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

177. Chapter 177

(A/N: So folks, it has finally happened. I'm not quitting but I do have a real-world job that is almost certainly going to interrupt my work rate on the story. I mean, I know that I'm nearly finished and I am certainly going to try not to lose a step, but it is a bit naive to hope that I am going to remain unaffected by this. And while I do have plans to start trying to make some money from my writing, I am deliberately leaving that until after this work is finished for a variety of reasons.

So if the rate of uploading slows down, don't panic, I'm not done. Believe me that I haven't come this far to quit at the last moment. But it just might take me a little bit longer than I, or you would have liked. Believe me when I tell you that you will know when it's all over.

Thanks for reading)

So now you have the context.

The truth that context is King, Queen, Lord, Lady, God and Goddess of any given situation is a rule that I was taught when I first started to study history. I think I must have been around the age of nine and it was a rule that was given to me by my earliest tutors.

The rule has been reinforced as my life has continued. Some of those realisations have only come long after the fact when I look back at the activities of my Father and what life was like when I was growing up. The time spent around his own father's dining table could not have been entirely pleasant. But the rule remains the same.

Back when I worked in the Redanian logistics division, the rule was reinforced there as well. When the order came down to send a certain number of supplies to this unit or that company, what was the context? Were the enemy even in that area and did the noble that was requisitioning that amount of axe-heads have a habit of selling those supplies on the black market?

When we decoded Nilfgaardian orders, what was the context of the orders as they came in? What actions had been fought, what was the terrain of that area like and so on?

It was true again as I got more into the history of things and then again, it was proven true when I travelled out on the road with Kerrass. What was the context of why this spirit was haunting that particular field? Because the lesser known part of the Witcher's task is to ensure that the monster, or the spirit or the… whatever, doesn't come back. And you can only do that if you know the context of the situation.

And it is true here. If you are going to properly take in everything that I say here. If you are going to take the facts as I see them and the evidence that I have collected, then it is only fair that you are aware of the context of the situation. This was the mindset that I was in as I started to compile this work. This was the place that I was in and this was the background of why I even started work in the first place.

Because the history of the rebellion and the account of what happened is not my style of recording or writing about history.

Whatever else can be said, I am far from an unbiased source. I was there in the middle of it. The rebellion tortured me, killed and tortured a lot of the people that I love and have responsibility for. It is all but impossible for me to be able to recount what happened without any kind of bias.

I also, as a habit and up until now, have recorded events from a first-person perspective as I write about what I have seen and done, before letting other people judge accordingly. But I didn't see all of what happened at the siege of Coulthard castle.

I wish I had. I wish I had seen the fall of Gregoire and the charge of the Knights of Saint Francesca. I wish I had seen the dragon fire and the emergence of the Armies from the mist.

I don't think it's possible that any one person could have seen all of it. So it is the responsibility of someone to compile everything, all the accounts… including mine, and then talk about them in a written format for everyone to see it.

But I do not think I am the man to do it. It is not my style of thinking, not my style of writing and it is not my…

However, the Empress has ordered that it be done and therefore I must do it.

So I start with the context of why I come to be writing what you now already have in your hand and as a means to explain why it will not read the same way my normal work does. Why it might be lacking in the quality that you have come to expect and why you might not be imagining the undertones of bitterness that you might be imagining.

I am writing these words from within my Pavillion as I watch people work on demolishing and rebuilding Coulthard Castle. I have elected to use Ariadne's old methods of working in the open in that I have this pavilion where the sides can be rolled up or down according to weather factors. I long to be down there, in the middle of the people and working as well. Both to be doing something that I can think of as being useful but also to be seen to be doing something useful

Even though working on my mobility and still, painfully, working on my recovery takes all my energy, I sit here and work, I feel very pointless and superfluous to the entire situation.

The problem is that I am an important and powerful man now, which means that the work that you are reading is often interrupted so that makes for another change.

My habit in the past is to compile things in one go. To take notes as events happen and then write it all out in a frenzy for my transcribers and publishers to break it down into the appropriate chunks.

But here, there are also interviews to do, research to conduct and all kinds of things to be done that are only to do with writing out this history. And that is nothing to do with the other feudal duties. So although I started this effort shortly after I was made Duke I am now at the stage where I work on this whenever I have a spare moment. So what is true now, as I write these words, and what might be true when I come to the end of things might be two different things.

For instance, I still haven't spoken to Kerrass.

I am beginning to dread that eventual meeting. It feels like he is avoiding me, is angry with me and I don't know why.

But by the end of the work, it might be true that I will have had that conversation.

It is also true that some of the events that I am supposed to be recording are still ongoing. I can't wait until the end and make sure that everything is true before publishing. The consequences of these events are still being felt and rippling out from where I am, even as I sit here. History is like that, you can't find a beginning and an end to tie it all up in a pretty bow.

I realise that I am procrastinating but it is vital that you, the reader, know that I am far from comfortable about any of this. I am terrified that all this is going to be is just a dry recitation of facts. Or the recounting of facts that will later be identified as not being true.

There here it is. The context of the matter.

I write these words as one of the most powerful men in the Northern Continent. I write between my other feudal duties and ensuring that I will be able to serve in my current duties for years to come. I have no idea when this work will be finished, I don't want to do this work and I think that I am among the worst possible people to record this history.

The thing about my thinking that I am the worst possible person to perform these feudal duties has sailed. I now agree with the Empress that I am the only person that can perform this role and I will do my best to serve accordingly. I can't pretend to like it, but I will serve. But the history… I think that it would be better done by someone else.

But the Empress has ordered and so I will do my duty.

So where did the rebellion start?

And right off from the beginning of this record, we run into problems. The problem is that there is no reliable record of this. If I was properly recording this then I am supposed to need a couple of independent, reliable sources as to what happened. But I can't get that because most of those sources are dead and/or unreliable. I have reread the record of what Sam told me, including all of my notes on the random things that were not immediately published and it is clear from reading those things that although Sam gave me the basic facts… It is also true that Sam was insane and is therefore not all that reliable a witness.

There is some corroborating evidence, but I find that I am relying on far too many assumptions to be entirely happy with it. If my old University tutor was still alive and was reading this then I do not doubt that he would take out a ruler and rap my knuckles as a sign of his displeasure at all the assumptions that I have done in the preparation of this work.

Poor old man. He was one of the people that died in the castle. There were times that I hated that old man but along with Mark, Kerrass, Emma and several others including my parents, there are few people that have had as big an impact on who I am now as that old man did.

We can, however, be sure that the Rebellion did not start with Sam. Like the matter in Toussaint, it started with a group of men who were displeased with their lot in life. Older men and younger sons had lost sons and brothers in the war and were displeased with the way that things had turned out. They shared Sam's sentiments that they longed for another crack at the black ones to salvage their lost pride.

There were other factors and it was not just this alone. They were displeased that they were being ruled by an, at best, Regency Council and, at worst, a Queen and therefore a woman. The fact that the Queen agreed with them was another factor.

For her part of things, it seems likely that Queen Adda knew that her days were numbered. As I wrote, her life has been awful, years of her childhood were stolen from her by a curse that meant that she was a monster. Then years of spoiling turned her into a tool for other men's hands. She had a couple of good and happy years when she married the good, clever, handsome and dashing young King of Redania but then the church of the Eternal Flame became more and more powerful. Which meant that the King's affection turned into hatred.

So she walked the tightrope of still being Queen while also keeping herself alive and able to preserve the life of her son. Because if she fell, then so too did her son.

To be clear. She feared that the church, who increasingly had the ear of an increasingly paranoid and hate-filled King, wanted her removed so that they could replace her with a more flame-fearing woman that could more easily be manipulated. They did this by arguing that her history as a magic cursed monster meant that she was evil and corrupted and therefore not fit as a Queen. Her son, as the child of so evil and corrupted a monster, could therefore never be King and would burn on the pyre next to his mother. Therefore leaving life open for any potential new Queen to have a more holy, and therefore more biddable, heir to the throne.

It is not an invalid fear.

Why did King Radovid keep her around? I don't know but I do know that he was advised, most strongly, to keep her around by his council because if she died, then her Father, King Foltest, Redania's Southern border and most powerful neighbour at the time, would surely go to war.

Also, not an invalid fear.

So now that she is free of that, she wants to enjoy herself as much as possible while still being Queen. The Empire prevents this. So there are limits on her power and she resents this hugely. She also doesn't see why she is not the Queen of Temeria. She would argue that she is the oldest daughter of King Foltest so therefore, why isn't she in charge?

The answer is that Foltest ensured that he didn't want future Kings of Redania to also be Kings of Temeria. I find this very ironic as it is becoming increasingly clear that the best solution for everyone when it comes to peace between the two Kingdoms is for Queen Anais of Temeria to marry the young King of Redania.

But that will have to wait.

So even those lords that might support Queen Adda were dissatisfied with Imperial rulership. I would suggest that this is only natural. After all, Redania is a conquered nation. For every Lord and Lady that knows this and can see all of the benefits that have come from being part of the Empire. There are always going to be those that think that life was better beforehand, even when plenty of their subjects might disagree.

As Sam said, they resent the loss and resent it hugely. Many cells of nobles were expressing their displeasure. Small groups of people met in back rooms and out-of-the-way castles and manor houses to express their displeasure and to optimistically plot what they would do if they could get together enough men, money and power to mount a proper revolution. History is bursting with examples of this kind of thing. Frost keep me but Imperial history is replete with examples of this kind of thing. Sometimes actual rebellions take place, born out of this kind of fertile ground as one or two of the groups get together and mount something between them. The Imperial solution to these kinds of rebellions is normally an occupying army. They have forces that are trained to deal with this kind of thing.

The reason why none of these things came to fruition in Redania, before Sam anyway, was because no one could agree on who would be in charge and what, specifically, they all wanted. I can very easily imagine lots of conversations that went like this:

"When we succeed, we shall ensure that all of those lesser peoples shall know their place."

"Hear Hear."

"I shall marry Queen Adda and become King and then we can ensure that the church/mages/non-humans/lesser nobles/peasants do what they are told. We shall return to the good old days when…"

"Hang on, when did we agree that you were going to be King?"

"Well I have the best claim and as such…"

"But I am the leader of this rebellion and so…"

"You are the leader? I command…"

And so on and on.

There was also a problem of decentralisation. The Imperial Intelligence Services is pretty good at snuffing these things out but what they hadn't realised is that Redania is a pretty big place. The maps distort things but when the treaty was signed, a LOT of territories were suddenly Redanian and so policing that vast amount of land was difficult without friendly people.

So there was a lot of discontent in the courts of Redania and it was into this fertile landscape that Sam walked.

And this is really where I get into the realms of assuming things and just… outright guessing.

I think that the Rebellion was fed by Phineas.

I think Phineas knew exactly what he was doing when he went to Sam. I think there were spells cast on Sam, maybe as part of the rituals or maybe there were manipulations in place… I just don't know. But I think that Phineas knew about Sam's sentiments and then, when Phineas judged that the moment was ripe, he would just turn up and put the thought in Sam's mind.

I have interviewed several experts in mind-controlling magic and it is, apparently, more than possible to read minds and influence moods and things. Outright controlling complex thought patterns is impossible. Simple commands yes but complex strategies and the like is all but impossible.

So I think that, at least in part, Phineas fed the ideas and strategies to Sam. I'm not trying to absolve Sam as my magical experts insist that the idea would have had to be in Sam's mind in the first place. But I think it's likely that Phineas helped just push him over the edge by adjusting his mood so that he was ready at the given times. Prompting him to come out of meetings angrier than he would have normally been.

So why did Phineas want a rebellion?

I have no answers to that question. Only theories and none of those theories are nice ones.

It is clear that the rebellion, the relevant schemes and their connections were only inside Phineas' head. He is definitely dead, and it was definitely him that died in Novigrad. That much is certain. It is also a relevant thing to say that Phineas did not particularly care about the Rebellion. That much is also certain. International politics was not something he was interested in or cared about.

Therefore, the things that he was willing to die to protect were the methods and the things that he had given Sam for Sam to be able to pursue the rebellion.

By which we mean the production of the fetish of Vampire control, the empowering of the various troops that were performed, and the final ritual for Sam to become… I need to check my notes here from that particular interview, for Sam to become the avatar of The God.

Apparently, that means that he would become the living vessel of The God's power on the continent.

Which sounds delightful.

So that is my guess as to Phineas' play. He wanted Sam to be desperate enough to be able to invoke those rituals and become that vessel. He fed Sam's anger, resentment and his paranoia, manipulating Sam into keeping Francesca around to be used and then manipulating him again into actually using Francesca and the tools that would come from that.

I imagine it a bit like a garden.

If Redania was a piece of land, well fertilised, irrigated and protected from the elements. Then Sam was like the plant pot that was the same. Phineas put the seed in the plant pot, he fed it with ambition, anger and the opportunity to do things. Then… as the seed started to germinate, he encouraged it with…

Whatever tools you use to do that. I never took to gardening as an art form.

… Before replanting it into the earth of Redania where it started to take root and the plant became a vine. At some point, the vine grew and grew and gave birth to a flower. The flower was not the result of the vine, it was not the fruit or the leaves. And after the flower had been produced, the gardener thought that the rest of the plant was unimportant. But it was also true that the gardener expected the flower to maintain its purpose and do… things of its own. I understand that botanists like to take parts of the flower and combine them with other flowers to do other things. Often in the pursuit of medicine.

So what was that flower going to turn into or be combined with?

Unfortunately, likely, we will never know. All we can say for certain is that was not going to happen.

I have these words from a mage named Kolbus Trant who made a study of this kind of problem. Like Yennefer was to Necromancy, Kolbus was to Goetia. He was permitted to study enough so that he would be able to recognise signs of it to properly police the matter from afar and prevent dangerous occurrences while tracking the goetia using mage. Lady Yennefer and he seemed to be old friends and had worked with each other at various stages.

The conversation was an interesting one given that a lot of what we talked about went clear over my head. But it seemed to me that Lady Yennefer and I would throw out theories and the other mage would just shake his head, smile benignly and tell us in detail how it was impossible.

We know that there was no way for "The God" to come through to this realm. The reasoning for this was a little chilling in that if The God could have been brought through to this realm then Phineas or one of the cultists from the North would have already done so. Or The God would have found a way through on his own, including by manipulating the cultists and people like Phineas into doing what needed to be done. The fact that that hadn't been done was telling.

We also know that the simple question of The God giving more power to the followers was also not an end goal. Because that was already taking place and the rituals in question were not designed to do that. It gave power, yes, but it didn't mean necessarily more power. In the mage Kolbus' opinion, it was clear that Sam was losing his mind and sense of self towards the end, and although Phineas didn't have a sister to build the fetish of Vampire control, he would have had the means to paint the circle and sacrifice people to it to make himself an avatar.

But he didn't do that. Therefore just gaining more power was not the end goal.

So there are many theories to suggest what was going on here and it is unlikely we will get an answer. The principal architects in Phineas, Sam and Ella who might have been able to provide more of the methods used which might have been able to tell us more, but given that they are all dead…. There is little we can do.

The most chilling theory was that Phineas was a genuine fanatic of The God and what he was doing was trying to send more power to The God to aid in The God's efforts towards freedom. He wasn't satisfied with the amounts of power that the small amounts of depravity and things that the cult of the First-Born was sending to The God and as such, came up with a way to send more power than had previously been managed.

And yes, according to Kolbus, the image of the imprisoned God is more than possible, it is even likely. He also wondered if the other supernatural creatures that I had met had been steering me towards an eventual confrontation with the minions of The God to prevent his escape. I told him that they could have just told me that, instead of all of the manipulations that nearly killed me. I also said that if they needed something like this done then they could damn well do it themselves. At which point Kolbus smiled and told me that there might be catastrophic, universe-ending consequences for direct interference and that sometimes, using servants and intermediaries might have been necessary.

I was on the verge of getting really angry then and Lady Yennefer interfered and stopped the meeting.

So that's how I think the Rebellion started.

I think we can trust Sam's account of the matter in that he spoke to a number of his old comrades in arms who he knew to share his sentiments and the thing started to grow from there.

I spoke to one of his former comrades whom I am not going to name. He remained loyal to Redania and the Empire although by his own admission, if Sam had told him what was happening, he might well have been on the other side.

He was appalled when I told him what Sam had done and replied that he liked to think that he would not have been party to any kind of blood rituals or anything. Like me, he is spending a lot of time looking back on old conversations with Sam and his other comrades to see if there was anything that he had seen or if there was anything that he could have done to try and avert this disaster.

Also, like me, he struggles to reconcile the laughing man that he had fought alongside in the battles against Nilfgaard and the leader of so horrific a rebellion.

I have two stories from the man. I have removed any reference that might be there that might give away the Knight's identity. As I say, he remained loyal and deserves better than to be destroyed by one side or another for perceived loyalty or disloyalty. And for whatever sins he may have committed to not seeing things beforehand, he is paying for them now by doubting himself.

We called ourselves the Spares. We were not expendable, the general had other lads for that. We were not… the elite. We were the Knights of Redania and we were pretty powerful. We called ourselves the Spares because we knew what we were.

We were the spare sons. Sent to war because if we lived, then our parents got to be all high and mighty because they had a son that was serving and if we died? Well, that was almost better, wasn't it? Because then they had a son that died in the war. They can beat their breast and wail about the tragedy of it all before pretending to be brave and saying "At least he died doing his duty for Redania."

Pffftt.

It doesn't take a lot for a man to realise that he wasn't the favourite child and your brother knew that. Same as we all did.

Oh I know, you are going to argue the whole thing about one for the land and one for the church and one for the army, but that is bullshit and you know it. You do, and you were not the least favourite.

But WE all knew it. We were there, properly equipped and trained which meant that we could do a better job than the PFI, but there is never a doubt in anyone's mind that your parents are secretly hoping that you don't make it home.

Then your brother comes in. I've seen angrier men, but not many.

I talk about him as though he's some kind of younger brother. I called him those same condescending things. I called him "lad" and "kid" and things even though I am, at best, three years older than him. But he came and he was new and he was green so that made him younger than us.

And he was younger too. In just about all other circumstances. He was naive about gambling, naive around women, the only thing he was aged about was that he could hold his drink like a motherfucker. That's when we could persuade him to drink. I don't think he liked it.

One time, we got him drunk after a battle and we found him in tears afterwards. One of those things which started off as being a bit funny, then it was really funny and then it just became kind of embarrassing. He looked like a fool too. His armour was misshapen and ugly to look at. His horse might have been impressive but she was a piebald and looked ridiculous. He was bland in a field of heroes.

One thing that can be said about being a spare was that our Fathers dressed us up so that when we died, everyone could know who we were.

We all knew who he was. More than one of us had parents that owed his daddy money and they took every opportunity to take it out on him.

And then we saw our first action. I had seen your brother train and he did it with this kind of off-putting intensity. He didn't train quickly, he trained with this kind of steady focus that most of us found off-putting. But then he went into battle that first time.

I don't know if you've had it, the moment where you look at a person and wonder why they are there, what they have to offer and why people speak of them with respect. Then one day you see them in all of their power and their glory. That was what it was like for us.

It wasn't that he was fearless. He was screaming with his fear, but he was also angry and he used that anger to fuel him. His horse did exactly what he told it to do and he was the first among us to charge home and into the enemy ranks. He broke through and what's an armoured knight to do when the ranks in front of you open and your enemy breaks?

We followed him.

We found him later. He had his mace in his hand and he was staring at it in horror. There was a mangled… brain on it, coating the weapon and dripping off his arm. He was laughing hysterically. The kind of thing where you get scared for the person doing it when you hear them. We took him off and got him cleaned up. He seemed very young to us all at that moment and we didn't get him drunk.

That time.

He was a natural at it. Where, off the battlefield he was this kind of naive little follower, in battle he was this instinctual beast of a man. At first, we followed him because he got results. Then he would start saying things like "Follow me" and we would because it made sound sense. Then l]ater we followed him because it was him shouting.

We lost people and he took it hard. He always took it hard. Any man that says that they don't feel it when a comrade is lost… well… I don't want to fight alongside such a man. But your brother always took it particularly hard. I never found out why but he was often inconsolable when one of us died and we had to take him off somewhere.

I can't speak for all of my fellows but I was proud of the man that he was becoming. Like he was my little brother you know? And then the war was over.

Then the war was over. Just like that.

I found that story interesting. It was an interesting perspective on my brother that I had not heard elsewhere. I had seen Sam in action as a military leader, but I had no idea how those skills had developed or how that had happened. So to hear about what he was like during his army days, from a man who did not need to lie or sugarcoat his accounts one way or the other was really interesting.

When asked about how Sam had made contact to recruit him over to the side of the rebellion he seemed to grow sad and introspective. When he told me the story it had the feel of a tale that had been told a couple of times before. I knew that Imperial Intelligence had been through Sam's former colleagues and comrades for any latent signs of rebellion so that would track with what I know. But here it is:

Like your brother, I kept my rank for a while and worked some garrison duty. Later I led a squad of guys that patrolled the roads looking for deserters and bandits. I won't lie, the line between the two was often whatever we decided that it was going to be. I lost touch with your brother then.

Met a girl, the daughter of a Nilfgaardian merchant that had lots of money that my Father needed. Nice girl. Bit shy for my taste at first and we both had to work at it to get over the fact that she was a Black-hearted Southern Bitch and I was an ignorant and hate-filled Northern Barbarian. But we are getting there now and increasingly, I look forward to returning home at the end of the day and seeing her smile when I walk in. And there are signs that she is doing things for me that she doesn't have to, but does them to make my life easier.

I just wish that the Southerners didn't like their women so quiet and timid.

But we are getting there. It helps that she's pregnant now.

So I stayed in the Redanian forces. I command one of the towers in (Left blank) and in a year or two, the commander of my part of the wall is looking to retire and we have hopes that I can get that command. We are never struggling for money given my wife's father insists on looking after his future grandchild.

Then out of the blue, This will have been late autumn, early winter, last year. As in, the one before the Rebellion started taking place… Your brother walks up the path that leads to my house.

(Freddie's note: This will have been somewhere in the middle of when I was recuperating in Angral after my encounters with the Goddess)

We live in a nice little townhouse in the richer part of town. We are well off enough and I have enough rank that we can have a house with a bit of a garden and a tree for the kids to climb and fall off of. There is a shed for my horse and gear and we have room for a couple of servants that clean and cook and things. My squire stays at the garrison.

So anyway, I have just come home for the night and your brother walks up to the door and knocks. He knocks you know? I remember standing guard over him while he took a shit and he knocked on my door.

Honest to flame but I was ashamed that day.

If you had asked me before the recent events, I would have thought very little of the visit. I don't suppose that you have any… way of seeing it. But we had been closer than brothers during the war, but then you get assigned to different places. You might have different backgrounds and your politics might be different, but in the heat of the moment, firm friendships can be formed when you charge into the enemy alongside each other. It's later that you kind of drift apart from each other.

But then, when it's peacetime again. Life, comparative wealth and family start to return to everyone's mind and then all you have in common are memories. Your brother came in, and we sat, talked and reminisced about old times. If he hadn't rebelled, I wouldn't have thought anything about that meeting. It was just… a meeting between old comrades. Old comrades don't want to pay the price of an inn or a tavern meal and know that a former comrade is in the area. I have certainly taken advantage of such a thing in my time.

But since everything kicked off… I don't know. I've thought about that night so often over the last few weeks that I can't even tell if I'm remembering right.

I remember that my wife didn't like him. It was one of the few times that she properly argued with me. We are getting better at that now. She used to get angry but then she would just kind of… keep it to herself but I hate the atmosphere that leaves. If I've done something wrong or if there is something we need to argue about, I want to have that out in the open, not bottled up.

I saw what that did to my parents.

But she didn't like him and she couldn't tell me why. Said she found him… repulsive. Said that she felt that she needed a bath after he had gone.

We talked about old times mostly, old friends and things of that nature. Old battles and old fights. We reminisced about the woman that I had taken to him on the night after his first battle and we talked about the first time that we had all gotten drunk together.

We talked about how we had felt invincible against our enemies and then we talked about how much we had hated the South and the Black ones. How much we had hated Djikstra, Roche and the rest for murdering Radovid and robbing us of our chance.

I wonder if I'm imagining things.

Nilfgaard is interesting to me. I know that we were conquered and I still hate Nilfgaard. I do, I still hate them and I know the resentment that he was talking about. I know that he hated Nilfgaard and that sentiment that he expressed about wanting another shot at them on the battlefield. I know that. I feel that. I still hate Nilfgaard.

I do. I still hate them.

But individual Nilfgaardians.

I care for my wife a great deal and increasingly, I would be angry if she betrayed me and left me. I still struggle to tell her that I love her, but I would miss her if she was gone and that feeling is increasing every day. Her Father is a good man and I've known some people that… I liked them before I knew that they were Nilfgaardian and since then… I don't know.

We sat and we talked about how much we wished we had another go at things. And then, abruptly in the middle of the conversation. He stopped talking about that and started to speak about his plans in the North. About how he resented you a lot for keeping things from him and then he told me how proud he was of you.

My wife claims that the conversation changed when he realised that I was insisting on referring to the problems that I had with Nilfgaard in the past tense and that you were looking forward to raising my child with my Nilfgaardian wife. She claims that she has never loved me more than that moment when I told your brother that these things were in the past.

It haunts me though. I have nightmares. If I had not been married. If I had… still been single. Would I have been nursing my hate and my resentment like your brother had? And would I now be a captive, or would I be dead in the same way that all of his fellows are?

Or worse. What would have happened if he had won? Would I now be a traitor that consorted with the enemy? And would I be forced to kill my wife and child to prove my loyalty to Redania?

I loved your brother as only a comrade in arms can love another comrade. We went through the shit together and I struggle to think of him as a traitor.

I found that upsetting as well.

What was the difference between being a traitor, heretic and conspirator and how many people that are currently being tried for treason only fall one side of the line or the other by dint of small circumstances? I am thinking of people like Sir Tristam who we have since found out belongs to that kind of group. He too was a veteran. I have been unable to find anyone who can say a bad word about the man, save that he was so obviously a traitor. I've had people refuse what I saw him do and be a part of, to my face.

I was even challenged to a duel on the matter although the fellow in question backed down.

I also found it disquieting to think that this unnamed knight's wife also didn't like Sam. I can look back through my memory and remember many instances of women disliking Sam to the point that I wonder how I missed it. I have often thought of myself as the kind of man that shows proper respect to the women in my life, but looking at what has happened, I am beginning to think that I still have a long way to go on that score.

So we know, or think that we can be pretty confident that Sam was recruiting people into his conspiracy during the time while I was recovering from my ordeals. That does put an interesting spin on things as to why Sam didn't come and support me through that illness and why he didn't attend the Yule celebrations that year.

I mean yes, the most obvious reason for that was that he was building a conspiracy that rather depended on him doing horrible things to Emma, Mark, Ariadne and Francesca, but the other point to be made is that he was not where we thought that he was going to be.

According to Lady Eilhart and Lady Yennefer, transportation can be tracked. There are weaknesses to the tracking systems in that you need to know precisely where the site of the gate was and you need to have the ritual components easily to hand. But it can be done. It is also true to know when magic is being used in general. There is also the superstition aspect of things that many people think that the mages can do more than they say. So people don't want to teleport around all the time in case teleporting can be tracked.

To construct the transport gate to get Sam, Ariadne, or Laurelen would have had to know where to send it to and if Sam was in Tretogor, or… anywhere other than his home in Northern Redania, then that would have led to the obvious question of "Why are you not where we were expecting you to be Sammy?"

So we can be sure that Sam was using that time to recruit those people that he would later consider to be his inner circle.

We also know that he was still constructing his vampire-controlling fetish at this point. We know that because one of the first things that was done after the rebellion was destroyed was that Lady Eilhart led a contingent of the Lodge of Sorceresses and the Council of Mages to the manse of the White Cliffs.

I am actively banned from talking about a lot of what they found there because we are working to ensure that nothing like that can ever be attempted again. But suffice it to say that what they found was awful. I have told them that they can feel free to do what they like with the land to ensure that it is safe.

When we took Angral from Lord Dorme, Ariadne and Kerrass both said that they found horrific things there in the construction of the flawed Fetish let alone what it would have been like in the production of a true fetish and as such…

The manor house is going to be raised to the ground, the physical building itself is going to be destroyed as far as physically possible and then the ground is going to be sewn with silver, salt and iron. In a few years, they think that they might be able to reclaim the land but they have warned me that this will be an optimistic guess.

But it is from speaking to the villagers and what passed for the household staff that we know more about what happened in that area.

It seems as though it was a dark area to be.

I can't give you a perfect account of what happened in that area as what we know is jumbled together from lots of different sources. There are many areas that my brother and I didn't agree on but one of those was regarding the education and well-being of the people that worked the fields under our care.

Whatever else can be said about Sam, he was very careful though. Phineas was the person mainly in residence. The locals were of the impression that there was some kind of curse on the manor house and as such, they didn't go up there in pain of societal condemnation. We are pretty sure that Phineas lived and worked there on and off since shortly after he and Sam first made contact with each other.

Before that, Sam used the place when he couldn't keep it in any more. When his rage or his… appetites became too much for him to bear, then he would go to the Manse of White Cliffs and… exorcise his urges. Sometimes there would be the sounds of whips and screams of pain from a male voice and a cloaked and hooded figure could be seen prowling around the local area which would often result in the stealing away of a young and beautiful figure.

The manse was too poor to afford a Witcher or some other means of getting rid of so obvious (to them) a curse so Sam was relatively safe in that area. But it must have occurred to him as being an obvious place to keep Francesca after he had taken her. I do not doubt that Phineas would have supported this decision as it would have meant that he could have done his work in relative peace.

The locals were now well cowed and it was from the date of Francesca's arrival that the real… I want to say that it was then that the real evil began, but let's be honest with one another. There had been evil going on there for a while. Phineas had set himself up a lair and as such…

But that was when the locals started to consider what was going on up on the cliff as being something dark and evil rather than just a hooded figure that prowled around meaning that it was safer for everyone if young folk just stayed indoors after dark.

All of the phenomena that I noticed going on in Castle Coulthard were exhibited up there. It was described as ebbing and flowing and given that these were people that lived on the coast, it seems only natural that they would describe the thing as a waveform. But they recount details of dreams, visual distortions and horrific appetites that would spill out of the place. Previously relatively chaste men and women would start feeling their sexual appetites increase, only in unhealthy ways that I am not going to illustrate or recount. Previously good parents would become abusive towards children and it became genuinely agreed that the place was cursed.

And that was when people weren't going missing as part of Phineas' experiments. Because again, he… or one of his creatures… would go into the local villages and farming houses to take someone away.

Why didn't they all just move away? The locals couldn't give me or anyone that had asked the questions, a proper answer. I think it was inertia more than anything else. They and their families had always stayed there and as such, they couldn't leave. There is a darker theory though which is that they, as a society, just kind of believed that this new, deeper darkness was deserved by them and as such, they needed to stay quiet and suffer the punishment that they deserved.

I don't like the implications of that. I prefer to think that it was something that Sam or Phineas did to them but… I have a sneaking suspicion about the way things are.

So Francesca came and we can believe Sam in that it would have been then that the truly awful rituals began. The locals certainly noticed that their feudal lord was in residence more and more often. There are even several endearing accounts about how they begged him not to stay up at the house because of its cursed nature.

Apparently, he laughed and agreed before turning his horse's head for the house.

We can be sure that those rituals came to fruition in the late Winter, or early spring of that year because that was when Sam's visits all but ceased. I don't know but I can guess from some of the words of some of the captives that they were all getting frustrated due to the lack of progress on the production of the fetish.

I struggle with what to call the small leather bag that allowed Sam to enslave Ariadne. Calling it a totem seems… rude somehow to those roadside totems of old and forgotten gods.

According to those same captives, Sam relaxed in their meetings in the late Winter or early springtime as it was about then that it was first noticed that Sam started wearing a small leather pouch on his belt.

The following is taken from the account of Sir Alexy Prusak who was one of the early conspirators. Sir Alexy is… as he is still alive at the time of writing… an interesting man given that I found that I kind of liked him. He acknowledges that he was on the losing side and considers everything that is coming to him as kind of the cost of doing business. He claims that he is going to meet the Eternal Flame with a clear conscience, a pure heart and feels as though he can answer for everything he did and every decision he took.

He refuses to accept that he will be known as a traitor because of everything he did, he did for Redania. He once told me "How can I be a traitor to Nilfgaard, I have never been there, I was born in Redania, I served in Redania, I bled for Redania and I fought for Redania. So how can I be a traitor? I never once, not ever, betrayed the nation of my birth."

He was not at Coulthard Castle and is rather appalled at the news that he is receiving of what happened there. I don't think that he wants to believe it but at the same time, he doesn't have a great deal of choice. As I say, I liked him quite a bit. He was cheerfully resigned, knew who I was and, helpfully, had read some of the previous chapters about what Sam had claimed had happened.

It was about the numbers you see. They had more of them than we did and that was rather putting a crimp in our plans.

I have to admit that you're not quite what I expected old boy. I mean, you look a bit pale and pasty to me. Sam had described you as some kind of weedy little scholar that barely knew which end of a sword to grip. But I've seen those kinds of men and I've seen fighters.

You've seen things, haven't you?

Of course, you have. Silly me. If even a hint of what you say is true then I can't pretend differently.

And nor should I for all of that. Not your fault that you are on the wrong side. Your Father made you do it and then your brother, for all his virtues, was rather ignorant of the qualities that were to be found inside his own family.

Yours not least.

You're a fighter, aren't you? A warrior poet. Imagine what we could have made of you if he had just had the sense to use you properly. The famed Freddie, a scholar and historian. If we had been able to get you from the beginning then you could have pointed out how stupid some of it was.

And it was FUCKING stupid, wasn't it old cock?

Not your fault. Not your fault at all. A truth that some people struggle with though. Not your fault that you were on the wrong side.

But you didn't bring me here to allow me to lecture you or to listen to me trying to convert you to my way of thinking.

You're a fine upstanding gentleman now. One of the most powerful men in the North I understand. I don't suppose I can persuade you to marry me sister could I? A nice gal that one. Huge tracts of land if you follow me and she will need a strong man to stand next to her given everything that you and I both know is going to happen over the next few weeks.

Not your fault at all.

I wonder if your brother was trying to keep you out of it all. Didn't succeed though, did he? Rather fucked that one up. And then when he realised we needed you, something that I told him of course, me and others, can't deny it, he had to force you to let us have anything to do with you.

And then you hate us and then you're not on our side when it should have been so easy to bring you over.

Not your fault my friend, not at all. Can you be friends with a traitor? I hope so. Otherwise, my coming time is going to be dreadfully lonely.

No, I don't mind. We fought, we lost and now we must pay the consequences. I have to say that it is going to be much cleaner this time. This time we FOUGHT. We weren't sent packing by a bunch of merchants and spies. This time we faced our enemies head-on. We fought and we were beaten. I actually feel better this way. When I am no longer useful to men like you I will march to the headsman or whatever is going to happen with my head held high. When I am told to say my last words I shall cry with a loud voice "LONG LIVE REDANIA" and then I shall lie my neck on the block without guilt.

Or in the noose. I don't mind the thought of having my neck stretched. I would prefer to die by a more martial weapon though if I have a choice.

So. You were asking about…?

Ah yes.

It was about the numbers you see. We didn't have any, the filthy Imperials had loads of them and there was no way to reconcile the two.

I would like to correct one fallacy though old man. Not your fault. You were writing the things you were being told to write. Your brother did not start the rebellion. He was instrumental but he did not start it. If we're honest with each other, old chap, then we would probably have difficulty picking out who it was that started things. I don't think it was like that though. I think that it's more of a mystery as to why no one had started a rebellion before that point.

There were lots of us I think. Lots of small little groups of friends and former comrades. Little barons in their insignificant holdings, dreaming of heroism in a war that they had missed altogether. All of us watched the others to see who would go for it first so that the rest of us could follow and could claim to get overwhelmed and caught up if and when it goes wrong.

The problem was. I mean… I think that the problem was that none of us were generals. The most senior military mind that we had was a Count, but he was thought of by everyone, including me, to be a nincompoop. He had guarded a castle wall like de Radford. He learned his tactics in a field.

So we all looked at each other. We all knew how to lead companies of men and I think most of us would be confident on the level of doubling it. But none of us had commanded armies and none of us had served in the logistic corps.

Says something that doesn't it old boy.

I can laugh now. I can.

I can laugh now.

.

So your brother didn't start it. I don't think he could have started it if he wanted to. Not a popular man, your brother. I mean, not a popular family to begin with but your brother was not a popular man amongst those people that he needed to be popular with.

I didn't like him for a start.

We all knew about his abilities on the battlefield.

I saw him fight once did I tell you?

Terrifying he was. There was a level of focus on him that I didn't see elsewhere. Nothing fancy. None of the tricks that some nobleman's sons like to think will set them apart from the men around them. Do you know the kind? Of course you do, you've fought men. The kind of trick that only works in the training yard with blunted swords and men that daren't try and kill you that are wearing little more than light padding. Try that on a battlefield against armoured opponents that are trying to kill you and you'll quickly find yourself skewered.

By men like you, for instance, old man. Men who know when to wait for the gaps and simply put their swords in the way of one of them.

But your brother would just charge his horse into the middle of them and he would lift his mace over his head and bring it crashing down. Little finesse to it, just up and down and every time it crushed a skull and caused a sickening splattering sound that made me shudder.

But anyway.

So no one liked him until he came up with the solution to the problem of numbers.

I mean. I know that the Queen's all flighty now, trying to tell everyone that she tried to avert disaster and that she was on the Imperial side all along. There might even be evidence to prove that she was on your side all along but take it from me, old friend, that woman is a snake with tits.

I think even she was waiting for a chance to rebel. Then in strides your brother with a solution. Not that he told us what it was at first. He comes to us all with this proposition. He tells us that he can swell our ranks, that he can upgrade our existing forces so that each soldier would be worth ten Imperial foot-troops and that he can protect us from the magical storm that we would know to be coming.

I laughed at him as I recall.

But he swore that it was true and he was backed up by that Gregoire fellow. Did you meet him? Of course, you did, silly me. You wrote so, didn't you? Humourless man. A friend of mine once joked about Gregoire that he would crawl through a perfectly good brothel to kiss Radovid's feet.

Gregoire beat the poor sod to the point of death as I recall. Ah well. Gregoire's dead now and I can't say that I'm sorry. Humourless fucker that he was.

I wonder if it was part of your brother's augmentation process. Where they forcefully remove your sense of humour.

Anyway.

Your brother comes to us with this grand solution without really telling us what it was. At first, we laughed at him. The problem with the sheer numbers of troops that you need to do the kinds of things that we needed, is that they are hard to hide. You can't just pull them out from behind the woodshed. They need feeding and equipping and paying and training and all different kinds of things. Which in turn means that you can't hide them. Small bands of troops are easy to hide but when you are talking about armies. You can tell where they are by the stench.

And we needed armies to do what we needed to do.

We could make up some of the shortfalls with mercenaries, of course, we all knew that and your brother did say that we would have the entire Coulthard treasury to help with that kind of thing.

Awfully decent of him. Until the money failed to arrive of course.

But anyway, he said he had a solution, we laughed at him and told him that we would look at his solution when it arrived.

And oh boy, look at it we did.

He brought us examples. The first example of it was this kind of feral beast. Like a giant, wingless bat if the bat was almost completely made out of muscle. Long arms with claws that ended in dagger blades. To be honest, I had been more than a little convinced that such things were inventions of my nursemaid when she was trying to scare me into going to sleep.

Your brother had the thing stand there while Gregoire hit it with a sword. Over and over again the big armoured bastard struck at that monster and over and over again, the thing would be marked, and it would even bleed a little, but the amount of damage done was nothing compared to the amount of damage that should have been done.

Then he had the thing tear apart an infantry breastplate. That made me sit up and take notice I can tell you.

Then he brought a woman. Not your intended, that came later. He brought this woman with long straight hair. A good-looking woman too. Kept making noises like a bird. Then he hit her and she turned into this kind of… heavily muscled woman. Imagine a woman that was built like those circus strongmen that you see sometimes. Only there was nothing funny about this. Terrifying she was. She did the same thing when she grew claws and impaled them through a chest plate.

Then he made her lie down and offered us the opportunity to fuck her.

I didn't. But I do know that a couple of people did.

Those men can get fucked as far as I'm concerned. If they're not dead yet and already freezing in the winds of the Eternal Frost, then they will be when the executioner is done with them.

And then, a couple of weeks after that. He brought your Countess.

The Queen of Dorn has just come to see me again. Some people might wonder what this has possibly got to do with history, but being as how I am living with this history now, even as I write it, then I still think it's relevant that I write it down as soon as it happens.

The Queen and I are relatively good friends, which is an odd thing to write. I hope that I never get used to that sort of thing. I hope there is always a moment where I look at myself and think, "Hang on, what am I doing here, advising Kings and Queens and having tea with Duchesses and yelling at Empresses? I hope that this never becomes routine and even more than that, I hope that it never gets to a point where I start to feel entitled to it. I've never met someone who has thought that they are entitled to something that I didn't want to smack in the mouth.

But Sleeping Beauty came to see me. Although I don't really get to write about those moments of quiet laughter and the like, we are relatively decent friends. She has spent a good amount of time with me during my recovery from injury and sickness. As I think I have written, we play cards with each other and generally speaking, it turns out that she is better at it than me. She is a gentle presence. The physical female equivalent of a warm blanket to wrap you up when you are feeling cold and to tell you that everything is going to be ok when you are feeling upset.

We talk of small things. We laugh about her mother and talk about the various foolish things that people do in her presence when they turn around to see her and her appearance strikes them in the face. I cannot claim to be less affected by that than other people. There is a reason she is described as the most beautiful woman on the continent although I have never met Lady Francesca Findabair who some claim to rival Sleeping Beauty. But I work hard at making sure that she is not made uncomfortable by my actions.

Also, my friend loves her which means that I feel as though there would be a wall between us.

And I love Ariadne.

But she came to see me today, cloaked and hooded and prepared for a journey.

"You are looking well." She told me as she walked into my little study pavilion.

"Liar," I accused her and she laughed.

I am still not used to having servants. I don't like it as I would much rather serve myself and my guests accordingly. But for two reasons. The first is a physical limitation. I am still missing an adequate left hand. I have a wooden appendage at the moment and I still find it clumsy. Also, although my movement speed and balance are improving, I still do not trust myself to carry anything that requires a sense of balance. So I would be just as likely to spill the hot honeyed drink down the Queen's dress as I would be able to put the cup down in front of her.

The second reason is that I am a Duke now. And as I once told a certain Vampire, one of the reasons that Dukes, Kings and nobles, in general, have servants is so that they could be seen to have servants. I am doing my best to learn their names, however.

I sent for tea which she takes honeyed to a degree that would make Kerrass complain and she sat.

"You are leaving then?" I wondered.

"I am."

I sighed and waited while the tea was served.

"I am not going to lie," I told her. "I will miss you and our little chats."

"And I you, Your Grace." Her eyes twinkled. She knows that I still have the urge to check around myself to see who people are talking to when they say that. "Although I would rather it not happen the way it did, I have enjoyed building on our friendship."

"As have I," I told her. "Where are you going?"

"Back to Vizima to start. Then through the transport gate to the Imperial Capital. Marion has written to me to tell me that there are another gaggle of suitors that I must meet. There seem to be more of them every time I consider the matter."

"You will find someone," I told her.

"Great Sun but I hope not." She told me. "I do not wish to become a baby making contraption for some prince that cannot see past my face and my cleavage." She looked a little wistful. "Besides, I had rather hoped that I had found someone."

"He has still not come to talk to you."

"No." She finished her tea and placed it back down. "I do believe that Kerrass is avoiding me."

"If it makes you feel any better, I believe that he is avoiding me too."

"You know, it really does not make me feel better."

We exchanged small, frustrated and sad smiles and sat in silence for a long time, watching some workers as they took some more stones from one of the ruined walls over to where there was a team of Mages waiting in the black robes of the Imperial Legion Magica, who were testing them one by one for worthiness to be reused. Yennefer and Lady Maleficent had collaborated on a simple spell that could detect the kind of corruption that had been prevalent in the various rituals that Phineas had designed and that my brother had carried out.

One of the stones was declared problematic and was taken off to another pair of mages who gestured at it in a similar way that Kerrass casts a stream of sparks. A beam of intense heat emerged from both mages which melted and then vapourised the stone.

The first time that the process had been explained to me, I had wondered if this would make the taint airborne and as such more dangerous. The mages in question had looked at me as though I was stupid. Then, rather gratifyingly, they visibly remembered who I was and told me that the heat was hot enough to mean that the stone was broken down to the point that there was literally nothing there to breathe.

Apparently, the spell has little to no range and requires a lot of power which is why it isn't used on battlefields. I remember leaving that meeting feeling a little faint.

"I don't know what's going on with him," I said after a while. "I am surrounded by friends. Sir Guillaume is refusing to leave the area as he insists that he be allowed to act as my personal champion should the need arrive. Helfdan is busy as befits his rank but I know that there is a tribe of Skelligans that are still around to make me smile. Samantha… Father Anchor and his wife… Even Yennefer and my old university friends. So many friends and yet the one that I truly want would rather be up to his ears in swamp-muck hunting the last feral vampires and the associated Necrophages than sitting here and talking to me.

"Or talking to you for that matter. I don't know what's going on in his head."

It took me a moment to realise that Sleeping Beauty was laughing at me.

"Oh Freddie," She chuckled. She rarely laughs aloud but she is rather prone to a deep, silent chuckle. "Guilt. Guilt is what is going through his head. He feels guilty for leaving you and every time he looks at you or your sister, he sees the injuries that you have both suffered and then he curses himself for fleeing to get help when he should have come to save you. Guilt is the matter."

"That's…" I stopped to try and take in the implications of that.

"Really, intensely stupid?" She asked, gathering her skirts and climbing to her feet. "I agree. But we are assuming that we are dealing with an entirely rational mind."

"That is true. But I need my friend."

"You should tell him that. Or try to anyway. But in the meantime, much though I would love to stay here and watch you slap the stupid out of him, I have matters of state to deal with. Will you carry a message to him for me?"

"Of course."

She handed me a small, sealed letter.

"It tells him that I miss him and that I meant to tell him that I love him." She told me. "It says that what I had intended was that on your wedding night, I intended to try and talk to him and have it all out with just how I feel about him. He will pretend that I said less than that, and maybe the letter is written in that way. But I rather think that I was going to try and kiss him at some point before seeing which way the night went. But it seems that it was not meant to be."

I looked up at her from behind my desk.

"He does love you," I told her.

"I know. But sooner or later, I must marry and produce an heir. And I will not betray my husband. I had hoped that the romance of your wedding night would carry us both past our misgivings and that we could then put it behind us. Alas…" She shrugged. "I would not trade my heartbreak for yours though. Be well, my Lord Duke. Give Kerrass my love and write to me would you? Come and see us next time you have access to someone that can open a transport gate?"

"I will endeavour to try," I told her. "And I shall speak to Kerrass. Maybe I can convince him to ride to you when he gets his head out of his ass."

"If anyone can do that, then you can," she told me. "But I will not hold out too much hope. From everything my people have told me, he can get his head jammed pretty far up his ass when he sets his mind to it."

I laughed at the image and she smiled back.

"Goodbye," I told her. "Be safe."

"You too," she replied.

I tried to work for a little while after that but instead, all I could do was stare at the workers. Over and over again, I tried to tell myself that I was the most powerful man in the North. I called over a messenger.

I have dedicated messengers now. Benefits of rank.

I wrote a quick note telling Kerrass that I needed to talk to him.

"The next time Guildmaster Kerrass comes out of the wilds," I told the messenger, "see to it that he receives my note."

"Yes, Your Grace." The messenger saluted and rode off.

I never want to get used to this.

I looked at my work pile for a long moment and decided that I didn't want to write the next bit today and instead decided to practise walking around.

I am getting better. My stamina is improving but I still need to work on my balance. I am beginning to look forward to that moment that Lady Eilhart has promised when I can have a working left hand again. It might be magical and it might be expensive and my rank and history giving me privileges that I didn't want... But I have been told that I am getting it and that I don't have much choice in the matter. And if I don't have much choice in the matter, then I can't turn it down. So now I am looking forward to getting it.

I am looking forward to cutting up my own steak again.

Or to eat a sausage by any other method than picking it up and biting the end off. Every time I do that I can hear Sam telling the old family joke about how he had a sausage for me to put in my mouth.

Dammit all.

So yes, according to my witnesses, of which Sir Aleksy was one of the more reliable about this particular period of the conspiracy, Ariadne was brought into the planning stages of the conspiracy. According to Sir Aleksy, the other vampiric subjects involved were just testing the fetish and now it was getting on to dealing with the main event. What that led to was the question of just how long Ariadne was involved and how willing she was when she was involved.

I was, obviously, more concerned about the second point.

I was not involved in that part of the questioning but Sir Aleksy recounted the matter easily. He claimed to be quite sickened by the entire thing. I was allowed to ask him some more questions after the Imperial interrogators were done with him regarding Ariadne's guilt or innocence.

There was a difference old boy. There was a difference. The other two… the bat-like one and the muscled woman with the claws were just… They were animals, old boy. Beasts. Little more than that. The woman was the closest to human appearance but even she swore, shouted and growled. She made noises like a little bird and could barely speak.

There was an edge to when he brought your Countess in. It's hard to say exactly what it was but there was a difference. He was less cocky, more careful and less sure of himself. He was paler, sweating a bit and he was very very careful with what he told her to do.

Do you follow old chap?

With the beasts, he was off-hand with them. Uncaring and unconcerned. With her, he directed her carefully. He pointed and gave precise instructions. He would stop and spend some time properly considering what it was that he was going to say. He placed the words carefully and left little to no room for wiggling about and for the subject to get creative with their interpretations of the instructions. He was careful, the same way that you do with particularly stupid servants.

Or particularly clever ones.

I thought that he was scared of her. I didn't suggest that, I could already see which way the wind was blowing. It was a turning point in the conspiracy that one. That was the moment, I think, where we all started looking at each other and realising that we were actually going to do this.

But she came in and he told her to keep her thoughts to herself. Her face was a mask and she moved around like a marionette. I don't think that you can be in any doubt that she was on your side and that she was being forced. The way she looked at us when she first came in and before Lord Kalayn told her to guard her expression. I think she hated us. And the way some of them treated her, I don't think I would blame her. If it helps you old boy, she was not on our side. She was forced. I've not lied yet, but you can believe that especially.

So I felt very reassured by that. Sir Aleksy seemed properly ashamed by those events. And I was reassured.

So when did Sam first make contact with Ariadne? I found the answer to that question from among the most unlikely of sources. It was actually one of the last pieces to the puzzle that I needed to find and it was when I was complaining about the lack of information on the subject while I was working on my physical recovery.

There are exercises that I have to do. Because I spend so much time on my ass and because I am still getting used to taking on proper amounts of nutrition and carrying around the extra weights of my prosthetic limbs, both the temporary arm and the more permanent legs, there are still a series of exercises that I need to do to help build the muscle up. They are hard, they hurt and the day that I don't have to worry about those exercises in the future seems like a golden dawn that I am still moving towards.

But I have found that the best thing to do is to have people there to talk through the problems with. Not about the exercise but separate things. Samantha is among the best as she doesn't stand for any of my bullshit and holds me to the task.

So I think that I was working on my strength with Guillaume while I was expressing my frustration with this particular missing part of the puzzle when Samantha looked at me with an expression of horror before she burst into tears and fled.

I sent someone after her although I don't remember who. It was probably Father Anchor as I find him a good person to bounce ideas off and he knows Samantha of old whereas she and Guillaume don't get on. He finds her sense of humour abrasive.

The news that Samantha had actually been there when my brother had first gone to Angral to try out his control of her caused a stir amongst the investigators that were still putting together the timeline of events. She was distraught. After setting the woman down and explaining that we didn't think she had done anything wrong. Indeed, we were rather self-recriminatory that we hadn't thought of so simple an explanation as asking some of Ariadne's household staff about it.

The easiest solution is often the simplest and it would seem that Sam took advantage of that in this instance. So we calmed Samantha down and the following day, I had her come and be interviewed by me and a representative of the Imperial Intelligence Service so that she wouldn't have to do the entire thing again.

I should also note that Samantha and I have a long history together and I should also stress that that history has never been romantic. Samantha is a beautiful woman, but is also happily married and still, hopelessly puppy dog style in love with her husband who is a professional wheel-wright and wagon builder for the merchant caravans. You can't look at the pair of them when they are together and not see it radiating from the two of them.

Detractors would say that Samantha has been acting as my nurse for quite a long time now and that would not be an unfair suggestion. She was the primary giver of care that looked after me when I was recovering from the incident where I met Kerrass' Goddess and since I came out of the castle cellar, she took over those duties as well.

Our relationship is closer to a kind of sibling rivalry than anything else though. On the outside, it can look competitive and abrasive while I hold Samantha in a great deal of affection and although she might claim differently, there have been a few shared and solemn moments between the two of us that would suggest that she feels the same way.

Not least because it was Kerrass and me who broke down the final barriers between her and her husband getting married.

I mention all of this because while you are reading from the following interview, it is worth remembering that the vocal tones that we were using with each other were a lot lighter and more comical than it reads. So please bear that in mind when you read the following excerpt.

So this is your move, is it? This is what you do when you want to talk to someone. You summon them into your tent with a full guard escort and then you have sinister armed men from Imperial Intelligence Services standing in the corner, glowering down at everyone. This is how you do it, is it? This is how you get people to tell you their deepest and innermost secrets.

I'm surprised that there isn't some iron bowl in the corner of the tent with many interesting, long and pointy metal shapes sticking out of it.

Oh for…

OF COURSE, I KNOW THAT YOU COULD PROBABLY ARRANGE SOMETHING LIKE THAT.

But this is your move, isn't it? This is how you conduct your interviews and this is how you get people to talk. Anyway, you've not been eating properly. I can tell. You look pasty and drawn. Do I need to cut your food up for you? Do you want me to hold it for you and pretend that my hand is the hound chasing the fox into the den of your mouth?

Here it comes, my lord. Here comes the fox, now open wide and swallow it whole.

Oh fuck off, would you?

To think that I would willingly serve someone like you. I could go further North you know. Or South for that matter. A woman like me with my special skills and a husband like mine. We could make a living for ourselves just about anywhere that we liked. Anywhere we wanted to. Maybe Skellige.

Oh but you've got friends in Skellige don't you?

Curses.

And it would mean that I couldn't use your money on gathering up all of the expensive herbs and things that your people have access to.

Ok, I'll stay but if you think that means I am going to make your life easy?

YES, I KNOW.

I know.

Dammit.

When's she coming back? The world is so much more fun when she's around. I used to enjoy it, watching uptight little pricks demanding to see the lady of the manor and then getting her. She was amazing, always being able to deflate their over important sense of righteousness. Meeting stuffy old men with a bouncy giggle and a smile, wearing a light dress that floated around her while she danced among the flowers. Or meeting the priests with a properly demure dress and wearing that symbol of the Eternal Flame around her neck.

We used to giggle at the Noble Knights when she would wear her corset with the big fan around her neck and carrying her spider staff while they tried to suggest that she should marry them instead.

I miss her.

Yes, I know that you miss her too, that wasn't what I was saying.

She used to wait out in the courtyard when she was expecting guests. She had this trick of turning up just as their horses would come clattering around the corner and she was always ALWAYS dressed to confound the person that was coming to see her. She knew EXACTLY what to wear and what to say and how to act to utterly disarm whoever it was and whatever they were there to do.

She would muck out stables with the stable hands when nobles would come to show them up for their laziness. She would…

Dammit.

I should have known that that one was different. I honestly thought… I swear… I would have told someone if I thought it was important. It was just… He was your brother.

I should have known that this one was different.

She wasn't ready for him for a start. I was out helping out the head groom. He had wrenched himself with a particularly heavy load of horse manure. Nothing could have been done about it. Just one of those things that happen when you are dealing with animals. He lifted what he thought was a reasonable amount of horse crap and then it turned out that that lump was stuck to another lump and then…

Well…

It's not important. It was an ointment that he had to spread into his back while a group of horsemen turned up. Maybe half a dozen of them all told. I had never met your brother and as such, I was really surprised to see who he was. He turned up, frowning in concentration. He looked… intense. Frowning at a point that only he could see. He was… distracted by something. Pale and sweaty. I would have thought he was ill or something, maybe a bit of a fever. He seemed to jump around at things that only he could see.

Have you ever been startled by a spider's web? You're walking along and the sun shines off the web and you jerk away from it before reaching out to brush it away. That's what he looked like. As though he was being startled by the world.

There was a man with him that seemed to be there to keep him on track. A big man, large and heavily muscled. The kind of man that girls swoon over when they don't know any better or until they have to talk to them and maintain any kind of conversation.

To be honest, though, I would have thought that he was in charge until I saw him check something with the man that would turn out to be your brother.

They all clattered into the courtyard, like they always do, and then looked around for the servants to see if someone was going to come and take care of them. Again, I always find that kind of funny. There's just a special kind of person that wouldn't know what to do with themselves if there weren't servants around to look after them and tell them what to do and where to go.

Honestly, I'm not sure your lot could wipe your arse if we didn't tell you where it was.

Eventually, though, the man I was working on called his apprentices over and sent them off to see to the matter. Messages were sent and the Lady of the house was sent which surprised me at the time because normally, she is out there and waiting for the visitor as I say.

She came out, dressed in one of her dark grey-blackish smock things and she looked at the visitors and she seemed surprised.

.

You know that thing where you have a memory and you looked, saw and acted on something that you thought it was at the time? But now that you look back you wonder if you should have seen something else. And then you examine the memory and you can't help but wonder how you didn't see it. And then, you wonder if you are adjusting your memory to see something else now that you have the full…

Heh,

Context of the issue.

Alright, you smug bastard. I know that Context is everything...

This time it's true.

The Countess looked shocked and then your brother laughed in triumph. At first, I thought it was the triumph of a man that knows that he has managed to surprise an unsurprisable woman. As well he might be but now? Looking back I wonder. Was that the moment that he first put her under his spell? Had he been afraid as to whether or not the control would work until he was actually there and doing the thing?

We probably won't know now, will we?

What?

No, I didn't recognise any of the others. They wore blank shields and rode without banners. Only your brother was riding without a helm on.

I mean, I could try but… later?

Anyway. Your brother walked up and hugged the Countess. She wriggled like a worm on a hook before she suddenly seemed to relax into the hug.

"Well?" He asked of her as they pulled apart. "Introduce us."

She stared at him for a moment.

"This is Lord Samuel Kalayn." She declared in a loud voice. "Freddie's brother."

"We have come to talk about some matters to do with the coming wedding," your brother said. "So it's vital that if any of you see him in the near future, you don't tell him about what you see here, or this meeting. Will you all promise me? We're planning a surprise."

His humour and his joy were infectious so of course we all laughed.

He could be charming, your brother.

He and the Countess spent a lot of time together over a couple of days. Enough so that people might have been outraged if they hadn't known what was going on.

But we didn't know, did we?

Goddess, poor woman.

But it all seemed happy. The Countess looked flustered but we all put that down to the fact that your brother had turned up out of nowhere. The Countess was always one that liked to make careful plans and things so his coming out of the blue like that must have been a bit of a shock.

Or at least, that's what we told ourselves and when we asked her about it later, she would just add that onto the suppositions.

No, I didn't like your brother. He looked at all of the women there like we were pieces of meat. He looked as though he was drooling as he looked at us to the point that my husband actively got upset. He would have said something too but then your brother would seem to realise something before looking away in disgust.

He left three days later.

When was this?

Just heading towards proper spring. We knew that you were on your way to the Black Forest so… Yeah.

After that?

No nothing that would stand out. She was always in and out at all times of the day or night. She would let people know where she was going and when so there was never any kind of alarm and so… we just didn't worry.

And it was perfectly understandable that the groom's brother would want to come and call upon the future bride. No one thought anything of it and it was only the other day when you said that I thought…

I could have done something. I could have said something and…

She got upset and more than a little distraught after that. We worked on the matter for a while, talking it through and making sure that she was alright. I told her that there was enough guilt going around for everyone and that we all should have seen something. We all should have done something or acted in some way.

I told her that it was just as likely that Sam had ordered Ariadne to keep silent and not say anything that might even approach giving the game away to her nearest and dearest.

There is even discussion as to whether or not she could be ordered to actively forget what she was doing when she wasn't… you know… doing it.

We have no way of proving that one way or another until we can speak to the woman in question of course.

Samantha was taken away to work with an artist to see if she could remember any details of some of the other people that had come with Sam to visit Ariadne. There is not a great deal of hope that she will be able to tell us anything new but there is always hope that something else might be shaken loose.

There is also a team from Imperial Intelligence that are on their way to Angral now to speak to various people to see if they can find anything else out.

So that is what we know about when Sam first made contact with Ariadne.

Back to Sir Aleksy regarding the formation of the plan.

What I don't think many people understand is that without what your brother brought to us, we didn't stand a chance. Don't get me wrong, other gentlemen such as myself, could provide contacts, could provide men, equipment, money and the rest. Leaving aside the rather obvious answer that your brother had all of those things in abundance, what he had?

He had the impetus and drive to use them. Until he provided those things and offered up his situation, putting his neck on the block as it were, then no one else was going to follow through. It wasn't until he stood up and declared in a loud voice that "Gentlemen, it is time to rebel." Until he had done that, we were all looking at each other to see who was going to be the first to jump to it.

Before your brother, we were just a collection of buffoons with plooms on our helmets toying with the thought of Rebellion and playing with our toy soldiers. Your brother was the first one who stood up and told us that it was time to put the toys away and put our money where our mouth was.

The other thing that I will say about your brother is that he played things very cleverly.

Everyone wanted to be in charge, but no one wanted to be the man out front so to speak. All of us wanted to be Kingmakers, viziers and chancellors. We wanted to advise and direct things from the shadows but no one was willing to put the money in the pot and actually risk everything.

Not the same mistake that your Father made, old man. What your Father did, which would have been almost as foolish as being the kind of man that stands forward and says "I will lead this treasonous rebellion," is to give the King what he wanted and then expect to be recompensed out of gratitude. What is the saying?

Yes, that's it. No one could ever say that you weren't an educated man Lord Frederick.

"Beware the Gratitude of Kings."

Not that there was much gratitude to go around in the grand scheme of things. Oh, the things that could have been done if Radovid had properly bound men like your Father to him rather than driving them away. Or destroying them when he had the chance.

Ah well, the benefit of perfect hindsight.

But your brother was clever enough to see what was going to happen. The leader of the rebellion was also the one with the most risk. Everyone wanted to advise the leader, to play both sides off against the middle and then, when the dust had settled, tell the victor that we were always on their side anyway.

So what your brother did was to trust his closest allies. He didn't walk into a meeting of the rebels with your Countess in chains. Instead, he told everyone that he had the problem sorted. He said that he had tested his… bag or whatever it was and as a result, he had an army and he had magic. He received money from his family and he had access to a large amount of influence from his time in the army.

Then when people told him to prove it, he would point to a few trusted individuals and tell us that he had proven it to them and loudly asked whether or not we would accuse those famous men of lying.

Was I one of these men? Of course not. No, I was nervous for any number of reasons. I am a nobleman but I was a military man. I understand completely that if I had been born on the Southern Bank of the River Yaruga then I would have fought in the ranks of the black ones. I am a patriot to be sure but I would just as easily have been a patriot for Nilfgaard, Temeria or any of the other places where people claim to be patriots but are always asking what the country and its rulers have done for them. Rather than trying to find ways to serve the country.

That was why I liked your brother. He loved Redania. There was a bit too much hatred towards Nilfgaard in his thinking which blinded him to certain factors, but he loved Redania and was doing what he was doing to free Redania.

There were a lot of us in that branch of things but there were also a lot of people that were part of the rebellion because they had lost out, or thought that they had lost out, on power and influence because the North had lost to the South. They were in it for power, wealth and influence.

The largest faction, of course, were those people in the middle but that's no matter.

I'm getting off track. Do you ever get off track?

Of course, you do. Not your fault though is it? Those of us that like the sounds of our voices tend to get off track because we just spend so much time talking that…

Well…

So he brought your Countess in to prove it to several people. He showed this dominance over her and then the real planning started to happen. He did that several times to an increasing number of people and I think I was there at the last one, the largest meeting. We all turned up and she teleported into the middle of us with a flash of black light. It was as though a hole had been ripped in the air and she just stepped through it with her golden staff twirling. And by the Flame sir, she hated us. Even without the expression on her face, you could feel it radiating off her.

It shames me now that when I saw that, I was excited. I had been one of the doubters regarding what your brother was capable of. But to see him there, see her there and to see him exert his dominance over her was something to see.

No, it wasn't sexual or anything like that. A few people tried to suggest that he should allow her to service some of them in that way in the same way that they had with the other, lesser woman]. I think your friend de Radford was one of them but your brother wouldn't have it. If I was a curious man, I would wonder why he was so comfortable letting people abuse the more bestial one but not this one.

I remember him looking at the person that suggested it with such a look of disdain that it fairly chilled us. That says something doesn't it? The differences between the two vampires are in his head. Not sure what it says but it says something.

Then your Countess gestured and another one of those holes opened up and he, your brother, and a couple of your brother's closest cronies stepped through the hole and vanished.

I remember it very clearly. Strangest thing, old boy.

I remember turning to my friend Sir Proznyac… Oh no, he died on the field. Caught the pointy end of a lance in his throat. He looked dreadfully surprised as I recall.

But no, I remember turning to him as everyone started to talk and I saw my thoughts on his face. I remember it so very clearly that my doubts had gone away. I remember thinking that there was hope. That the rebellion was going to happen and that we were going to win. Before that moment, I, and others, had gone to those meetings to see what could be seen and to hear what could be heard. But it was at that moment that I became a believer.

My friend and I left, bought a bottle of wine each and we went and walked through a park. I had this nervous energy in my legs and the urge to walk that energy away. I wanted to stride about the place and think. Not think, not really. I wanted to dream. We looked at all of the black flags with the golden sunburst on them and we imagined Redanian flags flying in their stead. We looked at the patrolling guards and soldiers in the city and imagined that instead of seeing black armour we saw red.

I cannot explain to you the excitement, the thrill of it, the determination and the… dreams that we had.

We were going to win.

I had visions of us coming out of the dawn, the sunlight reflecting off our shiny armour and our bright swords as our enemies were befuddled from fighting our monstrous allies and then we would cut them down in that same dawn. And then we could make plans for the future. We would form up behind our young King and make Redania great again. We would shore up the old borders and invade Temeria to punish them for their crimes of selling out Radovid. We could move East, into Aedirn and Kaedwen and then, when we had resecured the North, we could cross the Yaruga and invade the South.

Funny isn't it, old man? I can see you smiling there as you giggle at what I say. And you are right, don't let it be said that you are not right. We would have had to defend ourselves against the South and focus on defending our borders before we did anything else but in the right then and right there moment, we were young, we were strong, we were more than a little bit drunk and the future was going to be wonderful.

Ah well.

We played the game, and we lost. Proznyac didn't live to see it. Bless him. You would have liked him I think. He was a man that took life by the horns. He would have resented losing a bit more than I have and I very much doubt that you would have been able to get him to talk to you as much as I would have.

Wasn't a gambler you see.

A gambler knows that there are times when you win and there are times when you lose. Nothing worth winning comes without the requisite amount to lose. We played, we lost, that's the result of it.

The plan started to come together after that.

Truth be told that it wasn't that complicated a plan. But then again, plans are not supposed to be complicated, are they? What was it that Lord Jon said?

That's it. Flame but it's good to speak with a properly educated man. That's the problem with guards old boy. They've never read the right texts.

Word of advice, if you ever find yourself on the losing side of a coup, make sure you get captured with people that you have plenty of things in common with. That way you can wait for the headsman amongst friends.

I wish I had known you sooner old bean. I think we might have been friends.

No… You're probably right. We would have hated each other. I would have hated you for being the son of a jumped-up nobody who didn't serve Redania in any capacity that might have made a difference and….

Yes, that's right. You would have hated me for being an arrogant prick that thinks that only military service and strength at arms has any worth.

There is something to be said there isn't there. Something about how we are all the same when you strip everything away.

Ah well. I shall leave that for future philosophers as I don't think there is much more that I can add to the debate.

The plan was simple. We needed to cut the head off the snake in the early part of things.

It was more accurate to say that we needed to cut off as many heads as we could. But after that, we needed time to consolidate. Get our forces together and so on. Lord Voorhis and the Imperial Intelligence folks were good and scary and we had some early luck in that it turns out that the head of Imperial Intelligence for the North was pro-Rebellion. That was a shock. Seems he was a veteran of the war and…

Oh, you know the man?

I didn't like him. He had betrayed us once and now he was betraying his new employers as well. I rather thought that this was telling us that he couldn't be trusted. We should have learned the lesson from King Radovid when he put all the Temerians on the front lines against Nilfgaard. Those that would walk away from their old country will feel no loyalty to their new one.

But as a result, we had a pretty good idea as to what was going on in the Intelligence community. We figured that the Empress would be at your wedding, the Duchess of Toussaint, The Queen of Skellige and The King of Kovir & Poviss because of some connection that I didn't understand. We could also get a significant number of the Lodge of Sorceresses. So I'm afraid it was a rather simple solution to strike during your wedding celebrations. We figured that people would be drunk and vulnerable while they were all looking at you and your adoring bride. People would be relaxed and let their hair down so it was an easy answer to a lot of our concerns to strike at the wedding.

But after that, the Imperials would send their vengeance.

We couldn't gather our forces in advance of that to strike out fast enough and take advantage of their confusion. There was only so much that our man inside the Imperial Intelligence could ignore after all and gathering that many troops would spark some comment. So we needed a way that we could strike at the head of the snake, then we would need to have time so that we could gather our forces while not being afraid of reprisals from the Imperial contingent.

So then we came in with the idea of the storm. After all, we had access to one of the most powerful mages on the continent who would do what we told her to do.

So if she conjured up this huge Autumnal storm then wecould water and mud-lock the roads which would prevent armies from moving. There would already be the delay that a lot of those forces were tied up in the west and with the harvest. So a storm. It would keep the Skelligan fleet in their harbours and if it could be moved around, then we could get our own people together and be ready to strike at those areas and against those forces that we wanted to.

From there, again, the plan was simple. We would secure Novigrad docks so that we could, in theory, sail an army to anywhere we wanted up and down the coast or along any of the larger rivers. We would also move to secure the river crossings. The storm would help us there. There would be a lot of water that would have soaked the grounds and that would then flow into the rivers and the like. That would mean that the rivers would flood and therefore, the only way that our enemies would be able to cross the Redanian border would be at one of the crossings.

Which we could secure.

Coulthard Castle would be ours. Your brother was confident that with the help of the Vampires, we would keep that castle which is one of the most heavily fortified positions in the North. Therefore we would have a forward operating centre to protect against counterattack from the South.

We were confident that many of the old Knights and the Lords that maintained their own forces would see the benefits of our cause and then things would build from there. We didn't want to get too far ahead of ourselves.

So we would have three main forces. The first was Novigrad. We needed the docks to be able to transport troops but also so that we could bring in supplies, armour, weapons and food and so forth. Then Castle Coulthard which we would fortify. And then we had an army in the field which would march to the liberation of Tretogor. We had every faith that Tretogor and the rest of the Redanian countryside would welcome us home as heroes.

Oh yes, old boy. I don't care what she says but Queen Adda was on our side. I know for a fact because I was one of the messengers that took the plan to her and carried her endorsement back. My Father has many friends at court and as a result, it is fairly easy to get into the royal court for me. So I was one of the messengers who acted as a go-between. She might claim that I am a traitor that would say anything to save my skin. But she knew. She knew.

She betrayed us. I am sure of it.

When you look back on all of this old boy. When you take stock and properly look back on all of this. Don't let her off the hook. She knew. You know those false patriots that I was talking about. People that were playing both sides off against the middle… people who are patriots while thinking about how being a patriot can get you more power, wealth and influence.

Adda is one. She is no Queen of mine. Prissy little bitch that one. It's easy to forget sometimes but she is Temerian through and through and when you say 'Temerian' you might as well be saying 'traitor'.

So that was the plan. It was a good plan I think. There was enough room for us to come up with some other stuff if it all went wrong. There was flexibility there and strong points. We were confident and as the day of your wedding got closer and closer and we remained undiscovered through all of that time, our confidence grew and grew.

And then it all went wrong, didn't it.

It is a shame what is going to happen to Sir Aleksy. As I say, I liked him.

I made a mistake at one point and asked him what, if anything, I could do to help him. He asked me if I could find a way to look after his sister. He kept saying, over and over again, that she was a good girl and didn't deserve to die a traitor's death. I said that I would do my best but I was unable to keep from pointing out that the reason that she would die a traitor's death was that her brother had been a fool.

He shrugged at that and asked me to help anyway. I told him that the best I could probably do for her was to find her an abbey to go away to and he told me he would be happy with that.

So what went wrong with the plan?

Several things really. Not least of which was the fact that the storm broke early. The logistical situation of the matter was not secured in advance so the storm slowed down the gathering rebels just as much as it slowed down the Imperial response.

The third thing that brought the rebellion to its knees was the sailing prowess of the Skelligan fleet.

Taking things in order though.

It needs to be stressed that we don't know what happened with the storm. From conversations with Sir Aleksy, it would seem that the storm was supposed to be a big, breaking thing that would trap people here during and after the wedding. So it was actually supposed to break afterwards or even on the day of the wedding itself. The fact that it didn't was the thing that caused all of the issues.

So why did that happen? There are still plenty of Sorceresses and Mages around so I asked to be referred to an authority on weather magic to see if they could tell me why it might be the case and the answer I got back was rather… Well, most of it went over my head. So when I replied that I wanted something that I could put in a more populist work to appeal to the average person on the street, instead I received a very amused letter from the mage in question telling me that most of it went over their head as well. But they would send someone who was more able to explain things in less technical language.

I won't lie to you, dear reader, I felt more than a little bit called out by that.

What I didn't expect was that the person that would turn up would be the Rectress of the Aretuza magical academy herself Margarita Laux-Antille. I have no idea what that surname stands for and she jokes that she doesn't either.

Margarita, as she insists on being called, is one of the Sorceresses that I know the least. I know that she took over the project of salvaging the library of Pula, Saffron and Sally and what little interaction we have with each other was to suggest that she was absolutely aware of the moral implications of what the Non-humans were afraid of. We didn't talk much beyond that acceptance and a general letter that told me that salvaging the vast amount of documents was going "better than we feared but worse than we hoped."

The book-burners of the Eternal Flame, Radovid and Kreve have a lot to answer for when it comes to lost knowledge on the continent. In the centuries to come, we will regret that loss and the time that we have wasted just getting ourselves back to the levels of our forebears.

To say that Margarita is beautiful is, of course, rather redundant. She is a Sorceress and therefore she is beautiful. Long, golden curly hair and although, in theory, she wore among the slightest of dresses with the lowest of necklines. She is by far the least aggressive Sorceress about her sexuality that I have ever met. It is an odd contrast to be sure. Her beauty is one of kindness, you kind of feel as though you want to lay your head in her lap and for her to stroke your hair and tell you that everything is going to be alright. Very similar to Sleeping Beauty in that regard.

It is no surprise to me that she is the head of an academic institution and further to that, it would not surprise me to learn that she is really good at that and that students find it really easy to take their problems to her from the most complex magical problems down to the most insignificant of personal issues.

Today though, she came in with a shawl wrapped around herself against the early Spring chill and greeted me with a small hug. She waved off my apology for not getting up to greet her and asked me if we were any closer to finding anything out about Ariadne.

Which we hadn't.

She sighed and put her hand on my arm in sympathy before sitting down. We spoke about several small things. She asked me what it felt like to suddenly be elevated from the dungeon and into the position of one of the most powerful nobles on the continent. She wondered if I could be persuaded to help sponsor a magical school and whether or not I could provide a scholarship or two for those students that couldn't afford the necessary school fees to provide a magical education and the like.

I asked her how the rebuilding of Aretuza was going after years of destruction hate and neglect. It might sound as though we were discussing dark subjects but the truth is that I remember a lot of laughter from those exchanges. Despite her revealing clothing, I found that I didn't think of her as a sexual creature at all. It was kind of odd.

We were not avoiding the topic deliberately but I rather think that Margarita was putting me at my ease before she would tell me something that I would not enjoy. As it happened though, neither she, nor I needed to have worried about it.

I am sorry that I wasn't here to help during the rebellion. I was afraid that, given the obvious magical nature of what was happening, I was rather concerned that people might want to take things out on my students. I would have been here for the wedding of course so I rather think that the storm breaking early saved my life, if not completely saving the North from another disaster. But I wish I could have been here to help.

Not that I would have been much help in a crisis. Give me a problem to untangle or a hysterical student to set down, then I can help you but when daggers are drawn and people start shouting, then I fall apart or worse, I freeze in the face of…

Well…

You would be much better served by Phillipa or Yenna than with me. Triss would be better if you want sheer destructive power but for me?

But that's not what you wanted to talk about is it.

Yes, the weather and what happened with the storm.

I can't prove it of course but I rather think that the storm was sabotaged in some way and… when you find her (Freddie: I was grateful that she didn't say 'if' there) I suspect that is what you will find out. I wonder how she did it given that she was so clearly in the thrall of that… horrible fetish. I would normally hold that there is no such thing as bad knowledge, only the bad interpretation or application of that knowledge but that seems to be to be a particularly bleak…

If ever there was and is an argument for knowledge to be controlled then I think that that bag is going to be one of the principal arguments in the case for the control of certain pieces of knowledge.

But it would seem that the item had a rather thorough control of Ariadne and as such… It was not the control of the Master and Slave, it was the control of a master and a tool. It completely subsumed her will. So I wonder how she found a way to fight through that control to sabotage…

Oh yes, I think we can be pretty sure that it was her that caused the storm. It's easy to look back on the matter and see the necessary markers that would constitute a magical signature but the problem with the art of weather control is that it is so chaotic in the first place that it is hard to see the patterns and easy to see patterns where there is none.

People might claim that they can predict weather patterns but the truth is that we can look a couple of days into the future and make a few educated guesses but beyond that, it is anyone's guess.

The druids of Skellige can make small changes and bring rain down occasionally but even they will admit that they only dare make small changes because to make massive changes is to seriously affect the weather patterns of vast swathes of the continent. Droughts and famines have happened that way because a mage wanted to make sure his herb garden was properly watered.

The way it's done is slow build-up. Incremental changes to the temperature in certain areas. Lowering the temperature of certain other areas. Increasing the pressure of the air in still more areas and lessening it in others.

Yes… The pressure of the air.

Does it sound so ridiculous? Have you ever had a day where the air seems thick and heavy and you struggle to move around as everything seems to take so much more effort than it would normally? But then there will be a rain storm and the effect will lessen. Or have you had other days where the air seems so thin that you have felt it echoing in your chest and scouring the back of your throat? Where you feel light-headed and dizzy.

Think also of the effects of climbing a mountain. We know that the higher up the mountain that you go, the less air there is. That if you go too far, then things start to break down. You need to gasp for air to get more into your lungs.

So with hindsight, it is easy to see that the storm that broke before your wedding day was a magical event. In this case, although the better weather mages than I would need to look into it, it would seem certain that things were fortuitous that they wanted a storm in Autumn as it would be a good time to have a storm. Or Spring I suppose. But in this case, it would not have needed to make a completely new storm it would be closer to just building on an existing storm.

Holding it back until you wanted it to go so that the storm would gain more momentum and therefore be more powerful when the time for the storm to break came.

You yourself have noted that there was a time of intense heat and mugginess in the days immediately before the storm.

So yes, I think it was artificial and magical. I think that an otherwise regular autumn storm was built up to vast degrees and then it was unleashed.

And I would also judge, given the chaotic nature of magic and the weather in general… That it was set off early.

Look at how the storm was so utterly disastrous for the rebels when it could have gone so catastrophically the other way. That is no coincidence in my mind.

And she was right. The storm was a catastrophe and if it had just waited a day or two further then some of the important people would not have needed to have been at Coulthard castle to have been lost.

There is a group of us that gather to talk all of this kind of thing over. Father Anchor is one. Sir Guillaume and Sir Gregoire have insisted on staying nearby and helping out with the hunting of leftover "beasts and brigands"...

There is a lot of guilt flying around and the two men remain appalled at the state that they found me in and feel guilty that they could not have come to me sooner. They exorcise that guilt by helping with the formation of the Duchy of the Pontar by force of arms.

Another of the many things that I wish I could see and help with but Samantha and Tulip frown at me whenever I suggest it.

Seriously though, I am better now but I can only just manage an hour's worth of work before I have to stop and take a breather.

But I'm off-topic again.

Svein has had to return to his duties but Kar likes to be nearby, grinning at people evilly when he's decided that I am being mistreated and am doing too much work. So we, and others and a lot of the people hereabouts like to gather and eat together. I like to do it outside where I can see the sky and feel the fresh air. We sit and talk and one of the topics of conversation is the inevitability of "what if…". What if this had happened or that had happened or the other things had happened?

And one of the regular topics has been what if the storm had broken just a few days later. The Skelligan fleet would have been at sea. With the prowess of Helfdan at the tiller then it was all but certain that the Queen would have made it to harbour but what would she have found there? Especially if she had made it to Novigrad. Would she have found unfriendly eyes and armed men with dubious numbers of warriors at her back?

Even if she had made it home, the pride of the Skelligan fleet would have been damaged and who knows how many longships and good men would have been lost at sea.

The other one that regularly comes up is that the Imperial delegation would have been on the roads. They would have been coming up through Velen and making the crossing of the Pontar at Oxenfurt. The roads in Velen have improved since the war, especially the main ones to cross at Novigrad and Oxenfurt, but they are, by no means perfect, and it would be far too easy to imagine the vastness of the Imperial delegation ending up mired in some kind of swamp that they would need to dig themselves out of. The pride of Nilfgaardian chivalry would have been swamped down. And yes, the Empress can teleport out in times of danger but again, the damage that would have done could have been catastrophic.

I know the psychology of why we talk in such a way. In talking about how much worse things could have gone we are reminding ourselves that they didn't go that badly and re-emphasising to ourselves that we are alive and making our own way.

But it could have gone a lot better too. I could be married now, so many people could still be alive and…

I always find that topic of conversation depressing.

Fuck

How did the rebels take it? Again, I refer to my interviews with Sir Aleksy.

Some people might criticize how much I depend on Sir Aleksy here and it is true that I am using his words a lot. But he is one of the few surviving enemy Knights and commanders from the Rebellion. Many did not survive. That number gets even smaller when you are talking about those men that survived the siege of Coulthard castle where the number of superiors is vanishingly small. Of that pool of men, the number of people that have been willing to talk to me to any degree is smaller still and they are not reliable enough.

They are the kind of men that are protesting their innocence. Protesting that they were forced to take part and are blaming everyone but themselves. It might be true that there are better and more reliable sources of information out there. But the other truth is that that process might take time.

The other extreme of course is those people that call me a traitor and have actually tried to attack me when they are anywhere remotely close to me.

Sir Aleksy was rare in that he was kind of resigned to his fate.

"Oh, it was a disaster old boy. An absolute disaster," he would say. Over and over again.

I don't know when it happened but we had reached the point of no return. It was one of those things… I don't know if you know what I mean, me old cock, but there comes a moment where you try and figure out where the point was that you could have, where you SHOULD have, backed out of the entire thing. There is a point where you have no choice but to move forwards with the matter.

Sometimes that happens with courting a wench when you are thinking with your nether regions and the half a bottle of wine that you drank the night before and you wake up the following morning. You see her properly for the first time and then you try and talk to her. You wonder to yourself if there were any warning signs or if there had been a point in the recent past where you should have seen what you were getting yourself into and you could have gotten out. But then you realise that there were plenty of warnings but the fact that you have been out in the field with the men for several weeks, and you have had a bottle of wine to erode your willpower starts to tell.

It was like that.

I should have seen it for the disaster that it became but I had been seduced. The promise of a powerful mage on MY side this time. The promise of armies of disposable monsters. The prospect of the hero's welcome as we liberated Redania. You know the thing I mean don't you old boy? Cheering in the streets, flowers thrown under our horse's shoes, women throwing their undergarments, that kind of thing.

As I have sat here, waiting for the headsman, I have had a lot of time to think about when I should have backed out and the truth was, that it was clear that it was going to be a disaster.

But one of them was when I looked out of the manor house that I was staying in with my little unit of men and I saw the clouds forming up. I saw the towering, terrifying piles of blackness against the otherwise blue sky and I saw the distant haziness that suggested that there was rain in the distance. It was early, far too early and I should have known that we were lost.

I remember telling myself that it might not be anything important. That it might just be a shower, the equivalent of the warning before the storm. The flag being waved before the Knights start to come together.

And then I felt that first drop of rain.

I should have seen it then.

There's more of course.

We were committed. We knew that the rain would have just as much an impact on us as it would have had on the Imperials and the rest. But our advantage there was that we could plan for it. So we already had to be in the field. But also, we had to gather in ways that we weren't going to be seen to be gathering. Yes, we had a man in Imperial Intelligence that could obfuscate things for us, but even so.

We had a lot of men in Novigrad and the general confusion around Coulthard castle with all of the additional armed forces that were performing "security" for the wedding meant that we had lots of people there that could move quickly. But those of us in the field? There were groups of us. Twenty, thirty at a time. I think that at most, there were a couple of farms that housed a company of men. Old ruined watch towers and ruined farms from the war that no one has bothered repairing in the meantime. There was a certain autonomy to do what we needed to do and I do not doubt that there were some groups that were looking forward to doing some banditry at the time.

But there we were.

And the rain came.

Our Commander in Chief was embedded. He was in Coulthard castle so he couldn't get much word out and we couldn't get many messages to him. Our commanders in Novigrad could not entirely be depended on.

I stress that we knew that this was going to happen. We knew that there was a moment of dangerv before it all kicked off and we were out of touch with each other. The danger that whole bunches of us would get cold feet and just give up. But we all believed that the inertia behind it all would carry the day. Once the rebellion had started, the patriotism that we all felt would burst forth and we would carry the day like that.

We were already committed. We were already out there. Armed, supplied and ready.

The fight would start. Novigrad docks and Coulthard Castle would be taken while we rushed for the borders, to secure the crossings and to ensure that the countryside was safe so that those less reliable people such as your de Radford…

He was your enemy which makes him yours. I know you like to say that he was not "your" de Radford but that's the way it works old man. I thought you would know this.

Oh, I hated him. As did any right-thinking idiot amongst us.

He was just so punchable you know? He had this expression that just made you want to slap his lips off.

We were committed and the rain fell.

Another problem was that we had no idea what was going on.

When I asked him why they had no idea what was going on, Sir Aleksy got a little bit defensive. I think that this was the bit that he was kind of ashamed of as though he knew that this was a colossal mistake. He danced around the topic a lot and eventually, I moved on to other things, resolving to come back to the topic.

Later interviews fleshed this topic out however and although there is no real, useful, block of transcript that would say it all, there were a couple of bits that shed some light on it.

I have never been to the Imperial War College. Nor do I know anyone that has ever gone there. But you hear rumours don't you old man? There are always rumours. They say that there is a wargame scenario that was invented after their loss at Brenna. They would split the classes into pairs and then they would give them a model battlefield. There was some artistry to it. Hills, rivers, bridges, all of the exciting little features and bits of terrain that you could find on your average battlefield.

Then the opponents would be given an army in a series of models that would represent the various armed forces of the world. It would randomly be determined who entered the battlefield from which direction. Then the two opponents would be taken into separate rooms where the fields that they were presented with were given to them in stylised drawn maps on bits of parchment. They would deploy their forces on this map before separate judges would look at the greater model.

The judges would decide what intelligence would be given to the two "generals" regarding opposing forces and then each general had to give three orders based on this. The orders would be given so that they would be implemented and then both generals would be taken back into the actual room with the actual battlefields and the orders would be carried out.

I remember thinking it was remarkably cruel that they would have to stand there and watch as all of their careful plans would fall apart when the two armies met up with each other and there was no way to change those first sets of orders. It's meant to signify the confusion of those early parts of battle.

But that was what it was like. We were committed. The orders had been given and now it was simply our duty to carry them out. Why didn't we adjust things in the wake of the storm going early? Because we had no messages to say what had happened. And because there were no messages, there was no way of knowing how badly it had gone.

Why didn't we send any messages?

Because we were afraid. No one wanted to be the man who got the whole scheme found out. No one wanted to be the man that messed it all up so badly.

Nor did we want to be the man that backed out. Speaking personally, I was afraid of that too. If I backed out then I was surrounded by loyalists. And if I backed out and the rebellion worked, then I would be a traitor. I had been in some of those rooms where we had discussed what would happen to those people that had not followed through on their promises. It would not have been pretty.

But yes, it is true, when the storm broke early and the last couple of days before the wedding dawn was bright and rainless. I was left with a slow sinking sensation in the pit of my belly. But there was nothing I could do then. We were committed and we had to go.

So we went.

So there it was. The three prongs of the Rebellion. The one was obviously in and around Coulthard Castle. Commanded in person by Sam and Kristoff and again, I must acknowledge a blinding game was played by those men in putting that together. They deliberately played on the antipathy that Rickard, Kerrass and I all felt for Kristoff in particular and as a result, the pair of them allowed it to happen where he was stationed outside the castle with the rest of their forces.

So Kristoff was the second in command with frontline access to the people that he needed to have access to. They also played off the growing rifts that had been growing between Emma and Sam so that every time Sam made some kind of concession, we saw it as this great and generous effort by him to try and reconcile. Therefore we did not look at the matter too closely.

The biggest and best example of that was when he didn't care about the fact that his personal guard was forced to stay and bivouac outside the castle walls. I remember being worried about that and my own diaries bear that out. We had expected him to kick up a fuss about that, even though we could argue that The Empress, the Queen of Skellige, The King of Kovir & Poviss alone all needed to have their personal guards on hand. We had those arguments locked and loaded and ready to go should he have kicked up a fuss. We were so ready for a fight that when it just didn't materialise, we were so relieved that we didn't look at it too closely.

That was not the only factor either and this time, you don't even need to take my word for it. I had a conversation on the matter with a Captain Thierry Polmert.

Captain Polmert is a strategist. By his own admission, he would be useless in leading men or coming up with small unit tactics. He will cheerfully admit that he comes across as a bit of a wet fish and struggles to get people to listen to him. He freezes in military situations and in combat, he barely knows which end of the sword to grip. He and I commiserated on the problems with learning to use a sword as he shared the same problem with me in that he always overthought the use of the sword. He liked my suggestion of trying a spear or a stave of some kind before he got distracted.

He is a cheerful man but quite impossible to like. He's one of those people whose brain operates on a different level from the rest of us but he is arrogant with that. He looks down on people for not being able to keep up with him. As I say, he is a strategist and analyst. He can look at a situation, or a battlefield and tell you what happened. I suspect that if he had been born in a village he would have ended up being a tracker or some kind of detective. He comes up with larger plans for armies, far-reaching plans and ideas. He sees things and puts things together where you and I just can't make the connection.

It was a brilliant strategy, quite quite brilliant. So much so that I am surprised that it didn't work better. The human aspect I suppose.

But it was brilliant. So brilliant that I think it might change military tactics and overall strategies for these large state events. It will bear considering in the future about how to circumvent the large controls that are put on certain groups when the issues come up.

The problem with the coming wedding was that there was no single person that could have known and vouched for everyone that turned up. So all your brother had to do was turn up with a large body of men. Then, if all of them had several spare uniforms in their packs those uniforms could be distributed to everyone and sundry. Your brother goes up to the castle and declares in a loud voice that he will be dispersing his men out onto the roads to help police them and do all of the small jobs that need doing on lands like yours.

You and your sister are grateful, because of course you are, and then his men scatter. The uniforms are distributed to the enemy forces that are hiding in the bushes and any time that a visitor or a peasant in the fields sees a group of men training, fortifying a position or stock-piling supplies. They see the uniform and go "Ah yes, that must be the Kalayn people. Aren't they doing a good job and isn't Lord Kalayn a good man for helping out his family in this, their hour of need."

In this way, more and more men were able to sneak into Coulthard lands and no one could be the wiser that those men that they could see were anything other than they looked like. It seems clear to me that Kalayn had six or seven times the number of men that he turned up with, operating in Coulthard lands by the day of the Equinox. And it would also not be too much to suppose that he was not the only person that used this ruse.

It has disturbing implications for future state events. Very disturbing implications indeed.

Exciting isn't it?

It takes a special kind of man to be excited about the possibility of such over-arching change. I am glad that I do not have to be the one to come up with a solution to such a thing.

So there were the forces in and around Coulthard lands that were poised to take Coulthard castle. Then there were the forces that were there to take Novigrad docks. And again, Sam played this really really well. He took advantage of the general kinds of dislike and open hatred that people had and have for the Coulthard family.

For those unaware, there was a faction in Novigrad docks that was led by Sir Robart de Radford. This faction, fuelled by their jealousy, disdain and dislike of the Coulthard trading company as well as Emma, Mark and myself in particular, did everything in their power to disadvantage the family where they could. Mark was all but immune to this because of his rank in the church. He used to joke that he had achieved that state where to talk against him was to talk against the church as a whole and was therefore blasphemous. He found it funny, but also a little bit terrifying.

I sometimes wonder what he would make of the fact that he was going to be sainted.

They also struggled to do anything that might impact me. I didn't care, I was going to be a Count of Angral, I had no control, nor did I want any control over the family's mercantile efforts. I was so rarely in Novigrad itself as I find the place rather off-putting.

I keep wandering down the street and the historian in me looks at the square surrounded by flowers and traders and with children playing while minstrels play and find myself wondering just how many good people burned on the pyres in that square.

It's stuff like that. I can spend a few days there to enjoy the amenities and obviously, the docks and I are old friends. But I stay in the Rosemary and Thyme and there is no pressure that can be applied there to make my life difficult so I don't tend to get in any kind of trouble.

So the faction went after Emma and they did that by attacking the trading concerns. They planted evidence, they charged extra tariffs, forbade the ships from docking and charged exorbitant fees to use the warehouses. Emma complained to the city and port authorities and the authorities laughed at her, wondering where she would go if she didn't use the docks in Novigrad. According to her, the fact that they all stood there with their hands held out for expected bribes was rather telling.

Instead, Emma swallowed the loss and started to renovate and expand Oxenfurt docks. She built warehouses and hired work crews that could load and unload trading ships in a fraction of the time. With Oxenfurt being further down the road and river for trade to head South and inland, Coulthard shipping was not the only loss that Novigrad had to swallow.

What this means is that there are, or were, lots of empty warehouses and buildings sitting on the waterfront of Novigrad docks. All the rebellion had to do was to pay the owners any kind of rent at all and when they told the owners that in opening their doors, they would be sticking it to the Coulthard family and many people let the troops stay there for free.

There are remarkably few documents from this time in Novigrad as those docks soon realised which way the wind was blowing and destroyed any records that they might have kept in the first place.

I do have some records about what happened on the docks but that comes later.

And then there was the third group, the group that Sir Aleksy belonged to. This was the weak link in the Rebellion's deployment and they knew it. The same storm that they knew was going to delay the reinforcement of the Imperial loyalists was also going to delay the coming reinforcement of the rebellion. They knew that. But they also couldn't have a large army in the field, close to where they needed to be, because it is all but impossible to keep that kind of thing hidden. The only way to do that kind of thing was by magic or to have subverted the man to whom the reports would be going.

Which the Rebellion had done.

But they were not confident in that.

There are a few of the betrayals from the rebellion that have hurt me personally. Obviously Sam and a couple of old friends of the family. There are plenty of people who betrayed me, but I find I am not really that surprised over. Some of those betrayals are still things that I am coming to terms with. I am furious at the fact that there was a significant faction of the Church of the Eternal Flame that knew that this rebellion was coming and did nothing.

I know, I know that these were men that wanted to return to the glory days of having all the power, where people would tremble as a priest of the Eternal Flame would be walking down the streets. Where a priest of the eternal flame only had to extend a finger and then another man or woman would end up on the pyre. There are the people that hated Mark and detested the reforms that were being brought into the church at Mark's insistence. They fed the rebellion and I cannot deny that I hate them.

There is a fury there that I cannot easily comprehend and I am going to have to decide, at some point, what I want to do about that. The Hierarch promises me that…

And that's a strange sentence for me to write. Any sentence where I can write a letter to the Hierarch and have absolute confidence that it will be delivered. And that he will write me a return.

How my life has changed.

But he has promised me that he is aware of the problem and shares my dismay that I have never been anything other than a faithful son of the flame and for this, I am hated.

But one of the betrayals that hurts the most is the now-former head of Imperial Intelligence for the North. I worked with that man. I respected that man. I sat in his office and he lied to my face about what he knew regarding the night of the bonfires.

He wished me luck and offered me advice on how to have a happy marriage and he knew what was going to happen on my wedding day.

I didn't trust myself to be part of any interrogation of that man so I am relying on the transcripts of other people here. When it comes to discussing this particular period of the rebellion, he had a bit to say that might be relevant.

There are, or were, several mythical figures in the Imperial Forces that we all feared and respected. One of those was Lord Morvran Voorhis. Over the last… year really since it became clear that a rebellion was forming and I realised that my sympathies lay with the rebels I have… been terrified that I would be discovered. Voorhis looms over me like a spectre.

He has done things and made logical leaps that beggar the mind.

All the time that I have been sitting in my office, carefully filing the different reports away so that none of them would catch anyone's eye or cause anything to be reported up and above my head. It beggar's my belief that no one knew what was going on as it seems inconceivable to me. There were armed rebels and mercenaries in the docks. An untold number of people out near Coulthard Castle and even more people out in the countryside waiting to see which way someone would jump.

And no one would see that.

Our idea was that we had to mitigate the risk as much as possible and one of the ways that we did that was to minimise messages between the different cells. I was not too heavily involved with that as the less I knew the better but we were afraid that if runners and riders were going this way and that way throughout the countryside.

There were plenty of messages flying this way and that way as it was what with all of the logistical matters to do with the wedding, but there was only so much camouflaging that we could do. And those people that we would be hiding in amongst all of that would not be the kind of creative brains that could improvise excuses.

So we had to keep it quiet and so that what reports that I DID get in could easily be explained by too much activity from the wedding or just generally to do with traffic. But I was terrified of a report going direct to Voorhis in Vizima so we had to keep that quiet.

There are a lot of reasons why Lord Voorhis didn't identify what was going on. He and I have talked about many of them and it is true, that some of those reasons do not paint him in the best light. But it is also true that some of them paint him in the best light.

The reason that he didn't see the betrayal coming was because he was trusting the traitor to do their job. He was trusting that the Commander of the Intelligence service in the North to do what they had been assigned to do. As to the chain of trust and why they trusted this and not that and why he was allowed to get into such a situation in the first place… Well…

Someone else can do that analysis as I am not unbiased enough to do that. Nilfgaard conquered the North. The fact that they did that by negotiation and treaty just as much as they were doing that by the sword and axe is not important.

But what do you do when you have conquered that place? Do you install your own people in all the important positions? Or do you trust some of the people that were from the area that you have conquered to do the job for you?

I don't know the answer to that one. On the one end of the scale, that would turn you into a conquering tyrant. The other end of the scale is the route of painful naivete.

So it would suggest that the truth is somewhere in the middle. The now-former commander of Imperial Intelligence was trusted and recommended to the post by several people, including me. He had not been political, he had been military only. He was not nobly born and had no suggestion of political ambition. That kind of personal profile is the kind of thing that is vital for that kind of work. It means that you don't have to worry about personal politics interfering with the given reports.

In this case though, what we had was what Sam had once talked about. We had a soldier that had been defeated and was angry with the way that he had been defeated.

So why didn't Voorhis catch it? because he had been ordered to be nice and had trusted someone that he shouldn't have. That is why treachery is so insidious.

It also means that the next head of Imperial Intelligence is going to be a Southern Man born and bred and he will be strict and take nothing for granted. There are going to be talks of secret police, secret informers, knives in the dark and all kinds of unpleasantness over the next few years in Temeria and Redania and one of the reasons for all of that is because this man betrayed us.

I'm sorry, my anger got through a bit there.

I'm going to take a break here.

.

It has now been a few days since the Queen of Dorn left. I am still sitting here in my pavilion as I watch the workers put the walls of Coulthard Castle back together. I still feel too much like a fucking invalid for my liking, but I can feel my strength returning. The frustrations of it all are no longer about my being frustrated at not having the strength to continue with my physical training and reconditioning. It is more to do with the fact that sometimes I need to stop.

I need to stop so that I don't overstretch or overexert myself. Now my medical people are telling me that I need to stop and not go too far or over-exert myself because they are concerned that I will do myself a mischief. Or trigger a relapse which, at the moment, seems to be a fate worse than death.

So instead I sit here, my walking stick having taken the place of my spear in that I must, now, always know where it is at any given time. I watch my home being all but rebuilt and I watch the people scurrying around and think that I should be down there working with them rather than up here, answering letters, meeting with people and working on this giant series of articles and I hate myself a little bit.

I am not sure that I am going to enjoy having this much power.

I mean… I have a carriage now for Flame's sake.

I re-met the Baroness of Crow's Perch today. I like her and I hope that the two of us will be able to come to a working arrangement, Although rather disappointingly, she didn't remember me.

I was not the only suitor that tried to get her to marry me with an eye on her barony, but I told her some stories about what I had been like at the time and she admits that I will have been amongst those that she would have just dismissed out of hand as being unsuitable.

She is an interesting woman. She takes advantage of the fact that the Empress is well known to occasionally wear an arming jacket and trousers as well as carrying a sword. She keeps her hair in a shock of frizziness that leaves me wondering if she has someone that can work on it to make it look quite as frightful as it does. I wondered of her if she puts that kind of atmosphere across so that she can discourage suitors so that she can be left alone.

She said nothing although I rather thought I saw a glint of amusement in her eyes.

She also admitted that she is beleaguered. On her western border lies the Cidaris & Vergen alliance and they often raid over into Vergen for various things as well as to keep the Baronesses forces on the jump. Temerians and Northern Redanians both send raiders into her lands and act with impunity. She is pretty convinced that they do that so that they can convince her that it is all getting too much and so that if she would just marry one of them then the problems would go away. While at the same time, she still has monster problems while being unable to afford a proper Witcher, and her land is mostly swamp land.

I arranged for her to have an appointment with Emma who can make any land profitable if she puts her mind to it and then I also managed to persuade her that we needed to have a Nilfgaardian garrison situated on her lands. She balked at that but I pointed out that it was either Nilfgaardians or… someone else. The someone else would be Temerians or Redanians, which would leave her with the same problems that she had before, or it would be mercenaries. She liked none of those options.

It is also true that she needs to get married, or otherwise make provision for her lands and people should anything happen to her.

She didn't like this either.

I can understand why as she is fed up with people telling her what to be, who to worship and so on. There are always rumours of something that happened between her and her parents, but I am reluctant to take up the matter if it would make her uncomfortable.

Not until I have to of course.

But I explained to her why this level of security is important for her people as well as her lands. It had the feel of an old conversation for her as though she has heard it all before, but all I can do is put the words together in a new way and hope that this time they take hold.

I did make a joke about how I have to give the same advice to the Empress as well, which she liked. I also pointed out that her net is now a lot wider than it had been for the hunting out of a spouse. I can easily set her up with a correspondence with a young Knight from Toussaint who would be too busy wanting to right wrongs in the lands to be trying to wrest governance away from her.

She looked as though she might consider the idea but I got more of the feeling that my ideas were not interesting any more. She is specifically wanting a man of the Eternal Flame. She seems to be of more of the "burning evil doer" flavour of Eternal Flame worshipper and I wonder if that is going to be a problem between us.

She diverted me by suggesting that the two of us should be married.

I don't know what happened then but her eyes widened and she climbed down from the joke quickly, apologising profusely.

I told her that there was nothing to apologise for and we went back to trying to make some plans for the greater Pontar region. She left to go and see Emma.

I took up the thread of what happened to Samantha later while she was making me take my medicine and rubbing cream into my stumps. I struggle to get the cream into my legs properly. The arm stump is fine but the legs are still awkward.

"At the risk of sticking my head into the Griffin's mouth," Samantha began. "She made a joke about you marrying someone else?"

I nodded and she laughed at my face.

"You get this look about you when someone even drifts close to the idea," she commented. "You get all… intense."

"Do I?"

She looked at me sharply for a moment and I realised that I had snarled the question.

"Yes," she told me calmly. "You do."

I carefully put the pot of cream aside and the gnawing fear that I have felt for a while got a hold of me and I started to sob.

"What if she doesn't come back?" I wailed.

"Fuck," Samantha swore and put her arms around me.

Later, after I had calmed down and eaten and done some other chores, Samantha came and stood in front of me. She had been doing some small jobs around the immediate area rather than going down to the worksite and helping to bandage bruised sores and rub ointment into calluses.

"You know that there is a possibility that she might not come back?" She told me.

I carefully set my pen aside.

"Yes," I told her. "Yes, I know that there is a possibility. Intellectually I know that she might not come back. Yes, I know that some judging panel somewhere is deciding whether or not she should be allowed back or whether she is going to be found guilty of… whatever. Yes, I know that she might be hurt, weak or otherwise upset that I haven't found her yet or she may have found some way of harming myself.

"She might even be upset that I haven't found some way of making contact with her or she might be upset that I haven't gone to her yet.

"I also know that I am possibly the most eligible bachelor on the continent at the moment. I know that marrying a mere Baroness is somehow lower than I should expect. I know many people could try and marry me for my position and that my marriage would be a political one. There is even the possibility that I could be considered in the same breath as those people that might want to marry the Empress.

"I know all of those things, Samantha but I don't know them. I don't feel them. In here. In my heart, I don't feel them. I love her. I still love her and I want her back."

I realised that I had been yelling and had pushed myself to my feet. It was not the first time that I had realised that I was standing on my prosthetics without consciously doing so and I fell back into my chair, turning to one side as I rubbed at my eyes.

"I'm sorry," I told her. "I didn't mean to yell. I'm sorry."

I think she nodded and her voice wobbled when she spoke again.

"You have to remember that you are no longer silly Freddie Coulthard. If you lose your temper, people can die."

"Yeah," I admitted. "Yeah, I'm going to have to watch it so I don't become a tyrant."

I had meant it as a joke, but as I said the thing, I realised how true it was.

"You had better warn people to avoid the topic," I told her. "You are exempt, as is Father Anchor, Emma, Laurelen too and… Oh, I don't know. I still need some people to talk truth to me, especially on this, but that is a truth I am not ready for from just anyone."

Samantha watched me for a while before nodding.

"I will see to it," she said. "And I will send for Father Anchor."

I nodded.

"We loved her and miss her too." She added before fleeing.

And that was another day's business ruined.

For her part, Emma is now semi-permanently living in the Coulthard residence of Novigrad. Her offices there are almost as complete as the office was in the castle. From there she is untying the knot that she made with the Coulthard trading company. Apparently, it is going well but I wish that I could say the same for Emma herself.

I have not sat in on any of her meetings as it is increasingly clear that with my new position, I can no longer just sit quietly off to one side and listen. The meeting rapidly becomes about me.

Laurelen and some of the other people that have dealt with her and then come to deal with me, including the Baroness of Velen, describe an intense, expressive, expansive woman. Charming and driven, which makes me think of the woman that I think of as my sister. And it is true that whenever we meet up and are talking about trade and the doings of the company, that is who she is.

But the instant, the very moment that something else is mentioned in conversation, or if someone tries to take the topic of conversation around to a topic that is dealing with someone or something else, then she just closes off. Laurelen says that it's like a cloud covering the sun and I feel much the same way.

On those occasions where it is just the two of us, Emma and I, sitting quietly in a room, then we do little more than weep. I talk. I have talked about Ariadne and the fear about what and who I am going to become with all of this extra power. I quote the philosopher and say things like "Absolute power corrupts."

She tries to speak, she does but then nothing comes out of her mouth. She croaks, she just opens and closes her mouth before she becomes frustrated and upset. We tell her that it's ok and that her voice will come back. But more and more Laurelen and I catch ourselves wanting to exclude Emma from a conversation to not upset her or make her uncomfortable.

Which is the worst thing that we could be doing.

Kerrass still hasn't returned. I know that he's received my messages, but he will emerge from the undergrowth, and deposit his trophies, before taking on supplies and just heading back out into the wild. He has now ignored four messages and therefore requests, from me, to come and see me. Including the one sent by Sleeping Beauty.

Apparently, he took the message, read it carefully and told the messenger that he would attend upon me forthwith.

Which is messenger speak for "I've read the message now leave me alone."

I don't know what to do about that. I'm desperate to see him and talk to him but it would seem that he doesn't want to see or speak to me. Before too much longer, I am going to have to just send for him, making me even closer to being a tyrant.

I know that this will just make me another in a long line of uppitty nobles that he has encountered on the path that thinks they are entitled to a Witcher's presence.

But dammit, I rather think that I deserve better than to be treated like that.

Ok, that's enough self-pity. Time to get back to work.

So, we left the rebellion poised and ready to start their endeavour on the day of the Autumnal Equinox. There is one last thing that needs to be talked about in this period and that is regarding the now infamous "Dearest Cousin" letter.

I am well aware that historians are going to be picking over this period in our continental history for years, if not decades and centuries. Certainly long after we who lived through it are dead. It will be cited as the reason why the Empire had to tighten its grip over the North because the North showed everyone that it was not to be trusted. It will talk about the Pontar region from its source up near Loc Muinne all the way down to the sea and how vital it was to the continental political landscape for these years around it. Much is going to be debated regarding the importance of the different players and what we all got up to, the decisions we made, our motivations and why we did what we did and how important each of those decisions were.

But one of the things that is being the most debated, even as I write these words, is the role that Queen Regent Adda played in these events.

It is the kind of thing that even as I sit here writing this, I can hear the men that are assigned to guard me, gossiping over what she did, when she did it and whose side she was on really. I do not doubt that question is being asked down where the work crews are working on rebuilding the castle and amongst the military patrols that I spent hours discussing the patrol routes of with my new and shiny Imperial Adjunct.

And I do not doubt that these things are asked in the courtrooms all over the North and a significant part of the South. And just as many questions that are being asked, there are going to be just as many theories offered as to why this might have been the case, or that might have been the case.

People are saying that if the Queen had thrown her full support behind the Rebellion then maybe we would have thrown off the Imperial oppression. Whereas the opposite is also suggested, where if she had acted properly against the Rebellion then all of those lives would have been saved.

I have yet to have my first formal meeting with the Queen Regent and her council, just as I have yet to properly meet Queen Anais and the other members of her Regency Council. I am not looking forward to either event. History has taught me that any time there is a regency council, it is always too large and filled with overly ambitious men that want to use the position for their own ends rather than for the benefit of the realm or the monarch that they are seeking to serve.

For our Southern readers who might be less aware of Queen Adda's full history, I will do a quick summary although this falls far short of the actual events. For a full recounting, I can recommend the biography simply titled "Queen Adda" by Sir Franz Golzen. It is tricky to find in Redania as the Queen finds it offensive due to her opinion that the book portrays her as a weak woman that needed looking after.

She is not entirely unfair in her assessment of the work. Speaking as an academic for a moment, I wonder if the writer was more than a little bit in love with the Queen and as a result built her into the damsel of distress that, from a certain point of view, the events of her life portray her as. He has since fled to somewhere in Aedirn and we haven't heard from him since.

Queen Adda was born as the child of King Foltest's infatuation with his own sister. Although there is plenty of evidence to show that Foltest was hopelessly besotted with his sister, also called Adda, there is no real evidence to suggest that his ardour was reciprocated and records from that period are sketchy given that the young King's courtiers did their best to hush the scandal up.

Adda died in childbirth and to all intents and purposes, the child was stillborn and badly disfigured, this was due to a curse that had been enacted by a Count Ostrit who had loved Princess Adda the elder and was incensed at his perception that the King had raped her.

Foltest was insane with grief and promptly found his solace in the arms of any pretty woman that he could get his hands on. But in the meantime, he insisted that the still-born horror and the dead Princess were interred in the family crypt. The still-born child was named Adda after her mother.

Over time, the still-born Adda, due to the curse of Count Ostrit, turned into a Striga. She was returned to being a human some fourteen years after she was born by the efforts of Lord Geralt. I refer you to the works of the bard as to what happened there.

When she came to herself, she was still, essentially an infant in the body of a young girl. Her Father seems to have done well despite this. She was given access to the best tutors and soon grew into a strong-willed young woman. There are many tales of her beauty and her escapades from this period.

Lord Geralt had warned the King that the danger of the Princess Adda turning back into a Striga did exist but conspirators of the Flaming Rose saw to it that the precautions as recommended by then Witcher Geralt were set aside and the Princess started to show signs of a bestial and angry nature.

She started to be more predatory of a sexual nature and developed a taste for all but rare meat. Her ambition was fed as well until it got to the point where her own nascent rebellion against her Father, while allied with the Burning Rose faction of Jacques de Aldesbourg boiled over as the Princess returned to the form of the striga.

Again, Lord Geralt came to the rescue and lifted the curse.

Commentators argue as to her character from this period. Some say that the resurgent curse had made her predatory, rebellious and headstrong and that when the curse was lifted for a second time, she became a properly meek, obedient and doting daughter to her Father. Others say that this was always her character and she was merely presenting those virtues to keep herself safe from her Father's wrath.

But regardless, it was determined by her Father that Adda's rebellion was instigated by magical means and people didn't want to argue with him. Foltest had already entered negotiations with the young King Radovid of Redania for a marriage alliance and, as is the way with a certain kind of male, it was generally thought that a wedding would calm the girl down.

For a while, all indications were that it was a happy marriage. The ambitious nature of both members of the couple fed each other and it looked as though it was all going to work out.

Foltest realised though, that he had no heir and he had no intention of Radovid crowning himself King of Redania and Temeria and it was during his efforts to secure himself heirs, that he was assassinated and the third war against Nilfgaard began.

Why Radovid started to go mad, I don't think we will ever really know. But go mad he did. The stress of the war against the South, the less-than-ideal upbringing and the feeding of that madness by the Hierarch Hemmelfart of the Eternal Flame certainly all own some of the blame. But it was the last part of the matter that made Adda's life awful.

The thing that saved her was that she fell pregnant quickly and no matter how much the church people wanted to convince the King that she was cursed, the prompt production of an heir to the throne is seen as a blessing.

But the church got into the King's ear. As well as preaching hate of magic users which fed Radovid's own feelings on the matter, and as well as preaching the hate of the non-humans, they taught him to hate his wife.

Their public reasons were that she had been cursed and was therefore evil. The political reasons were undoubtedly the fact that Queen Adda had an understandable distrust of the Eternal Flame after everything that they had put her through and advised her husband against trusting the holy men too much. So the church wanted a Queen at the King's side that was more biddable and more of an advocate for the church.

The King, being wiser in his madness than some give him credit for, kept his heir and was aware of how much this endeared the Queen to the everyday person on the street. But there is also little doubt that Radovid became abusive towards his wife.

After the peace was signed, Radovid's heir was declared client King of Redania on behalf of the Greater Empire and finally getting the power that she craved, Adda was made the Queen Regent.

Her proponents argue that she is using her power to protect herself and her son from all of the people that have tried to disadvantage her in the pest. Detractors cite her earlier ambition and wonder if she will turn into a Striga again and just eat her young son.

So she is, and has always been, a woman under siege.

The survivors of the Rebellion are in no doubt as to whose side the Queen was on. And the problem that I have there is that their arguments are believable. The Queen has always been ambitious, that is true and she has always wanted to protect her son. That is also true. It is all too believable that she wants a free Redania that she can rule and so that later her son can rule where they don't have to run every decision that is made past an imperial overlord. It is also possible that she doesn't want the same for Temeria, the country of her birth.

I can absolutely believe that.

But I can also absolutely believe those people that argue that the Queen would never have put her name behind the rebellion. Why? Because the rebellion was led by women-hating men who believe that women should be seen and not heard. From Sam's own mouth, no sooner would the rebellion have been won than Adda would have been married off, possibly to me and she would then have turned into a baby-making automaton while the groom would then be King and rule accordingly.

And her infant son would, almost certainly, never be allowed to survive.

All of this to say that speaking as an observer that is free from the potential wrath of the Queen should she, or any of her courtiers ready this, it is more than believable to me that the Queen would have been on either side.

Which side was she on?

I have no idea.

But during this period of the Rebellion, the calm after the storm contrary to the common saying, a message was carried into the Imperial presence.

How the message made its way from, presumably, wherever Queen Adda was at the time of the rebellion which we know to have been in her castle in the heart of the capital, surrounded by her most trusted guards, into the royal palace at Vizima, we don't know.

We know that the messenger was a man and that he was of martial bearing. He was courteous and he was properly trained in matters of etiquette when it comes to the Imperial Court. He wore a sword but had no problem handing it over to the guards when required. He was instructed to give the message to the hands of The Empress but there were other surrogates that he was prepared to accept, including Duchess Anna-Henrietta of Toussaint, Lord Morvran Voorhis, the Imperial Secretary and a couple of others including Lady Yennefer, Lord Geralt and Lady Eilhart. He had no problem with the sealed message being checked for enchantments or poisons providing that the testing did not damage the paper or the seal.

Lady Eilhart served as the tester and it was the Imperial Secretary that carried the message from the messenger's hand to Lady Eilhart's prepared miniature laboratory where she performed the magical tests.

Then the letter was carried to the Empress where Lord Voorhis opened it for her as the Empress put gloves on and Lord Voorhis held the letter while the Empress read it.

The original letter is being kept under lock and key by Lord Voorhis now although I have a copy for reference and I have seen the original.

The messenger himself waited politely for the message to be read whereupon he politely asked if there was any return message.

According to the witnesses, his tones were precise, educated with an accent from somewhere in Redania with a slight hint to the accent that suggested that he had been educated in the Empire at some stage.

After the message was read, he was dismissed to wait while the Imperial council discussed what to do about the message and when the messenger was summoned back, he was no longer in the room where he had been deposited to wait.

Who was he? Well… No one can remember his face. Lady Eilhart in particular is furious about this development because it means that the face was almost certainly secured by some kind of enchantment, which she didn't spot. How did he get out?

Two theories hold water, the first is that he was a magical creature of some kind, whether human originally and therefore with access to magic, or a non-human that would go beyond the normal Human, elf, or dwarf branches of description, and could slip out through the cracks.

The second is that he was an experienced scholar of the royal palace of Vizima. Few people are going to know that place better than the Queen Regent herself or one of the servants. And therefore, he knew something that his guards didn't.

That is a question that we are not likely to know the answer to for some time yet, if ever.

The letter itself was on thick and expensive paper. The handwriting is large and flowing. It was the handwriting of a person that doesn't need to worry about how much paper they're using. Paper is expensive and even those of us with access to a lot of it write small to not waste it.

And the letter was signed by, simply, "Adda".

The letter takes its name from the opening line.

Dearest Cousin.

We write to you with the gravest of tidings.

Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to write to you or greet you personally, with news of prosperity in Redania and with the fealty, love and honour which I owe you. But alas this is not the case and instead, it is down to my pen to warn you of this grievous thing that, even as I write this and, I fear, as you read it, it is possibly too late.

We have heard rumblings over recent weeks and months regarding the flags of rebellion being raised in Redania.

At first, we did those things that we are supposed to do in these circumstances, I set trusted men to investigate the matters and passed on the reports that came to my ear to the representatives of Imperial Intelligence.

Later, as those rumours became closer and closer to the fact I made another mistake in that I expressed my concerns to those men that surrounded me in council and trusted that they acted in good faith. They told me that they had informed you of the situation and that the best thing that I could do to serve the Empire was to play stupid and let the plot ripen so that all aspects of the plot could be exposed.

Later still, men came to me and tried to extract my blessing regarding these efforts, as though my seal to this rebellion might give it some kind of shell of legitimacy. Again, I took the news to my closest advisors and the head of Imperial Intelligences to the North and still nothing has happened.

Now I am pushed to this last extreme in writing to you. The rebellion means to strike on or around the Autumn Equinox using the marriage of Lord Frederick Coulthard, our vassal and yours, to Countess Ariadne du Angral as a shield for all of their activities.

I implore you not to attend these events so that you and your fellows may be safe from this treachery and I beg that you take the proper steps to defend yourself, Redania and finally the Empire from these traitors that besiege us.

For my part, I can only hope that my message reaches you in time. I am surrounded by men in the red coats of my husband and the black coats of the Empire that were placed in my court to aid in my governance. I do not know who to trust given that it is now clear that at least some of those black coated men are involved in the plot just as much as any man in red coats. Also it is clear that my closest advisors are not MY closest advisors at all but are the advisors of my late husband who never thought I was fit to rule, and now the Rebellion.

Not to mention the problem where such men are reluctant to follow the orders of a woman.

I especially draw your attention to the head of Imperial Intelligence for the North as this matter could not have proceeded as far as I fear it has without his knowledge and dare I say, his blessing.

I hope that this letter arrives with you in time for you to be able to act as is needed and please be in no doubt as to my firmest loyalty to you.

May the Great Sun keep us in light, and the Eternal Flame keep us in warmth so that they may guide us home.

Your loving cousin

Adda.

Fascinating isn't it?

In years to come, long after my works intended to record the history of these events, I rather think that the "Dearest Cousin" letter will survive long after any of us. I think our children and our children's children will be talking about that letter. There is so much to unpack here and I even think that, at some point in the future, there will be entire volumes devoted to this letter alone. There will be a couple of chapters beforehand to establish context and then a few chapters afterwards to discuss results, but there are going to be chapters on handwriting, style, content, what the words said, what was unsaid, what was written between the words, what the intent of the letter was and so on.

I am too close to the subject to be able to answer any of those questions. I am still too angry and too disappointed by everything. I am sceptical and bitter and I cannot pretend otherwise.

At the time of writing these words I have yet to meet with the Regency Council of Redania and the Queen and I am not looking forward to it. I suspect that there are going to be powerplays. There are going to be games of dominance and superiority. So bear these things in mind when I say what I think happened here.

To my mind, the letter is the letter of a woman that was playing both sides against the middle. I think that people had talked to the Queen about the Rebellion and she was generally and distantly supportive. The Queen is more than capable of a politician to leave someone thinking one thing when she said something completely different. Then, when she knew a bit more about the conspirators and the men that she was dealing with, I think she started to be a little reluctant.

After all, given what we know about the foundation of the rebellion and its roots in the Cult of the First-Born, the Queen would not have had any power in the new regime.

So she was almost certainly waiting to see if the matter could be turned to her advantage. When it became clear that the matter might be going wrong when the storm went early or maybe there was some other telltale thing that meant that she realised… I don't know… something was wrong. She decided to hedge her bets and write to the Empress.

It is even possible that the letter was written when she first heard about the Rebellion and then kept somewhere secret and safe, so that it could be dispatched at any moment, on the receipt of a codeword in court if she realised that she was being watched and her letters were being read.

But the arrival of the letter, which was a mere couple of days before the Equinox itself is, to me, the most telling detail. Late enough to not really affect the outcome but early enough for the letter to be noted.

Also, right now, Imperial Intelligence is tearing itself apart trying to find out how the messenger knew where the Empress was to deliver the message. After all, she should have been in Coulthard Castle itself at the time and only the coming of the storm prevented that.

Onto the letter itself.

As I say, I have a copy. And when I say I have a copy, it's not the kind of copy where someone just noted down the words for me. This is the kind of copy where a trained monk was summoned and copied the words exactly. Every quill stroke of the pen was copied to the point that it's as close a facsimile to the original as I can get.

The letter itself was written quickly. The handwriting is large and flowing but that doesn't tell us much. I am reassured that the handwriting does indeed match and the paper is the same kind of paper that has since been found in Queen Adda's private study. But that paper is bought in a proper dwarven paper-making press in Tretogor so all of that is above board and believable.

The Queen herself says that she wrote it shortly before it was delivered and that she handed it to a trusted messenger. She used to use one of her maids to find a messenger and the maid was the one who found the person who actually carried the message. It was a system that the Queen had used before on other occasions.

What were those other occasions I hear you ask?

I certainly asked.

There is no concrete evidence of that. The suggestion is that she used this system to arrange trysts with lovers although that cannot be proven. It is also suggested that she used this system back when Radovid's depredations were at their most extreme and the Queen was most in fear for her life.

The maid-servant can no longer be found and there, I think, the Queen is protecting her agent. I can understand her on that regard even when I don't approve of it.

The contents of the letter are equally as fascinating. The first detail that leaps out to me is that no names are mentioned. Surely you would do so. You would mention to the Empress who it was that was rebelling and what they were rebelling for. The Queen didn't do that.

The second thing that leapt out to me as I have read this letter over and over again, is that the Queen does a lot to point out that although she knew about the Rebellion, she had taken pains to pass that knowledge on to the relevant and correct authorities. Neither she, nor we, can prove that one way or another. The head of Imperial Intelligence for the North is still being debriefed in detail on the promise of having his wife sent to a nunnery and for a quick, merciful and private beheading for himself. According to the transcripts of those conversations that I have access to, and they are certainly not finished yet, he knows nothing of this.

The Queen's counter to that is obvious. The man is an obvious traitor so why would we believe him? Especially over her who did her best to warn the Empress and blah blah blah.

The other defence is that the Queen was passing messages so it could easily be dismissed as "I told the head of Intelligence" when the truth is that the Queen passed it to a servant who passed it to the messenger who passed it to another messenger who passed it to a clerk who passed it to the head of Intelligence.

Please note that this doesn't mean that the Queen is lying. It just means that what she thinks of "I sent a message" is different from what you or I might mean when we send a message.

There are a couple more things to take from this letter.

The first is about the placement of the people around her. She talks about men in black coats and men in red coats meaning Imperial men and Redanian men respectively. She mentions that the Red coated advisors are men that obeyed her husband and with that comes the suggestion that they are not serving her, but are more supporting the words of her late husband, or what they think Radovid would have wanted from beyond the grave.

When she talks about the men in black coats she makes a point of saying that these men were "were placed in my court to aid in (her) governance". So she's also calling out those people that the Empire put with her as part of helping to govern a client nation.

In short, "this would never have happened if everyone would just leave me the hell alone and let me do what I want and need to do". If that comes across as being angry and bitter then you are probably right.

I also notice that she only talks about men and the line about following the orders of a woman. I remain certain that that phrase is there to try and associate herself with the Empress herself.

Does the Empress have the problem that the men in her life try to rule her rather than the other way around? Of course, she does so that is what I think that line was for and is, for me, the clumsiest line in the letter.

So that is the "Dearest Cousin" letter and if you hear other people talking about it, that is what they are talking about.

So yes, The Empress was warned a couple of days in advance as to what was happening. So why didn't anything happen?

Believe me, I asked that question myself and the answer is, unfortunately, all too believable.

She couldn't.

The letter arrived shortly after she would have returned from Ariadne's hen do. Something happened at the castle at that point which meant that large-scale action was impossible. So the only thing that The Empress could do was to teleport in herself and start shouting at people.

According to witnesses, Lord Voorhis and a couple of other people risked their heads by all but sitting on the Empress to prevent her from doing precisely that.

Remember that the letter said absolutely nothing about the names of the people involved. All it says is that my wedding was going to be some kind of smoke screen and distraction. So it might even have been that nothing was going to happen at Coulthard Castle itself.

Or, it was the residents of Coulthard Castle itself that were at the root of the Rebellion. The Court could not know that one way or the other.

So for all they knew, Ciri could have turned up and started shouting only for someone to shoot her in the back. It would have been difficult given the Empress' abilities but she can only do that trick so much before she gets tired and she has the same peripheral vision as everyone else.

Also, bear in mind that she can only transport one person, herself. She claims to be working on getting more than one person through, but that this is more difficult and in this instance, would not be useful.

So… why did she not do something else. Why didn't she order a half dozen Imperial Mages to open gates and have the Imperial Guard march through?

Leaving aside the problem that the Guard would still have to properly martial and arrange themselves, before dropping themselves into a situation that they knew nothing about which is the worst thing you can do on a military scale, it turns out that Coulthard castle was defended.

The Rebellion was quite aware that this was a risk and so they took steps. As far as they knew, Ariadne was working for them and in this case, it would seem that there was no wiggle room in what they had told her.

Coulthard castle has long had an enchantment over it to prevent enemy assault. It is true that to protect yourself from magic, you must use magic. When Father took over the ownership of what is now Coulthard castle, he hired a mage to defend it from everything that his paranoid mind could concoct. So there was a shield that protected unknown teleportations in and out. This shield extends for a good distance around the castle and certainly, the large gates that would transport armed forces would go catastrophically awry. To get in and out, a mage must attune themselves to the protective spells.

Apparently, this is called a teleport ward and is considered an elementary way of protecting yourself from industrial-grade espionage and sabotage.

What Ariadne did was to adjust this shield to prevent people from spying in as well as teleporting in. Laurelen had worked on the… I understand that the term is "wards" for an extended time after she was outed and then, while she was in and around the area, Ariadne adjust these same words so that when the time came, she would be in sole control over those wards. Anyone scrying in would suffer consequences and anyone trying to teleport or gate into the surrounding area would end up coming through a mile above, or below, ground.

What the Empress did do was order scouts out. She sent messengers to those armed forces in the field to try and ascertain who was loyal and who wasn't while also ordering the mobilisation of the forces that were there in Temeria itself, including a large number of Temerians.

But this is where the rain had done its job. That mobilisation took longer than was intended. Far longer than was intended. I understand that things are being worked on now to circumvent these problems in the future, but that is no consolation to me, or to the people that lost their lives or…Worse…As part of the rebellion.

So that takes us up to the day of the Rebellion itself. I hope it was interesting reading and I hope you join me soon for the day of the Equinox itself.

Something has happened and I want to have it recorded as it's the kind of thing that people might try and use against me in the future.

Firstly, for those people that want to hear about the reunion that I had with Carys, Chireadean and Padraig then I was planning on that to go with the chapter that talks about what actually happened on the day of the Equinox which you will hopefully be reading before too much time has elapsed. Safe to say that we were reunited, they did survive although the reunion was bittersweet given everything that has happened to all of us.

But that is relevant because, on the day that the event occurred that I am about to describe, Carys was with me. She is now the leader of my personal guard. Not by any real virtue although she has been, and will be, outstanding at the job.

But because a couple of officers from both sides of the divide, Northern and Southern, tried to tell her that it was inappropriate for, essentially, an Elven bandit, murderer and assassin to be guarding so prominent a Northern Noble.

They cited things like her flagrant disrespect for me and the people around me and things might have been unpleasant before her husband, who WILL become the new Knight Captain of my home forces whether he wants it or not, told the offending knights in his broad Skelligan accent that they can try to stop her, but to make sure that their funerals are paid for in advance.

So the message came to me on a sunny Spring afternoon.

Since my incarceration in the dungeons of Coulthard castle, the Cathedral complex on temple island in Novigrad and then later in the Rosemary and Thyme, I have a preference for being outdoors. I currently live in a pavilion that is set up on a small rise near what was and will be again, Coulthard Castle. When the weather draws in, the side flaps of the pavilion are dropped down other than by the entrance and I sit and look out over the wind and rain-swept countryside.

When the weather is nicer I will either stay there and all the flaps are lifted so that I enjoy the sunshine. But even then, sometimes having even that small covering is too much and I will stagger outsides to sit out beneath the sky where I stay until someone or another chases me back inside for the good of my health.

On particularly good days I can work and receive people like this and on those days, I have developed a habit of sitting with my nearest friends where we sit, talk, debate, argue, play cards or dice, reminisce, make each other laugh, eat, drink and generally be merry. Sir Hugh, my oldest friend, now knighted much to his wife's delight, has made jokes about this being the beginnings of what will become known as my "court". I threatened to have Carys slit his throat for me.

And it was on one of those warm spring afternoons that all of this occurred. It had been a good day. The business that I had, was taken care of. People were waiting to see me but then again there are always people waiting to see me. Generally, I'm finding that it's the kind of thing where people think that they will get further if they come straight to the top to see me when matters would be far more efficient if they had gone somewhere else first. They seem to think that coming to see me will cut through a lot of bureaucracy when they misunderstand that the bureaucracy is there for a reason and cannot be circumvented.

So I had done my work, written my letters and listened to some of my advisors when it came to a decision that was going to come up regarding the amount of trade that was going to be divided between the Novigrad docks and the Oxenfurt docks. One of those decisions for which I am vastly unsuited but only I can seem to have the authority to make.

I had exercised and was beginning to feel a lot better about my overall physical health so I had taken the chance and banished the scribes and the hangers-on and told them that my work was done for the day. I intended to sit out on the grass and under the blue sky. I wanted to listen to my friends laugh and the birds sing and just for a moment I would be able to set aside the worries that plague me.

I am rarely alone in these kinds of situations.

Sir Guillaume and Sir Gregoire were both there. Knight Commander Syanna had returned to Toussaint now that things were calming down, but had left Lady Vivienne here to represent Toussaint interests in the… I have to get this bit right… "fluid nature of events in the north" and so where Lady Vivienne goes then so too goes her husband. Where Sir Guillaume goes then Gregoire is bound to follow and he had brought his wife with him, both in her official capacity and as some friendly company for me. When she was around she joined the legion of people that were worried about my health and wellbeing which is always lovely if sometimes stifling.

Carys was there of course and she was whittling something with an intense frown on her face. Her, sword, knives, bow and a quiver of arrows were next to her and periodically she would look up and examine the surrounding area to see if there was anything that needed murdering in the near vicinity before she returned to her work.

Sir Hugh was there and his wife would be joining us later. The pair of them, husband and wife, have become invaluable advisors to me. Not least because they remember me as a snot-nosed, desperately lonely little boy that they shepherded through the process of becoming a man. They have seen me at my best and at my worst and they can cut me down to the quick whenever they feel that I am being pompous. Also, their professional qualifications are invaluable too, but the first thing was the most important.

Also present were Lady Yennefer who is in the North so that she can, "sit on the Empress when she needs sitting on".

The Skelligans were often there in ones or twos. Helfdan was still governing Novigrad although we had hopes that we would be able to hand that over to the proper mayoral office soon once we were sure that we had candidates that would be loyal to me and through me to the Empress rather than slaves to the Merchants, Redania, Temeria, the church or the rebellion in no particular order. They also had to be remotely competent and finding someone that fits into all of those boxes was being harder than I thought it could ever be.

On that afternoon, Thorvald, Sigurd, Sigurd's wife and Kar were there. Helfdan wanted Svein near him as he was feeling "fragile" which is Helfdan speech for either warning everyone that he might have to kill someone soon or that he is beginning to feel overwhelmed. Father Anchor was there although Tulip and Samantha were otherwise engaged in the work site. The young priest was mostly enjoying a nap in the sunshine.

We were just talking about something, possibly enjoying teasing Sigurd for how in love with his wife he was while he protested that he was not alone in that particular vice.

I remember leaning back in my chair and resting my hand behind my head. The prosthetic still works for this process. I was warm and happy and the air was clear in my lungs. I have to enjoy these moments when I find them as so much of my brain is still trapped in the dungeon or in Sam's study.

I am having the study redesigned by the way.

I was just letting things wash over me, listening to people laugh and enjoy each other's company and enjoy the small social rules that develop in groups such as this.

Such as to never, ever tease Lady Yennefer about her wardrobe choices.

I was in the middle of enjoying this good stretch when I was startled by someone calling me.

"Your Grace?"

I opened my eyes and examined the offensive oaf that had disturbed my doze and realised that I was being unfair. He was an Imperial Messenger and had been escorted to my little hilltop by a pair of guards. He looked tired, sweat plastering his hair to his skull.

I sighed and decided that my rest was interrupted. I climbed to what I am getting used to calling my feet and picked up my cane. I need it less and less now, but it's in those moments where I am overconfident that I need it the most. Full mobility is still a long way off though.

I waited for Carys to take the leather scroll case off him before she examined the insides and brought it over to me.

"Thank you." I told the messenger. I always try to be polite to the messengers as it is never their fault. "Whatever you have to do next can wait until you have had something to drink and something to eat. After that, I am sure there are some more messages somewhere for you to carry."

I nodded to the guards who took the grateful young man off somewhere for a bowl of stew, a hunk of bread and a cup of wine. Then, if I am any judge, he will spend some time at the jacks before climbing back on his horse with a fresh bundle of papers.

If there is one thing that being a Duke does now, it is creating paperwork.

I opened the scroll case and took out the papers inside. It was not a small bundle as I sat down and began to read.

Yennefer broke first.

"What is it?" She asked innocently.

"Can't be anything important." Hugh put in, he is becoming increasingly comfortable around the people that I associate with. "The messenger was sweaty but not panicked."

"Probably another invitation to a ball." Gregoire rumbled.

That is code for an invitation for me to meet an eligible young lady. It is now well-known how I feel about people suggesting that I begin looking at other candidates for a spouse.

"It is the judgement regarding Ariadne," I told them.

All lightness left the area as I read.

The top parchment was a summary that I passed to Yennefer who began reading while pretending that she was not as interested as she is.

"She's been found innocent," she declared. "A closer judgement than some but not as close as others."

"Closer than mine," I commented. I wanted to pace while I read but experience has taught me that I am not up to that just yet. "And to my reading, there is a lot more politics in these choices.

The papers started to head around in a chain. From Yennefer to Hugh and onto Guillaume. Gregoired read over Guillaume's shoulder while the Skelligans couldn't give a fuck. I think Father Anchor was watching me carefully.

"The main dispute," Yennefer commented. "Seems to be just how much control she had over her actions and the language involved. Some people want to call her a slave but others are arguing that even slaves can choose to disobey."

"They would not survive or they would be punished if that were the case." Carys spat, reminding everyone of her past history.

"Yes, but they can still choose," Yennefer told her. "Or that's the legal argument anyway."

She ignored Cary's bristling at that suggestion. For those who have forgotten, Carys was once, essentially, a sex slave. There was legal wording preventing prosecution but her status as a non-human meant that her rights were not as protected as they should have been. She escaped by murdering her keepers and joined us when we were fleeing from the Cult of the First-Born. She was pardoned for her "crimes" when Emma and Mark got her back to Coulthard lands and had her sign up to the guard.

"That's flawed." Hugh opined. "From everything I have heard, she was more like a sword or a dagger being wielded. She literally could not choose to do nothing. Not even to end her own life which is… Sorry, Carys… The last refuge of the slave."

"Which seems to have been the argument of those judges that are on her side," Yennefer told everyone. "The other problem that keeps coming up is that she is both a "monster" of the old school and a mage."

"What?" Thorvald wondered curiously.

"Legally in Novigrad," Hugh began, "There is human, non-human which means Elf, dwarf, halfling and Gnome. Then there is everything else which counts as "monster". Even sentient and reasoning beings are, legally, monsters in Novigrad."

He sniffed. Hugh would not be cross with me if I described him as being a little bit racist. He is the kind of racist that regularly checks his behaviour to make sure that he is not being racist. So he sometimes checks to see if what he says is being racist to people like Carys who will then tell him that she didn't think he was being racist until he pointed it out.

To be clear, I am often that kind of racist. So are many people of my acquaintance. It's a step up but there is still a long way to go.

"She's also a mage." Yennefer sneered. "The judge from the Eternal Fire in particular sounds like he was having a stroke in deciding how he was supposed to vote. On the one hand, she's a monster magic user. But on the other hand, she is baptised and confirmed in the worship of the flame. By a bishop and a cardinal, no less."

"A cardinal that is about to become a saint in your foolish religion." Thorvald, a follower of Hemdall laughed.

"There's a lot more politics here." Guillaume was ordering the notes. "Nilfgaard's judge voted to execute her because, and I quote, there are no such thing as vampires and this pretence of control is just an excuse."

Everyone snorted.

"There's also something here that I noticed," Hugh said, gesturing to Guillaume. "Pass me that page from… I think it was the Melitele judge?"

Guillaume did so.

"Yeah, here it is. Quote 'Although I agree that the lady in question was innocent of these charges and I will remain disappointed if she is found guilty, I am concerned about the legal precedent that this will set. If we defend this woman because she was… we need a better word than enslaved for circumstances like this one. We run the risk of that becoming a legal defence in the future. Any person that is caught will argue before the judges that they were magically, or monstrously controlled to commit the crimes of which they are guilty. There will need to be some way to govern that, as to my eyes, it will be used as a defence often and then, once again, any passing and innocent mage, Sorceress, Priest, priestess, non-human or "monster" will be blamed as they must have been the one controlling the criminal.' End quote."

"Not an invalid fear." Gregoire rumbled.

"Phil's response is very typical of her, I wonder how she keeps managing to get assigned to these cases," Yennefer smirked. "Ahem, 'the answer to the concern of using a defence as to whether or not the accused was controlled by magic is simple. A short consultation by a mage, properly licenced, of course, would be able to answer the question as to whether or not the accused was controlled or whether they acted of their own volition. The simplest solution is often the best and moving forward, that is the case."

Yennefer's impression of Lady Eilhart is uncanny.

"That would just take us back to, can we trust magical testimony in court? though," Hugh argued, as I guessed he would. "How trustworthy is the mage and would they be biased on a case-by-case basis? How available would "properly licensed mages be?"

"Or how expensive?" Guillaume commented.

The conversation died down for a moment.

"So…" Guillaume finished up. "Mage representative voted Innocent along with Melitele, Eternal Flame, Skellige and… Kreve of all people. Redania, Nilfgaard, Great Sun voted Guilty. Overall, found Innocent. There will be a follow-up order confirming her in all her titles and… blah blah blah."

He shuffled the papers back together and put them in their proper order before sliding them back into the diplomatic tube. He looked to give them to me but I had wandered off a little bit. My feelings were complicated, relief certainly but now I had a hunger to see the woman that I loved that was threatening to overtake me.

"So she's innocent." Hugh sighed, seemingly relieved. "Now all we have to do is find her."

"Easier said than done." Yennefer gave an answering sigh. "She doesn't want to be found. I've tried and once upon a time, I was one of the foremost mage trackers on the continent. Ariadne is no Necromancer which was my speciality but the principle was the same. Ida and Enid report no luck either."

"What about whosername?" Gregoire rumbled. "The dragon."

"Maleficent is looking," Yennefer said. "But she is, as you say, a dragon. Flighty is not the word for it. She keeps being distracted by the latest proverbial shiny object. A pretty young man to ravish or be ravished by. A new magical project that has just occurred to her. And as for more terrestrial tracking?"

Everyone kind of moaned in dismay.

"Sorry," Hugh began. "I know I have the least experience in these matters, but why can't the Imperial forces track her?"

"She can turn into a swarm of spiders," Thorvald told him.

"Or a cloud of smoke," Guillaume added.

"Or she can simply teleport." Yennefer finished.

"Oh." Hugh looked at me with a newfound respect.

The silence stretched. After a long moment, I forced myself to return to the group and lowered myself back into my chair. Father Anchor poured me a drink and handed it to me. I pretended not to notice how strong he had made it.

"Sorry Freddie," he whispered.

I nodded my thanks.

"I may…" Carys blew some of the sawdust from whatever it was that she was carving and took a cloth to brush it away. "Be being particularly stupid. But why not send Kerrass to hunt her? After 'is Grace here, who else knows her best? Why is Kerrass not out there combing the countryside for her?"

"Is that what he's doing out there already?" Gregoire's face was absurdly hopeful and others started to pick up the fantasy of Kerrass finding her and bringing her back to me.

The romance of the image was certainly attractive but I knew that it was false.

"Kerrass is not helping me," I told them. My voice sounded harsh and cut across everyone's speech as they all turned to look at me.

The moment lengthened.

"Why not?" Kar wondered, speaking carefully in the same tones that he uses when he's edging around a fragile Helfdan.

"I have not heard from Kerrass since the night in the basement where Sam died." I told them all. "He is out there at the moment, vanishing into the wilderness and occasionally surfacing to collect bounties on the necrophages and carrion eaters that the battles have attracted."

I wasn't looking at anyone, staring into my lap as I spoke.

"I have sent messages to him to ask him to come back. To come and see me so that we can talk and so that I can have his help and he has ignored every message. I've begged him even as I miss him almost as much as I miss Ariadne," I shook my head. "I even know that he ignored the letter that the Queen of Dorn sent." I shook my head again, this time with a bit more force and determination so that I could banish the tears that threatened me.

"Other than the return of a happy and healthy Ariadne there is nothing I want more than my friend at my side. But Kerrass is dealing with his own stuff at the moment. Sleeping Beauty thinks that he is dealing with guilt and I think I agree with her. He will not help me."

I looked up and no one was meeting my gaze or each other's gaze. Some stared into drinks that had been passed around while others stared off into the distance.

The moment lengthened again.

After a long moment, I realised what was happening.

"What?" I demanded. "What is it? The last time I ignored everyone else's opinions the man turned into a traitor that nearly brought the North to its knees. What?"

Still, no-one would meet my gaze.

After a long moment, Guillaume set his cup aside.

"I will say it," he declared as he rose to his feet, armour clanking.

"Lord Frederick," he began formally. "It is my honour, and my privilege to call you my friend and sometimes it is the duty of a friend to say the uncomfortable truth, even while knowing that it would hurt our friend more than we would wish it to. I am sorry for that but I feel that this must be said."

"Spit it out," Someone muttered. I suspected Carys.

"That," Guillaume gestured, "... What you describe is not the action of a friend. Let alone a swordbrother such as yourself. If a friend needed me then even if armies of monsters stood in my way, I would be at that friend's side through their hardest days and it would be my honour to fetch them a drink and help them to the Jacks, let alone rescue or find their loved one while they are unable."

I was astonished when I looked into his face and saw how outraged he was. He took a moment to breathe and master himself.

"I am sorry if I have overstepped," he said and he returned to his seat. "If you wish me to leave then…"

"Stop with your martyrdom," Yennefer teased the big man before she turned to me. "I'm sorry Freddie. Geralt tells me that Kerrass is as good a Witcher as ever came out of the Feline school. But Guillaume is right in this."

"He does rather seem to run away from you when you need him the most," Hugh added his voice to the matter.

"The thing after the Goddess?" Gregoire muttered.

"Is the best example of it, yes." Hugh agreed, "but it is far from the only instance. I would not have left a friend with the Kingslayer for instance."

"And if I knew about…"

That was enough for me. I groaned a little and shrugged.

"So what do I do?" I begged of them. "I can summon him, send troops to drag him here. But that would make me little more than every asshole that thinks that they are entitled to the Witcher's service. I don't want to be that man. I have sat next to campfires with Kerrass while we bitch and moan about nobles like that."

"Not any Witcher though." Father Anchor said. "This Witcher. If it was Lord Geralt or any of the others then yes, I would agree, if you ordered his attendance or dragged him here, you would become the tyrant that you fear becoming. But in this case. I rather think he owes you an explanation for his behaviour, even if he won't help you. And I agree that he has not treated you well here. He promised you that he would return to that basement. So where is he?"

"He does owe you that much." Yennefer agreed. "At least that much."

I looked around. Now they were all meeting my gaze in agreement.

I looked at Carys who was watching me carefully.

I nodded to her.

"Do it," I ordered more formally. "Send men and bring me Kerrass."