A Scholar's travels with a Witcher Chapter 169, a witcher fanfic

(A/N: So…. yeah.

Shit continues to be horrific in this chapter although it's not a case of things immediately happening to people. But it turns out that there are skeletons in the Coulthard family closet that Freddie knew nothing about. So….

(WARNING: Contains a character talking about sexual abuse that he suffered at a young age from a family member. This happens at the outset of the chapter. I have tried not to be explicit but at the same time, things get pretty dark. This is just the author's opinion, but if you want to skip the worst bits, then just skip to the end of the bit in italics, but that is not the limit of the horror)

As always, thank you for reading)

I am writing this first because it's fresh in my memory. Quoting from Sam.

I was Seven years old when Edmund baptised me into the family religion.

I remember it very clearly because we were still in that stage of our schooling where they were teaching us how to remember things and the night after it happened, I spent the time in pain and with a strange kind of horrible pride as well as an anger and a terror that I did not recognise…

I knew that something important had happened, something vital, something that would fundamentally change who I was and what I was going to do with the rest of my life. So as I lay there, under my blankets at night, shivering and shaking as I tried to ignore the pain, I used all of the mental exercises that we were being taught to remember the heraldry of our local neighbours to remember what had happened and fix it into my memory.

I don't know when it was exactly, not the date or anything like that. I know that it was in the late spring or early Summer because of how old we were, but I remember everything about that day. I remember that it was a nice day. The kind of day where small puffy clouds are rolling across the sky in an otherwise ocean of blue. The birds were singing and the guards were scraping the greenery off the castle walls. A task that seemed to take longer and longer every year. I know that Father eventually hired someone with an alchemical mixture to deal with that but the ivy was still a problem at the time.

It was in the afternoon because you had been taken off for your afternoon nap, which I knew that you resented and I was enjoying my freedom from those kinds of things. I was doing what I thought of as 'training' in the yard. I look back on it now, almost with amusement. It wasn't training. It wasn't even anything remotely to do with training. I had one of my practice swords out and I was taking a training dummy to task.

In my imagination, the dummy transformed itself into a Nilfgaardian warrior. There was a fair maiden behind me that needed protecting and I was doing my best to save her from the nefarious intent of the black knight that stood before me.

Heh.

I had no idea what made a lady "fair" although I thought it was something to do with not cheating at games. Which was fair enough for me… I just didn't understand why properly grown-up Knights would value such a thing to risk their lives against the enemies for that purpose.

I also didn't know what nefarious meant, what intent was or what the two words meant together but these are the things that you remember when your nanny reads you stories late at night.

So I was "training" when Edmund came up to me.

You were right in what you said when you wrote about him after he died. By the time he died he had had one or other kinds of pox that he had cured by this alchemist or that mage that could be paid for the service. He had dined on too much rich food and too much strong alcohol. He had stopped his strenuous training and as such, he had started to become fat and overweight, depending on his speed, experience and reputation to win the many duels that he was challenged to.

Even though by that point, it was for the insults offered rather than the cuckolding of men's wives and lovers but that's a different story for a different time.

By that point, his hair was receding, his eyes were bloodshot and he was obviously in a bad way. I know that he distrusted doctors that he couldn't pay to say exactly what he wanted them to say and so, he had never had anyone tell him what state he was in. But I don't think he could have lived another ten years at the rate he was going.

God, but when I think of the mess the family and our lives would be in if he had been allowed to inherit. I even know that Father made some provision to save us all from disaster but even so, Edmund could have made a real mess there. Whatever else I might think of the pus-filled bag of puke that is our mother, she did everyone a favour when she ripped his throat out with a knife.

At the time though, he was still young, fit and handsome. I remember hero-worshipping our eldest brother. He was everything that I wanted to be even though I didn't understand half of it at the time. He looked like a hero in my eyes. The way he stood, his left hand resting on his sword pommel, one leg slightly bent, the devilish smile on his face and the glint in his eye. He liked to wear black.

Heh.

The fact that I loved my brother for wearing black while, at the same time, hating the Nilfgaardians in their black armour causes me some amusement now.

But he wore black. He had his armoured wrist guards dyed black. His tunic was black and he had his armour painted black as well.

When he bothered to wear the thing.

I remember all of those stories about knightly heroes and although the hero is always in this shiny plate mail that his squires must have spent hours scouring and polishing to get it to look like that, there is always a black knight that turns up to interfere. They twist the fight in one way or another, being a blessing or a curse in equal measure with obscure motives.

I wanted to be the hero, but looking back, I wonder if Edmund wanted to be the black knight. Certainly, his persona leaned in that direction.

I didn't understand why the fact that he was able to turn the heads of the servant girls was important but it seemed to be something that people spoke of with pride.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about myself and working on myself and it occurs to me that I am trying to avoid telling you what happened.

Edmund came to me as I trained in the yard. He was dressed as though he was going for a ride. A sword on his belt, hat on his head, smile on his lips. He walked up to me and gave me his most charming smile.

"Well, little brother?" He began with. "How is the training going?"

That was the first time really that I had felt his presence fall upon me. You might not remember this, but Edmund could turn on the charm better than anyone I have ever met. If he talked to you, you were the very centre of the continent to him and it made you feel like you were walking on clouds.

I've seen it happen, before the drink, the pox and the drugs started to get hold, a room would seem empty when he was out of the room but when he walked in, the entire party was about him. As well as his blade, Edmund knew how to use that charisma of his like a weapon. If he had wanted to, that man could have led nations.

I remember being almost dazzled by him as though I was looking into the sun.

I stuttered out a response. Something foolish sounding I have no doubt. In response, he took his sword from his belt and leaned it against a wall before picking up a training sword.

"Then I challenge you to a duel, sir." He shouted in a loud and expressive voice.

We all know what you're supposed to do in this instance, you let the child win don't you? Or at the very least, you let them get at least one touch on you so that they don't feel utterly humiliated and so that they feel as though there is a foundation to work with.

Edmund thrashed me up and down the yard. I could barely get hold of him.

Froggart was furious later but that comes later in the story. Another piece of scum if you ask me, should have known better.

But Edmund knew his craft. His pride wouldn't let him even appear to have lost to his little brother, but as we finished, him breathing easily and my breathing hard, all but sobbing with frustration and anger. Edmund looked down at me and made everything better.

"Not bad." He told me. The condescending puke.

But I was seven and he was Seventeen and my hero. He said that and it was as though the sun had come out from behind a cloud for my seven-year-old self.

"I'm going out for a ride," he told me after he had put his practice sword away and strapped his sword back on his belt. "Do you want to come?"

Of course, I said yes. I was enticed by the idea of getting closer to my older brother. I had visions of a brotherly bond where we would go adventuring together, saving the innocent and standing together on some battlefield against the black tides of Southern Darkness.

Now, I wonder what he would have done if I had said no. Probably done his best to lay on the charm. But in that time and in that place, I could not say no.

So I went with him.

He selected our horses. Well… his horse and my pony. We saddled up and led us out at a gallop. Something that I was in no way skilled enough for. I was, at best, walking my pony around the practice yard and I know that Byarby, the old groom, was furious but the Eldest son was in charge.

I can't remember what Father was doing and why…

Never mind.

We got out of the castle and a little way down the paths. Edmund was laughing and I was just holding on to my horse's reins with all of my strength to keep from falling off.

"It is time that you become a man." He told me. I had no idea what that meant but it sounded marvellous. In the end, it became clear that riding my pony was impractical for his intended day's activities. So he put me on his horse and we rode off. My poor pony trailed after us before giving up and returning to the stable.

Something else I caught heat for despite being powerless in the face of Edmund's charisma.

We went to a nearby tavern that has been through several owners since then. He bought me half a pint of ale and looking back, I wonder if he spiked it with something. I was seven and was well used to wine in my water and half a cup of ale shouldn't have been so bad.

I remember not liking it and that it made me feel sick.

Afterwards, we rode for a little while. We rode slowly and carefully, far more careful than we had been going all morning until we came to a clearing. It's not there anymore as the land around it has been developed better into some orchards I think. Carefully manicured apple trees.

But he took me there and told me that he was going to tell me a secret.

I used to waste a, not particularly small amount of time, thinking about how my life would be different if he hadn't, or if I had escaped or been prevented from going.

Edmund told me about The God. He told me that The God was responsible for the family's fortunes and that The God was far less strict than the Eternal Flame. He told me that Father knew about The God but that Mark and Emma did not. Mark because he had to worship the false god of the Eternal Flame to keep the family safe and Emma because she was weak and that the God was a MAN's religion. But that he, as the older brother, had decided that it was time that I learned about The God and that I was inducted into his mysteries.

I remember being scared but also kind of excited. The idea of this other God was exciting and interesting. The encouragement to be able to do what I wanted, when I wanted and to whom I wanted was strong in my ideas. But the fear of the Eternal Flame was strong in me. I was afraid of the Endless Frost and of being cold in all eternity. Mark and his tutors had done their job well.

But on the other hand, here was my brother, the man that I idolised, wanting to tell me a secret. And it suddenly made sense. The unpleasant, harshness that Mark and his tutors were telling me about, versus this, far more pleasant God.

The prospect of not having to tell someone when I had sinned, even though those sins always seemed to be fairly minor in my eyes, the fact that the things that I got punished for were unfair and this new God offered by my brother…. It appealed to my childish urges and as I say. Edmund was my superior.

So when he asked me if I wanted to be inducted into this new religion, I said yes.

Another thing that I sometimes wonder is what would have happened if I said no.

We were in a clearing. I remember the long grass blowing around. I remember the noises of Edmund's horse and I remember the impossibly bright sunlight. There is some symbolism in there somewhere but I can't tell what it means.

Edmund went and got a blanket from his saddlebags and laid it out on the ground. He told me to undress as he took all of his clothes off before he took a flask from his saddlebags and downed a good percentage of it before telling me I was to take a couple of swallows as, and I quote, "I wasn't ready for the full secrets yet."

He needn't have bothered. I have no idea what it was, but it tasted vile and turned my stomach, even more than the beer had.

He told me to lie down and he lay down next to me.

At first, it was not unpleasant. Almost peaceful there in the woodland while lying in my brother's arms. I remember feeling safe and warm.

Then the pain came.

When he was done he told me to get up and get dressed and to wait for him a moment. I have no idea why but he turned away from me and curled into a ball so that he couldn't see or even look at me. I wonder if it was pain or shame or some other emotion. There is enough there for me to hope that it was one of those things.

But in the end, he rose and dressed before he took me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes.

I remember having to blink back tears and being ashamed of having been weeping.

"Remember. Tell no one of this." He told me.

"But what about the secret?" I wailed at him. "You were going to tell me the secret." I was… in no small amount of pain and I remember having to struggle to hold back any tears.

"That will come in time." He told me, there was scorn in his voice as he said that. He put me on the horse, in front of himself this time and we rode away. He said nothing and rebuked me when I tried to hold onto him. We got back to the castle where Byarby the stablemaster was waiting to yell at me about my pony having come back on its own. I remember looking for Edmund to make some excuses on my behalf or to defend me in some way, but he was already gone.

I went to sleep that night with horrible pain and in the morning I had to tell everyone that I was sick, claiming a stomach upset because I had no fever and my nose wasn't running. Eventually, it was put down to be something that… Edmund had taken me off and fed me something, probably alcoholic and it had made me sick.

Not entirely untrue.

But the decision was that it was something that I just had to get over and although at the time, I thought that the pain was so severe, it would never pass, it did eventually. I wanted to know where my brother was and why he wasn't helping me through all of this. But he had fled.

Looking back and knowing what I learned later about him. He was worried that I was going to tell someone and he fled so that he didn't have to face someone's wrath.

I was still in bed when I heard that he had gone. I had asked for my brother to visit my bedside. I had questions for him that I wanted to be answered. I wanted to know why, if this new God of his was so wonderful, then why did it hurt so much and why did we have to keep it so secret?

My nanny came to tell me that he had left the castle which was when I realised that my brother had deserted me.

I was young. I didn't know about words like 'betrayal' and 'rage' and 'hate' as being much more than words on the page. I definitely didn't know about words like 'hypocrisy' but I saw it that night. The night after Edmund left.

I was worse that night than I had been before. The previous night there had been blood on the blankets and in my chamber pot that I had carefully hidden and emptied myself so that it wouldn't betray Edmund. I still did the same that night. But as well as that, I wept tears from these horrible new emotions and I wondered what I was going to do about it.

Believe me, it was just as appalling to listen to as it must have been for you to read it.

So now I'm writing a biography and these are my notes regarding that biography.

I mean…

I really must laugh or I really will cry. This shit is getting ridiculous.

Talking about laughing, I've just caught myself wondering about this question from an absolutely serious academic perspective and using these last few lines as an introduction to the work.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages, people of every race and every religion. I give you my brother Samuel Coulthard. Lord Kalayn as is. The most utterly evil son of a bitch in the history of the continent"

Not evil in general of course. I mean, I suppose that if evil is in the eye of the beholder, then there must be someone somewhere that finds his actions understandable, patriotic or one of the other things that he is claiming.

I suppose that someone might find the actions sane. Although I doubt it.

There are still critics behind me and Johann is still sitting across from me, speaking my words aloud. Despite being so utterly ridiculous, the situation has now become routine for all of us. Therefore, it is beginning to become boring. Strange how that can come to pass.

Kerrass is, I'm told, still in the ditch into which he was tossed but I remember one of the conversations that he and I had early on in our friendship.

It never gets easier to talk about those that we have lost but I have found that with enough practice, you can get better at talking about people so that you don't end up weeping for them.

I remember that he told me that although there have been songs written about the exploits of a Witcher. Although people think it's romantic to be travelling on the road, rescuing people and slaying monsters, the truth is rather mundane. That he saw the romance in having a little house somewhere with a good woman to care for him and to be cared for by him. Maybe a small patch of land where he could grow specialised herbs that he could sell to apothecaries. That was strange to him, that would have a romantic edge.

Of course, he told me that before I had met the Princess that he was in love with. Before I even knew of her existence even. But the point is a valid one and remains the same.

Sooner or later, even the most bizarre of circumstances can become mundane.

And that is where we are now. I am sitting in my workroom and I am writing down what I am instructed to write down. The critics have relaxed a bit now, they lean on the walls and gossip with each other and while one still holds the whip and the other holds the bar, they have barely looked over at Johann and me. The scribes that are here are still nervous, but at the same time, there is a kind of… Anticipatory air to that nervousness. They are handling it much better.

Johann is doing better. He is still thin and pasty and the sweat still runs down his face freely, but there is less of a feverish glint in his eyes. He now wears a shirt and we are both regularly told to stop work so that his injuries can be taken care of and his bindings re-wrapped.

I am no longer quite as concerned that he's just going to expire in front of me.

I, however, am not doing as well. While I waited for my account of the night of the Autumnal Equinox and the conversations that happened afterwards were being "reviewed" by the powers that are in charge of this insanity, the infection in my hand got worse and I started to suffer from the fever.

As far as I can tell, it took me several days to recover but given that I haven't seen sunlight since I was in Sam's…

I notice how the changes creep in. It took me months, even a year, to come to terms with the fact that it was no longer Father's office and that it was now Emma's office. But after one conversation with the thing that reminds me of my brother, it has become Sam's office.

And he is not my brother any longer. I cast him aside and I hope that one day soon I will be able to piss on his corpse after everything that he's done and everything that he's still intending to do. I can disown him for that.

I can well imagine that he will read these words and chuckle. He has this new chuckle that I can't stand. It's this wry kind of condescending chuckle that he gives off when he sees someone as foolish or childish. It's similar to the chuckle that Father used to use when one of his children was being idiotic and childish and I can't stand it.

But I was talking about what was wrong with me.

I haven't seen sunlight since I was last in Sam's office but I get the feeling from whatever internal hourglass that we all carry, that I was sick for several days. I have been force-fed potions and other alchemical things and although the infection is still there, it seems to be burning itself out and is no longer quite as threatening.

But now, as well as all of the other routines that I have to live by, I must regularly take a potion that tastes… surprisingly good actually. Whichever alchemist that is brewing it, they are better than the masters that you can find in Novigrad. I have seen those red lines running underneath the skin of people before and it never, ever, ever bodes entirely well.

But I am better. My hand has started itching now rather than throbbing. I get tired easily and all of that but I feel as though, physically at least, I might be on the mend.

Of course, this might be the calm before the storm. I'm still a prisoner and although Sam has spoken many times about how he longs to get to the point where he can trust me and let me out of the constraints, I just don't see it happening. I can't be trusted. If I get the chance, I am going to kill him, do my best to free Ariadne from her bounds and then do my best to get some vengeance before I get taken down.

I have no idea how I am going to achieve this, but the intent is there nonetheless.

And now, it would seem, the word has been passed down that the people in charge of all of this, have agreed with my statements about how all of this lunacy began, from my perspective at least, and now we move onto the next stage of my usefulness.

I was picked up from my cell and given the same pantomime of them trying to disguise where it was that I have been kept. I mean, it was my childhood castle, Emma, Sam himself, Francesca and I would all regularly play hide and seek around the place to stay out of trouble and I'm pretty sure I know where I am now.

The critics remain unconcerned by this.

I was taken through the castle and shown into the office where, once again, I was coming in at the end of a meeting. Serious-looking men were just finishing an in-depth discussion but as I walked in, Sam gave a signal and they all stopped talking.

I am getting used to the size of these men now as well. They are all, to a man, tall, well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and heavily muscled. They move quickly with it as well. Very quickly when they put their minds to it. I would dearly like to know which Armorsmith they managed to arrange to make the ridiculous amount of armour that they all have. Because men of that proportion cannot exactly wear armour "off-the-rack" as it were. So somewhere a smith is working flat out to make all of this work.

But they straightened when I walked in and started to file out.

I tried to see if I recognised any of them, but the sheer size of them as well as the strange, misshapen bulk of their heads made recognition all but impossible. Huge heads with sloping brows, massive cheekbones, sunken eyes and huge, grotesque jawlines.

They nodded to Sam, and one or two of them even saluted. All of them were wearing that Redanian uniform of dark crimson and there was a sense of pride about it. They didn't look at me as they walked past though.

Fuck 'em.

There is also a new sense in the air from this other part of the castle. It feels like I am at the edge of a storm. My teeth are itchy, the hairs on the back of my arms are standing up and… I find that I am having an increasing urge to swallow. The sense of pressure in my ears is growing.

When they had all gone out, I was left with just Sam and Emma in the room. I have no idea where Laurelen is and I am also beginning to fall into the trap of not noticing the guards and things that are around the place. There were two on the doors behind me and then another two further in the room.

The guards that had brought me into the room removed my manacles, the ones from my ankles first and then my wrists and Sam watched as they did so.

Emma didn't look up. She was still sitting at the desk in the back of the room, writing furiously, ignoring everything else that was going on.

Sam spent a bit of time watching me.

We were being childish. That game that people play where they are both waiting for the other to start speaking. Then someone gets stubborn and there is an extended pause while you wait for the thing to happen. Sam was finding it amusing.

I did not.

"So what happens now?" I asked. "I have done as you asked and given that no one has come and has asked me to rewrite what I have worked on, I guess that you are all satisfied with what I have managed to get down onto paper."

Sam gave his little chuckle.

I just glared at him. I wasn't feeling very witty, still feeling a little bit weak from my small period of sickness.

"First I should check." He asked, pouring himself a drink of wine and mixing it with a lot of water. "Are you well? Have you recovered yet?"

"My hand itches," I told him. "It's two fingers light. Not the kind of thing that you can recover from. Other than that, if you want to know if I'm well, then I should tell you that there is nothing wrong with me that you falling off a high cliff or onto my dagger wouldn't fix."

I think that the guards were a bit outraged but Sam laughed and as such, they couldn't do anything about it.

"You feel better." He decided and moved to sit behind his desk.

There was another small writing chair sitting there. The kind with a large flat arm that can be folded down in front of it for someone to work on. Students use them a lot. It's also an efficient way to keep someone prisoner.

"What are we doing here Sam?" I asked.

"In general?" He wondered. I hadn't meant that, I wanted the specific but he answered that bit anyway. "In general, we are beginning a rebellion to throw the black ones out of the North and to do so for good. In the long run, of course, we will need to take our military ambitions across the Yaruga and into the Empire, but for now, I will settle for a free Redania."

He leant back in his chair and smiled contentedly. It occurred to me that he might be high on some substance or another. No alcohol but there was a glint in his eye that wasn't entirely…

I don't know. I don't recognise my brother anymore so for all I know, that relaxed humour is perfectly natural.

"I mean, Queen Adda wants us to free Temeria as well so that she can rule over her half-sister, but in the confines of these four walls, that is much lower on my list of priorities. I think she wants to marry her son by Radovid to the Queen… whatshername…. Anais? Of Temeria."

"That would make them Aunt and Nephew," I commented. "Not the wisest choice, breeding so close. Radovid himself was a warning that such intermarrying was not entirely healthy. So did Foltest for that matter."

Sam was laughing. "I know. Delicious isn't it, but she's the Queen and we do what she tells us."

He laughed at his own joke.

"God but it's good to talk to you." He told me. "All lies and pretences and masks put aside. I've had to pretend to be someone else for so long. So very long that… well… That's getting ahead of myself. And I see that you were asking me what we are doing here. Wondering why I brought you back to my office so that you can wonder what my purpose is in keeping you alive?"

"Pretty much." I agreed. The sad thing is that I kind of knew how he felt. He felt more genuine in some way, more true. There was a tightness about him that was missing. I hadn't known it was there until that tightness was gone.

"We…" He got up from his chair and moved over to the jugs of wine and water. "You and I are going to kill two birds with one stone."

"That rarely works," I told him. "And I've tried to kill two birds with one stone."

He stared at me for a long moment, brotherly scepticism radiating from his eyes.

"In the North," I told him. "When Kerrass and I were starving and running away from the cult."

"Ah," he nodded. "Do you want a drink by the way?"

"Why the hell not," I told him. "The worst you could do is poison it and hurry my demise."

He laughed, and I found that I was laughing with him.

"Oh, and by the way," I went on, trying to reach some form of anger that I could hold onto. "Were you in on that, because if you were in on all of that… You and some of the others keep swearing in the name of 'The God' and the only people who talk like that are from the South,"

"Which I hate," he put the cup on the writing chair, making me sit down in it.

"Which you hate. You wouldn't start this lunacy if you didn't."

"Is it lunacy?" He asked with all the air of a scholar who knows something I don't.

"Definitely," I told him with as much confidence as I could summon. "But swearing and cursing in the name of some God rather than a name… it's a phrase used by Southerners, or it's a phrase used by the cult of the First-Born. Were you involved in making me sick and breaking Kerrass' arms and chasing us through the undergrowth?"

He took his time before answering, walking around the desk and sitting back down. He sat in his chair and I followed the gesture to sit in mine. He looked at me and held my gaze.

He wanted me to believe this, which meant that he was lying, or it was absolutely the truth and he knew that I would struggle to trust him.

"No Freddie." He told me. "That wasn't me. No one was happier than I was when you and Kerrass turned up alive in the North."

I found that I believed him. I picked up the cup that he had poured for me and tasted it. I nearly coughed. Not because the wine was bad, but because it was good. Sam had watered it down to almost pointlessness.

He was watching me, amusement dancing in his eyes.

"This is Father's special stock," I told him.

"I know," he giggled.

"He would be furious."

"I know," he said again. "And part of the pleasure of doing that is that I know just how angry he would be."

He giggled, a lot like a child and again, his laughter was infectious, even while I was appalled that that was something he was doing.

He subsided.

"We will talk about the cult of the First-Born and what happened up there." He told me. "But we need to address things in turn. You say that context is king and we will get there, but other things need to be talked about first. I told you that we are here to kill two birds with one stone."

"Yes?"

"The first bird is that I promised you that I would answer all of your questions. And I intend to do as I promised."

"Ok?"

"And the second thing is that I need you to write my biography."

"Right… uh… what?"

He smiled.

I was surprised by how happy he seemed to be.

"My biography." He told me. "I am well aware that…"

I held my hand up to stop him in mid-flow. I did my best to copy the gesture of Father's that he had so enjoyed employing on me the other day and he gradually just petered out and glared at me.

"What?" He demanded.

"I can't do that Sam," I told him.

"What? Why not?" He was annoyed.

"Because…"

"It needs to be done." He told me, annoyance in his voice. "I am well aware that the things I have done will be examined and re-examined in the future."

"'By historians and the readers of historians' you said yesterday. Yes, I understand that bit."

"And although I make no effort to try and excuse these actions as to my mind, they are justified. I am well aware that these actions will be considered evil by those people that come after that."

"I tend to agree, but…"

"And people deserve an explanation. You, not least."

I had no answer to that. He was hurt by my refusal and I was astonished at this hurt that he was feeling.

"You have offered…" He started strongly before taking a moment. He placed his palms flat on the desk before taking a deep breath. Again, he reached into one of the drawers on the desk and pulled out a small green bottle before pouring the contents into the wine cup. I carefully did not ask him what was in the bottle.

He took several large gulps from the cup before wincing.

"Another thing that Father would disapprove of." He told me. "Mixing medicine with wine."

"Are you sick?" I wondered.

I don't know what I had expected but the attack of hilarity, full-on, tears rolling down his face, hilarity was astonishing.

"Oh yes." He told me, wiping the tears from his face. "Very sick."

He giggled for a while, occasionally staring into space before a thought occurred to him and then he would start laughing again.

When he eventually calmed, his hand jerked towards me and he leaned forward in his seat.

"That is why you are so essential to my plans Freddie."

"What?"

A shadow passed over his face and he was suddenly solemn. Afraid even.

"I have made sacrifices Freddie. I have done terrible things and although I went into them with open eyes, fully willing to pay the price… That price will eventually come due. When that happens, I need to make sure that everything I have built, everything that we have built, including you hopefully… I need to make sure that it doesn't all just fall into dust and ruin around us."

He spoke with passion and certainty, and more charisma than I have ever seen him use.

"And…" I heard myself say. "That is where I come in?"

He grinned, boyish and young again.

"Yes, that is where you come in."

"But Sam, I don't agree with what you're doing here. It's madness."

He gave a little shrug.

"Let's pretend." He said, leaning forwards and leaning on the desk. "Let's pretend that all is as it appears to be for the moment. Leaving aside, just for a moment, why you don't agree with what I'm doing. Why is it madness?"

I threw my hands up in the air in exasperation.

"Humour me, Freddie. Why is it madness?"

I took a deep breath and tried to marshall my thoughts. Whatever else he might be, he was my brother and I owed it to him to try and bring him out of the madness that he was embroiled in.

"Because… Ok. Let's start with the Empire itself. On a sheer numbers scale, the Empire has multiple armies the size of that which invaded the North. Two of them are experienced and trained to put down rebellions like the one that you are starting here."

He was nodding. I took that as a hopeful sign and strode on.

"Secondly, the Empress is popular and secure on her throne. If she orders it, there won't just be armies coming North, NATIONS will be signing up to her crusade."

Sam hid a smile at that.

"And when it comes to the North. I can accept that Adda might be ambitious. She's well known for it although I would go so far as to suggest that she will be playing both sides in this conflict and that you and your allies should beware of her stabbing you in the back."

"That thought had occurred to us." Sam agreed. "Adda, so close to the snake, Adder."

It was an old joke and I couldn't help but grin at it.

"But Temeria?" I argued. "Queen Anais has been on her throne for a couple of years now. I don't know off hand how old she is but I do know that she is popular, that she is intelligent, and most of all, she has two heroes of the last war on her side. Lord Roche and Lord Natalis. And they were the ones that arranged the peace signing in the first place."

Sam nodded in agreement with all of my points, but he was still smiling infuriatingly.

"Aedirn is in shambles." I went on, "And they will never field anyone to support you. Kaedwen is pretty much the same although their client kings were put there by the Empire as well, so owing the Empire everything that they are. The Hengfors league, Kovir and Poviss have lucrative trade with the Empire so they will only support you so long as the war is profitable to them.

"And as for Skellige?" I shook my head.

"Lyria and Rivia are still under Queen Meve and she would not support anything like this. She would object to being your shield as she knows that any army getting to you would have to come, at least in part, through her.

"So geographically speaking. The only people that you could count on are Cidaris and Vergen who are both already embattled by land and sea and wouldn't be able to help you even if they wanted to."

"All valid points Freddie, go on."

"You are trying to harness the anti-human and anti-magic user sentiment again. Mark and those like him have done their jobs too well and you won't be able to get as much use out of that as you might have done three or four years ago. The church might support you, but so many of them are tied up with the Empire as well and will be afraid that when the Empire comes North again, which they will, this time, it will mean the death of any religion that isn't them."

I reached for something else.

"And Magic. The Lodge of Sorceresses and the Chapter of Mages owe their existence to the Empire relaxing their laws."

"All of this is true Freddie and well done. I was not led to understand that you had quite as strategic a mind as you are demonstrating."

"Fuck you. It's essentially the same speech that I gave to Ariadne when she emerged from the tower. Look it up."

He laughed at me. He is doing that a lot and I don't like it.

"All of the things that you have said are true." He told me. "All of them. I won't deny it. But they are all things that I have taken into account. The plan hasn't gone perfectly so far, but at the same time, it could have gone a lot worse and we have still succeeded at the most vital parts. There is a plan and the first thing that we have to do is to puncture the aura of invulnerability around the Empire and the Empress. Once we have proven that she can be defeated, people will remember that they hate the Southern invader, don't you worry."

"What's the plan?" I asked instantly.

He smiled. "All in good time."

"You promised." I did not enjoy how petulant I sounded.

"Yes I did, and I meant it, but what I am doing means nothing without the lead-up to it. As you say, context is key."

I sighed. He had me there.

"Then what are your plans for me?" I wondered. "The problem that I disagree with what you are doing is a valid one. I won't help you."

He smiled. "I think I can convince you."

"More torture?" I growled, trying to sound more confident than I was.

"No. My plan there is not perfect, but I do think it's necessary. Apart from anything else, I just want you on my side. I need you by my side. You're the only one out of this awful family that we have, that I even remotely feel connected to. You are the only one that is worth anything and I refuse to just give up on the brother that I love because he's having a fit of temper."

"You killed my friend Sam," I told him. "You have enslaved the woman that I love, tortured our sister and her lover. I don't know how many people died on the night of the Equinox, but there is no way that you have done all of this bloodlessly. There were friends in that room Sam. And how many more people will die before it's all over? How many people are still alive Sam? Mark? Mother? Rickard? Aunt…?"

"They are all still alive Freddie," He told me, his voice less friendly and sterner... "First of all, I appreciate that there were some things in there that have angered you. Kerrass was your friend but, as you rightly guessed in your work, he was the largest threat on the ground for what we have to do next. So he had to die. Ariadne is a monster, Freddie. Her race was created to fight wars and to act as slaves. And even if that wasn't the case, there is no way that I would allow my brother to marry a non-human. I might let you have your way with her and use her occasionally when I don't require her, but we can't legitimise that kind of thing. Apart from anything else we need heirs Freddie…"

"I assume that you can…"

"No. No, I cannot."

His eyes clouded over for a moment.

"Sam," I began. "What did you do? What has happened? What have you done to yourself?"

He was startled "Many things Freddie." He shook his head again.

"We need heirs Freddie, and now you are the only man that can do that. And as for the rest?" His lips peeled back from his mouth. "Mark? Emma? Mother? Those people are worthless Freddie, worse than that even. I am glad that they are alive because I have a use for them, but I would not be sad if they had died that night. I would be happy. The only one in that lot that I have any time for is Rickard. He is a good soldier, among the best but he won't agree with what I need to do, so he must go. Not yet though."

"I don't agree with what you're doing either." I was appalled at the hate that was in his voice as he talked about the others in the family. "Does that mean that I have to go too?"

He smiled.

"No Freddie, you stay. I love you."

"So why do you hate all of the others?"

He opened his mouth to answer before he raised his hand in the negative.

"Ah ah. You haven't promised to write my Biography yet."

"I can't write the biography."

"I thought you realised what happens when you refuse to do something that I want."

"It's not that I won't, I can't. I can't write your Biography. I'm too close to it. And I hate you. Hardly an unbiased view."

He looked disappointed.

"You have offered to write about the lives of people far worse than me. You sit or stand before them and offer yourself as an advocate, as a way of recording the things that they are saying and to provide context for the actions that they are taking and have taken. You did so for Kerrass."

"He was my friend."

"Not when you wrote about his past you weren't. And I am your brother. You offered Ariadne?"

"I was trying to get her onto my side and to convince her not to eat me."

He stopped with that one and granted it with a nod.

"I suppose that also counts for when you did the same for Maleficent as well. But tell me, Freddie, are you doing any the less with me? Convincing me not to eat you?"

"Also Sam…" I said quietly, "I didn't hate them."

Those words fell into the silence with a clang.

After a while, Sam started to nod.

"I deserve that." He told me. "And I hope that I can rectify it and help you understand. One of the ways that I intend to do that is by telling you my story. I need a biography. I need people to know what has happened so that they can judge me, and condemn me if necessary. I want you to write it."

"Why should I?" Again with the petulance.

"Because I ask you to. If there is anything there that you feel left for me as your brother. Then do it because I ask you to."

He meant it. There were other ways, other things that he could use to get me on your side and we both knew it. The threat continued to hang in the air but that was not what he was playing with.

I did not remember him being this good a manipulator.

Of course, if he could keep up a pretence for so long without anyone knowing, then maybe he was better than I thought he was.

I found myself nodding.

"Good." He said. "Then as an additional carrot, I will have a gift for you when we are done. I have a surprise for you."

"What gift?" I wondered. "What could you possibly give me that…"

"Later Freddie."

"When shall we begin?" I asked.

"Why not now? I will send for food. If I am needed suddenly, then you might have to go. Do not fight them, Freddie, it would go badly for you."

I nodded.

"I will need some things."

He dumped a pile of blank paper on the table along with a sheaf of quills and a bottle of ink.

"But if you need your quill sharpening, then I have to do it. I saw you train with that dagger of yours and I'm not giving you a knife Freddie."

"Fair enough. I also have some questions first."

"Such as?"

"Is Emma alright?"

I looked over at her. It would seem that she was still focused on what she was writing. She didn't look up, she barely moved except to scribble on an endless stack of paper.

"I'm afraid that I might have broken her," Sam admitted. "Her bitch tells me that she will be fine though. It doesn't matter though, she is still doing the work that I need her to do."

I swallowed a retort to that.

"And Ariadne?"

"She's busy for me at the moment," Sam told me with a sigh. "Look Freddie, I know that you love the slave and I understand that. I do, even while I am disgusted and appalled by it. She certainly appeared as a comely wench when she wanted to." He took a deep breath. "But you should work towards forgetting her."

"Why?"

"Because even you know that in our social strata, we marry for name, lineage and wealth rather than love and that is what I need you to do."

"I would be a Count," I told him.

"And I would make you a King." He retorted.

I had nothing to say to that. I looked at him for a long time, but it seemed that he was not joking. It seemed as though he meant every word. My mind struggled with that and eventually, I just… moved past it, setting it aside to think about later.

"Do you know what's involved in the writing of a Biography though Sam?"

"I have some ideas, yes."

"So there will be a series of interviews between you and me where I will need to take copious amounts of notes. When I have done that, those notes will need to be written up so that I can reread them, check them and compare them with the other interviews that I will need to carry out."

"I appreciate that."

"Speaking of other interviews, there are many people that I will need to speak to."

"Do you know who?"

"Not off the top of my head, I would imagine that some of that is going to come out of our interviews." I pointed between the two of us. "But Mother, Mark and Emma would need to be involved I think. As well as some of the servants that were around you at the earlier parts of your life."

He made a face of distaste. The standard one that looks as though you have bitten into a lemon, or licked salt when someone told you it was crystallised honey.

"I will have to consider the timetable of that." He said carefully, considering. I tried to guess whether or not he was stalling before deciding that he wasn't. "We would need to get to work, as there are things that I need both Mother and Mark for." He told me. "Just as I have plans for you and Emma, so too have I got plans for them."

I found that reassuring.

"Well, I can always talk to them afterwards," I told him. I was trying to get him to calm down. He was nervous, as the subjects of these kinds of things often are when you are starting to ask them a series of questions.

"But as we talk," he went on, "make your lists and we will see what can be done."

I nodded. "Also, I will work at my own pace and with my own format. Things cannot be produced quickly just because you say them. Writing is not something that you can just sit down and do, you need to read the research, do the research, and think about how to write, what to write and how to phrase it. You need to get the words in the right order for them to be effective. Format and the like are just as important. So if I am lying in my cell, staring at the ceiling, that's just as important to the process as sitting at the desk writing."

Sam nodded in his understanding.

"I can appreciate that Freddie, but at the same time, I cannot have you shirking or pretending to be "working" when you are not."

"There will be a minimum output that needs to happen every day. And it will be some time before I start the proper writing of the book. There will be many interviews as well. You will still see lots of note-taking, lots of interviews and lots of physical, me at a desk, writing."

He nodded.

"Also, I need Johann," I told him. "I know that it's… This is outside of your expertise, but my clerk is just as important to the work as I am, or as you are. If you want this done quickly then I need Johann to be working at his optimum rate. Which means that he needs to be fit and healthy."

"I understand."

"Do you? Because your guards have been flogging him to keep me in line. He needs proper medical care to be able to do the things that I need him to do."

"I will see to it."

He turned to one of the guards and nodded to them. The guard left the room for a moment, giving me a moment of brief hope that with the loss of that one guard, I might be able to do something. But it was a fool's hope and we all knew it.

Besides, he came back in less than a minute and took up his former space.

"I also need to warn you." He told me. "Emma is busy and is likely to be busy for some time. She is not an appropriate source for you to work with."

"She has a vital point of view regarding your early life."

"It doesn't matter," Sam said. There was a look on his face when he said that, leaving me thinking that this wasn't an argument that I was going to win.

"Also, I am not stupid. I need the truth and I know it when I see it. You can exaggerate if you like but I will be checking with alternative people." He smiled at that. "And if I think you are lying to me Sam, I will just stop."

His smile grew.

"You will speak," I went on. "I will listen. I may ask questions and I might comment to get you back on track if you leave the narrative for a long period."

"Where do we begin?"

I couldn't help but smile. "At the beginning," I told him. "Where else?"

He laughed at my joke.

"More seriously though," I told him. There is little doubt in anyone's mind that the reason that we're all here or why this biography is being written is because of this rebellion that you have started. And that is certainly where my curiosity starts. What led you to this madness Sam? How did it start?"

He smiled a little as he thought about the answer to that question. He turned to stare out the window. I looked to see where he was looking and all I could see were some distant clouds. Some normal castle noises were coming from the window. There was the sound of horses and men moving about.

I decided he wasn't looking at anything and instead, got my ink and papers in order.

"I was Seven." He said eventually. "I think it was Seven although I can't remember for sure. It was in the magical time when I was two years older than you, rather than one year. I know that you normally write that I am only a year older but the truth is that I am a year and a bit older. What was it, two months?"

"Yes." I told him. "You were born in the Spring whereas I was born in the Summer."

He nodded.

I know that it was in the gap because at that point and at that time, I would feel so much older than you that it gave me a sense of responsibility over you."

He laughed at a thought.

"You know, I've always envied you a bit."

I didn't respond to that.

"You have always said that you envied me. My looks, my muscles and my physical gifts but there was a payoff. I always envied your freedom."

"My freedom?"

"Yeah. There was never any doubt as to who I was going to be. There was never any doubt that I was going to be a soldier, a Knight, a warrior. From my earliest days, I was told that that was what I was going to be. Edmund was going to inherit the lands, the title and the money. Mark was going to the church so that we could all get into heaven, but I was going to be a soldier so that Father and Mother could say that the family was doing its duty.

"I would like to say that I hated it, that I always resented that choice. But that would be a lie and you have warned me not to lie.

"I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the stories that they told me, talking about standing up for right and wrong. Learning about famous warrior knights and the made-up stories about their exploits."

He laughed suddenly.

"There are many regrets," he went on. "But one of the big ones is that I never got to meet Father Gardan, the crazy old priest on my lands that you encountered. He was one of my heroes as a kid. I mean, he was the hero of everyone my age who had an interest in what I had an interest in.

"Poor old man.

"But I liked it. I liked being strong and fast and handsome. I liked it when people came by and told me that I was going to be a lady killer and things like "what a handsome boy?" and all that shit. I enjoyed the fact that there was never any doubt as to what I was going to do and who I was going to be when I got older.

"It was only later that I thought that I might have been happier, that all of this might have been avoided if I had gone into the priesthood. Or if you and I had swapped places or something."

"Speaking as your brother, I think you would have been bored."

"Ha, you are probably right. But I had that surety growing up and that was a power that I… I cannot even pretend to think that I might have been better elsewhere."

He stopped and went silent for a long time. Long enough that I had to dip my quill into the ink a couple of times to keep it fresh.

Suddenly, he got up and strode to the jug of wine that was on a nearby table and, using a separate cup, he drank several swallows of the wine without any water mixed in.

"Sorry," he said after a moment. "I am not ashamed of what happened. I didn't do it, it was done to me. But at the same time, I haven't spoken about this in years. Not to anyone. I tried, immediately after it happened but no one believed me."

"What happened Sam?"

"I was Seven years old when Edmund inducted me into the family religion."

I knew what he was talking about instantly.

"Fuck." I swore but I don't think he heard me as I stared at him in horror.

He nodded along to whatever thoughts were going through his head, his eyes darting around in the sockets of his eyes, looking at nothing. He might have claimed that he wasn't ashamed and for all I knew, he might believe that about himself. But still

"The strangest thing about it." he almost smiled. "Is that before I realised what had happened, I kind of liked it. I had never been closer to my older brother than at that moment. I felt as though he was inducting me into some kind of secret club that would just be between the two of us. We were still young enough to not realise that he was a bully and a tyrant, we were still young enough to look up to Edmund.

"Speaking personally, I was a soldier and learning to be a swordsman and I had seen him train. Back then when he was at his peak, he was so fast with a blade and I wanted that speed. I remember training at it for hours to try and get that speed, even a fraction of it.

"I didn't like the pain, of course not. But that sense of intimacy, the thing that he and I had shared at that moment… I liked it. Does that sound awful?"

It took me a moment to realise that the question was not a rhetorical one.

"Yes," I told him. "It sounds awful."

He nodded his acceptance of that.

"I was Seven." He said. "You were five and the difference in our ages seemed huge. Francesca will have been… God, not even two yet. So that would put Emma at…"

He tried to think about it.

"She would have been twelve," I told him.

He chuckled at the memory.

"Yeah, twelve which means that she was just getting to the point where Mother was making her wear dresses and learn about makeup and hair and all of the other nonsense that women do. I know that Mark was away at one or other Monastary to earn his priesthood and "study" at the feet of… whoever the fuck."

"So Edmund will have been Seventeen." I had been doing the maths in my head. "Flame preserve us. Oh, Sam, I'm so sorry."

"Don't be." He told me. "You didn't do it."

Then he told me his story about how and what happened. He told his story in a kind of dull monotone, staring off into space. He looked like a statue as he spoke and I was reminded of those stories that you hear about the golems in Wizard laboratories that act as recording devices or who dispense warnings about going any further.

When he was finished, he sat there, staring into space for a long moment before he took a deep breath and with that breath, it was as though he sucked the life back into himself. He looked up and smiled at me, a little sheepishly.

"I've never told anyone that story before."

"I can see why," I told him.

"I am not ashamed of it." He told me again and the words struck me as though they had long echoed around his head. Repeated to himself on longcold nights. "It was something that was done to me and as such, it is not something that I am ashamed of."

I took the cup of watered wine he had poured for me and drank it all, down to the last drop.

"I am sorry that happened Sam," I told him after I had finished gasping for breath.

"Don't be," he told me. "You didn't do it." Another repeated phrase.

He nearly sank back into his thoughtful stare again before he shook himself and gestured to me.

"You will have questions?"

"Errrr. I must do," I told him and he laughed at me."

"Shocked Freddie?"

"What's a man supposed to do? How am I supposed to react after you tell me something like that?"

He took that and made a thoughtful face.

After a moment, my first question seemed obvious.

"Why didn't you tell anyone? Was it really just because Edmund told you not to?"

"At first, yes." Sam got up and poured us both some more drinks. He also summoned a servant and told them to fetch us some pastries. The servant was a soldier who was wearing a full plate and chain mail.

"At first," Sam continued. "Yes, it was. My brother had sworn me to secrecy and so I didn't break that code. He was away from the castle for a couple of months or so and then he came back briefly. I have insight now that I didn't have at the time and he came back like a regularly kicked dog who slunk back in knowing that he was in trouble but not knowing when the blow would fall again.

"Then he must have realised that I hadn't told anyone and he started to become more confident. Then we went out again. I was more careful this time about doing things with my donkey and made Edmund tie it to his horse before we rode off, forcing him to slow down. At first, he was dismissive but I pointed out that if I consistently let the donkey go then sooner or later, someone would realise that things were not entirely ok on our rides together.

"That got through to him and he did as I told him. Which, looking back, is what established our later dynamic. Edmund wasn't stupid. But he was lazy enough that he always wanted the easy path, the lazy path and the path of least resistance. He would do things to avoid the argument and his opinion was always the same as the opinion of the last person he spoke to.

"The same thing happened although this time, he was less ashamed I think. This time he hung around at the castle to see what I did. I don't know if I was used to the pain, but this time I recovered overnight."

"You said 'At first. Did you tell someone later?"

Sam smirked. "Yes and no. I tried to tell someone. I tried to tell many people.

"Something happened, which made me realise that what was happening to me was wrong and I have no idea what it was.

"Edmund would leave and come back and by now it was a semi-regular thing that he would take me out riding periodically. He liked to think of himself as a martial man and when he was asked as to why he went out with me rather than with you, he would tell those that listened that it was because I was going to be a knight and a soldier where you were of no interest. I think that was true. He viewed me as being a future power and something that he could use to tie me to him. He dismissed you as unimportant.

"Or someone told him that, I suppose we will never know but I do know that Cousin Kalayn was a regular fixture in Edmund's life by this point and that's what I suspect was going on.

"A connection was made in my head. Some piece of information was given to me… I don't know how. Some story that I had been told, some of our etiquette training, martial training or even religious training got into my brain. Some seed implanted itself and just needed the water to grow and spring into life. I have no idea what that seed was or where it comes from but I do know what the water was."

He smiled unhappily at me.

"Edmund brought Cousin Kalayn to our clearing."

"Fuck," I whispered again. My vocabulary seemed to be rather limited.

"Pretty much." Sam agreed.

Then we both saw the truly hideous pun and winced before we giggled at each other.

Sam subsided after me and I guess that I am not the only person that must laugh or they will weep.

"I knew that something was different because Edmund was serious when he came to get me. I was nine when this happened and it was in the late Summer so you will have been eight. And he came to get me in the morning. So things had been going on for a little over two years. I have no idea how often Edmund took me off for a ride. It was a surprisingly small number and I have reason to believe that I have forgotten some of them. The mind can play horrific tricks on you in that regard.

"I know that things had almost gotten routine by that point. But this time was different. I was not taken to a tavern instead. I was taken straight to the clearing. Cousin Kalayn, another bastard that I am glad we killed, by the way, was waiting for us and he was wearing these horrible robes that I remember you writing about. He had another set of robes for Edmund.

'This time was different. Whereas my times spent with Edmund were softer, almost… I want to say loving but that's far too gentle a word to describe something that horrific. With Edmund, it was about the act. With Cousin Kalayn, it was about humiliation. They shared me and they made me do things to both of them that I won't repeat now. But it was worse than I can say and far worse than you can imagine. They were drunk, they used some narcotic herb that I still don't know the name of and by the time Cousin Kalayn left, I was a weeping mess that he left on the floor.

"Edmund took me to a stream and cleaned me up. He tried to hug me as I remember and I kicked him in the balls. This means I activated his rage and that was the first time that he hit me, I mean really hit me. I saw a white light and then I was looking up at him. I remember seeing horror and shame and worry on his face. Doubtlessly worrying that he had marked me now and there would be questions. Why he said what he said next, I don't know but my guess is that it was a tactic that had worked on him in the past.

"'Tell people that you fell off your donkey,' he told me to say. Personally speaking, it would have been more believable if the lie was that we had been training together and I had messed up a parry and as a result, I got hit. But I suppose that this would still get him some portion of the blame. 'You are my little brother and as part of the society and the religion, you will do what I say or suffer the consequences. Tell anyone and you will not be believed. Mother and Father need me as their heir. Mark will punish you just as much as he will punish me because he will think that what we are doing is heresy and Emma is just a weak, frigid bitch. No one will believe you over me and I will see to it that you are destroyed. Do you understand?'"

"He must have seen some of the rage and the hate on my face because he stepped back with a look of shock on his face. It was not the last time that Edmund would be afraid of me. But then he stepped forward again with a snarl on his face and kicked me in the gut so that it wouldn't leave a mark.

"'ANSWER ME,' he roared and I nodded, not trusting my voice to speak.

"He dropped me off at the castle and sure enough, I was given a good yelling at by everyone about falling off my horse. Edmund stood next to me and got into a fight with Father about why he was allowing me to fall. The logic was that everyone thought that Edmund must have been riding too fast and in my effort to catch up, I had made a mistake and fallen. Edmund stormed off in a huff, leaving me to face the music before he left the castle for another week.

"I spent the rest of the day being bathed. Someone, although I can't remember who examined my injuries, which is another reason that I feel so angry about it all. It can't have been hard to figure out what happened to me but for whatever reason, they just decided not to comment. I wish I did remember who that was. That nurse, or whoever it was, deserves…

"Well…

"I have the most distinct memory of that night. The night after Cousin Kalayn joined Edmund in my "induction".

Something had changed in my head. I was in pain, certainly, but it was more pain of the mind than of the body. I read your diaries about the moment that you can remember changing, where you were in your room after a big fight with Father about how he wanted you to become something that you were not. About how you read a book, an old book that you had read several times and that was the moment that you decided that you were going to be a scholar?"

"That's right." I replied. "I couldn't have put words to it at the time and I still don't know if that's true or not. But that's what I've increasingly come to think. It was that moment that shaped me."

"Well, it was that moment, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, having wept to the point that my tear ducts were dry and no more tears would come. I remember lying there… In my memory, the pain that I felt had receded to a kind of dull ache and I had been weeping as quietly as I could so that I wouldn't attract any attention that I would then have to answer for. It was at that moment that the anger and the pain and the resentment and the frustration kind of solidified in me to a point and formed something deep within my soul. I remember feeding that point with the memories of the humiliations that Cousin Kalayn and Edmund between them made me endure, crawling through the mud and the filth that they had laid on the floor to pleasure their drunken, drug-addled bodies and minds. I remembered the laughter and the jeering and the insults and it all seemed to be sucked into that point.

"In the end, it seemed to me that it formed a diamond of hate and I remember gritting my teeth with it. I wasn't weeping with the pain or the hurt anymore, I was weeping with the hate and the rage. I remember it so clearly, my breath hissing between my teeth until it whistled. I remember biting down on my blankets so that people couldn't hear until I couldn't take that anymore either as all of this… this feeling seemed to come out of me and I lay there, sweating and shaking as I just lay there on the bed and one thought echoed through my mind.

"I was going to destroy them. Everyone was responsible for what had happened, I was going to destroy them all.

"They had both told me that there were more people out there that followed the same God and knew the same secrets that they had known and I decided, lying on my bed, panting with the leftover emotion, that I was going to destroy them."

He laughed suddenly and shook his head, allowing me to hide just how appalled I was by his narrative. He looked up at me after his brief surge of hilarity.

"I do believe that after I made that decision, I fell asleep almost instantly."

"I can believe it," I told him. "There is a release after you have made a decision like that. One of those cross-roads decisions where you know that your life could go one way or another and that now the decision is made you can rest."

He nodded as I spoke before we lapsed into stillness and silence.

Then he shook himself and started to speak again.

"In the morning, I didn't pretend to be sick, instead I went to the chapel to think and to plan. The most obvious course of action was to let people know what had happened and that would be the solution to everything. I mean, that's what you do right? Tell the adults and then trust that they were going to sort it out.

"I went down the list. Emma was discounted in my head. She was fourteen and just a dizzy young girl to my mind. I mean, now, despite being a woman, she is one of the most intelligent people that we know. But she was just getting to the point where she was rebelling at all of the feminine things that Mother and Father were trying to get her to do like wear dresses and receive people to take on potential suitors and arrange marriages for her. So she was out of the question. And no matter how much I now hated Edmund, his opinions on women had lodged into me and I may say that they have been proven right over the years.

"Mark will have been sixteen at that point and I was terrified of him. I had an instinctive feeling that what I was doing with Edmund was wrong and that Mark would be angry that I had kept it to myself for so long so I was afraid that I was going to be punished more than Edmund was. I thought that I was going to be punished for keeping the secret and not confessing when I had the chance.

"Byarby would have been appalled that I was lying about my brother, Froggart would have done the same. The thought of going to Father was just absurd at the time and so first, I tried Mother."

"I think," I began. "I think you might have been a bit unfair in your assessments about some of those people."

Sam smiled sadly. "Not really."

I just stared at him and he continued to speak.

"So I found Mother in the flower gardens. She had Francesca with her and Frannie was tottering around between the bushes, pricking her fingers on the rose thorns and scuffing her knees up."

I smiled at the shared memories. I remember Frannie doing the same things as well.

"So I went to Mother and I told her that I had something serious to tell her about why I had been so ill recently. She didn't ignore me, not really but she also didn't take her eyes off Frannie. 'Can it wait?' She asked. Another short phrase that I added to my diamond of hate. Never say that to me, Freddie, ever."

"I will remember," I told him. I could easily imagine what had happened next.

"I started to try and tell mother what had happened about how Edmund had come and taken me off for a ride and about how he had given me a beer that first time and abruptly, she just stopped me."

His eyes darkened and his lips peeled back from his teeth with an old rage. There was a hurt there, an old childish hurt that tugged at my heartstrings enough that I felt for him. Felt for him enough that I had to remind myself that this man had ordered the death of my friend and had enslaved the woman I love. Let alone that he had tortured my sister and the woman that she loves.

"'Take the blame like a man.' She told me. 'It is unbecoming to shift the blame onto others for your carelessness. Remember that a true leader will take all of the blame for himself but will pass the credit onto those that follow him. I tried desperately to tell her that there was more to the story and that it wasn't finished but she had made her mind up as to what was going through my head. At that point, Francesca fell into a patch of thorns and Mother leapt up to care for darling Francesca and left me behind. I was dismissed and that… That hurt, I won't lie to you, Freddie."

"It was another day before I plucked up the courage to talk to Captain Froggart and he assumed something similar, that I was lying to get myself out of the disgrace that I was in for having been neglectful in my behaviour and following my brother off on some wild horse ride. After that, I didn't even try and talk to Byarby who would have been even more outraged at the prospect of having had my donkey hurt."

Sam snorted in amusement before continuing.

"I did not want to confront Father about this so I went to Mark next."

I didn't want to hear this. I respect and admire Mark a great deal. He has turned the most awful thing that I can imagine happening and turned it into something positive. It is true that at this point in his life, he was getting ready to join the priesthood and as such was on more than a little bit of a holier-than-thou kick. But even so, I did not want to hear about how Mark had ignored his younger brother.

"Unfortunately," Sam said. "Mark listened carefully and took my story away. Out of all the people that I tried to talk to, Mark took it the best I think. But then he went away. I had great hope that he would be able to do something about what was happening and what had happened. But a week later, Edmund came back and took me out for a ride again.

Nothing had changed except that Edmund was a bit more brazen and treated me that bit rougher.

"In desperation, I tried to talk to Emma but she was too busy with the feminine stuff that she barely paid attention to me. She thought it was some game that I was playing with you, or with some of the other young men of the castle at the time.

"She laughed at me and told me not to be silly."

I didn't believe that that was true. I don't believe that that is true.

"I can see you don't believe me, Freddie," he said. "But it's true. Explain it away all you wish but the simple fact of the matter is that I tried to take the problem to my big sister and she ignored me. Where she has always been a kind and generous mentor and friend to you, she has always all but ignored me and that has never changed, ever. In you, she saw an equal, an ally and a friend. In me, she saw something lesser that she looked down on and was better than."

I wondered then that I had never seen the amount of anger, hate and disdain that Sam has for our sister.

"In the end, there was nothing else to be done except to go to Father. I have to admit that I was expecting to be yelled at, to be told that I was lying and that I was a disgrace and all of those other kinds of things. What I didn't expect was that he simply didn't seem to care.

"'Yes,' he said. 'Your brothers and your sister have warned me that you have this new fantasy going through your mind. A fantasy about how you are the victim in some kind of heretical conspiracy headed up by Edmund your brother.'

"I remember that my own words all but seemed to peter out in the face of his disapproving glare.

"He sighed and looked over his hands at me. 'It is only natural for you to be jealous of your brother.' I honestly think he was trying to be kind. 'The truth of the matter is that one day your brother Edmund will be the Lord of these lands and you will serve him. It will disgrace you to say these things about him and in turn, it will disgrace the family and we will be destroyed. It is vital that we present a unified front before our enemies and that we do not allow anyone to drive a wedge between us, even from within the family. Never forget that.'

"I told him that I wouldn't.

"'Promise me,' he ordered and when I did so, he made me write to apologise to Edmund. I had to write it out and show it to Father before he took it from me and posted it."

"Two days later, Edmund arrived and took me for a ride."

The bitterness in Sam was awful. I wondered, and I still wonder, if things had transpired exactly as Sam remembered them. The easiest one to believe was the story about how Mother had handled things. I could also understand how Byarby, Froggart and Emma…. Even Mark had behaved. After all, Mark and Emma had simply spoken to Father and asked him to sort it out, or at least, I think that's what happened.

I wondered though if this was the first indicator that Father had that something was still going on with Edmund after Uncle Kalayn had come to visit and Edmund himself had been baptised into the family religion.

Sam continued to speak.

"After that, I went to my room and sat down, staring into space to think. I had done the things that you are supposed to do in this instance. I was aware enough to realise that Edmund had taken some steps to poison the well against me and to cover his own back. Not least by telling me, early on, that Father knew about all of this."

"Which he did." I interrupted.

"Which he did," Sam agreed. "But I had done what you are supposed to do. I had told my parents, my brother, my authority figures and a priest.

"I was already being trained as a soldier, a Knight and a warrior and I loved the stories about the lone hero taking on insurmountable odds by himself. And I decided that this was my role. If no one were going to help me, then I would do it myself. And that night, I started to plot out my campaign."

He laughed again.

"The way I say it makes it sound as though this is all some grand scheme that played out since that night but that is just not the case. There were certainly some decisions that I made that night that have carried me through, but it's been more of an evolving thing.

"I decided that what Father, Mother and Mark were doing was protecting the heir. Edmund was going to be Lord Coulthard when Father died; as such, he was simply more important than me. The scandal that this would cause would destroy everything that Father had worked for all of these years. So that's what they were doing. And I suppose that, from their point of view, it made a certain amount of sense. I didn't hate them all, any the less for it but even so. I think that the objective for Father was for me to keep it quiet. The heartbreaking thing for me is that if he had told me that he would take care of it and that I just needed to keep it quiet. I would have believed him.

"But of course, Edmund came back and continued having his way with me.

"I just dismissed Emma as being weak then and there. Her task in the family was to sit there, be educated, look pretty and attract a powerful husband. Hers was the balance between being pretty enough to attract a husband that would bring power to the family, but not so much that the expected dowry would be crippling to us. That was what she did, that was what she was doing and being trained for and that was all that she was good for.

"It astonishes me that Father trusted her with everything else that he trusted her with, let alone that he taught her how to run the company. Ah well, I nearly made a mistake there as I was going to remove her completely and once again, I thank you for rescuing me from it."

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked him. "By that point, I would have been seven, or more likely eight."

Sam smiled.

"I wanted to, but I decided to protect you instead." He gave a little chuckle. "There was one lesson that our parents gave us over and over again that I never forgot. Not ever. That you were my little brother and that it was my responsibility to look after you and take care of you and all of that nonsense. Also… what would you have done? You would have, not incorrectly, gone to Mother, or Father and then I would have been punished for lying to you as well so…" He shrugged.

"I could have supported you Sam. I could have been your friend."

"No Freddie. No you could not, you would not have been allowed."

I decided not to fight him on that. His words had the ring of surety and I rather supposed that he thought such things fanatically.

"Before you go on as well. I loved Francesca just as much as anyone else at that time and she… she was the fragile and perfect flower that we all wanted to protect and look after so I didn't want to ruin that for her either. I started to view the knowledge that I had as a kind of taint, that it lessened me and it lessened the people that I spoke to about it. That it would adjust and taint the image that people had of me and as such, I should do my best to continue to keep it secret.

"I did try again a little while later. I tried to tell our tactics teacher. The man that taught us about Military history, remember him?"

I searched my memory.

"Claudius something," I recalled. "Short man, bald head?"

"That's the fellow. I wonder where he is now. He saw that something was wrong with me and asked me about what that might be. I must have been sitting awkwardly or something. I don't know if he recognised what was happening or had seen something like it before but he took me aside and asked me some very searching questions, almost leading questions. He was so kind and so gentle with it that sooner or later I just broke. I have never, ever, ever been physically affectionate with any of our tutors before or since that moment but he put his arms around me and told me that he would deal with the matter.

"A week later he was gone and I was thrashed for lying."

"Flame, Sam."

He shook his head and held his hand up.

"I don't want your pity, Freddie. They were protecting themselves and for all I know, they were doing something to protect me as well. I don't know what was going on and why they didn't act on it or even investigate it. Of course, after what happened later, we know that Father was well aware of Edmund's depredations and was taking certain steps, while still taking steps to protect the family and the company. Leaving the company to Emma to manage, ensuring that you and I would have money to live off that neither Edmund nor Mark, could touch. He couldn't keep the castle and the lands out of Edmund's hands but I notice that he did manage that out of Mark…. But we are getting ahead in the story there.

"So I started to formulate my plan. One of the lessons that I remember from that earliest time is the courtier one and I know that it's a lesson that you have taken to heart as well. That when you are strong, you pretend weakness and when you are weak, you pretend strength.

"So I started to downplay how good I was in certain areas. There was no hiding how good I was with weapons at that age. You have to be really good with weapons to believably pretend to be bad. I could throw a fight but our tutors could easily see that I wasn't putting the effort into it. But with regards to my other tutoring, My writing, my reading and all of the courtier work. I took all of that information in but deliberately pretended to be bad at it."

He laughed.

"I love you for how hard you worked to try and help me with all of that Freddie and I longed to tell you that you didn't need to try so hard but, it was so endearing and it was a good distraction from what was going on. I loved you for how much you cared, Freddie and I still love you for that. I will never stop. You are the only one in this awful family that ever really tried to care for me in that period and I love you for it."

We sat in silence for a while after that declaration.

"I won't lie, Sammy," I told him. "I don't know how to take that. I think I will need to go away and think on that for a while."

"I understand," he told me.

"I am…" I considered what I wanted to say. "I'm hurt that you lied to me though. I don't like that, even your affection for me was built on lies. I was genuinely trying to help and that time was wasted."

"It wasn't, it worked in solidifying…"

"No Sam. You're not following. If I had not been doing that, we could have spent our time being genuinely closer. Our brotherly relationship could have been built on trust and truth rather than lies and pretence."

I was hurt and I could not hide from it.

"No more lies Freddie," he told me after a while. "I'm sorry."

"I mean… I understand why you did it." I told him. "I understand that the lie is easier, that you were trying to protect me and all of that but even so…"

He nodded.

After a moment, some food was brought and we ate. Little more than plain bread, some butter and some cheese. Edmund cut the cheese for me and buttered the slices of bread that I was given. I noticed that someone had done the same for Emma and she ate mechanically and automatically, not lifting her head, just reaching for the plate and eating while not stopping writing.

I finished my food and set the plate aside before taking up my quill.

"What happened next?" I asked.

He smiled. "The war."

I must have grimaced because he pointed and laughed at me.

"You hated the war," he told me, "but looking back… I kind of think that the war saved my life. I am almost sure of it. On an intellectual level, I am aware of the horror of the war. I am aware of the injuries and the blood and the death and all of that. I know how awful it is and before you start, yes, I know how awful the coming wars are going to be as well. But afterwards?" He shook his head.

"The first Nilfgaardian invasion happened before we were born. The second happened when you and I were too young to understand what was going on and the biggest impact that it had on us is that Grandfather was able to buy a vacant minor title in Redania."

"I thought it was Father that did that."

"No, he built the castle and lifted us from being merchants into being proper nobles. Grandfather was a merchant and just bought the title. Father made us fit the role."

I'm not sure that Sam is right there but that is a fight that isn't worth having.

"In the intervening years. I know that Cousin Kalayn, Edmund and the rest, I know that their cult, that we now know was an off-shoot of the real one, was growing. After a while, another person was invited to make use of me. Then I was taken to Oxenfurt where I was put into a cellar in some building… I think it's been torn down since. But it was in a basement where a few people had their way with me. To them, I was a toy that had been passed around but eventually, they were growing bored of it and wanted more of the buzz that came with it. I still had no idea about the cult up in the North and now that I know more, what they were doing with me was building me to the point that when I did know about the cult in the North, I wouldn't react to it. That it would just be another thing that they were doing as part of their games.

"I never saw them going so far as to kill someone at that time. Looking back, I think that that was kept for special occasions back then. You liberated a wagon of children during your attack on the cult. Well… That was later but at the time. I was like that. I was a toy to be passed around, the same way that you might pass a bottle of something strong to the person next to you at the party.

"The fact that I was, due to training, becoming big and strong made them feel powerful, but eventually, there were new toys to play with and I was relegated to the position of servant. I would pass the wine and the drugs around as well as help chain up the latest plaything.

"I learnt to lie properly and to be able to tell truth in thought and lie with words as well as vice versa when the time came. I learnt how to swear in the name of the Flame while I really left my devotions to The God."

"Yeah, I have a question about that." I jumped in. "Do you believe in The God? Or is it just something that you spout out to maintain… I don't know… your cover."

He smiled. "Freddie, The God is real. We call him that because he likes to be called that and keeping him happy is… a factor. Is he a God on the same level as Kreve or the Eternal Flame? That I don't know. I suspect that you would need to speak to a priest or someone. Phineas is dead and we are following some of his playbooks on this so…"

"So Phineas is definitely dead?"

"Oh yes." He laughed. "Definitely dead. I checked and he did not escape the noose this time. Stupid ass. But again, that's getting ahead in the story. He was a true believer though, 'only one true God and all of that nonsense. But still…

"So then the war started and finally, finally, I escaped all of the depredations that I was being subjected to. I was Knighted because Redania wanted Knights. I served, I fought and I did my duty. I know that it was awful and I know that it was horrible, but Freddie…"

He shook his head.

"Freddie, I have never been happier. I was free. Edmund was off performing the stupid little duty that Father had found for him where he could be kept out of harm's way. I knew enough by now to know that I was disposable and I was there so that you could all say that the family had done their part.

"I was fifteen when the war broke out. I know that you went into the logistics and intelligence divisions and I cannot resent you for that. And I may say that when my comrades gave you all grief I stood up for you, say that if you had come out with us then you would have been dead weight. Which was true?" He checked to see if I was going to be offended by that.

"No that was true, at that time and that place, I knew which end of the sword to hold, but that was it."

"And I would guess that you didn't have the heart to strike home. Nothing to be ashamed of but in being where you were, I knew that the intelligence we were getting was good and that we could trust it. I knew that wars were won according to logistics and intelligence so I routinely got into fights with men who told us that you lot weren't real soldiers. I never stood for that. Ever."

"Thank you."

"So I was away from Edmund. None of the other people that might know my secret was anywhere near me. Cousin Kalayn actively hid somewhere so that he wouldn't end up serving. I don't know but I think he commanded some garrison off in the arse end of fuck knows where. But for the first time, I had friends and comrades. Men that literally died saving my life and would fight for me. I remember weeping with gratitude that a man passed me a drink and told stories of my exploits around the campfire to the other men there.

"I remember a superior sharing our last food out equally so that we could all have something to eat. The way we huddled together in the cold as we went over the mountains against Kaedwen and thinking, 'This is what brotherhood should be about.'"

He shook his head at the memory. And I shook my head at the horror implied that a man of fifteen would rather be at war than at home with his family.

"I learned how to lead during the war. I became a man during the war and not just in the way of having my first woman. She was a camp follower that helped out in the surgeon's tent and charged ten crowns a time. She was very kind to me and when I wept afterwards, she held me gently. But they taught me how to be a man. How to act, how to behave. To only give your word when you meant it. To set yourself a set of behaviours and stick to them. To know where your line of morals is and to stick to those as well. Not this bullshit masculinity that I hear about in the taverns and the brothels around the world. But real… When you take all of the bullshit that the world gives to you, all of the pain and the hardship and the unfairness and then you do your duty. Even when you know you might be thought less of for it, or that it might kill you.

"I learned how to think as well, to see things for how they are rather than what people want you to see or what you think you see. I learned the same things that you did, which was that the leader is not always the person with the fanciest armour or the one that shouts the loudest, and I learned that there is a difference between being intelligent and being well-educated. I owe my life to a Sergeant called Keef. It's dreadfully classist of me but I never knew his first name. When we were in a situation where it was impossible to charge our noble steeds."

He chuckled at something that I presumed was some kind of old military joke.

"... We were spread out amongst the infantry to provide, heh, 'leadership'. Fortunately, I soon learned that the real leadership came from within the unit itself and that they knew their jobs better than I did. Not all of my fellows were as clever as I was or learned that lesson as quickly. Funny how they didn't survive.

"But there was a Sergeant called Keef. He didn't give orders, he gave me suggestions and when he did so, he did it in such a way that it was clear to see the good sense in those words and as such, as is the way with good leaders, I was doing things because he told me to rather than because I saw the sense."

"What happened to him?"

"What?... Oh, he died. The black ones killed him. But he taught me so much in the intervening time. I owe my life to him and the lessons that he taught me, multiple times over.

"After we had taken Kaedwen and joined their forces to ours, we fought the Nilfgaardians to a standstill. I know that military historians are still arguing about various things but we fought them to a standstill and kept them on the other side of the Pontar. People can argue about holding choke points and this and that but are you honestly telling me that the Imperial war machine couldn't mount a river invasion? A pontoon bridge or get a bunch of mages to create a land bridge wherever the fuck they wanted? No, we had them to a stalemate in preparing for the winter.

"And then…"

I swear to the Holy Flame, he shed a tear.

"And then it was all over. Djikstra and Roche and whoever the fuck else… Fucking Eilhart… You have no idea how hard it was to nod and smile when she turned up for Ariadne's party. They killed Radovid and it was all over. Three years of our lives and it was done. All of that blood, all of those lives, all of that sacrifice and for sweet fuck all. God but I wish that Djikstra were still alive so that I could kill him again. I mean, I hate Nilfgaard as a whole but they were doing their jobs. We were supposed to trust Djikstra, Roche and the rest."

There was a pause in our conversation then. Sam poured himself a drink and went to look out the window to collect his thoughts and I scribbled a couple of notes down. A soldier took that moment to come in with a sheaf of papers that Sam read through, surprisingly quickly given what I knew of him. He scribbled some things down on the paper and then he came back to his desk.

"Are you ready to continue?" He asked me.

"I should ask you the same thing," I replied and he shrugged.

"So the war ended." He told me. "You came out of the logistics tent and into Father's bad graces as you were unable to be useful and lock down a wife. I can easily imagine the situation. I only avoided it because I was stationed elsewhere. But I came back and it was as though my eyes were opened and I could see things for being the way they actually were rather than what I thought they were.

"Shortly after I returned, Edmund came to get me and took me to a place in Oxenfurt. The other members of that little circle were there and I had to struggle to keep from laughing. First of all, it was clear that these people thought of themselves as a cult. But they weren't a cult. They were just a group of people that got their pleasure by causing sexual pain to those weaker than themselves. It helped if the victim was younger, pretty and female but many could be heard expressing the opinion that 'providing that the ass is young enough, it doesn't matter if it's a boy or a girl,"

I shuddered.

"I know," Sam said. "I have a dim feeling that they wanted to exert their dominance over me now that I was back. But I was eighteen, in the prime of good health, and my strength, speed and technique had been honed against the best that Nilfgaard had to offer. Edmund was twenty-eight and had spent the war in some kind of cushy Garrison duty away North. He had spent the war drinking, whoring and spending time with his friends and conspirators. His hair was greying and he was clearly going bald. He had grown a beard to hide his double chin and wore make-up to hide some of the splotches and blemishes that were cropping up from whatever pox he had most recently contracted.

"He was still quick. Lightening fast even and he knew how to hold that speed back ready for when his opponent would leave a hole in their defences and then Edmund could strike. He would stand there looking bored and nonchalant until his opponent panicked. Edmund knew his reputation and knew how to use it. He also knew how to get his friends involved to erode his opponent's confidence. Again, you said something similar yourself in Toussaint. There is a difference between a duel and a fight.

"So they took me into that room and I saw Edmund for what he was. He went to order me to do something and he must have seen in my eyes that I had no intention of doing what he said and would react with violence if he forced it. So he backed down.

"Edmund had fallen out of favour with the group at that point. He was often in favour and out of favour with them all I think. He was not alone in that as discipline seems to have been something that happened to other people in that group. How no-one caught them before you got to it, I will never know. But Edmund was struggling to keep things quiet and knowing what we found out later, I suspect that it was around then that Father finally figured out what was going on and told him to stop. Edmund was afraid and the other people were reluctant to trust him.

"So Cousin Kalayn tried to belittle him a bit and the others were jeering and catcalling. And just as I had been taught in the army, I looked at the big picture, I saw the situation, formed the plan and implemented it. I picked one of the stronger henchmen that were jeering at my brother and smacked him in the mouth.

"You know these kinds of people too. I know that you have written about this. It takes something to just start violence. Most people have to work themselves up to it. So if you can just start with the violence and then be so utterly violent that they can never recover from it. That normally works.

"The man fell and was up on his feet, his hand going for his sword, challenging me to a duel. I slapped him, took him out to the backyard by his hair, drew my sword and told him that I was ready and that I was going to kill him. I was, in fact, going to geld him and choke him to death on his own manhood. He saw murder in my eyes and I was honestly disappointed when he apologised. But I swallowed that disappointment and told him to apologise to Edmund instead. He was horrified but I held my sword point at his crotch and he fell to his knees to apologise to Edmund.

"Then I told the rest of them that if I heard about anyone bad-mouthing my brother, or planning his downfall then I would kill them. I made no extravagant threats about what I was going to do to them. I just told them that I would kill them and that they would not live to regret their actions.

"For some reason, this was more effective.

"Then I went and stood behind Edmund to make my stance clear and he was in a position of prestige again in their little circle. I had to keep from laughing. I still intended to destroy them all and now that I had been in an army at war, the plan started to form itself.

"Over and over again, I was astonished at how stupid they all were. So secure in their arrogance and their image of their self-worth and the immunity that their prestige gave them. It did not occur to them that they would be caught, let alone punished for their crimes. But now, wherever Edmund went in those circles, I went with him.

"Through those circles, I finally learnt about the cult of the First-Born as you call them in the North. And at first, I despaired. I thought that I was just up against this small circle of ass-hats and I reckoned that my crusade could be over and done by the time I was twenty-one. But that was not the case. After a moment, I decided that the decision had not changed but that I needed more information to work with.

"It was not hard to manipulate what they were doing or what they were thinking. In much the same way that I have no doubt Sergeant Keef had manipulated me, so too did I manipulate those… people. I object to calling them, cultists. They were ass-holes. So I arranged, through them and their family contacts to be stationed north so that I could go and meet the full cult of which my little group of ass-holes were a branch. I met Uncle Kalayn who was a weaker man that was trapped in the family business, the same as you or I am really. I met Lord Cavil who was increasingly becoming the power behind the throne."

"Did you meet Phineas?"

"I think I saw him once at the back somewhere, but he was hardly there. He was in Angral working on his plot and his experiments at that time. Don't worry, we will get to him."

I nodded.

"As big a nest of vipers I have never met, They were all after the top job and they schemed and fought against each other. To the lower ranks like Poor Arthur that you met, They seemed united, but to the upper ranks?"

I searched for the name "Arthur" in my memory.

"Cavil's bastard." Sam clarified and I nodded as I remembered the tall, powerful, charming but utterly deluded man.

"The top guys were united in their schemes but amongst each other, it was clear that the higher up you were the more powerful you felt and if there was one drug that got them all off, more than the power of the God, it was that power. In the same way that the ass-holes felt power over those weaker than themselves, the cultists felt power over lesser cultists. I know for a fact that the higher cultists got off on this power. At the time Uncle Kalayn was in charge but it was clear to me that his power was waning and that Cavil was sniffing at his heels.

"Not least of the reasons for this was the fact that Cousin Kalayn was further south getting his rocks off by torturing and kidnapping children and young people. The cult in the North chose their targets carefully. But in the South, they did it far too often and indiscriminately. The Northern cult was terrified of discovery and what they were afraid of was that in their misfounded zeal, someone from the southern off-shoot would get caught who didn't want to go to the executioner's block and tell everything in return for their own survival.

"All of that courtier training that you have mentioned, including the stuff that the army taught me, came to the fore and I realised that my planned destruction of the cult was a multi-stage plan.

"It wasn't just the cult in the North, nor was it the cult of thrill-seekers in the south."

"I thought we had agreed to call them ass-holes." I put in.

Sam barked with laughter at that.

"Yes, sorry, the assholes."

He chuckled at the image for far longer than the joke deserved before he leaned forward and poured himself another drink. This time, he reached into a drawer and seemed to open a box that was within the drawer before pulling what looked like a twist of paper. He untwisted one end of the paper and poured the contents into the drink before picking up the cup and swirling the liquid around for a moment.

"Sam?"

He took a long swallow and grimaced at the taste.

"Yes, Freddie?"

"Are you sick? Don't joke with me now, or dismiss this as metaphor, are you ill?"

He considered the question.

"Yes and no." He told me with a smile as I made a face at the answer.

"I'm not being deliberately ambivalent." He told me. "Yes, I am sick. I have done things and am continuing to do things that are making me ill in both body and mind."

"Such as meaning that you can't, or are unable to father any children?" I wondered.

A shadow passed over his face of remembered horror, disgust and self-loathing. Then he nodded.

"And some of the things that you are seeing me drink are to mitigate that sickness. Others are to prepare me for what is to come."

"What is to come?"

He laughed.

"Admit something for me first." He told me, pointing a finger at me. "You are just as much a storyteller as you are a historian. Is that not so?"

"That is so," I admitted, accepting the offer of another cup of wine as I spoke. "The purpose of my articles is to educate. But if the text is just a dry recitation of facts, then the reader will become bored and wander off. And even if, by some horrific circumstance, my writing is studied as part of some mandatory text in schools or universities, meaning that the reading is mandatory, then if the writing is boring then the facts will not be remembered."

He grinned and nodded before he stared into space for a long moment and his humour seemed to retreat from his face.

"I have done many things, Freddie. I have seen even more things and I can feel those things scrabbling at the edges of my sanity. I can feel the weakness in my limbs because of some of the things that I have had to do. What your bitch told you about the creation of the means of controlling her is true. To do that alone, I have done things that would challenge my sanity and well-being and that is not the worst of what I have done."

A glint of humour appeared in his eyes.

"Although it is pretty bad."

"For fuck's sake Sam."

"But it must be told in its proper order. You, and your eventual readers, will probably hate me anyway but I refuse to be judged without the knowledge of the proper context."

I nodded and dipped my quill.

"So…" I prompted. "A multi-stage plan."

"Yes. I knew that I wanted to destroy these things and these people and…"

"Hold on." I jumped in and we both smiled at the interruption. "Just a quick question. You were a much more powerful man and your reputation would guarantee that you would be heard. Or you would be much more likely to get heard. After the war, the church was falling over itself to try and prove its usefulness to prevent assimilation and destruction from the cult of the great sun. Why didn't you go to the church and explain the heresy that you had seen? They would have done your destruction for you."

"I have thought about that although if the truth be told, it just didn't occur to me at the time. Not because I was so fixated on my vengeance, although that was certainly part of my thinking at the time. Nor was it because I hated the institution, although I kind of did."

"Why? Mark might have let you down by not listening to what you said, or taking it to Father, but why hate the church?"

"You remember what the church was like at the time." He gave a sneer, more at the church than at me I thought. "I served alongside Witch-hunters and Knights of the Flaming turd or whatever it was that they called themselves. Pompous, self-righteous pricks that they were."

He sighed and with the breath, his dislike and vehemence seemed to drain out of him.

"Part of it is learned." He told me after a long moment. "I spent so much time with the ass-holes and the cultists that I have to guard my own thinning. You have written that if you tell a young person the same falsehood over and over again, then sooner or later they will begin to believe it."

"I don't think that I was that flowery but…"

He allowed himself a small smile at that.

"They taught me that the God of the cult was right, that he gave pleasure and power while the Eternal Flame gave pain and suffering. To not be punished, I had to believe what they were telling me and after a while, that belief became… permanent."

He shifted in his seat and took a deep breath. It was not the first time that I saw the body in front of me as an empty suit of clothes that was suddenly filled as my brother returned to it.

"I am a heretic out of survival. Which was another factor. In that time and place, if I had told the church that I had been inducted into a cult, then I would have been burnt at the stake to purify my soul. They would have come for the cult to be sure, but they would also have come for my friends and family, after all, they had the perfect excuse to come after the Coulthard's now. And although I would have cheerfully watched our parents and older siblings burn, then that focus would have come onto you and Francesca. I still had that big brotherly feeling and I wanted to protect you.

"And that leads me to the most rational explanation. I had spent time in the North and fought alongside the church troops in the war on the front line. Sent there by Radovid so that his political enemies, which included me I would later realise, could be destroyed. In the North, I learned just how corrupt the church of the Eternal Flame was, and still is in many ways.

"I hate Mark for his negligence in looking at the family properly, but he is doing his best to drag the church of the Eternal Flame into the modern age, working to stamp out corruption and return the church to a church of service rather than the rule. But back then…"

He shook his head.

"You have to understand that the cult of the First-Born was made up of prominent noblemen of the old school. Men that could trace their bloodlines back to the founding of Redania. Many of them had funded Radovid and his family and many still had donated vast sums to the Church of the Eternal Flame. If I had gone and argued that they were heretics, the political entities in the church would have torn me down. And then used that excuse to tear down the Coulthard family for my impertinence.

"So all of these factors are true, and I like to think that I considered them in the back of my brain somewhere. But the truth is that it just didn't occur to me.

"I did consider bringing you into it then though."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because you were… Out of all the people on the continent Freddie, I love you the most. But you were not yet ready for serious things. You were not yet yourself. You were still trying to be what Father made you and even I could see that it wasn't working. To my mind, you needed your war, whatever that might be. Looking back, that process started when you went to university in defiance of what Father wanted and then was finished when you started travelling with the witcher.

"But I had no idea how long that process would take at the time, or even if it would happen at all. And I was keen to get started before I lost the will to do the thing myself."

"And Francesca?"

"She was young, and besides everything else, she was a girl too." He sniffed in dismissal.

I decided not to push that particular line of conversation.

"The biggest problem was the cult in the North, and for that, I would need a power base. It logically occurred to me that the best power base that I could have was if I was Lord Coulthard rather than Edmund. I mean, I already intended to destroy Edmund anyway but if I was Lord Coulthard then I could have a base. So I needed to destroy Edmund and take steps to ensure that I would be made Lord Coulthard.

"So while messing around in the North. My stationing there amounted to little more than hunting bandits and doing the bidding of the Cult really. I wanted to perform military exercises to keep the wartime edge that our troops needed but my superiors in both the feudal sense and the military sense were lazy and as such, didn't see the point.

"Now, as I was saying, while I was in the North, I met several important people. I met Lord Cavil again, as a grown up this time so I like to think I met him properly this time…

"By the way, I thought it was incredibly sweet that every time he talked about that traitorous Lord Kalayn, you didn't follow it to its natural conclusion. You thought of it as some kind of natural assumption of superiority over the position of Lord Kalayn, rather than the possibility that I had once worked for him and was actually a traitor."

I had no words for that.

"I mean, from his point of view, I was a traitor but from mine, I had always aimed for his destruction. I also re-met Lord Kalayn at the height of his miserable glory. I allowed myself to backslide a little in his presence, and the presence of Lord Cavil to let them think that I was bowing before them."

"When strong…" I said.

"Pretend weakness." Sam finished for me. "They both knew about the off-shoot in the south and they were in the process of cutting them off. Cousin Kalayn believed that he was indispensable as he was both an elder son and his father's heir. But Uncle Kalayn was a cold bastard. Mother described him as a lapsed heretic but he wasn't. He was just… I think he was tired. He was not a healthy man because he had already been poisoned by his son to hasten him on his way…"

"Poisoned?"

"Oh yes. Like Edmund with Father, our cousin wanted the perceived money, status and power that came with actually being the Lord rather than waiting his turn. Uncle Kalayn had spotted the poisoning and had taken preventative measures but it had left him weak when the weather was cold.

"It was one of the few things that Cavil and Kalayn agreed on which was that the off-shoot needed to be dealt with so that it didn't attract attention from the growing faction in the church that might follow through on it. So, having come from that off-shoot, I persuaded them to send me to curb their… zeal until the older lords could arrange for the thing to die out with the older sons returning to the fold.

"I took several steps there. I saw the opportunity to add some more to my potential holdings and persuaded Uncle Kalayn to change his will to put it so that it was more ambiguous as to who the heir would be should anything happen to his son. It was already written so that it would be Edmund as the eldest surviving male heir. But I intended to kill Edmund….

"So I pointed out that no plan is perfect and that as a younger son and an initiate from them both, they might run roughshod over me. As such, it might even be prudent for one or the other to die. Uncle Kalayn saw the danger of his will, meaning that his estate would go to Mark and therefore the church. Cavil wanted the title for himself and one of his sons to consolidate his power as part of his scheming to be the next head of the cult. And Kalayn didn't want that, more out of spite rather than anything. So he adjusted his will and fairly clicking my heels together, I headed back south."

He chuckled at a memory.

"I remember them being so concerned about their power."

He chuckled again.

"But I met some other people."

"Phineas?" I wondered again.

"No, he would come later. I saw him and essentially thought he was one of Cavil's equivalents…. What I was to Edmund, I thought he was one of those to Cavil. He stood in the background of things. Taking care not to step into the ritual circles or take part in any of the rites at that time. I remember him at that stage as a nervous man, rubbing his hands and licking his lips. I certainly didn't talk to him. He left the North before I did anyway.

"I met Gregoire. Like me, he was a younger son of one of the Lords up there and had been brought in. Like me, he saw the hypocrisy and the stupidity of it all. He was a military man and was disgusted by the entire thing. I didn't talk to him about it but I pegged him as a possible ally for the future.

"I also met Ella, the Elven Alchemist. Do you remember her?"

"I do." I sighed. "She was always working for you?"

"Yes and no. I took over her masterhood shortly after you let her go. It was not hard. She was addicted to her own potions and some of the things that came with it."

He shook his head at me and he almost smirked as he said it.

"You should not have let her go, Freddie. For all of the evil that I have committed, she has done much worse. And if you had killed her, I would have found what came later far more difficult. She made all of my potions and powders and she does so so that I can still keep feeding her, her little green bottles."

"I was trying to be kind. That cult forced her to do…"

"Yes they did." he agreed. "They made her evil, they forced her to do evil. And I agree that that, in turn, made her evil. It drove her mad. Even now, she still justifies everything she has done by way of it being forced. She promises herself that things are not as bad as we think they are and that she is a good person.

"But when I heard her story, I thought of any number of ways that she could have fled, or could have utterly destroyed the cult. One good batch of poison in some of the drugs that she administered and the leadership of the cult would have been decimated. Or she could have given the cult's victims a quick acting poison so that they died painlessly, or any number of things to support my, and supposedly her, enemies.

"The cult taught me to hate women, it did and those scars are carrying forwards. But I have yet to meet a woman that would tell me that the cult was wrong. Women are weak, pathetic, stupid creatures. And of all that I have met, Ella is among the worst. She has committed so much evil because of her weakness and… "

He shook his head and fixed me with a stare.

"You should not have let her go, Freddie."

I took a breath. "Is she here?"

"She's in the castle. She's looking forward to seeing you again. You should thank her for the fact that the infection in your hand hasn't spread up to your heart and killed you yet."

"I will remember to thank her."

I was taking care to breathe deeply to keep myself calm. I had tried to help that woman.

"But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Because of my elevated position I also met The God. I was given a woman and I carried out the rites. I tried to minimise the required cruelty, but I felt The God's presence."

He looked at me with a haunted expression.

"He is very real Freddie."

I heard many things in my brother's voice then. Hate certainly, a deeply buried rage, a touch of scorn and more than a little bit of fear.

"What was it like?" I heard myself ask.

I felt strange. I maintain a devout outlook on the Eternal Flame. It has been a while since I've really considered things but it has always struck me that I prefer the Eternal Flame itself to the church of the Eternal Flame. I absolutely believe in the Eternal Flame but I cannot help but struggle with all of the evil that I have seen and heard of coming out of the church itself.

Having said that, other than a strange sense of peace that comes over me in certain holy places of the Eternal Flame. My family's chapel being the most obvious, the small wooden church in the village of the unicorn with the priest… Father Anchor and his wife, is another.

I found the cathedral at the top of Novigrad to be oppressive more than anything.

Other than that peace though, I have not felt the religious ecstasy that I have seen in the faces of some of the other members of the congregations when I have attended the various church services and sometimes that leaves me feeling as though I am missing out on something.

And in my weaker moments, I am jealous of those people that have felt something.

So I was intrigued. And Sam saw it.

He smiled slightly.

"I would flatter you Freddie, and I do mean that I would flatter you. This is a compliment. But I would flatter you and tell you that this would not be a religion for you. You are too good a person.

"It was like a hook on your soul. When you start the… I'm going to call it a rite. When you start the rite you can feel this kind of tugging feeling. I can only imagine that this must be what a fish feels like when it has been hooked. You can feel this tugging feeling. It is not unpleasant and my reaction to it all was fairly weak.

"It is not unpleasant but it is frightening. Or it was to me. It felt as though my sense of self was being tugged out of me by this strange hook and the more it tugged, the more pleasurable it was. The pleasure that can be found just this side of pain. But as well as that, it hurts. With a soul-deep pain and discomfort but within the depths of that pain is the most glorious pleasure that I can describe. And then, when the moment of climax comes, time seems to elongate out in front of you. And at that moment, I was aware of a presence that was there, watching me and approving of what I was doing. It seemed to me that it took pleasure from my pleasure and the pain that I was causing others in the heart of the rite. And then afterwards, there was a pleasure so profound that I passed out.

"It was like a beautiful but marred thing. Like a beautiful woman with a scar. Or blood running through an otherwise clear and pure stream.

"And as I came out through that euphoria, I knew that I was being promised more. There was more of that feeling available if I would just do a bit more, go that bit further, cause that bit more pain. It was revolting.

"But even now, I still feel that tug to feel that feeling again."

He shuddered and I may say that it was a similar shudder to what I was feeling. He looked up into my eyes.

"I would not introduce you to the God Freddie. I would give you many things, anything that is within my power to give you providing it does not go against my plans, but I will not give you that. When I am done with The God, I mean to take steps to ensure that no one will ever be able to contact him again. Including me."

He stiffened for a moment and then smiled.

"But I am getting ahead in my story again." He laughed and pointed at me accusingly. "You must be very good at your job Freddie."

"Published on a continental style." I boasted and we both laughed.

Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last. I felt a pang of horrible guilt. He was still my brother and I still loved him. While my broken sister worked feverishly at a desk behind me. While my best friend lay mouldering in a pit somewhere and while the woman I loved was being used as a weapon to subjugate the countryside, here I was sitting and laughing with the man who had made it all happen.

I swallowed and hung my head for a moment. Silence existed in the room but for the scratching of my sister's pen.

"So I was sent South." Sam continued his story, ignoring the moment of kinship that had existed between us. "My goal according to the cult in the North was to curtail the excesses of Edmund and Cousin Kalayn and to minimise the dangers that this was subjecting to the North. My own goal was to destroy the pair of them and have all of the rest of them killed. Preferably as part of some kind of legal thing where they could also be tried for heresy.

"The difficulty was being able to do all of that without being outed as part of their heresy myself. I could, and would, argue that I had been forced to become a heretic, but I rather thought that I would be burnt at the stake as 'better safe than sorry' and the church would love to stick one to Father.

"The easiest thing to do was to get them to destroy themselves of course and that was the course of action that I took. They all knew why I was there and I had to do some horrible things to guarantee, to them, my loyalty which involved doing some things that were dreadfully recriminating and distasteful. I will not go into them with you now. But with the philosophy that we used in the war which was that sometimes, a few dozen have to die for hundreds to be saved and hundreds of our enemies to be slaughtered instead.

"The men that forced that decision on me are all dead now anyway.

"So I sold myself to Edmund and Cousin Kalayn as a last lifeline. I played on their fears that sooner or later they might be caught and sold them the idea that, failing all else, I would be able to get word to the cult in the North so that Cavil and Uncle Kalayn could ride down here and save everyone. I insisted that it, therefore, be safer that I not partake in any of their little parties where they tortured and did horrific things to people. I also insisted that should anything happen, the only way towards safety was if I remained free.

"They accepted the plan, mainly because I managed to make it seem as though it was their idea. Cousin Kalayn especially was susceptible to only accepting a smart idea if it came from himself. And if he thought he was depriving me of something that I wanted for his good then that was all to help.

"So suddenly, I was the power behind the throne in that group of cultists. Sorry, the Ass-holes. Indeed, many of them that had joined since the war didn't even know that I existed. Some of those that had passed me around like a full bottle of spirits had moved on, realising the horror of what they were doing or having died in the war. So the secret was relatively safe.

"And I could start to scheme.

"I was not the only person that was doing so as I soon found out."

"Such as whom?"

"Father for one. I don't know when he realised that Edmund was still doing what he was doing. I do know that Father had tried to send him away to separate him from his more harmful friends and that the pair of them had had a knockdown fight about the matter. Edmund admitted as much as our fool of an elder brother had a loose tongue when he had had a couple of drinks."

I nodded at that.

"It was not a small source of worry for everyone." Sam continued. "The organisation of the ass-holes was that Cousin Kalayn was in charge, and a man called Derain was in charge of scouting. He died on the bonfired in case you were wondering. But it was Edmund that furnished their lifestyle.

"Edmund's tastes for debauchery were getting worse and more extreme. Increasingly he was getting his kicks elsewhere as well as within the assholes and Father was beginning to shake the branches underneath Edmund."

"Where was I during this time?"

"I think that this was somewhere towards the back half of your university career, maybe just before you were setting out with The Witcher. That might be why you didn't know much about what was going on there as you were taking pains to avoid contact with the family. But Edmund would have a pattern. He would fund his own habit as well as the habits of some of his friends. He would do more of what he wanted before he would be brought back in line by an unknowing combination of Father and Cousin Kalayn. But I was the one egging him on.

"Edmund was afraid. As well as being chatty in his cups, he became paranoid about it too. He would often ask me for advice and help with tears in his eyes and a tremor on his lips. And it was at this stage that I started to flex my muscles.

"I quickly found out that Father was aware of Edmund's extra activities and that he was adjusting his will in stages. I know that the first thing he did was to protect Francesca, you and me. He had already sent Francesca to court to protect her. I understand that there had been an incident at home between Edmund and Francesca that had frightened both of our parents. This was actually the main reason that Francesca went south. I mean, there were all of the other ones as well, ambition, self-preservation and the hope of Imperial influence. But apparently, there was a moment in the castle between the two of them where Father interrupted Edmund being inappropriate with Francesca.

"According to some of the servants, our Father's temper was something to behold that day.

So after Father had protected Francesca, he took steps to protect the two of us. Then, in smaller stages, he took steps to protect Emma and as much of the family's fortune and business as he could. The weakness in all of that was that he was specifically protecting them from Edmund, not me. Legally, he could do nothing to prevent his son from inheriting land and title without completely disowning Edmund which he saw as a last resort because of the obvious scandal that would ensue and therefore, the amount of damage that it would do to us all.

"So in talking with Edmund, I started to play off his paranoia that Father was going to cut him out of the will. I backed it up with evidence of the gossip that I had heard that Edmund knew was true and that meant that I could exaggerate and increase. He swore me to secrecy as he was just as aware and frightened that the Ass-holes could cut him off."

"Would they have done that?"

"Oh yes. If he couldn't get the money then he was actively dangerous to them. His exploits in the field of decadence were legendary and it was only by issuing huge bribes that some of that was already kept quiet.

"But, given all of the things that Edmund had done to me, I had no guilt at all of passing it all onto Cousin Kalayn and our friends in the North.

"And one night, after what passed for a rite among the ass-holes, Edmund had beaten a prisoner to death when some of the other assholes had still wanted a turn. They had moaned to Cousin Kalayn and in turn, as was his practice, our "high priest" was moaning to me.

"I remember it very precisely.

"'What we need,' I told him. 'Is some way that we would get the money without having Edmund in the way? That way we wouldn't have to be quite so accommodating of his mistakes'

"He nodded. Sometimes, he could be incredibly stupid.

"'But the wealth of your family is such that we cannot set it aside.' He commented. I can picture him clearly. He liked to sit in an armchair that he imagined as being like a bishop's throne. He would sit there in those laughable excuses for robes while he had some victim pleasure him as he sat there.

"There was no victim that night though. I could almost see the thought process and it took me everything that I had not to laugh into his face. He was staring into his wine cup. Then he looked up at me as I topped up his cup and added some of the white powder that he liked. He stared at me for a long moment.

"'What would happen,' he began carefully, looking at me for a long moment while I waited for the thought to occur to him. 'What would happen if Edmund died?'"

"I was playing for time at that point. I pretended to consider the question but I already knew the answer. I had long ago set up an arrangement with one of our lawyer's clerks to ensure that I knew about any changes to Father's will.

"'Title, money and land would go to Mark.' I said. 'Emma would keep the business but that would be true, even if Edmund inherited.'

"'Isn't there a law meaning that churchmen can't inherit?' he wondered.

"'I will have to find out.' I told him. There is, there was, but I didn't want Kalayn to become suspicious. In truth, Father would never have allowed Mark to inherit, he would want his title to pass down to his sons and if Mark got it all, then our lands would end up in the hands of the church. And the church would make efforts to take that money and land, even if the will said that the money and business went to the rest of us."

"'So the chances are that you would inherit?' Cousin Kalayn asked. It was laughable really. Truly laughable. He was weighing me up and I could see my chance coming.

"'There might be a need for some steps to be taken to ensure that, I told him. 'But the chances are good that that could happen." He looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded and I saw it in his eyes that the matter had been decided. Edmund was a dead man walking from that time on. But I wasn't entirely ready yet. I needed to make sure that I could destroy all of them at the same time. Just taking care of Edmund wasn't enough. A quiet stabbing in the alleyway was not going to cut it. I needed Edmund disgraced and destroyed. And although that first part of the plan would be relatively trivial, I also needed to make sure that the following steps were properly in place.

"Destroying Edmund would be easy, destroying the assholes would be equally easy really. But that would not bring me any closer to forming my own powerbase with which to strike out at the North. Being Uncle Kalayn's heir was good if I could arrange for Edmund and Cousin Kalayn to be killed but Castle Kalayn alone would not give me the power needed to take on the cult.

"I needed the backing of the Coulthard fortune, title and money. So I needed to delay Cousin Kalayn.

"'We need to be careful though,' I told him. 'If we just have Edmund murdered then everyone will be aware that they are all expendable when it comes down to it. We need to wait until he does something so foolish that you obviously have no choice but to cast him out and destroy him. If we leak some of the information about what he's doing to Father then Father will eventually disown him. Then it will be clear that you have no choice.'

"'How long will that take though?' He wanted to know.

"'Let's be honest with each other,' I told him. 'Not that long,'

"He looked at me sharply. 'Do you truly hate your brother so much?'

"I allowed a little bit of my true feelings to show through. 'When I was nine.' I told him. 'My brother held me, face down in a pile of his own excrement while he took me from behind.'

"Cousin Kalayn took that in silence but I saw his acceptance in his face. And just like that, I was my cousin's man and he absolutely depended on me and trusted me."

I was trying to swallow bile.

"Did…?" I had to clear my throat. The fact that Sam had told that story with such a lack of passion was quite… awful. That's the word that I'm looking for. It was awful.

"Did that really happen?" I asked. "The thing with Edmund I mean?"

"Oh yes." Sam nodded. That he said it without any kind of inflection and without shame made it all that much more believable to me. "That, and much worse but to a man like Cousin Kalayn, he would take that harder and understand that kind of degradation much more than some of the inflicting of pain."

I nodded.

"So now the plan was in place." Sam went on. "Mark was an issue and we had to deal with him." Sam went on, and I must say that it played out almost perfectly. I will admit that ideally, I would have been the one that figured out that Edmund killed Father but…"

"Hold on," I said. "You missed some steps there. How did it all happen and where was Mark involved?"

Sam scratched the side of his head.

"You're not going to like it." He told me. "Then again, maybe…" He shook his head and leaned forward. "The plan was that I would gently coax Edmund on to eventually disgrace himself to the point where it was beyond the pale for Father to be able to allow him to continue. There were two possibilities there. The first was that Father would threaten Edmund and then Edmund would be able to be manipulated through his fear. The second would be that Father would just cut to the chase and cut Edmund off. This would mean that Edmund would be murdered and Father could be manipulated through his fear of all of that coming to light. Then it would not be difficult to orchestrate the moment where it all did come to light and Father's death could be made to look like a suicide. I would inherit and be able to carry the fight to the cult."

I felt my anger come back to me then for a while as Sam talked about disposing of the family so easily.

"And Father had to die for all of that?" I wondered.

Sam's rage was sudden. He crashed his hand on the table. And leapt to his feet as he did so.

"Father knew. He knew everything that was going on with the cult and he did absolutely nothing about it. He didn't take any steps, he just warned Edmund to stop. I told him what had happened when we were younger. Mother had told him and when Uncle Kalayn had been a jack-ass and you can't tell me that he didn't know that something was going wrong while he was wooing her. He knew Freddie and he did nothing. Complacency is no excuse.

"And even if that wasn't the case, I was at war. And after everything else, Father was expendable."

"And how would you have disposed of the rest of us?" I asked.

He calmed a little.

"Mother would have gone to an abbey to become a nun. We all knew that she wanted that anyway. I would have liked to punish her a bit more but that was unlikely to happen. Mark was locked off into his ambitions as his enemies wouldn't allow him to climb any higher and although I was angry with him, I would be able to live with it if he didn't have any further issues. I would have married Emma off and that would have meant that I could carry on my crusade. I even had some hopes that I would be able to bring you into my efforts there, maybe even bring Mark in on it too. Francesca was in the South and so nothing was going on there."

I nodded.

He sat back in the chair.

"So…" He said after a while. "Satisfied?"

"I do not… I have never enjoyed being disposed of in Father's ambitions." I told him. "I did not appreciate it when he was trying to marry me off to this or that and I do not enjoy the fact that you were doing the same thing. Father had his flaws, I am the first to admit, and I am dismayed that he did not do more to protect you. But I remember all of the steps that he took to protect Edmund's other victims, the orphanage, the charitable causes and…"

"ALL OF WHICH WERE DONE AFTER THE FACT." Sam roared. "He could have… He should have done something to prevent all of that. Not wait until afterwards and mop it up in a way to make himself look better.

"Oh, he was protecting something alright," Sam went on. "He was protecting his stupid family company. He was protecting his name and protecting his heir from scandal. He just thought it was a minor thing and he refused to look deeper. Because if he had looked deeper he would soon have found out that the problem was far deeper rooted than all of that.

"What was it he kept asking us? 'Ask the next question, Frederick?' Well, why didn't he ask the next question?"

An insidious thought entered my mind then and I did not like it. I was agreeing with my brother. I did my best to squash that feeling and that thought as hard as I could. I did not want to agree with him. It was only one step after that that he would be able to have my sympathy, and then…

"What happened?" I forced myself to ask through gritted teeth.

I tried to remind myself what Sam had done. I pictured Kerrass' dead face. The agony on Ariadne's face as she had been tortured herself and the dead expression she had as she tortured Emma.

It was easy to find my hate and I tried to make a shield of that hate so that it would protect me. But Sam is my brother and I love him.

"What happened?" He asked. "Mark was a good man as it turned out."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, he was far too trusting and a traitor to boot. Father had told him not to worry about Edmund and the rest and he had trusted that. Another case of not wanting to look further or ask the next question. But then he made his little speech, criticising those that would call the then Empress Elect a harlot and a… whatever else the other church hierarchy called her. And suddenly, his root to higher church office was open.

"And therefore, if Edmund died, and Father died before or after, then Mark could not be allowed to inherit. Because if he did, then he would use the money, title, prestige and the rest to further his goals. Whatever else can be said that we all have in common as part of the family is our ambition. And Mark was no different. He had a vision about the change that the Church of the Eternal Flame had. And to be fair to him, he was and is right at that. But he got there by ignoring the heresy of his brother and by supporting the foul blackness that comes from the south so…"

He shrugged.

I felt a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. "Sam, what did you do?"

"Mark needed to be removed as well."

"Sam what did you do?" I repeated.

"First, I checked to make sure that Mark needed to die. I checked as to how hard and fast the rule about churchmen inheriting was and it turned out to be fairly malleable. It meant that Mark could inherit but he would be removed from church rank and have to become secular. That would not be a problem with my plans. Mark knew less about money and the running of the business and so it would be the place of the dutiful little brother to help him. But Mark was far too religious to allow that to happen. He was invested in what was going to happen in the church and he would not allow himself to be removed.

"So either Mark needed to die, or Father needed to properly insulate the fortune from Mark to ensure that I inherited rather than Mark. To do that, Mark would need to make his intentions plain for all to see. Or I would need to disgrace Mark and ensure that he never rose higher in the church.

"What did you do Sam?" I tried to keep my voice calm but I could tell that I was not entirely successful.

"I decided to make Mark ill. Something suitably degenerative but incurable unless through magic. The church was still…"

"FOR FUCK'S SAKE SAM," I demanded before taking as deep a breath as I could manage. "What did you do?"

He looked at me steadily. "I poisoned Mark." He told me. "It was not hard. I went to see Ella about my problem and she gave me poison that could damage his heart if introduced to the bloodstream. Mark had plenty of enemies because of his politics and who he was, so it wasn't hard to get someone to scratch him with a poisoned needle ring."

I got up from my chair and stomped a small distance away.

"It was curable," Sam told me, just a hint of protest in his voice. "I didn't want to kill Mark, I didn't. I swear it, Freddie. I was quite happy with him being in the church, I even thought he might be useful in place there in helping root out the heresy in the North. I thought he might be able to give me the names of reliable inquisitors that I could use. It was curable. He would need to speak to a mage and I figured that the use of magical healing would seal the deal for him and kill his ambition. No church hierarchy would allow him to be promoted if he had been healed magically, as consorting with magic was still a crime in the priesthood. They tolerated magic users but they were holding themselves to a higher standard. And the stupid bastard got stubborn didn't he."

There was genuine disappointment in Sam's voice.

I took a while to breathe in and out.

"Father found out he was sick," Sam said. "I don't know how. I had meant to leak it to him in some way later. But Father found out on his own and was one of the first to confront Mark with it. Father knew about Laurelen and knew that something could be done, but Mark wouldn't have it and chased Father away. Mark was actually on worse terms with Father than you were at the time of Father's death. Because Mark had seen through Mark and took steps to preserve everything that Father had built. Thus stymying Mark and ensuring my power base."

There was a pause.

"Look at me, Freddie," Sam ordered and at first, I wanted to refuse.

"LOOK at me, Freddie." He ordered again and I turned.

"I regret what is happening to Mark." He told me. "I do. Believe it. He has become a better man for his sickness and even he will admit that. But I did not want to kill him. In the end, though, I would do it again. I searched for alternatives to the problem, but the person who is truly responsible for Mark's death is Mark."

"Fuck that Sam," I told him. "You could have done so many other things."

"At the time of Father's death, Mark could have done any number of things. It was still curable then. Laurelen was in the open. Ariadne was making her presence felt in the family and Kerrass had confronted him with it, but he refused. He was sick and he ignored it. In his determination to be more holy than the next fucker, he actively made the problem worse. I did not mean to kill Mark. But I would do it again."

He meant it too. He was not ashamed of this.

"Who are you trying to convince Sam?" I wondered. "Are you trying to convince me? Or yourself?"

He sank back into himself and once again he was my brother. Whatever it was that he became to kill his brother, torture his sister, her lover and all of the other things that he had done, that part of him seemed to sink back and he seemed so like my brother again. I suddenly had to fight to keep myself from feeling sorry for him.

"Mostly you." He admitted. "But only mostly. It's one of those things that when I have a quiet moment, it rears its head up and I go over the argument again. It's a thing of long marches and rides. It's a thought process for garrison duty. Did I really need to do the thing that I did to Mark?"

He considered as he moved back around the desk to sit down. He had come out from behind it while we were both being angry with each other.

"What do I think now?" He said. "It's easy to see, with the benefit of hindsight, that I might have done things differently and that would have been more beneficial in the long run. But at that time and in that place, with what I knew then rather than what I know now? I would have done the same thing.

"I needed, I still need, the Coulthard fortune to finance my liberation of the North. At the time I needed it to finance my campaign against the cult in the North. If everything went to plan, then Kalayn lands would be my forward base while Castle Coulthard would be my home base. Mark's reignited ambition and the new route to the top jeopardised that effort. I didn't mean to kill him and I would even argue that he killed himself through his own…"

He shrugged and let the matter go.

"I did not mean to kill him." He said. "I am sad that he is going to die. But I would do it again."

He stared up at me from where he had sat down.

"Sit down Freddie." He told me. "We have much more work to do."

I thought about it for a while. I didn't want to sit down. I wanted to rage and shout and complain and scream and most of all, I wanted to smash his stupid self-righteous face in. But he was still in armour and I was still in my shirt sleeves. I looked at my brother. He was still the same Sam, with the same strong face, a strong jaw and handsome cheekbones. All of the features on my face contributed to me being ungainly and less than attractive, on him managed to make him seem handsome and charming.

There was a hardness in his eyes now that I did not recognise. I wondered if it had always been there and that I had chosen not to see it. I have thought a lot about what Chireadean told me about how lots of people have tried to warn me about the darkness that hides in my brother's heart and I have defended him. Was that because I didn't see it? Didn't want to see it? Or was it because he wore a mask to hide it from me?

As I lay on the cot in my cell overnight, that is the question that haunts me while I think of it.

In the end, I sat down.

"So what happened after that?" I wondered, taking up my pen again.

"You pretty much know it." Sam said, "or at least, you have guessed it, or you were there at the time. Both Edmund and Cousin Kalayn were depending on me, both thought that I belonged to them and no other and both thought that I was spying on the other for themselves. In doing that, I was able to feed Cousin Kalayn's disgust at Edmunds's excesses and I was able to feed Edmund's paranoia.

"I was, sometimes openly, spiking Edmund's drinks to drive him to higher and higher heights. Edmund was not stupid though. He realised that he was out on a limb and that that limb was creaking under him. He started doing his sincere best to ingratiate himself with Father and the other members of the castle. I do not doubt that this was when he started keeping that code journal that you and Kerrass found."

"Did you know about the journal?" I wondered.

"No." Sam grinned at a thought. "After you found it, I spent a couple of sleepless nights waiting for you to find my name in it or otherwise figure out that I was involved. I don't know why I wasn't. I have to assume that Edmund either thought that my name wasn't worth recording or that he was trying to keep me safe if he was hung out to dry so that I could come to his rescue or something. I don't know."

"Given what you have said. I think it's more likely to be the former." I commented. I think I was trying to hurt Sam's pride or something. The comments about Mark were still smarting. He didn't rise to the bait though.

"I tend to agree," Sam commented. "I had certainly tried to be that insignificant to him, to them both.

"In the end, it was Father that broke first. Edmund had gotten drunk and he, along with a couple of cronies, had done something unspeakable to a travelling band of pilgrims. I was rarely involved in this kind of thing anymore. I had never had the taste for it and the little contact that I had had with The God had left me afraid that if I partook in those activities, then The God would be more likely to get to me. I was powerful enough and had the ear of enough people to be able to argue that it would be better in my role of being able to get them all out of trouble if I would not be seen at such things. I played up to my role as a younger son and truth be told, it was not hard to do the persuading.

"So Edmund did something unspeakable and Father summoned him. Edmund told me what happened. He wasn't a perfect narrator in that his narrative was often interrupted by pleas for me to help him, to argue with Father and to keep things from Cousin Kalayn. But also with self-righteous assholery. Where he would insist that he was the eldest son and that Father couldn't possibly exile him and so on and on.

"The truth, as far as I can tell, is that Edmund and some of the other cronies had come across a band of pilgrims. Edmund had been drunk, high or both and had determined to have some fun. Our cousin wasn't there but some of the other assholes were and they did their thing with Edmund leading the rites. However, they were sloppy. One of the pilgrims was the youngest daughter of one of Father's assorted minor merchants. You know, the merchant families that are part of the greater company?"

I nodded to show that I understood and Sam continued.

"The girl was a homely gal and was on a pilgrimage to either get away from her father, pray for a husband or to find a calling in the church. Things are uncertain. But she was important enough that her disappearance was noted, she was searched for and her remains were discovered. The local investigation found some bandits that were nearby that had seen the whole thing. The bandits owned up to what they saw, fairly easily I understand, and Father arranged for them to be found employment far away.

"Edmund had been summoned and Father, matter of factly, told him that this would be the last time that he, Father, would bail his son out. And that if anything happened again, then Edmund would be disowned and disinherited. Apparently, a quote was 'I have more than one son for a reason."

Sam's impression of Father was still quite good and I could easily imagine Father saying something like that. I could not help but laugh and when I realised what had happened, I hated myself for it.

Sam seemed to ignore my brief moment of hilarity and carried on speaking.

"You pretty much know, or can guess what happened then. Edmund panicked and wanted to know what to do. He came to Cousin Kalayn and me and between the two of us, we had a big conference about the problem. The assholes all shared the problem because there was no one else that could provide the amount of money for bribes and debauchery that Edmund could. Therefore it was something of a crisis. I don't know, but I rather think that if it had been any other person that had been caught to quite that extent, then they would have been hung out to dry long before that.

"The situation was quite fluid and no one came up with an idea. It was quickly agreed that it would be better for everyone if Father just died so that Edmund could inherit, but no one wanted to be the first to say it. I stayed out of it. Just sitting in the background as my plan fell into place. The plan would be that if Edmund killed Father, I could leave it to ferment for a bit until I turned up on a more "official" basis.

"Then I would use my knowledge of the murder to "figure out" what had happened and hang Edmund out to dry. Then I would be able to pursue the assholes. Their protests that I was one of them would have been dismissed as blame displacement as I would have been able to prove that Edmund had done the murder. I needed to keep my hands off.

"So in the larger meeting, I stayed out of it. Everyone knew what had to be done for the survival of the assholes. But no one wanted to say it. Let alone come up with a plan. So I waited until Edmund got desperate and we were alone and then I just told him what he needed to do. The plan for sabotaging Father's riding equipment came to him quite naturally so all I had to do was to offer some practical points and insist that Edmund would need to force the issue so that Father would be careless.

"The job was done, Father had his "accident" all according to plan. It didn't kill him but he was injured enough. I persuaded Edmund to go and be the dutiful son and when Edmund suggested that the problem was that Father wasn't dying, I got him the stuff that he would need to poison the bandages and help Father shuffle off the mortal coil."

I noted all of this with an effort to contain my disgust.

"A brief problem for Edmund turned into a benefit for me in that Byarby figured out that Edmund had done it and fled, causing Edmund to panic and kill Byarby and his wife. A bit extreme but that was not something that I had any part in. I did feel sorry for Byarby as I had a lot of fondness for the stupid old man. I was kind of hoping that I could use Byarby as an expert witness in it all. But…"

He shrugged.

I shook my head. "You dispose of these lives so easily," I commented. "Byarby was one of the men that helped you to be who you are."

"That's right." He told me. "Byarby did. I regret his death, but I was at war. I did not kill Byarby or his wife. I was furious when Edmund told me what had happened and I think that was the first time that Edmund realised how much danger he was in from me. The first time he had really seen me I think."

He gazed at me steadily.

"You don't understand." He decided.

"No." I admitted, "I do not."

He nodded a little sadly. "I envy you your innocence. I say again, I was at war. My enemies were the cult and, to a lesser extent, the assholes. There is always collateral damage in war. That was what happened to Byarby.

"I "arrived" from where I was stationed further to the North, but the truth is that I had been camping in a deserted village just outside of our lands. I understand that Emma has turned it into an industrial brewing centre now. But at the time, we didn't have authority there. And then…"

He shrugged again.

"Mother killed Edmund," I commented.

"Yes. Mother killed Edmund. I was still figuring out how to turn all of that to my advantage when you turned up."

"Did you know that Mother killed him?"

"I really didn't." He admitted. "No, you did that on your own. I thought that I had lost control somewhere and agreed with the whole theory that it was vengeance from someone. Maybe from someone that he had victimised or otherwise abused, or maybe it was someone from the assholes that were trying to go up in the world. I honestly had no idea.

"But you and Kerrass went through all of the stuff. I literally could not have done a better job of it all myself and I knew where all the skeletons were buried. I mean, I didn't know about the code and the diary and you two figured that out."

He laughed.

"Oh, I wish I could have seen the look on Cousin Kalayn's face when you found all of that. I really do. I received a whole bunch of messages from him that told me to get my arse in gear to come and free him along with all of the others after you had caught him. I had to take them off somewhere private so that I could keep myself from crying with laughter as I read them."

He shifted in his seat to make himself comfortable.

"I still have many of them. I keep them in a chest up at Kalayn castle so that I can take them out whenever I need a good laugh.

"What you don't know is that you had been dismissed from both our brother's mind and Cousin Kalayn's mind as being the weaker brother. I had done my best to emphasise that to be fair, to protect you so that you wouldn't be recruited into the cult yourself. By that point, of course, you were far too strong to be recruited. You were too settled in your own morals and codes of behaviour and more power to you for it. But I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when they realised that it was you that was systematically destroying their organisation."

"I remember Cousin Kalayn telling me that he had often been told about my weakness," I commented. "Was that you or Edmund that he was talking about?"

"To be fair, it could have been both of us. They still thought of you as lesser and if you had become a threat, then they would have not paused in the decision to kill you for it. Edmund genuinely thought you were too weak to be considered as being worthwhile.

"I would say that it was more likely to be Edmund though."

"What about the sigils that we found?"

Sam cackled. "The inverted ankh and the Lionhead." He laughed again. "As I understand it, it's a genuine heresy. And it does have power similar to The God. It might even be the same thing, I have no idea and the people that know are dead or gone. My understanding though, was that it was just another taboo that Edmund and the rest got off on. Certainly, the folks in the North never used that sigil. It was one of those things…"

He considered.

"It had power. It did have power and we all knew that. But at the same time… It was almost like the hand of destiny or a more asshole way of placing the executioner's axe over your head. We had it, we did things on or near it and we would assign it to people for it to be looked after."

He sighed and his smile seemed to fade.

"I jest, but we empowered the thing with our rites. Was it connected to The God? Or was it connected to something else? I have no idea. I am glad you destroyed the thing. It was… unpleasant to be around."

"I remember having to keep you away from coming to the arrest though," I argued. "If you had come you would have been given away."

"I remember the same conversation." Sam grinned. "It was whether or not I would be involved in the arrest when you all went into the clearing to capture the cultists. You didn't want me to come and Mark and the rest agreed so I played the dutiful vengeful son and protested that I should go along before allowing myself to be placated. If you had all said that I should have been there, I would have argued that someone should stay behind and protect the castle. That it might have been dangerous to leave the castle undefended."

I nodded, it would have worked too. We didn't know how serious the threat had been at the time.

Sam continued.

"I remember being convinced that someone in the arrested cultists would either admit, or would be forced to admit, that they were the ones that killed Edmund. So when Kerrass turned up, gathered everyone and told us about Mother while you went off and confronted her. I was genuinely astonished. As were Mark and Emma for that matter."

"How much did you know of her past?"

"Oh, all of it. Uncle Kalayn used to boast to me about it. About how he had had my mother before my Father had. He was establishing dominance over me and, although I don't think he realised it. I think he was considering himself in competition with Father. He was always angry that Father had made more money, was more famous and had more influence than he did. Regardless of whether or not he was a cultist and an asshole. He still had that whole superior thing over the new money of Father."

I nodded, all of that made sense.

"So when we came to the sentencing of Mother?" I prompted.

Sam nodded. "I think I know a little bit more about what was going on there than you do. I know that Edmund had tried several inappropriate things with Emma and Emma knew about a lot of what Edmund had done to the servants and things. Emma was stronger… I mean physically, more than Francesca was when Edmund had tried the same thing and they were closer in age. So her knowledge of what had happened to Francesca was an extra thing for her.

"My fury was ignited by that though. Emma and Francesca had been believed where I had been ignored. There was something about that that struck me as unfair. I don't know why one was more believable than the other and knowing that my mother knew about the cult and had more intimate knowledge of it all meant that my story should have been just as believable as either Emma's or Francesca's story. Yet I was ignored."

"So your sentencing of Mother was out of vengeance?"

He winced at the phrasing. "Yes and no. Everything that I said in that meeting is and was true. If that had happened to anyone else, they would have been strung up. You have lived a rarified existence in that you have rarely had the opportunity to listen to the criticism that has been levelled against the family. But it is true that if anyone else had done what Mother had done, then she would barely have had time to gather her wits before she would have been taken to the headsman, or the gallows for that matter. Or… given her history, burnt at the stake.

"She could have done so much, but she didn't. She could have burnt out the cult before Edmund could have been corrupted and it's even possible that if she had done that, then she could have prevented Edmund from being corrupted, and although Edmund would still have been an asshole, lazy and entitled, he might not have been as bad. Maybe someone could have gotten through to him. I don't know. And that is, for me, her real crime.

"I do not blame myself, but I killed Mark and I have been a party to other deaths. But every death that I have been a party to, every death in the North, every death that can be described there. She could have done something about all of it. She would have been believed as well. So this fight would not have been mine. It would have been fought before I was even remotely aware that the fight even existed. Mark would still be alive and all of those people that the cult, and the assholes, have killed and tortured over the years, would not have had to go through all of that horror.

"For that, I hate her and for that, she deserved to die and she still deserves to die."

Not for the first time, I was dismayed by the anger and hate in his voice.

It was beginning to get late in the day by that point, the sun was setting through the windows and the natural light was turning red. Someone had come in and lit torches on all of the walls. Sam held his hand up.

"I know you have more questions Freddie and I intend to answer them. Next comes the night of the bonfires and the night that I properly met Phineas for the first time. And that will take more time than we have at the moment. So get some rest, and write up your notes. I will see to your comfort and the comfort of your assistant."

I nodded and went to pack up but Sam proved that he was still similar to my brother after all.

"What do you think?" He asked me as I was bundling things up to be taken off.

"About what?" I wondered as a memory occurred. I sniggered. "You know that Kerrass once asked me the same thing after he had told me his story?"

"You told him that it would not be your place to judge. Because you were too close to the subject."

"And what was true for him is true to you as well. There is a difference though."

"What's that?"

"Where Kerrass was a stranger who saved my life multiple times and had became a friend. You are my brother, my closest friend and my relative from my younger years. And it turns out that all of that was a lie. You have not saved my life, you have endangered it, stolen and tortured the woman I love and other members of our family and caused untold destruction. Kerrass saved me and rose to the occasion. You have destroyed me and sunk much lower than I could have thought possible."

Sam actually laughed. "Yes, but other than that."

I sighed and rubbed my head as I thought. "I think it's a very sad story so far. I still don't see how you went from that to where you are now, leading a rebellion against an empire that has only benefitted us. To a man that has betrayed and murdered…"

I forced myself to take a deep breath and consider things logically.

"I am forced to try and put myself in your place. What would I have done if those things had happened to me? Would I have risen to the occasion? Or would I have been destroyed?"

"There is no way of knowing," Sam told me

"Which is true. I would need to think about it. But otherwise, I am forced to admit that I can understand your actions. I don't agree with them, I don't like them and I would like to think that I would have done things differently. But we don't know. I can understand your anger against Father and Mother. And to a certain extent, I can understand your rage against Emma and Mark."

Sam nodded as I spoke.

"I do think," I carried on. "I do think you didn't know all of what was happening in the middle of all of that though. I wonder if your story set Father to thinking. You were, as you admitted, Seven, you did not see everything that happened behind the scenes and maybe that was the thing that set Father to looking at Edmund properly. But like people keep telling me that Father was proud of me, we will never know now."

I could not help but put some steel in my voice, some hurt and some of my own rage.

"We will never know because you had him killed."

Sam accepted that point.

"I also wonder if what you remember is actually what happened. Memory is a fickle and imperfect thing. There are whole things that I don't remember. I only remember some of what happened during my journey with Kerrass because I forced myself to write them down. So did those things that you describe actually happen? Or have you just forced yourself to remember them one way in order to justify what you have done. You did say that you cannot remember everything that happened in those early years and with the presence of the rites that you have taken and the drugs that you are continuing to take, medicinal or not, is your memory of the matter perfect?

"Again though," I told him. "I can understand your anger. I can even understand your reasons for not wanting to use the proper authorities in that they would tear down the accuser and the accuser's family just as much as they would tear down the intended victim."

I shook my head.

"These are the things that we will never know now though. As I say, I think it's a very sad story. I am sorry that you had to go through all of that and I'm sorry that you were forced to make those decisions when you should have been protected by those stronger than you. Emma, Father, Mark and Mother included."

I thought for a bit longer.

"I wish I could have known, I don't know what I would have done to help. It's more than likely, if we follow your logic, that I would have got us all killed by church inquisitors and the rest. But we can't know that. I am still a bit more hopeful about that. I rather think that the Inquisition would have relished an opportunity to tear down some old money and exert some dominance over them. Especially when trying to prove themselves to the newly conquering Empire and Emperor, Empress."

He nodded his acceptance of this point as well.

"If I'm honest though?" I decided. "The thing that damns you is the death of Mark. You can make all of the excuses that you want, and you can justify it all you want, but you murdered your brother. He might still be walking around and being Mark. But you murdered him instead and so, have killed someone that could have been a powerful ally to you. He might have shared your outrage and used the crusade against the cult as a way towards his ambitions. Instead, you ensured that you would get the money, power and prestige."

"Do I not deserve some reward for all of the things that I have been through?" He wondered, not aggressively, more curious as to what I thought.

"Duty is not done in anticipation of reward," I told him. "Mark could have been your strongest ally and instead, you killed him. When you look back and wonder, that is the moment of your damnation I think. He had done nothing to you other than to trust his Father would take care of it. Which is what he was supposed to do in that place. That is what has damned you."

He smiled a little sadly.

"Oh, Freddie. If by the time we are done with all of this, you still think of that as the least of my crimes, then I will be doing well."

"I meant…"

"It doesn't matter." He said, waving the point away. "But you should know that Mark is not the only sacrifice I have made towards my goals.

He looked at me sternly, forcing me to meet his gaze. This was the leader, the torturer and the fanatic version of Sam. He made sure that he had my eyes before he spoke clearly and precisely, the way you do when you want to convince someone of the importance of your words.

" In case you are wondering," he said, "my goals have been the liberation of the North and the destruction of the cult and its off-shoots. Know this Freddie. Remember it and write it down."

He saw me hesitate and he gestured. "I'm serious, write it down."

I found a blank piece of paper and dipped my quill.

"In the pursuit of my goals. There is no coin that I will not spend. There is no blood that I will not spill and no life that I will not sacrifice in the pursuit of that. And before you accuse me of hypocrisy and tell me that if I was so sure of my ideals, then my own life and blood would be spilt, let alone my own fortune…

"Right now Emma is liquifying the Coulthard company to fund the rebellion. Mercenaries, arms, supplies and all of the rest. I have already spilt plenty of my own blood and eventually, I will spend my own sanity, life and maybe even my soul will be sacrificed towards that goal. I know that and I mean every word, Freddie. The only person that will survive to reap the benefits of all of this, is you."

"Why me?" I asked, feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the determination in his voice.

"Because you are my brother Freddie. You are a far better man than me and while I remake the world, I would have you ensure that we do not then lose it afterwards."

I nodded, not knowing how to answer that.

"Write up your notes Freddie. I will read them and then we will continue the story. The night of the bonfires and the entrance of Phineas onto the stage."

"I would like to say that I look forward to it," I told him.

"But you don't?"

I shook my head and left.

(A/N: Sam's story of his early life is not based on my life, but some of the sentiments that were expressed by him have been taken from accounts that I am aware of. As is the reaction of Sam's parents and how various people reacted. If you, or anyone else you know, has suffered any of this or if any of it resonates with you, know that you are not alone and it is never shaming to seek help. In fact, that might be the bravest thing you can do.

Thanks for reading.)