(Warning: Anecdotal recounting of suicide along with anecdotal scenes of people dying in some quite grisly ways

I have something to say before I talk about the closing stages of the investigation into Jack and before I detail the, frankly, disturbing and horrific events that took place in the weeks after the night of Colonel Duberton’s capture.

There is something that I want to say and it concerns the fate of one of the victims of the Jack conspiracy. Specifically, about the girl who was masquerading as the wife of Colonel Duberton in the lead up to the final, climactic events. The girl who was there to throw us off the scent. The girl who was murdered in a way so horrible, that my vampiric betrothed had to remove herself from the presence of those people who committed those acts. Why? She feared that she would lose her composure and tear out the spines of the people responsible.

The girl who was there, just as a body, because she was the right height, the right body shape and because she had the right colour hair. The conspirators didn’t care about who she was. They didn’t care about her history, where she came from or what she was doing before she was forced to play her part in what happened. She fit a physical requirement for them and when they no longer needed her, or rather when they found a purpose for her beyond her initial remit, she was disposed of in such a way that it causes nightmares.

The worst of it? The part that still keeps me up at night with self loathing and disgust?

It took us nearly two weeks to find out who she was.

Just some girl.

Two weeks. Far too long.

I have a number of regrets in my life. I know that the priests and the scholars and the philosophers tell you to live your life with no regrets. It is good advice, never regret doing something or not doing something as the case may be. However, I also think that such a directive is an, all but, impossible task to set yourself.

I have a number of regrets. I didn’t reconcile with my father when he was still alive. I did not love Ariadne immediately and instead allowed myself to be ruled by fear. I have not done enough to keep my family together…

I did not save Francesca.

Those are the big ones really and people can tell me the logical reasons as to why none of those things happened. They can point out the very real truth that there is little to no chance that my Father and I would have reconciled while he was healthy. We were too different, we disagreed on too many things, the list goes on and on.

Ariadne is the first to argue that there was a deep, intense, instinctual and above all physical reaction to the presence of an Elder Vampire in my life. My entire being rebelled against the prospect of being in the same room with her, let alone being more intimate. It still does sometimes, in the deep parts of the night when all is dark and still. When the light of the Eternal Flame seems so very far away.

And my family is my family. Yes, I could have done more. I could always have done more. But it takes more than one person to break down a relationship. Sooner or later the other people need to put in some work too.

I’m not going to talk about Francesca. Soon, I hope, maybe. But not now.

Those are the big regrets. There are others. Of course there are others. An alarming amount of them are regrets of the moment. Even though if I had done the thing that I regret not doing, or not done the thing that I regret doing, then my life would be violently different now. There are girls that I look back at and think “They were into me,” with the benefits of hindsight and more experience. But if I had acted on that, would I now be engaged to the most amazing woman on the continent and maybe the world?

There are friends that I have lost touch with, battles that I should have fought and others that I should have left alone. Small battles, in the halls of homes and churches, streets and gardens.

In just about every case though, there is an argument as to why this thing that I did or did not do was entirely justified. I can argue that, in that time and place, I could not have done anything other than what I did. That I am looking back with the perfect vision of hindsight and the accumulated knowledge of all that has happened since. There are people, even now, who are prepared to argue with me, that these things are the case.

Apart from this one.

It took us nearly two weeks to find out who she was.

Just some girl.

Everyone involved regrets that it took us quite as long as it did. Even more than that, we also all regret that we didn’t prevent the horror that she went through. Even those of us that had no idea that there was a problem. Even those of us for whom it was not our duty to find her, protect her and see to her safety. We all felt and feel responsible that we did not do those very things. We did not find her, protect her or see her to safety.

We didn’t even know her name.

Just some girl.

Like all of those other petty regrets, there are people that are climbing over themselves to tell us why it was not our fault. People telling us why we shouldn’t hold ourselves responsible for what happened to “Just some Girl.” Every single one of them is correct. But that doesn’t stop us from feeling the guilt and the horror of what happened, why it was allowed to happen and everything that was involved.

The first excuse that we tell ourselves is a familiar one to me. The Witcher’s response to this kind of thing. They say that it is impossible for a person to save everyone. If you try, then there is a real possibility that you will go mad, or that you will end up making yourself ill or injuring yourself in the effort. It is the same excuse that Kerrass tells himself every time that someone dies when he feels that he should have saved them.

The next excuse is a weaker one but it is true nonetheless. We simply didn’t know that she needed our help. Although true, that is scant comfort to those people that have lost their loved one. We didn’t know that she needed our help. If we had then we would have done something about it. Of course we would have.

But we didn’t, and there is more than enough of an argument to be made that we should have known. We should… But we did not.

After that, it breaks down into smaller excuses and explanations. All of them true and none of them adequate in the minds of those of us who feel responsible for what happened to her. I was sick. Kerrass was dealing with his own frailties and the recovery from everything that had happened. Ariadne was focusing on me and my recovery.

Syanna, Damien, the Knights and the guard all blame themselves and regard it as their failure. But they were under the pressure of the court to find the killer. They were under pressure from the townsfolk, the merchants, the villagers and the vineyard owners to get the problem of Jack solved. All the while they were doing all of that, they were also expected to keep the lands of Toussaint free of bandits, monsters and everything else. So it is not unfair to say that they had their hands full in dealing with the minutiae of protecting a realm. When taking all of this into account, it is easy to understand that the fate of one girl would have slipped their notice.

The other officers and Knights of the 4th Alba division were heartbroken when they found out what happened. They joined the Knights and the guard in the search for “Just some girl.” There was an outbreak of fights and small violence taking place as some people, not as civic minded as the rest of us, who bemoaned the effort of what was going on. The questioning and the searching. “It’s just one girl” they would say. “Why are you worried about Just some girl?” and then, in a rage, the soldier of the 4th would turn on the complainer and have to be pulled off the speaker by their colleagues.

Those people that had hoped that Toussaint would return to normal after the unmasking of Jack, the many… many arrests that took place afterwards and it becoming public that there were actually multiple Jacks and that… yes, we had indeed caught them all. Those people looked around themselves at the small nation that was entering a state of mourning and sighed.

Nearly two weeks. It took nearly two weeks to find out who she was.

The Duchess took it really hard. When Francesca had been taken, she had become almost ascetic. Removing signs of wealth from the palace, wearing simple dresses and minimal makeup. I wrote, many times, that I thought she looked better for those changes.

We spoke about it a couple of times and she admitted that there had been some comfort in the Laughing Jack incident. There had obviously been some magical power in evidence there and as a result of which, it was actually quite reassuring. Laughing Jack, the night of the Long Fangs. Those things were carried out by inhuman monsters. By magical powers that were beyond the capacity of understanding for your average person.

But this? These crimes had been committed by men. Normal men with normal drives, ambitions and desires. She even admitted that she had once been skeptical of the regular trend in the works of the bard. The same bard that she still does not care to name. The works where the obvious and regular theme of the story is that the real monsters of the story are not the spirits, the beasts or the twisted abominations that climb out of the horror to do… whatever. The real monsters are the people that are involved in such things. She had always hated those themes. But now that she had seen it for herself, on multiple occasions, she was forced to admit that there was truth to be found in that sentiment.

She took to wearing black. She decreed a period of mourning. When courtiers asked her who she was mourning she would tell them that she was mourning “Just some girl.” When they would then tell her that her reaction seemed a bit extreme for some nameless woman and wondered when the period of mourning would be over, she would get angry. Just for a moment, her eyes would flash and her face would become hard and stern before her eyes would fall.

“I mourn for Toussaint.” She says. “For Toussaint that is not what it was, and the people within it who have lost their way. And it seems that I must add some more days to the mourning.”

Nearly two weeks. It makes me sick to think about it. And that’s not the really heartbreaking aspect to it all.

On the first day, riders left Beauclair and rode in all directions. Riders from every walk of life. Guards, merchants, mercenaries, knights. Syanna called up the old knightly orders and told them that for this purpose, the knights of Toussaint ride again. Once again, the words “I swear by the Heron that it shall be so.” were heard to echo the halls of Beauclair palace without the irony that had begun to accompany such words.

But it was not a triumphant return. The words were not said with joy or fervor. Instead, they were howled with grief and horror. Men who had hated Syanna and the new order of knights were united with her in horror of what “Just Some Girl” had suffered. So they swore their blades and arms and all of the other Chivalric pieces of nonsense to the cause of finding out who she was.

I’m told that Syanna was ruthless, the search was coordinated and organised within an inch of its life and not a single man complained. Older knights went from door to door, younger knights rode out to the villages and the farms. Once again, golden armour was seen on the streets as they searched for her.

And still, she could not be found.

Nearly two weeks it took us and the excuses and explanations started to pile up.

On the second day after his arrest, Colonel Duberton broke. Saying it like that suggests that he was being interrogated and questioned. You might have visions of torture implements and dungeons but that could not be further from the truth. When I say that he broke, the truth is that he just started talking. For the first day, he had spent his day in chains. He had said nothing, done nothing. He had not eaten or even responded to any other kind of stimulus. I’m told that various things were tried. The Duchess tried, Damien, Syanna and the other officers of the 4th as well as anyone who had been able to claim friendship with him tried to get through to him.

Nothing worked.

In the end, he slept and ate something in the evening of that first day. On the morning of the second day, he took a deep breath and said “What do you need from me?”

Saying it was like a dam bursting would not be true. He just started speaking. Again, although I was there for some of it and… Oh boy we will get to that, he needed to be prompted and led. The story needed to be pulled out of him. So much of it was just babbling, weeping and shouting, for understandable reasons, that he needed to be directed.

But he could not tell us anything about who she was. It was him that gave her her name “Just some girl,” and in doing so, damned himself in my eyes. I was not alone in my thinking either.

On the third day it became clear that the search was not a simple one. That the problem was not going to be solved overnight. There was not going to be some kind of grand national catharsis that would scourge the crime from the souls of Toussaint as a whole. More and more people signed up for the search. The vigilance committees that had formed in an effort to protect the countryside from Jack, were still active and used the search as an excuse to carry on with their activities. Only now, they weren’t looking for foreigners that could be Jack. Now they were looking for people that might know something. The problem there was that the committees efforts were no less brutal and misguided.

On the fourth day of the search, the Knights of Francesca were ordered to return to their former duties of peacekeeping and law enforcement. There were some exceptions, people like Guillaume were still being used to coordinate the efforts to find out Just Some Girl’s identity. Others, like Gregoire, were used as a potential punishment to keep people from going too far. Smugglers and the ever present bandits used the opportunity, the distraction, to commit their crimes under the guise of “helping the search”. And it was problems like this that the Knights of Francesca were forced to deal with, diverting them from the search effort.

There was also the problem that the full investigation into the matter of this, newer, Jack conspiracy was still ongoing. Knights and Guards were needed to preserve evidence, escort and question prisoners and so on. The lawyers were already working on how to deal with the legal ramifications of what was happening.

On the fifth day, nothing really happened.

The sixth day saw Ariadne drafted into helping in any way that she could. She was reluctant to leave my side as I was still very ill, but Kerrass, Sir Walther, Ann, Lady Vivienne, Emma and Laurelen between them threatened to sit on me should I try to do anything that hadn’t been approved of as part of my recovery. She revisited the corpse of Just Some Girl in order to see if there was anything more that could be gleaned from a proper and in depth investigation.

Unfortunately, what she was able to give out was far from enlightening. Just Some Girl was a couple of inches over five feet tall when standing barefoot. Her hair was definitely blonde, and comparing that hair to the hair on the corpse of Lady Duberton meant that the shade was close enough to be mistaken for the other easily.

She was young, younger than Madame Duberton who was in her late twenties. Ariadne suggested the theory that the youth was required to divert from the fact that Madame Duberton had access to proper hygiene and health care, whereas the pool of potential dopplegangers that the conspiracy had access too would have been limited. Therefore youth would have been needed to mask differences in complexion and the like.

Given her injuries, there was no way of telling what Just some girl looked like, but she would have had to have been close enough to Madame Duberton to avoid easy suspicions. Therefore, heartshaped face, small nose, slightly sad eyes that generally tilted down, strong chin. She was pale, but anyone would be pale, we were in the middle of winter. So that wasn’t as much of a distinguishing effect that we thought it might be.

There were a couple of other distinguishing marks on the body but there was no way to tell whether anyone would recognise her by those marks.

So that was what the searchers had to go on. A young girl of average height, erring slightly towards the round of face and figure, pretty but not beautiful, blonde haired and pale.

You can imagine how many people in Toussaint answer to that description.

On day seven there was a minor scandal. The majority of the bureaucracy of the court was engaged in efforts to figure out what they were going to do with the conspirators. The majority of the court were able to read the situation well enough to know that protesting the conspirator’s innocence was a quick way to earn the Duchess’ wrath and most of those people that might protest anyway were aiding in the search. It was as though the entirety of Toussaint had come together in the face of the scandal in order to find Just Some Girl. I’m told it was heartening to see. Heartening, but also a little bit of cause for concern that it took something like this to bring people together.

The scandal was that a couple of people muttered as to when the entire situation was going to be over. The day to day business of the court had ground to a halt as everything was tied up with the search or with the conspiracy. So everything else had just kind of… frozen. Who it was that complained can’t be stated for certain. Guillaume claimed it was a merchant complaining about the fact that he couldn’t get anyone to talk to him regarding matters of commerce.

The fact that Velles was a Temerian merchant and had been placed under arrest meant that there was going to be a gap in the market, so people were climbing over themselves in order to plug the gap that his absence would open up.

So Guillaume claimed that it was a merchant. Having said that, the man is so obviously biased against merchants that it’s almost comical. He has a hatred of the breed that is bone deep and learned from childhood. The humour comes from the fact that is well aware of the prejudice and does everything he can to work against this. Thie means that he will go out of his way to be exceedingly polite towards any merchant that he comes across in order to seem as though he does not harbour this prejudice.

Other than Emma. I literally once caught him out at this. He was moaning about merchants one day to the point that I think that Emma was getting uncomfortable and I pointed out that Emma was a merchant. And he protested, apparently without irony, that Emma was different. “She treats people with honour” was what he said. Emma just smirked at that.

Others claimed that the people who had spoken up in protest at the state of matters in Toussaint were some members of the old guard. Others claimed that it was the priesthood. It cannot be entirely certain because they did it in court and one of those strange things happened where, for no readily apparent reason, the entirety of the court heard what was said.

Three duels were fought that afternoon. Fortunately, two of them were to the first blood which resulted in an apology to the Duchess who was anything but understanding. She ordered that one of the men (a minor noble of some kind. A second son who had spoken out of turn, or expressed the words of their father in an effort to sound out the court before the father dipped his toe into the political waters) confined to their estates. The other man was a foreigner and he was exiled, never to return.

The third duel, although not to the death, still resulted int he death of one of the men. Injured at the first pass, his wound had become infected and he had died shortly afterwards.

All of this was a distraction. People were watching this when they should have been looking elsewhere.

Day seven, Syanna ordered a rotation. So that everywhere that was being searched would now be searched with fresh eyes and fresh minds in the hope that this might mean that something else was found.

Day eight. Nothing really happened. The ambassador from Nilfgaard made a formal apology on behalf of the Empress for the behaviour of the colonel of the fourth that had betrayed his mistress and betrayed the duty that he had been assigned to. The same order formalised the field promotion of those officers that that had already taken over the colonel’s duties. The ambassador also declared that the duchess might do with the colonel what she wilt and that the colonel was turned over to the duchess for punishment although he would be held in the Nilfgaardian embassy until sentence was passed.

The matter of Lord Velles and his diplomatic status was still ongoing however. Temeria is a different beast and is, in theory, still an independent kingdom.

Day nine. There was a breakthrough in the situation that actually gave us nothing at all that was useful. Now that it was clear that Colonel Duberton that was selling everyone out in an effort to try and redeem himself in some small way, while also gaining some small measure of revenge for his own lost honour and the death of his wife…

Who he loved. For all that I might have complicated thoughts about the man, it should be made clear that he really did love his wife.

… some of the other conspirators started to look for ways that they might be able to save their own skins. They started to open up about various parts of their involvement when it came to what had happened. Naturally, the first question that was on the lips of the interrogators was “Who was ‘Just Some Girl’?”

The answers were, at the same time, obvious and underwhelming. It turned out that she had been sought out early in the proceedings. She had been found and kept by the inner circle of the conspiracy. Because yes, they had inner circles and a hierarchy amongst themselves. These bastards were exactly the type of assholes that you might think they were.

But the girl was provided by Lord Leblanc’s men. Lord Leblanc himself was still holding to the strategy of “Deny everything” and told everyone that if any of his men were involved in such a matter, then he had no knowledge of it one way or another.

The interrogations on that particular subject moved on to the mercenaries and guards that were taken alive in the efforts to rescue Captain De La Tour and his men. When we finally found out how she had been found, there was a collective groan of despair from the interrogators. That groan being that the kidnapper was one of the men that had died that night.

Of course it was. Whether that was true or not could not be proven. Those mercenaries and guards, unlike their higher born counterparts, were easily able to see that this was a matter that had raised the anger and disgust of the countryside. They knew that their lives and their skin depended on the kidnappers not being them. That the kidnappers would probably suffer a worse death than any of the other conspirators, who were bound to not die clean as it was.

So the blame was shifted onto someone who was already dead.

For a while there, we got all excited about us finding something.

But then it became clear that we had found nothing.

Day 10, the rain and the slightly raised temperature meant that the mouth fo the river that flows through Toussaint had thawed. Which in turn meant that Lord Geralt and Lady Yennefer were able to come home. It turned out that Lady Vigo had been keeping in relatively constant communication with the pair of them so they were kept well abreast of circumstances. They landed further down river and rode the rest of the way.

Lady Yennefer came to visit me shortly after getting home while Lord Geralt joined the search almost immediately. It turns out that he has a much more intricate knowledge of the backways and back roads of Toussaint than many of the Knights do and was able to point out many hidden areas and camps that might otherwise have been missed by the more conventional search.

Lady Yennefer teased him with the suggestion that he knew all the pretty girls in Toussaint and where they were and as such, should have been able to identify the missing girl almost immediately.

There was an edge to the teasing though, apparently, Lord Geralt ignored it. Guillaume claimed that the edge is often there when Lady Yennefer teases Lord Geralt She likes to keep him on his toes and remind him that the ground under his feet is not as sure as he would like to think it is.

She did come to see me. She spent some time looking down at me where I was still struggling. She looked at me for a long time before leaving and going back to work.

Day Eleven. There is a long standing debate in legal circles as to whether or not the extraction of information from a person’s mind can be used in legal proceedings. The short answer is that it can’t. Because if a Mage or priest goes into a person’s mind and recounts what they saw there, then the court is till relying on the honesty of the priest or mage doing so. Once upon a time, that might have been enough, especially with those priests and mages that were assigned to the royal councils. But since the Kings and Queens of the North stopped putting their faith in magic as much as they used to, that practice has lessened.

It has become a truth, acknowledged through most of the North, that a priest or a mage is just as likely to warp the information until it is simply a recounting of whatever the mage or priest wanted to be true.

However, the Duchess was getting to the point where she had had enough. She directed both Lady Yennefer and Lady Vigo to delve throught he conspirators minds in order to try and find out who Just Some Girl was. This caused some problems as the use of such techniques on the wnwilling is, essentially, rape of the mind and can cause permanent damage to the people on the receiving end.

In the end, the two women were persuaded, not least because the Duchess had certain powers over them. She tried with Ariadne too but Ariadne finds the process abhorrent and said so. Loudly.

What did they find? Absolutely nothing.

Day twelve. A messenger came back from the outskirts of the Duchy. He had ridden hard and carried a message to the Knight commander who rode out herself under escort.

Day thirteen. The Knight Commander sent word back that they were as sure as they could be that they had found Just Some Girl.

Twelve days. Twelve days it took us. Just shy of two weeks. There will come a time when that doesn’t sound as bad in my head as it might have been. One day. But as I write this now, safe in a guest room in the palace of Beauclair, it burns my heart and my soul to know that we let her down so badly.

We rode out. The duchess led us, wearing mourning garb she rode in a simple carriage under escort of a score of knights. They were old nights and youny, the old and the new order of Toussaint. With her rode a company of the 4th Alba division, resplendent in their full black armour that had been polished to a burnished sheen. Not a scrap of mud or rust could be found on any of their equipments. There were numerous other people that went as well. Lady Caroline rode in her adopted mother’s carriage. Kerrass rode out and I rode as well in a small wagon.

I cannot remember much of the journey….

I will speak of the immediate aftermath of the cult’s destruction again shortly. It is important that certain things are said before I get to it though and I did not want to let these things go un noticed.

I was still exhausted. That stage where I was suffering from massive headaches, frequent nausea and a state of being that was not unlike being in a fever. I felt the cold keenly and was wrapped in several layers of the thickest, warmest clothing that money could buy in Toussaint. Even then, every gap, every opening that could allow the passage of air into my body was enough to set me shivering.

So it was already a miserable ride out to the outskirts of the Duchy. Even taking into account the errand that took us out there. We pitched a camp outside a farming village. It was a riding stop on one of the trade roues. There was a large inn and flat area that in the summer would be used for the trading of cattle. Those people in our group that could not stay at the inn camped out in the field and that night, we watched as the campfires lit up the night’s sky like so many stars.

On any other time I would have insisted on camping out in those fields too, but it was clear to me that such an insistence on my part would be ignored. And in all truth, I didn’t want to. I already regretted the determination that I had in heading out there. But I also knew that I had had no other choice. That I needed to go and look into the eyes of the people that we had let down and apologise.

Ariadne saw to it that I ate plenty of hot, filling food and that I took to my bed early that night. I went without protest. I was not looking forward to the following day.

It was a presser’s cottage.

I know next to nothing about the science of creating wine. It is not one of those things that has occupied my interest and I see no reason why I might change my mind now. I am well able to enjoy the proceeds of the wine making trade while I have never any need to investigate how the liquid came from the grapes, or other fruit, or flowers even, to being inside my cup.

One thing I do know is that the grapes go into a press in order for the juices to come out. Traditionally, this process is carried out by virtue of a person... preferably a beautiful woman which is a theory as to why Toussaint values physical beauty. Apparently it means that the beauty of the woman transfers into the flavour of the wine. I have no idea how but there you go.

The person is supposed to get inside a vat of grapes and jump up and down, squashing the grapes with their feet until the grapes have given up all of their goodness.

That’s how it’s done traditionally. And some of the vintages are still done this way. The wines that are carried to the duchess’ and empress’ tables are among these. However industrialisation is a growing theme in the continent. The innovations carried far and wide by dwarven travellers and merchants mean that wines and olive oil become more in demand throughout the world and more needs to be produced to satisfy the demand.

So there are wind mills dotted around Toussaint that do not drive the mills to grind grain into flour, but rather a mechanical pressing device. I know nothing about how this works, but to my amateur eyes, the difference between a grain mill and a wine press is only in the name.

The home that Syanna led us to was a cottage that was attached to one of these houses. It was not lost on me that the windmill was still working as we saw it.

We had gathered in the village square as the innkeeper brought out cauldrons of mulled wine to feed the duchess, her entourage, the knights and the soldiers that had descended on the town. The rain had stopped by this point and the sun had come out, giving the air a false sense of warmth despite the fact that there was frost on the ground and the instant that you were out of the direct sunlight, you would find yourself shivering again.

I had so many layers of wool about my person that I fairly waddled out to the meeting, The duchess stood, her hands cupped around the mug of wine to savour the warmth as she stood with her sister. Vivienne was there as well as Captain De La Tour and Sir Guillaume in his position as knightly champion. Kerrass was nearby, leaning against a wall and kicking at a lump of earth that would probably turn out to be a piece of frozen horse dung.

Ariadne was walking with me. She had been my shadow since we had caught Colonel Duberton and I was grateful for her presence every moment of every day.

Gregoire had decided not to come. He was invited, but he had argued, probably correctly, that there were still members of the outlying farms and villages that would flee at his name and that he would add nothing to what was going to happen here today.

We stood there and watched as the Nilfgaardian soldiers, and fully armoured knights climbed aboard their horses. It was taking a long time.

“Do they know we’re coming?” The duchess asked her sister.

I was not the only person that jumped at the sound of the duchess’ voice cutting through the silence.

“I think it is almost certain that they knew we’re here.” Syanna said. “A community like this, it is almost impossible to keep it secret that the duchess is abroad in her realm.”

The duchess grunted at that. She looked tired. “I need to be the one to tell them,” she said.

“They’ll know.” Kerrass had approached when I wasn’t looking. “They will know what has happened the instant you turn into the lane that leads to their cottage. They will see you coming and they will know. They always know. What other reason would a duchess, a noble, a knight or a witcher turn up on their doorstep. Only in those instances of something awful having happened. They will know.”

The duchess said nothing to that.

Our honour guards and escorts finally agreed that they were as ready as they were going to be and those of us that weren’t really capable of riding, or didn’t because of social nonsense, climbed back in our carriages and covered wagons. If I had been healthy, it is all but certain that I would have been warmer if I had been riding, but with the way my health was at that point in time, it just wasn’t as practical.

Ariadne had put a small heating charm on my wagon. The duchess was in her carriage with Lady Vivienne and Lady Caroline, while Ariadne and I travelled together. Kerrass rode nearby but I didn’t track that.

I just let the world pass me by, looking out onto the countryside without really taking it in.

Toussaint really is a beautiful place.

There was a row of these wind driven presses. They were built differently to the more traditional looking windmills that I had been expecting, taller, thinner and more tapered to their ends. Again, I don’t know why that might be the case. But the cottage looked like any other cottage in that part of the world

It was smallish though larger than a hut. It earned the title of “cottage” in my mind. The walls were made of stone and were clearly whitewashed. The roof was thatched and the thatch was well maintained. If I had been out on the road with Kerrass, I would not have complained about staying in the building for the night.

There was a small enclosure attached to the cottage which were made into several paddocks. A couple of goats were wandering about, chewing the hay that had been left for them and looking at us with the thoughtful, slightly disdainful expressions of livestock everywhere. Another small paddock was empty while the third was carefully cultivated to grow some vegetables and herbs. Basic things I have no doubt, currently devoid of the food, waiting for a spring thaw.

Again, I could almost see the kinds of people that we were going to meet in my mind. People that were used to just getting by. People who had never complained in their lives. People who would argue that others had it much worse than they did. Where they grew vegetables rather than complain about lack of food.

I could even guess that there would be a relatively large family and that the father would spend most of his nights sleeping up at the press to ensure that there are no problems. An act that also ensure that he could get a bit of peace in order to smoke his pipe and enjoy a skin of ale or two without his wife giving him any grief about it.

The house was not far from the road. Just a small little lane. There was no farm land attached as the press would be maintained by the local vineyard rather than needing to maintain itelf. The presser himself would be paid out of that stock and would send his wife to market to ge the things that he needed.

Kerrass training was telling me things.

I could also see why it would have been easy to take someone from here. Wind powered structures of industry are built to take advantage of the thing that they need rather than for convenience of proximity to civilisation. Roads, villages and towns are built around them and to them rather than taking their presences into account.

For this reason, the mill was on a hill, far from any sheltering trees and the town would have been a good hours walk away. The cottage was at the foot of the hill. I could see a path that wound it’s way up, a few steps were cut into the earth and reinforced with wooden planks.

There was a well.

There came a moment when all of the differences in class and wealth were laid out for us all. Just one of those moments where things are just made clear to you and there is… it hits you in the face like a hammer blow. If you are really very lucky, then you can see it happen. You can take it in and absorb it in the moment.

The small lane that led to the cottage was not wide enough for either the Duchess’ carriage, nor the wagon that Ariadne and I were riding in.

The way it worked, apparently, was that the member of the family would go into town to order the food and supplies that they needed, along with anything else that might be needed for the running and the maintenance of the wine press. Then the stall owner, or Vineyard manager would send the goods, along with the next batch of grapes along the next time the wagon was heading out in this direction. Said goods wagon was clearly a one horse deal. It must have been a huge horse but even so, the track was not wide enough for us to get down there.

To be fair to her, the duchess didn’t blink and dismounted from the carriage, picking up her skirts in one hand while she waited for her escort to form up around her. The knights and soldiers that were part of the honour guard arrayed themselves along the road and faced down towards the cottage in an attitude of respect.

It might have been respect but looking back on it, I could not help but think that the display would have been extremely intimidating if I had been on the receiving end of it.

So we dismounted and the duchess led us down the track towards the cottage.

The ground was firm under the cold which kept us from slipping and sliding about and so we were able to keep our dignity. Sir Guillaume walked at the Duchess’ side in order to catch her in case she lost her footing in the, let’s face it, muck. Syanna walked behind her sister with Captain de la Tour next to her. Kerrass and I, being lighter armed came next with Ariadne on the other side of me. Ariadne, who had complained bitterly when I had to stand out in the cold earlier, made no comment about the walk up to the house in the no less cold than the morning.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Lady Vivienne and the newly promoted Colonel Dunnet of the 4th Alba division brought up the rear. Colonel Dunnes was unhappy about what was happening to his friend, the colonel, and was confident that the officers and knights in his regiment would be scattered throughout the Nilfgaardian army in order to reduce any potential of rot that might have been spread out from the betrayal of the former commanding officer.

As I say, it was quite a nice little home that we walked towards. In my highly romantic idea of what this kind of life would be, I might have quite enjoyed this kind of life.

We had been seen. Half way down the track, a woman could bee seen hastily herding her children out of the house. The Children looked desperately uncomfortable and were tugging pulling at uncomfortable looking clothing. Even from this distance I balked a bit at the bright colours and flowers that were clearly embroidered on one of the boys shirts that was just as obviously too small for him.

One of the girls, around age nine I think, had lace embroidered on her dress.

They were wearing their best festival clothing. The stuff that you wear at the spring time dances. All their faces had the red flush of skin that has been hastily scrubbed with freezing cold water and a scouring soap.

There were seven children there. Five girls and two boys of varying ages. The oldest was a girl aged around fifteen and the youngest was four, I think. All of them had blonde hair of varying shades. It looked as though the children would be born with an almost white blonde set of locks before the colour would deepen in a more straw like colour. All of them seemed to carry the colouring of their father and the build and rough appearance of their mother.

As well as the Father and Mother of the brood, there was also a young man. He stared at us as we came down the track with sunken, sullen eyes and I could feel the hatred radiating off him. He stood apart from the others in that he was tall and thin with dark hair.

The Mother was shortish woman. Gravity and a lifetime of work and running after children were beginning to take a toll on her and she had something of a stoop about her as she straightened herself out of respect to the coming visitors. She had a round face and round cheeks that I guessed, in better times, would smile easily. She had the feeling of someone who liked to bake and gave out hugs frequently and to whoever needed them without question.

The Father was taller, receding hairline. He had a wiry strength about him which is not uncommon from someone who likely spends all his days trying to find new and inventive ways to unload and reload carts. Blonde haired and quick of eyes.

He and his wife stood next to each other behind the four children as if to catch them if any of them made a run for it. The other young man stood off to one side.

The mother’s expression was bleak and hollowed out while the Father had obviously mastered himself from some rather extreme emotion.

The duchess approached them and came to within a couple of meters when the Mother and Father knelt, pulling their children down with them.

The other young man looked, just for a moment, as though he wanted to protest, but in the end, he allowed his knees to buckle and he went to his knees.

We all stood like that for a moment.

“Please stand, there is no need to kneel,” the duchess said in a halting voice.

The family exchanged glances amongst themselves before they slowly climbed to their feet. The father had to be helped up, Sir Guillaume leapt forward to offer his hand.

“I have only just become a mother.” The duchess told them all. “I came here, thinking about what to say, what I could tell you and all of the trite things I could say. Things that people said to me when I have lost someone. But the truth is, I don’t know what to say.”

The family didn’t say anything. As Kerrass had predicted, they already knew.

I’m skipping over a lot of this because I don’t want to give too much information out. Nothing that might lead to their identity becoming common knowledge. They have been through enough.

We were offered hospitality and as such, we trooped inside the cottage and drank some coarse, new mulled wine and ate some really sweet honey cakes.

The young man that I had noticed had turned out to be Just Some Girl’s betrothed. He had been sent to learn the trade of being a press master from the father on the grounds that the father’s eldest son would not be old enough to take over when the presser was due to retire. Apparently there was some long standing health issue that would prevent him from serving for much longer. The betrothed had come to the family and as was the way with such things, a marriage had been arranged and the two young people had decided that there were worse fates than to be married to the other.

The father told me that Just Some Girl, who was his daughter, just to be clear, had just confided in his wife and he that she was actually beginning to quite look forward to her wedding night. It was due to happen on her Eighteenth Birthday which was a couple of months away.

He had to take a break as he realised he had spoken about her as if she was still alive.

Looking back, it was kind of funny as to how we all kind of split up in order to spend time with the family including into some directions that I had not expected. Some were kind of obvious to me. Captain de La Tour politely asked if there were any small chores that he could do in order to make life easier. When the Father looked aghast at the prospect Damien stood and left, returning with several arm loads of firewood before snatching up the wood axe and going back outside where the rhythmic sound of an axe splitting logs could be heard.

Sir Guillaume took the son in law in order to be shown the wine press and how it all worked. To all intents and purposes the big knight seemed genuinely interested as to what he was being told and when they came back later, Guillaume and the son in law spent a good amount of time talking, Guillaume asking questions and the son in law answering them.

Syanna and Lady Vivienne turned out to be really good with the younger female children while Colonel Dunnet had clearly come prepared. After asking the father’s permission, he produced two small training swords from his belt and set about teaching the boys how to use them. I was there for part of the whispered conversation between Colonel Dunnet and the father and it went like this.

“Young boys are always fascinated by knights and soldiers.” Colonel Dunnet began. “Now would you like me to discourage, or encourage that interest?”

The Father seemed astonished by the question, not least because he was being consulted at all. “Do what you think is best,” he eventually stammered out.

The Colonel took them outside and gave them a few lessons and a few exercises to do. He even came back in and gave his honest assessment that of the two boys, the older boy lacked the proper temperament for a knight or a soldier. The younger of the two had better coordination and physical gifts. Some more suggestions were made as to how the Father could encourage or discourage the attitudes in either of the boys.

Ariadne and the duchess went into the kitchen to help the mother of the household produce warm drinks and biscuits. Cakes would have been pushing it I think. That was an interesting exercise to watch. The woman was clearly mortified that the Duchess of Toussaint was in her kitchen and bustling around while another woman, who everyone clearly thought was some kind of demon of ancient darkness, calmly and politely asked where the milk and honey were kept.

The three women worked together fairly well until there was an incident. The way Ariadne described it later was that the news about her eldest daughter’s death was slowly sinking in to the mother and she was getting angry. Not at us or our presence. Apparently she seemed to be quite flattered and pleased at the fact that we had turned up at all. She was looking forward to boasting to her neighbours and especially her sisters, she was the youngest, that she had served tea and biscuits to the most important lords and ladies in the land.

Then she just seemed to collapse. Being who she was, Ariadne caught the pots that the woman had been carrying using some of her vampiric speed, saving the boiling water from spilling before turning round. The duchess was already crouching next to the fallen woman with her arms round her as she sobbed for her missing daughter.

She recovered almost immediately, retreated to her room to clean up and came back to apologise to everyone. Like everyone else, I wanted to tell her that there was no need for apology, but the woman’s dignity was fragile enough as it was.

Kerrass stood with me as I spoke with the father. The youngest daughter had a fascination with the Witcher and had broken away from the other group of children to sit and watch Kerrass. For his part, Kerrass pretended not to notice and amused himself, and the little girl, by lighting and extinguishing a nearby candle with a click of his fingers.

The girl then tried to copy his gesture, but couldn’t get her fingers to click properly. But that amused her for a while as she sat in the corner, frowning at her fingers as she tried to get them to click.

The father looked a little concerned at one point and wondered what the danger was of her clicking her fingers together and burning the house down. Kerrass took pity on the man and told him that the only way that would have happened would have been if the girl had some kind of latent magical talent. And if she did, the Father would already be well aware of it as Lady Vigo would have come down to make her presence felt and arrange for the proper schooling. The man only just seemed to be calmed by that.

So I found myself dealing with the Father. He had heard of me and promptly asked me to keep their names out of my writings, even as he acknowledged that it would surely come up where he and his family would end up being talked about. So if you’re wondering why I am avoiding naming that family then that is why. I spoke to him in much the same way that I had heard my Father speak to any number of Land owners and professional workers on our lands. I asked him how business was, asked him about the prices of things and whether or not the local lord was treating him well.

He gave me something of a withering look and I apologised for that last.

We stood in silence for a while after that as he watched his eldest daughter show Lady Vivienne her stitching hoop before his face seemed to crumple a bit. I passed my cup to Kerrass and steered the man outside so he could have a moment away from everything. He went to one of the fence posts against which he leant while he watched Colonel Dunnet showing his two sons a game.

It’s a game where you have two sticks on the ground about twenty feet apart. The idea is that you run between the two, bending to touch each stick. Then you have to get faster inside a certain time period. It’s a swordsman’s exercise designed to teach balance, flexibility and speed. You can’t really straighten between the sticks before you have to bend again which can cause you to stumble if you try to run too fast.

He watched them for a while. The two boys were laughing and joking with each other, oblivious to the grey feeling that seemed to have settled over the countryside nearby.

“She went to market.” He said suddenly. “She was the oldest child and she went to market for us. She would have a list of the things that we needed and we would send her off on her way. She would go. And then one day she didn’t come back.”

I didn’t ask him what day it was that she disappeared. I already knew and it seemed rude to interrupt him when he seemed to need to get this stuff off his chest.

“You tell yourself things.” He went on. “You tell yourself that you should have gone, That we should have sent the boy, or her mother. Surely the bastards wouldn’t be interested in her mother. I mean, to me she’s still the beautiful girl that I took flowers to when she was washing clothes down by the river, but to everyone else…”

He shook his head.

“You tell yourselves these things. The boy was learning his craft which meant that I had to be there in case something went wrong. If her mother went then who would look after the kids. They still want their mother even after all this time, they still want their mother.”

I said nothing. I was familiar with the pattern of self-recrimination and self loathing.

“She went to town one day and she never came back. She just never came back. To be honest, we didn’t think anything of it. We’re a busy family and to be truthful… we didn’t notice until late that night. What with one thing and another.”

He sniffed.

“Prophets, how could I not notice?” He demanded of himself, suddenly angry. It faded just as quickly as it came on though.

“The lad was just about to bed down up in the press and he looked around for her, hoping for a good night kiss or a quick feel behind the shed. And he wondered where she was. We realised that she hadn’t come back. It took us that long to notice. All day.”

He shook his head.

“We checked the next day. I sent the boy this time. He’s a good lad, thinks the world of her and a man couldn’t wish for a better match for his daughter. Thinks the world of her he does. He went, couldn’t find word of her. Punched a guy in the nose when they made a joke about her running off with a better man. But she wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t. She was as beseotted with him as he was with her. If we hadn’t kept our eyes on the pair of them they would have run off to the hey rick or snuck off somewhere. The only thing that stopped them is because it’s so damn cold I think.”

He chuckled bitterly at the thought.

“I should have let ‘em. Then she wouldn’t have attracted them.”

She would. I didn’t tell him that though. I still wonder if I should have. I wonder if I should have told him that his daughter had been scouted out for several days before hand. I didn’t because I rather thought that he would then have blamed himself for not noticing the people hanging about and watching her. If a man is determined to blame himself then he will normally find a way to do so.

“Then she didn’t come back. We looked around, the vigilance people warned us of… of…” He took a deep breath. “They told us that Jack was out and about. That there might be a risk ofsomething happening to her and we waited. We waited for her to be found but she never was.”

He sighed.

“We knew. We knew but… until you know, you don’t know. You hope. You hope that someone will find them and that they will come home. Every time I see a girl with blonde hair given towards being a bit plump you think, that’s her. But then...then we saw you all coming down the path didn’t we. You don’t know until you know.”

He sobbed then and I held him for what it was worth. I could do at least that. I told him I was sorry and as is the way with some people, he wondered what I had to be sorry for. I told him that I should have found her before she died. He asked how long ago she had died and I told him that.

He asked how she had died. That, I did not tell him. I didn’t see how it would do him any good. He won’t read these works, nor will any of his family so I think the lie is relatively safe. Safe enough that anyone who tries to tell him and his family the truth will be dismissed as being cruel. I told him that she had been used as a means to guarantee a man’s obedience. That she was a hostage. And that when she had stopped being useful, she had her throat cut. I didn’t tell him it was a quick death. Nor did I tell him that there would have been no pain. They would have been lies too far.

He had to set aside his grief after that. One of the children was catching the mood of what was going on and had started weeping which had set off some of the others. Lady Vivienne, Syanna and Kerrass of all people had the matter in hand, but a Father who has just lost one daughter will rush to take care of those that he had left.

We stayed there for a while and arranged various things. The son in law would still take over the press when the Father was no longer able to carry on. Something that was expected to happen in a couple of years. There was some suggestion that he would get betrothed to the next daughter down the line in order to preserve the family line, but he didn’t seem thrilled at the prospect.

The girl did. I sensed an un expressed crush there, developed from sisterly jealousy, but she was fifteen and still a couple of years off marriageable age.

The sons would be too young to take over. The duchess gave them a letter to say that if they needed anything then they could present that at the palace, or to any passing knight of Francesca and they would see to their needs. The family accepted this gesture as gracefully as they could manage, but it was not hard to feel the skepticism radiating off them.

The visit was over now. We could see neighbours leaning on the fences nearby. Pots were in hand, baskets of bread and carried bottles of wine. We were unneeded now. The countryside had heard what had happened and we were no longer welcome.

We bade our farewells and as we left, the duchess asked them.

“Why didn’t you tell someone she was missing? We have checked and there was no reports that anyone was…”

The faces of the family went still. It was like some spell had robbed them all of feeling, animation and emotion.

“What would be the point?” The betrothed said. I would bet that he meant to say it quietly, but it seemed to echo around the small yard.

The father looked over at the young man with rage, but a broken heart will not know guilt. The mother looked at the floor as her jaw clenched to keep from wobbling. The eldest daughter’s gaze fell. The other children said nothing, they did not know what had happened.

They hadn’t told anyone, because they didn’t believe it would get them anywhere. In that action, they admitted to a lifetime of.. Not cruelty. Not that. But more of a kind of… That’s the way life is. nobles, knights, merchants and the rest. They turn up, decide to take a girl, have their way with them and then leave them by the side of the road. It’s the cost of doing business.

The price of life.

We all walked up the track to where the carriage and the wagon had been turned around. I was shivering now and was looking forward to having a good shiver and a cry in Ariadne’s arms. Looking around myself I don’t think I was alone. Colonel Dunnet was appalled. Damien and Syanna walked close together and although they kept it from common view, I rather think they were holding hands.

Guillaume was openly weeping. I loved him for that. To be a man of action and still able to feel like that for the people in your care is a mark of the quality of the man. Lady Vivienne walked next to him, leaning into his arm.

We were halfway up the path when the duchess turned on her sister and hissed like a cat.

“Find out which lord, which knight, which…. thing was in charge of law and order in these parts. Which… person is responsible for allowing this to happen under their watch. If it was one of yours I want them kicked out of the knights in disgrace. If it was some lord then I want them removed from power, their livelihoods confiscated back to the crown. I want their heads. I want them on their knees before me. I’m going to have them bow down before that family and be made to lick their feet so that…”

Syanna held out her hands to her sister.

“We already have them in custody.” She said. “They were part of the conspiracy.”

“Still.” The Duchess was not being placated. “When did our knights…” She stopped, her hand coming up to her mouth. “When did the commonfolk stop trusting our knights.”

Syanna’s eyes hardened.

“Since long before we were born.” She said. “knights have been abusing their power to take what they feel as though they have earned for a long time. To these people… to me. It did not matter whether a man wore gold armour, black armour,” she gestured at Colonel Dunnet. “Or plain metal armour. Men with weapons do not have our interests at heart. It’s the same all over the continent and you should not think differently.”

The duchess shook her head.

“We have been doing this for a year.” She snarled. “And still they don’t trust you.”

“Forgive me madam.” Colonel Dunnet stepped in. “I’ve been doing this job or a long time. A year is nothing when it comes to winning the trust of the people. Your commonfolk will struggle to trust men, or women, in armour for generations to come. And even then, it will only take one bad apple to ruin everything all over again. This is not a problem that you can just throw money, men and…”

The duchess waved him off and resumed her walk up to the courage where she stopped and turned back to her sister.

“Find out who it was.” She said, a little calmer. “They will be flogged in public before they go to meet the headsman.”

Syanna nodded

“Someone go back to that family,” The duchess went on. “Tell them that their daughter will be included in the memorial to the victims of Jack and that, if they want to come to the memorial, we will send a full cavalry escort to bring them in honour. Tell them that we invite them to join us at the wake for those victims and that we would be honoured if they joined us. Tell them… Tell them that we are sorry.”

“Yes Your Grace.” Syanna, Damien and Sir Guillaume echoed. Lady Vivienne had produced a small book and was making a note in it.

The duchess held her hand out for a moment, which Syanna took. It was a promise. There would be a hug of mutual forgiveness later.

We rode home in silence.

You, Dear Reader, are going to hear a lot about Just Some Girl over the coming weeks, months and years if I can manage it. I am not alone in my determination either. Just Some Girl is a representative of something that, although I wish that it wasn’t the case, is still happening all over the continent. Noblemen and noblewomen will ride out and seek some kind of entertainment. They find it in a travelling peddler and his family, maybe a band of entertainers, an isolated farm house or a cottage out in the woods.

They find their entertainment and then they proceed to have their fun on the bodies of the people that they find there. Said fun is not always sexual, in nature but I would be lying if I tried to claim that there wasn’t a significant part of it that was sexual. Sometimes it is simply to torture something and someone to death.

And later, should the perpetrators of these… evil acts. And I will use that word, they are evil acts. Should those perpetrators be challenged on what they did then the answer is nearly always the same. “It was Just Some Girl.” Is what Colonel Duberton called her. But if we are honest with ourselves, we hear those words on a greater and smaller scale.

Sometimes it is just some boy, just some traveller that we found. Just a travelling vagabond of a witcher. Just an old troll that maintains the bridge for us. No-one will notice if we torture them to death. No-one will notice if we blame them for the crime that others have committed. No-one will notice if they die in their droves due to some disease, raid over the border, or famine induced by a Lord’s raids.

We all, as a continent, saw it on a huge scale when the armies of BOTH sides were travelling backwards and forwards in any of the three continental wars. Where soldiers or knights were sent to a village in order to see if there was any food there and to take it if there was.

“What’s that they said? That the cow was the last one they had and they needed it in order to provide milk and cheese for the village for fear that they will starve.”

“Tough, I need the steak in order to maintain my strength for the following battles. No-one will notice anyway. It’s just some village.”

They were just a group of Elves revering a statue of a great ancestor of theirs, in the ruins of one of their oldest cities. No-one will care if we just wipe them out and grind the statue to dust. No-one will notice if we make the dwarves a scapegoat for everything that went wrong in the campaign.

No-one will notice if we send in the mercenaries first in order to get them killed. That way, we won’t have to pay them anyway. And they’re only mercenaries.

Who cares?

It mounts up. This stuff has been happening on the continent for centuries. Ever since humanity first got here in fact. If I look back… I didn’t intend it to be the case, but my travels seem to have that running theme.

The witcher won’t care if we don’t pay him properly. It’s just a witcher, killing some nekkers is like breathing in and out for them.

No-one will care if we murder this stupid troll, torturing him for fun and so that we can draw the eye of that pretty nobleman’s daughter.

Just one life a month. Just one life a month so that we can have enough work to put food on the table. Just one life a month. It’s worth it to keep money in our pockets. Children’s lives are hard enough as it is.

Useless peasant girls in order to feed our own lusts. Enslaving a force that we do not understand and killing a small family to secure a throne in order to rule over a corner of the countryside that not many other people care about. It’s just a small part of the countryside to sacrifice to a Knightly order of holy warriors. No-one will notice if a few peasants are terrorised, a few magical creatures are destroyed and a few people burnt in the service of assuaging our religious guilt and paying our way into heaven.

It’s just a few sailors in order to guarantee my comfort and freedom from a curse that I brought on myself.

It goes on and on and on. It shames me that I didn’t notice it before now and it shames me that, just off the top of my head, I can think of times when I have done the same math in my own head. The sacrifice of a little in order to preserve my own comfort.

We intend to make Just Some Girl a figurehead. A symbol. In the same way that there are tombs to the unknown soldier to commemorate those people that fall in battle, in service to something greater than themselves, we intend for there to be shrines to Just Some Girl. To commemorate those people that have been lost in order to bring pleasure to another. To remember those people who were seen as worthless and who died to satisfy the whim of those that they looked to for protection.

And to those of you who are reading this, or who are already protesting the creation of these shrines in those cities where my sister has influence. Those people who are complaining about the fact that the shrines are dedicated to “Just Some Girl” rather than “Just some Person” or “Just Some Boy.” I will say this. The ratio of people that suffer this kind of fate is so vastly out of proportion that it would be comical if it wasn’t so fucking tragic.

We have spoken to the Church of Melitele and they approve of our message and intend to work with us on this. THe shrines to the Prophets have also agreed that as well as the various prophets and Saints that are already being honoured in their holy places. Another shrine to the unknown victim will not be too much of a hardship.

And to those people in Toussaint that are complaining about the adjustments to your culture and ways. People that are moaning about my family and our influence on your courts and your mercantile endeavours. Those people who think that we have undue influence on the Duchess and her sister. Then you should know two things. You should know that the tomb of Just Some Girl was actually Lady Vivienne’s idea, discussed over dinner in the inn that we stayed at on our way home from visiting Just Some Girl’s family.

Secondly, you should know that these things are in place because of problems that YOU allowed to take place. I feel guilty about this stuff and that these things happen. I still blame myself that we didn’t rescue Just Some Girl and it breaks my heart that this is still happening in the continent. Why is it still happening?

Because you allow it to happen.

-

To absolutely no-one’s surprise, least of all my own, I got really sick after we captured Colonel Duberton and neutered the last efforts of the conspiracy to prove their innocence. To make it worse, it was a progressive thing that got worse as the time went on. Exhaustion was only part of it and there is so much of what happened during those weeks of my recovery...

Because it took me well over a month before I began to feel like myself again.

So much that happened in that time period that I simply do not understand and cannot explain. Ariadne told me, and everyone else that would pay attention, that I was having a relapse. That I needed time, patience and love. She told us all that, sooner or later, I would climb out of the pit that I was in at the time.

The people around me were brilliant and I will tell you how wonderful they are in the process of that. I am blessed in my friends and family because without them, I’m not sure that I would have managed to even remotely get close to being in good enough health to talk about everything that happened later.

The strangest thing about it was that I felt like a prisoner in my own body as it seemed to be just getting on with things without me even remotely being involved in the decision making process.

That night, the night after Colonel Duberton was finally captured, I had been struck in the head by the man’s fist. I was unconcsious for a couple of minutes which people just assumed was my passing out from exhaustion. Which would have been an understandable diagnosis under any other circumstances. And that was what they believed until Ariadne teleported into the Graveyard and started yelling at everyone there that I was about to choke on my own vomit.

She grabbed me and jammed some of the most vile smelling herbs that you can imagine under my nose so that I could wake up and aim away from myself as everything started to come out my throat.

Orders were given and as well as a prisoner wagon for the colonel, who had stopped struggling and was howling in despair and grief, there was another wagon sent for me to get me up to the Palace as fast as possible.

The rest of that night was awful because I couldn’t sleep. I just couldn’t sleep. At first, it was because Ariadne forbade me from sleeping. She had me lie down, facing towards a vomit bucket and she held onto me by my ear and the whiskers that make up my sideburns. Any time that I threatened to doze off or pass out, she would yank them both cruelly until I made some gesture that I was awake.

When they got me back to my rooms, Sir Walther, the Ducal Physician, was there, already waiting. They did some stuff that involved shining light into my eyes and talking about me and not to me. Which is always terrifying if medical people are doing that near you.

It seems that there were two problems. Obviously I needed sleep and rest. However, I had been struck in the head by someone who knows how to it someone in the head. As a result, sleeping could be catastrophic.

I don’t know why this is the case. I just trust that people who know what they are doing were horrified at the prospect.

The second problem was that there were already too many herbal stimulants and magical stimulants in my body so that it would be dangerous to offer any more.

Gradually, the dazed feeling went away and people started to look a little less worried about me. I was brought some chicken soup and some bread to eat, again making me wonder as to why it is always chicken soup that you feed an invalid, and everyone became happy for me to lie down and go to sleep.

Except now, I couldn’t actually sleep.

Frustrated is not the word.

Why couldn’t I sleep? Your guess is as good as mine. As were the guesses of the various medical professionals that were involved in what was happening. It was not very complimentary to the medical profession to know that they know next to nothing about the way that the brain works and as a result, all they had was the best guess as to what was happening.

I mean, I knew that anyway. But at the same time, it’s still a little upsetting to have it spelled out to you when it is your head that no-one understands how it works.

So everything combined in my head. The potent ingredients for this particular recipe include, but are not limited to, fatigue and exhaustion. Apparently these are two separate things. I can’t begin to understand why that might be the case, but it is. If you can figure out the difference then I await the explanation with bated breath. To go with that was the general feeling of helplessness. This was not something that I was handling well. There was also a frustration at the fact that I was ill… Again… Frustration that I couldn’t be involved in the closing stages of the investigation…

I mean, I wouldn’t have added anything. We had everyone in custody, it was all to do with interrogating people and connecting the dots together until we had a cohesive picture of events. But it was immensely frustrating to not be in the middle of that. To not be the person asking questions.

I am well aware that there is an arrogance to that as well. There were plenty of experienced investigators and interrogators that were in attendance. Again, by interrogator I mean, person who asks questions. The need for any less than savoury techniques was far from anyone’s mind. My understanding was that their method was to just march them all in, one by one and tell them that they were under arrest for treason, that we had the testimony of Colonel Duberton, Sir Alain and Lord Velles and then left them to it.

The way it worked was that they would protest innocence, claim immunity because of rank, noble blood, privilege and so on. Then they would trot out that they had heard that there was another Jack while they were in prison so how could he possibly be involved and then the interrogator would drop the news about Colonel Duberton.

They would then try to insult Colonel Duberton’s honour. Which was countered in the labyrinthine rules of Toussaint honour, which I still don’t understand, by the fact that Colonel Duberton was doing what he did to save the life of his lady wife. Therefore, his word is more believable and his testimony was the final nail in the coffin.

Then it was just a case of… Sir Guillaume and one of the Knights of Francesca who was of a more legal persuasion and knew about how to ask questions, were sat in a room near where the prisoners were being held with a pitcher of watered wine. They played cards and chatted while they waited for the prisoners to come and tell them, in detail, what the other people were doing and why they, the person doing the telling, should be let off the hook.

Colonel Duberton’s interrogation was happening elsewhere.

But the fact that I wasn’t involved in any of that, was a source of extreme frustration for me. The lack of ability to let the matter lie. To question what was going on. My various nursemaids would constantly find me climbing out of bed, delirious with one thing or another, and trying to get involved.

It wasn’t until Ariadne sat me down and pointed out the parallels between what was happening here and what had happened with Francesca, that I calmed down on that regard. I was desperate to solve a riddle. The differences were that one riddle could not be solved and this time, the riddle had already been solved.

That utterly threw me from me horse and I spent several hours after that, sobbing.

Then there was the anger that all of this had happened in the first place, there was the disgust at what had happened as well as the intrusive memories that I experienced while fighting Jack, the parallels to what happened the last time…

And on and on it went.

So I got REALLY ill. Bouts of tears, sobbing, screaming, sweating, vomiting, blackouts, forgetting where I was, forgetting when I was and everything in between. It would not be unfair to say that I had temper tantrums followed by guilts and depressions. There were days when I got better and could function all but normally. Ariadne would let me go down to the questioning chambers and take part. But then there would be other days where I was just useless.

Nothing I could say or do would help on anything and I would just have to wrap myself up in a blanket before the fire and try to weather it out using one of the various potions that Ariadne and Sir Walther brewed up to give me.

That was a mixed bag. For those people that don’t remember him, Sir Walther is the Ducal physician. However, he would admit that his primary experience lies with injuries resulting from overzealous training and tournament injuries. In as much as anyone is, he is something of an expert when it comes to head injuries.

So he and Ariadne were coming up with potions that would help me weather the worst of these symptoms. They were not always successful. Indeed, some of what was tried made me violently sick as well as some other side effects that I’m not going to talk about in what is still supposed to be an academic paper.

Their efforts were aided when Lady Yennefer arrived back and joined in the efforts to help me. The same as last time, she tried to get me involved by getting me to work. She wanted to talk about the Jack project and whether we could add an addendum to future editions of our book regarding these latest copycats. An analysis of what they did wrong and how it would have impacted the countryside. I argued that I didn’t want to do such a thing as that might result in us giving an instruction manuel to anyone who wants to copy Jack in the future. She countered with saying that she considered it more as an instruction manuel in order to instruct people on how to spot copycats in the future when they inevitably come up.

Lady Yennefer was also instrumental in my cure and the proper start of my recovery, this time. But that is getting ahead of myself.

The only real link to sanity was the fact that I knew that I was sick. Once that first connection to the last time I was this ill was pointed out to me, it became almost elementary to see it. I was ill.. So that was, at the same time, reassuring and also adding even more frustration to the pile. Sitting there in a comfortable armchair while the tears stream down my face, having an in depth debate with Sir Guillaume about the relativistic morals of Imperial interventions in sovereign states, while occasionally having to take breaks to nap, puke and ensure that I was taking on the correct amount of liquids. That would be scary indeed if I didn’t just know that I was also ill.

There were still some times where I needed to be reminded of this though. Ariadne and Anne were particularly good for that, stopping me dead while I was having a bout of self-pity and informing me that I was sick and that sooner or later I would get better. Even though I knew that to be the case, it was still reassuring to be told this on a regular basis.

All of this is meant to explain to you, dear reader, as to why the information that I have about the closing stages of the latest Toussaint Jack scandal is something of a disjoined affair. I know what happened but I have little to no first hand recording of it.

The other problem was that it was all somewhat jumbled. It was a long time before a cohesive narrative of events started to come together as the prisoners would leap ahead in the story, before returning back to the beginning and then jumping ahead in the story to the middle and so on and so on.

It can be said that I was not completely out of the loop. As a matter of courtesy, I was visited on a daily basis by the duchess, Syanna, Sir Guillaume and Sir Gregoire. Either by themselves or in some conversations. They would come to let me know progress, ask for input which they would have got anyway whether they wanted it or not.

Going back to the daily rundown. The day after Colonel Duberton was finally captured, which was also the day that the rest of the conspiracy was caught, lest we forget, Colonel Duberton was still senseless. By which I mean he stared straight ahead and didn’t react to anything as he thought about what we had told him.

For the other conspirators, they were told what had happened and what had been found out and then they were all transported to the Toussaint prison which is an old, run down fortress on the island in the middle of the widest part of the river that the people of Beauclair refer to as their lake. This movement took several days as they were transported by prison wagon in secret and in disguise.

Colonel Duberton remained at the Nilfgaardian embassy, in secret to prevent assassins from reaching them.

The announcement as to the capture and neautralisation of the conspiracy was made in court as well as an announcement of those courtiers who were going to be appointed to run the judicial portion of the punishments. You might imagine, as I did, that these men were guilty of committing treason to further their own ends. Therefore the punishment would be death and have done with the matter. However, as is true with so much in life, it was more complicated than that.

The matter of estates, heirs, wealth, marriages, heraldry and everything in between needed to be discussed and arranged. Legal precedent needed to be consulted and all of that needed to be arranged before the sentence could be carried out. As a result, the conspirators would remain incarcerated for, potentially, some time before sentencing would be carried out.

For people like Alain, who had no heir and no surviving spouse, it was actually much simpler as his estate would revert to the Duchy. Lord Leblanc was a bit more complicated as he had distant family who could, feasibly, inherit. And so the legal process began.

Syanna didn’t complain. She wanted the first, real case of the Knights of Francesca to be discussed at length so that it could be used as a learning process for future investigations. She also had to redeploy the Knights and the guards in case the patrol routes and patterns that Colonel Duberton had passed out to the conspiracy could not be used against them in the future.

For those that were interested, Syanna vetoed the immediate announcement of an engagement between herself and Captain De La Tour. She declared that she wanted to be “Wooed properly” and as such, there would be no corners cut for her.

The Duchess was delighted although personally I am left wondering whether the commander and the captain will have time to get on with all of that side of things. And whether or not nature might have something to say on the matter first.

At first, the court was outraged at all the people that had been arrested. Friends and family of those people that were taken protested loudly until the proof of Colonel Duberton’s testimony was revealed.

That shut everyone up.

And after that, people returned to that part of courtly politics that means that courtiers earn the disdain and hatred of the people of the continent. They started jostling each other for position. Arguing over the wealth and land and all of the other things that would be confiscated in the coming days and weeks.

Day two was, as I say, the day that Duberton started to talk. At first, we got nothing new out of him at all. It was just a list of names and confirmations of what we already knew about who was involved and what was going on. It was a lot of yes and no without going into details. The understanding of the matter was that the Colonel was still shocked by what he had learned regarding his wife’s death. There was also a small break where he got to spend some time with the body of his wife. He was under escort and things, there weren’t any weapons and she was dressed formally with a scarf around her neck in order to try and preserve some of her dignity.

I made my own visit to the place where Madame Duberton lay. I felt the need to apologise, even as I also felt that her lying in state while the other victims of the killers did not get that same dignity was distasteful and insulting. But that wasn’t her fault so...

Like with so much else though, there was politics involved in all of that that was way above my head. The ambassador to Nilfgaard was involved and it was all getting a bit… tense. But without being able to be on the ground, I did not know how much of it was a pretense for the other nobles of Toussaint to remind them how much clout and power the Empire has in Toussaint.

On the third day, Sir Guillaume came to visit and if it were not for the ongoing search into attempting to find the identity of the lady that would become “Just Some Girl”, it would have been quite a fun conversation. He described a steady stream of conspirators coming into his little room and protesting their treatment. They were demanding writing implements so that they could summon help from relatives, contact lawyers and so on. Guillaume’s response was always the same. The prisoners would be told that Colonel Duberton had confessed, was confessing and still had a lot more to confess, before anyone would be allowed to communicate with the outside world.

He went into in depth descriptions of the faces and body language of the people that he was talking about and we spent some time laughing at them. Those were some good moments I especially enjoyed the fact that Sir Raoul Leblanc had to be kept in separate parts of the prison after the first couple of days in order to prevent the other prisoners taking justice into their own hands. We had already taken the fact that Sir Alain had been part of the effort to bring everyone to justice and so he was still being kept in the palace to avoid exactly this problem.

Lord Velles was being kept in the Imperial Embassy, awaiting the decision as to who actually has custody over him between Toussaint, Nilfgaard or his native Temeria. Another matter that seemed to promise to be dragged out for months yet.

It was on the fourth day that I felt strong enough, and Ariadne agreed with my assessment, to go down and take part in the interrogation of Colonel Duberton.

As prisons go, I have seen worse. Indeed, I have been in worse prisons and I have visited Kerrass who has been held in worse still. The colonel was being kept in a guest room. Not one of the big, swanky rooms that foreign dignitaries stay in, but more the kind of thing that the entourage and courtiers of whichever state visitors were visiting might stay in.

It was a nice room, windows were small and high up in the walls, well out of reach, the bed looked relatively comfortable for a given expectation of what beds were like. The room was bare of decorations, there was a desk and a set of chairs for the interrogators to sit in and also a pair of scribes to take notes on what was going on.

Duberton himself was wearing a plain shirt and a military tunic that had been stripped of all insignia and decoration. Apparently, military law said that he was still a colonel until his court martial had taken place, but that wouldn’t happen until superior officers would be convened. There also needed to be a decision made as to whether or not the civil matter might take precedence. Again, the Ambassador would need to get involved in that.

He also wore a set of leather riding trousers and some pull on boots. He looked comfortable enough, even if he looked utterly miserable.

The room was well lit, a fire in the hearth, even if I did notice the lack of fire tending implements, and a pitcher of water and a smaller jug of wine was on the table.

I was joined by one of the interrogators that had volunteered to join the Knights of Francesca. He was a thin man to the point of emaciation with a shock of grey hair at his temples and a thin look about his face that contained a pair of deep sunken eyes that glittered from underneath bristling eyebrows. He wore a tunic with the symbol of the Knightly order on his breast and a simple sword belt at his side. And he was as charming, friendly and funny a man as ever I’ve met.

I spent some time with him later as I was fascinated by the humour that I saw dancing in his eyes. His name was Lord Dryden and had served the ducal throne for a number of years as a Knight Errant before he had met the lady that was to become his wife. It was quite a sweet story actually, he was getting older and older and more and more despairing of ever finding anyone until one day, as a Knight, he rescued a woman from an unhappy home situation. There had been a resulting duel which Lord Dryden had won handily. Now that he was responsible for her, both as having killed her husband in a duel and as her rescuer, they had spent more time together and, perhaps inevitably, had developed affection, and later love for each other.

They had further astonished polite society by producing two children of their own which they raised together as well as the children from her first marriage. She had asked that he leave the Knights Errant to help her with her estates and he had agreed. Syanna had gone to him, asking for his expertise in the questioning of criminals, intending for him to act as a tutor, in much the same way that Lord Palmerin taught Sword techniques to the new Knights. His wife approved.

When all this was over, Ariadne and I went and dined with the couple and their family. In every way that he is tall and skeletally thin, she is short and describes herself as “pleasantly rotund”. She smiles happily whenever she sees her husband and he reflects that happiness in his own eyes. Their marriage seems to involve the two of them mocking each other until one admits that the other is the victor by exchanging lewd suggestions as payment to a chorus of protests from the children.

It was a nice household. I would have liked to have had parents like that.

I met him for the first time that day. It seemed that something as important as this needed to be handled by an experienced professional and he met me with a smile.

The colonel was already sitting at the table and we got to work, starting with my telling the Colonel and Lord Dryden what we already knew. We were at the stage where the purpose of all of this was to try and find out the Colonel’s part of the story.