(A/N: Apologies if there are more mistakes than usual. Spell-checker doesn't seem to be working)

So Kerrass decided that he wanted to go to Brenna. I had absolutely no idea why at the time and it is entirely possible that I should have asked more questions as to what was going to happen there.

But I didn't. What I did was get kind of excited.

This is going to sound like I'm going off on a tangent, but I'm really not. I promise. Just stick with me for a little while and I promise that it will all make sense in a little while.

Oxenfurt University publishes a travel book of historical sites. It's a book written by historians where the historian goes to visit sites of particular historical interest and talks about the place, the culture and what it's like now as a contrast to what happened in the past at the time of the events that made the site historic. The contrast between the two is then used as a way of analyising the past in a new light.

It's a technique that was pioneered by a colleague of mine where he argued that to most people, history is something that you read about in books, or listen to lectures about in stuffy rooms delivered by equally stuffy old men. He suggested that there is no comparison between reading about a thing in a book to actually standing there, on the field of battle and walking around a little until you find a spent arrow, or a broken lance head.

Or someone's skull.

He made it sound more flowery than that.

He said that you learn more about history if you actually go to the castles and stand on the walls where those troops stood on the night before the siege. He argues that we have no idea what those early refugees had to live through when they first came to the continent and settled in the Pontar delta. Not until you go into the depths of cities like Temeria and Novigrad. Just at that juncture where Elven architecture starts having layers of human architecture placed on top of it. Just at that point, and you find a bit of grafitti. A phallic symbol or a suggestive and lewd illustration of someone's wife or mother.

He says that we, all of four to five hundred years in advance of those settlers landing, have no idea what it was like to build those ancient castles until we go and stand there. Put our hands on the stone and realise how vast those blocks are and try to imagine how they were hewn out of the countryside. How they were transported to this location before being put in that particular place in order to fulfill it's destony of being the base of a castle tower.

All of this before the dwarves taught us about pully systems, winches, water-wheels and all of the other wonders of modern engineering. And before humanity finally managed to harness the awesome and terrible power of the continent's magical power.

He is not wrong, to be fair to him and I hate him a little for that. The fact that I introduced him to the lady that is now his wife after she turned me down flat at a party is immaterial. As is the fact that he took a very scared, very naive and very immature young runaway nobleman's son and showed him a little bit about how the world works.

He calls it “living history” and it is gaining some traction among the younger members of the University's population. It is becoming an easier method of study as well given the fact that the Third Nilfgaardian invasion is getting further and further into the past now while Black armoured troops are becoming a more and more common sight on the road. All while also talking, increasingly, with more and more local accents. So it is becoming a much more viable option for young men and women to go travelling with a suitable escort in order to visit these sites and take in the atmosphere of the place. So the university has taken to publishing a book, or magazine if you prefer, entitled. “Historical sites of interest for the enterprising scholar.” I teased my friend for a long time over the title, telling him that it was far too long and far too clinical to properly gather interest. He laughed at me and told me that it was better than “A Scholar's travels with a Witcher”. A charge to which I was forced to agree if we're being honest with each other.

But what it is, is a series of short essays published by scholars and archaeologists who have visited the various historical sites around the world. Discussions about the old and ruined Manor house in Temeria where the Striga once roamed that is now a hospital. The Battlefield of White Orchard, the last real battle of the war before negotiations and the assassination of King Radovid brought things to a halt. This last made easier by the fact that the place is only a short ride from Vizima itself. The city of Vergen and King Henselt's long abandoned wooden fortress nearby. The sunken wreck of Demavend's flagship where the Kingslayer single-handedly assaulted the thing and ended his first King.

The list goes on and on.

But I have never written one of those guides until now.

My friend has, on occasion, got quite angry with me on the subject.

“You are one of the most famous scholars in the school,” He yelled at me fairly recently. “Certainly among those of us that are still young enough to consider ourselves “The new Generation.” Why do you avoid helping us in such a way?”

He was only slightly exaggerating. And he wasn't really that angry. He was trying to guilt trip me into doing some work for him. But the truth of the matter is that I don't really....

Witchers tend not to go to those sites of cinsiderable historical relevence. Why? Because someone has already been there and cleaned out the monsters, lifted the curses and done everything that needs to be done. So why would a Witcher go to that place. Why would a Witcher go to the ruined Manor of the Striga in Temeria. The Striga was cured a long time ago and now licks her wounds as the dowager Queen Regent of Redania while her children await their coming of age in order to ascend to their throne.

Apparently the manor house became interesting again recently when there were rumours of spirits in the area, but this turned out to be false.

But why would a Witcher go there?

Why would a Witcher go to the battlefield of White Orchard? The Necrophages have long been taught that there are no corpses left there to eat. All of them burnt or properly burried in stone crypts by the local folk of the village as is right and proper. A Witcher might go into the local chapel crypt. Or they might go up into the nearby hills to see if more Griffins have come down from the mountain, or gone to the local deserted village to see if the Wraith has come back. But the battlefield? Why bother. There is no work for a Witcher in any of the famous battlefields or landmarks. To find work, a Witcher needs to travel by side-roads and shepherd trails. On mud tracks and poacher's paths. That is how a Witcher finds beleagoured villages under the threat of monsters torn from the nightmares of the local people.

It is true, sometimes there are military contracts to be had. But those contracts are nearly always accompanied by a cavalry escort with the invite and an official summons to “discuss certain matters” nowadays. Both things that are unlikely to provoke a Witcher's confidence.

But then Kerrass declared that we were going to Brenna. We went, and for a while, the two of us camped in the battlefield. I made some notes and eventually, much to my friend's joy, I sent an article to my colleague at the university and told him that if it was useful, that he could publish my article on the Battlefield at Brenna in his little magazine.

I was feeling pretty low at the time and felt an enormous upswell of pride when he responded almost immediately (Given the travel time of a courier in this part of the world) with his congratulations and the necessary funds for which anyone can be paid if they contribute to that magazine.

It was certainly more than I get paid to publish my journals in this magazine but that's a moan for another day.

Given that it might provide context to what would come later, I have asked for, and received, my friend's permission to duplicate my small article on the battlefield of Brenna as well as my analysis of the battle itself. I hope it makes for interesting reading.

The battlefield at Brenna is an interesting place. A fascinating place really. It's one of the last great battlefields that have been completely unisturbed by what has come afterwards.

That begins due to the village of Brenna itself that sits, just behind where the Northern Forces were marshalled. At the time of the batte, some nine years ago as I sit and write these words now, the village of Brenna was a small place. All but ruined and abandoned. The only people that lived there were old farmers that didn't want to move away. Old men and women that steadfastly refused to give up on the possibility that the nearby roads would begin to be used again. That a market might come back or that river-folk might start using the nearby river Chotla to start moving goods from one place to another.

But then the world changed in a battle that some folk still call “The Miracle of Brenna” in that part of the world.

After the battle, people came from all the corners of the continent. This was before the resulting upswing in Monster populations, the epidemic of banditry, the famines and pestilences that always accompany the end of a continent spanning conflict. Everyone came. People from the Northern edges of Kaedwen and the Hengfors league, all the way down to the bottom of the Nilfgaardian Empire. Elves made pilgrimiges there in order to try and remember what freedom had tasted like. Freedom that they had sampled, just for a minute as they charged home into the Northern ranks. Dwarves come as well. To see that place where the Mahakaman volunteer regiment managed the impossible.

But they came from all over the world and no two travellers came for the same reason. Similar reasons, to be sure, but not the same.

At first there were a not inconsiderable number of bounty hunters that were looking for the signs of the Nilfgaardian general Menno Coehoorn. The reward that was offered for news of his passing was enough to make even your average merchant rich beyond their wildest dreams. And that was before the supposed money that comuld be made from salvaging the man's weapons and armour.

Treasure Hunters came, searching for this or that. This knight's shield or that warrior's weapons. For a while, in the years following the battle itself, hawkers and charlatans could be found all over the countryside in markets and intersections. “I have a piece of the fallen battle-standard of the Vrihedd Brigade” they would shout. “Yours for twenty crowns.” While still others would promise that they had the only genuine sword-belt of Pretty Kitty the mercenary. Despite the fact that, as far as I know, that great lady of war still has her sword-belt and uses it as a sling to help her carry her babys around.

Witchers and other such professional monster slayers came to deal with the, correctly anticipated, epidemic of Necrophages that always loot the remains of the battlefield. Any battlefield. Priests and priestesses came to see to the fallen before they themselves, inevitably, fell to the pestilence and disease that accompanies the rotting bodies. As surely as Necrophages themselves.

But that was not the least of them.

Others came. Detectives came to see who had fallen, hired by desperate parents, wives, children and lovers. People who looked through the mountains of bodies in an often vain attempt to try and find some sign, some... omen to suggest that their darling husband, son, father, uncle might still be alive. After all, the battle was called “The miracle of Brenna.” Surely one more miracle wouldn't be too much to ask.

There were other people that came to the battlefield. Men who make their living from battlefields in less savoury ways. Insurance investigators trying to prove how a man had died. Scavangers to whom horseshoes and old, broken swords are actually worth a lot more money than the occasional piece of coloured glass that can be pryed from the jewelled belts and scabbards of the fallen Lords.

So how did the village of Brenna deal with all of this. They dealt with it in the same way that opeople all over the continent deal with it. They sold themselves. At first, it was just the old folk who sold themselves as tourguides to the different parts of the battle. That hill is where Constable John Natalis directed the battle despite the fact that many, including Natalis himself, claimed that it was actually Foltest who commanded the allied Northern Forces. This was the rise from which Field-Marshall Coehoorn watched the battle develop. This was the hill that the Redanian cavalry were hiding behind so that they could counter charge in that maneauver that was so costly to the Nilfgaardian troops.

And this was the famed hospital where a Halfling medic lay his body over the injured of both sides in order to save as many lives as possible.

Then another man turned up with a group of labourers and erected a large series of tents, nailed a plank of wood over two barrels and started to sell his beer, which even he declares as being piss at the time, to the travellers and tourists. Then he started to hire out his tents to people that wanted somewhere dry to sleep or to plough the camp followers of both sides that had nowhere else to go now that the war was over. That money meant that he could actually build a proper sized inn and the travelling folk would turn up, pay prices that would be extortionate anywhere else, even in the middle of the post-war famine, and have somewhere warm and dry to sleep.

He charged extra for rooms with locks on. He's still there and will admit to making his fortune in those early days, staying because he quite liked the area. He has competition now so cannot charge quite as exorbiant fees.

After the inn, then came, naturally, a group of women led by an older lady who also set up a series of tents. “Travellers need other services than food and drink.” She declared and those girls worked hard in those early years and, like the inn, they earned enough to make their fortune. There is still a brothel in Brenna. It is not as populace as it once was and they make more of a living from Dice and Gwent tournaments now with the women acting as beautiful distractions, waitresses and dancers more often than whores.

Gradually, other services came back. A black-smith arrived along with a farrier in order to see to the travellers animals and equipment. A wheelwright arrived. Carpenters and others and a new kind of person travelled to Brenna.

In the same way that townships grew around Gold-rush mining camps, Brenna grew around a different resource. Their resource was the dead upon the field of Brenna. People came from miles around to talk the gullible out of hard-earned coin. Luxuries were sold. Trinkets, Maps to where the various people had died and on and on it went. Paper makers arrived to provide people with travel journals and wherever paper is found, people need ink, quills, desks, candles and knives for the trimming of all kinds of things.

People sold blankets, tents, lanterns in order to help with the search. Chamberpots so that the scholars didn't have to shit in the fields where corpse eaters might mistake them for a meal. Water-proof oil-skins, picks, shovels. And always, there were people that were willing to spend their money on these things. Otherwise perfectly intelligent people who would have turned their noses up at the cost of a night with the most expensive courtesan in Novigrad were paying twice that for an hour with the cheapest girl in Brenna. Spending a fortune for candles when identical, if not better, candles could be bought, literally, anywhere else for a fraction of the price.

The town of Brenna quickly became rich.

Fortunately, the town elders and important folk quickly realised that the continent's fascination with the battlefield would eventually die out and they took steps to protect themselves. They built roads, renovated the river docks and started paying other merchants to come to the market of Brenna in order to take advantage of the other travellers. So now, people were going to Brenna, not just to see the battlefield, but to take part in all the market trading that could take place there and thus, the survival of the town was assured.

Now, the town is quite a pretty place. The market square is a short, five minute walk from the livery stable and I would recommend doing it that way rather than trying to ride to the market as there's nowhere trustworthy to leave your horse. The town looks a little off-centre though. They've deliberately built away from the battlefield so that they don't ruin their main selling point. Meaning that they've ended up building houses and smaller buildings up the hills away from the actual sites of historical significance. Although I am left wondering how long this will last as interest in Brenna as a battlefield gradually dies away.

So rather than there being some kind of village centre, the town behaves more like a shoreline town, or a town built on the edge of a river, where all the amenities, are along a line rather than around a central point.

The houses vary wildly from the older stone buildings, solidly built to last with tile and slate roofs to the more temporary accomodations. Wooden huts that get torn down and chopped up for firewood at the end of the commercial season. Only there to house those merchants or merchant's workers that are there for the market. I'm told that you can rent a square of land, construct your own little hut and then stay there for a season.

The people are friendly. There is still a leftover sense that they owe their very survival to the visitors that come through the town itself. I would say that they are a bit more tolerant of dwarves and gnomes than they are of Elves however. It is all too easy to remember that, on the day itself, the Elves were on the other side after all.

My eternal Witcher companion barely spent any time in the village itself so I cannot guage how they would treat anyone else. But the folk there, at least smile, shake your hand, make pleasantries and small talk before they start trying to fleece you for everything you have.

I was not entirely averse. On our night of arrival we stayed in the inn and ate the food. Overpriced it might still be, but it is clear that you are paying for the history and ambience of the thing. The innkeeper is a friendly sort. He married the old madam of the brothel and as a result, the pair are the richest people for miles around. The man is raising his sons to the business and is looking forward to an early retirement of drinking and eating his profits while telling tales. He's a fountain of knowledge about the local area, full of little tidbits of information and gossip. Small stories that he has diligently collected from the various people that have travelled through. He won't hide anything from you, including the very real probibility that a lot of the stories that he has to tell are probably false-hoods invented by travellers, bards and wanderinb bullshit artists. But even that is fascinating.

I told him that he should write a book of all the anecdotes that he has access to. He laughed and claimed that he would never be able to find the time.

I did not sample the bordello itself due to my pending state of matrimony but my companion, while chiding me for not enjoying such things while I still had a chance, claimed that he had a pleasant enough time while he was there.

The food was excellent.

The Witcher had some preparations to make over the coming days and moved to a camp-site that he established and told me to amuse myself which I did to much pleasure. You can buy a quality guide-book to the battlefield for the price of around twenty crowns. If that is too much for your purse then you can easily hire a guide to take you round for less. The books and accompanying map are fairly good quality and are relatively informative although they are unlikely to last long enough to survive being passed around too much. I gather that this is largely deliberate.

As a result, I got to stand at all of the sites of particular significance and listen to all the stories. I stood on the hill overlooking the field where Constable Natalis stood and made those fateful orders that saved the north, even for a little while. I stood on the rise and felt the autumn wind whistling in my ears and fancied that I could hear the sounds of a distant battle on the wind. I imagined the mass of fighting men attempting to perform the impossible task of holding back the black tide of Nilfgaard and I shivered.

I also made a small pilgrimige to the sight of the field hospital where a Halfling called Rusty, a pair of medics named Shani and Iola the Younger along with a Sorceress named Marti Sodgren, tried to save the lives of all that came. Of those three, only one still survives to this day and they remain scarred by some of the things that they saw and did in that tent. It is a quiet place now and I will admit that I didn't stand there for long. It made me feel uncomfortable.

It was a busy few days for me. I stood with the poor fucking Infantry. I went and looked for the Redanian reinforcements and I went hunting for the body of the Nilfgaardian commander, even if, by now, there is no way that his body will ever be found, let alone identified.

I tripped over skulls, I found horse-shoes and once, my footsteps rang hollow on the ground. Bending down and clearing away the turf and the soil, I found that I was standing on a shield. The battlefield is littered with this kind of thing and it will take a concerted effort to clear the place for farmland. It will do as pasture, providing the villagers don't mind their animals occasionally digging up a bone that once belonged to someone who hoped, dreamed and pissed themselves in fear.

If you're going to go and see Brenna though, I would recommend that you go now. There is talk among the village of hiring some Mages to drain the swamp which will change the landscape significantly. They claim it won't, but I have seen the results of such efforts before and think that they are deluding themselves.

I found it to be quite a sad place. Not just for the obvious reasons but also for the way the sacrifices of those men and women upon the field of Brenna are now beginning to be dismissed and made little of.

People are now starting to analyse that battle as being unimportant and therefore diminished in significance. They point out that the Northern Kingdoms fell after all and that all that brenna did was to prolong the inevitable.

This is true and there is no denying that.

So people are now finding it almost trendy to say that all of that blood, all of that sacrifice and death was pointless. That the North shouldn't have bothered.

I hope that you, dear reader, find that suggestion just as insulting as I found it.

There is also a growing, worrying suggestion that Brenna should be made little of. Minimised in the history books as being mostly unimportant. It is becoming a box to tick. A one off essay in Ban Ard, Oxenfurt or the Imperial Military academy where people argue the salient points. Go over the mistakes made by the Nilfgaardians turning what should have been an easy and overwhelming victory into a catastrophic defeat. But that is incorrect to me. Brenna was an astonishing moment in history and I suggest the theory that the battle at Brenna changed the face of warfare for the rest of history.

Let me make my case.

Brenna was the culminating battle. The focal point of all of the maneauvering throughout the second continental war. Vast armies were brought to the field and at the end of the battle, it was clear that the war was over.

Up until that point, that was how wars were won on any kind of scale. Two armies would be maneauvered around each other, sacking and looting as they went, foraging for food, killing each other's scouts and mercenaries. Marching and counter-marching. An army would retreat from a hopeless battle to live to fight another day while the other army persued until a shift in supplies or terrain meant that the hunter became the hunted. This situation can never last although it might stop over winter, but inevitably, both sides will agree that it is time for a battle.

That battle would be huge, all consuming and vast in it's scope. Thousands of men and women take the field. Entire wagon trains of food, water and other consumables are brought to bear and then the battle is fought. After this, history shows us that the two sides are almost always forced to the negotiating table. All that a battlefield victory did was to give one side or the other, the ability to be a little bit firmer in the dictating of terms. Those terms favouring the winning side of the battle while the loser would end up making huge concessions.

But the winning army is also heavily damaged. Meaning that a counter-invasion or a continuing pursuit beyond the initial day or two of the battle, is out of the question due to lack of numbers and all of the logistics that were brought to bear on the field of battle itself.

But Brenna, being the single largest battle in the history of the continent to date, changed all of that. Never before has so much death been concentrated into such a small space. Constable Natalis, after the battle, is recorded at having wept at the sight of the damage that he inflicted upon his own side, let alone the forces of the enemy. He quoted that other general and said, at the time, “The only thing worse than a field of battle after a victory, is the field of battle after a defeat.” Then he added his own quote. “I pray to Kreve that I am never again an instrument of bringing so much death to my own men.”

Time will tell on that last score as the man fought in the third war as well. Attempting to preserve Temeria.And in that third continental war, The war that Nilfgaard finally won, everything changed. Neither side of that war dared risk another Brenna. Neither the Emperor, nor Radovid wanted to put that many troops into a single field. No-one wanted to face the potential gamble. True, the possibility of overwhelming victory was there. But so was the possibility of catastrophic defeat.

After all. Menno Coehoorn was defeated, not really by the flower of northern knighthood, nor the massed infantry of the north. But instead, he was defeated by an incompetent and cowardly scout commander who didn't want to go and look behind a particular hill to see if there was any enemy there. As we all know, it turns out that there was and Marshal Coehoorn made his decisions based on innacurate information.

So no commander in Chief will ever risk such a circumstance happening again. Ever.

When I knew that I was going to be travelling to Brenna I, naturally, bought a book on the subject and one of the things that I noticed was in the similarities between the two generals at Brenna. Coehoorn and Natalis

Both men believed that a battle is won or lost before either army takes the field with factors like terrain, morale and supplies being the most important factors. Both men believed that numbers are important but it's how you use those numbers that can make or break a battle. Both men despised politics because both men had seen that when politics is involved, supplies, reinforcements or other factors can be used to against the general for the advancement of the conspirators or, worse, simply for profit.

They both preferred to choose their own officers as both had been victims of political appointees. Such as incompetent arrogance on the part of subordinates going into business for themselves. A problem that has defeated more than one general throughout history.

Both men believed that more importance should be devoted to Logistics than battlefield prowess and both men lobbied hard in the past for the commanders of the logistics divisions to be promoted and given the recognition that they deserved, rather than arrogant lords and knights who had managed to perform great feats of arms by virtue of the fact that they were better equipped and armed than the fleeing peasants that they rode down.

Both men bemoaned the fact that they had lost as many men to dysentry and disease as they had to enemy action. Both men struggled with the fact that they had to be politicians as much as they had to be soldiers and both men bemoaned the fact that the Kings and Emperors that they worked for, seemed to have little understanding of this part of being a general.

It was true that Marshall Coehoorn seemed to have been better at this particular side of things given his birth, but even so.

So I was struck by the similarities of both men. Bot both men had one other similarity. They both agreed that Brenna should never have been fought.

Natalis has written on the subject many times now that he is back to being an army commander rather than Regent for Temeria and that all of the people that he might injure or insult are dead. He claims to have been forced into a fight at Brenna. That the North were convinced of their invincibility. The often argued point that no single force of Northmen had ever been gathered into one place. He writes about the poetry of the situation overwhelming common sense and forcing him into a battlefield situation where it would have taken a miracle to succeed.

It was he that first started calling it “The miracle of Brenna” after all.

He has also written a book saying that the victory at Brenna is also the reason why the North eventually fell.

He argues that, on that field, the Kings and Queens of the North proved their own invincibility and it seemed absurd to them that the south would ever rise again. They told themselves that if Nilfgaard ever came again then all that would need to happen was that the nations would have to unite under the same monarchs. The engineering of Temeria and Foltest, with the Logistical and Strategic prowess of Demavend of Aedirn. The raw battlefield Leadership and charisma of Henselt and the tactical thinking of Redania under Radovid.

They so convinced themselves of this invulnerability that they went back into snapping at each other's heels and pursuing their own vices. Foltest and his inability to keep it in his trousers (Natalis' words), Radovid's almost sexual levels of Sadism in the matter of the mages, Henselt's greed and desire for the Pontar valley and Demavend's hatred of the Non-humans.

He goes onto write that only Demavend really saw what was coming, but that no-one would listen to him leading him into apathy, debauchery and depression while Queen Meve was too busy rebuilding her nation to realise what was building on the southern border.

Nilfgaard, in comparison, learned from it's mistakes. They learned their lessons from what happened on the field of Brenna. They read the letters and the correspondences of Field Marshall Coehoorn and the Emperor had the intelligence to see the truth in those letters, but also to take it that one step further.

Because Marshall Coehoorn didn't really want to fight. The soldier in him was anticipating the utter destruction of the Northern forces. But the general in him was not entirely pleased about the number of his men that he stood to lose. He was the attacker after all and the enemy commander was a Temerian.

Temerians are, and were, famous for the strength of their defensive positions and Marshall Cohoorn was worried that he would be throwing his troops away to die when it would be much better to wait for such a large army to succumb to the inevitability of infighting and shitting itself to death. In the mean time, he could look at out maneauvering the Northern Forces that were facing them.

So both generals preferred the battle to have been won before the first horn was sounded and said so, loudly, to whoever he could persuade to listen.

As it turns out, the Emperor listened. As did his chief of Intelligence.

So was born the Kingslayer plot and the Northern Kingdoms could not have fallen into the Emperor's hands more easily if it had tried.

The strategic genius of Demavend was ended. Henselt, unable to help himself, attacked the weakened Aedirn meaning that the Aedirnian forces were on their Northern borders, leaving the way open for Nilfgaard.

Foltest had succumbed to dynastic squabbling. Not content with allowing the possibility of Radovid claiming Temeria through Queen Adda, he was trying to reclaim the bastards that he had sired on Lady La Valette.

Because he died before formally accepting the children as his, Temeria was thrown into turmoil. Leaving only Henselt who's battle hardened army had just been defeated by a gaggle of non-humans and a peasant heroine, an outnumbered and overwhelmed Queen Meve in the South, and an untested Radovid in the North. A Radovid who was so consumed by his hatred of the Mages that, not only had he removed the possibility of magical aid, something that had been vital at Sodden before Brenna, but he was in the process of driving himself mad with it.

So the Kingslayer plot was born out of Brenna. Victory almost assured before the first blow was struck.

Radovid, for all his later faults, also learned his lessons from the miracle of Brenna. I will leave it to better scholars than I to decide whether or not he learned the correct ones though.

The first thing he did was to consolidate his power. The Winter War of 1271 that ended Kaedwen as we had ever known it. Once and for all ending the realm of the Unicorn and thus, bringing the Kaedweni hardened veterans under his direct control. He was supported with arms and armour from Kovir and Poviss. Money and food from The Hengfors league and he was in as good a position as any.

He fed, equipped and armoured the geurilla fighters of Temria, Aedirn and the rest while steadfastly refusing to be drawn into a deciding conflict. Battles were fought, albeit on a scale that veterans of Sodden, Brugge, Brenna, La Valette and the rest would laugh at. Armies fought but they numbered in the hundreds of men rather than in the thousands.

The front was not a shifting thing of marching armies. Marching and counter marching in order to get the advantage. Instead, this was a war of fortified positions and careful advancing. It was a war of carefully ensuring that lines of logistics were in place. And everywhere the front went, scholars.... yes, even scholars like me.... and diplomats followed the forces round. Banned from actually talking to the generals on pain of slow impalement lest the generals be influenced from doing their job. A rule enforced by both sides.

Neither side gave an inch.

So yes, Radovid learned his lessons. All of the lessons bar one. That he didn't keep his friends closer. His paranoia and madness saw to the fact that he stopped trusting those people closest to him. So suddenly, the Temerian forces would realise that he intended to cut them off and leave them to die. The Underworld support realised that their days were numbered and suddenly the Temerians cut their losses and negotiated a seperate truce with Nilfgaard.

And we all know how that turned out.

So this time, people were forced to the Negotiating table without the big climactic battle. This time it was done through a series of killings, an assassination or two, several prolonged engagements, one or two battles that would be called Skirmishes in any other war and lots and lots of ambushes, counter ambushes and night time raids.

There are records of hundreds of cases where men would wake up in the morning to discover that the sentries had been killed. Still more cases where it would turn out that the sentries had been killed by their own side in confused night time raids that would be funny if they weren't so tragic.

And that is the state of war now. Unless something new happens, some technological or magical innovation that means that the face of warfare changes. Unless someone manages to rediscover Alfred Nable's formulae or if someone manages to persuade the mages that joining the armed forces will be a benefit to them, it will always go the same way. Men will retreat to the ulltimately defensible positions. Generals will shore up supply lines and advance cautiously and carefully to prevent counter marching and flanking maneauvers and supply raids. Lands will be scorched to prevent enemies from foraging in the process of retreats. The only people that will benefit from the actual “war” part of the conflict, are the merchants who foresee the conflict and stockpile the food, weapons, armour and materials that the armies need.

And I am aware that I say that as the son of a man who made his fortune doing precisely that.

Brenna taught us these mistakes. Brenna taught us that the future of warfare is in siegecraft and fortifying. There will never be another battle like Brenna and so I, personally, believe that it is the height of arrogance to dismiss all of the things that happened on the banks of the River Chotla as being unimportant.

Brenna will continue to echo through the years. It changed the world then and it continues to change the world now. I suspect that it will still be changing the world long after I'm gone.

I, for one, am grateful that the Empress' peace seems likely to last.

So go and visit Brenna. Stand next to the Monument that the locals have erected in that place. Read a few names off the huge plinth and then ponder the significance of the entries like “Countless unknown men of the PFI” or “Un-named Conscripts from Nazair”.

You should go. Find an arrowhead in the dirt and ask yourself if the brown stain on the end is from the dirt of the ground, or is the last remnants of the blood of the arrow's victim. Kick a rusted helmet down the hill and try to lift a fallen shield.

Spend a bit of time looking for the corpse of Menno Coehoorn and try to figure out where he died. Buy the Innkeepers of Brenna a drink and listen to their stories. Spend a bit of time standing on the hill where Constable Jon Natalis surveyed the battlefield, ignoring the shouts of his King as he was exhorted to useless and idiotic heroic acts. Stand there and try to comprehend the sheer number of people that died in that relaticely small piece of land next to the Golden Pond and the River Chotla. Try to get your head round the number of people that lost their lives. Just in the field, not even counting the people that died from infection and disease after being wounded.

Do all of those things for me. If you are lucky, you will learn something. If you are REALLY lucky. Then you will leave that place a wiser person than you were when you first arrived in that beautiful, awful place.

-

The crossing from Skellige to Novigrad took three days in total. The storms that always come after the passage of the Skeleton Ship meant that we had to make a straight line course from Kaer Trolde harbour to the coast of the continent itself. From there, we had to pick our way along the coastline carefully to make sure that we were never too far away from any kind of shelter. Meaning that it was a cold, tired and worn out crew that finally pulled us into Novigrad harbour. The master of the ship was not amused at the delay and was in the middle of organising a flogging or two when Kerrass and I paid our accounts and disembarked, keeping a hard grip on our tempers as we did so.

The culture shock of the thing was enormous. Although the stereotype of Skelligans living in squalor is not entirely unfair, I rather think that if you asked any Skelligan whether they would rather live in their little hovels on an open hillside under the sun, stars, rain and wind. Versus living in the smelly, cramped and unpleasant conditions in the Novigrad dockside, then I rather think I know what the results of that choice would be.

We went off to the Rosemary and Thyme for a good meal and some pleasant company for the remainder of the day and the evening. Kerrass went out later after inviting me to join him at the Passiflora. He knows that I am never going to take him up on these offers again, but I think he would feel rude if he didn't at least offer to take me with him. I also got the feeling that he was rather interested in having some alone time of his own, that he had some things to think about and process.

Instead, I spent the evening with Professor Dandilion, telling him and his apprentices, the tale of the Skeleton Ship and the actions of the newest Jarl of Skellige. He was fascinated by the subject and both he and his partner in music and the bedchamber, Priscilla, were already putting together Rhyming couplets and some minor melodies when I finally gave up and went to bed.

The following day, we did a bit of shopping. I needed some new changes of clothes and some other equipment to replace what was lost in Skellige. I wanted to check what was going on in the world and put some things in order. Kerrass took me to a swordsmith to order a new Silver sword to be made for him.

We talked about it over breakfast.

“I thought that the Silver Swords were given to you at the Witcher Schools?” I wondered.

“And originally, you would be correct.” Kerrass agreed. “But the Witcher schools don't really exist anymore which means that we have to find alternative ways to keep ourselves in equipment. This sword,” He rested his hand on the silver pommel that was propped next to him. “Has been a constant companion to me for a number of years now. I've had to have the blade reforged a couple of times, but it's taking more and more time to keep it in the condition that is needed. Even light impacts are causing serious blemishes and nicks on the blade that are then taking hours to correct. Plus the constant wear and tear of proper maintenance...”

“Wait what?”

“Sharpening, oiling, polishing.” Kerrass chuckled at me. “All of that conspires to wear down a sword. Let alone a silver alloy one. Isn't that right Zoltan?”

The Dwarven part owner of the Rosemary and Thyme came and sat at our table. He's a genial sort, friendly, happy and spends most of his time drinking or gambling away his share of the profits of the inn. Between him and Dandilion, I always think that it must be Priscilla that does most of the actual running of the inn itself.

Having said all of that. Master Chivay has a violent streak in him and can go from calm and friendly to unspeakably violent and back again if one of the customers decides to take liberties at the dice or cards table.

Or if they start to get “disrespectful” to any of the female workers there.

“It's true Lad.” The Dwarf told me in his broad Mahakaman accent. “If you think about it, it makes a certain amount o' sense. What' you're doin' is essentially stroking your metal sword with a stone, over and over again. Wearing out the grooves and blemishes. And not all of them can be fixed after all.”

“But.... There are stories.... Men have taken up their Grandfather's swords to....”

“Aye well.” Zoltan scratched his arm-pit. “There are always exceptions to the rule o'course. Any blade of Gnomish manufacture can last for years at a time. Those Witcher Meteorite alloy swords can last for several decades if you look after them properly.”

“Alloy?” I could feel a lot of my preconceptions about sword making being torn apart by a grinning dwarf and a smirking Witcher.

“Oh aye.” Zoltan grinned at me. “You couldn't make a sword out of just meteroite Iron. That stuff is dense as a Sorceresses heart. That and it would take dozens of meteorites just to make one sword and then when you made it, you would struggle to lift it. Then it would be so brittle that....”

“The Alloy Zoltan,” Kerrass was enjoying himself.

“Aye well. So you have to Alloy the stuff in order to make a proper sword. That's all swords are really. The right mixture between the hard and brittle to maintain the edge, mixed with the soft and workable to be able to absorb impacts. There are forging techniques and things to make them all better but at the end of the day...” The dwarf shrugged. “You didn't think that that,” he gestured at Kerrass' silver sword, “is made completely out of Silver did you?”

“Well no but...”

“The sheer cost of the thing apart from anything.” The other think about Zoltan is that once he's on a train of thought, it is hincreasingly difficult to get him out of it. “You would never dare let it out of your sight. Bandits jumping out at you at all times trying to get the thing off your back and taking it off to get...”

“It does happen. People really do believe all of that on a semi-regular basis.” Kerrass told him.

“Aye well.” Zoltan sniffed. “That's just the way of stupid buggers isn't it. You've got to be a damn fool to try and make your living as a bandit anyway, before even trying to steal a silver sword for a Witcher.”

The conversation went backwards and forwards from there.

“But it's true,” Zoltan told me before getting up to go and try talking a victim into a game of Gwent...

…. I say victim. But the truth is that Master Chivay is famously bad at all of the games. And he can't help but get addicted to all of them, often at the same time. There is an unspoken agreement amongst all of the regulars that attend the Rosemary and Thyme, that none of us are allowed to play Zoltan at anything. Not Gwent, not cards, not Dice poker or any of the rest of them. The reason for this is simple. We will take Zoltan for everything that he's worth, and if we don't, if by some miracle he wins one of those bouts, then he is galvanised into his passion for carrying on the game.

…. “But constant use and maintenance of any weapon will eventually lead to it wearing out. There are ways that you can prolong that if you want to get sentimental. You can put a new blade on an axe, re wrap the handle, replace the cross-guard and reshape the Quillions. You can grind out just about all the nicks, scrapes and notches but sooner or later, you are holding something that will just snap. Then it's just a matter of wondering how sentimental you might be. You can throw the old weapon away. Have it melted down to form the basis of the new weapon. Or you can put it on the wall and admire it. Just don't fall into the trap of carrying on using it, long after it should have been cast aside. Remember that Scribbler.”

That name again. I don't think I'm going to get away from it. As I say, Zoltan walked off to greet some new merchantile travellers who looked a bit taken aback by the fact that one of the proprieters of the place was a dwarf.

I looked down at the dagger on my belt and found myself wondering.

“You don't need to worry about any of your weapons yet.” Kerrass told me, reading my mind. “Your dagger was made for you by Letho, one of the best forgers in the land. He made it as a hobby piece to be sure, but a hobby piece from Letho is as good as a master's work from the vast majority of places and you can quote me on that. You chose your boot knife well and your spare barely gets used and therefore, barely needs any kind of maintenance. Your spear is the first one that will go.”

I looked up at him in horror.

“It's the weapon that you use the most, maintain the most, train with the most and use in anger most often. It was well made from a skilled crafts-person's forge but I think it will need a new blade on it in a year or two at the current rate of usage. In the meantime,” He rose to his feet, strapping his swords on his back as he spoke, “You should learn to use that axe that you cart around. That thing will survive until long after you're dead.”

The swordsmith turned out to have his smithy in the non-human district. Not on the smithy row as, it turns out, he had been run off that place back during when the terror's were happening. Instead, he had set up his workshop to his own exacting specifications and was now reluctant to move. To ask him why, he would make some kind of excuse, telling me that it was due to the fact that he had the place set up the way he wanted it. That he was comfortable here, that all his customers knew where he was and on and on and on were his excuses.

Kerrass was sat on a stool, looking at some of the examples of the smith's work with open admiration writ large on his face before turning and saying. “None of that is true. It's just that (Freddie: Name removed at his request) here is a tremendous physical coward.”

The elf in question considered the accusation with a thoughtful expression before shrugging. “Not unfair,” he decided after a while before having Kerrass stand up before measuring the Witcher, in detail, with a length of twine.

It was oddly like watching my sister go dress shopping.

Calling the elf a blacksmith, swordsmith or Craftsman would be an insult. Both to the Elf as well as those men, dwarves and others who follow those equally noble professions. The Elf is an artist. He does not manufacture things, he releases the deadly beauty from within the metals and woods that he is presented with. Each of the weapons that he makes cost a fortune. But most of that money is spent on the materials that the weapons are made out of, as he is exacting on things like, the shade of wood that the handle is made out of. The specific colour of the metal and so on and so on.

He is married to a long suffering dock prostitute whose sole purpose seems to be to remind him to eat and sleep when he gets caught up in the individual projects.

She was a fascinating woman in and of herself. Huge woman with long, straggly, reddish blonde hair although I suspect that the red is the remnants of an old dye job. Her clothing hangs loose for, in her words, ease of access. She laughed loudly, scolded harshly and had a wicked sense of humour which she used on her husband in a way that I would not have stood for if our positions were reversed.

But they loved each other. Every so often, I would try to imagine how the two of them slept together, the skinny, almost malnourished looking elf and the huge, buxom human woman, before I decided that such things were not for me to wonder about.

Apparently there were two daughters though so they must have figured something out.

She was also one of those people that could make a meal out of absolutely anything with almost off-putting ease, so that it was absolutely delicious. I have long learned the skill of not questioning what the ingredients are though given some of the places that Kerrass and I have eaten over the years. But she was another case where she ran the business while her husband actually made the weapons. According to her, it was a constant effort to keep him from just giving them away. Some kind of old, elven tradition apparently.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

But he measured Kerrass in a way that I would have rebelled against. Making notes on a scraped goat skin with a piece of charcoal. Not only did he measure Kerrass' hands. But he also measured each individual join in the hand. As well as this, he took a cast of both of Kerrass' hands before measuring and weighing the older silver sword. All the while, he was admiring the handiwork on the older silver weapon.

“Good work this.” He said, over and over again. “Lacking an artist's eye, but good work nonetheless.”

While he worked with Kerrass I looked at some of the other examples he had on the walls. None of them were for sale, apparently. They were practice pieces, rejects and demonstrations. Things to show to discerning clients in order to demonstrate what was possible.

I took one from the wall. I had hated fencing at University. I could not just allow things to happen. I had to over think everything and it was my downfall in the practice circles over and over again.

But this blade? To hold it was to feel powerful. To actively want opponents so that you could skewer them. There was an ease to it. I found myself imagining how easy it would be to thrust this weapon into the flesh of someone else and how easy it would be to end the lives of others with it.

And it was so sharp that the enemies wouldn't even notice that they had been killed.

I carefully put the sword back. Killing should be hard work.

Kerrass and the elf sat in that little workshop and talked for a long time. Small details mostly, things that I wouldn't care about but seemed of utmost importance to both of them. But then, towards the end of things, part of the conversation caught my ear.

“And the pommel?” The elf asked. “A round pommel I assume?”

“Yes please. However...” Kerrass reached into his pouch and pulled out the carved likeness of the Wave-Serpent figurehead. “Could you work this carving into the pommel itself?”

“The design or the item itself?”

“The item itself.” Kerrass answered. “And I would like it so that, in the future, I could take the pommel with me when a new sword is needed.”

The Elf seemed a little confused. “I don't understand. You are a cat. But this is a serpent, why would you want to put a serpent in your sword?”

“Darling?” His wife snapped from where she was stirring the pot. “Now is not the time.”

“But...”

“Look at the man.” She told him. “This is a thing that he would die for.”

The Elf looked back of Kerrass and frowned. He was still confused but he let it go.

“Well, it will take a while to get the rest of the materials together. So it will take a few months.”Kerrass nodded his acceptance but I was appalled. The Elf noticed.

“It takes time. More time than you might think. Leaving aside getting all the things together, rituals to perform and that's not taking into account the possibility ot mistakes or accidents. You cannot rush art.”

He turned back to Kerrass as I was again reminded of the dwarf and an engagement ring.

“So where can I reach you?”

“I am wintering in Angral, in the Duchy of Angraal.” Kerrass told him. “At the estate of Comtesse Ariadne. That will find me.”

The Elf nodded and quoted a figure that made me squeak in dismay. Kerrass paid it without questioning.

The woman cackled “Steak for tea tonight.” While the Elf was already pulling over a fresh piece of hide and a stack of charcoal. Kerrass took another moment to gaze at the symbol of the Wave-Serpent before placing it, carefully, next to the waiting Elf and leading me back into the street.

We spent another day or so in Novigrad, reacclimatising ourselves to the people and culture of the continent. It was absolutely the right thing to do. There were far too many instances where Kerrass or I would be bumped into on the streets before having to fight off the urge to remonstrate with the person violently. So we ate, we drank and spent some time enjoying things. I went to see a play while Kerrass took another visit to the Passiflora.

The following day we left the city, riding along the river towards Oxenfurt. We didn't talk very much and there was a feeling of unreality to it all. A feeling of needing to get the continent back under our feet. We camped early, ate well and trained hard. Time aboard ship had not been easy. It had been hard physically what with the cold and all the other things that can make life unpleasant when you are aboard ship. We had also spent a lot of time training in that time as well. But building up muscles that are used to the rolling of the ship, versues the use of those self-same muscles that are used for riding are two different things. We had also spent a good week of doing little other than eating, drinking and having a good time, before another sea voyage.

So we felt the need to.... I don't know how to describe it.

We wanted to take our time with the journey. We wanted to notice all the little trees and streams and how they were different from the same kinds of things on the islands. Kerrass felt it too, I'm sure. He almost visibly relaxed the first time someone called him a mutant freak. The ride between Novigrad and Oxenfurt is almost as familiar to me as the ride from our castle to Oxenfurt itself and many people greeted us on the way. The road seemed strange to me. Longer than I remembered but the trees and rocks, earth banks and fences seemed smaller. That dichotomy left me feeling a little remote and dizzy.

We bypassed Oxenfurt entirely and rode up to Castle Coulthard. Neither Emma or Laurelen were in residence at the moment, off on some kind of business trip according to the servants. Mark was lecturing in Novigrad, training up a new group of priests. News that made me a little angry as if I had known that he was in the city then I would have gone to see him.

Still no news from Sam, or about Francesca.

We arrived midafternoon and I waded, manfully, into the small mountain of correspondence that always awaits me when I get home. It was more than a little tempting to just ignore it all, telling myself that I was only back home unexpectedly and that the letters could wait until the next time that I was home. The thing was, the next time I was home was likely to be when I got married. So I sighed and started working through them.

Lots of well wishes about the coming nuptials which are heavily veiled attempts to wrangle and invitation to what was promising to be an important society occasion. I penned short, non-committal replies thanking them all for their best wishes and put their names in a stack for Emma, mentioning what they had said and just leaving it to her and the Imperial protocol officers that would be deciding who had precedence over whom in the entire matter.

Even more, I was left with the feeling that I was, in fact, the least important part of the wedding itself. But that was the first time that I began to feel as though I was at peace with that suggestion.

There were still more letters with vague kinds of news about Francesca which I read before replying with the now standard well wishes, gratitude and a hint that such information should be passed to the local Imperial Garrison.

Then there were the personal letters that took more work. I resolved to take most of them with me and work through them while I was on the road. Along with more scribing supplies so that I could work on the publication of my account of what happened in the Skelligan Isles.

After a pleasant evening and following day of just existing in my families castle, I realised that I had no idea what we were going to do next. Nor had I spoken with Kerrass on the subject. Indeed, I struggled to think of a time where the two of us had talked in any kind of depth since leaving Skellige itself.

We had not agreed to stay in Novigrad, nor had we discussed when we should leave. We were communicating in looks and grunts, giving truth to the joke that Svein once made about the two of us that we were closer than many married couples.

I remember realising that and snorting with laughter as Yngvild had heard that and jabbed her husband in the ribs for the joke.

But that night, after the meal had been pushed aside and Kerrass and I had left the table to make an assault on my sister's Brandy stocks, I finally decided that it was time to tackle the subject.

“Ok Kerrass.” I began. Not my most original beginning I will grant you but I couldn't think of anything else. “What are we going to do now?”

He was staring into the fire at the time. There is always a fire lit in that room, contrary to what you might think, castles are actually fairly cold places. It's one of the reasons for all of those old tapestries that you see hanging from the walls.

I watched as the flickering firelight danced in his eyes, made slightly unearthy by the yellow irises that always seem to glow in moments where it's much darker.

He started at the question, shaking himself from whatever thought process he had been in the middle of. Then he shook his head, stood up and pulled over another chair so he could look me in the eye.

“This is not going to be nice for me to say.” He began, “But I think it will be worse for you to hear.”

“Well that sounds lovely.” I tried for some levity.

“The truth is,” He didn't react to the tone in my voice. “That I'm running out of ideas for things for us to try regarding your sister. We've already spoken to the foremost expert in otherworldly affairs that I have ever known in the factor of my brother and his wife.”

“Who?”

Kerrass sighed. “Think about it for a moment Freddie, remember the man who always seems to fall out of your.... black skin, unusual wife....”

It took a moment for me to remember. It always takes a moment for me to remember and then I always wonder why Kerrass doesn't get more frustrated with me. Then I remember that I'm not supposed to remember Schrodinger and his Unicorn. Because no-one is supposed to know whether they are living or dead.

I groaned as the memory came back. “It is getting harder to remember them.” I told him.

“And eventually you will forget that you should even work to remember. So we have spoken to them. The library is lost and if Margarita and the Sorceresses of Aretuza had found anything that might be useful in the remains of the library of the Succubus, Doppler and Godling, we would have heard about it by now.”

I nodded. Kerrass doesn't like to say the names if he can help it. Saffron, Pula and Sally.

“The Kalayn cult turns out to have been a dead end. They were our best hope of information to be honest but they said that they had nothing to do with it and I believed them.”

“I agree.” I did too. Lord Cavill had been most insistent and I doubt that you could fake his level of... feeling on the matter.

“I have spoken to every source that I can think of,” Kerrass went on. “And a lot that are unlikely to know anything but might be able to call in sources of their own. It never fails to astonish me that we still ahven't heard anything to be honest. But the druids didn't know anything, or if they did, it now sails on the decks of the Skeleton Ship.”

I took a deep breath, steeling myself for what I thought was coming next. “Are you telling me that it's time to give up?” I felt my own rage building but also a fear that I couldn't fathom.

But then Kerrass shook his head. “We probably should.” He stared at the fire for a moment longer. “We probably should give up. I do want to go to Angral and spend the winter turning over rocks and seeing what lies underneath. I do think that it's possible we might find something there but I am no longer as hopeful as I once was. I remain more than a little convinced that if we were going to find something, then we would have found it by now. But I'm not giving up yet.”

I nodded. “But that still doesn't tell me what we're going to do now.” I tried for a smile. Kerrass had been right. This was not pleasant for me to hear.

Kerrass took a deep breath. “I am keen to go to Angral and I am keen to speak to the contact that Ariadne has unearthed. But after that?” He sucked his teeth and tutted. “Freddie, I'm running out of ideas.”

I nodded my acceptance. “Are you telling me to stay home?”

“No. Not yet. We've had this conversation before though. I think you left Skellige in a good way. You're doing better than I would be doing in your place after a dissappointment like the one that we suffered there. So we're not off the table yet.”

He sighed and rubbed his head.

“There are two other places to look that I can think of.” He said finally after a long moment of breathing. “Both are dangerous. Very dangerous indeed. One of which will almost certainly end in death.”

“Well lets do that one last then.” I joked. I got the chuckle that I was aiming for. “But seriously Kerrass. What is that?”

Kerrass scratched his chin. “We have only been told one thing about the magic that was used to take your sister. We were told that the magic is both ancient and alien. Everything we've got coming up is on the side of chasing the “alien” side of things. Chasing that part that might be from other “spheres” or other places of influence. That and the possibility that it is someone out of our past that is chasing some kind of vengeance against you, us, your family or the Empress.”

“Or some kind of combination of the lot.”

Kerrass nodded his agreement.

“But what we haven't pursued is the “ancient” side of things.”

I nodded. “So what what do you propose?”

“Do you know what a Fetch is? Or a Leshen?”

“Primal forest spirit isn't it.”

“Close. Pretty much the closest that you will get. They are the spirits of those ancient pieces of woodland. It's more complicated than that but if you imagine a piece of woodland as being intelligent, then the Leshen is the manifistation of that intelligence. It is often angry and hates everyone and everything.”

“Why?”

Kerrass laughed. “They are ancient, primal spirits of nature and humanity, and Elves before them to be fair, have tried to tame that spirit. The Elves will claim that they try to work with nature, but at the same time, they are still trying to put it towards a common target. The equivalent of taming a wild Stallion and putting pretty pink ribbons in his mane and tail. Or worse, a wild Wolf. Humanity are worse to be sure, cutting down the trees and planting new, ordered, precise trees for future lumber production.

“At first, I had wondered if that was what was in the woods at Amber's crossing. But that thing was as close to evil as anything can be. Leshen are just angry.”

“Just.” I said with a raised eyebrow. “So...”

“So I suggest we go to the oldest of Forests and try to make contact with the Leshen in it. The Black Forest in southern Nilfgaard is huge, immeasurably old and vast. It's one of the last pieces of unexplored wilderness on the continent.”

“You're talking about the Shadowman.... What do they call him?”

“The Schatennman.” Kerrass corrected. “The man of shadow, or the man of scissors if you prefer the more childish version that is used to put children to sleep at night. He's kind of like the ultimate challenge to Witchers. The unclimbable mountain, the untamable beast. Countless have tried to banish him and none have succeeded. I would walk away from a contract to hunt him. But to talk to him?” He shook his head. “It almost certainly won't work. But I've heard of many attempts to destroy or dismiss him. All fo which have ended in failure. But to make contact?”

“Sounds dangerous.” I commented but I would be lying if I told you that I wasn't excited about the prospect of talking to a primal force like that.

“Oh it will almost surely end in our deaths.”

I contemplated this. “And that's one of the options?”

“Yes.”

“And the other thing?”

“Oh, I'm pretty sure we will survive that. Not intact, but we will survive.”

“Well that sounds lovely. What is it?”

Kerrass seemed haunted and shook his head. “Not here.” He said. “Not now. I do not want to draw the attention down on your home or your family. Your family have been through enough. I will also warn you now that you might be better off staying behind.”

“You've said that before.”

“Yes I have.”

“Kerrass, the old deal still stands. If you tell me to stay behind, I will.”

Kerrass shook his head. “I once promised you the truth. As before, I will tell you everything. Sooner rather than later.”

I nodded my acceptance of that. “So what's next? Where are we going?”

“South. To Brenna. We will be taking our time though. Some things to do and collect on the way. We need to be there by the Autumn Equinox.”

“We have loads of time then. We can be there in a few weeks.”

“We can. But as I say, some things to do on the way. Preperations to make.”

And some of those preperations were rather strange.

For a start, we went North rather than South. For those people in the south of the continent, or who have little idea about the entire geography, the Battle of Brenna took place in the southern part of Temeria. I know, I know that the site of the battle itself takes place in various different places depending on the map maker and the people involved. The geography of the continent as a whole seems to change on a regular basis from map-maker to map maker and I wait, longingly, for the day where someone manages to definitively map the land mass that we all live on.

But I suppose that that will not prevent people from coming out with a new set of maps claiming that “Finally, we have a genuine and proper map of the continent.” This because the words “genuine” and “proper” are words that tend to sell maps. Oddly like histories in that regard.

But first we went North, leaving word with our Castellan that we had placed a bounty on crows in the local area. Kerrass gave me no reasons for any of this. He was back onto one of his maddening crazes of just repeating the same words over and over again.

“Patience Freddie.”

He seemed... scared. Frightened but also excited in some way. I could not put my finger on it.

We went into town on market day and Kerrass bought two live chickens that he kept in a caged box that was tied to his saddle bags. When we camped for the night, I expected to have to kill and butcher the things, but Kerrass forbade it. Carefully laying out feed for them and erecting a tiny wire fence to keep them enclosed. I didn't complain about not eating them. One of them was laying and we did quite well for eggs in that part of the journey.

We travelled North, where Kerrass took me to see a Witch in the wilds of North Eastern Redania. The two seemed old friends and, I suspect, old lovers. They greeted each other warmly with gentle teasing and reminiscences of old times. Now that the restrictions on magic are beginning to relax in the North, the older, knowing people are beginning to come out of hiding.

By which I mean those women that would live in the little cottages out in the trees somewhere, away from towns and villages. The common belief was so that these people can practice dark and sinister sorcery and witchcraft and dance around naked. When the truth is much simpler. They live out there because that's where the wilder and more esoteric herbs grow and that those self-same herbs tend to be quite fragrent so villagers treat them like weeds.

And what with bending over to pick the herbs all the time, such work is hard and requires the keeping of unsocial hours. Plus all the unsightly sick people everywhere, moaning, crying and screaming the agony of whatever illness it is that's currently tearing apart their guts.

So Herb-women are often forced to live well outside the village, but that makes them scapegoats for the type of person that likes to throw these older folk on pyres. But now, it's not as alright to have roving bands of fanatics burning everyone that they don't like the looks of. So these cottages are beginning to become occupied again.

After all, these people, because it isn't just a female occupation, know the woods far better than your average fanatic of the Eternal Flame.

But Kerrass went to see one. She was sat outside, watching the sky and smoking a pipe while stroking her black cat. Now it's true, that there are a few stereotypes of being a Witch and that this lady was fulfilling all of them, but the way she bounced to her feet and greeted Kerrass was anything but sinister and frightening.Her cat was the first cat that I have ever seen that greeted Kerrass with any kind of affection. Rubbing round his legs and purring intil he picked it up and sat it around his shoulders.

I was astonished at this, more so when the cat started rubbing itself up against the side of Kerrass' face in greeting and affection.

As I say, the two greeted each other like old friends with warm embraces and a rather more intimate kiss than I was strictly comfortable with observing. Then they started insulting each other like old companions. Age is never relevent but I would guess that the woman was in her seventies somewhere. Still hale and hearty with thin wisps of white hair escaping from her plaited hair.

She and Kerrass spent some time catching up. Talking about old friends and acquiantences. This person has died, so and so got married and has three kids now. As is the way with such people, she was on the verge of retirement herself and was training up a “youngster” to take over when her body couldn't do the job any more. Apparently, she was away attending a church school in order to get her letters. I will give you one quote from her.

“Those Alchemists miss out on a good deal of talent, only training boys. That girl is already coming up with applications of certain herbs that I would never dream of. But she needs her letters to read the herbary. Sometimes, you have to learn how they used to do things in the past in order to figure out why we've been doing it wrong all these years. And then teach us old folk how to do it better.”

I liked her and would have liked to get to know her better. But Kerrass didn't want to stay long. Just long enough to buy some packets of something. He didn't tell the old woman what he wanted and she didn't ask. He gave her the two chickens from the box on his horse before giving the cat a small ball that had been made out of rope that the cat took to with gusto.

Kerrass carefully took the packets and folded them into his alchemy pouch of raw ingredients.

“What's that?” I asked as we rode away, not really expecting an answer.

“Oh, she has a breed of Deadly Nightshade in her garden that is better than anything else you can find on the continent.”

“Yikes.”

“In certain circles, that woman would be considered a genius, and if she's taken on an apprentice, then that girl could shape the world of chemistry and pharmacology for years to come. Don't judge.”

“I wasn't talking about that. What do we need Belladonna for?” Yes I was showing off my herbology, but I was a little sore. I hadn't prejudged anyone he invited me to meet for years.

“Patience Freddie.”

We rode back to Oxenfurt where Kerrass took collection of several lengths of twine that he bought from a fisherman. Someone who, according to the man's blurb, made the best fishing line for miles around.

“Why's it the best?” I asked as Kerrass measured the amount he wanted.

“Cat-gut.” The old man said. “Fish like to bite out at cats out of vengeance. Stands to reason that if you make your line out of cat gut then the fish are more likely to bite aren't they.”

He looked at me like I was stupid. I caught Kerrass' eye. This was one of those times that it turned out that it was alright to judge. The thing about Cat-gut was a superstition with no basis in fact, but fishermen can be superstitious folk too about their lures and lines. So I didn't jest.

“Why Catgut Kerrass?” I asked. “And if you tell me that he makes the best cat-gut fishing line for miles around then I'm going to laugh at you.”

“Not that. He does make it nice and thin which is good for my purposes but you can find men like him anywhere fishing goods are made or sold. He was just nearby and catgut is what we need.”

“Why?” I asked.

Kerrass grinned at me. “Patience Freddie.” We said in unison.

Our Course took us back to the castle where, four days since we had first set out. We found several sacks of dead Crows waiting for us and still more coming in.

I knew that I wasn't going to get anywhere by asking the question. But I asked it anyway.

“What do we need the crows for Kerrass?”

“We don't.”

“Then....”

“We need their feathers. Grab a stool and start plucking.”

I was suddenly glad that Emma and Laurelen were not present at home during all of this. I think they both would have found it ridiculously funny and that we would never hear the end of it. But in the end, with Kerrass, myself and several servants who had nothing better to do, working at it. We were able to turn several sacks of dead Crows into a fairly sizeable sack of newly cleaned crow feathers.

The castle cook make a pie out of the crows and after all the hard, boring, labour intensive work of plucking the birds, I felt more than a little bit vengeful as I tucked into the pie. Making sure that all of those workers that had volunteered to help a Witcher and their crazy young Lord with an unpleasant chore, also got to share in that peculiarly specific kind of vengeance.

We took another day to stay in the castle. Kerrass had started us on a strict new training regime which left me sore, bruised and aching. As far as I could see, the only benefit that came out of all of that was that I was getting new looks of respect from the other guards. Other than that though, I was permitted to do paperwork while Kerrass seemed to be taking up some form of arts and crafts.

What he was doing was taking a very sharp needle, medium sized and was punching holes through the stems of all the feathers that he was gathered the previous day. I had no idea why. But then he was taking some resin that he had comandeered from the stables and reinforcing the holes so that the feather itself didn't split. It must have taken an extraordinary amount of concentration to do all of that but he attacked each feather with care and precision. Not allowing distraction or food to get in the way. He was still going long into the night as well, long after I had retired.

Ariadne had no idea what he was doing either.

Ariadne was enjoying herself and keeping herself busy. She takes a great deal of delight in doing boring and mundane things. She calls them “humanity's labours.” So with it being the Autumn, she is taking a firm hand in helping out with the harvest in her lands. The first harvest that has properly been able to take place since she took charge of the land. She is not allowed to do too much of the physical graft as the farming folk would be mortified that a lady was taking part, but she was able to help out with the cooking and ensuring that the field workers were properly fed, not getting overworked and offering her medical services where required.

She avoids the use of magic in these kinds of instances as she finds that it tends to frighten people. But just seeing their lady helping out and taking part was doing the morale of the people of Angral a lot of good.

She did complain that a few of her neighbours were not as impressed as it made them look bad in comparison, but she found that more funny than annoying.

I also took that day to write several letters of request to my sister. Mostly to tell her about what had happened in the Islands, specifically the news from Jarl Holger about his promise to not attack our ships. So I was suggesting the possibilities of new trade agreements there. Also, to get her to hire the best siege engineer that money can by and send him or her to Holmstein. There were some warnings that went with that though. Specifically that the engineer in question needed to have a thick skin regarding the various jokes that would, undoubtedly be made at their expense and that they must be comfortable with the idea that they would be working with Yngvild and therefore a woman.

It occasionally saddens me that certain fields of study, not only restrict themselves to only recruiting men to that particular field, but also look down on anyone that might have some knowledge in that field from outside our very specific brotherhood. I have to work at it in order to not be that kind of prick myself on occasion.

We set out for the South the following day, after a similarly bruising exercise regime and with the sack of newly punctured feathers hanging from Kerrass' saddles where, recently, two chickens had hung.

We took our time with it though. It seemed that this was a far from urgent matter.

It was an interesting journey really in that it seemed like those, now far off, early days of travelling with a Witcher. Most recently, we have been on our way somewhere, going off to specific places to do equally specific things. We had a destination in mind and a thing to do when we got there. But this was different in some way. We were heading faintly southwards and when it came time to make a decision about which way to go, we inevitably took the southern most route.

But other than that. We would stop, train, and take contracts. It seemed like ages since Kerrass had last taken a real contract. It had, in fact, been when we were in Novgrad before heading off to Skellige when the, occasional, nuisance of Necrophages in the sewers had returned again. Kerrass had taken up the contract to get rid of a particularly troublesome nest of Rotfiends.

But even then, we had been on our way to Novigrad, passing by many lucrative contracts in order to make sure that we were going to be there and ready to take part in the festival of the Skeleton Ship itself.

But now, Kerrass seemed to be back in the job market and he was working hard. No job seemed to be too big or too small. He took it, performed a cursory examination of the local area before performing the hunt.

I guessed that this must have been what it was like when he was in the process of making money. When he was preparing for winter or something similar. Wanting to put a bit of money by, this was how it worked. Moving from one place to the next, governed by the contracts available rather than anything else.

He did take more trophies. I did notice that. Monster heads, teeth, ears and tongues all started to be thrown into one of the many sacks that started to spring up around his horse, and around my horse as well. The stench began to be overpowering until one day I woke up and realised that I didn't care as much and no longer noticed it.

We returned to an old way of working and slotted into that habit fairly easily. I would always be back in the village or town and dealing with the victims of the monster attacks while Kerrass worked. Not that I needed the extra examples for the work that I was doing but I was once told that a man can't have too many case studies. And truth be told, I was able to make some notes on the differences between different Ghoul nests.

Also, in the way that Nekkers seem to have some form of hierarchy among themselves.

I remembered one of the earliest things that kerrass told me about life on the path. In that it was actually rather boring and routine. Sooner or later, you have seen all of the monsters that there are to see. Done all the things that there are to do. I began to recognise it in myself even. Kerrass would read a notice from a fencepost, a noticeboard outside an inn or behind the bar. Maybe it would be nailed to the side of a market stall, those ones that are set up permanently in front of an empty house that wandering merchants and peddlers stay in when they get to the city before laying their goods out on the stall afterwards.

But Kerrass would take these notices down, read it carefully and then pass it to me where I would read it, ponder for a while before looking up at Kerrass and saying something like... “Noonwraith then?” or “Endrega nest,” or on one particularly unpleasant occasion. “Bog Hag?”

Kerrass would nod, add a comment or two before we would move on.

And the sacks would get larger and larger.

The other thing that was taking place was that Kerrass had another new Arts and Crafts project. After we were settling down for the night's camp and I was cooking, putting things to rights after another bruising training regime, he would take the sack of feathers down from his horse and get back to work. He had punctured holes in the stems some time ago and was sorting them out into different sizes which he divided into sets. I could tell that some of those sets were divided into long and short. But there were other sub-sets of it all that I couldn't quite.... I couldn't quite guess what the points of those things were.

When he had done sorting, he produced the long lines of cat gut. I might have understated just how much of this stuff it was that we had bought. But he took a few long straight bits of wood and seemed to construck some kind of frame from them. Tying them together at the ends. From there, he started to weave a strange kind of pattern with the cat gut, going from one side to the next and back again, wrapping the cat cut round the frame before it would be tied off. It looked like he was building some kind of loom but a more old-fashioned, hand made one. It was closer in appearance to those basic outlines of wood that are used for leather hides. When people want to stretch and cure the leather ready for cleaning and working.

It took him a long time, several nights at least. Maybe even a week. Long enough for me to begin to find it boring. Our short-hand had developed enough, we knew each other well enough for me to know that there was no way that he was going to tell me what he was doing. So I just concentrated on the cooking, trusting him to tell me what was going on at a later date.

It was slow going, meandering in that way. We made another stop in one of the villages that surround Lake Vizima. An old place called Murky Waters that worship the mythical figure of the Lady of the Lake.

Apparently it was once the site of a massacre during the uprising of Jacques de Aldersbourg and the elevation of the church of the eternal Flame. The people were friendly enough and they seemed a bit more comfortable with the presence of a Witcher than some of these smaller villages seem to be. It made me think of a village in recovery. There were signs that some of the buildings had been torn down. Still more had been burnt to the ground and then new buildings had been built. It was as though the entire village had been picked up and moved a matter of yards down the line of the stream that they lived next to.

Kerrass wanted to see another of the local healing women that you find in this kind of place. Rather than being remote and well outside of the villate, this one lived in a fairly sizeable house next to the inn itself. I found her charming enough. But there was also a sense of professional distance that she kept between us. It was a professional charm. I rather thought that she wouldn't have many friends that sshe was close with. If at all.

Sure enough, Kerrass concluded his business with her, buying a certain amount of powdered foxglove, and we left. We spent the night in the inn which had an alarmingly high skilled number of Dice players in it. I watched a couple of games before deciding that the people there were a little bit too skilled for my coin purse and sat aside.

It was a pleasant evening, the people were moving towards harvest time so there was dancing and merriment. It was made clear that there were willing partners around if either Kerrass or I wanted to partake but I passed and Kerrass was too intent on his little project.

We moved on the following day. We skirted Vizima itself. I understand that Queen Anais and Lords Roche and Natalis are cleaning house at the moment and I didn't want to get caught up in the middle of all of that. Kerrass seemed to agree and we simply passed round it. The soldiers on the road seemed polite enough and the rumours are not too bad when talking about things like non-humans and magic users. I understand it's more to do with Lords that are not properly supportive of the Queen, Redanian agents of Queen Regent Adda and the still brewing discontents of the remains of the Flaming Rose. It all seems a bit political and just the kind of thing that I want to keep my nose out of given who my friends are.

It would be one of those situations where I would be absolutely unable to remain neutral. Where even doing nothing would create problems for the people in the surrounding.... you know.... continent.

We did hear some interesting news though. The Empress had made good on her threat to demand, sorry, I meant to say request, a formal ambassador from the Skelligan isles. Kerrass and I laughed for a long time when we heard that she had specifically requested Jarl Helfdan of the Black Boar. The rumour was that he had begged leave to see to his lands before sailing south which was approved. I suspected Politics as there were layers and things to that entire decision that I didn't want to go into.

Don't get me wrong, I could waste an awful lot of ink coming up with theories as to why Helfdan, why Queen Cerys had agreed and what was going on there. But that would just be speculation and a waste of everyone's time. Including mine.

South of Vizima we passed through a band of heavy troop movements. Cidaris and Vergen have refused to recognise the independence of the Brokilon forest and as a result, the Empress absolutely intends to crush all opposition. What the Kings of the two hold out nations are thinking is beyond me as they will be fighting wars on multiple fronts. The dryads will destroy any large scale invasion with their frighteningly accurate shooting. The armies of the North will invade from the North through Velen and the armies of Nilfgaard will invade from the south intending to meet in the middle. All the while the Skelligan navy will be blockading the two coastal nations with gleeful and ruthless efficiency meaning that the fishing fleets of both nations are all but grounded.

That it has gone on this long is surpriseing to me. Why they haven't sued for peace, or why the populace have turned round to the Kings of both nations and said something along the lines of “We can do without the wood you know?” But so far that has utterly failed to happen. Flame only knows why.

Then we passed into what was once the no-man's land of the previous war where the going seemed to get much more dangerous. There is a frontier like feel about the place. Villages have watchtowers and wooden stockades that are manned day and night by villagers with torches and spears. These watch folk seem to be made up of the veterans of both sides who have come together to found thesse small communities. Settlers from the south who have come to take advantage of the deserted land. As well as settlers from the North who have done the same. Well the land is rich, fertilised by the passage of armies. But that also means that there are bandits and monsters alike.

Kerrass continued to work hard and for the first time, I saw the Cat Witcher in him. That part of the Cat Witcher's mindset that says that he gets to choose what is a monster, and what isn't. I can't say that I disagreed with him in any of the “monster” hunting contracts he took

Two of these occasions were when he led a small group of townsfolk out to deal with a large group of bandits. It sounds worse than it was as most of the townsfolk were experienced fighters and former soldiers. Men who might have lost one hand but still know how to fight with the other, that kind of thing. There was a group of former soldiers that were in the area that hadn't wanted to go home and return to tilling the soil after the end of the war and so had set up in a former outriders camp in order to prey on local merchant traffic. Occasionally they would head into a village and shake the place down for food, women and anything else that might come up.

As I have said before, professional bandits are actually relatively normal and nice people. When they treat their banditry as a kind of job they are careful about making sure that they don't take too much, that they are relatively polite and send people back on their way.

The problem comes with unprofessional bandits. Men and women who have been forced into the profession or who have only just started their career of banditry. They tend to, for want of better phrasing, over-farm the area that they are preying on. A Professional bandit would never take everything that a merchant has because then the merchant will go a different way next time, or worse, they will hire guards.

One of the villagers that we went out with was a former bandit himself before the war and the love of a good woman had reformed him. He was disgusted at the behaviour of the bandits. He told me that, while working for the bandits, he almost never had to actually be violent. He used the threat of violence and that was normally more than enough. He told me that the moment that the violence starts then there is always the risk that some merchant or merchant's child is going to pull a dagger and get in a lucky strike, leaving a good man dead.

So this was to be avoided at all costs.

But these bandits were the worst kind of bandits. Folk who believed that the state owed them more for their service than they had received and were therefore punishing the people that came through the area for their own perceived injustices.

So they were robbing, killing and raping with abandon. The reason that the veterans in the villages hadn't done anything about this was because they had a mage with them.

I very much doubt he was a real mage. I think he was someone's runaway apprentice from back when the Witch-hunts were taking place. Enough to be able to chuck a fireball around and summon some fog and other such basic (so I'm told) effects. Still enough to intimidate even the rather intense villagers that were there.

So Kerrass led us on a dawn attack after the bandits had returned to the camp after raiding a merchant caravan. Truth be told, it was not that much of a fight. The bandits were drunk on the stuff that they had taken and most were taken alive. Kerrass killed several of them and I can be sure of one to meet his end at the end of my spear. As is right with this kind of thing, the survivors were tied up and taken down to the village where the Alderman claimed the right to trial due to being some kind of minor son of a minor knight from somewhere in Nilfgaard.

There were plenty of witnesses to the men's guilt. The Alderman cited some obscure rules in Nilfgaardian law which meant that the villagers were well within their rights to carry out trial and sentence. Rope was found and they turned a large tree into a hanging tree, decorating it with the corpses of the enemies.

The mage had the worst of it. Kerrass and I tried to explain that a mage would swing just as easily as a common bandit would but the villagers were enjoying their vengeance. They knocked the mages teeth in, pulled his tongue out and smashed all his fingers with a hammer so that he couldn't cast spells. They were building a pyre as Kerrass and I left.

I could understand their hatred, it is no good thing to live in fear, but I did not enjoy their vengeance.

There was now a pig skin attacked to Kerrass' saddlebags as well as another sack that got quite gory. I did not ask what was in them but I noticed that Kerrass kept them well away from the camp and tied them up in a tree to keep them from the teeth of scavangers.

There was also the duel.

As I say, a lot of this area was populated by people that had come with the war and then hadn't wanted to, or felt unable to, go home. There was a man there who had raped several younger women including a farmer's daughter who had killed herself when she had found out that she was pregnant and a miller's daughter who had tried to name her attacker but it became his word against hers and all the fucker had to do was to provide a series of friends who were prepared to swear that he had actually been elsewhere at the time. There were more too but they seemed terrified into staying silent.

Everyone knew who had done it. The bastard would swagger down the street with some of his cronies. He was the son of a local Lord that had set himself up after his father had won the rights to the land during the war. So the son had been elevated and was enjoying being people's Lords without having any of the responsibility.

He reminded me of Edmund quite a lot to be honest.

The other problem was that he, and all of his friends, were pretty good swordsmen. Because everyone knew who it was, the fiancee of one of the assaulted girls had tried to attack the man only to be killed in “self defence”.

I can sense that some of you are disgusted by this behaviour. I can also sense that some of you might be saying something like “Well what did they expect going to live in such a place?” To those people I would say this:

“Don't kid yourself. This kind of thing happens all over the continent.”

So a group of the villagers found out that Kerrass was in the area and went to talk to him. I was honestly surprised. He has been approached like this before for this kind of thing and mostly, he declines. He would say that this kind of thing runs the risk of being political and he is right. But this time, he listened to the stories. Wandered round a bit and spoke to some of the victims.

Then he arranged for the young man to challenge him to a duel.

Kerrass won. It wasn't even a contest really. The lout went into it feeling smug and self-satisfied, ignoring his friend that told him to be more careful. Kerrass just parried the idiot's first strike and ran him through and that was that. We rode out thiat afternoon, Kerrass taking the sword of the man that he had defeated. Another trophy that he strapped to his saddle. I asked why he was doing this, only to be met with another “Patience Freddie.” The blade looked fairly cheap to me. The kind of thing that people think makes them look really good but is actually just flashy and sparkly. So I couldnt really see the point in keeping it. I was almost sure that some of the jewels on the pommel would turn out to be glass.

If we're being honest with each other, I found the entire duel situation incredibly distasteful and further to that, I probably wouldn't have mentioned this little episode but for three reasons. The first and most important was that it would become relevent later. The second was that Kerrass insisted that it be included in the account although he agreed that it was by no means vital to the overall shape of the world. The third reason is that it kind of highlighted for me how inured we are to the amount of bullshit that goes on in the world.

As I say, this kind of thing is not that unusual. It just suddenly struck me that Kerrass could ply his trade doing this kind of thing and only this kind of thing for years at a time and he would barely have made a dent in the overall population of scum that can be found walking the pathways of the continent. He would be like the only shit shoveller in the city. No matter how hard he works or how fast he works, sooner or later everyone is going to drown in shit.

That's if someone doesn't try to assassinate him first.

As it was, we had to leave the local area at some speed as the Lord's Bounty Hunters chased after us. The duel had been set up legally and before witnesses so that the Lord had no legal recompense, so he took advantage of the only one left which was his money.

I felt a bit sorry for the Lord himself. He had won his position by right of arms, luck and being in the right place at the right time. He didn't fleece his subjects particularly hard, he was just unused to the money and privilige that his life had brought him. That meant that he lived quite frugally preferring simple food and drink but more of it and of a better quality. But he had ruined his son with the besetting sin of the newly rich which was that they wanted their children to have all the things that they never got to have when they were little. My father learned his lesson with us. Mark to the church, Sam to the army with Emma, Francesca and I able to make our own way, albeit with the best possible start.

It was just a shame that Edmund had to be....well.... Edmund before our Father would learn his lessons.

Poor sod. I have found myself wondering recently. My memories of Dad have mellowed somewhat and I begin to feel my rage towards him lessen in infinitesimal ways.

I wonder what that says about me. Ariadne claims that it means that I am getting older but I don't like the sound of that. Not really.

We had to kill one of the bounty hunters. Or rather, I had to kill one of the bounty Hunters. I was not happy about it, but I was caught and trapped in the situation. We were staying in a small tavern in a small town in the back end of beyond. The kind of place where we didn't so much as hire a pair of rooms, or even a room really. More kind of a pair of adjoining straw lined benches for us to wrap ourselves in our cloaks. Kerrass was, much to my pleasure, back to doing monster hunting work and the pigskin on his horse was getting larger. But Kerrass had risen early to go and scout out the location of the Cockatrices lair. The kind of hunt where I was only going to get in the way really so I took the opportunity to sleep in and catch up on some paperwork.

Being able to read and write in this kind of village is almost the equivalent of being able to perform magic and more than one villager was watching me awestruck. As is always the case with this kind of thing you get to the point where your eyes start hurting, your hand starts cramping and you want to go out and get a look at the sky and listen to the birds sing.

So I went outside to get some water from the well.

There was some running feet, you know the kind of thing, splashing water and some sucking noises.

I ducked. Kerrass drilled these things into me. Running noises, scampering noises, strange noises of movement, thumping, whooshing of air. Over and over again he would drill it into me. Hear those noises coming from behind you. First thing you do is duck. Then make room, roll but don't stay down as the ground is not your friend. Come back to your feet and assess the situation. But keep moving until you know what you're dealing with. Keep moving. Spin if necessary but keep moving.

I ducked, I rolled and came to my feet. Ducked again, spun and felt the wind of a blade going over my head and moving my hair.

But Kerrass drilled something else into my head which was to take your weapons everywhere. So I was spinning and the butt of my spear spun with me. I stuck the end out as I moved. Not really intending anything to happen with it. But then I moved further, still spinning. I had located my opponnent now and as I turned I was able to keep my eyes on his face as I spun, keeping the dizziness down. As I hoped, he flinched backwards.

It wasn't until this moment that I realised that I was facing a man. He had flinched backwards now. But I wanted more room. Another turn, blade lower and he stepped backwards.

Not far enough. He needed to be further back to bring my blade to bear. Some part of me registered that he was wearing chain mail that was woven with leather so my dagger tactic, learned from Letho all that time ago, would be all but impossible to bring to bear unless I knew what I was aiming at. He was also bigger than me, with all that armour he was heavier than me so closing into grapple range with him would be potentially disastrous.

So instead I tried some quarter staff tricks. I stopped spinning and turned into the opposite direction. Holding the spear like the Quarterstaff I helf it almost vertically. A strike at the face, a strike at the feet, another strike at the face.

Trying to lure him into a pattern and not giving him the time to mount an offence. From the same place that had told me that he was wearing chain mail, I received the insight that he was surprised.

Couldn't have told you what he looked like yet though.

He fell for the pattern and tried to parry the expected strike at his feet with his broadsword, trying to bring the weight of the weapon to bear. But there was nothing to parry and the blade end of my spear was moving towards his face. He jerked backwards.

Now he was off balance and I risked a bigger swing to drive him further back while he was unable to strike back properly. If he was using a quicker, sharper blade then I might have been in trouble but instead he was using a broadsword and a buckler. A solid lump of metal that needed some strength behind it to get anything moving or actually being able to hurt me.

He blocked the strike with his buckler but staggered with it. The combination of him being unbalanced and my being able to put some force into pushing him further off balance made it so.

Now I was holding the spear like a spear again and confident energy surged through my arms and legs. I sprung forward with a pattern of lunges. He parried, blocked and dodged desperately.

He had dark hair.

I saw his attack coming in his eyes and he swung. But I had seen it coming and I sidestepped. Using the momentum of the sidestep I brought the blade of the spear down and slashed him across the back of the leg around the knee. The blade ran deep and he howled, collapsing to one knee.

No time for mercy. No time for talk.

He flailed with his sword. More to drive me back, I thought, than anything. But it showed that he was still trying to fight.

No time for mercy. I was well outside the reach of his blade and off to one side so his buckler was useless. One powerful strke forwards into his midiff. Not where his heart was as I was on his right hand side. The impact drove him further. I must have hit a rib as my blade didn't go deep. I aimed lower for my second strike and stabbed in the guts.

This time the blade went in deep.

The entire thing took less than a minute. Considerably less than a minute in fact.

Twist, pull and the dark coloured blood came with it. I already knew that I had killed him. At first he flailed at me weekly before the realisation struck him. I kicked his sword away and quickly went in and took the dagger out of the sheath at his side.

He looked up at me with eyes that were already clouding over.

“They said you were just a scholar.” He commented dryly.

“I am.” I told him.

He had brown eyes and a pale face. At some point he had suffered an attack of some kind of childhood disease, his face had the pockmarks of the Chicken Pox or maybe Measels. He had been lucky to survive that as it was.

“Just a scholar.” He shook his head in amazement. “I thought you would be the easier of the two.”

I moved forward and took his hand. He was losing his strength rapidly.

“I should have.... I should have charged...” Then his eyes widened and he groaned with the agony. Shani or a Doctor like her would be able to tell you why the body has a delay between occurrence and the pain that comes afterwards. It was not the first time I have seen it and I always think that it is a cruel jest of whichever power created us. Could we not stay numb to the agony until death came for us?

His grip tightened and I held his hand as he died. I never found out what he should have charged.

“Well done Freddie.” Kerrass said calmly as he walked up. “He was good.”

I shook my head. “He underestimated me.”

“He did.” Kerrass agreed. “But that doesn't lessen your acheivement.”

“Where were you?” I was suddenly very tired.

“Not very far off.” He said and something in the way that he said it made me look at him sharply. He hadn't been running, he wasn't out of breath or flushed with any kind of exertion. He saw the look, held my eyes for a moment before turning away. He picked up the Bounty Hunter's broadsword and cleaned it, taking the man's sword belt off and resheathing the weapon.

A few of the villagers had seen the fight and were able to say that I had killed to defend myself. The Headman was convinced. The Bounty Hunter's armour was stripped and his belongings sold. I insisted on proper funeral rites according to the Holy Flame.

As we rode away with the villagers firm, if polite, encouragement to get going, I noticed that Kerrass had strapped the broadsword that the Bounty Hunter had used alongside the sabre that his own opponent had used and a nasty suspicion started to form in my head.

We rode south, Kerrass still hunting monsters. Every night that we would stop, Kerrass would spend a bit of time with his home-made loom of Cat-gut threads and would start work threading all the feathers that we had collected onto the stroing. He went about it painstakingly. A layer of Long, shiny feathers followed by a layer of shorter feathers followed by another layer of fluffyier, more downy feathers.

He worked painstakingly and slowly. Regularly holding the blanket of feathers up to the firelight to see how it all looked. On more than one occasion, whatever it was that he saw was unsatisfactory and he had to undo his work in order to redo something.

At first I thought it was exactly that. A blanket of crows feathers although I could not possibly imagine the uses for that kind of thing. But then Kerrass started to wrap it around himself like a cape. The similarity continued when he started to add a hood to the cape and I realised that he was making a cloak out of Crow's feathers. It seemed ridiculous to me and I laughed as I told him so while he was trying it on. He smiled with me but refrained from comment.

I would like to say that it was a magical moment the first time that we rode into that area that the Battle of Brenna took place. But it wasn't. Autumn was properly setting in now so the air was full of damp and drizzle, nothing that could properly be called rain but still enough to leave you feeling thoroughly damp and miserable. But that left the air with a fine kind of mist that obscured everything. We hid Kerrass' more grisly bags in an area of the marsh land, again, up a tree so that scavangers couldn't get at it before we rode into town for at least one night's rest in a warm bed with a warm meal in our bellies. Kerrass went off to the brothel that night but, even if I had been willing, I don't think I would have been much use to the women there. I found a room and collapsed into bed into the kind of sleep that always accompanies a long period spent on the road.

Kind of restless but out like a light in case you are wondering.

We had intentionally arrived a few days before the deadline of the Autumn Equinox. So we took the time to wake slowly the following day, ate a large breakfast, which is something that I'm getting better at now that I've spent a bit more time on the road, and went out to buy a guidebook. The two of us spent a bit of time poring over the map that was in the front of the book and Kerrass pointed at a scrap of the map. It was at that point where the Mahakaman volunteer regiment had begun their movements where they turned their defensive square into a mobile defensive square. A military maneauver that no one has mananaged before or since except in the training yard.

The dwarves managed to do that while in the thick of battle and moved into harder conflict as they did so. Think of that next time you try and accuse the Dwarves of not pulling their weight in the Northern Wars.

“There.” Kerrass said. “I'm going to make camp there. Where the fighting was the thickest.”

On that first day Kerrass went shopping, buying several tools that looked like they were to be used for extensive manuel labour. Some lanterns and a length of rope. He also bought a small donkey to carry it all. We rode down to Kerrass' chosen side and surveyed the scene. There wasn't a great deal to show for it as looters, monsters and others had already picked the place clean. It was gently sloped downwards and to one side but Kerrass declared that the area was satisfactory.

“So what's next?” I asked.

Kerrass produced the heavy broadsword from the Bounty Hunter and plunged it into the ground. Then he pushed it down deeper and deeper until it was well anchored.

“Good sign,” He muttered before he fetched a length of rope, tying one end to the pommel of the broadsword and tied the other end to the handle of the illfated duellists sword. Then he used the anchor and the length of rope to draw a circle, easily twenty meters in diameter.

“First we need to clear this area.” He said. “Everything within this circle now needs to be outside the circle. Bones, old bits of debris, believe me when I say that we want this entire area to be as flat and featureless as possible.”

“Why?”

“Freddie,”

“I know I know. Patience” I thought my impression of Kerras was getting better but it seemed that he didn't agree.

While I worked, Kerrass took a pair of shovels out of his gear and started to dig a loose trench around the circle marked. It wasn't very deep at all in fact, more a way of marking the ground in some way. But nevertheless, clods of turf and piles of dirt flew as he worked. I worked similarly, having learned my lesson about physical labour, I worked carefully and slowly, taking my time and making sure that I did not get overwhelmed by it.

One of the secrets is to hydrate properly. Lots of water with only minimal alcohol contained within for purity.

It took all day. Several times I thought I had finished but Kerrass would look over and find an arrowhead or something that besmirched the area. He didn't get cross, or angry. He wasn't losing his temper or calling me names like he does when I get something wrong in training. It was more as though I didn't understand something.

So although the bulk of the battlefield debris was cleared relatively quickly, a lot of time was spent walking around slowly and peering at the ground, moving the blades of grass aside to peer around them.

At the end of the day we built camp just to the North of our cleared circle. We erected a shelter and stretched a tarpaulin over our site, digging a rain trench around our sleeping area. That evening we trained inside the circle. It was a more gentle kind of training after the extreme levels of exertion that Kerrass had demanded over the previous weeks of travel since we had landed back on the continent. It felt more like we were stretching and limbering up. The same kind of training we do before an expected fight is coming.

The atmosphere was relaxed as the two of us finished up. There was a feeling in the air, like something was about to happen that we had not anticipated. We felt as though we had done a good days work (NB: I know that we hadn't and had any common variety farmer, villager or craftsman done the same amount then he would have laughed at us. I'm saying that that's what it felt like) and we were sat, listening to the rain strike the oilskin that we had set up to cover us, eating the roasted meat and looking out over the battlefield. It was peaceful and I felt... Contented I suppose.

“What are we doing here Kerrass?” I asked. “We're several miles away from the town now. No-one's around but us and I'm sitting here wondering what the hell is going on. Don't get me wrong. Overjoyed at the opportunity to come here and poke around a site of historical significance but still....”

Kerrass sighed and put his platter aside.

“This is the last secret Freddie. The last thing I have to tell you about my past I suppose. Don't get me wrong, there are details, matters of philosophy and circumstances that we could talk about. But this is the last major thing I think. I did promise you after all and now is as good a time as any.”

He leant back and looked out into the rain soaked night.

“No details yet, now is not the time. But we are here to summon someone. That's what all that is about.” He gestured at the captured heads, the bag of blood, the taken swords and other things. “It is time I told you about my Goddess.”