A Scholar's travels with a Witcher

by Spike368

Sent out to gather the knowledge of the real world. A young scholar from the University of Oxenfurt finds a wounded Witcher on the steps to the inn where he was staying. So he starts gathering the material for his journals. Rated T for language I will be publishing this story on Royal Road /profile/349358

170. Chapter 170

(A/N: This chapter was paid for by Covid industries. So I apologise if bits of the chapter seems a bit strange or wobbly, Covid brain is real y'all. Not helped by the fact that a lot of this is exposition so… Thanks for sticking with it. Warning: Contains off-hand and dismissive references to horrific things having been done to women in the past.)

This is no longer funny.

When I was first brought into this, after I had first been captured by… whatever and however, I remember saying that I must laugh about what had happened or I would cry. I found ways to look at the entire situation and find morbidly funny things that would make me snigger. I would mock the men that stand guard over me with a metal rod and barbed whip ready to inflict pain in the event of my disobedience. I referred to them as critics to make myself feel better about hating them.

I don't hate them. What I feel for them is so small and banal. It doesn't deserve the word "hatred". It might be scorn instead, or maybe, given the introduced possibility of what has happened to these men to make them so big and physically powerful, it is possible that I might even pity them.

The world has changed for me now. Things seem to be sinking in. This is the new normal. Routine has crept in and the horror of the situation is a dull and muted roar at the back of things. I no longer believe that it's all going to be ok. That I am going to be better or that this will, in some way, be fixed. I no longer believe that.

I wonder if I used to be an optimist. I never thought of myself as one, instead, I preferred to think of myself as a realist. Hope is useful, but I am experienced enough to know that hope can also be cruel.

Now there is no hope. I am done. All there is, is anger. Anger that this has happened to me and mine. Anger that this could have been allowed to happen. I see no way out of it all.

And worse than that, I must hold onto that anger. I must grip it tightly and fuel it in the same way that I would fuel a campfire. I must do this because if I let go of that rage, then all that there is left is despair and if all that I have is despair then what is the point of it all anyway.

And that leads to far more horrific questions.

But I have my orders and I must follow them. Not because I have any kind of hope, but because if I disobey then others will be made to suffer.

I hate this. I hate this entire process. Two interviews in and I am questioning everything I know and everything that I have seen. The world is no longer what I thought it was and I feel lesser for it. Holy Flame but what have I become?

Again, There is an important extended section to start this entire thing going. I know that it was important because as he was saying this stuff, Sam was staring just off to one side of me and so, he was watching those events as they unfolded in front of him.

Eventually, if these fucks are serious about all of my notes being turned into some kind of official biography, then all of this will need to be compiled into whatever order makes sense to the publishers. But these passages will need to be kept almost entirely together. The ones where he is just remembering.

It says something about me. I have no idea what it says, but it's definitely something that even though I am being forced to write these things. Even though I am being forced to listen to this awful, horrific shit. I am still determined to do a good job.

I could argue that I am doing so for people to remember exactly how evil Sam and his cronies have been, one way or another. I also wonder if this book or these notes are going to be used against me in an inquisitorial court. Because I can't believe that some priest is going to believe that I had no idea that any of this stuff was going on. I barely believe it myself. How could I not have seen this? The only solution is that I deliberately decided not to see it.

If Sam succeeds, then he promises that I will live a privileged life although I have no idea what that means and he isn't telling me. So there is even something to say that I should hope for his victory.

But I don't. If the price of his defeat is that I go to the pyre, then I will go and gladly. Believe that, whoever it is that is reading these notes. I will go gladly and I do not believe that I will be entirely alone in that sentiment.

So here, I am using Sam's words again, regarding his first proper meeting with the Mage, Phineas Tordril. From the sounds of things, this means that the hooded and cloaked swordsman that I received some accounts of, was almost certainly Sam. I can't confirm that of course but it seems likely.

Over to Sam.

I remember that he was at the back of the group of them. Everyone else was walking around with serious expressions on their faces. Scowls and frowns. Laughable expressions that they deliberately wore over their faces to make themselves appear thoughtful, or to appear like men of substance. They turned the collars of their coats up and wore absurd voluminous hoods that would not have looked out of place on the head of a monk in some out-of-place monastery where disgraced men are sent to live out the rest of their days.

I found them laughable and I had to school my face into a careful expression of control, subservience and modesty.

You did not know it, but you had done me an absurdly huge favour in being the man that had figured all of this out and if Kerrass had lived, then I would have thanked him for the same reason. It meant that I was absolutely beyond reproach and that the assholes that we were burning, had obviously hung themselves during their efforts to go that bit further and fly that bit higher.

But now a moment of crisis for the cult had come and as such, they all needed to come south so that they could survey the ruin that had been left for them by their errant sons and off-shoots. They were afraid. The death of Cousin Raynard Kalayn and Edmund von Coulthard was a disaster because it meant that they were vulnerable. They had no idea how much those other cultists that had been led by my cousin knew. Therefore, they had no idea what had been passed onto the necessary authorities so they were terrified that there were already Inquisitorial armies that were rallying to see to the destruction of the cult in the North.

They were afraid, and because they were unused to being afraid, they were angry and they were looking for people to be angry with. These men had not fought in the war. They had stayed in garrison towns at the heads of their household regiments. Regiments that would have made all the difference if they had actually turned up on the field to support us but obviously, that was never going to happen.

They were trying to be angry with me. All the while Uncle Kalayn was standing near me but not beside me. He was listening to the other men rant at me before he would interrupt them, remind them of where they were and the danger that they were in before snapping that they should be quiet. I was enjoying myself and frantically trying to keep that enjoyment from my face in case it betrayed me.

I had a counter to every argument. I could hide behind their own rules and laws. I was the younger son and was not in charge of the offshoot. I could prove that I had advised our cousin and brother as to what to do. I had written to the North that they needed to send someone with more authority to curtail the excesses of the pair of them and their associated hangers-on. I could prove that and both Cavill and Uncle Kalayn knew that.

Cavill wasn't there though. He had more sense.

But Uncle Kalayn had come south and he had brought some of his nearest and dearest with him. Powerful men to be sure and they were unhappy with the new regimes that were beginning to take over. They could feel their power trembling and had come to realise that they were sitting on a branch while someone was sawing at the tree. They knew that the Empress was coming to power and that the Emperor was meaning to retire in favour of his daughter. They knew that the Empress had no time for men whose only argument as to why she should listen to them was because she was a woman and they were a man. They saw the increasing power of the female rulers under the Empire such as Queen-Regent Adda, Queen Anais, Queen Meve and the rest.

They were afraid and like all people who realised that their world was ending, instead of changing and moving with those changes, adapting and learning to live in the new world, they were desperately hanging onto what they thought was their powerbases.

As I say, it was funny to watch as I saw the despair enter their faces. I saw the slow sinking sensation that they would not be able to pin this blame on me.

They looked for other targets to direct their ire at. The guardsmen all had their orders and the Watch Captains had chosen those men carefully that night. These were men who had been born on the streets, fought on the front line of wars and had no respect for unearned or assumed authority.

Another moment where I had to struggle not to laugh was when one of those fine fellows that our uncle brought south with him, endeavoured to order one of the guards to release his son. The guard laughed in his face. The parent tried to insist, remonstrating with the guard physically until the guard hit him in the face with his mailed fist. Not even that hard.

Do you remember the first time you were hit in the face? Properly hit in the face, not with a training blow or on the training fields. But a real, honest to The God, punch in the face. You blink, tears come and then there is a moment where you cannot believe that this is happening to you. You sit there dazed and blinking stupidly while the tears stream down your face before, if you are lucky, someone will come to check on you. I remember it. I remember what happened the first time I was struck in the face. I remember being ashamed of the tears even though I had no control over them and they sprung to my eyes without knowing about them or conscious thought.

But I looked at that fallen man, his nose crumpled as he automatically spat the mixture of blood and teeth out of his face. He could not believe that this had happened to him.

It was glorious.

This… I think that there were more of them, moving through the crowd, trying to save their children and keep their identities secret so that the crowd did not try to end their lives out of associated guilt and communal rage. But there were only about half a dozen that knew who I was. And they were terrified and didn't know what to do with themselves.

The only exception was Phineas. He stood at the back of the group, looking around at everything with an air of interested, curiosity-driven enjoyment. I could well imagine the words that would come out of his mouth when he invited himself to come down south with Uncle Kalayn.

"Oh," he would have said. "Can I come? I have never seen a mass burning before."

He was like a man walking through an art gallery for the first time, or a museum. I remember that we had to chase off a couple of stallholders that had wanted to sell snacks and street food there. Phineas would have been one of the people that complained that you didn't let anyone sell toffee apples or some kind of cooked meat in bread. He would have watched someone burn with a cake in one hand and a flagon of beer in the other. He would have been annoyed when someone jostled him causing him to spill his pint.

You remember what he looked like. He didn't seem to dress ostentatiously like other Mages that I have met over the years and he certainly didn't look like any of the Sorceresses. I cannot imagine any woman in their right mind describing him as attractive, let alone having the kind of conniptions and the foolish, stupid, lust-filled gaze that they get when someone suitably gorgeous passes them in the street.

He had longish dark hair at the time. I would later learn that he cut it whenever he remembered that it needed cutting or when he was going to be entering some kind of formal place where he would need to have his hair cut. At the time, it was tied out of his face with a kind of top-knot kind of affair that you see in the Northern Kaedweni

He wore a dark robe and the firelight glittered in the lines that were in the depths of that robe. Arcane patterns or whatever he claimed them to be. He was not an ugly man, it was more that he just didn't seem to care about romance or self-grooming. I certainly knew that he had physical needs which he exercised when he felt the need. But it wasn't one of his priorities.

I understand that women felt him off-putting. Men too for that matter. I think it was the low-level kind of scorn that he had for everyone and everything. Some people default to liking people and then they need a reason to dislike someone. You are one of these people. Phineas was one of those people that dislikes people until he is given a reason to treat them as equals.

But on the other hand, if he decided that you were his friend, then you had a friend for life.

He was in that process where he was looking around at what was going on around him. Looking at the people on the flames and listening to what was being said with half an ear. Like you, I have had training and I was keeping watch on him with half an eye. I know to look for the people on the outskirts of things and this man made me nervous. But I had other people in my face, many of whom were trying to yell under their breath and I could not devote enough time to properly keep him in my gaze.

I am confident that he didn't know who I was. At best, he knew that I was the cult's agent in the Oxenfurt, Novigrad kind of area. But he certainly didn't know my name. He was paying attention to what was going on around me with a kind of remote, half-paying attention kind of gaze. But at some point he stopped and stared at me, frowning in concentration which was very different from the fake frowns that were being worn by the cultists that were around me. The frown was much slighter, calmer, and more thoughtful. He was considering me.

Then I had to look away for a moment. The same fear that infected the men around me was beginning to infect me. Would this strange, uncaring man on the outside of things finally be the thing that was my undoing? But I could not do anything about it. All I could do was carry on as if I was safe, and hope that it would be so in the long run. When I finally managed to look back at him, he was looking back around himself with a new expression of interest in what was going on around us and a slow smile was growing across his face.

Now I was really nervous about him. Uncle Kalayn was finally tugged aside to exert some of his authority on some guards which was, in turn, ignored. Things got a bit chaotic in the middle of all of that. On the one hand, I had to be the good, noble and righteous Sir Samuel Coulthard whose little brother was the reason that we all found out that this horror was going on in the local area. The other part of me though was the cult infiltrator.

Adopting one persona over another was not difficult. Going around and being righteously angry was certainly not difficult. There was also a certain amount of triumph in my feelings when I was able to be your brother. I enjoyed that bit. It felt good.

I was trying to enjoy my victory a little. You might have been the person that finished them off, but I like to think I set them up for you. I didn't mind that it was that way around, I was watching men that had abused me die, screaming in agony.

On the other hand, the subservient lackey of the cult persona was not hard to adopt either. It helped to be able to distance myself from what I was seeing and what was happening to me. But switching between the two at the drop of a hat was more difficult than I could have supposed. My solution was to tell a bit of the truth when the cultists caught me. I told them that I was having to pretend to triumph to maintain my cover. Whereas when it went the other way, I could tell them that, regardless of what had gone wrong, watching people burn was still difficult.

So that was how I danced the fine line, the one to the other.

It was tricky. I have done both extensively over the years. But now I was hoping from one to the other and that made it more difficult and that was what I was focusing on. So I was there, talking with all of the other people that had a vested interest in what was going on, trying not to give away the entire situation.

I remember being called away. Someone had shouted my name, it might even have been you so I had to dismiss the people that I was talking to and walk off so that I could deal with this or that. But in the same way that the most dangerous time for the thief is when they think that they're free and clear and therefore they start to relax. That was my moment of danger. I turned to look back at the new man that had caused me so much worry.

He was smiling and he saw me looking. And as he saw it, his smile widened.

I remember thinking that this was it. This was the moment that all of my careful planning was going to come crashing down around my ears. This was the moment where I lost. I had destroyed the assholes but the greater threat, the cult itself, was still out there. Still a danger and therefore, I might as well have not bothered.

I remember that moment of despair so clearly. I remember knowing that Edmund and Cousin Kalayn were going to be destroyed anyway, whether we all wanted them to or not. So that was going to happen, all I had done, was do my best to control the descent and arrange matters to my benefit. And now this man, who I still didn't know the name of. This lackey of our uncle was going to bring that all down around me.

I was so upset that it took a distinct amount of concentration to keep to my responsibilities. I remember thinking that at least I could take Uncle Kalayn with me if he came after me. I was an infinitely better swordsman than any of the people that he had brought with him combined and even more than that, I had armour on so I might have survived the moment. But a message would have been sent north about my betrayal. Uncle Kalayn was stupid but he wasn't that stupid if you know what I mean.

I had dim ideas that I would be able to take Uncle Kalayn down with me as I fled, then I would steal a horse and some goods to go North before I would start murdering my way through the people that were at the top of the cult. I wondered how far I would get before someone would catch me. I thought I had a good shot at Cavill and his cronies, but at the same time, I didn't think I was going to get far.

I remember operating automatically for a while, going through the motions and thinking about what to do. I started to write you a letter, mentally composing it in my head so that you would know what you would be looking for when you went North or the information that you could use while you stood before the Inquisition to claim your innocence. I knew that my mistakes would cost me my life and maybe cost the family everything. But you would still be a trusted scholar and maybe you could… I don't know.

Phineas snuck up on me.

I don't know how he did it. He always claimed that he had skills that the average age was not supposed to have and as such, he was better equipped for this kind of thing. I always wondered if he used magic to help him when it came to sneaking around. He could certainly move quietly when he put his mind to it.

But he grabbed me by the sleeve and hauled me off between some fires to a quiet area. He had found an area amongst the pyres where the heat wasn't too hot that you couldn't breathe, but hot enough to banish some of the onlookers to go and worry about other things.

"Who are you?" He asked with a kind of smile of wonder on his face.

I remember looking around to see if there were any witnesses. I had my hand on my dagger and thought that I could kill him and put him on one of the fires that were already burning hot enough to turn the average human body to ash. There were plenty of screams and the smell of roasting humans anyway so the only danger would be if someone saw me.

He guessed my intent and took a prominent and intended step away from me.

"Who are you?" he asked again. If anything, his smile had broadened.

I decided to play for time.

"I would have thought you knew who I was," I told him, measuring the distance between the two of us.

He laughed. "I know that you are Kalayn's agent down here. I know that he sent you after an already lost cause and that you kept these idiots alive long after they should have been dust on the wind."

I stared at him.

"I am Samuel Coulthard," I told him. "Sir Samuel Coulthard."

His eyes widened in a delighted expression and his smile broadened even further. I am lucky enough to have been in the presence of many highly intelligent people. Yourself not least and there is always a moment that if you watch it carefully, you can see their brain working. You can actively watch as they think things through at a rate that the rest of us mere mortals cannot even comprehend.

"Brother to the scholar?" Phineas said. "Younger brother of… You did this."

He paused and looked at me again for a long moment.

"This is your doing." His eyes widened in surprise and delight.

I have been so careful over the years, keeping these things from other people. But suddenly, there was a man that I didn't know that seemed to have figured out what was going on.

"How did you do it I wonder?" He asked, genuine curiosity on his face. He seemed to be interested, fascinated even. Excited. I put my hand on my dagger and went to draw it.

"No no," he said. "You have nothing to worry about from me. Nothing to worry about at all. I might even be able to help you. I certainly hope so, I would love to work with someone that is not an idiot. Someone that has a goal, who knows what they want to do."

He smiled. I was still taking in the fact that someone was standing in front of me who seemed to have made me so completely.

He was looking at me, searching my face. I have no idea what he was looking for but he nodded, before shaking his head.

"The sheer amount of talent that this cult has just wasted in focusing on the elder sons. You are there, right in front of them, thinking on your own feet, acting, deciding and strategising for them. I bet they trusted you with everything that they knew, everything that they wanted. I bet they gave you all of the power that you could possibly need to do whatever it was that you wanted with them."

He laughed.

"And they didn't realise that in doing so, they had laid the foundations of their own destruction. How utterly marvellous."

I was honestly speechless.

"Honestly…"

By the way, if there is one thing that I learned about Phineas over the couple of years that I associated with him, he loved the sound of his own voice. He rarely gave in to that urge as he had other things going on and much preferred holding that knowledge over those people whom he considered lesser than him. But once he had decided that you were on equal standing with him, you could rarely shut him up.

"Honestly, there you have it. Your younger brother manages to all but single-handedly demolish a coup attempt that took years of planning and implementing. And as far as I can tell, he did it by being nice to someone that no one began to consider being nice to. Your immediate older brother saw which way the wind was blowing in the political climate of the church and with a stroke, he is going to be a powerful man. And then there is you, a military man who has orchestrated the downfall of the Eldest sons of many families that were part of their little circle-jerk of idiots. But instead of taking any of that talent, or honing it, training it and encouraging it… Instead, they focus on the older brother.

"The drunk, the Lech, the addict, the debtor… The idiot."

He laughed again. I got the feeling of a man that was relaxing for the first time in years.

"It is not just you and your brothers that have been cast aside and treated sceptically either. Have you met Arthur in the North?"

I nodded mutely.

"Illegitimate son that one. Has more talent in his little finger than the rest of his God-forsaken family. He could lead the cult and make it great. He could have made the worship of The God a real thing. An honest power in the world. He could have led armies and instead of worshipping some kind of…" he waved his hand searching for inspiration, "metaphorical candle flame. Men would be worshipping The God instead and then the North would have been so much stronger and maybe even able to resist the coming black tide from the South."

The thought of rebellion against the Nilfgaardians was not yet in my mind. I just wanted to carry my war to the cult and to the ass-holes. This was the first time that someone had said it, the first time that someone had put the idea in my head that that was something that I could do.

Like all ideas of that kind, it took root, flourished and my imagination ran off with it for a moment. The power to cast the Empire out of the North. That was the kind of crusade that I felt as though I had been born for. I tried to squash it, to smother it. I had things to do first.

He had been watching all of these thoughts across my face. And maybe, he had even read them because although his mouth was talking, he was thinking and planning.

"But Arthur is ruined. His brothers are brutes and cretins. Hedonists and extraordinarily lazy. But if I had someone like you at my side, someone that could properly see the benefits of the gifts that I have to offer. Who could strategise as to how to properly use them? Then we could be a power. The things that someone like you could do with the gifts that I have to give."

He saw those words hit as well and he smiled.

"Oh…" He began. "You and I are going to do great things together. It's going to be such fun."

I shudder now, as I shuddered then when Sam was saying those things.

I don't know how long it's been since the previous time I was called into Sam's study. Not Father's study, not Emma's study. Sam's study. The previous time that I had seen him was when he had told me about his earliest interactions with Edmund and about how he had arranged to poison Mark. According to the rhythms of the days where I get up, eat, go and work for a while before coming back to my cell, eating some more and going to bed. It has been four days all told. Mostly, what I have been doing in that period is just going over what he told me.

I already have the shorthand notes that I made when he was speaking so that Johann is reading those things out which, in turn, are being transcribed before being taken back. Then I re-reading them again so that I can think about those things and ruminate on them.

I am taken back to my cell… They call it my room but it is still my cell and I have to keep reminding myself not to let their language try and affect me. They want me to call it my room as though I am privileged to have such accommodation. I am privileged too, I know that there are far worse quarters in the castle that contain many prisoners.

I can hear them screaming sometimes.

But that doesn't change the fact that I am sleeping on a short, narrow pallet with a thin blanket and no pillow while also being forced to piss and defecate into a bucket. That bucket does get emptied for me so I suppose that that is a certain level of privilege that I have over others.

I am encouraged to exercise, but I have no idea what I would do to manage this. Despite it being on the mend, my hand is still injured so the traditional things of what Kerrass calls "push-ups" are impossible and the other traditional "sit-ups"... well… I don't really want to put my ass on the stone floor of the room that I have vomited, pissed and shat in.

The food is also far from wonderful. It is a soldier's food, but not the good kind of soldier's food. I know this because someone has since pointed it out to me. It turns out that there are tiers of soldier's food. There is the food that is fed to the professional, armoured soldiers that need their strength. Simple, nutritious, tasty and plenty of it. But there is also the kind of thin watery gruel that is fed to the common foot soldier. The men that are herded together, wrapped in a blanket that they are told is armour and given, essentially, a sharpened stick and told that it's a spear.

The collective name for these kinds of fighters is the "PFI". I now know what they eat. It's a thin, watery porridge. There are occasional lumps in it. The lumps seem to vary from time to time and I have learned that this corresponds to breakfast and dinner. There is bread, cheese and some meat though but I haven't seen a vegetable or a piece of fruit in some time.

I am beginning to long for an apple. Something juicy and tart. The kind of apple where the juice explodes out of the flesh of the fruit and is in danger of squirting you in the eye.

I am worried about the sailor's disease now. I keep checking my teeth to see if any of them are loose in my gums. It hasn't happened yet and I struggle to remember at what stage that disease starts to settle in.

I have no idea.

But these are the things that are kind of leading me to think that there is more to all of this than I am kind of understanding. Why do I think that there is more going on?

Because Sam looks fucking awful.

The last time I saw him, he told me that he was making sacrifices, that he already had made sacrifices to see to the end of his goal. But Holy Flame… I just can't see what poison, or even… I've seen curses affect people on the path with Kerrass and I have seen some sick people while doing the same. I have seen men who should have been dead, but those men took weeks to get to that point. When I had seen Sam at the dinner on the night of the Autumn Equinox, he had seemed a little pale and sweaty. Not unsurprising that even the sickest individual might seem a little bit put off by what he was about to do.

The time he was coercing me into working for him, he was calm, collected, and maybe a little pale.

The time after that when we had begun the process of compiling his biography, he had seemed the most like my brother. The Sammy that I had worked and fought with as a child. The Sam that I couldn't believe was doing all of these things to me and to the people that I love, the people that I thought that he loved.

He was a bit twitchy to be sure but Sam has always had more energy than the rest of us.

This time he looked sick.

They came for me early in the day. I know that because when I arrived at the study, The shutters were open and I could see the light of dawn there. There was dampness in the air and I guessed that some of the autumn rains had settled in at some point. Even at my most optimistic, we had not hit winter yet.

Sam was dressed in his shirtsleeves in defiance of the damp weather. He was sitting back in the large, padded chair that lived behind his desk and he looked pale as a sheet. I would almost call it waxy. There was a sheen of sweat on him that he occasionally would stir himself to wipe off with a towel that was kept nearby for the purpose. He sat back, legs stretched out in front of him and he would often rest his head on the backrest of his chair as if the effort of keeping himself upright was too much for him.

Emma was still in the remote corner of the room, scratching away with a quill on the numerous pieces of paper. But there were several more people in the room this time.

The first person that I saw was Ariadne. At first, I was glad to see her. That reflexive wave of delight and joy that she was still alive and still living. That I was seeing her for real, rather than just imagining her or hoping that she was alright.

Saying that she was alright was possibly a strong term.

She was still wearing the same blue dress that she had been wearing the night of the Equinox. Now it was torn, dirty and there was blood splatter all over it. It would not take much effort to just rip the entire thing off and all things considered, that might be a mercy. I could see her underclothes but far from being the erotic sight that I had always imagined, instead, I felt shame and an overwhelming desire to look away. The dirt and the bloodstains were up her forearms and around her feet but there was certainly some generalised splattering.

I was pleased to see that there were none around her face. I know that she doesn't need blood to survive, but I also know that drinking blood is like a strong alcohol or drug to elder vampires and as such, the thought had occurred that they would force her to drink blood to control her. But they had obviously decided that this was not going to be something that they were going to pursue.

She looked awful though. For the most beautiful woman in my mind, she had lost weight. Her skin was pasty and clammy looking and her eyes were sunken in deep shadows as well as being bloodshot. Her hands hung down by her sides and were slightly elongated with claws extending out of the fingers. The blood and filth was encrusted under the nails.

She didn't register my entrance. She didn't look at me at all. Just staring straight ahead without moving. The only reason that I knew she was alive at all was that she would occasionally breathe.

I longed to go to her. I felt that need in my legs to propel me over to her side. A surge of energy that I struggled to contain. It was in my arms as well, the need to wrap my arms around her and to feel her pressed against me. Even if she was instructed to just stand there. Even if she didn't have a choice but to stay there and stay still like a statue, I felt as though somewhere underneath there, she would know that I was there.

So why didn't I? Self-preservation. There were a lot more guards in the room. Several of whom were standing between Ariadne and me which meant that if I had taken a good attempt at getting closer to her, fast. Then they might be under orders to stop me from doing precisely that. Aggressively for all I know.

'Soon' I told her in my mind and I put as much effort into expressing that same sentiment with my eyes. I can only hope that she heard it.

She was not the only person that was there though.

There was an elf there that was fussing over Sam and I was not particularly surprised to realise that I recognized her. Saddened? Yes, but not shocked. I remembered Ella, the Elven Alchemist that was the root of so much sorrow, as an angry, bitter woman. Beautiful in the way of her race but there had been a lot of hard edges to her face and her posture. I remembered her as being an angry woman. And by angry, I mean that it seemed to almost consume her. Her gestures were short and sharp. She spat her words as though they offended her lips to be saying them.

I had not remembered her being this thin though. The plays of memory are powerful things and as I looked at her, it took me a moment to recognise her. One of those strange things where I knew who she was, or rather I knew who she must be. But she looked different to how she looked in my memory.

She looked… uglier. She was gaunt and uncomfortable in her skin. An edge was missing from her, a sense of defiance that seemed to have leaked out somewhere. I have no idea where of course but that was the way it felt to me. Whereas before she had been fuelled by something. A determination to see to the end of those that had tormented her. Anger at everything that had happened.

I am unsure.

Now, it was like she was not really there. She was just an empty bag of skin and bones. Moving around, speaking, thinking and carrying on but otherwise, there was little here that reminded me of the woman that I had known. She looked… resigned I think. She would stop and shake suddenly as a tremor of some kind would run through her which she would grit her teeth against before she returned to her work.

And her work was Sam. She had a box of vials that reminded me, intensely, of Kerrass' potion box. It was not the same as I wondered if someone had stolen Kerrass' box and brought it out here. But it was not. This one was newer with shinier hinges and made from rougher wood. Kerrass' box was covered in dark leather to keep it dry. It was shinier with much handling.

As I was shown in and shuffled into position. I watched as Ella took a syringe from a bag and sucked some green liquid into the syringe before injecting it into Sam's veins. She pulled the needle out before wiping the area of insertion with a cloth and putting the syringe away. Then she looked up at Sam and he nodded to her.

A guard put a wooden biting stick between his lips and he bit down as his body started to shudder violently.

As it did so, Ella simply started to pack up her stuff.

The shuddering didn't last long before Sam subsided and spat the wooden stick onto the floor where one of the guards picked it up. Ella tucked her box under her arm and walked past me.

"I'm sorry." She whispered. So quietly that I genuinely wonder if I imagined it or not.

I noticed that she was not escorted or taken anywhere by guards. Sam must have noticed.

"She is a slave to my will." He told me. "Not as much as Ariadne but at the same time, she is broken in ways that we could not comprehend."

"I let her go," I told him. "She should have been able to find her own way."

Sam accepted a cup of something that I presumed was restorative from one of the guards that he drank quickly with a grimace.

"You underestimated her weakness." He told me, setting aside the cup and leaning back in his chair for a while, seeming to focus on breathing in and out.

I took the time to look around myself but there didn't seem to be much going on. A couple of people were examining the large map and arguing over some of the things that were there in low voices. They seemed to be pointing to the passes over some of the mountains but my perspective was flawed. A couple of the other guards were being much more attentive around Sam, standing between me and my brother, between Ariadne and my brother and between everyone else and my brother.

"Flame Sam," I said eventually. "What are you doing to yourself?"

"My course is set." He told me. "There has been no turning back for me for a while but soon, relatively soon, it will be time to take the fight to the Empire."

"I'm honestly surprised that the Empire hasn't brought its fight to you yet," I told him. "Also, you look fucking awful."

He chuckled. The guards looked as though they wanted to be angry with me because of my tone but Sam's laughter seemed to take the wind out of the sails of their anger.

"Yes," he agreed. "I must look a state. I'm going to get worse before I get better."

"What was in that stuff that she was injecting you with?" I demanded. "Are they mutagens? Are they trying to turn you into a Witcher?"

He stared at me for a long moment in surprise and confusion. Then he really started to laugh before he winced and held his stomach.

"Ow, ow. Don't make me laugh Freddie, it hurts."

"Then I shall think of more jokes," I told him. "Why did the cockatrice cross the road?"

"To eat the chicken," Sam answered promptly. "You will have to try harder than that."

I tried to think of another joke for a while but my inspiration had left me.

"Honestly Freddie." Sam went on. "Not everything in the world revolved around Witchers. In fact, not many things revolve around Witchers. I am preparing myself, that is all."

"What could you be preparing yourself for that makes you look so god-damned awful?"

He smiled.

"That comes later in the story. Everything is in its proper order. Everything according to the proper context." He leaned back in his chair for a moment before his eyes snapped forward and he leaned forward in his chair.

"But," he declared in a loud voice. "Things to do. Not least of which is to finish our conversations."

One of the guards leaned forward. "My Lord, surely we…"

Sam laughed at him. "Don't 'My Lord' me in front of my brother. He probably finds it more insulting than I do."

The guard stiffened. "But… My Lord, you need to rest."

"By The God, could I be any more of a cliche?" Sam demanded of him. "Could you for that matter?"

"Let him off Sam," I told him. "It looks like it's his job to worry about you."

The guard looked at me with surprised gratitude.

"Also, cliches exist for a reason. In this case, stupid uppity noblemen think they know more than their doctors and their assorted bodyguards and attendants when it comes to their own health. Believe me, I have fallen into that trap on more than one occasion."

The guard clearly couldn't decide between yelling at me about impertinence or whether to thank me for what I had said.

"It's alright," Sam told him. "You can go. I have the vampire to look after me if anything goes wrong."

"Yes… My Lord." I saw the corner of the guard's mouth twitch towards a smile, triggering an answering smirk from Sam. as the other man left.

"Sit down Freddie," Sam ordered.

"'My Lord' is it?" I did as I was told and one of the guards put a stack of paper on the arm next to me and place a quill and ink in easy reach.

"Yeah," Sam admitted. "Isn't it fucking awful? I can take it from servants and things but at the moment, it's coming from all over the place and I'm hating every second of it."

"Well, this is what you get for launching a coup."

He laughed and winced. Leaving me feeling as though I had won a point.

"So where were we?" He asked as he caught his breath.

"I had caught Mother and we were in the process of beginning what happened on the night of the Bonfires."

"Yes. Phineas, enter stage left." He sighed. "By The God's sweaty balls, he was a strange man. I didn't like him but he was really likeable. Does that make sense?"

I thought about that. "I think it might."

Sam nodded.

"Context though," he said.

"Context." I agreed.

Sam thought about it. "I have to admit, I don't think any of us really understood what you were capable of anymore. Even I, who theoretically knew you the best, had no idea that you would be able to so destroy Kalayn and the rest. It was really interesting to watch if we're honest.

"Truth be told, although I had wanted to be the one to destroy Edmund and our Cousin… I had wanted them to know that it was me. I wanted them to look into my eyes as I explained to them exactly how I had destroyed them. But in the end, it being done by you was the best possible outcome. You did it all, following other leads you were able to find out everything that you needed to know. You even managed to find a path to Edmund through some of the victims and through official channels. The conflict of it all… Mother killing Edmund means that you found… I mean, it couldn't have happened better if I had organised it that way myself.

"And it meant that when Kalayn and his cronies came South to take me to task or to otherwise find out why I hadn't done my job. I could point out exactly what had happened and there wasn't anything that they could do about it. It was delicious.

"So there were various plans that they wanted to try and absolutely none of them would work. They wanted to know if they could discredit you in some way and therefore bring the entire thing into disrepute. But that wouldn't work as whatever else could be said about your and Kerrass' investigation, it had been well documented and impeccably sourced. You had physical evidence and had actually caught the bastards at it as well.

"So that wouldn't work.

"There was also a conversation about whether or not you could be killed and that would set everything back, but that wouldn't work either. The plan about delaying everything was working a treat for them which was why it became necessary to do everything on the night of the Bonfires. No matter how hard we tried, money talks and those delays were beginning to extend and people might have escaped if we hadn't arranged for the "mob" to open the cells and trot them all out.

"And just so we're clear. That was the right thing to do, no matter how I try to change it all around. They might have got away with it a bit but the people would not have stood for it and there would have been riots and lynchings in the streets. I know that you were being quite down on yourself for letting that all happen at the time, but I don't think you had a choice. Not all of the assholes would have survived, but one or two might have. There were some sons of powerful people in that little crowd."

"So we all trotted down there to watch the bastards burn. I don't know why Uncle Kalayn and his nearest and dearest were so keen to attend that. If it were you or me that was doing it, I would suggest that we were there to spend the last few moments with the people that we love. But nothing could be further from the truth. Some of them were sad that they were going to be losing their sons…

"I should mention, not all of the assholes were firstborn. Edmund and Cousin Kalayn were not as strict about that as they were in the North which was another source of distress but that couldn't possibly be less important now. They kept the requirement for a certain sense of entitlement though."

I jumped in.

"Why did they recruit outside of that need for the firstborn?" I wondered. "We know that the…. This God of yours prefers firstborn sons."

"He does." Sam smiled at me. He had noticed me nearly calling 'The God'. "Or rather it does, it has never been made entirely clear to me as to what the gender of the thing is. But still… They recruited lesser because they wanted minions. Raynard Kalayn knew many things and one of those things he knew was that the more followers he had, the more powerful he seemed. I don't necessarily think that there was some kind of well-thought-out strategy behind it all.

"But he did think that if he had a load of powerful sons in his… congregation I suppose, for want of a better word. Then he would be all the more powerful for it. All the safer if he had the sons of magistrates and courtiers and the like.

"He did use it as a status symbol as well. He liked to have an inner circle of people, Edmund included and those lesser people only really came to what Edmund laughably called "Rites." Then there was like an inner club of 'first-born'."

"I see."

"So Uncle Kalayn came to see his son burn. I think that they just wanted to yell at me some more. I had not been too available up until that point because I was busy helping you call out that Robart person. So the chance to harangue me in person rather than just with exchanged words was a powerful enticement.

"They came in a group. Maybe half a dozen of them with Phineas being on the outskirts of it all, watching. I remember that he was at the back of the group."

Sam told me his story about his first meeting with Phineas.

"So that was how I met him," Sam said. "As I said last time, I had not met him before, later I would decide that I had seen him on the edge of things. Hanging around at the back of rooms, watching and listening. He would attend rites and parties and things but he would never take part in them. He seemed to think, not unlike me, that those kinds of things were beneath him.

"'There they all are.' He would say. 'Dancing naked with their dicks in their hands. A fraction of the power that is available to them. They could have so much more if they just had the vision, the wit and the quality to be able to use the power that I could offer.'"

Sam shuddered theatrically. "He always made me feel like I needed a bath after when I talked to him about that stuff."

"What did he get out of it all?" I wondered. "I mean, you… I presume, got the tools to destroy the cult…"

"And more." Sam agreed, "Without what he told me, I would not have been able to do a fraction of what I am doing now and the North would forever be in the dominion of the South."

"You will forgive me if I don't canonise him just yet," I replied with as much acid as I could manage.

Sam acknowledged my sentiment with a mockingly magnanimous gesture.

"But what did he get out of it all?" I asked. "Why would he offer you these things?"

"The long answer, I will get to. The short answer? He was a lunatic."

I could not help but laugh with him. I wonder if I will continue to hate myself for still loving my brother. I hate him. He has done so much but he is still my brother.

"We couldn't talk much the night of the bonfires. He promised that he would find me later and we would have a long talk. I was nervous about that but I agreed. It was a strange night that night. I took great delight in watching some of those people die. Some were just weak boys who thought that they were entitled to more than their ability and birth gave them. The sons of noble families that had fallen on hard times.

"More than one was bitter because of how successful Father had become. Men who thought that they 'deserved' the things that Father had through dint of Father's hard work. They thought they were entitled to that and that Father, and us, should just hand it over. Them,? I didn't care about them. But there were some others that I enjoyed watching die."

"Flame Sam."

"Do not pity them, Freddie."

"I don't pity them." I sighed. "I kind of pity you."

He nodded his acceptance. "Well, partly I am the way I am because of what they made me, so think of it that way. Some of those people had passed me around like an after-party sweet treat when I was younger."

I was forced to nod as I accepted that.

"Who killed Uncle Kalayn?" I wondered. "Numerous people have suggested that it would be impossible for someone like Uncle Kalayn to do something like that."

"That, at least, is true." He looked at me straight in my face. "I will not lie to you, Freddie. I saw my opportunity and I took it."

"What happened?" I wondered.

Sam smirked. He seemed to be getting some of his strength back. His sweating had dissipated and energy seemed to be returning to him. He leaned forward now and there were fewer pauses between his sentences.

"There came a point where the cult members realised that there was nothing that could be done. There was this moment where they just seemed to… almost come to terms with it. There was little sentiment there. But Uncle Kalayn decided that it was the least he could do to watch his son die. I do not think he did it out of kindness. Earlier he had told our cousin to show some respect and die like a man. So I do not think it was kindness. I think it was much more likely that he wanted to make sure that the job was done.

"There was little love lost between the two of them. There was also a certain amount of saying that he wanted to set an example for others., whatever it was. He was standing there, looking up at his son who was beginning to cough with all of the smoke that was rising to swallow him with all of it.

"I remember looking at him. He was off by himself, I didn't see a guard or anything which I always wondered about. He was normally more paranoid than that. But he was there, he was alone, I had my dagger in hand. There were plenty of other people wandering around. My hood was up and I just saw my chance.

"I knew what Father's will said because of the agents that I had planted in the solicitor's office. I also knew that Kalayn lands would belong to me in the event of this man's death. I could be patient regarding Coulthard lands. But suddenly, it all seemed as though my course could be set and I could further my goals that bit easier.

"I can't even blame anyone else, not that I would want to. Uncle Kalayn was a snake and a sick dog who needed to be put down.

"I just walked up to him. I can't remember what I said. There was certainly no word from me about 'Now is the time of my vengeance' or anything like that. I just approached him, we spoke a bit about logistics and things. I do wonder whether or not he planned to see to it that I was ended shortly after that. Wondering whether he would have decided that I had outlived my usefulness. It is possible I suppose but there is no guarantee there.

"He finished our short conversation quickly, he turned back to look at his son and I stabbed him in the side. He looked at me in shock, I remember that. He was honestly astonished that it had happened and when he realised who had done it, I think he was even more astonished. It was inconceivable to him that I might be a person that would do that kind of thing.

"He staggered, I remember, going to lean on me. One of his hands scrabbled for one of his weapons but he was already bleeding his strength away. I had not had any more of a plan than that. I reasoned that in what crowd there was, then anyone could have been the killer and that my guarantees and alibis would be set.

"But as he was standing there, his life-blood leaking out over my hands it occurred to me that if he fell, then someone, maybe even you, would realise that he had been murdered, there would be a further investigation and then things would come out before I was ready for them.

"He was staggering, already weakened, already dying so it was actually quite easy to push him onto the fire and give it a little jerk so that he would look as though he had leapt. He even obliged by giving a little cry of despair as he went. One movement and I was back amongst the crowd. A moment later and someone screamed. Someone from the cult ran over and recognised the burning body and that was that."

"But witnesses described him hurling himself onto the pyre in despair?" I was not refuting, but more pointing out the flaw in the story.

"Yeah." Sam agreed. "There was a witness. Only one. Can you guess who it was?"

I sighed. "It was Phineas wasn't it."

Sam nodded. "He told as many of the official people as he could. Changing what he looked like with a bit of judicious magic so that there could be 'multiple witnesses'. He and I had a good laugh about it later. But then Uncle Kalayn was dead and it was all over.

"The Ass-holes had been destroyed and it was time to move on in my plan."

I nodded. Again, food was ordered and set out so I had something to eat. I had some small pastries, some bread, cheese and things but Sam was brought a large plate of hot meat with green vegetables and gravy.

"I need my strength." He told me as he must have seen my surprise at the sheer amount that he consumed.

"For what?" I asked, not really expecting an answer.

He grinned at me as he shovelled another spoonful of beans into his mouth.

When we were done with our food, someone came and cleared away the plates and the dishes and things. Sam leaned back and rested his head on the back of his chair as though eating was too much effort for him.

"Are we going to continue?" I wondered.

"Oh yes." Sam agreed, leaning forward. "So much to talk about. So much that I need to tell you. There are instructions regarding what needs to come afterwards but I think it's important that we do this beforehand."

"Before what?" I asked him. "After what?"

"Sorry," he shook his head. "I misspoke. So, I met Phineas and we burnt the assholes. Uncle Kalayn was dead and for a while, I could return to being the dutiful son of the family. I enjoyed that. It felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders." He considered something for a moment. "I was excited, I think. I was anticipating something. Do you ever get that? When one phase of things has been completed and you are moving on to the next phase of things?"

"I have," I told him. "Sometimes, when I have been coming to the end of one account and I just want to get it finished so that I can move onto the next, more recent account that is fresher in my mind. I remember, especially, coming to the end of speaking about the Jack conspiracy in Toussaint and wanting to set out on the journey towards the Black Forest."

He nodded and grunted.

"Also," I couldn't help but throw a small barb. "I remember stopping my work at the university in preparation for getting married. I remember being excited about that."

I looked at Ariadne, but she didn't react. It was, I won't lie, heartbreaking.

"I deserved that, I suppose," Sam admitted, a little ruefully.

I had nothing to say to that. Tears had come to my eyes and it seemed that the dart that I had thrown to injure my brother had caused more harm to myself than it had to anyone else.

"But it was like that." He went on.

"I do have some questions though, just to confirm things."

"By all means."

"So we sentenced Mother? You tried to have her executed."

"Yes. I was right as well. Your answer and solution were good and, I think, were a little crueller than mine. To dangle the thing that she wanted out of her hands. Like the man holding the stick with the carrot tied to the end of it to get the donkey to continue to chase it. Holding the promise of holy orders just out of sight of her like that. To me, I thought that was cruel."

He considered again. "It worked though, I will give you that. In the brief time, I've known her since she has come back, she seems better for it. More at peace. But even so, leaving aside my desire for vengeance for a moment, we should have sent her to the headsman. Allowed her a full confession and repentance beforehand so that she could go to the Holy Flame or wherever with a clear conscience. But we should have had her killed.

"Back in Toussaint, I told you about all of the people that don't like us. About how you had been shielded by Emma, your friendship with the Empress and your future as Count Angral. But for me, I was exposed to the dislike and hatred that Father and Emma's policies had caused. Many decisions caused that attitude towards us. Picking individual things out is all but impossible and that wagon train started long before either of us was born. And, again, being fair to you," he pointed at me. "Other than the most fanatically angry people that hate you rather than the Coulthard family as a whole. People admit that you were at the right time and place for so much to take advantage of. You made the most of the breaks that you were given access to.

"But that decision, the decision that left Mother alive? That is one of the big decisions that people point to, to say that the Coulthard family is worthless."

I shifted uncomfortably as Sam continued.

"I say again what I said then. If that had been anyone else, it doesn't matter what Edmund did or what Mother's family did to her. Mother killed her son. Infanticide is a serious thing and people get executed for far less. But we, as a family, decided to spare her life. Some might call it mercy. But the other word for it is corruption."

"Then why didn't you protest harder at the time."

"If you remember," He frowned at me, "I was outvoted. You said what you wanted to do, and Mark and Emma agreed with you. It is the height of stupidity to continue to fight after everything is already lost."

"And yet, you insist on leading a rebellion against the Empire."

"Yes, but I am going to win. I know that you can't see it, not yet anyway. But you will."

I left that alone for now. I was beginning to get to know him as a subject for an interview. There was a bit of a turn to him whenever he was talking about things that he had no intention of answering and he had reached that point.

"Any other questions?" he prompted.

"Yes, was your helping me with de Radford genuine?"

"Oh yes. I was even looking forward to watching you skewer him. I have seen you train since then and I rather think that you have never been better with that spear and dagger that you have than you were at that moment. You might have been good in those periods when we were away from each other but in Toussaint, you were busy after a period off the road and away from training. In the North, you were still recovering from your ordeal at the hands of Sansum and again in the South, you were still sick. You had the skill but some things were missing from your… whatnot."

I nodded to show that I had taken the point.

"Where was Phineas at this point?"

"He was waiting for me. Up north a little way in one of the wayside inns. That meeting is next in my account if you are ready to move on."

"I think so, for now at least."

"So…" he smiled. "The wills were read. I was Lord Kalayn as well as the Lord of the white cliffs. Mark had gone off in a huff about the fact that Father had anticipated him and his desires. You would be heading off soon because Kerrass was wanting to get underway and also because you were still terrified of the slave."

He gestured towards Ariadne. I was getting better at ignoring those gestures.

"You were going to go North as I recall? Take up your Lordship?"

He laughed. A real belly laugh, to the point where I was astonished. He laughed hard enough that it left him out of breath and needing to rest his head on the backrest of the chair again.

"Tell me, Freddie," he began. "How incompetent do you think I am?"

"What?"

"Well…" He struggled for a moment. "Twice. On two occasions. Two of those times when I am honestly astonished that I was not caught. Astonished that you didn't come after me or were able to tell what was going on. I told the family and everyone where I was going, twice. TWICE. And you believed me both times. Which would be ok, but then when you and Kerrass came North, you find that, at best, I've made a few huts in a clearing below the castle and have made no real inroads into my lands. How did you not put all of that together?"

He was right, it did seem rather obvious when I was looking at it like that.

"I mean," he went on. "I know that your brother, Sammy Coulthard is not supposed to be very good at this whole Lording thing. But I was a damn good soldier. I won awards for it. So surely I should have had, at least, a map of my lands and the local area for you and Kerrass to study. And I should definitely have been aware of the "Hounds of Kreve" or whatever it was that the locals were calling them."

I sighed.

"It has recently become clear to me," I began carefully, "that I have several weaknesses. But the main weakness that I have is that I am blind to the faults of my family." I considered this statement for a while. "Other than Father where I am blind to his virtues."

Sam grunted at that.

"There is even room to admit that there are those people that I have chosen to be my family where I am blind to their faults as well."

"Rickard's drinking," Sam said.

"Kerrass' arrogance is a famous one."

Sam shook his head. "That is the arrogance of professionals." He said. "You have that arrogance. It is the arrogance of someone who knows more than the next person. You guard it well though and you are protected in that you are aware of it. Also, I would say that that was a lesson that Kerrass learnt from you. He was not as arrogant in the lead-up to the Equinox as he was when we first met each other. But I would point out Shani's ruthless single-mindedness and selfishness. Many of your friends are very self-righteous as well. They are right, therefore everyone else must be wrong."

"You are thinking of the Knights from Toussaint." I accused.

"Yes, them too."

He sighed and his humour subsided. "I did leave here and I did go North. I did make some steps to begin securing my new territory. I hired a steward and sent them North. I also sent a couple of messages to the castle and various things to talk to Uncle Kalayn's staff and the like. I told Aunt Kalayn that she didn't need to move out if she didn't want to but she was desperately unhappy and I didn't want to force the issue. But what I really wanted to do was to speak to Phineas and scout out the cult.

"A campaign cannot be carried out without plenty of intelligence and I needed that. I needed to know how much of that entire effort was still in place. What had changed now that I knew that Cavill was going to be in charge and just how much difficulty was I going to be in?

"But first, I needed to speak to Phineas and find out how much trouble I was in.

"We met, as I say, in one of those road inns that you see on the main highways. The giant things that have huge courtyards for the housing of wagons and horses. Giant kitchens and tap rooms and more rooms than they ever really seem to need. I think that when my people and I rule, we will install intelligence operatives in every single one of these, as the number of dodgy dealings that go on in those places is astonishing. Not the cheap and nasty places on the docks in Novigrad, no, the real dirty business is carried out in road inns. Where the staff can't remember one face from the next and even if you question them, they couldn't tell you who was here and when.

"He was there first as I rode up.

"I was travelling incognito. It's not hard as you know. Simply don't make a huge fuss over everything and you soon find out that people will treat you according to the attitude that you carry with you. If you treat people with respect but don't stand for any shit, then generally, you're fine. I rode up and the place was doing a fairly stiff business. Quite a few travellers were in, as well as a wagon train.

"The sun was shining and a lot of people were resting outdoors, snoozing or napping in the sun. He saw me as I walked over and waved. I acknowledged him and went to the landlord to find that Phineas had booked me a room for the night alongside his.

"It was a long conversation. He drank and I stayed sober. Through various stages, I had my hand on my dagger and was ready to kill him before making a break for it and in other stages, we were laughing like old friends."

"The two are not mutually exclusive," I told him with what I thought was a suitable amount of intensity.

He missed the point though and went on talking.

"So I dumped my gear in my room, made sure that I could easily sneak out of the room in case I had to murder Phineas and then, wearing my disguise although I am not sure how necessary it was, I went to meet the mage.

"Given that it was our second real meeting, I remember being surprised at how charming he was. He had a cup of wine that he raised in salute towards me.

"'Welcome,' he said. 'I hope you don't mind but I decided to get some drinks in, ready.' He frowned at me as he looked me up and down. 'Ah, I see that you are trying to be prudent and cautious. Good. Very good. Too many people from our particular social circle are too assured that their… privilege will protect them against all comers. Please, please sit.'

"He gestured to the chair opposite him and I sat down gently and we spent a bit of time looking at each other. Truth be told, I was astonished at what I saw there. I know that you described him as a man that made you want to wipe your hands on your clothes after you have shaken hands with him. That he inspires people to go and take a bath afterwards and I say that that was very close to how I felt with him. But, I had to fight not to like him.

"He was dressed in the same kind of robe that would not have looked out of place walking the halls of the abbey with hands pressed together in an attitude of prayer. His hair was slicked back and looked permanently wet which might be something close to why you felt the need to bathe after meeting him. That and he had a habit of appraising people. He would look a person up and down, paying attention to detail and trying to decide if this was a person that could be used or that needed to be disposed of.

"Plenty of people do that. I know that we, you and I, were both trained in that direction as part of our courtier training and then later when you were practising being an interviewer and when I was learning what to look for when I was sizing people up for a fight. The difference is that we were taught to disguise our observations so that the person didn't feel that we were being rude or so that we wouldn't give away our intentions. Phineas did this and took his time about it too. It leaves a person feeling like a sack of meat, like an object or something to be discarded.

"It was even worse for those women that I saw him interact with. He wasn't a woman hater in the same way that Cavill or his son was. To hate someone you have to, at least, think something of them. But he didn't even do that. To him, women were either a threat or some means to slake his lusts. So when meeting a woman he would decide whether or not they were a threat to him either physically or magically in which case he would avoid them. And when this was dismissed he would look them over to see if they were a woman that could slake his lusts. He did not hide his appraisal in that regard either.

"'He thought of women as objects,' '' is what I am trying to say.

"So the pair of us sat there, looking at each other. Then he moved and started to speak. I know that he did this to you as well. That habit of being utterly still so that he lulls you into a sense of false security, then he moves suddenly and you are startled into jumping. He did that deliberately and enjoyed the effect that he had on people.

"So we watched each other for a while and then he moved, smiling slightly as he noticed how much he had surprised me.

"'You are trying to decide,' he began, 'whether or not it would be better for you if you just slit my throat. I do not doubt that you could. I think that you already have several plans as to how it would be done. Accusing me of magic before stating that you were defending yourself. Murdering me in my sleep tonight would be another good choice, slipping some poison into my food or something of the like. Personally, I would go with listening to what I have to say before you decide just how much of a threat I am. That way you would ascertain how dangerous I am to you.'

"I remember nodding to that. 'Just how dangerous are you to me?' I wondered.

"He sniffed. 'Not very. Indeed, I want to help you. Believe it. You have every reason not to trust me but I want to help you. It would even not be too far a statement to say that I need to help you.'

"I tried to hedge my bets a little. 'Help me with what?' I asked.

"He laughed and pointed at me with the hand that was holding his drink.

"'You want to know how much I have figured out. You want to know how much I know. Very well. I know that you are Lord Samuel von Coulthard, Lord Kalayn elect, pending Imperial verification of course,' his mouth twisted when he said the word "Imperial." 'I know that you were Lord Cavill and Lord Kalayn's agent in the Oxenfurt area and I know that your brief was to mitigate the growing disaster that was your eldest brother and the young Lord Kalayn. I know that, as far as they were concerned, you were diligent in your duties but that you were fighting a losing battle. That there was nothing that anyone could have done, least of all a younger son like you, could really have done to curtail their efforts but that you did your best.

"'Despite your best efforts, the inevitable has happened and someone figured it out as to what was happening. Much to everyone's general surprise, the person doing the figuring out was your younger brother, Lord Frederick von Coulthard. Why no one saw that coming I will not know, given that according to the very smart people that I know, that young man is going to be a professor of Oxenfurt at an alarmingly young age.'"

"'He has brought considerable fame and fortune to Oxenfurt.' I felt myself arguing automatically. For the record, I know that you earned your titles and achievements but I have a habit of downplaying your talents when it comes to interacting with the cult so that no one thinks that you are enough of a threat to destroy you.

"'Yes,' he said. 'I suppose he has at that. Witcher Lore and monster Lore are fascinating subjects, the problem is not that there is too little to talk about but rather that what there is to talk about becomes repetitive after a while. There are few insights, just a dry recitation of facts. But still, he has taken what he has and has made astonishing inroads for it. Whatever else you might think of him, he has made a name for himself without patronage from his family, which is rare for someone in his line of work, and that betrays a certain intelligence and analytical mind. I think you all misjudged him when you dismissed him as not being a threat.'

"He saw straight through me.

"'Ah,' he said, his smile broadening. 'But you know exactly how intelligent your brother is. You are protecting him… Now now, don't misunderstand me. I mean no harm to your brother. I will admit that I did consider seeking some vengeance against him for reasons of my own, but I have since decided that the matter would be entirely pointless. My experiment had failed already but he ensured that I would not be able to pursue new avenues with the same subject and, it is rare that those conditions are so easily met.'"

"'What experiment?' I demanded. He smiled.

"'Lord Samuel,' He said, chiding me gently. 'Although I have every faith that you and I will be able to come to some kind of accord. Even though I believe that a beautiful friendship will be formed and that the two of us will be able to do great things together… You are not the only one that is doing some appraising here. You are deciding whether or not you need to murder me in this out-of-the-way inn. I am deciding whether or not I should throw you to the proverbial wolves. So until we agree to trust each other and have some kind of framework regarding working together, I will need to keep some things a secret that is kept… For now.'

"I felt myself smile as something occurred from an old lesson.

"'But trust is an act of faith.' I said, 'I am trusting you in coming here, I am aware of the disparity in power between the two of us, so what are we doing here?'

"He laughed.

"'I was working on a weapon in Angral.' He told me. 'I am keeping what weapon I was working on a secret for now, but I was working on something that would give power to the wielder. Unfortunately, I was missing a key component and as a result, the matter was rushed due to impatience and when it came to its final test, the weapon failed. What your brother did was render the experiment unable to be followed through on.'

"'Do you know what went wrong?' I felt myself ask.

"'Oh yes.' Phineas admitted. 'It was one of those situations where there was a branch of experimentation. We could go no further down one road of work because of natural circumstances but as the other was open to us, we followed through on that. Unfortunately, this was incorrect. But we were working blind anyway so…' he shrugged. 'But also in my line of work and the circles I operate in, you do not leave such matters closed. Your brother hurt me and as such, I should seek vengeance.'

"I felt myself getting ready for anger or violence and he saw it.

"'Do not mistake me,' he said, holding his hand out placatingly. 'If you ask it, as you have done without using words, I will set aside my vengeance. I will not harm your brother unless circumstances suggest that it is him or me. Indeed, give me the word and I will work to keep him alive.'

"There was an edge to his voice that left me under no illusions there.

"'Who are you?' I asked. It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea who this person was.

"'My name is Phineas.' He said. 'I am a mage and although I do not have fame, the Chapter of Mages threw me out because of some of their foolish rules… Do not worry. I can explain and I will, I am the foremost expert in my realm of study.'

"'What is your realm of study?' I asked and he smiled.

"'The technical term is that I am the foremost study in extra-planar entities, the contacting of them and the interacting with them. You will want to say that I am an expert in demons, but that is incorrect.'

"I snapped my mouth shut as I had, indeed, been just about to say that.

"'Let me tell you about myself,' he began and I settled in for the story. It was a long one and it was rather involved so I will paraphrase rather than go blow-by-blow. There is also some truth that some of the stories were elaborated on in later conversations so…"

I nodded to show that I understood. So with my brother's agreement so that this entire work doesn't turn into a biography of Phineas rather than a biography of Lord Samuel, I am paraphrasing what we talked about. I do not doubt that in the future, I will have to check a lot of this story. I don't know how massive my list of sources is going to be in that regard but I do have hope that I will be able to fact-check some of what Sam told me.

Even he was forced to admit that he got a lot of this story from Phineas himself and as a result of that, the story might have been a way for Phineas to sell himself to Sam as something of a commodity. There is nothing quite like a good story to get someone to buy into what someone is selling. Sam himself did some fact-checking of his own. Not least of which happened in that period when we could openly hunt Phineas down and as a result, Phineas' history was much more of an open book.

Phineas was born to a minor noble family in upper Maecht which was part of the Empire back before the first Continental war. I did not enjoy the fact that Phineas could share a country of birth with Kerrass' assumed identity. But Kerrass only chose that place as a name so that he could appear to be exotic, so I doubt he would have minded.

As far as Sam could tell, Phineas' father was relatively good, if a weak man who served a greedy and unpleasant Lord. The Father was doing his best to lead a good and noble life until he was met, and seduced by one of the Lord's distant relatives to assuage the relative's boredom. Much to everyone's astonishment, the assignation resulted in the woman becoming pregnant to the joy of the family as a whole. A wedding was swiftly arranged and from the way Phineas talked about it, this meant that his Father actually went up in the world.

That is not an unusual story in that kind of strata of life. The problem with the story is that in Nilfgaard, especially in that time and place, Nilfgaardian women were not exactly trained to be seductresses. They would wear deliberately frumpy clothing and were trained to be seen rather than heard. They would stand in the background and watch and listen so that they would be able to help their husband's memory when things needed to be discussed and talked about later.

So that might strike a bit false if I was looking to poke holes in that part of the story. If the story took place in any of the other four Pontar Kingdoms of the North. If it had happened in Cintra, Lyria, Rivia or any of the other smaller nations north of the Yaruga, then I could absolutely believe that this happened. But the specification that it took place in Maecht ran a little false to me.

Sam agreed but the man was long dead so what did it matter?

"I'm a scholar and a historian," I told him. "These are the little details that people like me get caught up on because they might lead to a completely different conclusion than the one that I should arrive at. Reputations are made on this kind of thing."

"I accept that," he said as he took another one of his little potions. "But you can note, that you are getting the story from me, who got the story from him, so you are recounting the sources somewhat removed. Surely saying that would mean that your back is covered."

"To a certain extent." I agreed. "But any decent academic book would want a couple of extra sources on that."

Sam laughed. "Ok, well, when we conquer Maecht you can enquire and look around."

There was no budging him after that.

That part of the story would imply that Phineas' father was some kind of minor clerk or chamberlain to someone really powerful. Off-hand and without my reference books, I cannot remember if Maecht had a King before the Empire came calling, but I would certainly expect it to be some kind of Duke. That would also allow for the declaration that the Duke was so pleased about some distant cousin finally finding someone that could make her pregnant. That is the way I can twist the facts to suit the story. So if we follow that logic, Phineas' Father was a knight of some kind. A second or third descendant of someone that had been knighted at some minor skirmish and by the time of Phineas' birth, was working as a member of the Duke's entourage. Or maybe as part of the entourage of one of the Duke's sons.

The story continued.

Much to everyone's astonishment, the marriage of convenience turned into a relatively happy one. Phineas' father could never be entirely confident that he was the father of his son because the Mother had seduced him rather forcefully and the thought had occurred that she might be pregnant by some strapping groom or guard captain. Only to become pregnant and need to seduce someone to… you get the idea.

For whatever reason, the marriage survived until the Nilfgaardian wars of the Usurpation where Phineas' father was on the wrong side by accident of allegiance. He and his family had always been sworn to someone and that guy had been called a traitor by the winners.

Phineas' mother grieved her husband but quickly married one of the victors as she still retained her charms as well as some claim to her fortune. Her son and she were packed off to a countryside castle where young Phineas remembered spending his younger years learning to read and write and pick up some of the more "gentlemanly arts''. However, once again, he found himself on the wrong side of history for two reasons. The first is that the Emperor came back.

I have no idea how old Phineas would have been at the time and neither did Sam. But as is the way with such things. The Emperor's side was of the opinion that Phineas and his mother should have died when the usurper came to power and that her remarriage was a sign of treason rather than a longing for survival.

The other problem was that Phineas was magical and given that the mages of Nilfgaard had supported the usurper who had subverted the rule of the Emperor's Father, Emperor Emhyr had "views" on magic users roaming around the country getting into trouble. Phineas, despite his relatively small talent in the ways of such things, would have been drafted into one of the Nilfgaardian magic schools with all of the unpleasant forces of servitude and brainwashing that that implies. And then his life would have been spent in some military campaign or the other.

So… quite sensibly, Phineas' mother took her son and fled North.

Life on the run quickly soured for the pair of them. The servants and the guards that went with them started to leave when they realised that fleeing meant that they weren't going to get paid for their efforts and that they might even be guilty of treason under the new regime for doing so. So the pair's entourage started to melt overnight. This was not the romantic flight into exile that either of them had imagined when they set out.

Eventually, Phineas' mother fell back on her oldest skills and seduced her way into a marriage with a much older man in Queen Calanthe's court in Cintra.

"Phineas laughed when he told that story," Sam told me with a chuckle. "His mother seemed to be quite delusional by this point. Guilt and no small amount of grief were part of it, I have no doubt. But she would tell stories that part of the reason that the Emperor was so interested in Cintra was that she was in it. She concocted this entire, mad fantasy that she was the only reason that the Empire cared about Cintra. That she was some kind of grand traitor that needed to be brought to justice before the entirety of the Imperial court."

"This despite the Emperor's desire to get his daughter back," I commented.

"And that Cintra was strategically vital to the North as being the reason that the North held both sides of the mouth of the Yaruga," Sam agreed. "According to Phineas, he did know that she spent quite a bit of time with the Queen and Marshal Vissgard explaining about Imperial military tactics but she was far from the vital advisor that she portrayed herself as to her son and her friends."

Regardless of the young Phineas' family's importance to the court of Cintra, Phineas' magical talent was finally spotted and tested. He was sent off to a magical school where he was to be trained. Phineas did tell Sam which school it was but neither Sam nor myself had ever heard of it and, likely, it has now been long since destroyed and sacked.

And then another setback was found which was that Phineas turned out to be, well... Not a very good mage.

"I suspect it was a combination of things," Sam told me as he sat back, sipping from a cup. "The first possibility is that the school that he was sent to was just… not very good. He claimed that it was expensive, even while he also admitted that his Mother would have struggled to pay for the fees for anything else. So it is possible that it was just the equivalent place where it is called "a school of magic" where the older teachers can call themselves powerful mages. The students, not knowing the difference, believe this elaborate fiction and give these elder teachers respect and awe that is undeserved. In turn, the students become elitist snobs and gradually, given the huge fees, the school becomes less of a magical school and more of a boarding place for the rich and the privileged.

"I can see that." I agreed. "There is a special type of professor that believes that students only exist to make the professor feel powerful and important. Some few of these turn out to be really good teachers but that is the rarity."

"The second major possibility was sheer lack of talent." Sam went on, topping up his cup and pushing the jug over towards me. "I don't know much about magic, but one of my understandings is that people can channel different amounts of power to different degrees."

"It has been explained to me that that can be trained," I said. "That with enough practise, then a mage can channel more and more of the power to get to the point where the power that they had originally becomes an almost trivial amount. But it is true that some of that power is latent. This is why mages can be mages at all whereas I can't channel enough power to light a candle flame without my brains dribbling out of my ears. That is if there was anything there in the first place."

"Phineas made no secret of the act that he wasn't a very powerful mage. It was almost… I kind of want to say that he was almost proud of it all. As though it was a matter of pride that he could never quite get enough power to make anything worthwhile. This was certainly the part that he blamed for the path that his life took after that."

I nodded, frantically scribbling notes.

"The last reason is that Phineas was lazy. I mean, I have no idea how old he was at the time that all of this was going on. But he would probably be somewhere in his teens or his early twenties. We didn't get to do that bit given that when we were at that stage, there was a war on so our view of that part of our lives was different. But I think it's possible that he just didn't care enough. What's that saying about magic being as much science…"

"Lady Yennefer once told me that magic is equal parts science, art and chaos.", told him. "That to be a mage you needed to be good with one of them. To be a powerful mage you needed to be good with two of them and to be a truly great mage you needed skills with all three."

"So I wonder if he was lazy," Sam said. "I know that he was disdainful of women. Not as much as the cult was and I wonder if at least some of that comes from the behaviour of his mother and about how she got what she needed by convincing men to marry her."

"From a time and a place where that is one of the only viable ways of doing that." I chided him.

"Fair comment," Sam admitted. "But I know that Phineas did not have as much hate for women. I would more likely call it disdain than hate. I also know that he was something of a drinker and a gourmet. He liked the finer things in life so I wonder if he was easily distracted from his studies which his tutors found annoying. Certainly enough to prevent him from being trained enough to become a proper mage."

"I don't know if that was the case." Sam went on, stroking his chin and musing. "But it strikes me as a distinct possibility. I wonder about the influence his mother had on him. Using your…" he gestured at me, "tools on Phineas a bit."

"Which tools?" I wondered.

"The tools of a historian looking back on the activities of someone."

"Ah, I'm not sure that I'm going to enjoy this."

"Relax, it's quite complimentary."

Sam and I had slipped into the relationship of colleagues and friends, the same that we did when we were younger and struggling with some lesson that our tutors had been trying to impart. We would sit, bantering and bickering over something. That feeling was seductive and now I wonder if Sam was doing it deliberately as an effort to get me to come over to his side or to drop my guard in some way.

"But we can say with some certainty." Sam continued, "That Phineas' mother was a good-looking woman. We can guess that because Phineas himself was not a bad-looking guy. I mean my tastes don't run in that direction and I am as confident as I can be that you're not interested in the male of the species."

"Not as far as I know," I admitted.

"But Phineas was a good-looking man. But also his mother, several times, was able to secure a life for herself and her son. She was able to marry Phineas' Father, who I would also guess to be quite a good-looking man..."

"How So?"

"Because she chose him when she was young. She might have been covering for the fact that she had been made pregnant by some groom, but even then, if we can allow that she was a good-looking woman, she would have her choice of lovers to convince that they were new Fathers. She was able to bag someone younger and less powerful.

"Therefore, I would also suggest that she was fairly shallow, but that is not important. That first man was blinded by her, the second man was horny enough for her to forgive her transgressions and take in herself and her son. And then when she fled, she found someone in the Cintran court that could look after her, and her son again at a point in life when women start to lose those charms that nature gave them.

"And on top of that, she was able to send her son to a school that was not known for accepting poor people to their classes which means… and I cannot believe that she was able to bring vast amounts of wealth to the north with her, it means that she convinced her new benefactor to pay for that in the bed chamber."

I nodded, it was plausible and not a bad chain of reasoning.

"So I think his mother was fairly attractive. Also very good at seducing. But I think it's also true that she was lazy enough that she made her living that way. She was used to the good things in life and made damn sure that the good things in life did not pass her by. She felt entitled to those things and I wonder how much of that rubbed off on her son.

"He felt entitled to what he was given on several levels. But he was also clever enough to have a certain scorn for his Mother. He saw the way that she was seducing her way into the beds of powerful and wealthy men. So as well as teaching him a sense of entitlement, and not managing to instil a work ethic. She also taught him to be scornful of others. Full of pride for himself, but scornful of others."

"You also tell me that Phineas was intelligent."

"Oh, fiercely so. Intimidatingly so. And he expected people to keep up with him."

"So his mother… She must have been a clever person." I mused. "She was clever enough to see which way the wind was blowing in the South."

"Twice in fact." Sam agreed.

"And she was clever enough to gain that better lifestyle for herself. But then she settled for the life of a wife to… whoever."

"So I wonder if Phineas was lazy at school." Sam went on. "He always claimed that it was the fault of the teachers, that they didn't try hard enough to help him. There's no way of knowing of course but he did not leave school successfully. He was frustrated and angry and the grand life of the rich and powerful mage had eluded him. In his mind, he was not powerful enough, not talented enough and not rich enough to get the best masters and as such, he was going to be resigned to being some kind of… backwater mage that would become an assistant to someone powerful. But would always be passed over. He would become someone's research assistant… and also,"

Sam took a moment to consider.

"Here's his pride again. He also thought he would become the kind of research assistant that did all of the work while the more famous, more powerful and more connected mage took all the credit."

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat as I remembered how I had once felt about doing all the work for my Professors. Oh, how I miss only having that many problems now.

The narrative continued. Phineas left school in a huff, resentful of the process. For whatever reason, the schooling did not take root in him. He was interested in things though and he became the kind of person that makes researchers nervous. He started wondering about those things that his tutors either told him that he wasn't ready for, wasn't powerful enough for, or simply outright forbade him from using.

He had taken the treatments that meant that he was not ageing and was a good-looking person, thus destroying some of Sam's and my own earlier theories. So he decided to do some research. His efforts were leaning towards ways in which he can improve the magical channelling capabilities of a person.

His idea, although undoubtedly a self-serving one, was not a bad idea and I could certainly imagine the applications. He wanted to remove talent from the consideration pool, meaning that mages with the ability to channel magic would no longer be limited according to that talent.

I can well imagine that there is a caste system amongst mages, or there certainly would be back when mages were more numerous on the continent. But the more talented you are, the higher you would climb in the hierarchy. Whereas a less powerful mage could work hard to achieve lesser results and that would be the death of their efforts and what research they might have done would be dismissed by the more powerful.

So according to Sam, he experimented and researched and he looked this way and that way but he started to feel that his efforts were being hampered by the Mage hierarchy. Some texts were being kept from him because he was not skilled enough, which Phineas took as an insult and what they were really telling him was that he was not talented enough. These denials meant that he was even more determined to find his own way forward.

Eventually, though, he found someone that was bribeable and he found his gateway drug to the lands of Necromancy. Sam didn't know who it was that gave him this as Phineas had never told him, claiming to have killed him when the master had started to become jealous of the progress of the apprentice.

As we keep saying, Phineas was a clever man so when he took the plunge and started using illegal magics, he already had ways to escape. Trinkets, magical artefacts and the like would obscure his passage from his pursuers. He was also careful and paranoid without letting the Paranoia take over his entire being. So he travelled, at first, raising dead people and forcing them to tell him what they knew. Later, he would kill people before raising them as a form of torture to find out what they knew.

Sam felt that, eventually, Phineas had started to get off on the amount of pain and misery he was causing and I tend to agree. It is not for no reason that the Mages of the continent used to hunt down people like Phineas before they completely lost their minds.

One of the benefits that Phineas had though, was that he was looking for something specific. He was not doing it for pleasure, or just for the kick of it. He was doing these things to make himself more powerful but after finding that there was no mage, living or dead that could help him, he decided that this was pointless and moved on to something else.

"I don't understand everything that he said," Sam told me, leaning forwards. "I would imagine you would need some kind of training or experience in this kind of thing to truly understand it, but he told me that he was looking for alternative power sources."

"What does that mean?"

"He was not stupid enough to try and summon demons. He made that point over and over again. He wasn't summoning demons to talk to them or whatever. He found, relatively early, that communicating across planes of existence was easy and that you didn't have to summon anything at all, but the problem was always that the information wasn't dependable. He wanted me to know that what he did was not Gosher or whatever they call it."

"Goetia." I told him. "The summoning and binding of demons. I don't know how it works but I think it's more illegal than Necromancy because Necromancy is cruel to the body and soul that you brought back. Goetia is cruel to the bystanders and the people nearby that the demon will take advantage of."

Sam nodded.

"What he was reasoning was, was that if Magic was a thing that could be used… We know that magic is an energy source that we can tap into. So what he was looking for was an alternative. A magic-like thing or an entity that he could use to achieve magic-like effects. He made lots of statements that I have no doubt are almost impossible to verify. He said things like "Mages use magic and priests use magic. Mages use the raw form whereas the priests channel that magic through the beings that we know about and call them Gods. Are they Gods? We have no idea. Or are they constructs that we have created to properly quantify, or justify what we have had them doing in the meantime? There is no way of being able to tell the difference."

"Sounds pretentious," I commented.

"He was, he was very full of himself. Very self-righteous and self-congratulatory."

"So what happened?"

"Well, he found another form, didn't he?"

According to Sam, Phineas spent a lot of time trying to find this alternative power. He reasoned, not incorrectly, that if there was another magic-like force on the continent that could achieve the same ends, then we would have found it by now. Leaving aside the inherent horror in that situation, he, therefore, moved onto the possibility that there would be another force that he would be able to tap into in one of the spheres that would be adjacent to our own. So he started to continue his research in that regard.

He was still cautious. He was aware of his limits when it came to power and the like so he never had a permanent lab. He would properly prepare and then he would perform the experiment, wait for the results and then move on. He became an expert in monitoring his experiments from a distance so that he could start the experiment moving and watch from another country with a load of monitoring spells to see what happened. There was even something to be said that if he had just taken those spells and told people about them, he could have made a fortune off it."

"So that was why we didn't catch him in Angral?" I mused.

"Precisely. He had set the experiment in motion and was already in a hideout in Temeria, watching, before Dorme even got anywhere near catching up to you before taking you off to wake the Vampire up."

"Was Dorme in the cult?" I wondered.

Sam laughed. "Getting ahead of ourselves Freddie?"

I scowled

He laughed at my face.

"No, he wasn't," he told me. "Dorme's drug of choice was power. I never met him and didn't know he existed before Phineas told me about him. The cult had scouted him before Phineas had started his experiment to try and spread their influence, but had decided that Dorme's personal ambition would leave them vulnerable. He just wanted power and even if he had not been successful, he would not have stopped with Angral. The future you predicted for Ariadne about the Imperial armies turning up and squashing her, would have happened to him in the end too."

"They will do the same thing to you," I warned him. I was trying to get the warning in whenever I could manage it. He was not being drawn on it though. He just smiled in response.

So Phineas continued his experiments intending to find this alternative power source that would make him more powerful. Both Sam and I had a little laugh at the man because if he had devoted all of the time and effort that he had to this alternative, to his actual studies, then he might have excelled. He spent so much time looking for his shortcut that he could have spent working on the proper method.

Something to be said about that. There's a moral to the story there but I'm too tired and upset to think about it properly.

So Phineas worked and although he had been doing some sick shit beforehand to further his understanding, according to Sam's account, this was where the really nasty stuff started to happen and those authorities that governed the mages at the time really started to take interest in what he was doing.

A lot of what he had found previously could be corroborated in books so he was better able to hide what he was doing with the facade of genuine research. But now… He was breaking into the tombs of otherwise heretical people to commit further heresies. And by heresy, I mean those horrific crimes that would just get you burnt. With the mages, the church and the governments all taking the time to stack some logs on the bonfire.

"He did some vile things," Sam told me. "Some terrible things. I mean, I've done some dark stuff to get where I am today and there are some nightmares still in my future. But what I have done and what I am going to do pales in comparison to what Phineas did."

I remember shifting in my seat uncomfortably as I failed to do my job. Any self-respecting scholar would know that when someone says something like this, you ask for examples. But I didn't. I didn't want to know the answer. I didn't want to know whether Sam was using hyperbole or whether he had done some awful things. I mean, it would be easy to say that Sam had done some horrific things. I mean, I know he had. But what could be worse than that? And if I found out what Phineas had done, would that make what Sam had done seem better, or worse?

But I didn't want to know. I felt myself retreating from the subject. I didn't want to talk about it.

They say that the observer, the chronicler, has an effect upon that which they are observing and this is certainly one of those times when I know it to be true.

Phineas continued on his little experimental crusade to find some way that he could achieve power without having to and Sam quoted, "bow down to the tyranny of the established method". He viewed the establishment of the council of mages and the Chapter of Mages as being this kind of tyrannical overseer that dictated how the world was run to confine people and ensure that they didn't have the opportunity to reach outside of things.

"He genuinely seemed to hate them." He told me.

"Was the hate fed, did someone teach him that hate or was it just something that occurred to him?" I wondered.

"It's impossible to say," Sam said. "There's room to believe both. We know that the chapter of mages held strict controls over the magic users of the continent, even if some people including the rulers of the continent might wish that they had even stricter controls, those rules were still fairly strict. I can easily imagine that a certain kind of person, someone like Phineas would feel as though he was being held back. Was he?"

Sam shrugged before continuing.

"I actually don't think so. I think he was limited by his own problems and his own weaknesses. I think…" He reached for a metaphor. "I am never going to be a painter. I could learn a lot about painting. I could study. I could learn about colour mixtures and I could learn about perspective and the technical aspects of being a painter but at the end of the day, even if I practised every day, I would, at best, be mediocre. Phineas was like that. He had the spark but lacked the talent. And then he was complaining that they wouldn't let him paint the pictures that he wanted to paint. He would never be allowed to use the big canvases or the particular colour blends or the really expensive brushes."

I nodded to show that I understood. "He was like the craftsman that kept blaming his tools."

Sam nodded excitedly. "And then kept trying to invent his own tools to do the job.

"But gradually, it would seem that Phineas started to see something. It was distant, a long way off and he felt it was obscured by some kind of fog, or encased in a shell. He likened it to hearing a noise behind a wall of rock and knowing that if he just worked at it, he would find a way around the rock, or through the rock. He suddenly started to have that kind of inspiration that I know you cherish as much as I do. That moment, when a light is lit in your skull and you can see the alternative path, the other way of thinking and the new way to do something. Then life becomes that little bit easier."

I was back to scribbling frantically as Sam spoke. There are always moments like this when you are interviewing someone when the conversation stops and all you can do is just sit back and let the subject talk. Despite my best efforts, those instincts were firing at me as I listened to Sam speak.

"He started to find new spells. Things in his brain that had always been tricky suddenly became simpler. Deductive leaps that he might once have struggled with started to become easier and easier and the wall that he had described started to feel as though it was made from a crumbly sandstone rather than the hardened volcanic granite that he had felt beforehand.

"He felt as though he was beginning to make headway, and the more he researched… And by research I mean the acts of Necromancy and the speaking across realms that might be considered Goetia depending on your point of view, the easier and more powerful he became."

Sam stopped talking for a moment, staring at a point in the distance. It occurred to me that my brother was afraid.

"He told me that he knew, in detail, the moment when he realised that he had found what he was looking for. He said that it came to him in a dream. He could never remember where he was when he had that dream. He could not remember what he had been doing the day before to trigger the dream. All he knew was that he seemed to wake up in another place.

"He was standing on a flat, dark, glassy surface and automatically he looked up and he saw stars. Lots of stars arranged in constellations that were strange to him. But at the same time, they seemed to be much clearer. There was none of the normal sparkling patterns that seemed to be prevalent if you look at the stars from the ground. They just hung there in the darkness. He could see spinning clusters of stars like gigantic wheels, rotating and shooting off into the night sky. Two distant suns seemed to bathe the area in light. A larger, reddish one and a colder, blue-white one that hung in the sky, perfectly still, unmoving.

"Then he looked down and scanned the horizon. He was standing on this strange, mountainous range. He remembered thinking, or feeling that he was high up in some way, towering above the ground level. The mountains behind him were made out of this strange dark glass. He tried to look into the glass to see if there was anything behind it but it seemed as though it was obscured to him.

"Beneath him was a vast plain of this dark glass that stretched out from horizon to horizon. It reminded him of the ice plains of the distant north where the ice forms or when a lake freezes over. It was jagged and uneven, covered in peaks and troughs as though the surface had once been that of a sea. There were cracks in the surface

"But he was not standing on ice.

"The ground itself suddenly seemed to shake and he automatically looked down, looking for somewhere that he could grab onto in case of an earthquake to keep himself from falling. There was something beneath the glass. Something that had just shifted and moved. Now that he looked, he could see that it was pressing against the glass. Straining against the glass. It was… Pushing outwards, struggling to get out. It was trapped, working against its confinement.

"When it had shifted, the glass gave this awful groaning sound and somewhere something cracked. He looked back out and a great fissure had appeared in the ground. Some of the shattering pieces flew high in the air and did not come down. Some other pieces fell around him and he was covered in this strange dust. He automatically tried to brush the dust from his clothes but his finger caught on some of it and his fingers bled.

"He described the feeling as the most delicious agony that he could conceive.

"He looked further, a bit closer now and he could see figures moving amongst the cracks. Being a mage, he could recognise those creatures instantly. They were lesser vampires. Fleders, Alps and Echidnas and yes, the Elder Vampires that you and Lord Dandelion have described were there directing the others.

"Some of them worked at the cracks with their clawed hands. Some of them had crude tools that were seemingly made out of the same strange glass that Phineas was standing on. But that was not the only thing. Some seemed to choose a spot before fornicating on the edge. There were captives too, who were dragged into place before being tortured using every agony that Phineas could comprehend. And it seemed to Phineas that as they did these things, the more the captives screamed. The more horror that was bestowed upon them all, the more that the cracks in the surface widened.

"And he understood what was beneath the glass."

Sam stopped speaking for a long moment and I felt that I had to give him a little bit of a prompt.

"What was beneath the glass?" I wondered.

Sam smiled.

"He didn't tell me that time. All he would say was that the thing beneath the glass was The God. And that was the thing, the being, the God that he was communing with. He told me more later and this is the only place where I will jump ahead in the story.

"He told me that he had never been more afraid in his entire existence. He had never felt or even comprehended something so vast. This was a being, an entity that was so large, so huge and so massive, that he felt his mind shearing off it. He couldn't comprehend it. He had been standing there next to a mountain. And for all that he knew, that mountain was little more than a finger to this being. He felt dwarfed by it. Massively intimidated but then it all seemed to make sense.

"He rose from his bed and teleported elsewhere instantly in case the dream had drawn the attention of anything or anyone that he needed to worry about. And then, when he got back to work, he found his new method of casting magic. He was no longer drawing on the chaos, but he was drawing from this being that he had made contact with. The thing in the glass. He said that it suddenly seemed so simple and so sensible that he found himself honestly wondering why he had not thought of it before. Or why no one else had either.

"He did wonder if the thing in the glass had guided him to this point. If The God had been leading him to his inevitable destiny. If this had been the reason why he had never been properly able to use magic or do the things that his peers had found so easy."

"Let me guess?" I wondered. "He decided that he didn't care."

"Bitter Freddie?"

"Do you remember what that man did to me, Sam? Drained my blood and put me through some of the worst horrors that I have ever experienced. I mean, I've been through some hellish circumstances in my time but that journey back from the North. The blood loss, the isolation and all of the shite that came with that." I took a deep breath to calm myself. "I mean… I've never graded my experiences on which one was worst. The Beast of Amber's crossing is still the worst, time will tell if this…" I gestured at my surroundings, "gets up the rankings. But that shit in the North?"

I shook my head.

"Looking back, that was the closest I've been to death. To actual death. I don't know how much more I could have taken. When the Elves found me, I was staggering around with it all. Chireadean claims that I looked like a walking corpse and he nearly killed me as it was."

Sam leaned back in his chair with the annoying attitude of a man who was patiently letting me get it all out of my system.

I wasn't finished though.

"I know that Cavill ordered it, but fuck's sake Sam. How much of that can be placed at Phineas' feet? How much of what Kerrass went through, how much of what I went through. How much Sam?"

I realised that I was becoming frantic and hysterical. The horror of the past days and hours was beginning to boil up. It is a truth that you can hold onto this stuff for extended periods but sooner or later, it will all come boiling up to the surface and there will be nothing that you can do to stop it. This was not the first time that it had happened to me and I could feel it, almost literally, climbing up my throat.

But long practice helped me to realise what was about to happen and I was able to swallow it down. I turned away from Sam for a while and focused on my breathing until I couldn't hear the blood thundering in my veins.

"He's dead, Freddie," Sam told me gently. "He's dead. It's not going to be a problem anymore. You won that one."

"Fuck me dead Sam," Rage this time. "Are you honestly trying to console me and make me feel better?"

"Would that be such a bad thing?"

"Sam…" I looked at him to see if he really did have that little self-awareness. "Sam… You have ruined my life. Of all of the people that I want comfort from, you are somewhere down the bottom of the list."

The Fucker actually looked hurt by my words.

I felt like I had won some kind of point. A point in a game that I did not want to play and hated myself for even suiting up for.

"He uhh…" Sam took a deep breath and took a drink.

"Would you like to take a break?" I hissed, unable to help myself from allowing some of my anger to hiss through my teeth.

His eyes sparkled with annoyance.

"I would actually." He told me. "But there is not enough time. I have things that need doing."

He took another drink.

"Phineas found that he was a powerful mage now. He was able to do things, learn things and research things that were completely beyond his previous reach and even when you knew him, he was still growing in power. When he had first made contact with The God, he had been only a little bit more powerful than the kind of apprentice that they close off from their talent in the magical academies. But by the time I met him, he would have been able to stand toe-to-toe with any of the Lodge of Sorceresses. He would claim to be able to do such things and he was not boasting. You learn the difference between someone that is boasting and someone that knows what they are doing when you have been training for a little while.

"He also had a guide to follow and that guide sent him to the North. According to him he teleported into the middle of the rites to The God and made them all shit themselves."

Sam laughed and I will freely admit that the image was certainly amusing.

"Apparently," Sam went on. "They thought that he might have been the personification of The God coming through from whatever ritual they had summoned. They were almost disappointed when he pointed out that he was just a man and just a mage."

I took a deep breath and forced myself to do my job.

"What happened?" I asked.

"He was soon able to prove that he had made contact with The God. He claimed that he found himself in quite an odd position. He was a mage, but at the same time, he felt a bit like a priest. Everything he had belonged to The God. The God had given him power, knowledge and skill. Trying to claim that The God did not exist was a pointless exercise. They knew that The God existed so why try and claim differently? He felt grateful to The God. He felt, not incorrectly, that he owed everything to The God.

"So he also seemed to worship The God. To my eyes, he behaved like a priest, but he would, often violently, refuse to be called that.

"I also know that he was incredibly disappointed with what he found. The then High Priest of the Cult was Kalayn. Still well before my time but I think it was Uncle Kalayn at the time. I didn't pay attention to that part of things and truth be told, it wasn't that important.

"He knew what the rites were about because he had seen it with his own two eyes. He had seen, in that dream, the other beings and the creatures that were being tortured and misused and he also knew what all of that was in aid of. Such a thing was unimportant to The God himself. What would something like that care with the sexual pleasure of something that, to it, was no bigger than a louse.

"But… What the rites did do and what Phineas knew that they did, was that they damaged the cage that was holding The God in check. He knew that that was what the glass was. The Glass was holding it. It was a prison that was keeping it locked up. Who the jailors were? I doubt we will ever know for certain. But it was a prison. And The God wanted to get out of that prison.

"It was trying to do that in ways that we can understand, by hurling itself against the walls of the prison to break free. But also by getting its slaves, its servants to damage the walls with its efforts. But you don't damage a prison like that with hammers, chisels, files and picks. You do it with those rites that have already been described."

I shook my head. The implications of what Sam was telling me were bouncing around inside my skull like lightning leaping around in one of those displays of physical science at the university.

"How awful," I said.

Sam grunted his agreement.

"The problem was that the cult didn't believe him. There's that old saying isn't there that the Prophet is never believed in his homeland."

I nodded.

"Well, it turns out that Phineas turning up to actively explain what was going on made him the least popular element of it all. They all but hated him for turning up and telling them all that their practices were not correct and that they would need to work considerably harder to get anything worthwhile done. They laughed at him and took him to task for it. I suspect, although I can't prove it, that they wanted Phineas to pay his dues in some way. So his efforts to try and leap to the top of the mountain and take charge of the cult were greeted with antipathy, to say the least.

"But what he saw was a group of people, playing at it. He tried to explain, demonstrate and show them exactly how much further they could go. But they wouldn't listen and he was furious and massively disappointed. He had thought that he was going to be involved with the founding of a new religion, an actual religion with provable results and a provable power to worship."

"Why didn't they listen to him?" I wondered.

"Phineas' opinion was that they were weak and lazy. My opinion is a bit more complicated than that. For all of his privileged position in the cult, the higher-ups never quite trusted him. With good reason as well because he made no secret of his scorn for the way that they were doing things. My theory is based on a bit more knowledge.

"The cult trusted me because they thought I was weak. Therefore, I sat in on meetings that I had no business sitting in on really and I heard their innermost thoughts.

"I think that Phineas frightened them. They saw the cult as a kind of… underlining of their own thoughts. It was a justification of their morals and their feelings. It proved to them that because they were nobly born…"

He stopped for a moment to consider.

"There is always fear in that strata. You have never really seen it because you have been a student and then on the path with Kerrass. Emma hasn't seen it. After all, she is ostracised because she's a woman and she has owned the credit slips. But what you don't see is just how terrified the nobility is. They believe that their position is right. That they are justified in what they do. They see it as their God's given right to rule and to do whatever they like because if the Gods didn't want them to do that then they would have been born at a different level of life. So that is their justification for their behaviour.

"Then someone like Father, Grandfather and the Coulthard family comes along. We show that anyone can become a noble if they get rich enough and can purchase their rank from a crown that needs the money. And that terrifies them. It suggests that their powers are an accident of birth rather than at the root of some God's given scheme. Then they start to wonder what else they are wrong about and when Father attains success by investing in his lands and his people…

"I mean, you and I both know that most of the reason he did that was to annoy his neighbours and because he couldn't climb any higher, but we are reaping the harvest of what he sowed with all of that.

"But they look at that and they are afraid. Terrified even.

"So suddenly, here is a power. A God, even. That is telling them that they are right in their original feelings. That they are correct to feel secure in their power. That they are entitled to the work of their peasants and if they want to take the most beautiful girl in the village back to the castle and rape her to death, then that is their right according to this new God that they have found.

"But then Phineas comes along and tells them that anyone can get the power that they have attained. That anyone from any walk of life can achieve the same power, the same pleasure that The God uses to reward the rites. They found that terrifying. Once again, some upstart mage, some peasant and craftsman knows more and can do more than they could ever have even dreamed of. They found that terrifying. And well they should as well. I think he offended them with his arrogance.

"Because he was arrogant. All of us are. Those of us that know a little bit more about something than the next guy. I know more about strategy and tactics, you know more about monsters, Witchers and the way life really works in the villages and the continent. Most of us hide it so as not to offend people. You, especially, are quite good at that although not perfect.

"Phineas… Not only did he not hide his arrogance, but he also didn't see the point of doing so."

I considered that for a moment. It was not an uncommon problem. There is a fine line between people's perceptions of ourselves and how we actually come across to the people that we are dealing with. We see ourselves as knowledgeable and trying to get our points across to those people that have less knowledge of us. But they feel as though what we are doing is calling them stupid.

I have caught myself going on both sides of that argument on several occasions.

"So yeah… Here is another reason that he frightened them." Sam mused, stroking his chin in thought. "And I only say this now with the benefit of hindsight as I've never really had to think about this before, is that… Look." Sam leaned forward.

"Phineas felt nothing but gratitude towards The God for giving him that thing that he had always wanted. That gratitude was profound and in the end, it progressed towards genuine worship. He wanted to empower The God, he wanted to free the God from its prison. Leaving aside the rites and the things that would need to be done to make that happen. What would have happened to the cult if Phineas had succeeded?"

I considered it.

"I don't know," I replied.

"Neither did they and that frightened them. For the most part, The God, even while they had proof that he existed, gives them, in their eyes, the right to do what they want. They can rape, steal, torture and generally carry on to their hearts' content and the sensation from all of that is heightened in the presence of The God. Now, what if The God was freed? It would mean change. It would mean that their way of life would be over.

"After all, would The God even need those kinds of worshippers if he was free? The thought of that, I think, was quite scary. Suddenly, they would be slaves and they knew what The God and the followers of The God liked to do to slaves.

"But if they carried on the way that they were doing up until that point, they could enjoy themselves, keep having the supercharged orgasms that they were feeling and should The God eventually be freed then that would be the problem of their sons and grandsons."

"But what would happen when they died?" I asked. "Do the devotees of The God go to it to serve? I'm not sure I would want to risk that kind of thing."

"Freddie, you and I both know that the thought of such things is unimportant to self-righteous ass-holes who see religion as an excuse to do whatever they want. After all, you have been tortured by several such groups who have used that, the Cult of the First-Born not least."

I grunted at that and Sam continued talking about Phineas.

"Phineas looked at what he had found and again, he was not patient enough to do things properly, which in this case meant that he would need to work his way up from the bottom level to be a mover and a shaker in the cult. He decided that he didn't have time for that."

"Another example of his impatience," I put in and Sam gave me that point with a smile and a nod.

Like a professor acknowledging a point from a particularly stupid student. I have been on the receiving end of that gesture or a gesture like it far too often. It makes my fists itch and it did the same thing this time.

"So instead, he decided to make the best of the situation that he had at the time. He started to do some work with the cult to attract them to himself and to establish himself. He saw the potential for finally having a more permanent base of operations as well as a noble caste that would look after him should the need arise. He gave them some minor things, some pointers really, on how to make their rites that little bit more potent. To make the… uh… the climax that little bit more rewarding.

"He was working on making himself indispensable to them and he was mostly succeeding. By the time that you got to the North, he was in the councils of our enemies. But he was still not "one of them". He was never going to be one of them because he wasn't nobly born enough. And although he had been nobly born, his parentage was from the South which made him lesser.

"Whatever else can be said about Cavill and the rest of the cult, they were patriots."

I had to force my expression into one of calm acceptance as Sam said that.

He continued.

"But he also found them frustrating. He knew how to make the rites even more powerful than they were. He knew how to further their goals and the stated goals of the cult, but they did not seem to want to go any further. He had ideas. He had several laboratories by now and would move between a lot of them as he worked. One large one was in the caves of the cult and in those laboratories and during his meditations, he came up with weapons that could be empowered by The God to carry the influence of The God throughout the continent.

"But the cult, Kalyan and Cavill did not use any of them. They liked the knowledge and they funded the research. Not just with money but with slaves, rites and all of the other sick things that you need to research that kind of thing. But for the more practical testing of the artefacts, Phineas had to go elsewhere so as not to draw attention to the cult."

I nodded.

"Which is where Ariadne and Dorme came in."

"Precisely," Sam replied. "Phineas had already recognised the beings that were working on freeing The God in his dream and in his many and varied dream quests, or visions afterwards. So he reasoned, not incorrectly, that The God had some kind of power over the Vampires. This fact has since been borne out by your narratives in the South by the way."

I nodded my acknowledgement of that.

"So Phineas' theory was that there was a method of controlling the Vampires. He meditated on it and The God provided the necessary magic and method to create the totem that could then be used to control those vampires within the local area. He did the research, formed the plans and was then in Angral doing the more practical experimental parts of the process."

"When Kerrass and I blundered in."

Sam laughed. "Yes, he was quite annoyed by that. He claimed that it didn't matter, that his mind was already made up and he knew what the missing link was. He claimed that he never intended for Dorme's experiments to succeed. But I am not so sure. He was genuinely angry that you and Kerrass had thwarted his plans. He was nowhere near you when it came time to work on that kind of thing. So don't feel guilty that you didn't catch him at the time. But he was angry that things had fallen through.

"He was genuinely astonished that you had a link to the cult, no matter how tenuous it was. He was considering whether or not to take revenge on you and Kerrass when I met him, versus thinking that the final death knell of the cult had been sounded and that he needed to make preparations to leave. It was during that considering that he met me.

"He knew about what had happened from Cavill and had gone south with Uncle Kalayn, more as a scouting mission than anything else. Cavill wanted to know how dangerous you were and how dangerous the problems with Edmund were and whether or not Kalayn was actually going to do anything worthwhile about it all. So he was there as an observer.

"Then he met and saw me, figured out my part in things and then…"

Sam shrugged.

"I don't mean to be condescending Sam." I began carefully.

"But." Sam prompted with a smile. "Something something anything said before a but is untrue something."

I smiled.

"But what did he see in you? Serious question, I'm not mocking you, or him." I considered it. "Well… maybe him a little bit."

Sam smirked before turning his head to one side to consider.

"What he told me," He said after a while. "Was that I had a will that was lacking in other people? He said that the cult in the North was complacent. That they were lacking in ambition and as such, they were satisfied with where they were and had no real desire to carry things further. Whereas in me, he saw a man with will and passion. A man that would be able to take things further and take the necessary next steps.

"He told me that, through me, The God would have a route forward. The God would never be reborn in my lifetime but I had the will to properly use the skills and the experience that he, Phineas, could bring to bear. I would be willing to use the tools that he had at his disposal to bring down my enemies. And in doing so, I would be working with him, Phineas, to further Phineas' goals."

"What were Phineas' goals?"

Sam mused. "He told me that just by using the things that he had to offer, I would be working for The God and that was all that he wanted. I think…"

He did the thing where he leant forwards in his chair again, resting his elbows on the desk.

"You and I have been around people of faith our entire lives. I said earlier that Phineas was as close to being a true believer as anything I have seen and I meant it. We have, both of us and you cannot deny it, we have both seen men and women that claim to be people of faith that are not. Men and women go to church in order to be seen to go to church. Who listen to the sermons, nod, smile, sing and put their hands together in all of the right places but when you ask them to follow through on what the sermon was about, they will cast that aside like it was hot.

"You have seen it. I have certainly seen it. I've seen it in those people that worship the Sacred Fire. I've seen it in Knights of Kreve who prayed to Kreve for the strength of their arms before pushing everyone else forwards so that they would be as safe as they possibly could be on the battlefield. I have literally heard Knights tell their fellows that they are too important to die after begging Kreve for a good death back in the camp before the battle.

"Even fucking Cavill and the cult of the First-Born. They gave lip service to The God. They took his gifts and they were involved in the rites that were involved in all of that but when it came down to doing anything about it, all they were interested in was their own power and influence.

"God but I hated those fuckers.

"I have only known a few real men of faith. That Father Jerome of yours is one. Mark believes, but he is too much his Father's son. He sees the church as a way to further his own goals and beliefs. Mother is too concerned with her own redemption. You are the closest to what I would consider a true man of the Eternal Flame as you seek to guide people to the light. You see it as your duty. But even you are a little selfish in that regard as you are desperate for the safety that the Flame provides.

"Phineas believed in it with all of his heart. Not only that, but he was grateful too. So in giving me the tools and showing me how to use them, I would be furthering the works of The God. That was his goal."

"By tools, you mean weapons?" I wondered.

"Yes."

I felt myself nodding.

"What happened then?" I asked.

For the first time over our many conversations, Sam began to look ashamed.

"He played me like a damn lute." He told me. "I was willing to be played of course, but that never changes anything. In the same way that Mark got you to read the Holy scriptures and the books of the prophet by telling you that they were too advanced for you and that you would never understand them."

I grunted at that. That particular manipulation had been a source of some argument between us for a while. But Sam continued to speak.

"I remember it very clearly. This was the moment that began my path. I mean, the other day you argued that the poisoning of Mark was a significant act. I don't think it was. I think it was this. I remember it very clearly."

I'm switching back to Sam's direct account for a while.

We were sitting there, out in the early evening sunshine. I remember it so clearly, the point of your life where you make a decision and down one pathway lies one life and down the other pathway lies another. We all have these moments. You have even talked about them in your diaries. Why did you stay at that particular inn the night that Kerrass came along? Why did you tell Father to go fuck himself? Why did you insist on investigating Father's death? And on those rare occasions where these decisions are made, if you are really lucky, you get to see it happen. You get to watch.

And sometimes, even rarer than that, you get to see the moment coming.

I remember it so clearly. The two of us were sitting on one of those benches with a table between us. Picnic benches they call them although I never saw the point in calling it something like that. We were facing each other in the late Autumn, early winter months. The sun was going down but it was still warm out in the open air. There was the smell of meat roasting at a time when such things were still considered a luxury. I could tell from the smell that it would taste good but to let a few other people get their portions first because the outside of the carcass would be burnt.

The birds were singing in the trees, I could hear children playing in the nearby fields as they chased each other with sticks and played at warfare. They were young and by this point, the war was several years ago. Half a lifetime for many of those children and no longer an object of fear.

I remember it so clearly, the smoke hanging in the air, the distant strains of the bard that was plucking away at their harp in the main room of the inn. People were laughing and singing. They cheered when someone dropped a plate of crockery.

Phineas had been talking for a while. It had been a while since one of the wenches had last been with a jug of beer and I thought that I had better order one so that they didn't get moody about the fact that we were taking up one of their prime spots. I also realised that I was hungry as well which was never a good sign.

So I signalled and procured us another jug of ale.

"So all of this is very interesting," I said as I made sure that my dagger was still where I left it. "Interesting, and terrifying if I'm telling the truth."

"It can take people that way at first." Phineas agreed, seemingly entirely unconcerned.

"So what's in it for me?" I began carefully.

Phineas nodded, as though I had crossed some item off his list.

"You wish to destroy the cult in the North." He was not asking a question, he was making a statement. "You have destroyed their offshoot with the help of your brother, his Witcher friend and your mother and by dint of some manipulation, you are now also the Lord Kalayn which means that you have a large amount of territory in the lands of the cult."

I nodded, trying not to be concerned that he knew so much of my plans. I think he saw that too because he smiled.

"I can help you." He said.

"Why would you help me?" I asked.

He was prepared for the question.

"The cult is weak." He told me. "They are weak people being led by weak minds who hold their authority over those that are lesser than themselves. They hold onto that authority without earning that authority and they have allowed themselves to become lazy, fat and indolent. You," he pointed, I remember him pointing, "are the biggest threat that that cult has had since the day that they were founded and they don't even know that you exist.

"They are falling. They don't know it yet but they are already dead men walking. To The God, they are an insult to him, not followers and The God would be better off if they all died."

"But they are your power base," I argued.

"I don't need them." he waved his hands dismissively. "I don't need them. If I help you, you can provide me with more than I could ever need. You could provide the same stability, if not more so than they have ever given me. With them, there was always the possibility that some passing priest or official would find out where they were so I have always been poised with one foot out of the door as it is.

"But with you. You come from a known religious family. After you have destroyed the cult, you will still be there and you will have the power and the reach and the… trust to be able to work towards the betterment of The God without any of the rest of the nonsense that comes with it."

"That still doesn't explain why you would help me," I told him. "Yes, I can do all of the things that you describe. I can keep you safe. I can probably fund your research and with the influence of my brothers and the family trading concern, I will likely have enough power to keep you safe, or at least to know that the hammer is falling when the time comes. That is true. But you could get the same guarantees from some priest or another. Why me?"

"Because you have what I need." He told me.

"What is it you need?" I asked. It was an automatic question. The instinctual movement and I could no more have not asked that question than you could have."

"Later." He told me, waving me off.

I don't know if he smiled then. As I have played back the memory in my head since then, sometimes he smiles in my memory and some other times he is expressionless.

"I can give you weapons," he told me. "I can give you methods and powers so that you can overcome the mightiest army. I can make you, or your followers, stronger, faster and more hardy. I can even increase your skills and the speed of your thought. I can implant combat muscle memory into the body. I have forging techniques for weapons and ways that even the common person can throw magic around the place in ways that will not be monitored or guarded by the elitist fools that used to live at one academy or the other."

It was my turn to hold my hand up to halt the tirade.

"And why should I trust you?" I wondered. "You are betraying one set of masters, only to approach me."

He definitely smiled that time.

"They were never my masters…"

"Your allies then."

He acknowledged that point with a nod.

"I can, and have, offered these same gifts to the cult in the North, but they have done nothing to follow through on those things. I could make them powerful. I could give them the rule over the North but they refuse to follow through on those things. All the while, The God languishes in his prison. Why should you trust me? All I want, all I have ever wanted, is to have a seat at the table. The God is important, he has given me everything. All I want you to do is listen to me and use the gifts that I can give.

"They cast me aside, you can listen to me."

I nodded.

"Not really a compelling argument," I told him.

He laughed.

"Then trust me because you already have." He told me. "I could destroy you by virtue of taking your treachery to Cavill but I have not. I will not either and with every day that passes, I prove that you can trust me that little bit more."

"Now that is more compelling," I told him. "But I can't help but notice that it's also a threat."

He was surprised. I genuinely think that he hadn't thought of it like that.

"Not a threat." He told me.

"So why would I want you?" I asked. "The threat works both ways. I could go to Cavill and the rest to tell them about your treachery just as easily as you are doing so now. I already have plans with which I can destroy the cult. I have allies and friends…"

"Do they know that they're your allies and friends?" He asked with a slight smile.

"Do they have to?" I responded, making him laugh. "I cannot deny that the possibility of these things that you offer is interesting. I would be lying if I tried to claim that it wasn't. But at the end of the day, I can do this without you."

"You probably can." He told me. "But two things occur. The first is that I can make it easier for you. I can ensure your success without risk. I can give you a fallback position so that even if your other plans fail, then there is a contingency in place to solve your problems."

"What contingency?" I asked.

He just smiled at me, baiting my curiosity.

"So what is the other thing?" I wondered.

"You are an ambitious man." He told me. "Are you honestly going to sit there with a straight face and tell me that you will be satisfied after you have destroyed the cult? Or will you want more? Will you want the next target and the next enemy?"

I didn't like that thought.

"How would you do this?" I demanded.

"I have told you, have I not, about how I was working in the East with the Count Dorme? About how I was providing him with a method that he could use to control the Elder Vampire to use her as a slave?"

"You did."

"The Vampires, as a race, were the slaves of The God. That is how I know about such magic. The other things that I can give you are mere trifles of the power of The God. Useful to be sure, but this… With this item, you could control that slave race and bend them to your will, whatever that will might be. I saw them, in my dreams and my visions as they hack away at the prison of The God. They are meant to be slaves and I know how to control them."

"But you failed," I argued.

"Did I?" He wondered with a smile.

"The fetish didn't work," I argued. "Ariadne was able to take control."

"Dorme was a fool." Phineas sneered. "He rushed and demanded. He was as much my subject of experimentation as the slave was. He proved that the basis of 'the fetish' as you call it was correct. But he was missing something. I did not forget. I knew exactly what was missing."

"What was it?" I wondered.

He shook his head.

"Trust." He told me. "I am placing myself in your power just as much as you are placing yourself in mine. I will tell you when I know that I can trust you. It didn't work for him. But it will work for you if you want it of course."

And he had me. He knew it and I knew it as well. I had to know.

I felt like I was banging my head against a wall. I was missing something and I had no idea what it was. You have described the feeling before when you talked about what it's like to reach for an answer in the exam hall. I have never felt more connected to you than at that moment. I could see that there was a question that I could ask him that would call him out for some of his nonsense. There was a piece to the puzzle that he wasn't telling me and it seemed vital to me that I knew what that piece was before I committed to anything.

I could see that answer, hovering, just out of sight in my mind's eye and I strained to make that question manifest. It was like that moment when you forget a close friend's name. Someone that you might not have seen for a few months but you were once close to. I think of some of my old war comrades like that. I knew that I needed to find that question so I backed off from it for a moment. I just… edged away from it to give the question room to breathe in my head and I wouldn't be locked behind it.

Phineas and I talked about other things. We talked about what my immediate plans were for the future and I explained that I would need to take some steps to re-ingratiate myself with the cult. I needed to scout things and talk to people and get the pieces in place ready for the end game.

He was sympathetic and was in almost total agreement. He warned me about a couple of people, suggested some others that I might be able to recruit to my cause as well as reassured me about some people that I had thought were trustworthy but couldn't be sure of.

Like Kristoff for example.

We were eating when the question came to me. Some of that wonderful roasted meat with the berry sauce served on a thick slab of bread and butter. I remember it like it was yesterday and I put off continuing the conversation while I just focused on enjoying the meal. There was a feeling that this was the ultimate question. The one that was going to have a major effect through it all.

So I waited until we had both eaten our fill. I moved the question around in my head a bit to make sure that I had it right and could make sure that I wouldn't be struggling with anything and then, just as he was leaning back from his meal with a sigh of contentment, I pounced.

"But I do have another question." I began.

He raised an eyebrow in curiosity. I've always wondered how people do that, the way they raise a single eyebrow, seemingly at command. I know that my body has control over the muscles in question as my squire and my comrades have all told me that they have seen me do it where an eyebrow has been raised in the questioning of some adjunct or another.

"You say that you have all these rituals." I began. "All of these things, these weapons and magic that you have access to that you could use, both to further my goals but also to help empower The God."

"That's right." He replied.

"Then why not use them," I suggested. "Why do you need me at all, let alone why have you allowed the cult to continue as it has been doing for… however the fuck long. You could perform these rituals, you could make these weapons and then use those weapons to ensure the ascendance of the God or whatever it was that you needed it to. So why don't you do them?"

He smiled. "That's a good question and out of all of the people that I have ever made this offer to, you are the first person that has actually bothered to ask it. The answer is simple. Because I can't."

"Cannot, or will not. I have seen you standing on the edges of the rituals, being there but never quite taking part in the rites yourself. Never quite stepping inside the circles of power. I've seen you draw those circles but you've never actually been inside the circle themselves. So why do you not get involved yourself?"

He had sneered when I had talked about the rituals of the cult

"The answer is that I cannot. In that regard, I am lacking. Or rather if I ever had it, then that thing that I need is long since lost to me. The rituals of the cult are… weak. So weak that I find that I would prefer not to even bother. They are so behind on their devotions, so pointless and so…

"Think of it like wine which is a far better metaphor for it than sex. You get to the point where you are so used to the good wine that you actively don't want to drink the shite wine that they serve in bad roadside inns."

"Like this place?" I wondered.

"The wine here is actually quite good. But the wine amongst the cult is truly terrible. I would rather go thirsty than drink what they would offer. The God accepts it and gives of his bounty, but it's barely enough to keep him going, let alone setting him or damaging his prison so that he can give us even more power."

"Ok," I said. "And I thank you for your explanation and I suppose that I asked the question. But I notice that you are still dodging the other thing that I asked about. Why don't you do these things?"

"Because…" He took a deep breath and I could tell that he was thinking about his answer.

"Because there are rites that are involved. It is a ritual and that is the best way to think about it. Think of it in terms of a magical thing. Or like devotion in a church. You say your prayers, you donate things, you sing and you offer things to the Eternal Flame do you not?"

"I do."

"And in The Cult, you perform acts and things."

"Yes."

"It would be the same. But some of these rituals require certain factors that you have, that I do not."

"What factors?" I immediately demanded.

He smiled. "At the moment, although I am pretty sure, I am not certain. At the moment it's pointless anyway. You do not need these things, at least not yet. There might be an argument for making certain preparations so that you have those tools and weapons in your back pocket so that they are there, should they become needed. But for now, I would suggest that you do not need them and as such, you should not worry about them."

And he would not be drawn on the matter.

Back to the pair of us talking now.

"What was the factor, Sam?" I asked. "What was it that you had that he did not?"

"Do you not know?" Sam looked tired. Tired and infinitely sad.

"Flame…" I breathed. "Flame, but I hope not."

Sam nodded and looked away for a long moment.

"We parted from that inn the following morning, putting our plans in place so that we could proceed. He didn't answer the question that night or in the morning afterwards. We went our separate ways. I paid my first visit to my new lands but I did so in disguise. I arranged for those servants of the castle that might be loyal to the former Lords Kalayn to be quietly disposed of and those people that were not were encouraged to flee. Aunt Kalayn was already a wreck of a person, her body and mind were shattered a long time ago and she was only a shadow of her former self at that point. She went off to the dower house and I arranged that a couple of people that I could not and would not trust were assigned to "watch" her."

"So you didn't try to rescue her." I was feeling more tired than angry. "Sam, she was a sick and dying old woman. She could have been looked after. I know those cultists were taking advantage of Ella…."

"Call it what it was, Freddie. They were raping and abusing her whenever they had the chance and when she wasn't needed in her other duties. It does not do to look away from the crimes that others commit."

I filed that comment away for future use.

"I also paid my respects to the cult." Sam went on. "I talked to Cavill and some of the others to let them know that I was in the area. There were lots of very boring talks about what my plans were when it comes to Kalayn lands. For me, what that meant was that I ended up doing lots of nodding and smiling while I watched them dispose of the lands accordingly. I don't think that they even consulted me as to what I thought of the entire thing. I was just going to live there, do what I was told and send any money that I made from those lands to the funding of the cult.

"It didn't occur to them how impractical all of that was. I knew that Emma would want to know and would have some suggestions as to how I could monetize Kalayn lands as much as anyone else. I also knew that, given our rising to Imperial significance, there was more than a small possibility that some inspectors would turn up. You and Kerrass had already recommended that a Witcher and some priests turn up but those warnings were ignored.

"What they wanted was for Kalayn lands to operate as they always had and offset some of the risks. I think they had these visions that I would be some kind of glorified innkeeper. They would turn up 'use the facilities' as it were and then stand in the corner and serve them drinks while they conducted their "rites".

"It didn't matter that much anyway. My plans were in motion. The most important parts of those meetings were the before and afterwards. Where I could meet and talk to those people that might be sympathetic to my cause.

"Unfortunately, most of them were too cowed to be of any use. You spoke to Arthur and most of them were like that. Younger sons or bastard sons that didn't even consider that if they all got together and made a concerted effort, then they could overturn the cult's so-called Natural order.

"Kristoff was the exception. Like me, he had been away at war and had learnt something of his own value during that warfare. He was…"

Sam considered Kristoff for a moment.

"Kristoff was on the other side of your equation. You say, correctly, that education does not automatically indicate intelligence. But one of the side effects of education is that you can appear intelligent in certain circumstances. Kristoff is educated and is fairly clever but he lacks that last thing… I want to say that he lacks the imagination to be able to make reasoned leaps. He was angry that, after having been given access to units of knights and having fought in wars, he had returned home only to be ridiculed and lessened in the eyes of others. He was sullen and very angry.

"He thought that the cult was ridiculous. He had never been in a rite at that time and thought it was all nonsense designed to keep others down and he hated them. He was the most open to the changes that I proposed and I was able to arrange matters that he would be working with me while I took over Kalyan lands.

"But the other side of things was that I was mapping out the cult. I might have been a younger son and therefore not as important as others, but I was still important. I had influence in external courts and I was, of course, rich. The cult thought that I would be able to exercise influence over Emma and that therefore, I was a source of funds. They dismissed her as being unimportant of course and assumed that Mark, you or myself were operating her behind the scenes. That or she was some kind of stooge for one of Father's lawyers.

"I began to realise that I was not as secure in my position as I thought I was. Emma was not as forthcoming with the money as they wanted her to be. Apart from anything else, I had my own plans for that money, legitimate plans as well. Plans which, at that stage, Emma agreed with. I knew that the cult was going to attack me. I was even planning the moment that I told them to go and fuck themselves with no small amount of relish. But the fact was that I couldn't get any more money out of her. I didn't want to get any more money out of her and that was beginning to upset people.

"Another problem was that, although everyone understood and agreed that there was little that I could do to prevent Edmund, Cousin Kalayn and their hangers-on from completely imploding, they wanted someone to blame and I was convenient. I was a younger son after all and I had been there. It was one of those strange situations. They knew I wasn't at fault, but they also knew that the fault was mine.

"I got the impression that they would much rather have blamed Uncle Kalayn for it all but… That was impractical for any number of reasons. If they attacked the former head of the cult then they would be saying that the head of the cult was incompetent and therefore not the direct conduit of The God.

"I started to feel it, people talking behind my back, people muttering and making sly comments. I could probably have fixed it if that was the only thing that I was devoting my time to but I just didn't have time. Francesca had done her job too well for my purposes. Her efforts along with you and your diaries meant that we, as a family, had come to the notice of the Imperial Court. As such, my movements were becoming more recorded and remarked upon. Therefore, the cult started to view me as a threat."

I jumped in.

"You would have thought that they might have seen our, and therefore your, rising for the opportunity that it was."

Sam grunted.

"There you were." I argued, "a man with contacts and friends at court. An agent and a spy that they would have access to… blah blah blah."

Sam chuckled. "You know that and I know that but you are putting your finger on the problem that the cult had as a whole. They were not a meritocracy. They had a very rigid social structure. The most incompetent First-Born son in the world had authority over the most competent second-born true son. And on and on down the line until you reached the bastard-born sons. And below them were the women.

"You have to understand this. It's a difference in the brain. You are still working on the presumption that they saw the Empress, Emma and all the rest as being rivals. Intelligent and powerful women to be sure but rivals nonetheless. But that is wrong. Women were seen as being lesser in every way. It was not just an insult that they bowed down to a Queen or an Empress; it was actively against nature that this could be allowed. It was inconceivable to them that I could not order Emma about. They just… couldn't comprehend it. They didn't get it. At all. It was its own peculiar form of madness.

"So as a result… Yes, you are right. It would have been a benefit to have me in court. But they didn't see the benefit there. They didn't see that The Empress was an important figure. 'How could she be important? She is a woman? They would say these things but they never did. Why? Because in saying those things they would be forced to acknowledge that other people would think otherwise.

"They didn't need an agent in the Empress' court because it was the Empress' court."

"Holy Flame," I breathed.

"Now you begin to understand the scope of my problem. I was being pulled in all different directions. I needed to be in the South, getting ready for the coming tournament for the Empress' coronation, because I needed to train given that my jousting skills were rusty. Not being in the tournament was unthinkable given my status. In fact, not being in the tournament would draw more attention than being in it.

"I was needed in the North to repair my relationship with the Cult as I was not ready to rebel against them. I did not have the trust capital with the Redanian forces to give me the troops. The Inquisition and the church couldn't send anyone as the Imperial lawmakers had made it clear that changes were coming regarding the laws governing religious inquisitions. I could not work with Emma or work against the cult and suddenly it all started to seem like it was too much.

"Against the vast might of the cult. I had the promise that you and Kerrass would come North when you had finished with your errand in the South. The coronation of the Empress meant that you would be further delayed. I would also have the aid of the churches of both Kreve and the Eternal Flame should they be able to pull their fingers out and send me some help. If the Inquisition was going to come then the Redanians would send someone. I knew that my authority as well as Kristoff's authority would be able to scare up some troops between us.

"I planned that I would install myself in Kalyan lands as their lord with you either on your way or already there. Then I would send messages to the cult instructing them to take their fat, privileged arses and swivel on my middle finger, or my sword point, whichever they were most comfortable with. I knew that they would then attack me and start to exert more control over Kalayn lands themselves.

"From there, I expected that you would investigate what was going on. Kerrass would go with you as well. If you didn't then I had the redundancy of expecting the Inquisition to investigate. I was less enamoured of that idea at the time given that they might unearth some of my own activities. Remember that this was before the Empress had decided that Inquisitorial courts were no longer allowed to summarily try and execute people.

"So it was about six weeks before the coronation was due to start. I was taking advantage of the fact that we now had a Sorceress in the family and influenced enough that we could use the transport gate that had been established in Toussaint to acclimatise to their warmer weather and get used to how they do things down there. Then I would dash North to make plans with Emma about what we were going to do with Kalayn lands. And then I was needing to go further North to fight the fires that had spread in my absence.

"Into all of this, strode Phineas."

Sam and I both shifted our weight in our chairs a bit. I had a horrible sick feeling that I knew what was coming, even though I didn't know what it was. Thinking back, people have warned me about Sam over the years. But also there have been various supernatural entities, the woman on the Skeleton Ship, Kerrass' Goddess and I'm sure that there are more, that have warned me that the answer that I have been looking for is right in front of me but I had not been willing to see it.

Of course, at the time of writing, I know what Sam was working his way up to telling me, but at the time, sitting in his study waiting for Sam to get to the damn point. I had no idea. All I could feel was a growing sense of doom. I had gone utterly still. My right hand dipping my quill and scratching the spider's lines that make up my own shorthand as I took my notes, was working automatically by this point. So I was just waiting.

"We had been in touch a couple of times since our last meeting. He was one of the people that had warned me that the cult hierarchy was unhappy with me. I might even have considered that a manipulation but for the fact that other, independent sources were telling me the same thing. We talked some more about The God, this and that and the other thing. Ways that he could help me and other stuff as well.

"So I was in Toussaint. I had been exercising my horse, acclimatising to her and her to me. She was not a warhorse and she was not a riding horse. She was a jousting horse and had been trained to joust. Emma must have spent a fortune on her. I think she's a breeding mare now for the Knights of Francesca or something."

He stopped for a moment and considered this.

"What a grotesque thought." He said quietly

He shook his head and carried on speaking.

"But regardless of where she was, I was exercising her and getting used to her. I had stopped in one of the roadside taverns for a small skin of wine so that she could have something to drink and rest as I was still testing her limits and didn't want to push her too hard. This was about us learning about each other after all.

"So I was sitting there, watching the world go by when someone asked me if anyone was sitting in the chair next to me. I waved them away on the assumption that they would just take the chair and move off, but instead, Phineas sat down in it.

"'So how are things going down here?' he asked. I remember that he was smiling as he said it and not for the first time, I felt this urge to smack him in his mouth.

"'So-so,' I replied. 'Busy. How are things in the North?'

"'You should really be up there.' He replied. 'Things are getting tense and there are people openly commenting about having you killed so that they can take over Kalyan lands. They want to arrange so that you leave everything to one of Cavill's whelps as well as your Coulthard lands, title and wealth and then you will be killed.'

"I smiled. It was not a new fear and the answer was the same.

"'Emma's lawyers will have them for breakfast.' I told him. 'Not only that, but it would be seen to be a forgery because why wouldn't I leave everything to my younger brother? Also, Mark isn't dead yet so at the moment, the cult would get that village on the white cliffs and the old manor house there that I've still not set foot in. Also, a five per cent stake in the family business which, between them, the rest of the family would buy out in moments. So to get everything that they want, Mark and Freddie would need to die as well and they would need some kind of hold over Emma. Good luck trying to get her to marry one of Cavill's sons. She'll rip his balls off first.'

"Phineas nodded. 'I know that and you know that, but will Cavill know that? Or will he do it anyway and be damned to the consequences.'

"I had nothing to say to that so I tried to turn it back on him.

"'Anyway.' I said, 'What are you doing down here? The place is crawling with members of the Lodge of Sorceresses and I'm told by very smart people that Lady Yennefer is one of the more powerful members. Shouldn't you be avoiding Toussaint like the plague?'

"He shrugged. 'Nah.' He said. 'The Bitch of Black and White chased me for years and never caught me, and little miss Fringy the Entitled is not motivated enough to do anything about it. If we came face to face then I might struggle but they would both underestimate me anyway. But also, they cannot detect my magic anymore because my magic comes from The God, not this formless and irrelevant chaos that they think so much about.

"'I came to warn you.' He told me. 'That's all."

"I had nothing to say to that. For a long time, I had been trying to tell myself that my fears were all in my imagination and that I was really making something out of nothing. But Phineas' declaration somehow made it seem more real to me. I went through all of the argument points with him again. Talking it all through and making sure that he knew everything that I was talking about and that all of these things were being considered. Then he said something that kind of knocked the wind out of me and I didn't know how to respond to it.

"'All of your arguments are sensible.' He said. 'All of them and I agree with every single one of them. The problem is not that you are wrong, but you are presuming that you are dealing with a rational mind.'

"That knocked me onto my back foot, I will freely admit that. I had no idea how to respond to that and as I sat there in the still-warm Toussaint sunshine… Have you noticed that? You were there last winter, even in the middle of winter, their sunshine is abnormally hot,"

I just nodded, not allowing myself to be drawn. It was not an unfair observation but Sam was stalling and we both knew it.

"I suddenly felt the sense that things were getting away from me." Sam carried on "I felt the urge to run. To maybe write you a letter of warning as to what was coming and then fleeing. Maybe over the desert or something. That confirmation of fear that Phineas had brought was absolute. It felt as though the world was closing in around me and I didn't know what to do with it or do about it.

"'Anyway,' Phineas said, pushing himself to his feet. 'I must be off as well if I'm going to make sure that I can guarantee my own safety, let alone yours. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.'

"I remember that I seemed to sit there for what felt like hours although it must have been heartbeats at most.

"'What?..." I said without really meaning to. He stopped and turned to look at me. His face was a picture of polite, slightly concerned curiosity.

"I took a deep breath and took the plunge.

"'You once told me that there was a weapon that you had access to.' I began carefully.

"He sat down, all polite concern. I took another deep breath.

"'You said,' I went on, 'that there were things that would need to happen. Ingredients to the preparation of that weapon that I have that other people do not.'

"He nodded.

"'What are those ingredients?' I asked finally.

"He nodded and considered for a while. 'The short answer.' He began carefully. 'Is that you have a sister.'

"I remember nodding.

"'How would it work?' I asked him.

"'Well, obviously.' He began, 'This would have to be a thing of last resort. But before we can do anything, we would need unfettered access to one of your sisters so that things would need to be fine-tuned. But we need one of your sisters.'

"'Is there a line of no return?' I asked. 'So could we do things in preparation and then leave certain things until they absolutely need to be done?'

"He considered this for a while.

"'There are many stages to the ritual in question. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that there are a series of rituals that need to be committed to make all of this work. You would need to be present for some of those ritual, but not all of them. There would also need to be some things done that would have an effect on you. These things will change you. But yes, there is a line.'

"So, in theory," I said slowly, 'we could make preparations and then, when the situation becomes dire, I could take the next and necessary steps?'

"'Yes.'

"I took another deep breath.

"'Then which sister would be best?' I asked."

Sam stopped talking. He was watching me carefully. It suddenly occurred to me that a couple of the guards had moved so that they were more closely surrounding Sam. Sam was tense and some long unused training from Kerrass…

Flame… Poor Kerrass. I wonder if he ever warned me about Sam. I can't remember at the moment.

But I remembered that training from Kerrass and I looked at Sam. He was ready for a fight. He was tired, pale, and probably fairly ill and there was all of the other stuff that was involved in what was happening, the things that he was taking and all of the stuff that those things had done to him.

So what guards he had in the room with us had kind of formed around him. They were expecting me to attack him outright.

It is an interesting thought. Until I saw what was happening with them and figured out what they were afraid of. It honestly hadn't occurred to me. It hadn't even crossed my mind that I would attack him over this.

But there it was. The answer that I had been looking for, for nearly two years. Sometimes openly and sometimes hidden even from myself. My brother had taken Francesca in order to save his own skin.

For a long moment, I felt like I was falling into a dark hole full of suffocatingly dark water and I had to force myself to breathe in and out to stay conscious. I wasn't angry, not really and dimly in the back of my head, it occurred to me that I might get angry later. Instead, I felt hollow. Immeasurably sad and so incredibly tired.

I rubbed my head and looked back up at Sam.

"So it was you that took Francesca." It was not a question and we both knew it.

"Yes." He admitted and I remember nodding.

I subsided again. I want to say that my thoughts were spinning, echoing and bouncing off each other in an effort to make sense of it all, but that would be untrue. I felt hollow and my mind was blank. Instead, I took refuge with the oldest ploy. I buried myself in my work.

"Ok," I said before taking another deep breath. "Ok. I have so many questions but first I will ask something that I need to know. I know that you don't like to look ahead and want to tell the story in its proper order, but if you don't answer it, then I will put down my pen and I don't care if you torture me or anyone else for that matter, I will simply not start work again."

He nodded.

"Is Francesca still alive?" I asked. "Because if she's going to turn up out of some side door and…"

"No," Sam interrupted me. "She is dead."

I nodded and I felt the first tear gather in the corner of my right eye. A sharp lump appeared in the back of my throat which made me feel as though I was trying to swallow past a blade of some kind. It took several clearances of my throat for me to be able to speak again.

"So I suppose." I cleared my throat again. "I suppose that the next stage of our conversation is to talk about what happened with Jack and what happened in Toussaint."

Sam nodded.

"But first of all, not that I would trade and if you try and make this about which of my sisters is my favourite then I swear that I will gouge your eyes out with this quill."

"I won't."

"I'll do it, Sam, don't try and use that as a ploy because I really will find a way to…"

"I won't do that Freddie."

I could hear the hysteria in the back of my throat and I took another moment to calm down.

"Why did you choose Francesca and not Emma?" I asked.

It was Sam's turn to take a deep breath.

"There were a number of components to that." He said. "The most obvious one was that Phineas told me that because she was younger, then Francesca's contributions to the ritual would be more potent because she was younger. The other thing was about utility. As you would later point out, Emma is vital to the running of the trading company. Without her, the entire thing would fall apart. Some lawyer could take the reins, but that would leave the company without a master for several months while the new guy got up to speed. In the meantime, could the new guy ever be trusted not to be using the company to line their own purse?

"But the other consideration was purely a matter of making sure that we got away with it.

"With the use of Phineas' magic that came from another source, spriting Francesca away was not the difficult part. The difficult part was ensuring that we would get away with it in the long run. That was the hard part. So we came up with the plan that we needed to have a way to ensure that there were so many suspects that people wouldn't be able to see the forest for the trees. We needed to make any kind of investigation so that it would be like looking for a particular needle in a haystack's worth of needles.

"We've talked about the family having lots of enemies in the past. Thaont is still true and I don't think that that is going to go away any time soon. But also to that, one of the people that was going to be investigated most closely would be me. There were plenty of other people that would have a reason to kidnap Emma but one of the ways that that would fall would be that I would be investigated particularly closely.

"But Francesca? Not only would the enemies of the Coulthard family be involved in such a hunt, but so would all of the people at the Imperial Court that had been involved with her in either an official or a personal level. Also, given that the people around the Empress, who would certainly be the people conducting the investigation on such a level, would concentrate on that link before all others. So it would not be a case of asking who had the motive to remove Francesca from the Imperial Court, but more of a case of who didn't?"

"But the suspicion would still fall on you." I protested but then the realisation fell. "And then I proved your innocence."

Sam smiled and a flash of pure hatred went through my skull as I saw him smile.

"Yes, you did." He said. "Thank you for that by the way."

"Yeah," I said as calmly as I could manage. "Go fuck yourself. Talk me through it."

"Toussaint really was a horror show at that point. I understand that a lot of changes have been made, but back then… The North still had its cult but Toussaint had a more destructive cult if you ask me, the cult of Chivalry and even worse, the entirety of the countryside had bought into it. So I could see the gaps between the haves and the have-nots. The Knights Errant wandered around being full of themselves. There were some good men amongst them, that's not in dispute. But there were also some greedy, rich and entitled fuckwits there as well.

"Mostly it was Phineas' plan. He would invent a serial killer, picking someone out of the crowd who he would magically enhance so that they could act the role that we had assigned to them. We looked to your own writings and the story of Jack for inspiration and that struck us as being suitably macabre. The God provided the ability for Phineas to implant Jack-like abilities and behaviours in that man and then he went to work.

"In the meantime, we needed to work on my innocence. Ideally, Phineas couldn't be in Toussaint. Not only because of his innate cowardice but also because, despite his use of magic from a different source, he would still be detectable if he was transporting Francesca in and out. So we hit upon the plan of hiding her in plain sight and by the by, proving my innocence by making it look as though I had been framed."

My sense of just general fatigue grew. I had seen it, I think, at the time. But I had refused to acknowledge the possibility that Sam could have been involved. I had not wanted to believe it and had refused to believe it. I had been looking for reasons why it couldn't possibly have been Sam that had been part of the efforts to take Francesca. And in doing so… I had allowed her to be taken.

Kerrass' often repeated line about it being the simplest solution that was true came to mind.

"So it really was you." I began carefully. "It was you that walked up to the messenger booth and had a secret message sent to Francesca."

He actually laughed and I felt my fist clench with the desire to punch him in the face.

"Yes. I'm sorry about that. But also, thank you for proving my innocence with that. I had hoped that it was going to be you that saw that."

He sniggered and pulled over a piece of paper and dipped his own quill.

"My handwriting is still as you have known it for many years. At first, it was a genuine weakness and then, as I said last time, I started to pretend to be worse than I actually was with my writing in order to pretend weakness in the face of Edmund's nonsense. So my penmanship is still… not great. I've never thought it was the most important skill we were taught when we were younger. If I need a letter to be sent, I can always get someone else to write it after all but… Let's see if I can still do it. It's been a while since I've practised."

He stared at the paper for a long moment before he leant forward and his pen flew across the paper. There were a couple of pauses where he ran out of ink and then had to retrace some of the letters to get into the proper flow of the message but then, he was there, handing over the paper to a servant that brought it over to me.

He either didn't trust me to get within arm's reach of me, or his illness or medicines were robbing him of the strength to get up and hand it over himself.

I kind of hope that it was the first of the two options.

I don't have my notes with me and as such, I cannot guarantee that the message that Sam showed me in his study was the same as the message that was what lured Francesca out of her rooms that fateful night. But it looked similar. "Close enough" was kind of what I thought of it. Both the flowery message and the shorter, to-the-point message. He was setting aside his paper and the pen and ink.

"Wait," I told him, setting aside the messages. "Write the same thing again as I made you do it, to prove your innocence."

He smirked and started writing. I lost my patience about halfway through.

"Ok, that's enough."

He raised an eyebrow with a smirk.

"Write this, as you would normally." I closed my eyes so I wouldn't have to watch his penmanship. "The riders will come with the dawn, cold will be their breath, icy their armour and their blades shall be as shards of ice. They smile as they come, the snow obscures them and muffles the hoofbeats of their skeletal horses. Their hounds play among their feet."

I opened my eyes to see that he was just finishing.

"Flowery," Sam said, passing the paper to one of the guards to bring it over to me for inspection. There was an echo of that somewhere in the back of my brain. It felt like he was quoting something or someone.

"Professor Dandelion's Saga of the Wild Hunt," I told him. "Or thereabouts anyway."

"I've always wondered something." He told me as I looked at his penmanship. "Why do you always call him that? Not Dandelion the bard, not Viscount Julian or whatever his name is. Why do you always call him Professor?"

"Because that is the title that he earned," I replied, tilting the paper towards the light.

"Some would argue that he is a disgrace to the office of the Professorship." Sam countered. I could tell that he was trying to get a rise out of me. "Some would say that his behaviour is reprehensible."

"And yet we still made him a Professor, and if he is still a disgrace I have never heard of an effort to remove the title from him. Therefore we should own it. He is a Professor." I responded. "I also do it to remind him that he's a professor. Whether he likes it or not. He wants us all to think that he's an entertainer, a bard or at worst, a minstrel. But he's also an educator. One of the things that Kerrass and I, as well as some of the other Witchers that I have met, have to work against is Professor Dandelion's portrayal of Witchers. People think of Witchers as these heroic Knights Errant when they're not they're just…"

I sighed and set the paper aside. I had been speaking absently while I examined the penmanship. Sam might have known what I was going to say after I had begun, but even if that was the case then he would not have been able to keep up with my speech. The penmanship was better than his old form although I could see his old writing style in the rounding off of some of the letters and some of the sloppier pen strokes. There were also a number of ink splatters that would need the attention of some blotting paper if this was going to go anywhere. It was, unquestionably, my brother's handwriting though and finished in a fraction of the time that I had been expecting.

I felt incredibly depressed. Sam had been playing me for years. I had loved my brother and he had been betraying me. I had defended him before others. I had gotten into trouble at our Father's dining table, for protecting him and defending his poor academic capabilities.

"Witchers are just… what Freddie?" He asked.

I tried to remember what I had been saying.

"Witchers are just professionals," I told him. "They get hired to do the job, they cannot afford to do it for free. They do the job, then they get paid. Professor Dandelion's stories portray Lord Geralt as some kind of magnanimous hero that protects the weak and allows the truly desperate to get away without having to pay him. Nothing could be further from the truth. He might not go on a bloody rampage when someone tries to con him, but he still takes steps when people try to get him to work for nothing. There are accounts from the road of him simply walking into houses and taking anything that can be sold to a merchant in order to make up the shortfall."

I sighed and waved the writing up to my brother.

"So you've been lying to me," I told him. "Since we were little, I've… I defended you, Sam."

"I know, and I've never not been grateful, even when you didn't need to."

"Yes, but Sam. You say that you want to bring me over to your side. Knowing this…" I waved the paper again. "How can I ever…"

And then I laughed.

"What's so funny?" He asked.

"You've just told me that you took Francesca and in all likelihood, that means that you were party to her death. You killed Kerrass, enslaved and tortured Emma, Laurelen and Ariadne as well as performed untold cruelties on numerous other people. You have enslaved me. And this is the thing that I'm angry about."

I started to laugh again and this time he joined in.

"The human brain is a wonderful thing." He told me.

"I defended you before the head of Imperial Intelligence," I replied.

"I know, and I'm just as grateful that you did that. Just as I was grateful whenever you defended me before Father."

I considered this.

"That doesn't help," I told him. "That doesn't help at all."

His face honestly fell a little bit.

"What was the plan if I didn't argue for your innocence?" I asked him. "You know, if I hadn't figured out why you were innocent, what would be your scheme?"

"My squire," Sam told me. "I had always hoped that you would come to my defence as you always had in the past so that was what I wanted. It would mean more coming from you anyway. I wanted it to come from you. I wouldn't have blamed you if you hadn't done it. I want you to know that Freddie, I wouldn't have been angry with you. It would have been perfectly understandable to say that you were in shock at the kidnapping of Francesca as well as all of the things that had happened beforehand."

"My engagement you mean." I put in.

"Yes," Sam responded, completely missing the acid and anger in my voice. "But it was going to be my squire. My squire was innocent in such matters but eventually, Phineas was going to give a couple of people dreams. Kristoff was in Toussaint at the time. You won't remember him but he was competing in the tournament. He had been knocked out early, partially that was deliberately on our part. But he had Francesca in a place away from where the search had begun. One of the deserted cottages that litter the landscape, or one of the hidden, former bandit hideouts. I had no idea where deliberately so that it couldn't be read from my mind.

"Then when Johann was given the inspiration to argue that I was innocent and that had been secured."

"I nodded.

"Talk me through it," I told him.

"It was really simple." He told me. "I sent the messages and then made sure that I was watched and seen. It all happened at night. I arranged the messages during the day and then made sure that plenty of people saw me during the course of the day. After that, I went to bed in my assigned guest quarters and that was that.

"From there, Francesca slipped around the circle of guards keeping her safe to meet 'me' at the waterfall but our false Jack was waiting for her there instead. He took her to his den and then Kristoff took her from there while we were all hunting the Fake Jack through the streets, so as to leave a bit of a false trail. He kept her in one of the caves in the countryside while the jousting camp was searched and then she was moved into one of my travel trunks during the time where the search had passed over me and was heading for the cave. She was teleported away while still asleep and drugged in my biggest trunk."

I nodded, it made sense. The simple solution. The simple solution is always the easiest.

"The night we hunted for Jack?" I asked.

"Yeah." he shuddered and I think he meant it. "One of the more terrifying nights of my life. I had known what Jack, the entity was, and I knew what Phineas was planning, but until I actually saw it, that…" He shuddered again. "And later, he would admit that he actually toned down the figure that we faced that night against what the actual entity is capable of. I won't lie, Freddie, I read about your final meeting with him and when he called you friend, I have been living in fear of that for a while."

I nodded. It was almost reassuring to know that some elements of my brother were still human.

"But Phineas…" he continued. "Reassured me that if the Entity Jack took an interest in what we were doing, then his wrath would fall on the poor sap that he had chosen to make our patsy. And then I took further reassurance that if Jack took it past that, then his wrath would fall on Phineas first before it came to me. I felt shielded in many ways."

I nodded. I could feel my brain just beginning to slide off matters. I wanted to weep, rage and shout and scream and just sit and stare into space for a while.

"Where did you put her?" I asked. "When you left Toussaint?"

"That small and stupid parcel of land that I was given as part of being a Knight? The White Cliffs? She was kept there."

And that was the point where my mind just shut down.

"Ok," I said, standing up abruptly. "I give up there. I'm done. I need some time to…"

The guards and things were momentarily surprised by my sudden movements.

"We still have much to get through Freddie." Sam began, irritation in his voice.

"THEN WE CAN HAVE ANOTHER MEETING." My rage was sudden and it took me by surprise, let alone the other people in the room.

I took a breath and was disturbed by how much it shuddered in my throat.

"Sam, you have been lying to me since we were little, manipulating me to your own ends."

"Freddie…"

"NO SAM." I snapped. "I spent a year and a half hunting for Francesca. I nearly died looking for her. Not only that, but I nearly killed myself looking for her. I nearly drove away everyone that I care about, including you, by looking for her and you had her the entire time."

"Freddie, there's more to tell you…"

"I KNOW THERE'S MORE TO TELL ME." I wailed. "I know, but I'm barely taking it in now. I need time to process this. I need time to think. I need… I need a break."

I turned to go for the door. It honestly didn't occur to me what would happen if those guards would try and stop me.

"All of this will make sense," Sam told my back. "When we are free of Southern tyranny. When we have carved our own North out of the wreckage that has been wrought for us. I promise you that it will come right."

I heard him take a breath. I was standing still listening to him, I didn't remember deciding to stop walking.

"I promise you." Sam went on. "I promise, we will be brothers again Freddie." He told me.

I turned back to him.

"You don't get to call me that," I told him. I could hear the tears in my own voice. "Only my friends or the people that I love get to call me Freddie. Friends loved ones… FAMILY get to call me Freddie. You are none of those things. Never call me Freddie again."

He nodded and I wondered if I was imagining the tears in Sam's eyes.

"I will earn that right back, Frederick," he told me.

I had nothing to say to that and left the room.

(A/N: Sorry it couldn't be a happier chapter during the festive season. It should have been out before Christmas but Covid and life got in the way. Still have a small cough over three weeks later. See you next time. Hope you had a nice festive season and all my best for the new year)