's old study. The room where Edmund had died and, I assumed, the room where Emma still conducted most of her business from. It was rather suitable for purpose after all.

I don't know what it was, something about the feel of the air maybe, or the feel of the floor underneath my feet. Most likely it was the smell in the air.

On the other hand, I could smell ash and blood.

We passed several people and more than once, my minder hauled me out of the way of someone that was jogging down the corridor in armour and we had to flatten ourselves against the wall. It was a busy feeling. Lots of people moving around and being busy.

Then we turned, moved through a door and then we were in a room where lots of people were talking. The talking ground to a halt as I stood there for a long moment. There was a signal of some kind as a lot of people left before the sack was pulled from my head and the blindfold was untied so that I could see.

For a long moment, the light dazzled me and I stood there blinking.

I must do this in stages. Even now, however far I am from these events although I have no idea how far I really am. I must break it down into its parts so that I can take it in, even remotely.

So, the place itself first.

It was my Father's office although, at the same time, it was not my Father's office. For the best description of the office, I can refer you to the chapters that I wrote regarding that place back when I was writing about my Father's murder….

It would seem that the critics are not satisfied with this method and instead expect me to go into detail.

Fine.

When the office was my Father's office, he liked it to be busy and I would also say that he liked it to be cluttered. I sometimes wonder if he did this deliberately.

The room was lined with cupboards, strongboxes, shelves, scroll cubby holes and all kinds of random things. It was a deliberately chaotic system as it was not below our competitors to utilise spies and saboteurs to get into these secrets to glean what Father was thinking or what the trading company was up to.

The shelves were deliberately different-sized and differently organised. Some appeared slovenly and some appeared disused. The strong boxes were the extravagance in the room but I knew for a fact that some of those strongboxes were kept all but empty and that others contained vital information. I also knew that Father made it a habit to regularly change the organisation of everything in the room to keep people on their toes.

He did have a desk but normally that was occupied by a scribe when Father was working. He only sat behind it when he wanted to exert his authority over some errant worker or some disobedient child. I knew that he conducted personal correspondence in his private chambers.

It was while sitting at this desk that Edmund had been murdered.

Father kept a comfortable chair next to the fire where he would sit. There was another chair opposite that visitors would sit in and you could often tell what kind of day you were going to have based on where the chairs were situated and where Father was standing or sitting. Father would sit in this chair and listen carefully to everything that he was told before he would give instruction and he would expect it to be carried out.

According to Emma he would sit there, listen to the tales and the stories and the business that everyone wanted to conduct with him. He would ask for everyone's opinion on the matter and then he would make his choice based on what he had been told.

There are various records that this is how the best generals in the world conduct their business and when I commented on this to Emma, she agreed that it sounded like a valid point.

There was little to no art in this room unless you count maps as art which, I may say, I occasionally do. The maps were of the individual countries of the continent with red lines and blue lines intersecting everything. The red lines were land trade routes and the blue lines were river trade routes that were carefully marked. As well as these were the various trading outposts, harbours and the markets where business could expect to be done. Not for Father the maps of cities and population centres, sites of battlefields and historical centres. I know for a fact that several castles and palaces were completely ignored regarding the construction of these maps.

Each of the maps was put into solid wooden frames that were hung on the walls so that they could easily be taken down to be examined in the minutest detail.

There were two large maps of the continent. One was just the same map that you see in just about every atlas and book regarding the continent, more accurate than most and only had the major trade routes labelled on it. The other map was, whatever else it might be, a genuine work of art.

It was a topographical map and it was designed to be laid flat and poured over. It could be placed on the floor or a table if the table was large enough and Father used it when he wanted to dominate a rival or when he was doing some large-scale strategic thinking with his closest advisors. I had seen it at work both here in Father's office and down in the greater hall when things were being discussed. It regularly made an appearance during the war and I know that one of Radovid's generals had demanded that the map be handed over for military purposes. Father had refused, telling the general that he too was a general and that he needed the map for logistical purposes.

The incident was one of the few where King Radovid the Just sided with Father over any of the other nobles and generals in his courts. Whatever else King Radovid the Just, might have been, he was a military genius and he knew that Father's logistical needs were more important than some cavalry general's ego.

Beyond that, there were rugs on the floor to keep people warm in the summer and the room had several other smaller desks where scribes worked to keep hold of whatever else was happening in the room.

Many people have commented on the absence of a conference table. Father, did have meetings but where he was allowed to sit, either at his desk or in his chair, those people that were meeting with him were expected to stand. He would regularly tell people that if people couldn't tell you what they needed to tell you before they got tired and asked for a chair, then it wasn't worth telling.

He made exceptions for older and injured people that needed chairs though.

It used to be said in the family that Father was like a spider sitting in the middle of his web. The trade and contracts and maps laid out around him. There might be chaos and all kinds of things going on around him but he would sit there, calmly and patiently until someone made a mistake or someone told him something that he needed to interact with and then he would strike.

Now that I make that connection with Ariadne I… I'm not sure how I feel about that. They say that you marry your parents but…

Fuck me dead, one of the critics just laughed.

.

I'm not sure how I feel about that.

After he died, Emma moved into the office on a much smaller scale. She made relatively few changes although I must confess that I haven't visited her in the office while she was working. I do know that she has continued the practice of having two offices. The private office where she does most of her own paperwork including her correspondence and where she works when she doesn't want to be disturbed.

Father's old office is where she meets people for official reasons. I'm told that she likes to sit behind the desk. There are large comfortable chairs placed in front of the desk for people to sit in. She shares Father's disdain for Conference tables but she has gone from one end of the extreme to the other. She has a circle of large, comfortable sofas and armchairs that are arranged in the centre of the room where she sits with people and they discuss things at length. In the middle of this circle, there is a large, low table that is constantly filled with jugs of water, wine, tea, coffee and all of the other things that would go with these things and there is always at least one servant in the room whose responsibility is to keep everyone's cups and glasses well topped up and to order replacements for any of these things should they be in danger of running low.

She also keeps bottles of spirits behind her desk for those times when she wants to put people at ease.

Or off-centre.

She kept the maps and the chaotic filing system, but I notice that the maps are less taken off the wall. They are, however, fixed further down and more on eye level. There have also been a few more maps added to the collection which record the Southern parts of the Empire. I know that Emma was particularly proud of the fact that she was one of the first people to have a full map of Dorne.

The ornate, topographical map was moved to the back of the room and I had never seen it used while my sister was in charge. That's not saying much though because I had not been home while my sister was in charge.

She had added a couple of pieces of decoration as well. She had the Coulthard family coat of arms fixed above the fireplace and she had ordered a portrait of Father to be commissioned. It was affixed to one end of the room and it portrayed Father sitting in his chair with his hands steepled together in his traditional attitude of listening intently. The effect was startling and told everyone that might have been watching that our Father was still there and was still in charge of everything.

I remember from the couple of times that I had been in there, that the curtains had been changed. They were thicker and more insulated to keep the warmth in. There were also tapestries around the room, covering the barer patches of wall and the use of bits of carpet and rug to keep the chill out of the floor was much more pervasive. It was still a place where work was done but Emma seemed to believe that she was spending a ridiculous amount of time there, therefore she wanted to be comfortable in her place of work.

I could understand the sentiment although I found it a bit too cluttered for my liking. Distraction is the enemy of work for me and I need a relatively austere workspace.

I have never been in Emma's private study since she had taken over the trading company.

The room was now startlingly different.

There were no carpets on the floor. The picture of Father had been taken down from the wall. The curtains had been taken down and those tapestries and draperies that were there for the keeping in of warmth had been taken away.

The maps that Father had been so proud of, had been removed and the main, huge, topographical map had been placed in the middle of the room, propped on a couple of tables so that you could walk around the entire thing.

The main desk had been pushed back into a corner to make some room and there was still a chair standing behind it.

The coat of arms was still there above the fireplace, as were all of the shelves, cupboards and strong boxes that were still arranged in a chaotic pattern.

There were also the old scribe desks at the back of the room. They were still there.

The overall effect of the place was of a room in transition. It felt like a military room rather than an office. This was not a place where people worked or lived. This was a place where people argued and fought. Where fingers were pointed and words were yelled. This was a room where people grasped the hilts of their swords and gestured wildly.

The room felt cold, even though the air felt warm and muggy, the room felt… austere and unpleasant.

I didn't like it but I suppose that that was a given.

Then I saw the people.

The first person I saw was Ariadne.

People might think that I am lying or that I am being overly dramatic or romantic but she was the first person I saw, possibly even the first thing that I saw when I blinked in the light after having my blindfold removed.

When I saw her, in that first, split heartbeat of a moment when I saw her I could see both her face and the expressionless, lifeless eyes of Kerrass as he stared up at me from the table after she had broken his neck. For a horrible moment, all I could feel was rage.

After that, my mind caught up with my eyes. She looked awful.

Awful while still, to my eyes at least, looking achingly beautiful. Maybe a little thinner than I had seen her last.

She was still dressed as she had been when the feast had been happening. She wore the same blue dress and her hair was still up in the same hairstyle, only now, her long dark hair was falling out of the style. It was tangled, caked and matted with dirt that I could not identify and along with the dark brown stains on her face, I decided that I didn't want to identify whatever it was that was in her hair.

The dress was torn as well. The neckline had been torn down and the slit that had been made in the skirts had been lengthened considerably. There were more foreign, unpleasant and distasteful stains on the fabric.

She was utterly still. So still she reminded me of that time back when I first knew her that she was wearing an illusion and that she would occasionally forget to maintain it. So it would just stay in place meaning that we were confronted with this strange, silent, picture of a woman. She would do this while she was thinking of something or deciding what she wanted to do next.

She would later tell me that this was a sign of her weakness and that when she became stronger, she could maintain a much better, more solid illusory construct and it was this version that I had met in the gardens of Angraal all that time ago.

At first… and I must emphasise that this was an instinctual decision, I thought that this was what I was looking at. But then I looked closer.

No illusion could be this good.

She was standing just behind the desk and to the right in the surprisingly bright sunshine that was coming through the windows. The light shone in the minute hairs that were on the back of her hands that were hanging down by her side. There were small threads that were hanging from some of the torn seams that were on the sides of her dress, around the shoulders and the skirts. Small wisps of hair moved in a draft that I couldn't otherwise see.

I could see the light shining through her eyes.

The eyes stared straight ahead. As far as I could tell, she hadn't even seen me coming. She was a statue, an immovable thing. She reminded me of a golem.

Strange as it might seem, I felt the first flutterings of hope as I saw that. Regardless of what she thought of me, her eyes would have moved when I came into the room. That meant that she was under… control of some kind. That meant that she had not decided to kill Kerrass. Someone else had decided that for her. She was a weapon that had been fashioned to someone's hand which meant that, in turn, she had not killed Kerrass.

The woman that I loved had not killed Kerrass.

A surge of elation shot through me. Chireadean had told me that it was foolish and I agreed with him. Ariadne has stated to me, many times, that although her interest in Kerrass is not sexual or erotic, her affection for him is almost as much as it is for me. She would not have killed him. She did not kill him. She had been ordered.

The realisation made me dizzy and almost staggered.

She was not the killer, she was not the betrayer, she was the betrayed. Someone controlled her. She was the victim, one of the victims at least. She was a weapon.

And that realisation made me feel horror and dread. Because that puts some more things in line. If she was a weapon then the first thing that she did, or was controlled to do, was to remove the only person that was there who could feasibly stand up to her.

Kerrass and then… Laurelen.

You have to remember that although all of this might have taken you an age to read… it certainly took me an age to write, it all rattled through my brain in an instant.

So, given that Ariadne was here, where was Laurelen? I looked for her.

She was sitting on a stool in the corner of the room and looked eminently more alive than Ariadne had. She was wearing a plain, colourless shift. And by shift, I mean that it was the grey of sheep's wool. There was no dye in it whatsoever and didn't appear to have been washed thoroughly. Where Ariadne was actively filthy with matted hair and stained clothes and skin, Laurelen looked… merely dishevelled. Her long hair was certainly tangled but at least it was clean.

Laurelen is a Sorceress and although she lacks the predatory beauty of Lady Eilhart or the stormy effects of Lady Yennefer and Lady Vigo, she is still a striking woman.

But like Ariadne, I got the feeling that she was possibly a little bit thinner than she had been when I last saw her. Her hair lacked some of the lustre that it normally had and her skin had less shine. She was… She was "peasant" clean rather than "noble" clean. That she had scrubbed herself with water but lacked any of the cosmetics or creams or soaps that she would normally use to take care of her hygiene.

There were dark shadows under her eyes which were bloodshot.

She still had the odd, dark metal collar around her neck. Made of a metal that rippled with a strange rainbow sheen that seemed to ripple as she moved.

And a guard was standing over her with an axe resting on his shoulder.

This guard looked like he might have been one of the critics and with Laurelen being the size and shape that she was, I have no doubt that that axeman could have cut her in half without really trying.

Where Ariadne was absolutely still, Laurelen was constantly fidgeting. She was pale and sweating and every so often, she would lift her hand to the collar and try to ease it away from her neck before she would give up and let her hands fall to where they were clasped in her lap.

She greeted me without words as I had the bag taken from my head. Her eyebrows lifted and for a moment, there was joy on her face. But it was only a moment before the pain and discomfort came back into her expression.

After I saw Laurelen, I saw Emma.

Emma was sitting at another desk, a smaller desk that was facing opposite Laurelen. She was writing frantically at that desk. She looked up when she was on pause while her pen scratched furiously at the document that she was working on. Fast enough that I winced at the speed. It was all too easy to predict that the quill would split or that the paper would tear. There was certainly going to be more than a fair share of ink splatter.

Like Laurelen, her expression lifted for a moment when she saw me. Then it lifted even further when she saw my condition although I could not understand what that meant. Then she glanced at Laurelen.

Laurelen nodded and Emma's expression firmed back into a line before she frowned in concentration and she returned to work.

Emma seemed to be in a similar state to Laurelen. The same, grey-brown shift, the same scrubbed face. The same look of fatigue and the same signs of a lot of time spent weeping.

Her hair was tied back in a tail. She had knotted her own hair to do so rather than tying it back with a thong or a piece of fabric as she would normally do when she needed to do this kind of thing. She hated that and only did it in extreme circumstances because she always felt as though the hair would be too damaged afterwards to justify tying the knot.

She wasn't as pale or sweating though.

The last person in the room that I saw was Sam.

"Hello, Freddie." He said calmly.

There were a couple of other guards in the room as well, but I don't remember much about them. They were men in armour. Tall, broad, with weapons and shields and they stood around and stared into space.

Sam was… different and for another long moment, an obviously false thought occurred to me. That Sam himself was being controlled in some way similar to how Ariadne was being controlled. Foolish hope flared even though I knew that this wasn't the case. For some reason, I just knew it. Chireadean's words were echoing in my ears.

"Your brother is a snake." The Elf had told me.

He was leaning over the topographical map of the continent and was straightening up from that posture when I had the bag taken from my head.

He looked different in some way although I could not tell what it was until much later when I was lying in my cell trying to make sense of everything that I had seen, heard and done that day.

He still had my brother's hair, he still dressed the same, he still had the same colour eyes and…

He was wearing the same uniform that he had been wearing the night of the Autumnal Equinox. It was the outfit of a soldier. He wore leg greaves and infantryman's boots. A chainmail coat over the top of a padded gambeson which was dirty and streaked with the grease that they use to keep the mail from rusting. And there was a tabard over the top. The tabard was a dark crimson shade with the symbol of Redania on the front.

All of that thick padding must have been why there was no fire in the hearth at the moment. Armour can be fiercely hot at times.

He also had a sword strapped over the top and he held it at his side.

On the sword belt was another fighting Knife and an eating knife but alongside a pouch which, I assumed, was for the keeping of odds and ends, was a large, brown leather bag.

And when I saw that, I knew what had happened.

"Holy Flame Sam," I heard myself say. "What have you done?"

He almost smiled and just for a moment, it felt as though my brother was back in the room. Once again, I was struck that the person in front of me was not my brother.

But I was wrong, this person was more of my brother than I had ever seen before. I had never seen the similarities before. But now… He reminded me of my Father. There was an attitude about him, a subdued quiet that I had not seen before. There was a confidence and a seriousness about him that I had never noticed, or if I had, I had explained it away as part of something else.

This was my brother. He looked… lighter somehow, more solid. Older certainly.

He scratched at the side of his head, another gesture from childhood.

"What have I done?" He wondered and for a while, his eyes looked haunted. "A lot Freddie. I have done a lot. And before I am done, I am going to do a lot more too in the pursuit of a North free from Southern Oppression."

He moved to stand behind the desk, having to turn sideways so that he could fit between the corner of the desk and the walls.

"I do not doubt that you have questions." He told me as he reached for a sheaf of paper. "And I absolutely intend to answer them for you. I know that you hate me and I cannot deny that you have good reason to do so."

He reached into one of the drawers of the desk and pulled out a small bottle which he lifted to his lips and took a sip from before making a face.

"But know Freddie, realise, that everything I have done has happened for a reason."

I felt myself sneer.

"For the family?" I wondered, "how cliched."

He stared at me and laughed. "For the family? Fuck no. I don't care about the family."

"Then what do you care about Sam? Why did you… What have you…?"

He held his hands up to quieten me.

"We'll get to that." He told me before sitting down. "First though, I need you to do something for me."

It was my turn to laugh as I stared at him.

He was serious.

"No," I told him.

He nodded before leaning back and turning to look out the window. As though I was behaving according to expectations. He was back to reminding me of Father again.

"Nothing would make me happier." He told me after a while and he leaned back forwards again. "Nothing would make me happier than if you were on my side on this. And we will get there, you and I. I know that you hate me. I know why and I even understand it. But first, there is something that needs to happen. And I cannot wait for you to come over to my way of thinking."

I decided that it was time for some bravado.

"I will never come over to your way of thinking," I told him. "You have…"

He held up his hand to forestall me. The gesture was identical to the one that Father used to use when I was trying to make a full and reasoned argument as to why Father was wrong and why I was right. It was so uncanny that I wondered if Sam had practised it in the mirror.

Before his hand lowered, he pinched the bridge of his nose and I could see that his hand was trembling.

"Yes," he said as he squeezed his eyes tight. "Yes, you will. I will explain everything that has happened and I will show you why I have done the things that I have done. I will convince you and you will take it in. I am sure of it. The only reason that I haven't brought you in on this sooner was that you needed to play your part. Which you have done so… admirably."

He laughed suddenly, there was an edge of bitterness that was almost like madness at the edges of the laughter. I remembered the bag on his belt before I looked over at Ariadne staring straight ahead like a statue. Then I made the connection.

Dear Flame.

Ariadne had once commented that one of the tell-tale signs of a person that made such a bag was that they would be howling at the moon, throwing faecal matter mad.

"You've lost your mind," I told him. "Sam… Sammy, we can help you, we can…"

Again with the gesture to stop me.

"No Freddie. No. I am not mad, not yet anyway although I can understand where you are getting that information from."

"What is all of this about?"

He smiled, a little sadly. "I told you once, do you not remember? I told you about how much I desperately wanted another crack at the Nilfgaardians. One more proper battle, them against us on an equal footing."

He stared at me for a long moment, but the memory did not occur to me and he shrugged.

"It doesn't matter anyway. I absolutely intend to tell you what is going on and why I am doing these things, and why I have done the things that I have done. I look back over it all and although some of those actions are brutal, unpleasant and… I do not doubt, evil from a certain perspective. I have done so to right a much greater wrong and I do so on the behalf of the Northern Kingdoms that I love so dearly."

"That sounds like a rehearsed speech," I told him.

"That's because it is a rehearsed speech." He laughed like my brother. "You and Mark were always the ones that were better at making speeches. But just because it is a rehearsed speech does not make it any the less true."

"Oh Sam…" I said. "What have you done?"

"Many, many things." He told me. "But before we do all of that, it is time for you to do your part."

"I will never do what…"

"Yes, yes. You said." He sighed and smiled at me sadly. "I wish I could just ask you to do this and that you would do it. I wish that you and I could work together on this as partners and, as I say, we will get there. But there is no time. First I need you to do something for me."

"I will not."

He smiled. "You will, but you have not heard what I want you to do yet."

"It doesn't matter."

He smirked again and lifted a pile of pamphlets from the desk.

"I know that you sent your diary out to Oxenfurt in the hands of that Elven Hellcat bitch that follows you around like a lost kitten."

The sudden venom in his voice when he was talking about Carys was startling.

"I had wanted to use you like this anyway, but now it is even more important. I need a record of the early days of this insurrection. So I want you to continue your work."

"My work?" I was suddenly feeling stupid.

"Yes. You record history as you see it. You do not attempt to remove yourself from that history or be dispassionate about it. That emotion and your perspective lends it all a certain amount of authenticity."

He stared at me for a moment before standing back up and walking around the desk to stand in front of me.

"What that means is, according to one of my colleagues in all of this…"

"Which one?" I demanded.

He just grinned and otherwise ignored the question.

"Which means." He said again. "That you are one of the most reliable voices in the North. People believe you."

"So…?"

I did consider going for him. But he was a soldier and nothing would be achieved. At most I would get my head caved in. He saw the impulse in my mind.

"So I need to use your voice."

"To what end?" I demanded carefully. It would do no one any harm to know what was going on.

"To the end of this. In the future…"

He was restless. When he had looked at me for a long moment, he moved away to go back to re-examine the map.

"In the future." He said after rubbing the side of his head. "The continent will look back on these days. What we say and do now will be discussed by historians and the readers of historians for decades, maybe even centuries to come. As such we must have a record of what happened. We are already working on our version of events but we want you to write another version of events so that the truth can be remembered."

"What truth?" I demanded. "The truth that my youngest brother ruined my wedding, murdered a lot of people and has done… what was it you said? 'Brutal, unpleasant and maybe even evil things."

"Yes." He told me. "Yes, that is what I have done. And I want it recorded. And I want you to record it."

I took a moment to decide what to do. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. But the question was about how to do that.

"You do not have to hide anything?" He told me. "Tell the truth, tell what happened. We know about your movements, we know about what happened in Oxenfurt. Although we could not stop your Publisher Dorthan from getting the word out, he was soon handed over to our forces for collaboration. We also have your clerk so that we can make use of your skills to the utmost.

"We captured the Elf and her filthy lover when they came back to try and rescue other people and we caught that other Elf who stole the inn from a decent human owner. There is no one for you to protect and there are no lies that are worth telling. We just want you to write the truth."

"And if I say no?" The question had to be asked.

"Do not say no." He told me.

I tried to search his eyes to see if the truth or the lie was buried in the depths of those eyes. But I couldn't tell. He was too far away for me to see it clearly.

I looked at Ariadne but she was still staring straight ahead. Unmoving.

Emma was not looking at me. Laurelen caught my eye and shook her head. But I had no idea what that meant. Was she telling me not to rebel? Was she telling me to resist? There was no way of knowing.

I missed Kerrass desperately at that moment.

"No," I told him. "No," I said again. "I will not do it. I will not work with you. I will not work for you. You killed my friend, my best friend in the whole world who has saved my life more times than I can count. The man that made me the person that I am today."

He sighed and shook his head. Again there was an attitude about him that said that he was not surprised by my answer.

"Technically, the slave killed him."

"I recognise that bag on your belt you piece of filth," I told him. "Slave is right. She had no choice in the matter. You made her kill my best friend and then you made her enslave our sister's love. I will not do this for you. In fact, I will not do anything you ask."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

He nodded in acceptance of the point before shaking his head sadly. Again, he moved back behind the desk but stayed standing.

"You hate me." He told me. "As I say, I understand that and one day, you will remember this and remember that it was all happening for a reason. And then you will be sorry and you will thank the God, or the Holy Flame if you prefer, that I was the one that did what was necessary. However, for the here and now, you are assuming that what I have told you to do was a request. It was not, it was an order."

He did not raise his voice.

I did.

"Go fuck yourself. I will take great delight in thwarting you at every turn, in every way that you can."

He seemed to be sighing a lot.

"We have talked a lot about what we would do if we came to this impasse," he told me. "More than one person told me that I should torture you into doing what I wanted. I see that some of them have even started that process. Believe me when I say that I will find out who that was and have them punished. But as they have found out, and as Sansum in the south discovered, torture does not work on you."

Then he sat.

"You have often claimed in your articles that the Beast of Amber's Crossing was one of the worst things that happened to you, but you have not seen some of the gifts that he gave you."

"Gifts?" I spluttered in outrage.

"Certainly. It means that no matter what happens to you. No matter what magic or what event or what torture is visited upon you, you have always seen worse, you have always had worse happen to you. Then your training at the hands of Jerome means that… You are not susceptible to torture."

He shrugged with his hands expressively.

"I do not doubt that you would break eventually, but you would then tell us what we wanted to hear, or rather you would tell us what you think we want to hear. Your mind would be broken and that would render you useless to us. You are vital… VITAL Freddie. Vital to my plans."

"Fuck your plans," I told him.

He ignored that.

"So you are immune to torture." He said. "At least, immune to pain and anything else we might do to you." He finished. "But you are woefully, naively compassionate."

His left hand fell to his waist, below the desk and he shifted in his seat to look at Ariadne.

"You may express yourself freely and without constraint although still with the earlier orders on you." He told her. There was an edge to his voice, a resonance that seemed to echo in my chest.

Ariadne seemed to sag in place although I didn't see her move. She still stood stock still apart from her head which turned to look at me.

"Gods Freddie," She whimpered. "I'm so sorry, It wasn't me I swear that it wasn't… He made me…"

"FEEL PAIN." Sam hissed the words but they echoed hugely. My teeth hurt.

Ariadne's mouth snapped shut over a scream but she couldn't keep from whimpering. Tears rose in her eyes.

It occurred to me again that Vampires could weep.

But they were not tears of pain.

Her body seemed to spasm.

She gritted her teeth and her lips peeled back from them.

"Do not listen to him, Freddie." She hissed. "Do not give in. Stand…"

"FEEL AGONY." Sam hissed at her and the strange thrumming sound in the air seemed to grow.

Ariadne's mouth opened and blood started to leak out of the corner of her mouth from where she must have bitten her tongue.

A strangled sound emerged.

"MORE."

Her entire body shook as the ripples of agony tore up her. She was shaking with it but she still didn't move. Her mouth hung open and a noise emerged from that mouth. It was no human sound. It was a grunt, a moan, some kind of primal thing as her body seemed to jerk around.

Then she screamed.

"I LOVE YOU." She screamed but then she seemed to be seized by a fresh wave of pain and her head flew back and she screamed so loud that it hurt my ears.

"SILENCE," Sam ordered and the sound cut off instantly. But the pain did not. Her body whipped about as though it was caught in some kind of wind. I watched as her left arm broke under the muscle spasm. Then her right leg twisted under her, adding fresh agony to it. Her mouth was open and her eyes locked on mine.

"Stop this Sam," I told him, pleading really.

"Do as I ask," his voice sounded reasonable.

Ariadne's eyes caught mine and I could see the negative in them.

I could see the pride.

I looked at Sam and he seemed calm. Emma was hiding her face in the paperwork and Laurelen would no longer meet my eyes.

"No," I whispered and I caught Ariadne's eyes. At least she would know that I was there.

And then the pain just stopped.

Ariadne was breathing hard.

"Heal yourself," Sam told her and I watched her limbs right themselves and start to reform.

"Good." Sam said. "You see her for what she is. Just a slave, Freddie. She was born for it. Created for it. She serves. It is her lot in life and her life's purpose. But I still need you to do what I asked."

He turned back to Ariadne.

"No reaction." He told her. "No emotion."

Even as her limbs started to reknit themselves. I watched as Ariadne turned back into the statue.

I was shaking with fury. I was so angry that I was paralysed by it. I remember feeling the fire running through my veins and the only reason I didn't attempt to murder someone is because my anger was a cold one. I could easily see what was happening and could take stock of the situation. Two guards behind me also saw just how angry I was, or were well-trained enough to be able to take that into account and had moved up to prevent the situation from getting out of hand.

I was wearing a shirt and a pair of trousers. I didn't even have shoes on my feet. Sam was armed, armoured and for all I knew, Ariadne might have had a standing instruction to protect Sam's person at all costs. Not only that, Sam is a trained soldier and although he has admitted, and others have agreed, that his skills have fallen off in recent years. It was also true that we all thought of him as a loving and loyal brother.

How much could be believed? How much had his skills decreased, really?

But the chances of me being able to hurt him, or rescue someone, anyone, that might be able to help were remote.

Like I could hear Jerome's voice whenever someone deliberately causes me pain, I heard Kerrass' voice. As clearly as if he was standing beside me.

"Time Freddie. Always play for time and wait for the proper moment."

So I ground my teeth together and said nothing.

Sam turned to look at me.

"So what shall I do now?" It was a pretence, he was still my brother and I still knew some things. He might be different or pretending to be different, but I could still see it in his eyes. He was still a man. And what I saw in there was that he already had a plan. He knew what he was going to do next.

"I don't know Sam," I told him. "What are you going to do now? You have tortured the woman I love most in the entire world. She didn't want me to bend so now what are you going to do?"

"Is she the woman you love most in the world?" Sam smiled. Again, there was a sense of sadness in his eyes.

"I don't think so." He went on. "Or at least, not yet. Given time, you might have. But now you will never have time. But even then there is someone else.

"Your pet Vampire even said as much once. She said that one of the weaknesses of human language is that we only have a limited supply of words for those things that are more complicated than that. The example that was given was 'love' itself."

He leaned back and crossed his arms as he thought.

"What was it you wrote? That whenever you meet a woman, you automatically compare them to Emma and that in every case they have been found wanting. You declared her the most beautiful, the most talented, the most intelligent and the most charming woman that you have ever known."

He shook his head.

"I know that she was more of a Mother to you than our own Mother was and I understand that. But I wonder why you hero-worshipped her so much. Not Mark, not Father, not me? I am self-aware enough to know that you were not interested in what I was doing but Mark? Should he not have been your hero in the family? Should he not be the person that you seem to emulate?"

He chuckled at a thought before shaking his head. He blinked furiously for a moment and shook his head violently.

"The person you love most in the whole world is Emma. She has been your hero, your parent, your supporter and your friend. Over and above anything else that anyone else can ever give you. Many factors have gone into making you the person that you are today but not least of them is a love for, and a love by your elder sister. You have been her defender and her champion in so many other ways. When she took over the family business, you stood by her when she needed to fall, giving her the confidence to keep going. You championed her disgusting love of another woman where her proper place was in providing children and sons to continue the family line."

He didn't raise his voice. His words were angry but he said them almost calmly as if with great remorse.

"Not your fault." He told me before a thought occurred to him. "Nor hers really if we're honest. Where were the parents in all of this to set her, to set you… heh… to set all of us on the right path. But I am digressing and we both have work to do."

He interlocked his hands behind his head and leaned back before looking at Ariadne.

"Use Magic." He told her. Again, there was a strange weight to his words that seemed to make my teeth itch. "Something visible that Freddie can see. Lightning maybe?"

Then he turned back to look me in the eye.

"Use it to torture Emma."

"NOOOO" Laurelen screamed and hurled herself forward. The axeman that was standing over her was too fast though or had been expecting something of this type and he caught her by the arm and hurled her back against the wall. She hit her head on something and this seemed to knock the wind out of her or send her dizzy.

Ariadne ignored this and moved towards Emma who had risen from her stool, her face going pale. Other than her feet moving, Ariadne didn't seem to move.

"Do not disturb the paperwork though." Sam went on.

There was a pause as Ariadne seemed to consider this.

Then the Vampire lifted her hand in a strange gesture and Emma rose into the air and hung suspended.

"Please…" I said I did not believe that anything could happen. I hadn't believed that this was going to happen until Emma started to float in the air. "Please don't do this?"

Sam took his hands down from behind his head.

"Then do as I ask."

Ariadne did not pause.

In my image, when a mage casts bolts of lightning at someone, they always do it with their hands. Some kind of grand, ostentatious gesture that people could see and be afraid of. That, spectacularly, failed to happen. Instead, Ariadne seemed to frown and a light came to her eyes.

Emma had not said anything yet. I think she whimpered in advance.

The lightning tore out of Ariadne's eyes and shot into Emma's body.

And Emma screamed. Her body, still floating in the air, spasmed and shook violently, and all the time, Emma just screamed and screamed and screamed until whatever muscles that you use to take in the air that we need to breathe just seemed to stop working.

"Stop," Sam told Ariadne. "If we kill her, it will be over too fast."

My eyes darted to his face at his first words. He was not looking at me. He was watching Emma writhe in pain. The right side of his lip had curled in hate when he spoke about it all being over too fast.

"How can you do this?" I demanded of Sam. "How. She's your sister. I'm your brother, why are you doing this?"

Sam had gone back to smiling sadly.

"Because it is necessary." He told me. "I am no pantomime villain Freddie. I am not evil for the sake of being evil. I too have read the philosophies and I am well aware that no villain thinks of himself as being a villain. I have my reasons.

"Yes, you are my brother and believe it or not, I still love you. Fiercely. I look forward to the day when we can be trusted friends again. But her?" He gestured to Emma, who was gasping for breath as she floated. I was watching for it and again, his lip curled in hate.

"She was never a sister to me."

He nodded to Ariadne.

"Again." He told her and the screaming began again.

I have spent some time looking back at that moment as I watched my sister being tortured. She didn't tell me not to give in. Nor did Laurelen who was pleading with Sam to stop.

I don't know why I didn't give in there and then. I wish I had though.

But I have lain on my bed, staring at the flickering torchlight as it danced across my ceiling. I wondered why I didn't stop it all then. I've kept myself awake wondering about that.

I don't know the answer to that. The Macho answer is that I was still trying to resist Sam at any cost. I was trying to force him to come to his senses. But I don't think that was true.

It might also be true that I was frozen in horror, or disbelief that this could be happening. That the sister that I cannot deny that I love was being tortured by the woman that I love romantically and want to marry so that I can tell the world how much I love her. And that she was doing so on the orders of the Brother that I loved and that I had been closest to when I was growing up.

That might be true. I don't know though.

The truth is that in the heat of the moment, it didn't occur to me that I could.

Again, Emma screamed so hard that she couldn't breathe. There was blood dripping out of her mouth now from, presumably, where she had bitten something in the spasms. More blood came from her ears and her nose. Even after the power had stopped. She trembled as her limbs spasmed around her. Jerking and drumming everywhere.

"I am not going to pretend," Sam said after a long moment where the only sounds were Laurelen whimpering and Emma gasping for breath.

"I am not going to pretend that this is your fault," Sam told me. "I am not some idiot that is going to say that you are forcing me to do this. You could indeed stop this at any time but I am also aware that I am the one doing this. I have read those books where the villain tortures someone to do something that the villain wants and the villain argues that it is the hero's choice, the hero's fault that the torture is taking place."

He shook his head before continuing to speak.

"It always occurred to me that there is a simple philosophical argument that could counter the villain's cruelty. But I've never figured out what it was. 'You can stop this at any time they say to the hero. 'It is your fault that this is happening,' they say. But that is not what is happening here. I too could stop this at any time. I know that you know that. And if you give me what I want, I will stop."

He nodded to Ariadne. "Again."

The critics are unhappy again. They want me to go into more detail. I told them that I wasn't going to do that. I told them that they were sick fucks for wanting me to recount the torture that my sister was suffering at the hands of my brother.

They did not laugh. Nor were they particularly offended. I even think that one of them was sympathetic to what I was saying.

But the truth is that I can barely remember what happened. My mind tries to go back to it and it just… shys away as a horse might shy away from a particularly high jump. I know that it lasted for a long time. I know that at some point, Emma was dropped to the floor and I watched her bang her head on the floor with her spasms.

I saw the blood dripping from Ariadne's nose as she started to overextend herself magically and still Sam would not let up.

He watched as Emma was tortured and one of the few images that I have of that… however long it was, is Sam's face, the light of the lightning reflecting off the sneer on his lips.

But eventually, it stopped.

Why didn't I say anything? Why didn't I stop it then when I had the chance?

The answer is that I have no idea.

Sam sighed and again rubbed his head.

"Much though I would… kind of enjoy watching Emma get tortured for a significant part of the day. I have things to do."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"I see. You are overwhelmed. That is fine and understandable."

He found a chair that was against the wall and sat down in it.

"The truth is that Emma… The only reason that she is still alive is that you warned me. You told me that the company wouldn't exist without her. You told me that this was the point and that is true. I wouldn't know half of what this was all about."

He waved about the room, taking in the drawers and the cupboards and the shelves.

"And in the time it would take to figure out, we would lose so much of it and we would lose so much more time that it would almost become pointless. And I just don't have that kind of time."

He must have seen the hope register in the edges of my eyes.

"Oh don't get me wrong Freddie. There is more than enough time to do permanent, irreparable harm. We certainly have enough time that I could make you sit here and watch the sister that you love so much screaming her lungs out in agony until, eventually, her heart gives out and just stops. But I can't do that, because I need her to disentangle the trade empire that she has built up for the family.

"And whatever else I can say about Emma, her filthy habits and her weakness. I will say that she has done an admirable job in making the family rich and powerful on that level. So you were right in saying that I needed to keep her alive. I do. I saw that when you told me about it down in Toussaint when you pointed out how much I was going to need her and that we couldn't do this without her."

He stood up and came towards me. I was staring at Emma who was lying on the floor, panting for air while every so often, her limbs would just give this little tremble and send her to spasming.

Gently, kindly even, he put his hand on my shoulder and I straightened to look into my brother's eyes.

"You saved her life, Freddie, and you made my life so much easier in doing it."

He straightened and moved away.

If I was going to do something, anything even, that was the moment that I should have done it.

"So I can't kill her, even while I hate her."

"Why Sam?" I wailed. "Why? What did she do? What did we do to make you…"

"Ah…" He held his hand up for silence. "All in good time. I promised that I will tell you everything and I meant it. There is a reason that I hate her. But I don't hate you. You are my brother and I love you. In fact, you are the only person in our entire, worthless, wretched family that I feel any kind of affection at all. There is only one thing in my life that I hold above you. That I swore that I would…"

He stopped and laughed at himself.

"And there is me about to give the entire thing away. I don't want to prejudice you or give you truths that would taint your views when it comes to recording what has happened. Suffice it to say, again, that there is a reason.

"But in the meantime, We need to address this situation. I need you to do what I require of you. You don't want to… You want to thwart me or to be angry with me or out of some kind of… misplaced desire to delay things or something. I also know that you are susceptible to the pain in others.

"Your compassion is something to be proud of Freddie and don't let anyone, least of all me, tell you differently. You are a compassionate man and that quality screams from every action that you take and every word that you write. It might be argued that you are compassionate to prove to yourself and to others that you are a good man. But to me, that denies the possibility. And if you do good deeds, does it matter the intent behind them?"

Something in the way that he talked about me caught my temper.

"Are you trying to convince me, or yourself of that?" I asked him.

It was meant as a barb, a verbal attack to throw him off me so that I could take the time to regroup and come up with some kind of rebuttal. But he took it as a genuine thing to consider.

"I am not sure." He said. "It could go either way I suppose. But here, what I am doing are acts that would be considered evil, to achieve a greater good."

"Something something, the road to hell, something something, good intentions, something," I told him with as much sarcasm in my voice as I could manage.

He laughed, and as far as I could tell, he did so with genuine humour.

"God Freddie, I look forward to the day when you and I can work together again, openly and with an understanding between us. Together we will work towards healing the world."

"You and I will never…" I was trying for defiance.

"Yes, yes." He waved his hand dismissively. "But for the immediate future, I need you to write that record."

"Fuck you," I told him.

"Ah Freddie," he shook his head sadly. "Not your best retort."

He turned to look at Ariadne.

"Laurelen." He said.

Ariadne nodded and turned to stare at the other Sorceress.

Who screamed.

"Interesting thing," Sam said. "Dimertium, when worn by a mage, can prevent the mage from casting spells. But it doesn't protect a person from having magic cast upon them."

Emma had turned over on the floor to look at her lover who was shaking as if she was in the grip of some unseen fist. She thrashed about, her arms and legs snapping about, this way and that way.

"Also interestingly," Sam told me as though we were watching a play being put on at a theatre. "I might need you alive. Ariadne is a tool that is essential to my plans and it is proven that torturing her will not work with you as she has enjoined you to resist me at every turn."

Laurelen continued to scream. Another low voice appeared in the room as Emma moaned and started to crawl towards her wife.

"But Laurelen?" Sam continued. "Her, I can kill. She is in no way vital to my plans. Useful? Certainly, but vital? No. I can use her as an example. I can use her to show you, and Emma, what happens to those people that disobey me and work against my plans. Her, I can show you that I absolutely mean what I say and that I am not just making this up or making empty threats."

In the thrashing about, over Laurelen's screaming. I heard something snap and I thought I could see that one of her legs wasn't hanging right.

Emma got to Laurelen but turned to look at Sam, her legs were still cramping and spasming so she couldn't stand.

"Stop," Emma wailed. "Stop, I am doing what you told me to do. I am giving you what you asked for."

"Yes." Sam told her, coldly. "You are."

"You promised Sam." She wailed, "You promised that you wouldn't hurt her if I did what you told me to do."

Sam shrugged.

"Any promise made to a woman isn't worth keeping." He told her. "And this is not about you."

I saw it then. He wasn't talking about torturing Laurelen. He was still torturing Emma.

And so, he was torturing me.

Emma watched as Laurelen bounced off the walls. At one point, her nose broke as it smashed into a corner of one of the shelves. Some impacts even made Sam wince. But he winced in the same way that you wince when someone lands a good blow in a bare-knuckle match.

Or when someone lays down an unknown and powerful card in Gwent.

Or you see a friend make a fool of himself with a girl.

There was laughter in the wincing.

I think that Laurelen was unconscious now as her head still thrashed around. Involuntary noises came from her mouth.

That strange, paralysis was on me again. I couldn't move. I don't know why. I wish I did. I wish I knew why so that I could get angry with myself about it. I wish I had done something, anything, to make Sam hurt me instead of those I hold most dear. I wish I had done something. But I didn't, I stood there and watched.

I can't even claim that I felt that it was my duty to see what was happening to them. To take it in.

Emma was trying to catch Laurelen, to hold her close and prevent her from hurting herself as she bashed into things. The man with the axe was openly laughing as Emma would just seem to get close to catching her lover and then Laurelen would jerk out of reach or spin. Or Emma's limbs would start to spasm and she would fall, arms flailing.

Tears fell down Emma's face in the agony of watching this happen to the woman that she loved.

And I did nothing.

Eventually, I broke. And as the Eternal Flame is my witness, I wish I had broken sooner.

There is a common thing that says that everyone has their price. No man is incorruptible and all that needs to happen is for a person to find that price. But it's also true that no man, woman or person is immune to torture. All you have to do is find the right amount, or the right type, of pain to inflict on a person and that person will break.

And I broke.

And the moment was that I saw Emma's mind break.

Flame… I wish I had broken sooner. I don't know why I didn't. I wish I had…"

Flame….

.

Flame preserve me and carry me home.

.

.

Emme stopped trying to hold onto Laurelen and she was trying to be with her as she suffered. She was calling out to Laurelen to be strong. To tell her that she loved her and that she was here and that it was all going to be ok.

She turned and begged Sam to stop again. She was on her knees, tears, snot and blood intermixing to run down her face and stain her teeth and her chin.

Sam ignored her.

She reached forward and grabbed his boots, tugged on his trousers to get at him.

He kicked her off like you would a disobedient dog. Not hard, just enough to dislodge her grip.

The guard was less gentle and dragged her away when she turned to watch the horror that was happening to the woman that she loved.

And then she just stopped. Her tears dried on her face and her expression went vacant. Her eyes darted this way and that for a moment, looking at nothing while she stood still.

And I heard her words clearly, even though Laurelen was screaming.

"I need to get back to work." She said,

Then she turned and stumbled towards her desk, picked up a piece of paper, read it and dipped her quill in ink and went back to writing.

That was the thing that broke me.

"Ok stop." I whimpered. "Stop, I'll do what you want."

And instantly, Laurelen's pain vanished and she collapsed to the floor.

Instantly.

Sam didn't try and hold it over me, he didn't try and make me repeat it. He had my word then.

It was the trust that gets to me now. I had given my word and he trusted that I would keep it.

Flame but my brother still loves me.

Even though I hate him.

"Heal her." Sam told Ariadne, "Heal them both. Then you may heal yourself."

Ariadne moved over and started casting the spells. The blood was running freely down her face now. Her nose, her eyes and her ears were all bleeding from the insane amount of magic that she had just used.

When she was able to, Laurelen went to Emma and tried to get Emma to talk to her but Emma just shook her off and tried to work. Laurelen looked up and caught my eyes.

"Well…" Sam said. "Looks like Emma broke after all. Hope she's still useful." He raised his voice to address Laurelen. "Care for her."

Then he turned to me.

"How could you do that?" I asked him. "How could you…" I shook my head. My voice was hoarse and my throat ached. It occurred to me that I hadn't just been standing idly by as the women that I love were being tortured.

I had been screaming too.

There was a metallic taste at the back of my throat.

I shouted myself hoarse.

"They're just women, Freddie." He told me. "Useful for producing children and providing pleasure. That is all. And if you rely on women then that weakens the man as well."

He shook his head dismissively.

"We will save the philosophical discussions on gender roles and politics for a later date." He told me, moving back to the desk where he took out another bottle. This time a small, pottery one with a dark stopper. He drank it in a swallow.

"After all," he went on. "You have work to do."

"How long do I have?" I asked.

He smiled.

"No deadline. Do a good job and don't dawdle. That's all I ask. When you are done, I will read it and if I am satisfied then we will talk again and I will give you your answers."

"And if you are not satisfied?"

"Nothing, you write another draft."

"No torture of anyone."

He laughed. "No Freddie. No torture. I would rather not do any of that anymore. But if you work hard and sincerely, with the rules and constraints that I place upon you. Then you, and those you care about are safe. You have my word."

"Your word?" I wasn't trying to deny him, but it was more a case of… checking I suppose.

He sighed. "I know Freddie. You have no reason to trust me. But now that I am open in front of you, you are a man. More than that, you are my brother and I love you. I will not break my word to you. Work hard and the faster you work, the faster you will get your answers and when you have your answers we can move onto the next stage of what we have to do, you and I."

"What do we have to do?" I asked.

He just smiled.

"Check on your sister if you must but then, you have work to do."

He left through the door behind me, Ariadne going with him.

Emma was broken. I want to talk more about that but I can't. I really can't. She just worked. Got up and moved to a cupboard and removed a journal on the timber output of some lumber company and then started making notes on a piece of paper.

I pleaded with her to forgive me and say something. Laurelen did too. But as far as I could tell, she didn't even know that we were there. She just worked.

I apologised to Laurelen who looked at me with bleak eyes.

"It's not your fault Freddie." She told me as the tears ran down her face. "It's not. Everyone breaks sooner or later. You were far stronger than we were."

She literally sniggered.

"I folded like a wet piece of tissue paper when he started hurting Emma."

I chuckled with her.

"We must laugh," She told me, "or we will cry."

"I should have broken sooner," I told her. "He was… It's my fault that…"

Tears ran down my face and Laurelen hugged me.

She hugged me. What have I done to deserve these women?

"No." She told me firmly, grabbing my head so that she could look me in the eye. "This was not your fault. You were right to resist and no one knows what they will do until in the moment until it is upon them. You were right to resist and whether you froze or… I saw you, Freddie, when he was torturing Emma. You were frozen, you weren't inside your own head. Much as what's happening with…"

She sobbed and covered her mouth with her hand before, through dint of effort and, presumably, some training, she calmed herself.

"Like Emma is now, you were not at home. For a long moment, I thought that Sam had broken you and I thought the pain was going to continue."

We stood and looked at Emma as she took blotting paper to an ink splatter.

"Will she be ok?" I wondered.

"Your brother was not lying when he said that he needs her and that is why she is still alive," Laurelen told me. "I will care for her, Freddie. That is why I am still alive."

I nodded.

"You have work to do," Laurelen told me. "That is what he needs you for and that is why you are still alive."

I nodded again, feeling stupid. Like a sulky child being sent back to do an unpleasant chore.

"Stay alive Freddie. That's the objective now. Just stay alive."

I nodded, unable to face her anymore, and I turned away.

"And Freddie." She stopped me. "Don't blame Ariadne either. She is more of a slave to his will than we are and when this is all over. She will need our love."

I nodded again and walked away.

The guards took me to my new lodgings. It seemed that the work would not begin immediately. I wept for a long time. Food was brought. Some kind of surgeon came to look at me and eventually, I wept myself to sleep.

In the morning, I was woken with breakfast and escorted to the work room where I met Johann and the critics before I bent to work

I write these words by the grace of Queen Adda of the joint kingdoms of Temeria and Redania.

And if she is responsible. I hope that the bitch rots in hell.