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

178. Chapter 178

I am reluctant.

The last issue and therefore the first series of writing on "The Kalayn Rebellion" is now in the hands of you, the reading public as I write this. Writing that was a deceptive process, the words flowed from my pen with an ease that was truly off-putting. There was certainly a bit of a criticism of it that I wrote too quickly which meant that there were more errors and more problems with it than I would normally be happy with. But it came out of my pen easily. The editing and proofreading process was, likewise, much easier than it would be normally and as a result, it got into your hands that much the smoother.

That is, so far, not the case with those events that come next. Writing is always hard. Sometimes it is easier, sometimes it is more difficult, but it is always hard. Sometimes people ask me questions about which part is the most difficult and the answer is always the same. Starting. Starting is the most difficult. Not the moment where you are staring at the blank piece of paper at the beginning of a new article, book, lecture or whatever. But the physical act of starting to write every day.

Reading what you had written previously to make sure that you are in the same place, possibly consulting some notes to ensure that the thought process flows as it should and then there is always the moment where you have to dip your quill into the ink and start transferring that ink onto the parchment.

That is always the hardest part. I have always done whatever I have had to do to get to that point and believe it or not, like with this little preamble, that is where a lot of my tangents come from. Just trying to find a way to get my head and my hands onto the same page to talk about the things that I need to talk about.

It would be an interesting study for someone, some… historical analyst, to go through all of my work, including the academic stuff, and see if they can spot those times when I am going off on a properly illustrative tangent versus just getting myself into the proper mood to be writing.

It's easier now. I have a new clerk. His name is Walther which possibly conjures the image of some kind of crotchety old man, set in his ways and amusingly grumpy. But you would be wrong. He is a young lad, maybe twelve and has those qualities that I always admire in a clerk and a historian. He is quick, clever and unimaginative. He sees what is there to be seen, not what other people want him to see and that is a vital skill for someone who is transcribing someone else's work.

The addition of this young man to what I am still jokingly referring to as "my staff" has freed up a lot of time. I no longer have to write these things out long hand and can, instead, write out in the long lines, hoops and dots that I used to use back when I was making notes about Kerrass' journey.

Flame but I miss Johann and I hope that I do not take out my misery on this new young man that shares my workspace.

The need for a man like Walther is becoming apparent though. It is fitting that I start to write about the first day of the rebellion at this point in my life because it is a time of "firsts".

That should also give you some idea of why I am so reluctant to actually start. The day the rebellion formally started was supposed to be my wedding day. If I close my eyes, I can still see Ariadne in the blue dress that she was wearing. I can still feel her hand in mine and if I close my eyes, I can still smell the scent of the shampoo in her hair.

In previous times that the two of us have been apart, there has eventually come a time where she starts to fade from my memory and I struggle to picture her face or the sound of her voice.

Not this time and not that instance.

If that is the only memory that I will have of her going forward then I am working on that being a good one. The two of us, walking under the trees and amongst the bushes of my mother's old rose garden. Not a patch on Ariadne's rose garden or her herb garden but still an impressive place nonetheless. I will work on ignoring the fact that she was almost certainly trying to tell me what was going on but was unable to due to some unseen magical force and I will work on forgetting the fact that after we had parted in that late afternoon sunshine. It was not going to be long before she walked out into the main hall of Coulthard Castle, snapped the neck of my closest friend and was party to the first, open declaration of rebellion against the Empire that the North has seen.

Dammit.

I work at that, every day.

But I am not there yet.

So that is why I do not want to return to those days. The days immediately beforehand are easier as are, I find, the days immediately afterwards. But that first day of rebellion. It is almost impossible for me to think about it.

So now I am procrastinating. Not for the first time today, I have checked around to see if there is anything else for me to do. It is raining which means that general activity has been reduced. The workers are done at my insistence. I will not have people making themselves sick to rebuild that which was lost. A piece of advice that Samantha glared at me about until I realised that she was pointing out just how much it applied to me.

The rain also means that the number of visitors that are waiting to see me has been reduced. It is another reason why I do not chafe at the fact that the castle is taking so long to rebuild. Indeed, I am actively encouraging the workers and the architects to work on the fortifications first. It seems that there is nowhere for anyone to stay that is closer than Oxenfurt.

This is, in fact, untrue. There are plenty of places for travelling nobles, priests and merchants to stay in the surrounding area but that would mean that they would have to either camp somewhere…

"At this time of year? Good gracious sir no, that is quite impossible"

…Or they would need to stay in one of the working inns and taverns that litter this part of the countryside.

"Outrageous, sleep in the common room on the straw, with the muck, the mice, the dogs and the… common workers. Flame preserve me."

So there is even more reason for the delay in building proper guest quarters. I always find these kinds of meetings kind of amusing because I look out at the weather and think that when I was on the road, I would have considered this a rather pleasant kind of downpour. Something to wash the dust and the mustiness from my hair and clothes. It brings a nice… fresh smell out of the world. And there have been times that I have been glad for a place on the straw amongst the dogs.

Dogs are warm and are always grateful for some attentive humans to snuggle against. The mice can be a problem so always look for an inn with a cat strutting around.

It also means that the inns, taverns and Bordellos of Oxenfurt are singing my praises. Because instead of staying in any kind of presumed guest quarters that hospitality would normally insist I provide, instead the nobles are staying in Oxenfurt and because they are staying in Oxenfurt, they are making use of the facilities and amenities provided.

I have even been approached by one enterprising landlord who asked if he could rename his inn "The Duke's Head".

I wondered if he could remember tossing me out on my ear when I had been a student. He looked confused so I told him that he could call his inn "The Duke's arms" and put a spear, an axe and a sword under the coat of arms above the door. But calling it "The Duke's Head" rather suggested that at some point, my head will be removed from my shoulders and I didn't want to tempt fate.

That went over his head as well.

But according to my secretary, I have many letters wishing me well and offering me a free pint when I want to come and visit.

Not a free meal I noticed. Or the free use of a courtesan from the bordello who merely offered the thanks of her ladies.

And yes, I have a secretary now. I wanted a non-human one and the one I got was not what I was expecting. I was expecting an Elf or maybe a Dwarf. I actually quite like the thought of a Dwarven Secretary. A fully armoured dwarf who produced a battle-axe whenever someone got uppity.

Or a troll.

Heh.

I'm imagining a troll secretary, carefully consulting my calendar before threatening to squish someone she doesn't like.

What I got was a Yukki-Onna. She terrifies me and I'm the one she works for. She dresses in the demure, floral robed style of her people with her hair immaculately done up in a style that I remain certain, and Samantha agrees, could be attained by no human hair, and her face is pure white. Her lips are a pale blue and the irises of her eyes are black.

Thrust through the sash at her waist are the twin sticks that I know to house the peculiar bent swords of her people, one long and the other shorter… about the same size as a good short sword used in a shield wall. She has a prodigious memory for everything I say or everything I have done and she can pluck facts out of the air that always seem strange but are always relevant to what I need at the time.

And when someone tries to browbeat her into letting them past her to see me, she just stares at them. Unblinking and unmoving. She is like a statue and eventually, the offending idiot starts to lose their nerve. At this time she nods and returns to whatever it was she was doing beforehand.

She was provided by Sigurd's wife. The Yukki-Onna are trying to make more of an entrance into Continental society and this was one of the ways that they decided to do that. Apparently, another one is now working with the Empress' personal secretary.

Her name is Ameiko. I would tell you how to say it but it amuses me to watch people trying to figure it out.

I like her and my life is made only slightly more complicated given that she has joined the alliance of Tulip, Samantha and Carys in that they have all decided that I couldn't find my arse even if I had both hands and a map. Therefore I need looking after.

So I have a non-human secretary which is what I wanted. I wanted someone who could not be accused of having human-level politics and I have more than got that.

Anyway. I find that that's enough procrastinating.

So, where were we… The rebellion was in the field. They had forces in and around Coulthard lands, secreted in the docks in Novigrad and then dotted around the countryside. They themselves admit that the weak link in their plan was the countryside forces because the storm was going to have been just as much of a hindrance to them as it would have been to their enemies.

The plan was that on the day of the Autumnal Equinox, the forces in Novigrad would come out of their various warehouses to take the docks as a first priority before then moving onto securing the rest of the city with the aid of plenty of presumed patriots that were going to be provided by elements from the church of the Eternal Flame. Lots of old Witch-hunters and churchmen who wanted to return to the height of the power of the church. They would also be supported by the intelligence from the head of Imperial Intelligence that they had suborned.

The forces around Coulthard castle had already spent quite a while fortifying their position under the guise of "helping with preparations and security for the wedding" and all that they needed to do was secure the castle, which was all but open to them, and then move into position in the surrounding area.

They had every confidence that this was going to be the easiest part of day one.

Other than that, the forces in the field would come together at a central point and then move as required. They were the contingency force. We still have plenty of different witnesses from that force, the highest ranking that is willing to talk to me still being Sir Aleksy. But there is confusion as to what they were for. Sir Aleksy has changed his mind between two options, the first being that they would march South and secure all of the various river crossings across the Pontar. The other was to march North and meet the expected reinforcement from the Redanian heartland.

Time has passed since my first set of knowledge about that and it now seems certain that they were intended as the contingency force.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy so what that force was there for was to be versatile and reactionary. There was also some confusion as to the chain of command there as well which many of them didn't like.

On the day itself, things began for me in the evening when Sam marched into the feasting hall and declared that the Rebellion had begun.

The Rebellion itself actually began in the Early morning. The soldiers in the countryside put their armour on and started to move into position. They were careful and stealthy because they were still lots of little forces and as such, could be easily picked off if the proper authorities could see what was happening in advance.

They didn't but the paranoia was still there.

But no one saw that and there is no definite time of commencement to be declared there. We know that they started that process in the morning but beyond that, things get vague.

The real thing started at the tenth bell in Novigrad.

I have the following from a guardsman on one of the Southern Gates out of Novigrad. Again, I am being obscure to preserve the man's identity in case of reprisals.

Just quickly some… heh… context. The way that the city gates work in Novigrad.

Each gate is commanded by a Knight or officer. The two are not mutually exclusive. Under him are four to six Watch commanders depending on the size of the gate, the type of traffic that goes through and the shift size. Smaller, less busy gates have four, six-hour shifts a day but the busier gates divide it into six four-hour shifts a day. These Watches then have several men each. These men are highly trained and highly skilled and although they are almost universally hated, they are vital to the running of Novigrad. It is their job to stand in the way of wagons, noble coaches and riders and search them for contraband. If a criminal is on the run, these men have to demand people lower their hoods so that faces can be examined and compared to sketches of the fugitives and in doing so, they risk a knife in the ribs.

Never has a group of armed men been more subject to the fabled "Don't you know who I am," than the men at the Novigrad city gates.

No, I don't like them either. But I am also aware of just how important a job they do. Think about it, when some garrison commander declares "Close the gates" then it's these men that have to do that. They have to stand in front of the important, powerful and armed men that want to get out. And also in front of the important, powerful and armed men that want to get in.

They also need to know when to get out of the way and when to stand firm. They need to know how to properly search a wagon, a horse, a cart, a barrow and everything else in between. They also need to know how to read a person. Who is looking nervous, and who is looking confident? Who is trying to hide their face? Who is looking sick or who has their hands on weapons at any given time? They need a good memory and analytical minds.

And it is vital to know the difference between something that they themselves can deal with, and when it would be better to send for the Sergeant or the Watch Commander.

Many of these men indeed make themselves rich off bribes to let these people through, or to ignore that bag that's hanging inside the cart that is full of "personal possessions" and it is also true that the job needs a certain criminal mindset.

But it is just as true that there are often just good men doing an unpleasant job because it needs doing, they want to serve and their mind has a tendency towards that kind of work.

I like to think that the man that I spoke to was one such. As a note, I have done my best to translate some of the slang here. I ran it past him later and he looked really confused and told me "Well that's what I said isn't it? Fucking nobles and their fucking…"

You're one of those Coulthard Fuckers aren't ya.

Yeah, I thought you were. Fucking merchants. Don't get me wrong, your lot are better than most. Not perfect mind you. You tend to give gifts of apples and small things to eat when it would be much better to make gifts of coin to the widows and orphans fund if you follow.

No not a fucking bribe.

The way it goes is this. You do the job. You check the bags, getting your samples from the bottom and checking underneath the wagon.

With. Your. Eyes. Never just having a feel.

You search the people, look in all the pouches and things. Get them to sign the declaration and then you give the gift, don't you? Your lot are a little fucking tight. That's all. Fucking apple. What am I supposed to do with a fucking apple?

Yes, I know that you're supposed to fucking eat it.

Prick.

Here's the thing though. The giving of a gift means that you get it. You understand what the job is. It's fucking hard. I mean, yes, there is the very real probability that I'm gonna be fucking rich by the time I give it all up, or some fleeing criminal knives me in the guts but…

What, you surprised by the big words? You've gotta be educated to be a gate guard. I would have thought you knew that, an upstanding gentleman like yourself.

You've gotta know what you're talking about. You've gotta know the exchange rates between florins, crowns and marks. Just off the top of your head. You've gotta know what all the shit is that people are bringing in. That powder that someone is transporting in a bag. Is it yellow because it's a spice or is it yellow because someone has dyed fucking flour and is trying to swindle people?

Are these things overripe and about to go rotten?

You've gotta spot things and sometimes, just sometimes, uptight noble assholes like you lot turn up and start trying to browbeat you into doing what the fuck that they want. They try to bribe you with money, with drugs, with women…

Fuck… I was once offered access to a nobleman's daughter.

Fucker must have thought I was stupid. We weren't gonna fuck in the middle of the street and if I let them through then turned up at the house later I would have been whipped.

You've gotta be educated and the primary thing that you've gotta be fucking educated in is the city itself. You've gotta watch the people that are passing by. Not just the wagons or the wagon teams. Not the people walking. Not the pilgrims or the mercenaries. I mean the people on the street. How fast are they moving? Why does that guy have his hood up? It's a clear day so why does he need a hood? Why not a hat?

How rich are that guy's clothes? How well cared for is that woman's hair or her skin? How clean are the teeth? It all creates a picture.

It's also true that a good percentage of what we do is that we watch. There's a reason why we're fucking called Watchmen after all.

I don't know how they do it on other gates but we tend to have a team that searches the wagons and things that come through the gates. I mean, it's mostly for the feel of the thing. You have a set of wagons moving in front of you, you soon get the instinct for when a wagon is trying to hide something and when it's on the level. You tend to know it and THEN you see the things. I don't know, it's hard to train. I can look at a group of wagons and tell you which one belongs to a smuggler. And then when I train the new kids you have to show them the things that you have to see when you're being a guard.

But the other thing you do is you watch. Just watching. Fuckers like you and that de Radford prick. They see a Watchman sitting on a stool watching the people going by and assume that we are being lazy. And if we were a soldier or something you'd be right. But a proper guard. A REAL, honest to the flame, real fucking guard. He is fucking watching, isn't he.

Fucking soldiers. Gives us guards a bad name. Generally, the ratio should be two watchers to one searcher and the searchers tend to be the greener recruits. They're learning the ropes, learning where to look, how to look and what to look for. Because it might not be this fucker that you're searching that's smuggling something, but the guy three wagons down the line waiting to get into the city might see you searching people, he gets nervous and starts letting the watchers know that he's hiding something.

It's also true that you're not just looking outwards for those people trying to get into the city. You also have to look inwards. Looking for sick people that are trying to leave. That's always the hardest. When they think that the plague's in town and you get the orders to close the gates to contain it.

Tell you somethin' you properly wash yer fucking hands after a day like that, let me tell you. Then it turns out that it wasn't the plague after all, it was someone over in the bits that was poisoned. But we're the last to know, aren't we?

No one tells the fucking gate guard anything.

But just as people are trying to smuggle shit into the city, there are also people that are trying to smuggle shit out of the city. Not just goods either. It gets really fucking bleak sometimes. Pretty young girls are the worst. You've gotta check their hands and their feet. Are they taking small steps or long strides? The difference being that some fucker's put some manacles on them. Are the hands clasped together inside some long, flowing sleeves, and then their hands are tied?

Last guy we caught doing that, my Sergeant took the fucker behind the stable and knocked the shit out of him. We left him there and dumped him in the river.

Oh no, the Watch-Commander didn't care. He helped us load the body into the wagon and Sir (Knight in charge) pointedly turned away when he saw where the Sergeant was taking him.

There's some real bleak shit happens on the gates and don't let people tell you otherwise.

And then there is the thing where we have to keep an eye out for this criminal or that particular set of goods leaving the city. When it happens, some bloke turns up from further up in the city. Temple Island or the Imperial compound. If you're lucky, one of the watch will come from one of their houses. They'll have a woodcut or something that can be hung in the guard house so that we can all know what we're looking for. They hang it in the room and we're all supposed to have a look and read what we're going to be looking for when we come onto shift on any given day. It works too. You can always tell how bad the fucker is by how quickly the messenger moves. We try and tell them to calm the fuck down and that their nervousness and determination are making the gate traffic restless but they never fucking listen do they.

We find out about that sort of thing faster than we do when there's no fucking plague after all. That shit can take weeks. But when it's a criminal someone tells (The Knight) and then he tells the Commander and then the notice gets taken down. So that's better.

But again, there's an instinct to it all. Sometimes it's in the way that the fucker is moving. Is he limping, is he trying not to run? Is he moving with a purpose? Is he being too polite? Not polite enough? Is his confidence natural or forced?

But also there's a feeling about the crowd. The city knows. You can hear it in the wind. There's a smell to it as well.

You hear tales of those wilderness types. Hunters and trackers. Scouts and so on where they listen to the trees around them and then they take a deep breath and can tell you that something strange has changed in the undergrowth. It's the same in the city. Sometimes you just know. You can see it and the guards are the best at this.

If you watch carefully, we stop what we're doing. We might look into the city, down the way and look at the stream of people. We might exchange glances and then those of us that were sitting down and minding our own business will stand up. Swords get loosened, and gloves get pulled on. Helmets get properly tied into place rather than just resting on the head.

My point is… It wasn't like that that day.

I know who you are My Lord. Thank you for not coming in here and waving your lordly dick around. You could have done and you could have demanded this or that or the other thing. We knew that it was your wedding day because every fucker and his dog was, and had been, leaving Novigrad for ages so that they could be there. It was a right fucking exodus it was and the road was still busy with people that were hoping to get there and take some of the free food and drink some of the free wine.

I didn't mind not going. My girl had gone and I had the feeling she wanted me to propose. The romance of the whole thing you know? She wanted me to propose. She hasn't come back yet, just as I know that yours hasn't come back.

The truth? I should have married her months ago and made her mine. Then she might have stayed at home but… I had to be a stupid fucker and drag my feet, didn't I?.

I see you feel the same.

I tell you what Sir, it's a fucking kick in the balls isn't it, to know that you had a good woman and then you lose her.

Nah, she's gone. I know she's gone. If she could have come back, she would have come back by now. The best case is she's run off with someone that she fled the area with. She had a pretty smile and she knew how to use it. So if she survived, that's what she did. I don't blame her and I would rather think of her like that rather than…

.

My point was that it wasn't like that that day. There was no warning, there was no feeling in the air. I mean… not at our gate anyway.

There were no traitors at my gate and I doubt there were at any other gate either. The Black ones know the value of a good guard and they pay a lot more than the city council ever did. I were loyal and so were me mates.

It were at the tenth bell in the morning. I know it was then because the cathedral had just rung. That and we all thought it were fucking weird that it happened at just that time.

When you get panicky… fucking URGENT orders, they don't come on schedule you see. They turn up when they need to turn up. Not beforehand and not afterwards.

So it were weird.

So this guy comes down. Black armoured he was. Some runner from the Imperials coming down on his horse. You know the kind of thing "Make Way for the Golden Sun" And all of the normal kinds of bullshit. He comes riding down the street as though the Wild Hunt were nipping at his heels. I mean, he was a young lad. You know the kind sir. Hasn't learned that you can often move faster through the streets if you take care and know where you're going rather than forcing your way through. But on he came and clatters to a halt next to the guard house.

The Watch-Commanders were in charge. (The Knight) had left to go and try and be at the wedding… Don't know what happened to 'im either. Poor fucker. He wasn't a bad sort. Had the sense to stay out of the way of the professionals and let us do our job. A rare quality that.

But anyway. The rider took his hat off (Freddie: I never knew why but certain kinds of military men refer to their helmets as hats. The two terms seem to be interchangeable and I don't know why you might use one and not the other. One of life's little mysteries. If someone does know the answer then please get in touch. In this case, it is unlikely that the rider was wearing a hat as Nilfgaardian messengers have to wear proper armour by military law.) and passes a scroll over to the Commander and waited to see if there was a return message.

I was a watcher that day. There was no other news. No strangeness to the day. There was nothing triggering any kind of instinct in my head. I just… I was kind of wishing I had gone with me girl you know?

Course you know.

But I was watching and the black one was the most interesting thing that happened that day. A dwarf had picked a fight with a wagoneer earlier and a group of priests had decided that the crowd should have parted to let them through as was their proper religious dues.

They had gotten their faces smacked in and I was looking forward to seeing what was going to happen from that.

But anyway, the commander read the order, because order it was.

I remember that he looked as though he read it twice. That kind of order is always interesting so I wandered over. Anything to alleviate the boredom you know?

The Commander looked up at me before looking back down at the order.

"Oh for crying out loud." He said before looking up at the messenger.

"Really?" My commander wondered.

The messenger shrugged.

Yes, I believed him. He looked about twelve so he will have been sixteen or something. New to it all, and still learning the ropes. Not imaginative enough to come up with a prank like this one.

The Commander read the message again before passing it to me.

"Keep this one." He told me. "Put it somewhere safe in my office because if this goes wrong…"

The threat was implicit. The rider didn't give a damn and I decided that if it was a prank then the rider wasn't in on it. It might have been that the rider was the subject of the prank but we didn't want to push it.

"What's your name?" The Commander asked the messenger who replied. No, I don't remember what it was but the Commander will have made him write it in the record book. He was a stickler for that kind of thing.

What? No, I hated the fucker? Not the worst Commander I've ever had. Bit of a martinet. There were a reason he wasn't at the wedding if you follow me. His redeeming feature was that he protected his team from outsiders. He was an equal-opportunities fucker. He could hate us all he liked but the moment a higher-up or a merchant kicked off at us then he was the first to get in their faces and tear them apart.

So I read the order. I mean, why wouldn't you?

"Close the gates," it said. "No traffic under any circumstances. NO VIP NO EXCEPTION."

That last bit was the surprising thing. They didn't even put that on during the war. There are always exceptions. That's the kind of order that gets sent out when the siege is finally just settling in around the city. It's the kind of order that gets sent when you can just see the soldiers riding towards the gate. It's for that kind of order that we keep a sharp axe next to the suspension rope for an emergency closing.

You'd better fucking believe I put that order somewhere safe.

What did we do? Exactly what we were told. What the fuck else were we supposed to do. There were some merchants that needed to back their wagons up and some others that needed to be forced one way or another because their people were on the killing grounds. The spears had to come out and we had to force some people out. It seems ridiculous now but more than one person lost their goods and they promised to have our heads.

"Your superiors are going to hear of this." They complained and shouted. Wept and swore. The answer to that is always to point to where the Commander is standing and to tell them to shout it louder so that he can hear them.

There's always people like that.

But a sharp spear in the ribs soon discouraged them. We cleared the gates and shut them both, inner and outer. Then we properly armoured ourselves as we are supposed to in those kinds of circumstances and went to our posts. Mine was with a couple of my mates to guard the winch.

Why me?

It was my turn.

It wasn't till later that I heard what happened at the docks.

So that was what happened. We know that it started, properly started with the closing of the gates at Novigrad on, or shortly after, the tenth bell in the morning as rung by the cathedral on the island.

Riders left the Imperial Compound and carried that same order to all of the gates and that order was followed. After that, archers were stationed on the rooftops and on top of the walls and started shooting down anything that might have been a carrier pigeon.

And because it was Novigrad, no one noticed until later in the day.

In the meantime, we can be confident that the soldiers in the field were starting to move towards their rally points, scouts were moving around and those men under Sam's command started to secure the river banks.

I have many of these reports and many more eyewitness accounts. It is a common mistake to assume that the only way to cross a river is by bridge or boat. There are other ways too. There is often a local ford where people from the nearby villages that need to cross the border to get to the next village to get this, or that, more locally, will dump loose rocks and dirt in the river to form a pathway that a fit man or a woman might be able to travel. These things are never marked on maps and the locals guard their secrets jealously.

Some fishermen might make a small living by keeping another boat in an outhouse and charging smugglers some coin to get the goods across the river.

And that is not including the simple use of a rope, or chain, that has been stretched across. Often a rope that is allowed to slacken off so that none of the local tax collectors can see it. Then when someone comes along, or someone who knows where the rope is, the rope is tightened so that people can haul their goods and their services across the river.

There are many accounts of this kind of activity so I'm picking one at random.

My lad watched them front the river bank. He's sweet on the fisherman's lass so he often goes down there and hides in the reeds and they played "You show me yours". I mean she was nine and he was eight so nothing was gonna come of it and none of us were worried about it.

But he watched them.

The fisherman kept a ferry you see. You couldn't get more on it than may half a dozen men or a couple of horses. It could take the weight there just wasn't enough room.

I got the tale from my lad.

They came in the middle of the afternoon. Just at that point where the heat is making people feel sluggish and tired. The urge to lie down for a nap in the shade starts to take you and your eyelids start to feel as though there are weights there that are pulling your eyes closed.

He saw them. I don't know why he hid but I thank the Eternal Flame that he did. He hid in the reeds. I always knew that I would find him there if he had gone missing, trying to shirk the work or whatever. I'm never going to be able to shout at him for that again.

Never.

He hid and sat in the water so that only his face was above water. There is a sheltered bit that he likes to stay in so that he's safe in even the most torrential rivers. The river was moving fast then, but not so fast that the ferry didn't work or that my boy wouldn't go and hide in the reeds to see if he could get a glimpse of the Fisherman's daughter.

He watched as these soldiers turned up. Twenty of them. There might have been more than that but that's as high as my lad can count at the moment. Twenty means "a lot" to him.

Like all lads his age, he wanted to be a soldier so what it was that made him hide that day, he can't tell us. He says he doesn't know and I believe him.

He says that they came. One of them went into the fisherman's hut and rousted him out. The Fisherman tried to explain that the currents were too strong for the ferry but one of the soldiers went to slap him. It wasn't a nice thing, he wasn't being merciful. He was wearing a gauntlet.

The ferryman did as he was told and the Fisherman's wife came out with some bread and cheese which was when my lad started to get scared.

Apparently, the woman was weeping. Formidable woman that and she came out with tears streaming down her cheeks as she came with a basket of loaves and apples. Simple stuff and the soldiers started to take the food.

Four of them went on the first ferry. Then they brought a couple of horses over. My lad was all but shaking in fear then. He told me that while they waited, they passed the fisherman's wife around and raped her. He didn't know that that's what it was but that was what he told us.

He had to cover his mouth so that they wouldn't hear him. The fisherman protested but they held a blade to his throat and he kept working.

The daughter tried to run off.

She didn't make it.

They were all ferried across when they just gutted the fisherman by the side of the river and left him there to bleed to death. Then they cut the rope and smashed the ferry a bit before sending the remains of it into the rest of the river.

Then they mounted up and rode off. My lad did the most sensible thing he did in the entire thing. He counted to twenty and then came to the village.

I'm not ashamed that I did what I did. I would do it again I tell you.

The soldiers didn't know where they were going. They knew there was a village there but… There are roads and pathways that a little boy can use where mounted men can't. He ran like a hare my lad. He did, he ran like a fucking fox through the undergrowth. He came into the house weeping silently, tears streaming down his face.

I remember being angry at the state of him, curse me for a fool. My wife is always better at spotting what's going on with the kids and she saw it first. She told me that he was terrified. We brought him inside and collected his sister. My boy looked me in the eye and just said the same thing as he wept.

"Soldiers," he said. He said it over and over again as he trembled from being in the cold water for too long and bled from his mouth where he had bitten his lips to keep himself quiet.

So my wife and I had a minute's head start when we heard the first screams. I grabbed my hunting bow and arrows. My wife picked up the baby and we ran out of the back door. My boy, my darling boy, told his sister to be quiet and carrying the little un on his back as he ran.

As we ran we saw that the riders were killing and burning. They wore no uniforms, flew no flags. They just killed, burned and… worse. It was only later that my boy told me that they had worn dark red tunics when they killed the fisherman…

That particular villager had a lot more to say. He expressed his hatred of Redanians and Temerians both. Redanians because they had done the killing and the Temerians because they had been the ones that had been supposed to protect them. Over and over again he would bitterly say the same thing

"We were told to hate the colour black, but the only ones that have been good to us are the ones that have the sun on their pennants."

He and his family were the only survivors of that village. You can barely tell that it was ever there now. Just a few burnt timbers and an empty, dead patch of ground.

Those riders and people like them went up and down the river. They were helped by the old military chokepoints. There were a lot of men that had even served in those wars that knew where the chokepoints were. The weakness in the rebellion's deployment was Oxenfurt. Not because they couldn't infiltrate the city, they wanted the city. But because of the sheer amount of traffic between our castle and the city itself. What that did practically was mean that they couldn't move in that area for fear of being spotted and the alarm being raised. They told themselves that they could secure one side of the river just as easily as they could the other.

They wanted Oxenfurt for the docks. It was all about mobility at the time. The roads were still pretty waterlogged so they reasoned that they might be able to move troops around by river, faster than they could do so by road.

They were probably not wrong.

So during the afternoon of the Equinox, there were lots of rebel soldiers moving around. I don't want to say that there were no deaths or no combat because, as illustrated above, there were both. But I would imagine that any rebel analyst would describe the numbers of losses as being "negligible."

There is very little that unprepared villagers can do against armoured troops and for anyone that says that the hunter from whom I got the earlier tale, could have done something… a hunting bow is not the same as a proper war bow. A properly armoured man will not really have to worry about a hunting bow unless the archer is very good. And hunting is not just a skill about being the best shot.

And he had his family to worry about.

I understand there were a few deaths in the rebels. There were some veterans up and down the river that had kept some weapons or knew how to use a heavy wood axe but we are talking about ones and twos of rebel soldiers dying whereas an untold number of villagers died on both sides of the river.

The troops in the field got to their rally point and started putting out proper scouts and sending riders to find out what was going on. Coulthard lands were well secured and it was only those of us in the castle itself that had not been secured. And Novigrad was shut.

After that, a signal was given in Novigrad, which I'm told was a hunting horn blast. It played the Redanian Knight charging signal. Reports vary as to where the call originated but once it started, it was passed from man to man until the city itself reverberated with it and then the rebels attacked.

I have the following from a Skelligan sailor who survived by jumping over the side and swimming to safety. He now has dysentery and some other kinds of parasite lodged in his guts from trying to swim through Novigrad harbour but the surgeons tell me that they have hope that he will survive.

I used to like coming to Novigrad. The beer is reasonable, they know how to bake a loaf of bread and cook a slab of meat and if you know how to look in the right brothels you can find yourself a nice whore with Elf blood in them. And if that doesn't work, there are plenty of merchant's wives who married for money that just want a good fuck from a real man. They want a beard you know. Something for them to hang onto while things are in the process.

And they squeal most appealingly.

Yeah, I'm a Skelligan. But don't hold that against me. Fucking cowards the lot of them. There are some good sailors amongst them. I hear that the new Jarl is pretty good, but I've never seen it. The rest of them are stupid, coast-hugging cowards. They never head into the deep black if you know what I mean. I've always wanted that. The deep sea. Where the waves make you feel small and there is no land for days around. I like that. You can hear things.

And I've always wanted to see different places you know. Sample the foods, the drink and the girls. Never met a slab of meat that I haven't liked to eat or a woman I've not enjoyed fucking.

I tell you, they serve this stuff across the maelstrom that tasted so good. I mean, it made me shit liquid fire but by the swinging hammer of Hemdall, it tasted good.

The islanders don't get that. Or at least, they never did.

I like tall masts and big sails. I like new places and strange…

Fuck me I'm getting poetic.

I liked Novigrad. I really did. Cheerfully corrupt. They don't pretend in Novigrad. Everyone's on the make. From the lowest dockside whore… and I can't claim I never went there. Sometimes a run doesn't make as much as it should and you need to find something you know?

But from the lowest whore to the highest fucking noble. Everyone's on the make. Everyone's trying to hustle you out of the coin that you have in your pocket and the clothes from your back if they can get it.

Won't lie. I've been that idiot before now and barely made it back on deck before the collectors break my thumbs.

I really liked Novigrad.

It was about dusk. It was Autumn and the shipping season was coming to a close so I volunteered to stand guard on the ship to keep my coin in my pocket rather than in the pocket of someone else. I was gonna catch a berth taking me south to foreign and warmer climates to keep working for as long as I could you know? So that when it does get to winter and the seas…

Ah fuck.

It was just getting dark. The sun was falling and I could hear the city getting loud. There were four of us on board under the command of some fucker… son of the master or something… I didn't care. Never got in my way so I didn't get in his. Our cargo wasn't rich so we kept a lookout, playing dice for wooden splinters. We were older men, all of us with similar plans and experience. We weren't really paying attention because one of the new lads was getting 'is end away with a dock whore up against a nearby wall. He was going at it hard and we could see her face so she was sticking her tongue out and making faces at us while she moaned for all it was worth.

We tried to put him off by shouting encouragement but he was too far into it so…

But we were guarding so we weren't completely neglectful. The plan was to sell the cargo in the morning when the factors crawl out of whatever pit they've found for themselves.

No, I didn't know what the cargo was. I don't ask generally. Not worth the hassle.

So I WAS keeping a lookout. I turned and had a look around to see what was going on. I kind of figured that we weren't a big ship and nor were we in the expensive end of the dock so that if thieves were going to come there would be other ships between us and danger.

I saw something. I have no idea what it was. Probably the sun glinting off someone's helmet. You trust that sort of instinct when you're a sailor. It's kept me alive more times than I can easily tell you. You see something, you know that you've seen something and then you have to figure out what it is that you've seen.

It didn't take me long.

Armed men were streaming out of the warehouses. The derelict ones on the Southern Bank. The ones that used to be used by the inner continent companies. Men came out, good, hard professional men. You get to learn the kind after a while. Not guards, definitely not guards. These men were hungry. Men with a cause.

Mercenaries possibly. You see it when they are men hungry for money. Get the job done quickly so that we can get paid. That kind of thing.

That or fanatics, could go either way. They were all wearing this dark red uniform. There were so many of them and more of them were coming down the streets towards the harbour.

I didn't know how bad it was going to be yet. One of my mates had seen it too and was standing up for a better look as I kicked the other two into watchfulness.

At first, it looked funny.

One of my mates told me that it looked like the moment that smoke breaks free from a charcoal burner's mound and I could see what he was saying. Where they haven't looked after it properly and too much air gets n so that the smoke and the flames just start billowing out of the thing.

I thought it looked like ants coming out of a hill. We used to do it as kids and young sailors when we had nothing better to do. Find yourself an ant hill, make a little hole in the bottom and then put a burning taper in the hole. The ants come boiling out of the top and you have to run for it. The loser of that game is the one that gets bitten the most.

These men came boiling out of their warehouses, pushing folks aside and the look of the thing changed. I saw one merchant trying to get out of the way of one of those men and in doing so he bumped into another one who ripped his guts out with a dagger.

Poor fucker vanished under the boots of the ants and we didn't see how he died. He was not alone though, don't think that. He was just the one that I saw. The one among many. The mind and the eyes lock onto one among many, picking out details, don't it?

Then they hit the first ship. They'd gone past some of the smaller ships to get to this one. Big fucker it was. Rich too and it just went to show that they were as stupid as the next one. That ship was big, rich and laden. It was a ship for Kovir. You don't fuck with Kovir shipping. It's almost as bad as fucking with an active military ship. You just know that the military is gonna take you down. Sure you might get away with a load of plunder, after all, Kovir is one of the richest nations on the continent. But the price?

They swarmed over it. I watched as sailors started to spill over the side. Some still trying to keep the blood inside their own throats as they went, arms pinwheeling as they fell and hit badly.

I thought of ants again. Have you ever seen a swarm of ants take down a spider or they swarm around a dead bird or something, stripping it of meat and anything useful?

I have.

We were frozen in place. I remember that. I was frozen as I watched it. We all were. No more than half a dozen of us. The ship's officer and four of us that were guarding the place and we just stood there and watched as one ship nearly sunk with the weight of men that were climbing over it, physically tearing the stuff out of it. Anything that could be sold, anything that might be worth a bit of money. We watched a growing pile of weapons have more and more added to it, blades, clubs, crossbows, bows, and quivers of arrows.

My mate told me that they were looting the shops as well. Those smaller shops exist to service the crew that sells knick-knacks mostly but there were a couple of useful things there. Smithys and the like. More weapons were added to the pile but they kept the smithy going. Just carted off his wares.

We just stood there for an astonishing amount of time. Including me, I won't pretend otherwise. We just stood there and watched as these people got closer and closer. We were sailors, professional men. I've fought off pirates with those men but we just stood and watched. I have no idea how long it was that we just stood there. It wasn't long though, there were just so many of them and they moved with this horrible speed.

The poor lad that thought that he was in charge. Of all of us, HE was the one that reacted.

"I think…" he began before he paused. "I think that we need to arm up."

Still, we just stood there. Even in the face of so blatant a truth.

"They'll leave us alone surely." One man said, still picking up his crossbow and loading it. "We're only small and far away."

Still, we watched as I picked up my club. I don't use a sword or an axe on board. They're too heavy and the urge in a fight is to hold onto your weapon, so if you end up in the water, you need something that floats.

We watched as another ship, similar to ours. I think it carried nails. Barrels of the things that were going to be carted off to help with the construction going on in Ard Skellige. I counted as twenty-six men overwhelmed a watch crew of six. And there were more climbing aboard as they were obscured from sight.

"We should run." I heard myself say. "We should run."

"Fucking coward." One of my fellows drew his sword. I nearly clubbed him for that. What was my club, his sword and a young lad's fucking rapier going to do against that mass.

I was frozen to the spot though. I couldn't move. Whether it was the shock and horror of what was happening or what, I don't know. Maybe it was the accusation of cowardice.

They just moved so fast.

The thing that moved me was the lad and his whore on the docks. I don't know how he lasted so long, maybe we put him off or maybe that horde really was that quick, but he was still going for it as they came up. I don't know why she didn't see. Must have been the angle or something, or maybe he was doing something right.

But they pulled him away from her by the scruff of his neck. His trousers down around his ankles and his dick swinging in the wind. He reacted the way you or I would if you were pulled off a woman. He turned around and hit the guy.

And the soldier pulled back, more out of surprise than anything before he stabbed the lad three times and threw him over the docks into the water.

His was not the only body floating face down by that point.

The girl screamed and I started to move to the back of the boat.

Our fearless leader held his absurdly slim sword out in the textbook-ready position and told us to stand our ground. Our crossbow fired. He can't have missed. I barely know one end of the crossbow from the other but there were so many of them that he can't have missed.

I saw the kid try and tell the soldiers that the ship was the rightful property of…

And then they just ran him through. My mate that called me a coward sprouted an arrow from the throat and he turned, his hand clutching at the wound as the blood came out of his mouth. He started to choke and I knew that he was already dead and didn't know it.

And it was clear that I would be dead too if I didn't do something.

So I turned and jumped over the side. I went down into the depths. I figured I was safe from crossbows there and then I just floated. Truth be told though, I didn't have much to worry about. There were easier targets than a few enterprising sailors that took their chances by leaping over the sides.

I was not alone in surviving. If I survive, but then came the terror didn't it?

And then came the terror.

I didn't like that Skelligan. He was very much the opposite of those men that I respect and admire and it's because of men like him that good men like Svein are feared when they walk down the street. I have no doubt that he had been a pirate as often as he had been an honest sailor, but should he survive, he will never sail again and if he dies, his death will be horrible.

Shitting yourself to death is not good and the other problem is that they are trying to kill the parasite that has taken root in his guts without killing him, while also doing so before the parasite does the job for them.

His doctors told me that it would have been the kind of problem that could have been easily solved if he had gone into the apothecary quickly rather than waiting. They said that with more sympathy than they would normally say such a thing. After all, then came the terror.

But we are still on the first day of the rebellion.

It was just getting dark when the rebels took Novigrad harbour. Once the harbour was taken they moved through and secured other places where attacking troops might be able to sneak in. They got the bridge between the main city and the temple isle and they set a lot of lookouts. The Gate guard were confused as it seemed as though the city was under attack, but at the same time, it wasn't. Not to mention the fact that the chain of command had been shattered and no one knew what to do. So men followed the orders of their immediate superiors.

So many men died that didn't need to. Many on our side as there was no organisation against the rebels.

While all of that was happening in Novigrad, I had just about been getting ready for dinner.

There are several mistakes in what happened at the castle that are obvious with the benefits of hindsight. Obvious. So obvious that it keeps me awake at night with the embarrassment of it. One of those examples was how Sam's people infiltrated the castle.

Not with the strangers or the performers of any of that kind of thing although that certainly helped in all of the general confusion.

But during the buildup to the intended wedding where the plan was still that everyone had been there. The castle had been thoroughly searched to ensure that we knew where everything was. Every nook and cranny was looked at and checked for security problems. A process that can best be illustrated by how it was not done properly back in Toussaint with the fact that they didn't know about the secret passages around the place.

Emma, Mark and I had been determined that we would not fall for the same mistake. So we searched and we searched hard. And when we put it to Sam, he helped us search. So not only did Sam know where all of the hiding spots were, he could then lead his people to them to either hide or deposit stores or something. And then he could tell everyone that the place was safe.

It was exactly the same ploy that he pulled in Toussaint with Francesca in a way. Because we all believed him so implicitly, then it became a situation where he could hide bad things in the places where he had absolutely insisted that there was nothing hidden.

So what happened at the docks in Novigrad happened in pretty much the same way at Coulthard Castle. The rebels already had, just about, control of the local countryside. Any troops that the rebels didn't like the look of just started to find themselves facing armed men who were casually cutting throats and things. It was a time when, because everyone was so sure that they were in the middle of a celebration, the thought that people could actually be attacking them seemed absurd. According to more than one person, it felt like some kind of prank that had gone wrong and was being taken to uncomfortable extremes.

Sam, essentially gave the order to attack before he walked into the great hall and declared his intentions to us all. I can attest to the speed with which it all happened and the sheer shock of what was taking place. I won't go into it in too much detail because I have already written about that night from my own perspective.

Sam might have forced me to write that account but I am astonished to find that it was still, largely, the account that I remembered having written in the heat of the moment. There had been nothing left out and I could remember no facts that had not been in that account so I have decided to let it stand. My existing memory of those events is taking on the quality of a fever dream now and I am concerned that my memories can't be trusted. Therefore I don't want to rewrite those accounts.

Those men and women that survived from inside the castle and that night tell a very similar story to me and to that Skelligan sailor. They describe these men in the strange, Redanian uniforms coming out of places where there wasn't supposed to be anyone. There are also records of otherwise well-known veterans of the guard that had been recruited by Rickard and Froggart before them who simply took off Coulthard tabards and placed the new colours on instead.

From all accounts, they moved with far more precision and discipline than the men in Novigrad and the castle was taken all but before the garrison realised there was a problem.

This is the shit that really hurts my heart and brings tears to my eyes as I sit here and try and write about this stuff.

Men, good men and women too. People that had served my family since we lived in a manor house. People that had helped make us rich had been in a place of safety and celebration. They had been expecting to cheer the youngest son of the manor, a man that some of them, many of them even had watched grow from a boy into a man. A process that doesn't just refer to the movement of years. They were there and they were enjoying getting drunk and looking forward to cheering at every joke, saluting Ariadne and me and going "Aww" as we looked at each other with dewey, loving eyes.

THAT was what they were there for. And they were met by treachery from those people into whom they had placed their trust. They LITERALLY saw men approaching the fires and went to meet them with tankards raised and food in hand.

And that is the shit that I have and will continue to throw into the faces of those men that try to claim that what Sam did was justified. You weren't there. You didn't see it. You haven't had to console widows and husbands, sons and daughters, Parents and…

If the cause was just. If it was really a just cause then they would have raised their banners and declared it so. But instead, they took THEIR OWN FUCKING CASTLE BY MURDERING THE PEOPLE THAT THEY CLAIMED TO BE THERE TO PROTECT.

They did this in the name of Redania and although there were small skirmishes on the Temerian side of the river and Novigrad is always filled with foreigners so I cannot make too many sweeping statements. But in a declaration for freedom against the Empire… and vengeance against the traitors from Temeria, the first and by far the most numerous, casualties on that first day and indeed the few days after that, were Redanian.

BY FAR.

My opponents will argue that some of those dead wore black, and that is true but many of them didn't. Many didn't even wear a uniform became many of them were not soldiers. Many of them were just people working at the castle and doing the things that they needed to do. They were working.

If the cause was just, then why did they not try and make it just? Instead, they resorted to murder and treachery.

So if you want to believe that Sam was justified then I will say this. You weren't there.

Also?

Fuck You.

Samantha has ordered me to take a break and she is probably not wrong to do so.

.

Unfortunately, I am not done with that first day. We are getting to the end of things now. And I need to tell you about what happened after Padraig, Carys and I climbed over the wall and met up with Chireadean and his wife. Also, to write about something happier, I promised you a story about how we were reunited.

It happened shortly after I returned from Vizima. There was a brief period, something like just under a week where I spent some time getting used to the fact that I had been as elevated as I was. There was also some concern that the stresses that had been placed on me during the court session might have some lasting effect. Which was not an invalid concern. So I was back in the Rosemary and Thyme in relatively short order.

To be met by Professor Dandelion who I had not seen at court and Master Chivay who made a big fuss of me while also cutting me down to size. Something that I absolutely needed. Being elevated that high and that quickly can do things to a man and even though I knew that it was not really a reward, it was a job, and it was going to be impossibly hard, every so often the thought would occur to me "His Grace, Lord Frederick Coulthard, Duke of Pontar," and I would hear this kind of hissing noise in my ears. I mean there were other titles that would come after that but that was the one that would be announcing me into rooms on informal occasions.

Professor Dandelion made a big show of announcing me into the common room using ALL of the titles as well as a whole bunch that he made up including, but not limited to, "Mediocre student, belcher of wind, he of the missing toes and the protector of chastity. He of the inability to hold his ale and to last in the bedroom" He went on and on and on with all of that while Master Chivay wondered if they should rename the place "The Duke's Head". There was much catcalling and jeering as he did all of that. I tried to stay in the room for a while as many of the faces that were there were familiar to me and I wanted to stay with all of them. It seemed that the prohibition regarding politics had been lifted and I could see Helfdan and many of the faces from Skellige as well as some members from Toussaint.

Chireadean, Padraig and Carys claim to have been amongst the sea of faces that were there and I so desperately wanted to talk to them. But I just… didn't really see them.

Sam had told me that they had been caught and killed and to see them alive, even though I had been told, I had struggled to believe it until they were there and in front of my eyes.

Sometimes, seeing is believing and that goes both ways.

I did not last long that first night. Emma and Laurelen had both gone back to the city residence and I had begun to feel faint and shivery. Lady Yennefer saw this first and called to Samantha and Tulip so that between the three of them they carted me back upstairs and put me to bed where I cried myself to sleep.

I was ill for a couple of days after that and the fever broke on the third day. I bathed and got back to work on my recovery. I was the Duke now and I had work to do.

A few things happened first. I met my Imperial Adjunct that would be helping me in the early stages of my job. He was, and is, the one that was helping me choose my secretaries, heralds and advisors. It was his job to remind me of things that I would not normally think about or would otherwise just forget.

There was another day's delay before I could go "home" and see the remnants of Coulthard Castle due to a sudden and violent Spring Rain. The rain was a result of the tampering that Ariadne had performed on the weather patterns apparently. I felt very strongly that even if I couldn't help rebuild, I needed to be there to be seen to be there. And I wanted to see it. I wanted to see what had happened before all of the mess could be cleared away. I wanted to see what was there and what my brother had done to the place that I had once called home.

The following day we set out and I deliberately informed people that I would be travelling by road. Sometimes rank comes with privileges. I was not yet up to riding so I was carried in a wagon and covered in blankets. Sir Guillaume rode on my left with a large shield that had been painted with the Coulthard coat of arms and Gregoire rode on the other side of me with his sword drawn as part of my honour guard. I found it incredibly funny and would often comment about how ridiculous we must have looked but it did the job. People moved out of the way and bowed and I got to order men from my escort to help dig a couple of wagons out of ditches.

I reached the site of Coulthard castle in the evening and in that grey, early spring daylight, it looked bleak and awful. People came out to see me and there were many tears. I bitterly hated the fact that my lack of mobility meant that I couldn't walk amongst my people and weep with them. There was flame-scorched stone, shattered walls and there was still the smell of ash and blood everywhere. People had done their best with taking care of the dead, but there were still some things that could not be fixed easily.

There was something of a camp nearby for the workers that were dismantling what was damaged so that we could rebuild and a pavilion was erected for me. I would later move to a much larger one to run my business out of when it rains and I have another mobile one modelled after Ariadne's pattern of outside studies that I move around as the whim takes me.

The following day, the weather and the light were brighter and the sun was peeking out from some of the clouds which gave the entire thing a much more hopeful air. I surveyed my realm and felt a little better and much to my delight, I saw a grinning Carys, Padraig and a slightly more subdued Chireadean coming towards me.

It was this meeting that began the tradition of my sitting outside with friends.

As they got closer, I was astonished that Carys ran the last distance and threw her arms around me, tipping me back in my seat so that we fell backwards. At first, I laughed but the Elven woman was not letting go to let me recover and I realised that she was shaking.

A fraction of a second later I realised that she was sobbing.

So I held her for a moment while Chireadean looked away and Padraig found some more chairs.

"Fer Hemdall's sake woman, let the man sit up." Padraig chided his wife gently in his round, broad Skelligan brogue.

Carys pulled away and wiped her eyes and smiled a watery smile at me.

"Stupid fucking D'hoine filth," she said. I got the feeling that she wanted to put some teeth into saying that but it didn't come off very well.

I smiled at her as Padraig helped me up and back into my chair.

"Dirty fucking Knife Ear," I replied and she laughed.

After her, I hugged Padraig and shook Chireadean's hand. Chireadean was watching the entire thing and smiling slightly. There was some distance there and I didn't know what it was.

Much to Carys' amused disgust I ordered some servants to bring us food and something hot to drink.

"Yes," I told Carys. "I have servants now. Until I can easily get up and get it myself, you will just have to deal with it."

She shrugged and nodded, she had pushed aside the chair that Padraig had brought and sat on the floor, drawing her legs up so that she could rest her chin on her knees.

"I don't know." Chireadean sighed a little. "The thought of having servants seems rather pleasant."

"It's a profession." Padraig agreed as the tea and food were brought. I told the servants to leave the pots and that we would serve ourselves from there.

"How's the arm?" Padraig asked as he frowned at the cup of tea that he had been poured. As in the Skelligan tradition, he preferred his hot drinks served in a wider, flatter bowl.

"Do you mean the lack of one?" I wondered to the amusement of everyone. "It itches," I told them. "The legs ache and I suppose it's a cliche but, even though I have lost the limbs, I can still feel them."

"Aye," Padraid agreed. "It took me Da like that when he lost an arm. Complained about it for hours he did. Said he couldn't scratch his arse properly."

We all groaned in horror at the story.

"The problem was that me ma didn't do it properly." He finished and Carys threw a pastry at him.

I looked at the three of them and I couldn't hold back a tear. "They told me that they had caught you all," I told them. "They told me that you were dead."

"Ah, you wish." Carys tried for lightness and her face fell. "Sorry."

I nodded to her.

"What happened?" I wondered.

"We disobeyed you," Chireadean replied.

It was a long conversation and I didn't take notes because it was a reunion more than anything. The long and short of it was that they all met up just a short distance away from where I had been. I hadn't seen it in the dark and all three of them were used to moving quietly in dark forests at night. The presence of Chireadean's wife notwithstanding.

They had a brief conversation while Chireadean held onto his weeping wife and the three of them decided that I was a cretin but that there was little that they could do to prevent me from hurling myself onto my sword to martyr myself.

I won't lie, I felt a little called out by that.

In the meantime though, they judged that my instructions were sensible ones and that they should go ahead with what I had told them to do.

But instead of splitting up, they went together. They claim that it was not hard going, but it was slow going. It was not a headlong flight but the riders that were, by now, wearing the colours of the rebellion were rushing this way and that, they weren't really looking for anyone. The riders and Sam had assumed that anyone that was fleeing would have been heading in the general direction of AWAY and so the thought that people might just go to Oxenfurt was not really considered. So what they saw was a LOT of horsemen and marching soldiers but those men were not doing any searching or real looking around.

And it's worth remembering who it was that was in the group. Padraig had been a professional soldier, scout and harrier from the Temerian special forces where he had served the best and among the best. This kind of movement was the kind of thing that he was born to and his craft had been honed after the war in service with Rickard, for my sister and in the awful flight from the North.

Chireadean was a veteran of the Scoia'tael even when he had not shared their strictest of beliefs and their entire mode of fighting at the time that he served was as a guerilla unit. They were saboteurs, raiders and assassins. And Carys had been a fugitive from justice before having those skills honed and trained under Rickard and the man that she loved. She had seen them at their best during the flight from the North and she had taken to the skills well.

They didn't tell me how they did it, but I can guess. I can visualise Carys leading, Chireadean with his wife and Padraig bringing up the rear. They went tree to tree, ditch to ditch and bush to bush. They will have gone slowly before they came to the river bank, stole a boat and using Padraig's expert Skelligan experience, crossed the river and entered Oxenfurt from the West to deposit my diaries. Chireadean stayed with his wife near a Stonecutter's settlement on the Western Bank of the river while Padraig and Carys entered Oxenfurt. And when I say that they entered Oxenfurt, they snuck in by the docks.

They tell a harrowing tale of what those first few hours were like in the countryside. The fear in Oxenfurt as people came out of their houses to look at the fires off to the East and wondered what was going on. I can easily imagine the psychology of that. The war had been over for a couple of years now. The locals have just been getting used to the idea that they do not need to be afraid. That there will not be marauders coming through the gates while looters and madmen start running through the streets murdering anyone that they don't like the look of.

There was just that feeling of people getting to the point where they didn't need to clench up every time fast horsemen or running guardsmen sprint through the streets. They were just getting comfortable and now this was happening. The inevitability of it. That this was their life now, waiting for the next burst of warfare.

I can easily imagine it.

The two of them used back alleys and rooftops to get to where they needed to go as they were afraid of people spotting them, recognising them and then being able to betray what was going on at the castle and what their orders were. So they hid until they made it to the publishing house so that Carys could hand over the documents while Padraig kept a lookout for anything that might be going on. Telling each other that there was no such thing as too much Paranoia they stole another boat and crossed back to the Western bank so that no one could spot them going over the bridge.

They held another brief conference with Chireadean and his wife where it became obvious that Chireadean's wife was terrified, exhausted and heading rapidly towards hysteria.

The couple's children had, fortunately, been with her grandparents during the wedding festivities where the adults were expected to be too busy to properly take care of the parents and so at least that wasn't something to be worried about.

It was decided that, because Chireadean's wife, and yes, I am hiding her name deliberately, had family in a nearby village called Mulberydale, she would be dropped off with them while Carys, Padraig and Chireadean would steal some horses and make their best speed towards Vizima.

It took them a few days to get there before Padraig saw and recognised a soldier that he had known during the war who now wore a Temerian tabard with a Golden Sun emblazoned upon it. They were taken to an outpost near White Orchard, a place I keep meaning to visit for its historical context, where they told their story to the officer in charge who provided them with a cavalry escort to Vizima which is not that far away from White Orchard as it is.

They told their story to an increasingly incredulous and furious Empress and Lord Voorhis and they stayed in the city while they were debriefed extensively but not unkindly.

The rest of their story comes later in the circumstances as then they start to split up and get caught up in the larger grand scheme of things and as such, it can wait and I didn't ask them about it until later.

"I'm so very sorry," I told them.

"What for?" Padraig demanded. "What did you do?"

"I should not have sent you to… I should not have made you…"

He waved off my declarations.

"You gave us a home and a job when no one else would." He told me and I saw Carys nodding. "The Temerians threw us out to Redania when they no longer needed and the boss (Rickard) was becoming inconveniently competent and just plain inconvenient. You protected us against vengeful fuckers like Rat-Face Radford and then you gave us position and therefore prestige and money where I didn't need to sell my soul to do it."

He took a breath and Chireadean kind of jumped in with a wry smile.

"We do, all three of us, rather owe you our loyalty Freddie, can I still call you Freddie? 'His Grace' is so grand a title."

"And after that, you introduce me to the most beautiful woman in the world." Padraig still wasn't done. "And gave me some real fucking villains to fight. How often does a soldier like me get to fight proper fucking villains ey? Mostly they're just the poor fuckers that are trying to kill you before you kill them."

Carys put her arm on the big man and just looked at me as though I was being foolish.

Tears were streaming down my eyes by this point I don't mind admitting.

"Thank you," I told the three of them. "Thank you. You are…" Words failed me and I shook my head before I took a juddering breath. "Thank you."

We sat and talked for a while. It was not the first time that I could feel some of the shadow that still lay over my heart lessening, but it was one of the first times and one of the bigger ones.

Carys and Padraig left to find a way to make themselves useful around the castle and to see who else and what else had survived but Chireadean stayed.

"Freddie," he began with a sad smile. "I have to go. Not permanently I hope but I need to run some errands first."

"Chireadean of course, is there anything I can do to help?"

For a while, the normally cheerful Elf's smile faded.

"I don't know. I hope not and if I need the kind of help that you can provide then the situation is much worse than I fear."

I stopped and once again made use of a servant to bring us something stronger to drink than tea which Chireadean accepted gratefully.

It's a strange factor of my mood and sickness that I find it much easier to console and support others in their grief than I do taking care of my own feelings. There is some food for thought there although I don't know what it is.

"Chireadean, what is it?"

He sighed and looked out over the castle work site.

"My wife's gone. I sent word to Mulberydale and where her parents are, or were, all until we had won and when I could, I went myself. They're just gone."

"Oh no. Oh Chireadean," I said. I tried to reach out to console him but my right hand had my drink in it and my left is still a prosthetic so my touching gesture turned into me punching him in the arm with a wooden fist.

"Ow," he said and laughed. "Odd way of comforting an Elf Freddie if you don't mind me saying."

I laughed with him, pretending not to hear the bitterness and the… the resignation in his laughter.

"They up and went in the middle of the night apparently." He told me. "The family in Mulberydale packed their stuff and left in the night. My inlaws are gone as well, taking the children with them."

"Fled the fighting?" I wondered. "I understand that there are still refugees that have not come back yet."

"That's what I hope," he told me. "I mean to go and look with your permission."

"Not that you need it," I replied. "You never swore to my family and you don't need my permission. I would give you an escort if you want it but I sense that might be part of the problem."

"It might be." Chireadean agreed. "They left no word and I got the feeling from the neighbours that they were deliberately… Oh, I don't know." He sighed.

"So they definitely weren't caught up in the fighting?" I wondered, not knowing whether I was being hopeful or whether I was despairing.

"Almost certainly not." He told me. "Although they took all their valuables and movable belongings, the house was still left too tidy. It had not been looted, they packed up and went."

We both contemplated that for a long moment.

"They'll turn up," I told him, wondering if I was lying as I did so. "They will. But of course, if you have to go, you have to go and you go with my blessing. Do you need papers? Do you want papers? I can give you a warrant now if you want one. I imagine that a Ducal warrant has some weight."

He stared at me in horror and then he started to laugh.

"Ah Freddie," he said, wiping a tear from his eye. "I do love you. At some point, preferably soon, someone is going to have to sit you down and explain to you just how powerful you are now. A Ducal warrant?"

He started to laugh again and he kept on giggling for some time after that.

Later, when I saw him, every so often he would just catch my eye and mouth the words "Ducal warrant" at me, or I will do it to him and he will need to go off and calm down for a while.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, Chireadean's family still hasn't turned up and we have reached the limits of what can be done with Chireadean riding around the countryside on his own and looking. He has finally allowed me to use some of the power that he tried to tell me that I have, and so we have riders and messengers out looking now.

In the meantime, as I said previously, Carys just turned up at my pavilion the following day laden down with weapons. She didn't tell anyone what she was doing or why she was doing it. She just turned up and started being my personal bodyguard. She takes the job far more seriously than she ever did before. We still barely speak with each other except when she is telling me something regarding her concerns regarding the safety of this or that. She just has a series of looks and expressions. She is eloquent with her eyes and body language and I can often just tell what she is thinking.

As I think I've said, she has joined that cadre of people that see it as their responsibility to remind me that I am still just Freddie Coulthard, not Lord Frederick Coulthard blah blah blah.

Having said that, she has no fear in the face of the powerful when she is unhappy about something and it caused me to borrow a line from Helfdan when once talking about Svein.

A nobleman came to see me. He was objecting to this or that and was trying to put me in my place about something. There was a lot of body language and domination tricks. He turned up with numerous people that he referred to as "his staff" and tried to tell me things like "We just don't do things like that in…" the area that he was talking about. I have hope that we can get his head out of his ass but he did not make a good first impression.

He was standing over me and was offended that I hadn't stood up to greet him. The fact that I didn't have any feet was not something that he seemed to care about so he was trying to intimidate me.

He leant forward, doing the thing where he rested his fists on my desk to loom over me when Carys just stepped out of the shadows and put a blade to the man's throat. One of his followers put their hands on his sword and Carys just looked at him until he subsided.

"Step. Back," Carys ordered. She was using her thickly accented voice that sounds like she barely knows how to speak Northern. "Step Back or I cut your throat."

"How dare you?" He tried to hiss at her, but it's quite hard to do that with a razor blade at your throat. "Don't you know who I…"

To me, you're just another piece of D'hoine shit." Carys growled. "Not worth wiping from my boot."

To my eyes, she was enjoying herself but in times past, I would have found her terrifying in that moment.

For a moment, the tableau was frozen. The guards were just outside, only a call away if it came to it but then I would have to take drastic measures.

By this point, I had a better idea of just how powerful I am.

So I threw them a bone.

"I would step back if I were you," I told him before turning to Carys and giving her a little wink. "Carys? Leave the man alone."

Quick as that, the blade was back into its sheath and she retreated to the shadows.

"Really sir," the nobleman tried to be angry after stepping back automatically. "This is not the proper conduct in a meeting between nobles. An elf should know their place. And a woman at that. I insist upon an apology from the…"

I had been thinking about how to handle it and the perfect response came to me from the mists of memory. It was only later that I realised that I was paraphrasing Helfdan.

"She knows exactly where her place is," I told him. "And I have no problem with how she chooses to act." I smiled at him. "After all, I did not maker her my bodyguard, nor did she earn her place in my guard by following proper conduct. But I agree that an apology is required."

He nodded and turned to her.

"Well?" He demanded.

I chuckled and looked at one of the young idiot's attendants who had sighed and rolled his eyes a little. He saw my glance and nodded, stepping forwards to put his hand on his master's arm.

"I think you misunderstand the situation here," I told him with a little more heat in my voice. "When you have spoken to your advisors and realised what needs to happen, come back and see me and we will discuss the situation with your lands further. Until then?"

I leant forward, picked up a quill and pulled over one of the papers that I had been working on.

After he had left, mostly being dragged by his people, Carys checked that he was gone before we had a good laugh together. He did come back and apologise and we did discuss his problem. He got some of what he wanted, but not all of it and the concessions that he had to make to get that much were not entirely pleasing to him.

But I have digressed enough. I am here to talk about the rebellion.

Those were the major events of the first day of the rebellion that we know about and we move into those things that we can be pretty sure about but not certain. At some point, Sam moved into the basement of Coulthard castle and started "Augmenting" those select members of his troops. We don't know how he did that and there is more than a small argument to say that we are better off not knowing.

We also know that some of those troops had already been augmented elsewhere and were being brought into those places which the Rebellion expected to be the front line of the fighting which was Coulthard castle and along the Pontar.

It seems clear that some came in with Sam's troops, hiding in the ranks and possibly in the carts among the baggage, but there were probably many in the camps in the undergrowth as well.

Also, they had enslaved Ariadne who could have been teleporting them in.

In the meantime, Sam started to sort and arrange the prisoners that he had taken. Who did he have and what did he have?

The rest of the Rebellion moved towards a consolidating phase which was what I saw while I pretended to flee and tried to draw attackers away from Padraig, Carys and Chireadean. The countryside was well scouted, not least because Sam had grown up there just as much as I had and knew everything about what and who was where.

So there were patrols for the sake of showing people that there were patrols on the roads with the new colours on them. Declarations were made that the Redanians had liberated the countryside.

Also, that was when the conscription of the countryside started. Not that they called it that, but that's what it was. If there is one area where Sam's faction treated and thought of women in the same way as men, it was regarding their ability to perform physical labour. Large numbers of people that had no value as hostages started to further entrench the siege defences around Coulthard Castle but they also started various defensive earthworks around the place. Roads were dug, buildings were demolished and put up and there were the beginnings of streams being diverted. All according to plans that only Sam's knights carried around.

We have captured a couple of examples of these plans. Again, I refer to Sir Polmert the strategist.

They're not bad. To my eyes, they are the plans of men that have spent a long time looking at old maps, or maps that have been drawn from memory but when we cross-reference the maps that were drawn against what was done in the field, we find the kind of confusion and problems born from the fact that these two things do not always meet up.

Having said all of that, the plans are good and I would refer Lord Coulthard to those plans when he sets about rebuilding his lands. After all, just because they were the plans of madmen and traitors, doesn't mean that all of the plans are bad.

They are constructed according to a simple theory. The purpose of fortification and entrenchment is to make it so that attackers find moving and attacking difficult and time-consuming while the defenders can move where they need to be and, well, defend, quickly and easily. It's about making the defence efficient and forcing the attackers to be inefficient.

And, in theory, these plans were quite effective.

Or at least, they would have been if they had been implemented using the actual real, witnessed experience of the area rather than someone's memory.

Also, if they had had more time to take the necessary steps.

So that was the end of day one of the Rebellion.

I was captured in the early hours of the following morning and although we can't be sure as to how that was managed, it remains all but certain that when it was clear that I was going to avoid conventional tracking methods and when Ariadne had finished with her immediate duties, she was ordered to bring me to heel. Therefore it is all but certain that I was bitten by a spider whose venom was a paralytic of some kind.

A couple of the early conscripts can verify that I was carried back into the castle, tied face down over an empty saddle. The following is from one of the castle blacksmiths.

Coulthard castle had several and although there was plenty of cross training meaning that the Armourer could still put a shoe on a horse should the need arise, and the farrier could still hammer a sword together, there was a swordsmith, an armourer, a smith down by the stables who made horse kit and then a couple of other men who had some general kind of training that could move from one to the other as needed. Men who could make nails and buckles and pans and brackets and things.

It sometimes boggles the mind as to just how much small things can turn out to have vast and intricate thought put into them.

They had been priority targets for the infiltrating force and they were captured as a matter of urgency.

Well sir, as I told the Imperial man, they put me to work right quick. I was drunk of course and I think they expected that a bit but it didn't stop them from being angry with it. Held my head in the horse trough until I was sober enough to hold metal and hammer at it if you follow me.

That wasn't the sobering thing though. The sobering thing was watching all of those soldiers bringing in all of those captives. Watching men that I had been drinking with only minutes or hours beforehand, being murdered or killed. I've seen war, I mean we all have haven't we sir?. There is not a smith for leagues around that hasn't been conscripted by one side or the other to hammer shitty metal into even shittier blades. But there was a joy to this savagery. They enjoyed it. They called us traitors and the only reason that they didn't flog me was because one of those big knights ordered them not to.

I wanted to rebel. I told that black one that asked me all the questions that I wanted to rebel and I think he believed me. But they had a blade at my wife's throat is the thing. If I was more sober, or more drunk, then I might have fought or reacted quicker.

Sorry m'lord. I know that you don't fault me it's just… I find I want to tell people you know? I feel like such a coward and…

Sorry M'lord. I will try and stop apologising.

The sky to the east was getting lighter when they brought you in. I hadn't seen any of the other of the gentry yet. Not your lady sir, nor either of the Lady's Coulthard. I saw a couple of the guests but none of the really important people. There were clouds overhead though which kind of deadened the air. So there was no sunrise, just a kind of slow realisation that it was getting lighter.

I saw you then as they brought you in. I've seen you looking worse. I have, I'm pretty sure. But you looked pretty bad. You were bloody and your face was beginning to bruise up something proper. They brought you in quickly, tied to the horse and I don't mind admitting that I wept to see it, sir. I don't mind admitting that. We all know about the things you managed to do in the North and we hoped you know? We hoped that you would escape and bring help.

No, I'm sorry sir. It was a fool's hope but we had it nonetheless.

So I wept and the big knight stood over me and threatened to strike me wife with his huge gauntleted fist if I didn't get back to work and I went back to hammering.

Couldn't even begin to tell you what it was they had me working on. Probably some kind of ridiculously huge plate for armour given the size of some of the men.

But they brought you up, right to the entrance of the keep and one of the riders went inside. They pulled you off the horse and dumped you in the mud where you tried to move or something and one of them kicked you to keep you quiet. Or docile or something. I thought that was a bit harsh to tell the truth sir as it was quite clear to me that you were basically insensible but…

Anyway, the kicker regretted it for a few seconds as your brother Sam… I still struggle not to call him Lord Kalayn, came out and saw it. He looked calm as he did it but he just walked up to the man that he had seen kicking you and rammed a dagger into his belly.

The thrust was hard and powerful. Just this short hard stab before he tried to rip the blade upwards. The fucker groaned horribly and your brother heaved him off.

Your brother looked calm as he cleaned his dagger on the dying man's cloak before he pointed at two men to carry you into the keep.

I didn't see you again until we were liberated. To be honest M'lord I was overjoyed that time. We had long thought you had died.

Glad to see that the fuckers couldn't bring you down, sir.

History will remember the second day of the rebellion for one reason though. And that reason is that this was the day that the Rebellion was properly declared openly.

History liked to debate these things because as historians, largely, we have nothing better to do. When did the rebellion start? I mean arguably, it started from the moment Redania fell. There are many moments where the rebellion could have started. The moment that Phineas first made contact with Sam. The moment that Sir Aleksy mentions when Ariadne had been proven to be dominated and therefore, the other rebels started to look around each other and begin to believe that this was going to happen.

Lots of debates are taking place and many historians are going to make themselves relatively wealthy by arguing about it in lecture halls and in print.

You have to understand the difference between wealthy and rich though. Historians are never rich. And we tend to consider being "wealthy" as having enough money to not have to worry about where the funds are going to come from the next time we are on a big research project.

However, there are two main schools of thought as to when the Rebellion properly started.

The first school of thought is that the rebellion properly "began" when Sam walked into the feasting hall and declared that he was rebelling.

The second school of thought was when an armoured knight rode up to the gates of Oxenfurt while wearing and carrying the new colours of Redania and ordered them to open the gates of Oxenfurt.

Before that moment, people didn't really know what was happening. They had seen fires burning in the distance. There were rumours and eyewitness tales of soldiers and armoured men crossing the countryside this way and that way. There had even been sightings of armoured knights carrying flaming brands as they hunted for fugitives and they rounded up the people in the nearby villages for conscription and, it would turn out later, sacrifice.

But there came that moment that Dorthan wrote about when a Knight, a herald really, rode up to the gates of Oxenfurt, planted his flag in the mud and declared that Queen Adda was rebelling against the Imperials.

As you will have read, the argument as to whether or not Adda was rebelling is another one of those puzzles that will be argued about for years to come and I'm not jumping into that debate too much again.

What Dorthan wrote is largely accurate about this event and although he might have overstated the effect that it was going to have on Oxenfurt on a sociological scale, it is also true that I have not spent much time there as a non-human so my experience is not necessarily the best one.

I have not been back to Oxenfurt yet, but I very much doubt that I will be able to go back and experience the city in the same way that I used to. A fact that leaves me feeling a little sad if we're all being honest with each other. To my eyes and the eyes of some people that I trust, what Dorthan feared has not come to pass although it would have done if there had been any kind of long-term occupation or if the Rebellion hadn't been squashed as relatively quickly.

But that visit by the armoured Knight cannot be discounted for just how important it was. Up until that point the rebellion had not been declared before hostile figures. It had been declared before people already in the Rebellion's power, or with people that were hoped to be on the side of the Rebellion, but not an opposition. From that moment, the rebellion knew that there was no getting around the fact that Nilfgaard and the Empress would hear.

And hear they did.

Riders and messengers set out from Oxenfurt that very morning. Most headed South to Vizima and the Empiress but others went North to Novigrad where they found a city being torn apart from within and to Crow's Perch and the nearest feudal master.

Those messengers were ahead of Padraig's party as Chireadean had been diverted by the need to drop off Chireadean's wife and the group's concerns about secrecy and not knowing who to trust.

That didn't discount what Padraig and the others had to tell the Imperial party given that they had come from the castle and had eye-witness accounts of what had happened there.

The small trickling of refugees that were fleeing Oxenfurt became a river at that point. The work that the Knight had begun on the bridge on the Eastern part of Oxenfurt started well. Non-humans and a lot of people who saw and felt the same thing that Dorthan had seen and felt had learnt from the last war and had already been preparing since the first alarms had started to be sounded in the earlier parts of the morning. So many were already prepared to depart.

Unfortunately, we have no idea who that Knight was that carried the declaration that the people of Oxenfurt should open their gates and it is all but certain that, like the other augmented Knights that took the field against Imperial Forces, he did not survive to be taken captive. There is little chance that they would have been allowed to survive much longer anyway.

Whoever he was though, he did his work well.

After that event, things continued around Oxenfurt and Coulthard Castle. The locals were rounded up, earthworks were prepared and the people were divided into two camps. The first was those camps that the rebellion thought of as being useful. The other was those people that they thought of as being "disposable".

In doing so, they made the same mistake that military leaders have made since time began. What they thought of as being useful and what was actually useful were two completely separate things. As a result, a lot of the people in the disposable area were farmers and field workers.

I don't want to discount what was happening there, but it is also true that it just… continued. The rebellion was digging in and consolidating. As well they might.

The Oxenfurt guard commander held a council and although everyone agreed that they wanted to fight, they also knew that they couldn't hold against sustained attack. They determined that they would close the eastern gate and keep it closed for a day "for the form of the thing" but after that, if a large armed force turned up at the gate, then they needed to come to terms and surrender.

I will leave other people to analyse that decision as I cannot claim to be neutral. Fortunately, the decision about what to do regarding those counsellors has been taken out of my hands. They were relieved of their duties and new people were elected from the guilds and University before I was given my position. For now, I intend to leave it at that and see how things go.

I think… I think I cannot afford to be too conciliatory. I wish that the city that I love had held out. But I understand why they did not. The garrison of Oxenfurt is, as Dorthan said, not military and things could have gone very bleak there if they had elected to fight.

But I wish that they had fought.

We have no idea how things would have turned out and the probability is that it would have gone badly. But I wish they had fought.

The forces in the field were still consolidating. It was a process that was far slower than they were happy with. Sir Aleksy described it as being better than they feared but not as fast as they had hoped.

And Noivgard essentially fell in the early evening of that day.

With a city that size, it is worth saying that the full situation was more complicated than that small statement suggests. What was happening was that there were lots of conflicting orders flying around and many people simply didn't know who was in charge. So many many people became traitors by accident as they simply followed their chain of command.

My friend, the gate guard, was one of these.

I didn't know what to think. We heard that there was fighting going on around the docks and we just thought it was some kind of riot. They happen from time to time. A bunch of sailors come off a ship after being marooned by a calm or as we thought were more likely in this case, the storm had been so violently unpleasant that they had lost a mast or something and had had to limp into port. They get shafted out of their money and decide to take their anger and frustration on whoever's passing or the nearest tavern or whorehouse.

It happens, the guard moves in, batters everyone into unconsciousness and sorts it out when they figure out who's in charge. Often there's a nice mass hanging and people are more careful about such things when they come into port next time.

Reports were confused though. All we knew was that it was our job to guard the gate and that's what we did. We stood there, messengers had been sent to call up the off-shifts and they turned up looking sleepy and grumpy at having been called out of bed and told to get to work. We made jokes about how it must have been some people being grumpy at the fact that the wedding was delayed and that they didn't get to take advantage of everything. We heard sounds of fighting but nothing happened to us.

Then a message came to our Watch Commander by way of a Knight that I didn't know or recognise. I liked him though. One of those natural leader types. The kind of man that when he tells you to do something you find yourself doing it automatically if you know what I mean.

Some Knights, you do what they say because you fear them. Some, you do it because you obey the rank, not the man and some Knights you follow because to do otherwise was unthinkable.

He was one of those last. I liked him but he turned up and handed over a new letter to the Watch Commander who read it, sighed and looked at all of us.

"It was an honour serving with you lads," he told us and then he just walked off up the street. He was all but whistling as he went.

Haven't found out what happened to him after that.

So then, we all had a meeting with this new Knight. Turned out he was going to be in charge of the gate. Told us all that there were going to be changes and that some of us might be transferred to wall duty and some new lads might come in.

"Politics was happening," he said. It seemed to be one of his repeated lines that he would say over and over again. "Politics is happening," and that would be the explanation as to why any number of things was going on. Apparently, there were a new governor and he wanted to make some changes that no one else had thought of. He wanted to shuffle people around regular so that we could all get used to different gates and things. So that we all had an understanding of what life was like with it all.

Can't say I agreed. I was quite happy with my life at that gate. I had a side-woman in one of the locals that I liked and she was always up for a quick boff round the back alley. Just deciding if I wanted to do something about that before I got her pregnant. Or me other girl found out.

She was after a leg up and a gate guard gets paid enough that she wouldn't have to…

Oh, fuck it.

She died in some of the fighting or the other.

So the new Knight told us all that there was a new Lord Mayor and that he was the new boss. I didn't mind, he seemed like a good one as I say. Later that day, a new set of uniforms came down and later still, there was a new flag up over the gate.

I remember looking at that. We had been on duty all night and I were tired but I remember looking up at that in the slightly damp and grey light of the morning and looking at that flag. The new Knight who had gone off for a meeting somewhere or other? Well, his words kept echoing around inside my skull, over and over and over again.

"Politics is happening," he would say. Well, it was then that I knew what he meant.

There have been a couple of moments over time where I've wondered what I should have done and that was one. It was the same question that I think we all asked ourselves. Should we stay or should we go? I remembered the other times when this kind of thing had happened. When the order came down and we switched from Novigrad uniforms to Redanian uniforms. And then we were wearing Redanian uniforms but with a Nilfgaard flag stitched on the arms. And now this.

I remember the day when some Knights came down with a priest of the Eternal Flame who came along the line of us when we were on parade. He picked something like one in four of us and declared that we had been seen consorting with magic users. They came again when they declared that we had been seen consorting with non-humans. I was terrified both times. The first was because I had bought some lucky heather from one of those hedge witches while out on patrol.

I mean, she'd leapt out at me and scared the crap out of me. Put the fear of the frost into me if you hear what I'm saying. So I bought it for a copper coin and it has brought me good luck.

And then there was that Elven whore that I like. I don't know, sometimes you want them slim and shapely you know what I mean?

It were all nonsense. They took one man because he had a huge beard that he'd been growing for as long as I'd known him. They said it was evidence of dwarven blood.

Heh.

That was the thing of this time. It was so routine. If someone hadn't eventually turned up and told me that we were rebelling against the Empire, I really would have believed it was just another day.

Just another day.

Not all of it was as bloodless as that. Several small fortresses remained loyal to the Nilfgaardian flag. The Imperial compound was not one of those because the head of Imperial Intelligence was one of the rebels. He let some of those killers in and by the time the soldiers had realised what was happening, a good portion of them were dead.

But there were some bastions. A barracks that had dared to question the orders that were given. A group of soldiers that were not on duty commandeered an inn and fought back. There were a couple of mansions that housed Nilfgaardians who had decent guards, either from the Nilfgaardian military in the case of the ambassador or the form of very expensive mercenaries in the case of a couple of the merchants.

One of those men agreed to come out of Coulthard castle and speak with me. He had heard of me and liked what he had heard when it came to my understanding of the mercenary's trade.

He will never do that job again. He lost his right arm and his left eye during the fighting.

It was just supposed to be an easy job. Just an easy job.

I see you laughing there and yeah, it's never just an easy job is it? It's never that easy. Well, sometimes it is just an easy job. Guarding the Nilfgaardian merchant Lord. It's not as looked down on in the South as it is up here. The boss (Freddie: name removed) was a good sort, paid plentiful and on time which is more than some do. But he once claimed that it's because the Imperial treasury is more careful about taxes and as such, so the richer we get, the richer the Imperial treasury is.

But he paid well and I quite fancied some well-paid guard duty in the richest city in the North. Good food and beautiful women along with the best shopping and all of the other things that a man could want. Wish the prices were a bit cheaper but that's what you get if you want quality.

I've served in other rebellions though and it was nothing like this. This was different. And it wasn't that complicated to see what was different about it.

This was more organised.

I've been in the South as a mercenary. Course I have. That was where the money was at one point with all of the Rebellions going on. Never fought on the side of the Rebellion though, the Imperial response was always, ALWAYS harsh and brutal. I guarded wagon trains and yeah, I saw some fighting. The difference? Those rebels were always idealistic young idiots led by people that should know better. They thought that the "rightness of their cause" would carry the day against trained knights and man-at-arms that were used to dealing with this kind of nonsense. So that's what I think of when people talk about Rebellion.

A horde of young men.

This was a marching block of soldiers. They weren't wearing a uniform although I saw a couple of priests with them. We had heard sounds of fighting in the lower city, and plumes of smoke around the docks. We thought it was one of those riots that happen from time to time when sailors come in and get rowdy. So we thought that these soldiers were just on their way down to the docks to help keep order.

Instead, they just marched up and attacked us.

There was a dozen of us on guard with eight off duty and they turned up with fifty soldiers. They just marched up and started swinging. My arm was lopped off before I realised we were being attacked and I fell. I flailed around with the shock and pain of it I think and I must have hit one with my shield or something because he turned around and kicked the side of my head. Fair kicked my eye out didn't he, fucker.

I've been hurt before. I have. I've lost a couple of fingers and there was a time with a punctured lung where I didn't think I was going to survive that.

But I tell you, the agony of losing that eye and the smashed bones around it. In the immediacy of the moment. I didn't WANT to survive that.

So, before anyone wants to try and claim that the rebellion was bloodless in Novigrad. It was not. Lots of people caught on the wrong side were just killed outright. Still more were killed for the crime of guarding the wrong piece of real estate.

The rebellion was after money. They needed the funds to be able to finance the ongoing thing. Money for troops, money for provision and equipment. Some unfair souls will point out that the more that the rebellion would be able to liberate off of other people, the less the rebels themselves would need to invest in the coming in the days and weeks.

There were also just some places that could not help but be caught up in events. Whenever there is fighting in the streets, there are always some people that want to take advantage of that kind of thing. Things got bleak if you were a woman walking the streets. The Passiflora was burnt to the ground when it became clear that the women had scattered and fled. Several shops, blacksmiths and armourers were looted into nothingness with the workers and smiths there being conscripted into the armed forces.

After the fall of Novigrad. Nothing much happened for some time. Through the efforts of various people and the incompetence of various other people, the rebellion caught everyone completely by surprise.

Although Greater Redania is more aware of the possibilities of a Winter War than they had been once upon a time, they were still unprepared for this. So any Imperial troops that might have come from the North, or come over the passes from Kaedwen, were simply not ready. It takes time to gather troops and set out on a war footing. Not to mention that, as had been proven, not everyone could be trusted. So there was a period of witch-hunting going on in the North of Redania. A much more traditional civil war kind of situation. Where people would declare the other a traitor and weapons would be drawn.

Often without cause, it must be said. Men who had been loyal all their lives were declared traitors to assuage old grudges or for the simple crime of being in the way of ambitious men.

That is not in my remit though. My remit is about what was going on around the front.

The Rebellion in Novigrad had been almost completely successful. They had taken the city and were flying their banners from the walls. Some curiosities were spotted around this though. Mostly around the role of the church during the Rebellion.

When Radovid was at the height of his power and the Witch-hunters all but held Novigrad in his name, as well as the flags of Redania flying from every tower, there were also the banners of the Eternal Flame.

This didn't happen this time.

We know because we have numerous eyewitness accounts that say that many of the rebel groups had priests that rode alongside them. We know that men were wearing the cassocks of the Eternal Flame. Soldiers that carried the symbol of that flame on their shields and even the old banner of the Witch-hunters was flown above some armed forces.

The church though, the main body of the church did not react. Cathedral Island is one of the few parts of Novigrad that was utterly unaffected by the brief civil war as the gates at that end of the city were simply closed and lined with church soldiers. They had plenty of supplies in the tunnels and catacombs under the island and as such, they simply ignored what was going on.

I have many questions regarding this period. Not least of which is… Did they know how Sam was going to retake the North? Did they know that the intention was to harness the powers of the Vampires and the other monsters? Did they know about the magical rituals and horrors that were being performed in the basements beneath Coulthard Castle? Did they know?

Did they care?

Many swear that they did not and of those rebels that survived. Not one of them can tell me what happened to those soldiers and followers that harnessed their religion to the horrors that were committed in the name of Redania and against the black ones.

The optimistic might say that those treacherous holy men are now martyrs. That they died as part of the first waves against the Black ones.

The more pessimistic say that those men simply set aside their robes and their banners, tossed them on fires or buried them in pits against the next time that all of this nonsense kicks off and then they slithered back into the holes that they first came out of.

The new Duke in me says that it is possibly a mix of the two. What I can say for certain to all within reading distance of me is that the Hierophant has just publicly condemned the rebellion after it had been declared what had happened in the depths of Coulthard castle. He has done so in the strongest possible language and as such, his will is beyond contestation.

So know that. The most powerful church leader in the area, the direct conduit between mankind and the power of the Eternal Flame has condemned you and cast you out of the warmth of the glow of the fire into the cold.

You might call him heretical which is funny to me because this is the man that gets to decide what heresy is.

As for those forces that were in the more central deployments and at Coulthard Castle. As I say, they were consolidating. No one had come down from the North which meant that those central forces could help to secure the positions that needed securing. The rebellion was now confident, or as confident as they could be, that the war front was going to be along the Pontar River. They were literally having a rematch against their oldest foe on their oldest battlefields. They were not stupid though, they kept lookouts and extensive networks of messengers should those Northern forces seek to fight against the Rebellion.

But they moved to the river and started to fortify it. The major crossing points were taken and secured. The work that had begun in Coulthard lands spread up the Pontar river as far as Flotsam itself which was taken in a matter of hours as that place is barely fortified and the troops just walked in.

So they were fortified and confident of their position.

I turn again to Sir Polmert to explain the strategy of this.

Deployment is a matter of geography, just as much as it is a matter of troops on the field. Facing an enemy is more than just figuring out when and where to charge.

Now it is elementary to know that an army marches on its stomach. But an army also needs latrines, which means that the new latrines need to be dug on a regular basis, proper hygiene needs to be observed with regards to drainage, and the rations need to be properly prepared otherwise the matter is such that the troops will simply catch dysentery or some other kind of horrific disease and the army will fall apart.

But again, everyone knows this. Everyone knows that an army needs arrowheads and sword blades and wood and horseshoes and nails and all of the small things. But after that, people think along the lines of "hold the high ground and stand between an enemy and what they want."

But it's much more complicated than that. The truth is something that only the greatest strategists know. Men like Natalis, Coehoorn and Radvoid knew this. People like to put Foltest in this group of military thinkers but that is not the case. He depended far too much on the strength and quality of his men to carry the day. He understood the principles, but eventually, he would argue that his men would be able to take the difference to victory.

By far the most important factor when deciding things is geography. Now I'm not talking about battlefield deployment. This is far more simple than that. This is a question that needs to be decided by the people that look at the big maps and decide where the army goes.

Tactics wins battles, strategy wins wars.

The understanding of that truth is why the North now flies the banners of Nilfgaard above their castles.

Why do I say all of this?

Because your brother understood this truth very well.

The geography of Southern Redania is such that it is very easy to defend from the South but almost impossible to defend from the North. The area North of Novigrad is where the farms of Redania are which feeds all of their people. That's why there are big, wide, well-maintained roads that travel between the cities there so that no merchant is ever tempted to take his wagon train across the fields and ruin a crop.

The placement of roads is such that armies can be directed according to the movement of those roads and can go where Radovid…

Yes yes, I know you weren't asking about that.

But from the South, the countryside is dominated by the Pontar. Even if you try and suggest that Novigrad is a separate state from Redania, which would be tricky given the end of the war and Radovid's presence and power in it, the real fortress wall is the Pontar River and it is an incredibly strong wall.

The river is wide enough in most places that no siege engine could fire across it. There are only small parts of it that a good archer could make that shot let alone do so accurately with enough energy in the bow to actually kill someone. It is too wide for some kind of pontoon bridge and is too fast flowing for the building of a new bridge. Let alone the problem that it is all but impossible to do such a thing with subtlety so the workers would get about halfway across and presuming that the river and the rain didn't wash away all your work, you would then have to deal with the archers and crossbowmen, let alone the catapults and trebuchets that have had time to properly sight their engines while an attacker was busy building a bridge.

So there are only a few crossings. The bridges of Oxenfurt, the east and west banks, and the ruined bridges directly south of Novigrad. I notice that no one has bothered to try and repair that bridge in the meantime. The other bridges that used to exist were knocked down, by Radovid and the people of Novigrad to help with this defence. The only reason that they left the ones that they did was so that they could leave one place for the enemy to concentrate their forces. The "open gate" tactic is a classic for a reason.

(Freddie: This has been pointed out to me and I intend to rectify this)

After Oxenfurt the river does narrow and it would be much easier to put a barge or something to cross troops, but not enough and not fast enough to make a massive difference. People would soon realise what was happening and there would be an answering force there to meet you.

You could also float the barges, or the pontoons for a bridge, up or down the river, to your chosen site of crossing, but if you tried that you would need to come along the river one way or the other.

Now that is possible, but the rebels held Novigrad and the other two major crossings. So to get down the river, you would need to make it past those places without being seen. The same if you intended to land troops by boat.

The other end of the place would be Flotsam. Flotsam is big enough and the river is wide enough that you could float troops through there, but after Flotsam, although the river is wide enough for purpose, the banks are not. Those woods are famed for their Endrega populations and further up, the river banks become rocky and… or… are too distant to be useful.

So naturally, the rebels sent a force to occupy Flotsam. They dumped a load of shit in the water. They installed river chains so that men couldn't sail down it and then that was that.

As well as all of this, the land to the South of the Pontar, the Temerian bank of the river is, essentially, marshland. Not a nice place to marshall an army. Pure water would need to be shipped in by the barrel, the act of purifying the water that was there would be colossal. Same with fresh food and vegetables as the farms of Velen were stripped bare and are only just showing the first signs of proper recovery.

The Baroness can barely feed her OWN people let alone an army that would be camping there.

So it is an ideal situation for the defending. Your brother knew this, or at least had an advisor that told him that. So in the time immediately after the fall of Novigrad and your castle, he moved to secure those crossings.

And he did a good job of it too.

Ok, I'm done for the day. I always struggle with it when people praise Sam.

I am happy to say that I have made a couple of appointments and done so formally. This ranges from the obvious ones where I have formally named Lady Tamara Strenger as the Baroness of Velen. She is confirmed in that role and I am looking forward to working with her in bettering that place and fortifying it against probable incursions from the Cidaris and Vergen alliance.

This was the easiest appointment to make. Crow's Perch was a place where her Father was Lord and she inherited it when her parents left. She doesn't have a great deal to say about her parents that is nice and she is declaring loudly that if people want to discuss marriage with her, then they can do so through me, her feudal master.

From my end, I would heartily recommend speaking to the lady first before you bring the matter to me. I think that Lady Strenger and I have a good understanding of each other. I don't think she would protest if I told you that she has a rather stricter interpretation of the teachings of The Eternal Flame than I am strictly comfortable with but her devotion to the people living in her lands cannot be questioned.

It is also my distinct pleasure to inform people that I have named and confirmed Lord Francis Kolrab as the Lord Mayor of Novigrad. He will be governing the city with my blessing and will be answering to me accordingly. He will be dealing with all terrestrial matters such as trade and law keeping while the Hierarch will continue to serve as master of all things spiritual, specifically on the Temple Isle. It took us a long time to get there and find a candidate that pleased everyone but I think we got there in the end.

Lord Helfdan is keen to return to Ard Skellige and to take up the duties that he has been assigned there as he feels that he has neglected those duties for too long. There will be a short handover period and then Lord Kolrab will take up his duties. I wish him all the best in the pursuit of them.

The matter of the master of Flotsam is still being decided. As Lord Polmert pointed out, Flotsam is an important strategic position and we must be careful there. The master must be a Temerian but also must be willing to work within the greater framework that is being established around Flotsam.

Speaking personally. I have Knighted Padraig and he will be the new Captain of my castle guard. He has taken Rickard's surname of Greencloak to honour the man and has promised that he will secure Coulthard lands and ensure that my troops will work towards the security of the local area along with the guards in Novigrad and Lady Strenger's forces. He grinned nastily when I spoke about Flotsam.

That took some time as he rather needed to be persuaded. I wanted someone that I could trust who had the military experience and would be able to think around the problem.

He didn't want the job and the matter got quite heated at various times.

"I won't be knighted sir, I won't do it. Catch me being a fucking knight and all of that lah de dah nonsense with a coat of arms and a fucking huge horse that I've got to ride on the back of. I won't do it Milord, I won't."

Carys and I exchanged glances and she rolled her eyes.

"Pat," I began, rubbing my eyes. "I need the best. I need someone I can trust. I need someone that knows me and knows my lands. I need someone that the people in those lands can trust. I need someone of the world. You tell me someone who would be better fitted for the job than you and I'll hire them right now."

"But sir…" He began, I might tease him but he was in real distress. "Surely someone from the South, you'll have a Nilfgaardian Captain General type who will command the guards and the soldiers that you're going to be raising."

"Yes, I will," I told him. "And I am still deciding who that is going to be. That man is going to be standing over me and behind me. His job is going to be to make sure that I don't rebel. I'm going to make sure that he and I have a good working relationship but I am under no illusions, he is there to keep an eye on us for people like Lord Voorhis.

"But he is a commander of the Ducal Forces. I need someone who commands my forces. The Coulthard forces. The men and…"

Carys cleared her throat pointedly.

"Yes, I was going to say women as well. The men and women of Coulthard and Angral. Angraal has its own troops now, but I need someone that's mine. I want you. That's it."

The big Skelligan collapsed into a chair in front of my desk. I rose and poured him a drink which he took and drank at a swallow.

I can do that kind of thing nowadays. My balance is coming back, even if my stamina is not.

"Let me ask you this instead?" I began. "If it's someone else. If I choose someone else that will be wearing Coulthard colours and throwing orders around, would you follow them? Or would you still want to follow Rickard? Would you resent them for not being Rickard?"

"That's a low fucking blow, m'lord."

"I know. But I know that you feel that way because I feel that way. Whoever is going to take Rickard's place, I am going to resent and hate for not being Rickard. I will think it's an insult to his memory. Which is another reason it has to be you."

He grinned, the Skelligan in him spotting the joke.

"Because it's alright if I insult his memory."

We both laughed as Carys rolled her eyes at both of us this time.

He sighed and it was at that moment that I knew I had him.

"I'll never be a proper Knight sir. Not a proper Knight."

"Are you telling me that Rickard was?"

"Sure he was," Padraig grunted. "He was a grand one at that. He never saw it though but the rest of us could."

Carys poured us all some more drinks.

"Lord Jon knighted him for the same reason that he himself was knighted," I said. I had spoken to Constable about Rickard. The older general had gotten a serious look on his face before he sighed.

"He should have died in battle," he told me and then he told me the story I told Padraig.

"'There are some men that are bigger than their station,' the Constable told me. 'Some men are born noble and should have been born in a pig-sty. They don't deserve anything more than that. They deserve to be the ones that society looks down on and casts aside. Then there are other men like Ricky, who were born to common whores on the streets of Vizima and then should have been born into the nobility. What a leader of men he could have been had he just been born noble'."

"Yeah, that sounds like the poor fucker." Padraig gazed into his drink morosely.

"He didn't think he was a proper Knight," I told the big Skelligan. "I don't think I'm a proper Duke. And between us, we're going to keep these people safe. Because if we don't, who else is going to do it?"

He laughed at that.

"What do we need to do to secure Coulthard lands?" I asked him. I started by listing some problems that I had seen and he came up with solutions to them. Then he suggested his own share of problems and said what needed to be done. Every so often he just needed prompting with the simple question of "What would Rickard do?" and then he would be off.

It was late when we were finished. I had notes, my secretary had notes and Carys had curled up on a blanket before going to sleep. When we were done with work, we drank heavily and talked about Rickard.

"There's going to be a monument," I said. "Big ass lump of stone somewhere and we're going to put the names on it. Not the men that died in the fighting, but those victims that didn't stand a chance. The people that were drinking at the feast, those that were sacrificed to feed the rituals and those that bled to make those augmented fuckers stronger. Rickard's name will be on that stone."

"Make it one amongst many," Padraig told me. "He would not want to stand out."

"No," I agreed. "No, he would not. I wanted to have him remembered in the family crypt as he was a better brother than some of my brothers were but apparently, I'm not allowed."

Padraig just looked at me.

"He would want a hillside," he told me. "A hillside overlooking a little village or a road or something. In amongst some trees. He would not like a crypt or a grave site. I never heard of him wanting to be burned or anything. I think he liked the Elven way of doing it or the soldier's way. That his belongings would be shared out amongst his friends and that then we would get drunk and tell stories about him. He would want something peaceful."

"Choose a hillside," I told him. "I will have something done."

Padraig nodded and we lapsed into silence for a while.

"I think…" I began. "I think he was a great man."

Padraig chuckled.

"He would have hated to hear you say that."

"He would." I laughed in response.

"I agree though." Padraig didn't try to hide the tears on his face. "He used to say the same about you sometimes, when he'd been drinking."

He turned to me, the tear tracks standing out on his face.

"I agreed with him too."

I nodded acceptance of that.

"I miss him," I said, staring out over the rise to the campfires of the castle workers.

By the time we were done hashing things out, we also agreed that Carys would also be knighted. It is not a completely foreign or alien process to knight either Elves or women, but it is bound to have some people protesting it. I'm kind of looking forward to those protests, to be honest, but Padraig, now Sir Padraig, pointed out that the commander of a Duke's personal guard was nearly always a knight of some kind and as she was the best person for the job, then I needed to knight her.

I don't think that he was threatening to resign his own posting if she didn't get the nod but I was happy to do it. I think Carys enjoyed the small ceremony that we did. She rolled her eyes through the entire thing and told us both in detail just what she thought of this "foolish D'hoine ceremony" but I think she was pleased. She was certainly pleased with the sword that I presented her from Eibear Hattori's forge.

That had taken some work to arrange. He had come to measure her, pretending to be a tailor to get all of the points correct for her new uniform and all of the dresses that she would need to wear now that she was married to a knight of the realm. She had looked a bit confused about how detailed his inspection of her dominant hand was but she had accepted it without comment.

Her look of surprised delight could not be faked though and Padraig promises me that she was surprised. So Sir Carys of the Pontar Valley is now the commander of my personal guard. I told her that she is allowed to hand-choose two dozen people to protect me and that she can protect me according to her own remit on the understanding that she doesn't interfere with my own duties, the duties of her husband and so that the protection can fade into the background when matters of state require privacy.

The look of careful consideration on her face was…

Terrifying. The word was terrifying.

I have also declared that Father Anchor will remain with me as my confessor. He will not be my religious advisor but he will remain my confessor. He insisted on that distinction because he wanted the separation.

"The differences are important," he told me when he had recovered from his shock at the elevation. "As your confessor, my responsibility is for the status of your soul and your spiritual well-being. I cannot be responsible for decisions that will be made regarding church policy and balancing that with trade and military requirements. Nor the balance needed between what the Priestesses of Melitele might need and declare as well as the priesthoods of Kreve and the Great Sun. That matter needs to be between you and them. Not you and me."

I accepted his point as well as took on the fact that my council was getting bigger every time I thought about it. So now I needed advisors from most of the great religions on the continent? That was… staggering.

Tulip took Father Anchor's promotion in stride and kind of nodded as though it was what he deserved. She has fitted in with the local community well and has formed a firm friendship with Laurelen and Carys which I am pleased about.

It remains to be seen what the greater religious community will think about that appointment but I like Father Anchor. He keeps me honest, keeping my feet to the coals when I am in danger of disappearing up my own ass. His interpretations of scripture are traditionalist enough that I find that I like them. He is kind, caring and loving of his wife and those are the kinds of things that I need when it comes to religious guidance.

So… back to the reason I'm here in the first place.

And no, I still haven't heard back from Kerrass.

As I say, there was a good week while the rebellion did nothing but dig in, literally and figuratively. Events in the regency court in Tretogor were confused. The court was woefully undermanned as many dignitaries had been coming south for the wedding, or were actively involved in the rebellion themselves, urging the Queen and others to openly support the rebellion in the name of the dead King.

In Vizima, The Empress convened her military court and locked herself in Queen Anais' study. The study that had once been used by Foltest and later used by the Emperor was the most secure building in the Temerian royal palace and as such, no one was allowed in there. Food and drink were left at the door before one of the Imperial Guard would open the door, thank the servant and take the food in.

Many people were in and out of that room at various stages. Lord Helfdan, as the Admiral of the Imperial and Skelligan fleets. Queen Cerys, Queen Anais, Lords Natalis and Roche from Temeria were also in there. I understand that Lady Eilhart and Yennefer were in the room at various stages. Knight Commander Syanna and Lady Vivienne de Launfal were also there. Of course, Lord Voorhis was there as well as the general of the Imperial Guard and the General of the sixth Nilfgaardian army who was bottling up Cidaris and Vergen from the South.

There were plenty of people coming and going so that list is far from exhaustive. It is also true to say that the Empress regularly came out to receive messages and news of what was going on in the Pontar region around Coulthard Castle and many of those declarations were made public so that the court could be aware of what was happening. There were many public and private debates about what the Imperial, Temerian and Skelligan responses should be as they were the three powers that could feasibly make a response and there were many orders given about troop movements.

Regiments were broken away, and Elements of the Sixth Imperial were broken off to travel North to scout things out and figure out what was actually going on. The Lodge of Sorceresses and the Council of Mages collaborated in scrying out what was happening in the countryside and the news was bleak. Not least because Ariadne, later aided by Laurelen, had done their jobs well and the movements of the countryside were well masked from scrying.

More and more of the rebels were marshalling in and around the Pontar valley itself. Troops were being disembarked in Novigrad where they were being equipped with arms and equipment that were liberated/confiscated from the shops and locals. It is also worth stating that there were quite a large number of men who joined up with the rebel forces because their food had been confiscated and they needed to be fed. They also wanted to prevent their families from being victimised as traitors.

There is no real way of telling which men were real rebels and which were there just to ensure that they remained safe. Short of having a mage go down the line and read everyone's mind which would be impossibly expensive and time-consuming.

The standing armed forces of the rebellions, which you can take to be the professional soldiers and guards from the rebellious lords, focused on the two major crossing points. The one south of Novigrad proper and at Oxenfurt. Oxenfurt was garrisoned and work had begun to turn the university into a proper fortress.

One of the amusing things that came out was that a lot of people hated Emma for being Emma. I mean they claimed that it was because of her business practises and so on, but most of them just resented her for being…

That's an old argument.

But while they hated her, they could not deny that a lot of the work that she had done and financed in the city actually made their lives a lot easier. The proper extensions of the docks meant that building materials and other supplies could be offloaded all the easier. So they hated it but they could not destroy it as they wanted it.

So they fortified those two crossing points and had cavalry patrols roving up and down the river ready for any kind of amphibious action that would carry troops across the water.

In the meantime, Coulthard castle was churning out the altered, augmented soldiers.

"Dumber than pig dribble," Sir Aleksi called them. "But by the Flame, those bastards could fight."

He looked sad after he told me that.

"But if someone had told me how your brother made them, I would have told him where he could stick his damn rebellion before I tried to stick my sword in him."

There is not much that's provable about that process and I can't add much to it. Sir Aleksy only found out about it all later when he was told what was going on. He didn't believe it at first and I'm told that it was this that broke him later.

What we know is that one of the wagons that came with Sam's troops from Kalayn lands contained the apparatus that he used to convert a normal living soldier into the huge grotesquely muscled, lightning-fast warriors that they became. None of them survived to see the end of the rebellion but numerous reports suggest that one of the effects of the process removed the imagination of those men as well as their abilities towards creative and critical thinking. They could still be intelligent but there was just something that wasn't quite right about them.

We know that at first, they were volunteers that went into the process but later as the situation became more desperate for the rebels, men were being rounded up and taken into the basement.

We also know that the process had started since long before the rebellion was formally declared. So once again, I have asked that the Witchers make another trip up to Kalayn lands to check the castle out and make sure that there won't be any surprises waiting for… whoever it is that ends up living there and what they end up doing.

]I have yet to decide on that matter. I mean… they are my lands now and my castle. At some point, I shall have to go. I don't want to live there though, or sleep in that castle again. My memories of those places have since twisted in my head so that they are now something that they were not previously.

As to what was happening in Coulthard Castle itself?

I asked for, and received, Laurelen's permission to interview her. She did not have much to offer that was contrary to what I had already written. She was permitted in no meetings and she knew that Emma was too busy with her work of saving everyone and everything to pay much attention to that. Not to mention that any interview of my sister would be an arduous process for everyone involved.

But here it is. Life in Coulthard Castle at the beginning of the rebellion from another perspective.

I am ashamed to say, ashamed to admit, that they broke me at the first pass.

I folded like freshly cleaned laundry. All they had to do was to put some Dimertium on my wrists and hold a blade to my throat while telling me about all of the things that they were going to do to your sister and me and I'm afraid that was it. I was blubbering and begging for mercy.

I've fought in two wars exchanging spell-fire with my opposite numbers in Nilfgaard. I was not on Sodden Hill as my expertise was not all that relevant. I mean, you can't be a mage and not know how to throw a lightning bolt or a fireball, but at the same time, my specialities are in healing and… we would call it utility magic. So I served with the surgeons with Marti in that first war. In the second I fought. I had learned the necessary skills and I was better at fighting having seen how much my lack of knowledge left me disadvantaged.

I hid beneath Novigrad and when it came time to make our exit I led one of the groups from our hiding places to the docks and afterwards, when I found I could not go with the others, I travelled, by myself to come and find your sister.

And all the time I did not know whether she returned my feelings or what was going to happen. And then… After that, there was the fear of discovery. There was the glorious moment where Emma saw me, recognised me and I knew that she felt the same way… After the first moment that I kissed her and then… Then came the fear of discovery. Your Father and his general disapproval of everything. Your Mother and her religious longings. Your older brothers, Edmund with his… And Mark with his equal religious fervour. Not only that but in the knowledge that if I was found then then I could bring down your entire family. Including the woman that I love.

I was afraid of that for so long. I'm still afraid of that even now. Even when the Empress of the continent knows and has ordered that it is alright for me to love her. But there was always that fear and I stood up to it. I faced it and I did not back down.

So I had thought that I was not without courage, but at that moment, the thought of your sister's pain and… the sheer helplessness of the Dimertium…

I just couldn't face it. I couldn't…

I'm sorry. There are many more apologies left in me but here is another one. I am sorry. I failed all of you.

Emma was harder than me, but not by much. Similar to what happened with you, Ariadne was ordered to cause me pain and although Emma herself had already been through some stuff, they took me to see her… it must have been the morning after the Equinox. She was in chains, tied to a wall and her dress was torn and her face was bloody. She promises me that they didn't do… anything to her other than beat her a bit… her words there. But they took me in and again, all they had to do was take a red hot poker and push it into my arm and I was screaming. Emma was screaming and…

Emma folded as well.

Emma was taken to the study where she got to work doing… well… Sam told her to dissolve the company to finance the war effort and now we know that she was doing precisely the opposite. I was so proud of her when I found out that that's what she had been doing.

Just as I'm so proud of you now.

But after that, I was permitted to see her once a day in the morning. I would be taken from my room…

Yes, sorry Freddie, but I had a room of my own, kind of tells you just how completely they broke me.

… and they would take me to the study where I would often find Emma already at work in the clothes that she had been wearing the day before. If we were lucky we would be able to tell each other that everything was alright and that we would have a quick hug.

But she started retreating into her own head that time when your brother brought you into the room. I think that was the moment that broke her. I mean, we can guess and whatever but that was brutal.

No, don't blame yourself, or Ariadne, blame Sam. He did it. He ordered those things to be done and it was your pain, and mine that broke your sister.

And she will recover.

She will Freddie, I promise.

But I'm supposed to be telling you what life was like in the castle and what happened. I know that you spent your time moving between your cell and your brother's study. But I had more free rein. I was followed by a guard who had orders to kill me at any moment if I started to act up but I was well shackled by this point. Your survival and Emma's survival meant that they had me and I think that they knew it too. But it was a reminder, a constant reminder of what was happening.

I didn't see your brother and Ella the Elf descend into the basement. I had heard that among the first things that were ordered was the emptying of the lower basements. Emma had taken me down there once and I remember vast caverns of rooms where the tables, chairs and assorted detritus were arranged. We had hoped that we could find a place to retreat to down there, but it was just… kind of dusty and a bit sad. The general feel of the place meant that it soon quenched our ardour and as a result, we never went down there again.

We used her rooms when we thought we could get away with it and there is many a meadow or wooded glade near the castle that saw things that would make you blush.

Just like you are doing now in fact.

But they cleared the place out so that in the early hours of the morning. After the tables and chairs and Goddess only knows what else was cleared out of there. Ella and your brother took some things from one of the wagons that had been brought into the castle courtyard and descended into the depths.

As I say, I didn't see it myself but I was told that your brother had to be carried out of that room. That he looked pale, skeletal even. That you could see the veins standing out against his skin. That he was gasping for breath and sweating profusely.

I wish I could tell you to speak to the person who saw that, but she died later. One amongst the many I'm afraid.

But I was brought to see to him. I was already broken and I had not slept or eaten anything since the feast at that time so my sense of time was a little hazy. This will have been shortly after it all went bad. Your brother was suffering from Massive blood loss.

I asked why Ariadne couldn't help him and Kristoff told me that she was otherwise engaged.

I came to hate that metallic, echoing voice of Kristoff. You could hear it in the depths of that helm that he wore. Low and rumbling, echoing off the metal so that it sets your teeth on edge.

It was clear what was wrong with your brother and there is little that magic can do in that case. But yes, massive blood loss. He had lost so much blood that I didn't know how he could possibly still be alive. I healed the damage that I could, on pain of Emma's well-being and then I told him how to recover the blood that he had lost. I told him that I could mix him a tonic to help but he waved that away telling me that Ella was twice the alchemist that I was.

Which was true by the way. It hurts to say it now, but it was true.

I hated that Elven bitch. You gave her every opportunity to redeem herself after the North. So did Chireadean and yet she was still here. Without her, none of your brother's plans could have come to fruition. He would not have survived the process if she had refused to help, but she did it anyway. I hate her so much that I worry that I'm going to look at other Elves and judge them in the same way that I am clearly judging her. I know that at the end, she helped you escape and it is true that without her, you would not have been able to help Kerrass slay your brother but to me?

Too little too late.

I hated that Elven Bitch and come to that, I hate her still.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry but you didn't see what she did. You didn't hear it. Does one act of redemption counter all of that evil? Does the fact that she has been tortured for her knowledge and her skill for decades, if not longer excuse her?

I don't know. All I know is that I saw her…

Goddess Freddie but they killed so many people.

Your brother gave the orders but she worked the machines. He would just stand there, even if he turned up at all and all the while, people would go into that room and corpses would come out. All to fuel that damn…

I'm sorry.

They kept the captives in pens. They built cages out in the courtyards. The more important captives were given individual rooms or cells. They would be the men or women that might have been usable as hostages or might have been able to earn the rebellion some kind of ransom or something. There were also some VIPs that came. Men and women that Sam had asked for. Old friends and lovers that he had liked or thought needed to be protected or something. But I didn't know them and I rather hated them too. I read your account of how Bronwen died and about how she tried to kill your brother at the last.

And I hate myself for hating her. She was biding her time, looking for the out and at the last, when she knew she was there to die, she acted and it still killed her.

There is so much hate.

Far too much of it.

During that first day, workers were hammering away. Hammering at metal and wood. You could hear it throughout the castle. I think you were still unconscious or something but there was just that constant noise. That and people shouting.

There was the sound of whips.

But then they started to bring in the captives. People from the local villages and then from further afield. Not just humans but all races. I saw Elves… So many Elves on Coulthard lands now. So many since your efforts in the North that kicked Emma into action. Elves, dwarves, we have halfling farmers now that look after the crops. They were there.

All ages too, old, young.

Children Freddie. Children.

They herded them into basements, offices, and guest rooms and eventually, when there was not enough room then, they herded them into cages and enclosures in the castle courtyards as well.

They fed them and fed them well. They wanted their victims to be healthy.

Full of blood.

Then they started to feed them into the machines. Not just machines, the machines were just a means to an end. That end was extracting as much blood from those prisoners as they could. The rituals were fuelled by blood and pain. I don't know what the formula was but it was something like three or four dead people to every man that they enhanced into horrific proportions. Some of them even got bigger than that. Men like Kristoff who is… was sorry… all but fused into his armour. Not needing to eat or sleep or do any of the things that a man… a real man would need to do to survive. That process was harder and fewer people survived that. I think that there were about a dozen of those but I can't be sure.

I didn't count.

I've not seen anything like it. I hear stories about what it was like in the prisoner pens in Novigrad. When the witch hunters were herding together everyone had even a hint of magical talent. It sounds the same. But every so often, I wonder if your brother's cages were worse.

Why?

Because in the cages of the Eternal Flame, all of them knew that sooner or later a Witch-Hunter was going to come down those stairs and take them to the place of their execution.

In Coulthard castle, your Brother gave them hope.

If they made themselves useful. If they dug the ditches or they cooked the food or they built the wall, worked the forges, did good work, cleaned up the shit, fetched and carried and…

And yes. When they gave themselves to their captors appreciatively. Then they might survive.

But even then, they were not safe. The rituals still needed feeding. The potions that Ella was brewing to help fortify your brother still needed their raw materials and eventually, there would be an urgent need and the attendants… I think you called them "critics" who would just turn up and grab the nearest captive and cart them off screaming that they had been promised that they would survive.

I would listen to that. I would listen to the awful screams that would come up the stairs that led down to the basements. I would hear them and I could feel, even through the dimertium that shackled me, I could feel the magic of the ritual growing. I could FEEL it, Freddie.

Day after day I watched as people were taken down into the basement and there they were killed. They died horribly and another heavily muscled… thing would emerge. I won't call them men because no man would do the things that they did.

No real man anyway.

Day after day I watched it happen and I did nothing to stop it.

What could I have done? I don't know. Something. ANYTHING but I did nothing. I told myself that I was waiting for the opportune moment. I told myself that if I acted out then they would hurt or kill Emma but that was a lie and we both know it.

Sam needed Emma to generate the wealth that he needed. Without her, the trading company was just so much nonsense. I was the guarantee against HER good behaviour, not the other way round and if I was dead, she could do anything she wanted.

I am so proud of her for what she did.

And you fought. You fought too and I did nothing.

Nothing.

I was the castle Doctor. When soldiers or the more important hostages hurt themselves or got sick as part of the captivity. Some of them were still hurt from that first night and I was busiest after that. But gradually it was you and the things that they did to you. You and your scribe. Johann.

And that was it. That was what life was like In Coulthard Castle. Knowing that I was only there to keep Emma at her desk. Knowing that if I had any courage at all I would have ended my own existence so that she would have been free to do the same. I could have done what you did and attacked my guards. Even when I knew that they would probably prevent me from going too far. I could have done something though. I could have done something.

I know why I didn't, but I could have done something.

Some of those people, some of those captives hated me. They saw me working for the enemy and they called me a traitor and collaborator and worse. They were right, Freddie. They were right and now I'm a peer of the realm.

Doesn't seem fair.

She wept for a long time after that. I am more reliable now when I try to climb to my feet from a kneeling position so I held her as she sobbed and then we talked for a long time before I let her go back to Novigrad where Emma is waiting for her.

I told her that it was ok and that we all did what we had to do to survive. I told her that I felt that I could have done more too and that I hated myself for losing my temper. That if I had been able to restrain myself then I would have been stronger when the time came to fight back. I told her that I bitterly regretted not going with Padraig, Carys and Chireadean and that then I could have gone back to the castle in a moment of triumph. I told her all of those things and I meant them.

It's true. All of it.

But at that moment, I could not have done anything other than what I have done.

It is also easy to tell ourselves things that we could have done with the benefit of hindsight. We can easily see things that we did that could have gone better. Yes, I could have gone with Carys and the rest, but if I had done that, would I have been more easily tracked by our enemies? It's almost certain that Ariadne found me. In doing so would it have meant that in going with the others, she would still have found me and therefore the others too?

Would I have been more closely guarded in the basement if I had been healthy? And therefore would I have been unable to break free? Would Sam have neutralised me, rather than dismissing me so that I could sneak up behind him and give Kerrass the opening that he needed to finish the thing?

There is no knowing. But I do know the same self-loathing that Laurelen talks about. My self-loathing comes from the fact that I should have seen Sam for who he really was. I should have listened to all of the people that told me about him over time. There are so many of them and I ignored all of them. I refused to see what was right in front of my eyes.

For other reasons, I recently reread the chapters regarding meeting Kerrass' Goddess, the Morrigan and she told me that this was my weakness. In fact, as I look back on my travels, I wonder why I did not see it before. So many people have been telling me that Sam was a bad man but I refused to see it. I refused to listen and this is what he did.

Why? Because he was my brother.

I remembered the little boy who I had had to help with his poetry studies.

And even that turned out to be a lie.

I will never stop hating myself for that mistake.

Time for another break I think.

.

So the two sides in the rebellion came apart from each other.

At one point during our travels, I think it was in our first year travelling together, long before friendship had been achieved, sometime after Tom the Troll but long before Amber's crossing. We travelled along the road with a mercenary. He and Kerrass seemed to have something of an understanding and it was nice to have someone else to talk to. He made some observations about combat. I'm paraphrasing here because I didn't entirely believe him at the time and I didn't write it down. I even forgot about that man until these events reminded me of him.

He said that in combat, you can always tell the people who are more experienced by how close they stay to a fight.

"You watch them. Next tavern brawl you see, you watch 'em. The first stage of a fight is when people run away from each other. It all kicks off, a glass is thrown, a tray is kicked over, a beer is thrown and there might be a first shove or a punch thrown. Then the combatants back away from each other. It's only a short thing but they back away from each other. Those that know what they're doing might lift their fists to protect their heads but they sort of dance away from each other.

"The less charitable might suggest that they're doing this so that their friends can get in the way and try to stop the fight and they can claim that they were going to properly beat the senses out of the other guy if their mates hadn't stopped them. But it takes some time to get yourself into a proper mindset to fight.

"It takes time to psych yourself up.

"Experienced men? Well, they stay close to you. They follow you and stay eye to eye. They know that when the fists and kicks and things start flying, you need to stay inside the range.

"It's the same with armies. There might be an early couple of skirmishes where one side or the other might look victorious. Then both sides stop and wait to see what the other is going to do. Scouts go out and watch. One side might dig in because both sides are secretly hoping that the other side is going to attack their defensive position. There is a pause and then…

"Some fucker on a big horse gives a little wave and a horn sounds and then they come together."

I haven't thought about that mercenary for years. I think he was Skelligan originally because I can hear his words in that accent.

But that's certainly what the two sides of this rebellion did.

The Imperials were going to be the attackers. They needed to because to do otherwise was to look weak. The rebellion knew that they were outnumbered but they had an incredible defensive position and every day that they existed was a victory over the Imperials and showed the continent that the Imperials were not invulnerable.

And someone broke.

His name was Count Henri Bernier of Temeria. I can name him with impunity because he died and was posthumously tried for treason. That treason was a matter of record and his actions led to the first battle of the Pontar crossing and the utter defeat of Temerian forces.

Count Bernier was one of those lords that tried to leverage control over Temeria in the aftermath of King Foltest's death. For the uninitiated, after Foltest was assassinated there was a period of time where, given the nature of the succession, Temeria had no real ruler. Constable Natalis did his best to keep control and ready the Kingdom for the attack that he was pretty sure was coming.

Oh, if only he could have known the truth.

His main opponents in all of this were the various Lords. Barons, Counts, Viscounts and the like. They all got together and started to shout about who had the better claim and as always happens when this kind of thing takes place, people started drawing swords and promising violence on the poor people that only had the misfortune to be born in the wrong place.

All the while, Lady La Valette was trying to exert her will over the situation and have one of her children placed on the throne with herself and her eldest son to be placed on the council as some form of regent.

It was a brief and bloody time in Temeria and it is worth remembering that the younger of the two La Valette children did not survive it.

The entire thing didn't have time to explode into full-on civil war because the treachery of the then Lodge of Sorceresses was brought to light and Nilfgaard invaded. Before thinking that this was all for the best though, that entire process is also why Temeria posed absolutely no obstacle to the invading forces.

Count Bernier was neither a young man whose military ambitions were stymied by the peace or all the civil unrest of the succession, nor was he an old man that was trying to take Temeria back to some kind of, half-remembered glory days of his youth or his grandparents' times. He was a man of middle age who had served in all three of the continental wars with a certain amount of heroism, if not any kind of sound military sense.

In the first war, he served at the battlefield of Sodden Hill and is reported to have led at least one charge into the hearts of the enemy where he survived by some miracle. He also fought at Brenna in a slightly more senior position and there are numerous accounts of him riding to and from behind the lines, and in front of the lines, exhorting the infantry onto further feats of heroism.

Witnesses declare that those shouts were quite charismatic to listen to, even if the unfair noticed that he didn't actually take any time to stand in the ranks with the men. I know this to be unfair because, again, he did lead divisions of the Temerian Knights in some of their charges and as such, bears a certain amount of the responsibility for driving the enemy off on that particularly unpleasant day.

However, through all of that, he didn't seem to be too much of a favourite of King Foltest. There might be any number of reasons for that, not least would be the suggestion that he was quite a devout man and as such, resented the King's lack of Piety. There is also a suggestion that he had something of a crush on Lady Merigold and was resentful of the fact that, at the time she was sharing her bed with a "filthy mutant freak" in the personage of Lord Geralt.

It is also entirely possible, although again, cannot be proven, that although he himself was married with several children, one of his sons was of marriageable age of then Princess Adda but she amused herself by spurning the son and so… angered the Father.

Whichever is true, he fell out of favour at court. He did not join those others that tried to defend La Valette castle against Foltest, nor did he send any troops to help with Foltest's "dynastic adventures." He was sulking in his home castle when Nilfgaard invaded and he led his troops away and to safety. Theirs was not a big enough force to warrant hunting down and destroying, but at the same time, it was a significant force.

After the peace was signed and Queen Adda ascended the throne with her regency council, Count Bernier's surviving forces provided a significant backbone of the Temerian armed forces. He made a big, courtly, public, magnanimous gesture when he tried to make them a "gift" to the young Queen.

Who told him that it was no gift to render unto his Queen, that which was owed.

This was one of the earliest incidents that are used to demonstrate the steel that runs down the backbone of Queen Anais.

He joined the political factions of Temeria and was one of the largest, more militant ones. He would cite his military experience and his success record as reasons why he should be promoted and put in charge of the Temerian soldiery. He was one of those kinds of men that would often point out the common birth of Lords Natalis and Roche and would question their rights and their abilities to sit on the Regency council in the places that they occupied. As a result, he was extremely popular amongst the old money, and military types while being vastly unpopular amongst the new blood, younger family types that supported Queen Anais as some kind of semi-religious, romantic figure.

When the Rebellion happened and those first messages came south, letting everyone know about what was happening, it would seem that he rather thought that his time had finally come.

While the Empress was gathering all of her advisors into one room to decide what to do, it would seem that Count Bernier was rather offended that he wasn't invited because he was a renowned military man and blah blah blah.

There was even some concern at one point as to whether or not the Empress was actually going to do anything. The answer to that was obviously "Of course, she's going to do something". Empires don't survive if anyone thinks that they can just rebel and decide to not be in the Empire any more. The reason that he wasn't invited was that the chamber contained those rarified figures as the Commander in Chief of the Temerian Military, and second, and the head of Temerian Intelligence. Along with the Admiral of the Imperial Navy who was in the area to do with the wedding, the head of Imperial Intelligence and the Empress' chief Military advisor a Lord General Franz Martinand. The Queen of Skellige came later.

So it wasn't that he wasn't invited, it was just that things were in the very early planning stages and as such, men of his rank were not yet needed.

So he determined that he was going to take matters into his own hands. We can't prove it but it also seems likely that he was also having ideas about proving himself to the Queen, taking more land for Temeria and all of the stuff that came later. He was trying to get a jumping head start as there were already whispers going on about what the rebellion could mean for the future of Temeria and whether those lands that had been caught up in the rebellion could be taken for Temeria. I would imagine that Count Bernier told himself "Fortune favours the bold" and he acted.

He gathered a few like-minded friends along with their men and started the invasion early. The marshalling of his troops happened quickly as he was local and no one thought that this was unusual as everyone was marshalling. He managed to put together a sizeable force from the people within his little political and military faction and marched North to attack the trade crossing South of Novigrad.

Where he got absolutely murdered.

I am fortunate in the account of that battle because my friend Aleksy was part of that battle and watched as the Temerian Forces got destroyed

Oh, Frederick old boy, it was absolutely gorgeous. I've fought in a number of actions and battles before this one but I struggle to think of one that went quite as well as that one did.

We knew he was coming of course. We had scouts out and we could see the signs of his travels. We had scouts and spies and informants on the other side of the river and as soon as his force started to gather and march forward we knew that he was coming and we knew where he was going.

The only piece of sense that he showed was that he came at the crossing rather than trying to attack Oxenfurt. Your brother's forces commanded there and the bridge crossing was much narrower so every inch of that bridge was covered by arrows, crossbow bolts and siege weapons. Even on approach, you would be lashed about with rocks, boulders and all of the other horrors that could be concocted. And that was before you got to the walls and the gates where the horror would have just continued.

The trade crossing is thicker, wider and has cover. The opposing banks are no place to site war engines. And it would mean that he wouldn't be caught up in a lengthy siege. So he attacked in the right place. If he took the crossing, then he could have gone anywhere.

But we knew where he was. We were still cautious, we made sure that there wasn't another branch of an army heading towards Oxenfurt or using his attack as a shield so that they could build a bridge or row across in boats, but it was soon clear that his attack was the only attack that was coming.

So we all rode there, formed up ourselves and watched as he ordered his army on the opposite bank and then they all just stood there in our mutual defensive deployments and watched.

I don't know what he was playing at but it looked to me as though he was waiting for us to attack him. So we waited and he waited and then it started to get dark. We lit torches and things to make sure that he wasn't going to try and get across at night which would have been dicey anyway, but we were not so confident that he knew that. So we waited for a little bit more, set some watches and then waited for dawn, quietly laughing at the stupid fool as his army mouldered in the late autumn rains.

I know that you're not a fan of our late king, Old Cock, but one thing that even you have to agree on is that he was a military genius. Defending on our bank, we had a higher, better-drained bank, but on the Southern Shore, you were waiting in Velen. In the swamp. He was there for a couple of days and I do not doubt that that was enough time for the swamp smell and the insects to start getting into everyone's armour and make it all unpleasant.

I don't know about the politics of the situation, but it was inevitable that he was going to have to attack.

And attack he did. As textbook a thing as ever I have seen. He led his men into an attack, infantry first to take the crossing, form a beachhead and then he would follow with his knights to clear the space. He was Temerian so he had the same weakness that those Toussaint folk of yours have where they are so very certain of the invulnerability of charging Knights that they don't see the issues involved with that.

We defended the crossing for a bit before falling back in good order. He saw it as a retreat and attacked hard, as we had expected and wanted. As he attacked, we rained arrows and bolts on him from our infantry but when he got to the other bank, our trap was ready for him. As he emerged, we charged and penned him in. All of our army was fighting against the relatively few numbers that he had managed to get across.

Slaughter isn't the word for it.

Aleksy shook his head and smiled at the memory for a long moment.

I don't know about your level of education on these kinds of things me old mucker, but there are some truths that we all know about.

A new army is like a newly forged blade. When you gather a group of men together and take them into combat, there is absolutely no way of knowing how they are going to react. The best-trained, best-equipped men… veterans of multiple combats can shatter and break. Just as how a smith is never sure until he takes the new blade and tests it against the training dummy. A new blade will either strike true or it will break.

It doesn't matter if the smith worked carefully, followed the techniques as passed down to him by his master from his master and so on to the first smiths. It doesn't matter if the ore was true and the tools were well made. There is always the danger that during the heat, or during the hammering, something will go wrong and the blade can shatter at the first blow.

And sometimes the opposite is true. A blade forged by an apprentice from the offcuts of the master can hold an edge for years of combat.

I mean… I am forced to admit that I don't know if any of that is true, old boy, but that's how it was taught to me by me tutor.

So there we were. A brand new rebellion. We had come together from all the different parts of Redania. Veterans stood alongside green troops. Some of us were in old armour and some of us were in makeshift armour that we had put together from pans and folded blankets. We had no idea how we were going to react to that first action. Absolutely no idea.

We were as prepared as we were going to be. We had the terrain for it, the morale for it and many of us had the training for it.

But until you fight your opponent, you just don't know. We were nervous. Of course, we were. We were nervous, completely unsure about what was going to happen.

And then, in the moment. Our enemy had arrived where we knew he was going to arrive. He had attacked in the only way that he could, in a way that we knew he was going to attack. And we defended according to our own tactics and strategy and it all came together in the way that it should.

Oh, my friend. It was glorious. That feeling of righteousness as we watched them trying to flee back over the crossing and we chased them. We knew that we could do it. We told ourselves that the Eternal Flame blessed our cause. We cheered for the King and for the Queen. For the first time in a long time, cries of "LONG LIVE RADOVID" were heard on a battlefield.

We had beaten them. We had shown the rest of the North that it could be done. That they had nothing to fear and that this was our moment. This was the moment that we could take it to our enemies and this was the proof that our cause was just.

I can still feel that feeling now if I close my eyes. Just for a moment. I can still hear those cries and those cheers echoing inside my helmet as I lifted my visor and held my own mace aloft with my voice joining those of my comrades.

Eternal Flame… it was beautiful.

It sounds so foolish here in my comfortable little cell in the Imperial Compound. But in the heat of that moment… my heart pounded for the joy of it.

The account is as accurate as an eye-witness account could be. It misses some of the detail of the matter but that is largely how the battle went.

The Temerian forces lined up on one side of the crossing, the rebellious forces lined up on the other side of the crossing and then they both waited. We can't get any accounts from the Temerian side because those men that might have been part of the thinking and command structure of that battle are either dead or desperately attempting to pretend that they had nothing to do with it, or that they were just following their feudal orders and had no choice but to obey.

Anyone that was in the command tent and didn't try and talk the entire matter out, shared Lord Bernier's guilt it would seem.

The assessment of the matter seems to be that Count Bernier was trying to make a name for himself and although he might have been a talented unit leader or company commander, he had no idea what to do when he was commanding a large-scale engagement. There is going to be more military assessment and analysis of what he did, but in short, he attacked a well-sited military defensive position from a place of weakness. The forces were roughly even, if not Bernier had the advantage, and if they had met on an open field then the action might have gone the other way, but the weakness of the terrain and the fact that Bernier had no choice other than to attack without his forces succumbing to sickness, meant that he was doomed before the first order was given.

I suspect that he was fortunate enough to have died on the field. He tried to be a "lead from the front" kind of military commander in the same way that Foltest had been. He led a charge across the river to find himself hemmed in on all sides. The Temerians couldn't break out and bring their cavalry to bear. All they could do was just stand there and withstand charge after charge from the Rebellious Redanians.

He died there, somewhere. His body was found, his armour crushed so that he fair exploded out of each end. His still recognisable breastplate was sent back to Vizima by way of the defeated army. The rebels refused to look after the Temerian wounded so the Temerians had to carry the wounded back with them.

Through the marshlands of Velen.

Baroness Strenger took in the wounded but refused to accept responsibility for any of the actions. She made the surviving nobles swear oaths that she would not be implicated and rode to Vizima with them to hand them over along with her own commanders and the Nilfgaardian scouting officers that were using Crow's Peak as a site for being able to watch the Rebels efforts.

The reception of this loss was received as though it was the disaster that it was back in Vizima.

Why was it such a disaster?

Aleksy's declaration is true. I have had the same lesson from a tutor about a new army being an armed force that needs to be properly forged. There are numerous military treatises on the subject of the first battle needing to result in a victory. That first victory is important. The first action is a vital one and cannot be discounted. Count Bernier had given the rebels their first victory. Sam had declared that his plan revolved around proving to the world that the Imperial war machine was not as invulnerable as everyone thought it was. That was a central part of his schemes. It was a piece of strategy that the Empress and her advisors had predicted and were working to make sure that they could overwhelm the rebellion with overwhelming force.

But Count Bernier was lacking in patience and as such, he ignored the orders that he had been given and rode out to meet the enemy. There is even analysis which suggests that he honestly expected the Rebellion to cross the river to attack him. Otherwise, why else would he have waited to attack?

"If you are going to attack, then fucking well get on with it." Was one military assessment.

But Bernier didn't. He waited. No more reinforcements were coming. There were no more men or supplies. He was never going to be stronger than he already was. But he waited.

More charitable accounts were suggesting that people deserted him. That he was expecting friends and colleagues to come and reinforce him but chickened out of it when it became clear that the political wind was turning against him. Men who stayed at court and listened to the assessment of Bernier and realised that to ride after him was political and literal suicide.

Or they were secret enemies that were hanging Bernier out to dry.

We will never know, because any that might have fallen into that category are now swearing that they had nothing to do with it and would never have discounted the Empress and the Queen's orders in such a way.

So regardless of anything else, Bernier had he survived, was in real danger when he would have returned. But that wasn't the thing that really caused him to be destroyed…

The thing that tipped him over the edge from being a man who would have been exiled, fined and otherwise punished, to be the man whose wife and children were promptly arrested and executed….

His wife was beheaded, and his eldest son who had followed his father in the adventure had been one of those that had returned, was tortured and had his tongue pulled out before he was locked in a cage to die of exposure. His younger son was still on his family's lands and was arrested before a merciful Queen Anais decided that he would be beheaded.

I understand that some other sons died in the earlier wars while his two daughters were married to Bernier's cronies. As they are legally no longer his daughters I understand that they will survive, but they and their husbands will be watched closely.

The line of Bernier is to be expunged, his medals and belongings will be sold and I understand that his lands will be divided up between more loyal lords.

There was briefly an argument to say that his lands should be added to lands that I would be overseeing but they are in the middle of Temeria which would make things problematic.

But that thing that turned him into a man guilty of treason was that his forces carried Nilfgaardian colours. Meaning that they marched on behalf of the Empress.

Again, I am trying really hard to be charitable to what was happening here but the fact that this action almost certainly made my rescue and the destruction of the rebellion either delayed, or certainly more difficult, makes that really hard.

But I am a historian and it is my duty to…

Fuck it.

People are trying to say that it was a tactic. That it was an attempt to intimidate the enemy into falling back and surrendering before it was all over. If this was the case I can easily imagine the officers and Knights of the army congratulating each other and telling themselves that they were being very clever.

But according to Aleksy, all that meant was that to the rebels, they had fought the Imperials and won. Which meant, in turn, that it had proven all of the former military of Redania right. If Radovid had been allowed to survive then Redania would have held the Pontar crossings against the Imperial Invaders. Meaning that those conspirators that arranged the death of Radovid were traitors looking to secure their own power, rather than men and women who were trying to end a dangerous conflict before it took more lives.

My time in the castle as a prisoner becomes increasingly blurred and hazy in my memory. According to my doctors, this is only natural and the blame for this can be laid at the feet of many things. Not only the horrific events but also the malnutrition, the infections in my bloodstream and the pulsating magic in the air. But it seems to me that I remember a time when the conspirators were walking around with smug expressions. They were grinning at each other and smiling, laughing and joking.

I now wonder if this was the moment where all of that lines up. It would certainly track that this was the case.

So ends the account of the Battle of the Crossing. If there is any benefit to what happened there, it was that it made the Rebellion overconfident. But that is a small victory when it comes to the fact that so many good, decent men of Temeria lost their lives to the ambition of one overconfident Lord of Temeria.

I wasn't going to talk about this here. I didn't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it but, again, it's the kind of thing where I'm not sure that I can avoid talking about it.

Whether I want to or not, it is clear that my life is now a public one. I will never again be able to wander down the street for an ale in Oxenfurt and expect to be able to eat a Pork Bun on one of the benches outside and watch the pretty girls walk by.

I will never be able to stay in a quiet inn and enjoy a bowl of the common pot stew. I will never sleep outside, nor will I be able to slip into a place quietly and unobtrusively. I am an important man, a powerful man and with that, comes certain expectations and responsibilities. I am a public figure and so, these things are of interest.

I know this because many of you have written to me regarding the growing gulf between Kerrass and me. I have been told that I need to be patient and that Kerrass went through his own things in the aftermath of the Rebellion.

I agree.

I have been told that I need to be understanding and that I need to expect that Kerrass will come to me in his own time.

That is where you start to lose me. I have been waiting for Kerrass to come to me in his own time for months now. And in those times when we have previously been estranged, he has only come back because he had someone yell at him first.

He is my friend. Dearer to me than my brothers. More responsible for me being the man that I am today than my parents, my tutors and everything else in between put together. We have shared everything that two men can share except for women and only then because neither of our tastes ran in that direction.

Since I woke up in a surgeon's tent. Since I was captive in the cathedral on temple isle, a patient and later guest in the Rosemary & Thyme, lifted to power in Vizima and now a lord of Redania and the greater Nilfgaardian Empire a short ride away from Oxenfurt.

Ever since then, I have wanted two people.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted to sit and talk with my sister. I wanted, and still want, to bury my face in her shoulder and for the two of us to mourn our family and everything that has happened. That time will come when everything is rebuilt. I want to get drunk with friends and spend time that is not…

But I have wanted two people. One is the woman that I love, Ariadne. I want to see her smile, hear her laugh and I desperately, desperately want to hold her hand.

The other is Kerrass.

I needed my friend through all of that. I needed his strength so that I could lean on him, get his advice and borrow his strength. And I wanted to be there for him in return. That is friendship. I wanted to offer my advice. I wanted to make him laugh and help lift him out of his pits of despair and depression. I wanted to be there for my friend and I wanted him to be there for me. We have been there for each other through the darkest times and I needed my friend now as well.

And he wasn't there.

I had asked for him. I had written numerous times. I had sent messages and I was not alone in doing so. But he had gone into the wild. At first, he had been hunting the last of the feral vampires that were no longer in the control of Ariadne after she had been freed from Sam's influence. Then he was in the business of hunting down the Necrophages and corpse eaters that always accompany the armies as they travel this way and that. And then he had just… not been there.

Finally, with a certain amount of encouragement, or goading depending on your point of view, I had sent for Kerrass in my official capacity.

And finally, escorted by troops, all but a prisoner…

Kerrass came.

I was in a meeting at the time. And to be honest, I couldn't tell you what the meeting was for. After a while, I have found that all of these meetings that I am involved in can seem to be ever so important at the time. Real life and death kinds of crises and then, a day later, you struggle to remember what the meeting was about. I was managing to exert some strength by the simple virtue of the fact that I could not go to anyone when a meeting was required, people had to come to me.

There is a simple domination trick where people exert their power over you by making you go to them. I had been summoned, or invited, on several different occasions by several different men who were trying to exert influence over the new Duke. Suggesting that I could ride out to meet them and take part in activities for which I am obviously unsuited.

But my capacity as a well-known crippled man, despite my slow progress towards recovery, meant that this was impossible. And every time someone tried to do that kind of thing, it was recorded as an insult to me and there were various mechanisms by which my allies were taking the offending people to task.

I do not enjoy the process. I want to be friendly to everyone and make people happy. I also know that this is a quick route to being regarded as weak and as such, I need to be strong and gain their respect before I allow myself to be friendly.

But I was in one of those meetings. Probably discussing something like where the new watch towers were going to be built or which particular road was going to be repaired first. That kind of thing.

And then my secretary, the little Yukki-Onna approached me with a note. People never come in and tell me something, they always come in and hand me a note.

I read the note to say that Kerrass was outside. I nodded, thanked her and handed the paper back. I sometimes wonder what she does with all of the pieces of paper that used to have something written on them. Maybe she burns them.

I finished the meeting so that I didn't insult the people that I was speaking to and then when they had all left, I took a deep breath and nodded to the guard.

Kerrass pushed through the entrance to my pavilion and stood there.

It was an interesting moment. On the one hand, I was still so very pleased to see him alive. I still have a very vivid memory of the wet cracking sound that was made as Ariadne took hold of his head and twisted it to one side. I remember the red liquid leaking out of his mouth and the light fading from his eyes as he just lay there.

And here he was… alive.

For just a moment, my heart swelled. Tears returned to my eyes and my breath shortened. I do not weep as often now as the work has taken the place of all of that emotion. There are still moments, but they are becoming fewer. But suddenly as I sat behind my desk looking up at my dearest friend, all of that fear and hurt and joy and relief came rushing back. I wanted to leap to my feet and wrap my arms around him in a hug.

Or throttle him, the line between the two was not large.

He looked the same as he ever did. In his brown leather armour with the metal sewn into the more vulnerable areas. He was wearing his heavy weather coat and I could see the belts that crisscrossed his chest that were providing the basis for his sword harness and the potion bottles that he would be carrying with him.

I rather thought that his coat and armour might be on the newer side of things but I couldn't tell for certain. The first thought that crossed my mind was that he looked good.

And then I realised that he did not look good at all.

He looked… drawn. Paler, thinner and more hollow-eyed. He was… jittery. His eyes were everywhere, checking the corners of the pavilion and seeing if there was anyone else in the place with us. He was on edge and I could see his hands clenching and unclenching.

My first urge was to check with him that he was alright. I wanted to tell him to set down and take it easy. I wanted to demand to know why he hadn't been taking care of himself. I wanted to send for a Doctor, a Sorceress or someone with an alchemy kit so that we could arrange for him to take his potions and help him recover from whatever it was that he was going through.

I was worried for my friend. Glad to see him. Happy to see him and just wished that I could get up and show him that. My mouth opened with all of those emotions, along with those words of frustration and even anger that it had taken so long and my official order to get him to come at all. My mind fought with my heart to get the first words out before Kerrass beat me to it.

"Well?" he demanded. "You summoned me."

The cold fury in his voice rocked my back in my chair as though he had slapped me.

"Of all people," he hissed. "Of all people, of all of the lords of the land. You should know what that means to me. You summoned me as if I am some servant that is to be pushed around and ordered around to meet your whims and… whatever the fuck it is that you want."

I stared at him. I swear to the Eternal Flame that it was as though my Father was in the room and I felt as though I was about eight years old having to explain myself to someone who was raging at me unfairly.

"Well?" he demanded. "You summoned me so here I am. What is it that you would wish for, Oh Lord Freddie the magnificent? Do you want me to fetch you something to eat and drink? Would you like a fresh pillow for your back or would you like me to wipe your arse for you? I draw the line at sucking your dick for you but I suppose you might want me to summon some whore to see to your needs?"

The sheer shock of it all had driven me back into my seat.

"I…" I tried.

He put his hands on his hips and just stood there. Frustration and anger radiated out from him.

At the time I didn't see it. I couldn't register it and I still don't know for certain what was going on in his head. But I remember his eyes.

With the logic of distance and having talked it out with various people I can only say this.

Kerrass was angry, frustrated and hurt that I had summoned him to a place that he didn't want to go. There was hate in him.

But it looked as though his eyes were screaming. As though they were looking out of another man's body and desperately horrified at what they were seeing.

"For the Goddess' sake Freddie…." He began.

For a moment, a chill ran down my spine. The flames in the fire bowl that keep my pavilion warm in the spring rains seemed to roar up a little higher, glowing a little brighter and as they did so, I swear that the shadows lengthened.

"You of all people should know what it means to summon a Witcher," he raged, I don't think he noticed the fire. "You are not entitled to my time. You are not entitled to the sword or the work of a Witcher just because you are a Duke now. I go where I will. I work where I will and I will NOT bow to the whims of such as you. How dare you? I deserve better than this at your hands, you greedy, entitled little…"

From somewhere, I have no idea where my own fury was kindled.

"Fuck you," I told him and for all I know, not only was I yelling at Kerrass, but I was yelling at my Father too.

"Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. How dare I? How dare you? You arrogant piece of shit. You promised me Kerrass. You promised me that you would return and that we would talk. You promised me that you would come back and you never did. We are supposed to be friends and this is how you greet me?

"You promised that you were going to stand by me. You promised that you were going to be there for me. You told me you were going to come back Kerrass. Where the fuck have you been? Why didn't you come back?"

I swear that I heard a woman's voice laughing. "You tell the fucker," she said, laughing harshly.

"All I wanted was my friend," I told him. "That's all. All I wanted. But you fuck off. You ignore every message. You don't come and see me. You literally go in completely the other direction. You've been hunting fucking ghouls. Ghouls Kerrass. Soldiers can hunt ghouls if they're careful. Yes, the Vampires needed hunting. But they can be hunted by any fucking Witcher and there were several in the area. Whereas you could have been my friend. I needed my FRIEND Kerrass. Where the fuck were you?"

"Don't you speak to me like I'm some servant." He snarled at me. Angry enough that my secretary opened the flap that separated my area from hers and checked what was happening.

"I'M NOT SPEAKING TO YOU LIKE A SERVANT. I'M SPEAKING TO YOU LIKE A FRIEND THAT'S BEEN AN ASSHOLE." I screamed at him.

That seemed to rock him a bit.

"Flame Kerrass. I love you like a brother. I wanted you to stand next to me on my wedding day. Where were you? When everyone around me wants something I needed someone to rely on. I needed my friend. I needed you Kerrass where the fuck were you?"

"I do not answer to you." He said again. He fed it with his anger. "I go where I will, I do what I will and as I recall, you promised that you would do as you're told and not question…"

"That agreement was made between a lost little boy and a Witcher that was heartsick and dying. We were different people then Kerrass. That was before we were friends and have I ever, ever let you down? We both know that I haven't. I needed you Kerrass and you fuck off. You left me. You didn't come back. Where were you? You say that you deserve better from me. I DESERVE BETTER FROM YOU."

He had nothing to say about that. The feeling of his eyes screaming at me continued.

"When I was free, I sent word," I told him. "When I was recovering, I sent word. When my future was being decided, I sent word. When I was elevated, I sent word. I wanted you next to me Kerrass. This is not a reward, it is a duty and yes it comes with some perks along with the responsibilities and I wanted to share those things with my best friend and you stayed away. Sleeping Beauty sent for you, she loves you Kerrass and I know what happened because the messenger came into my tent and told me that you took the letter from the young woman that loves you and was telling you that she loved you and that she wanted to seduce you on my wedding night and see what the two of you would make of each other. You took that letter and you threw it on the fire."

He stared at me, his eyes boggling at me.

"WE NEEDED YOU KERRASS." I wanted to roar it but my voice cracked at the end. "We needed you and you turned your back on us. I need you. I need my friend. This is the hardest thing I'm ever going to do, possibly the most important thing I'm ever going to do and I wanted my friend next to me. I sent word to you that I needed you and you THREW IT IN MY FACE."

I realised that my face was wet and I wiped my face angrily.

"You're giving up Kerrass," I told him. "You're my friend, I love you and I care about you more than I care for myself and sometimes it is a friend's duty to say the unpleasant thing. You are burning your life down around you. Friends, loved ones. You're driving us all away and I don't know why. I can't make you tell me. But I deserve better from you than just being driven away, Kerrass. You say that you deserve better from me. I deserve better from you. You are giving up, the same way that you swore that you wouldn't and I will not stand for it. I won't let you do it Kerrass. I will not let you kill yourself.

"So yes. I summoned you. I need you and it is the only way I could get hold of you. Fuck you if you can't see that."

He stood there, staring down at me where I met his gaze.

I broke first and turned away wiping my sleeve across my face.

"Fuck." I muttered.

"I don't have to stay here and listen to this," he turned to leave.

"Yes, you do," I insisted, struggling to try and get to my feet, absolutely intending to go after him.

"No, I don't." He turned and snarled, his anger pushing me back. Once again, I thought I saw fangs. "No, I don't. You have summoned me, Lord, and unless you have a task for me or unless you intend to throw me in the dungeon I am going to leave. And if you try to take me to the dungeon, then I will fight. I notice that you don't trust me enough to have weapons with me in your august presence, Lord of ruins." He gave a parody of a bow.

Once again, I thought I was looking at someone else wearing my friend's face.

"I mean, honestly Freddie, I've seen better pigsties than that castle that you are supposed to live in. Your people are living in poverty and your lands are piss, shit and mud. You deserve to be left with the monsters and I would not stay here for one moment longer than I have to. I will leave you to your stinking, rotten, remains of tyranny so that you can Lord it over the ruins and the dead that you hold so dear over…"

"ENOUGH." I roared it. "Fine, if you want to drive me away then fine. You want a job, then I will give you a job. Find her for me Kerrass. You owe us both that much at least. Find her for me, come back and guide me to her. I will pay you whatever sum is reasonable and you can jam the money and our friendship up your ass as far as I'm concerned. Find her."

"You would find better whores…" He tried.

"Say no more words," I ordered him. "Say nothing more. Take the job and that job can be the last business between us. I will pay you and when we come back, there can either be a final parting or you can be my friend."

I stared at him for a long moment before I could no longer hold in a sob.

"I just want my friend back Kerrass," I told him. "My friend and my love. Come back Kerrass, let us help you and…"

"I don't need your help." He snarled. "I don't want your help. I survived for decades without you and I will survive decades more after you are dead and buried. I will find your bitch for you Lord Coulthard and then I will leave the two of you behind me."

"Who are you lying to Kerrass?" I asked him, but he was gone and I finished the thought by myself.

I have not heard from Kerrass since then. I still have word of him travelling this way and that way across my lands and in the neighbouring ones. He asks for signs of Ariadne's passing so he seems to be hunting for her in earnest.

I am now convinced that what I saw in him was his self-loathing coming back to the fore. I don't know why it has come back but as time passes, my sadness fades and my anger at him grows. We are all waiting for him to come back but I fear that this time he has gone too far.

I think he is deliberately trying to drive me away from him. Me and the others that love him. I don't know why. I am afraid. I think he is in the process of giving up and this time, he does not want my help.

I hope that he finds Ariadne first and that I get to see him again to talk to him properly.

I hope…

I hope for many things.