(Warning: Contains some body horror. Also contains some historical references to some… I’m gonna call it “questionable” parenting. Also, for the spelling, grammar and punctuation hounds amongst you, and I know you’re there, my spell checker and grammar checker is causing my laptop to freeze, so I’m doing my best with the onboard google docs one. Please be gentle.)

It took me a long time to wake up.

The first sense was that I was warm, dry and comfortable. It is a truth that even should you go to sleep on the coldest of stone floors, in that moment where you start to wake up and you feel the solidity beneath you, it can feel like the softest mattress. Even should you be cold, pillowing your head on your arm, then that arm will feel like the softest pillow that will seem to suck your head into it with the beckoning arms of warm slumber.

Then I’ve found that the mind performs a kind of process, like a list of things to check. It happens in no particular order and can take a certain amount of time. There is also the problem that if you have confused the brain with things like narcotics, sex or alcohol, then it might get its priorities wrong. For me, that checklist will go down a number of things. Do I have any chores to do that day? Do I need to get up and urinate or defecate? Am I hungry or thirsty? Do I have something to do?

Is the outside world too cold and scary to be contemplated at this particular time?

These are the questions that we ask ourselves. To my mind, there is a process and there are priorities. Other questions creep in like, Is it safe where I am? Am I outside? Am I about to be attacked?”

We will come back to that one.

Another question is as to whether or not there is someone in the bed with me. Now I have never been mystified as to the identity of the person that I am snuggled up to in the early hours of the morning. I have always known who it was and as such, I have always been able to remember their name. But I am told by people that have been down this route themselves, that waking up next to someone can also be a matter of panic, as you try and identify who the person is and what you were doing with them the night before.

I have had the thing where I have woken up with a nice warm woman in my bed and felt a desperate surety that I should stay in bed and see if I could convince the lady to stay with me for a bit longer. That is something that I can get behind.

If the answers to these questions turn out to be things that can be ignored or are otherwise, nothing to be worried about. Then I, for one, used to take great pleasure in simply rolling over and going back to sleep. There are some simple pleasures in life and one of those pleasures is the ability to stay in bed when you want to.

Eventually though, the pressures of the world will drive you from your blankets. The need to feed yourself or urinate is the most common cause of forcing me out of my bed in these situations and as soon as the air hits my body, that begins the entire process of my waking up. It is never pleasant and I always resent it, but sooner or later, what are you going to do.

But even then it is a battle, the balancing act of being warm, comfortable and cosy can keep you in bed until one factor overwhelms the other.

The best, or worst if you have that point of view, is on those cold winter mornings. If you are lucky, someone might have been able to set a fire in your room. One of the benefits of having servants although Flame knows I try not to abuse that immense privilege. But when you know that the outside world is a cold and inhospitable place, the warmth and cosiness of your little cocoon of blankets can be awfully seductive. It’s at these kinds of points when other people say “You can’t stay in bed forever” and you find yourself tempted to test that theory for everything that you’re worth. I will admit that I have never managed it though. Hunger and boredom are powerful masters.

But even during these times, you start to wake up. Your brain starts working and doesn’t want to let you go back to sleep. It wants to turn over and start thinking about the various chores that you have to do over the course of the day. The meetings that you need to have, the people that you need to talk to and the conversations that you need to have.

And slowly, the warmth leaves the bed, the softness leaves the mattress and the pillows beneath your head become lumpy and uncomfortable. Your body starts to feel stiff and your back starts to ache The eventual inevitability of having to wake up and get out of bed in order to get dressed starts to come to your mind.

It was one of those situations.

It was more interesting to me at the time because I so rarely get to experience this kind of thing any more. Kerrass has trained me well and although I am grateful for his training, there are times when I sincerely wish that I could set the training aside. In this case, the ability to set aside the fact that I haven’t slept a full night through in several years. Not because of anything in particular, but because Kerrass has trained me not to trust my own safety to anything else.

I have been trained to expect a threat at any time which, in turn, has led to me keeping my spear next to my bed and my dagger under my pillow. I sleep lightly now. In a castle, inn or building, I wake up if someone walks in the corridor outside my room. In the woodland or in the fields or under hedges, I will wake up if someone is moving down the nearby lane. I can hear the animals in the trees, can sense Kerrass when he is moving around and I act accordingly.

You see, the problem is, that it is always better to check. Always.

Paranoia is not paranoia if they really are out to get you. It is an old joke but at the same time, there is truth in that. When you are out in the countryside, there are always monsters creeping through the undergrowth. Sometimes bandits, sometimes enemies seeking to do you some mischief. And sometimes, it is what everyone else thinks of as monsters. Necrophages and the like.

So when you are sleeping in a forest clearing. Yes, it probably is just the wind blowing the branches and yes. It might just be some running water, or a rabbit nudging a rock. But it might just be someone trying to sneak up on you. In inns it might be the innkeeper trying to get at you because he has decided that the amount of money he is getting from you for the room and the food is not enough and wants to kill you, sell your goods and go through your bags in case you might have a bit more money hidden away, given your fancy clothing and things.

In castles and manor houses. The person that you are staying with might be an old friend. But if they have duties elsewhere, or you have offended their masters or there might be something or someone that they have allegiance to over and above the friendship that they have for you, then your safety is meaningless.

And if you are in your own home. Your own castle. Then your enemies know where you are and might have sent assassins or bribed servants or guards or any other things.

That is why I keep a dagger under my pillow.

Yes, there might be people on watch, yes, there might be trusted guards walking the walls, a watchman under your window walking up and down and loudly declaring that all is well on a regular basis. But at the end of the day, the only thing that you can do is to take your own word for it.

So you teach yourself to check. You teach yourself to jerk awake, weapon in hand and prepared to fight. I have it on good authority that I have leapt to my feet, drawn weapons, pulled on an armoured coat and been facing down someone who has come to inform me that breakfast is ready before I have even opened my eyes. It makes for some interesting conversations when you do wake up and have to explain such things to your host. Military households tend to understand but courtiers?

Sometimes, they might understand but be looking for an excuse to pick a fight.

So I don’t get to wake up slowly any more. The flipside is that I can fall asleep just about anywhere. But that’s not a story for right now.

I woke up slowly. I didn’t jerk awake or sit up violently or anything like that. I didn’t scream or gasp or carry on. I woke up slowly. I was lying on my side, and had tugged my blanket tightly around my shoulders. For some reason I find that particularly comforting when I sleep. I have never been able to understand why I find that comforting but I do.

My pillow was soft and properly supportive and my blanket was warm. I was lying on some sleeping blankets and there was a scratchy feeling that suggested that I was on some kind of forest floor. Loose leaves, bits of twig and rotted debris have a particular kind of feeling under a blanket. It was not uncomfortable though.

I didn’t need to urinate. I didn’t need to defecate and I was not hungry. It was dark. It might sound obvious but you can tell through your eyelids so I didn’t even need to open my eyes to be able to tell these things. No part of my body was in any kind of pain and I felt rested, comfortable and calm.

So I did my best to go back to sleep. For a while, I drifted in and out of that kind of feeling. Emma calls it ‘snoozing’. That point between proper sleep and proper wakefulness where your body walks that line, occasionally tipping over from one to the other. It is a glorious state to remain in and not one that I get to explore too often.

Slowly, other sounds and sensations started to occur to my thoughts. I was warm, but I could also hear the crackling of a wood fire going on. The realisation that the fire was behind me. I could feel that heat on my back so I knew where the fire was.

Interesting.

The next factor was that I could hear the gentle sound of the breeze blowing through the trees above me. It had a certain quality that I had missed while under the canopy of the Black Forest. It was a restful feeling rather than an oppressive one. I cannot properly describe the difference as to how that made me feel, but the difference was definitely there.

Which was the first time I realised that I was not in the Black Forest any more. The air felt different. It felt fresher. The trees felt looser and calmer. I felt… Comfortable and safe. It had been long enough that I had forgotten what that was like.

For a long moment I felt like weeping, but I did not yet want to wake up from my slumber. The realisation that I was no longer in the Black Forest was a powerful one and I allowed that to carry me home for a moment and into some more time spent dozing.

But my brain was awake now and was working through the situation.

I was not in the Black Forest any more. Was I dead? Was I in any pain? Had, by some miracle, someone come to save me and carried me from that awful place?

I performed the rituals of self assessment. I could feel my arms, wriggle my fingers and toes as well as have a quick check to ensure that my manhood was still present and correct. It might make you female readers chuckle to hear that, but it is a thing that worries us malefolk. Please do not judge.

I wasn’t in any pain. Nor was anything missing and I wasn’t confined in any way. Meaning, I wasn’t someone’s prisoner. Nor was I strapped down to aid in healing.

Had it all just been some dream? Was I still on the road somewhere to the West of the Black Forest? Would I open my eyes to find Kerrass, Trayka, Henrik and the rest pottering around camp?

I listened, my eyes still too heavy to want to open properly.

There was someone else in the camp. I could hear them moving around. Occasionally clearing their throat and shifting their weight.

Not Kerrass then. He has trained himself not to do that so that he doesn’t give his position away absentmindedly on the hunt.

I listened. I heard them play around with the fire. The sound of something heavy being lifted, along with the kind of held breath groan that older people make when they are awkwardly lifting something before an explosion of sparks and the sounds of wood settling. A branch cracked in the flame and then there were the sounds of burning ashes being stirred. The strange roaring sound of the fire adding extra layers to the sound.

I listened. A pot was placed above the fire. The metal handle being hooked up to something, a metal cooking tripod settling into place under the weight of the pot. The sounds of a metal utensil stirring the liquid. The smell of hot metal.

So there was one person who was working next to the fire. Playing at making camp. They were sniffing, clearing their throat. Making the small noises of a man who is comfortable in their surroundings. I was confident that it was a man. Definitely a male. There was an overtone to the voice that made me certain that it was a man that was doing the work.

I listened.

There was wind in the trees above me. Nothing too strong, nothing too powerful. But try as I might, I could not find the sounds of anyone else in the background.

Time to try an experiment. I shifted my weight a little bit. My dagger was under my pillow which was a good sign, and if I leant over a little way, I could feel that my spear was where I would normally be happy to leave it. The man in the camp did not react. He was not worried about me, he was not watching me or taking care of me in any way. He was just moving around the camp.

I rested. I tried to think of everything that had happened. To try and reason out what had happened and what was happening now.

The most obvious suggestion was that I had died and that I was on my way to… whatever it was that came next. I didn’t feel dead. There was certainly a feeling of cold when I moved around and adjusted the blanket. The ground was hard, even while it still had the false comfort of a surface that I had been sleeping on. But I was not in any pain and had no idea what was happening.

I thought back to the ending of the adventure in the Balck Forest. I remembered being hit by the flailing root… But that was wrong. It had not been flailing. It was more like a tentacle in the way that it had moved. It had made a spear out of itself and lunged at my chest like a javelin thrown by a soldier. It had pierced my chest. I had felt the crunching of bones and the strange discomfort, as well as the pain, of having something alien moving around my insides. And then the agony of being lifted in a way that a human being is not meant to be lifted. I remembered my feet being off the ground and moving around.

I had kicked out. I remembered the taste of blood in my mouth and trying to spit. I remembered that the movement of the tentacle, root, branch or whatever it was within me and a new feeling of agony tearing through me and then…

And then…

I was waking up here.

I felt… Good. I felt rested. Not tired, not thirsty, maybe a little hungry. I felt underneath my clothes for a scar, or some kind of pain in my chest where I had been struck. But there was nothing there. No pain, nothing. No matter how hard I pushed, it was all ok.

I felt… absurdly relieved by this and I settled back down into a snooze. But such actions were now in the process of kind of denying the inevitable. My body was waking up now. That process of bits of me trying to wake up and let me know that I was still human after all. There was a growing urge to urinate. A similar urge was either the need to pass wind or the need to defecate. But one of those feelings could go either way.

And my brain was awake too. Other suggestions as to what could be happening to me were occurring. The possibility that I might be dead was still a high one. There was no denying that and that possibility would need to be confronted at some point. But there were others as well. I even allowed myself to be reassured and dwell on these thoughts for a while. I could have been dragged clear and then drugged to keep the horror and the pain of my injury from coming to mind while I healed. So it was more than possible that now that… whatever process I had gone through, I was now recovered, or recovering.

Another possibility was that it had all been a dream. And yes, I know that this is a cliche answer and it is true that I hate it when these kinds of things are done in plays and in books as well. But at the same time, it was possible. Magical things have had that effect before where people have been known to spend an awfully long time suffering from some kind of delusions that have been summoned by… whatever.

So it was possible. I was a bit reluctant to say that it had all been a dream. It was so detailed. I could remember so much. The pain, the fear, the pleasure and everything involved with that.

It was no good though. My eyes no longer wanted to stay closed. I mean, they would have been happy to stay closed, but they were no longer glued shut and the urge to feed my curiosity and satisfy my other bodily needs was becoming oppressive.

So I opened my eyes and looked around.

Well… That theory about me having been taken away and healed in a way that I do not understand was clearly out.

I was in my clearing. The one that I had been dreaming about for so long. I could see the stars above me and the tree branches blowing softly in the wind. It was a northern forest as well. Some difference in the types of the trees made that clear. Occasionally sparks were thrown upwards by the fire and I cautiously and slowly looked around myself, all the while my brain was working and trying to figure out the riddle of what was happening.

The theory that I was dead and that this was a measure of what came afterwards was still a strong possibility. But there was something in that that left me feeling a bit disquiet. There was still discomfort here. Not pain which I might expect if I had gone to some version of an afterlife where I was due to be punished for my sins. This was more… everyday in its discomfort. So death was still a possibility. As was some kind of magical delusion. But this felt… real to me. I had no explanation for what was happening.

There was another bed roll a little distance from mine which gave me my second shock. It was not Kerrass’ bedroll. You can tell this because of the layout of his swords and the way he sets out his gear.

This was an expensive bed roll. Something akin to what a noble might have. And when I say noble, I mean the kind of noble that spends time out of doors. The blanket was well woven and patterned. It was not just undyed wool or oilskin. There was an expensive but worn looking longsword propped next to it. The belt that the sword was tied to was of rich, dark leather with silver ornaments as well. The hilt was shiny where it was metal but had well worn, more practical leather where it was not.

The colour of the leather on the hilt matched the leather of the scabbard and the sword belt. That was the kind of ornamentation that only noblement can achieve and care about. The rest of us just choose a belt that will do the job rather than caring about things like colour coding.

Having said that, the weapon was clearly a practical one. There was a quiver of crossbow bolts next to it and a boar spear was set nearby. All of which were good quality. I was looking and I found a leather bag which I would assume held the crossbow itself. Like many such nobles do, the saddle was positioned as a pillow and it was, again, of good quality.

Ok. Enough was enough. I rolled over to look at my erstwhile travelling companion. It was time to see who I was dealing with.

He looked familiar to me but I could not quite place him. There was a feeling at the back of my mind that I knew this person although I could not immediately tell you why.

He saw me looking and pointed towards the woods with his spoon.

“I am relieving myself that way,” he told me. Again, the voice was familiar to me although I saw no recognition in his face when he looked at me. “The drinking water is in the other direction so we will be better off…”

His voice trailed off as a look of confusion crossed his face.

Then he shook his head.

“Anyway. I have tea brewing. It is late but I find that I cannot sleep.”

I nodded and went off in the direction that he had pointed.

There was more of that feeling of nobility about him. He probably thought he was travelling incognito. The same way that I had once thought that I was travelling cautiously and carefully without actually doing any of those things. Now that I was several years on the road, I could see the telltale signs. His boots were expensive and obviously made by a proper craftsman rather than a village cobbler. His clothing was well worn and hard wearing but it had also, just as clearly, been made with care and out of expensive materials.

I wear similar types of clothing myself although Kerrass has taught me how and where to shop if I don’t want to draw too much attention to myself. And how to wear it as well.

I went into the trees and did my business before returning to the fire and frowning at the man opposite me. Now that I was closer, I could see more signs of his aristocratic nature. He was well cleaned. More than just the clean that happens with the occasional dunk in the nearest water source. This was done with soap and scrubbing. And hot water. His face lacked the marks of disease and he moved easily.

He peered at me for a moment before a frown of frustrated and impatient annoyance crossed his face.

Which was when I knew who he was.

“Do I know you?” He asked me sharply.

I couldn’t speak. The ‘I’m dead’ theory was becoming much more likely.

“Well,” the noble demanded. “Speak up man. I feel certain that…”

“Father?” I wondered.

He peered at me sharply.

“Is this a joke?” He demanded. The tones of disapproval and annoyance were well remembered. “You are clearly no son of mine. No son of mine would dress like that or carry weapons like those.”

I looked down at myself. I was dressed the same as I ever was after these three years on the road. I looked back up at him and realised what was happening. I started to laugh. All thoughts about this theory or that theory were gone.

My Father did as he always had, as I had always known him do when he was confronted with someone that he didn’t know that was faintly annoying him. He retreated into formality.

“I assure you, sir, that this is not funny.” He said sternly, that same tone of voice that he used to use when he told me that my latest flight of fancy would not be tolerated. For a moment, an old thrill of fear went through me. Old memories, old unhappinesses and old resentments. Old pain and anger.

I laughed louder.

“I am glad that you find this amusing.” He told me in some measure of disgust.

“Ah Father.” I told him. “You always get this little crease between your brows when you get annoyed.” I pointed at my own forehead. “It’s your youngest son.” I told him. “Your greatest disappointment.”

“Impossible.” He recoiled from the idea. “Freddie is…” And then he stopped.

“Freddie is what… Father.” I felt the latent anger in my own voice.

Many people know that I don’t like to be called Freddie. But now I will tell you why.

It’s because of the way my father says it.

Most people, including Kerrass pronounce it “FReddy” whereas my Father, and therefore my mother and a lot of the people that have, or had some kind of authority over me, pronounced it “FreDDiey.” Which gives it that extra edge. When my Father says my name it reminds me that my full name is Frederick. It makes me think that he wanted my name to be Derrick but put that extra syllabelle on the front because… I don’t know. Annoyance maybe?

It made me feel as though he couldn’t be bothered with saying the rest of my name. As though it wasn’t worth saying it. As though I wasn’t worth it.

It was made worse by the fact that everyone else in the family got called their full name by my father. Helped, I have no doubt, by the fact that their names were shorter and punchier. Emma, Mark, Edmund, Samuel. But that was defeated by Francesca. For her, he always used her full name as well, despite the fact that her name was longer and more involved than just about every other person’s name combined. I was the only one that had a shortened name.

And he would bellow it at me whenever he caught me doing something that he disapproved of. Or when I disappointed him in some way. Which was regularly, let's face it. Whenever he caught me reading a book rather than working on my correspondence with any of the women that he had arranged for me to be introduced to. Women that I could tell wanted nothing to do with me or the provincial, new money Coulthards. But I couldn’t say that to his face of course.

He would sigh and say it whenever he would watch me getting my ass kicked on the practice fields of the castle. He would yell it in annoyance when he saw me avoiding my chores or putting in what he thought to be, only the barest minimum of work on those things that he, my father, was most interested in.

It was the word that would be bellowed at the bottom of staircases. That would summon me from whatever refuge I had found in order to pursue my own interests and would disturb the fragile peace and quiet that I had managed to summon in order to… I don’t know… make my peace with the world.

I hated those two syllables with all my heart and that name, that hated name, was the first thing that I shed when I left home. I would no longer be Freddie, I would be Fred, or Frederick. And I was happy with either of those things. I used to get really cross and angry about it too.

My attitudes started to shift as I got away from home. As I started to grow up and realise the difference between my friends calling me that name as a term of endearment rather than as a term of punishment, it started to become something that only my friends were allowed to call me. It was a privilege that only I could bestow upon people. Then, over time, as people’s pronunciation shifted, I started to relax my deathgrip on the name.

Emma and Mark have adjusted the pronunciation of the name. I don’t know why. Knowing them both, it was because they finally took on board the way I would always shrink from whoever had said the name previously. They saw the way that Kerrass said it and the way that Ariadne said it and was happy with that.

If you meet me, try it and see. Try to call me Freddie and see what happens. You will soon find out whether or not I like you.

But hearing Father call me that old name and in that old way. It brought out that childish rage that still lives in the depths of my chest. Whether I want it to or not.

“Freddie is what, Father?” I growled. Putting everything I have ever learnt from Kerrass about making my voice seem dangerous. It was not hard. I was angry.

“Shorter?” I spat, “less able? weaker? less confident?”

He seemed to subside.

“A disappointment?” I hissed that last one, no longer able to keep the emotion out of my voice.

He gazed at me steadily before opening his mouth.

“I was going to say that Freddie is far from here.” He told me, picking out the words carefully. “He is in the north somewhere, with his Witcher companion. Although I do recognise the petulant tone in your voice, I would not recognise you otherwise. You are taller than I remember although it has been a couple of years since we saw each other last. Harder as well by the look of you.”

He reached out and stirred the pot again.

“These years have been good to you.” he declared. “I recognise the boy that left, in the man that I see before me. The boy that I expected to come crawling back on his belly when he found out that the world was harsher than he had led himself to believe. Although I also see that you know that. That you have been hurt by the world. You are older I think, yes… much older. Older in a way that has nothing to do with years. Tea?”

I nodded and he placed cups out in preparation.

“I understand your anger.” He told me. “There were many harsh words that were said between us. Some of which I deserved and some of which you deserved. But…” He looked up from the cups and stared me in the eyes. “You were never a disappointment. Never. Do not think it.

“And…” His gaze hardened, “I would also remind you that whatever else might be the case, whatever else that you might have been through or whatever Countess that you might have caught the eye of. I am still your Father and you will talk to me with a civil tongue in your mouth.”

I just gazed at him as he looked back down to his work. There is something about parents that, no matter how old we get, we are still reduced to children when we find ourselves before them.

“Whatever else might have happened.” He spoke again after a moment. “No matter how much training you might have received at the hands of that Witcher of yours, that I am looking forward to meeting by the way, I would still think you would struggle to overcome my blade. So watch your tongue boy. I deserve better than your scorn.”

He added a touch of honey into both cups. A moment of dismay occurred to me when I realised that I take my own tea with a similar amount of honey. As I watched him add cows milk and stir the pot, I felt a certain strange horror that I did not recognise. I took my tea in the same way. I make tea the same way that he did. I wonder what else was the same between us.

“You would be surprised.” I pulled the words from the depths of my soul and then my voice broke. I cleared my throat and tried again. “You would be astonished just how quickly a person realises that they are their Father’s least favourite child.”

He looked up at me and I found myself quailing before an anger that I saw in his eyes. Anger and hurt.

“No.” He snarled. “No. I will not sit here and be lectured by someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I will not be told by anyone, by anyone, that I love one of my children more or less than the others. You have no idea what it is like to be a parent. What it is like to plead to the Gods for their safe return. To be there at their birth and simply pray for something as simple as having the correct number of fingers and toes. I love all my children, all of them. Do not lecture me about how I loved one more than the other.”

His eyes blazed in a way that I didn’t immediately remember having seen before. Then he laughed.

“Flame curse me, but I even love Edmund and I’m pretty sure that he tried to kill me.”

He laughed again at the thought and I felt a lump rise in my throat.

“I love you, my son. Look at me.”

My eyes had sunk to looking into the flames and his command forced hy eyes up to stare into his eyes.

“I love you, my son.” he told me. “And I am more proud of you than I can put into words. All men have talents and I am immeasurably pleased that you have finally found yours. But being genuine and loving was not something that I was good at. Not after… well… That’s not really an appropriate thing to talk about at a family reunion. But I love you and I am so very proud of you.”

I sobbed. And stared back down at the fire. I listened to the sounds of something being stirred, spoons rattling against metal pots and wooden cups.

“I cannot deny it though.” he told me. “That there have been times that you have made me more angry than I can ever remember being. And other times where I have been unable to fake happiness at some of your choices. But even so…”

I risked a look up. He was pretending not to notice the state that I was in.

“I am happy to see you Freddie. Never doubt that again. Now…” He passed me one of the cups before he looked at me strangely before shrugging. “I think you’re old enough,” he muttered before he pulled a small metal flask from somewhere on his person and poured some into his own cup.

“Don’t tell your mother.” He told me. “But I always enjoyed some strong spirit when sleeping out of doors on a long hunt. She didn’t approve but…” He shrugged. “What she doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her and from the look of you, you are old enough and experienced enough now… You’ve probably had more than just a snifter in a hot drink at the end of the day haven’t you?”

I took the offered flask from his hand and sniffed it. It smelled like Brandy, good stuff too. The kind of Brandy that I would always have thought that my Father would insist on serving to only his closest friends. Let alone from drinking it in a cup of hot tea. I tipped a bit into my tea.

His eyebrow raised. “Surely you can do better than that.” He told me.

I poured more into my cup.

“Good.” He decided. “Now tell me about this Countess that your sister is telling me about.”

All thoughts left me as I leant back with the cup in my hand. Whether I was dead, dreaming, hallucinating or whatever. It had all left my mind at that moment. I was warm, comfortable, safe and it seemed that I was having a campfire talk with my father. There are times when you just have to say “Fuck it” and just go with the flow.

“What can I tell you?” I told him. “She’s a Countess of a minor duchy called Angral to the East of our lands along the Pontar valley on the Southern tip of the mountains.”

Father nodded. “I have heard of it.”

“Her lands were being mistreated by the previous Count. Kerrass…”

“Your Witcher friend?”

“That’s him. He and I released her from captivity and in turn, she rescued the Duke from the Count who was plotting treason. She was awarded the County as part of her reward.”

“And where do you fit into all of this?”

“I helped her…”

“No no no. You are marrying her? How did that come about?”

“Oh, well…” I looked at him sidelong. “Emma told you who she is, right? Elder Vampire and Sorceress?”

“Yes, she did mention. I recall laughing and saying something like ‘of course she is’ and ‘only Freddie’. My only concern in that regard is whether or not she could produce sons in order to further the line.”

“She tells me she has some ideas in that direction. She would describe herself as a scientist as well.”

“Good, but you were saying.”

“Yes, ummm. But she was used to an ancient way of thinking and I challenged her I think. She claims that I surprised her in a way that she had never come across before and that endeared me to her. When she was named Countess, she was told that there were certain duties that were expected of her and that one of those was to marry. She was already interested in me and so… she enquired as to how she would go about arranging that.”

He nodded along.

“So you will be a Count?”

“Yes. Lord Frederick von Coulthard. Count of Angral.”

Father nodded and a huge grin split his face. “Now that sounds good.” he said. “Fairly rolls of the tongue.” He leaned forwards. “So let me ask this. I have a lot of questions on the subject. I want to know about her lands, road access and primary exports and imports, that kind of thing. But before I ask all of that I need to know this. Is there…”

He winced at something and a shadow crossed his face.

“Is there an understanding between the two of you? I don’t mean love. That can come later but…”

I held my hand up.

“I love her Father.”

He nodded as another shadow crossed his face.

“And will she treat that love with the respect that it deserves?”

“I think so.” I said, “There have been mistakes made between us. On both sides. But she challenges me in ways that I had not expected and…”

“Good.” He smiled. “You need someone to challenge you. I had always thought that the way forwards for you was to be the driving force behind you. I thought that you needed someone behind you, cracking the whip and driving you on. As it turns out though, you needed me to forbid you from doing something and then just get out of your way.”

We both laughed. It felt amazing.

“Now tell me about Angral.” He told me. “And tell me about her as well.”

And I did.

I started with Angral, giving him the rough layout of the land and what it looked like. I was forced to describe all the cruelty that had been committed against its people and the deep scars that had been left in the countryside. I also told him about the horrors that Kerrass, Ariadne and the Bishop of Angral had found and what had been done to the old manor. I pretended that I really was just the Freddie that had come down from the north when I had been summoned when we had really heard about his injury and pending death.

It was a remarkably pleasant fiction.

I told him about the plans that Ariadne had for the surrounding area and I told him about the general things that could be expected to come from the land. He expressed interest in the exports of Angral and admitted that he had all but dismissed the place in the past as mostly being able to export sheep and the like but he did consider how much of a benefit it would be to have a base there in order to get to the Eastern Markets in Vengerberg and the like.

The problem with trading down the Pontar valley is that sooner or later you have to go through Flotsam by river and that place is rather known for its corruption. We talked about that briefly and he was surprised that my knowledge base about trading and the like had expanded since I had left home. He approved.

“So tell me about the girl.” He told me.

“Other than the fact that she’s several hundred years old, a Vampire and a Sorceress rolled into one?”

“Yes.”

“What is there to say?” He seemed to be taking that supernatural element in his stride.

“Emma has told me an awful lot.” He told me. “She is eager for the marriage to go ahead. Her dowry is mostly in land and title which you will assume and although she trusts that you will work with her on things regarding her land, she is not averse to the fact that you will be called Count and will be assumed to be the ruler of her lands. I also know that she is interested in you intellectually and that one of the reasons for her interest is that you are undeterred by her supernatural status.”

“You don’t seem too worried about that side of things.” I prompted.

He waved his hands dismissively.

“She is a woman.” He said. “She brings you titles, lands and others. I admit that I would be a lot more concerned if she hadn’t openly discussed that she was willing to convert to the worship of the Eternal Flame. Something that I am looking forward to discussing with Mark by the way.”

He smirked a bit before sniffing and moving on. I was astonished. I had forgotten my father’s occasional playful side.

“We did ask about the status of any heir production,” he went on, “and it would seem that the lady is not concerned in that regard. Precisely what Emma said was that she “had ideas in that direction which would need some experimentation.” I understand that there were other parts to that conversation that a Father and a man did not need to know. But none of this tells me about the woman herself.”

“She is…” I laughed at something. “She is both older than me and much younger than me. She is wiser in the nature of things than I can easily describe but at the same time, there are things that she is utterly naive about. She cares about things that we would not even begin to consider while at the same time, not caring about others. She is kinder than I deserve, more considerate than I am to myself and more than once, she has told me off for not taking proper care of myself.”

Father nodded and held his hand out for my cup which I passed back as I spoke

“She is a scientist and she approaches the entirety of life like that. She sees something and then she needs to test that something. She forms theories and then needs to test those theories under certain conditions. She is magical so she has contacted me in the middle of the night in order to ask me questions about aspects of life and society that I had not considered.”

I laughed at another memory.

“She certainly has ‘opinions’ on the traditional role of the female in society as well as other matters of societal pressure that she is learning to live with. She also likes to take advantage of it as well. She tells me that she has taken meetings with so called ‘powerful men’ who have misjudged her by her appearance and her gender. They look at her and see a young, attractive and as yet unmarried woman. Then they think that this means that they can take advantage of this and try to run roughshod over her before they realise that she has distracted them in some way and that they actually have surrendered more than a small amount of what she wanted. She also enjoys confounding people’s expectations of her. She wears bright, light dresses and enjoys sunshine and out of door activities when people expect her to dress in dark, forbidding clothing due to her vampiric nature.”

He enjoyed that. “Which in turn means that when she wears a more expected costume, the effect is more pronounced. I like the sound of this woman and look forward to meeting her. What does she look like?”

“She is shorter than you think when you look at her, maybe a little shorter than me and a clear head shorter than Emma. She has some measure of control over her physical appearance which is, I understand, more to do with her vampiric abilities than her magical ones. There is a slightly otherworldly look to her face, meaning that she looks human but in a certain light she seems a little alien. She suggests that this is due to the mouth shape of having to accommodate fangs. She is certainly aristocratic to look at. The high cheekbones and pointed chin that you would expect but there is… It’s difficult to describe. Something to do with her not being human. She looks otherworldly to my eyes.”

He smirked. “You like that though don’t you.”

“I do. I admit that. She wears her dark hair long and she teases me by wearing it pulled over one shoulder. I don’t know why I like that but I do. Nor do I know how she found out that I liked it so much.”

He laughed with me at that.

“Emma tells me that, according to the maths, she wrote to arrange a marriage almost immediately after you left her lands.”

“So I’m told. Yes.”

“Eager wench isn’t she.”

“Don’t call her that.” I snapped.

“What? But…”

“I said don’t call her that.” I felt the growl in my throat.

Father’s eyes hardened. “I would remind you who you’re…”

“I know who I’m speaking to sir.” I told him, my own voice becoming formal. “You say the word ‘wench’ with a derogatory tone in your voice. You will not speak of her in that tone to me, or using derogatory language again.”

“I am your Father.” He stood up.

“And I am your son.” I stood up as well.

“What derogatory language? She is a wench just like any other.”

“Wench is a catch all term.” I told him, feeling my temper rise. “Men call women wenches when they want to dismiss them as just some kind of eye candy, or a woman that makes their living off their looks more than… Men call barmaids wenches when they want to excuse the fact that they slapped their arses or tried to steal a look down their tops. Men call sex-workers wenches, barmaids, farmers wives and daughters. Any kind of attractive woman that they might feel some kind of lust or attraction to, get called a wench. It’s a term of dismissal. A term of…”

I ran out of words.

“But this woman, this lady, is a Countess in her own right which is more than you can say. She attained that rank under her own merits and by her own deeds.and whatever small part I played in those auctions are things that I am proud of. And even if she wasn’t a noble woman and a noblewoman. Even if she was some kind of tavern worker, sex-worker or normal kind of villager. Even if she was just some woman that I had picked up off the street, you would not be allowed to call her ‘wench’.

“Now I know that you have read my work so you will know that I have been trained to fight by a killer, some distance from your training yards. You might be a gifted swordsman, sir. But if you speak of Ariadne like that again, then you will find out what kind of spearman I have become.”

A slow smile crossed his face.

“You really do love her don’t you?”

I stared at him. Feeling a childish anger being replaced by the rage of an older man.

“I’ve not missed this.” I told him. “I’ve not missed the little manipulative games that you like to play. I used to protest them and insist that I was not a child any more and you would laugh and tell me that that very protestation proved that I was still a child. Well I am telling you now, Father, that I have done everything that you wanted me to do in order to prove that I am now a man. I went into the world. I have made my own way. I have fought. I have killed and I have known the love of several beautiful women.

“As you bid me, Father, I have widened my horizons sir and I would thank you not to forget it. And before you start even further, I would warn you that if you insult her in her presence? I will not need to defend her honour.”

He stared up at me and it occurred to me that he had sat down in the middle of my tirade.

“You are right.” He said. “I am sorry. I handled you very badly Freddie. Very badly indeed. You were lost when you left the army and I thought that I could help straighten you out but I was wrong.”

He laughed at a thought. My two sons, the ones that I handled badly. Edmund turned into… well… Edmund. And you became the man that I see in front of me. I wonder what would have happened if I had just left Edmund alone a bit.”

“He would have spent all your money.” I said, warily sitting down. “And then you would have had to rescue him from his creditors.”

He grunted his agreement. He looked at the cups before shaking his head and just taking a sip straight from the flask.

“Is there anything else you want to say to me?” He asked. “Anything else that you want to get off your chest?” He offered me the flask.

“So much.” I told him. “So very much.” I honestly considered taking the flask off him and hurling it into the woods. But that would have been the actions of a childish Freddie. Instead I took the flask and took a sip.

Father grunted.

“You have grown.” he decided.

We sat in silence for a while, watching the fire burn. The moment stretched and I felt myself reaching for that same sense of calm that I had felt when I had woken up.

“Anyway.” Father said. “Thank you for coming. We had no idea whether or not the message would reach you.”

“It did.”

“Heh.” He chuckled. “You know that it was Edmund that arranged my injury right?”

“We do.” I told him. It seemed that the unfortunate part of the conversation was coming up on us.

“Idiot.” Father snorted. “Couldn’t even murder his Father right. I’ll have to disown him or something. Really figure out what I’m going to do with him.”

I risked looking up at him. He was frowning in thought, looking around us.

“What do you remember?” I prompted, as gently as I can remember.

He looked at me sharply. “How much do you know?”

“Pretty much everything.” I told him.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

“It’s all a bit fuzzy for me.” He replied. “I love Edmund, he is my son and although he was the worst possible of my children to inherit, the world doesn’t work that way. So we tried to train him and he hated us for it. He had got involved in that cult of your mother’s.” He sighed, shaking his head. “Bloody fool. I should have seen it coming really but the Kalayns had sworn that they were out of that and that they didn’t do that kind of thing any more.”

“They lied.” I told him.

He laughed, despite my serious tone. “Well of course, I know that now.” He chuckled.

“I looked into that, you know. I looked into what they did up there. Couldn’t find anything so I asked your mother. She hated me for a while, again I should say. And then I found that your cousin had come south and that Edmund was associating with the execrable little man. I was concerned and asked some questions and Flame help me, I found answers.”

He shook his head.

“We had already been hiding his indiscretions for years but that was the last straw. I told him that if it didn’t stop… well…”

“You threatened to disown him.”

“Yes, scandal be damned. He didn’t take that well and we had a screaming row. I looked into it further and discovered that Edmund had been involved in a local branch of that awful cult and I lost my mind. I went for a hunt to calm myself down and then…”

“You fell.” I told him. “Edmund goaded you into riding angry and not checking your gear. He had sabotaged it and you fell, injuring yourself.”

“You speak as if…”

“We were there, Father.” I told him.

He shook his head. “I remember none of it. Those drugs they gave me to help me fight off the infection were powerful things. Lucky for me that I got better isn’t it.”

I sighed. How do you tell a person that they died. And then how do you tell a person that you died too.

“Freddie?” He prompted.

“You didn’t get better, Father.” I told him. “You died. Kerrass and I…”

“Your Witcher friend who I’m looking forward to meeting.”

“You may get to do that sooner than you would like. But Kerrass and I arrived to find you on your deathbed. You on your death bed and Edmund murdered in your study. I hired Kerrass to investigate your murder. That’s why I know so much.”

“That’s not funny,” his eyes darkened. “That’s not a good joke. I remind you that…”

“Lets not do that dance again.” I told him sadly. “Look at my face Father. I was there when you died. Sam, Mark, Emma, Mother and I all sat at your bedside while we watched you die.”

He stared at me for a long time.

“No,” he said. “No, I cannot believe this. No. I am not dead. I cannot be dead. How can I be dead? Edmund failed. He was not clever enough. I had found him out, our doctors were on top of it. There was an infection in the injury to be sure but at the same time, I was getting better. I know that I was getting better.

“Look around you Father.” I told him. “Look around you and see where we are. Do you know it? Do you recognise this place?”

He did as he was told.

“Which of those horses are yours?” I asked him, pointing. “Because neither of those horses are mine. Where are your servants? Where are your guards? Even if you went out on the hunt and stayed out overnight, you would not have been allowed to go by yourself. I know that you like to think of yourself as a worldly man who can live and manage by yourself but I would wonder as to when was the last time you cooked a meal on your own fire? When was the last time you did a camp chore more basic than taking care of your horse and weapons. When was the last time you dug your own…”

He held his hand up, halting the flow of words.

“I don’t feel dead?”

“How would you know?” I wondered. “Have you ever been dead before?”

The tensions between the two of us disintegrated and we both started to laugh abruptly. Then he sat up.

“Then the thought occurs.” He began. “What are you doing here?”

I smirked. “I rather think that I bit off more than I can chew.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I got overconfident.” I told him. “I have survived more than I can easily describe and it seemed impossible to me that I would lose anything else. It seemed impossible that I could lose and then…?” I shrugged.

He nodded thoughtfully.

“We will get on to that in a bit. What happened to me please? Leave nothing out.”

“We were on our way south. Kerrass wanted to take advantage of the regular bounties on Necrophages on the border of Northern Temeria. We got your message and came as fast as we could south as fast as we could. We got to the gates of the castle where we were met by a man called Sir Robart de Radford.”

Father grimaced at the name.

“De Radford.” I went on. “Accused me of Fratricide which is when we discovered that… You know what? I’m telling this in the wrong order.”

“No no,” He said, leaning backwards to listen. “Keep going.”

“So that was how I found out that Edmund had been murdered. Radford had a grudge against the family and against me in particular for reasons that we never really found out. Although I think it was some kind of trade issue but…”

I shrugged.

“We got free. We found that you still had a few days to go before you would depart. Edmund had been found a day or so earlier with a stab wound to the neck in your study. He died quickly. I was concerned that the rest of the family didn’t really seem to care about this death so I hired Kerrass to investigate.”

“Why were you so concerned?”

“Because I thought that it might not be a one off attack. It could have been a prelude to a greater move against us, against Francesca in the South. I thought it might have been a destabilising effort. After all, if Edmund didn’t inherit, Mark couldn’t, Sam was a younger man and not trained to be the head of…”

“Yes, I had foreseen that issue which was why I took the steps that I did regarding my will and your inheritances. Why was no-one else concerned?”

“I don’t know. I think it was partly because everyone thought that Edmund had it coming. I know that that was certainly Emma’s view. Everyone rather thought that Edmund had owed the wrong person too much money or had offended the wrong person and that vengeance had finally caught up with him.”

“But you didn’t think that.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t think that. I was more concerned about what would happen if we were all wrong.”

He nodded. “It seems that you took on the lessons of your political tutor better than we thought.”

“I did.” I told him. “Believe it or not, I have had many opportunities to use those skills over the years. I keep meaning to find out where he is now in order to thank him.”

“He always said you were too soft for it.”

“And I am. I hate using those skills. But I would be lying if I said that sometimes, it isn’t deeply satisfying to take a man down hard.”

He chuckled. “I seem to be taking this awfully well. What did your Witcher friend find?”

“We knew that you and Edmund had had a confrontation about something. We later found out that the confrontation was probably about the cult activities that he had been a part of. Where they were taking young and beautiful people out and slaking their sick lusts on them. Edmund panicked when the prospect of his free meal ticket was taken away. Went into Oxenfurt where he had hired rooms and set about getting drunk, getting high and talking to his fellow cultists about what he should do.”

“That sounds about right.”

“At some point, someone, we still don’t know for certain who it was, came up with the plan of rigging matters so that you were injured on a hunt and that you would “die of your injuries”. We know that it was someone else, both because we reasoned that Edmund wasn’t clever enough to come up with the plan by himself and because a cultist that we caught agreed.

“He rigged your tack so that you would fall off your horse badly. Riled you up so that you wouldn’t check your own gear and went out. Sure enough you were hurt. Badly.”

“Yes, I remember this much.”

“The horsemaster figured all of that out and left.”

“I remember Emma telling me that he was distraught.”

“He was. Edmund had arrived at the castle to ‘help’ and the horsemaster went to Edmund with his suspicions about the sabotage of your horse. In the process, the horsemaster figured out that Edmund was at fault and he fled. Edmund hunted him down and killed him.”

Father winced at that. “Poor man.”

“Emma and mother called for the doctors who worked to heal you. According to our consultant. They did everything right and Edmund again panicked and started to smear the bandages, or poisoned the herbal stuff that the bandages were being smeared in, so that the infection would get worse, not better. At around the point where it was clear that no matter what, you were not going to survive. Edmund reverted to type. Lauding it over Emma and the other servants, talking about improvements that he was going to make and things that he was going to do.

“Fearing that Edmund was just going to turn our lands into some kind of cult haven. Mother had a moment of… I don’t want to call it clarity. She realised that Edmund had killed you and that he was the biggest threat to the future. So she killed him.”

“Holy Flame.” Father breathed.

“Pretty much what I said.” I told him.

“You figured it out?”

“Kerrass did, but even he admitted that it was only because we had run out of other suspects. We found out about Edmund’s involvement, about the cult. We were confident that Emma didn’t do it and she had an alibi anyway.”

“Her maid?” Father asked.

“You knew about that?”

“Of course I knew. They were not as discreet as they would like to have thought. You only had to look at the way that Emma’s face lit up whenever that maid of hers walked into the room. I’ve known for a long time that Emma preferred women. I imagine that I knew before she did.”

“How?”

“We were visited by some country dancers. They performed for their supper and Emma was uninterested in the men but was openly fascinated by the women dancers. I never told her that but she was so fascinated that it was almost comical.” He chuckled. “Mark?”

“Mark was tricky. He had refused to be questioned at first but his recoil and confusion about the cult was impossible to fake. And given that your accident and Edmund’s murder were linked. Mark had no idea that you were being murdered. He hadn’t even considered it and resented that we pursued that line. And he wasn’t there for some of what was happening. And he was guarded more than you were. No way that he could have snuck off and murdered Edmund.

“Sam was also late to the scene and frankly, Sam isn’t that good of an actor either.

“We tracked Edmund’s trail into town and figured out how he was communicating with the cult. We raided a cult meeting and arrested a good chunk of them, including Cousin Kalayn who claimed to have inducted Edmund into the religion.”

“Yes. He did. It was before you were born. I have been angry before but…” He shook his head. I waited for a while to see if he would keep talking but he lapsed into silence.

“At first our assumption was that Edmund was not playing nicely with the cult. The whole… debt thing didn’t ring true for us on the grounds that Edmund was going to inherit.”

“He wasn’t.”

“Yes, but neither he, nor we knew about that at the time.”

Father grunted at that.

“But it turns out that Cousin Kalayn had no idea about who had killed Edmund. He was furious about it too. Edmund was his meal ticket and they were looking forward to spending all of that money on cult things.”

“I bet they were.”

“So in the end, Mother was the only one that fit.”

“Why didn’t my healing work? Our doctors were the best.”

“According to the doctor that Kerrass called in, they were once the best, but they were not any longer. They had grown lazy in their old age.”

“I can see that.”

“So you died. The cultists that we had taken were victims of some vigilante justice, including Cousin Kalayn.”

“Vigilante justice?”

“Yeah.” I scratched my chin. “Many of them were sons of powerful men. Those powerful men brought wealth and influence against the arrests and it looked likely that many of them were going to be released. So locals, outraged at the story coming out. Broke them out of prison and burnt them alive as heretics.”

“You didn’t have anything to do with that did you?” he looked at me sharply.

“I had absolutely nothing to do with that.” I answered carefully.

He looked at me for a long time.

“So that was that.” He decided. “That was how I died. Victim of Patricide.”

He shook his head after a long moment. “Edmund was not clever enough to come up with all of that on his own.”

“No, he wasn’t.” I agreed. “We only have Cousin Kalayn’s word for it that the initial idea didn’t come from him. But the idea to kill you was given to him by someone else. The plan as well as the materials. We are sure that Kalayn was involved in the planning of things but…”

I shrugged.

“So Kalayn died as part of the…” He waved his hand.

“He did. And get this. Lord Kalayn threw himself on the bonfire when his son could not be saved.”

Father frowned at that. “That doesn’t sound like the man I knew. He would be far too… self-centred to do that.”

“Again, we don’t know.” I said, “It seems that the Northern cult might have had a hand in that too. He wasn’t as devout as they liked.”

Father grunted. “It would seem as though there is much more to your story.”

I nodded. “There is.”

He leant forward and stared at me intently. With a focus that I had always found off putting as a child and was the same as an adult.

“Tell me.” He said. “What did you get up to? And not the sanitised versions that you put in your articles. Tell me the real story.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Well, if you’re right, then we’re dead. What else are we going to do?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

A sudden pain ripped through me. I have no words to describe it. It felt like, literally, that I was being torn apart. That the corners of my mouth were tearing. That my eyes were bugging out of their sockets. And that my ass was rupturing. I know that there’s a reading of that statement that makes it seem funny, but I promise you that it is anything but that. It hurt so much, so very much. An agony the likes of which I have never experienced and I hope to never experience it again.

I was also struck by a very vivid and painful shade of green. I know that that makes no sense, but that is the closest way that I can describe what it looked and felt like to me. It felt like I was being assaulted by a colour. I have always thought of the colour green to be a fairly nice colour, a restful colour that we could use to fall asleep to. I associate it with pleasant things like grass on the hillside, trees in the sunshine. The old riddle about how to describe colour to a blind man and you say that yellow is like the sun on your face, red is the heat of the fire when you reach towards it, blue is the cool water running through your fingers and green is the sound of wind in the leaves.

That has always struck me as being quite a restful thing. And even though it is true that the sound of wind through the leaves has taken on a new and sinister meaning when talking about moving through the Black Forest. Green was still a quite pleasant feeling for me.

But just then, it was a violent, upsetting and off putting thing. It hurt.

It was as though I looked around myself and all of the greens in the surrounding area seemed to surge towards the forefront of my vision. It leached the reds, the oranges and the blues away until all that was left was that deep, violent and unpleasant shade of green.

I reeled backwards and I found myself leaning on the ground, supporting my weight while I gasped for breath. The feeling began to fade slowly. The greens started to retreat from the front of my vision and I was back to being sat across from my Father in a wooded clearing.

“Are you alright?” He asked me, gazing at me steadily.

“I’m fine.” I said, “I don’t know, I suddenly felt as though I was in a…”

My words petered out and I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Take your time.” Father told me. He poured me some more tea. “Tell me what happened.

Such are the habits of being obedient to our parents that I did as I was told. I sat, took some more tea and drank it which seemed to soothe the sudden pain and nausea in my gut before I started to speak. I told him about my time with Kerrass. I told him about the rescue of Sleeping Beauty which he didn’t seem particularly interested in. He was only curious from a kind of distant way and when I asked him about it he pointed out that Dorne was a long way from Novigrad, that the lumber concerns would not be that important to someone in his position and that therefore, there was nothing immediately to worry about from his perspective.

“Emma took advantage of it.” I pointed out.

“Oh?” His eyebrows raised.

“Yeah, after she took over the company, she was making efforts to expand her own circle of influence and one of the ways that she took advantage of the matter was that people underestimated her. So she helped the Princess because no-one else would. I’m told we got a good deal on the lumber coming out of Dorne and also, we had access to the blade thorns. Applications are still being worked on in the Sorcerous elements of our society, but it looks as though it might make a real difference.”

“Interesting,” Father stroked his chin.

“Also, Francesca made an introduction to the Empress and so, we are quite well thought of in Dorne. Emma tells me that it’s a nearly invaluable route in, a foothold into being able to trade in the South.”

“She always had a good head on her for that. What happened next?”

I told him about my attaining my qualification in the university which he congratulated me for. Although he was more interested in any monetary income that I might make from such a thing and said that thing that I really hadn’t wanted to hear.

“Well, it’s good to hear that your hobby has paid off.” He told me. In another time or another place, I might have gotten really angry with him about that.

I told him about having an engagement ring made for Ariadne and my plans to propose over the Winter court at the coronation of the Empress. But then I had to tell him about the disappearance of Francesca.

I did not enjoy that.

I told him about what we did and how we did it. I told him what we had found and what we had guessed. He just stared into the fire as I spoke. He didn’t yell, weep or recriminate which I might have expected otherwise. He just… He just sat there and listened. I explained the strange world that Jack took me to. He did admonish me about my stupidity regarding throwing myself into an offer of service to an otherworldly being. An accusation that I have no response to.

I mean he’s right. In the list of stupid things that I’ve done, despite Kerrass’ personal list on the subject, I think that my headlong rush to serve Jack in an effort to find out what had happened to Francesca still ranks as the most stupid. I mean, I was desperate and if you held a gun to my head, I can’t pretend that I would do anything else if I had my time again, but still.

When I was done, he didn’t say anything for a long time. Instead, he just stared into the fire. The first question was about Jack. So too was the second question. Then the questions started to come thick and fast. Leaping around in the narrative. I don’t know what his thinking process was regarding it all. At the time, I wondered if he was trying to work his way into the fact that Francesca had been taken from us. He asked about the efforts to find her. He asked about how she had been lost, the framing of Sam and how I had figured out that Sam was innocent.

He was interested in the way that the Empress had reacted and listened in detail to the hunt through the streets of Beauclair for the false Jack.

Then there was another long period of silence while we both stared into the fire.

Then he took a deep breath.

“I think you were taken for a ride.” He said.

“What do you mean?” I wondered.

“That false Jack that was running through the city scape. The disappearance of your sister. I can think of several ways that it could have been done in quite mundane ways. I can also think of several ways that that false Jack of yours could have been faked.”

“So can I.” I admitted. “And it turned out that at least some of that is true. We found the guy who did it and it turns out that some of it was very basic. It was more than likely that Francesca was under our noses on several occasions. The mage that did it was studying magic that is outlawed and that the use of the Jack entity was true though.”

Father shifted uncomfortably.

“I suppose that we must trust the experts who were there at the time.” He said unhappily. “I have heard of several of the names that you mention. Figures of politics and power. But I also think that it’s true that knowledge can blind you to things that are obvious. It can make you arrogant and blind you to certain solutions. Certain obvious things that you should have seen differently that would provide explanations and answers that you would even be reluctant to see. Sometimes, all you have to do is to look at things a little differently and then the entirety of the tapestry unravels.”

“You are not wrong.” I told him. “All I can say is that we operated on what we knew at the time.”

He looked up at me sharply for a long time.

“So you left to try and find your sister.” It was not a question.

“I did. I took Kerrass with me and we went to work.”

He nodded. “Whatever else I might say, or however else I might act. Do not doubt for one moment that I admire your filial duty, and respect your devotion to your sister. I know that Francesca was the one member of the family that everyone loved. But even despite all of that. You went after her when others would not. I am proud of you for doing that and even though it might seem as though I am disapproving of some aspects of your scheme. Do not doubt that I am proud of you for those actions. But do not mistake that for condemnation of your other siblings for doing what they felt was right.”

“Thank you.” I told him. I felt an absurd urge to bow.

“Why did you chase after her? Leaving aside love and devotion. Leaving aside the fact that your sister and brothers all felt the same way. Why did you go looking?”

“Starting with what I knew at the time then. I went because I could. Emma had responsibilities with the company and Mark was sick.”

“Mark was sick?”

“Yeah….”

I explained the entire situation. He listened carefully.

“So Sam is going to be my heir.” He mused.

“He is.”

“Hmmm.” He grunted. “I think, I would rather it was you.”

“Why? I think he will make a great Lord Coulthard.”

Father smirked. “You were always the closest with him but that made you a little blind to his faults. No-one works harder than Sam to fit in. But you didn’t see how lazy he could be. Or how judgemental or stubborn he could be. A lord needs to be able to listen to the advisors around him and be able to adapt to those opinions. A lord needs to put the good of his people over his own selfish desires. And Sam hated me, and your mother I think.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Oh he did.” Father nodded. “You weren’t there but your own story backs this up. He wanted to execute your mother for the murder of Edmund. I can’t say that he was wrong. But I think he would be the kind of person that would want to tear apart everything that I had built so that he could prove that he was his own man. He resented being pushed into military life, even when it turned out to be one of the only things he was ever good at. I love your brother, but it is also a Father’s duty to see the flaws in the child and to address them and help to educate him out of them.

“Just as I tried to educate you.

“I made mistakes there. I did well with Mark, Emma and Francesca. The three of them went where they were told and found that they were suited to where I put them. I ruined Edmund by trying to turn him into something he was not. Sam… I was blinded by the fact that he seemed to be suited to the role that I had chosen for him and didn’t see his resentment. He wanted to find his own way, like you did.

“The two of you were very alike. Where I was right in his life path, I was wrong in yours. But he still wanted to have found his own way and he hated me for not letting him do that.” He shrugged and sighed. “Ah well. It’s done now and I must live with it. You were explaining why you took the search for Francesca on yourself.”

I smirked at the question.

“Would you like to know the answer as I think of it now? Or as I thought of it at the time?”

“Are they different?” Father asked with an answering smirk. “Why not tell me both?”

I nodded.

“Then at the time. I thought that I was uniquely suited to the church. I was convinced that Francesca’s disappearance was to do with me. I was also convinced that I was guilty of the fact that I hadn’t done right by her during the search and I felt, very strongly, that I needed to atone for the mistakes that I had made.

“I knew that Francesca was a favourite of the Empress, so I also knew that the Imperial Guard would be looking for her. I knew that the Imperial intelligence service would be looking for her. I also knew that there would be, almost a contest between the different magic users, knights and courtiers to find Francesca. Because they also all knew that the person that actually managed to find my sister would be sure of rank, wealth, privilege and advancement.

“So everything was covered except the Witcher angle. There was something monstrous in the taking of Francesca and of all of the people that were out looking for her. That was the angle that wasn’t being covered.”

I considered it for a bit longer.

“I was also convinced that Kerrass and I were uniquely suited to the search. We would be able to look in places that other people would not be able to look. We would be able to ask questions of those people that would not want to answer to the newer version of the Lodge of Sorceresses or someone in Black armour with the Golden sun emblazoned on it. I thought that there were places that we would look that no-one else would think of.

“I also felt that someone from our family should be personally involved in the search. I knew that Emma had to be involved in the trading company or a significant portion of the Economy of the Northern Kingdoms would collapse. Not all of it, but the failure of Coulthard trading would impact the regrowth of the nations of the North after the depredations of the war. Mark was sick and had work to do of his own. Sam wanted to get back to his lands in the North. He had taken the loss of Francesca quite hard, not least because he had been accused of being involved in the affair. So he wanted to go back to his lands in the North which he told us were problematic and that we intended to visit anyway because we thought that one of the elements of Francesca’s disappearance was possibly revenge for the loss of the cult around Oxenfurt.

“And that was another reason why I went. Because I felt that if I was going to be looking, then I would draw out our enemies.”

The fire crackled as we sat in silence for a while.

“All of that sounds a little bit weak.” Father said with a slight smile. He even looked a little bit surprised when I agreed with him.

“And it was.” I told him. “Now for the real reason. I mean, there’s more to it than this, but what it boils down to is that I could not bear not to look.”

Father nodded to that.

“I was the protagonist of my own story.” I told him. “I was right and everyone else was wrong. I remember looking around at the Empress, at Emma, at Lord Voorhis the head of the Imperial intelligence service. I remember looking at them all and I distinctly remember the moment when they all gave up on Francesca and I remember being so angry with all of them. I wanted to shake them and rage and scream and shout.”

I chuckled bitterly at the memory.

“That was very much the start of my downfall. The beginning of my taking stupid risks for no other reason than I thought I could do it, I thought I would get away with that. That… rage, that anger. I still struggle to let go of that today. Why did I do it?

“I wanted to be the one that found her. I wanted to be the one that took her from the dark, horrible, damp, slimy dungeon that she would have been kept in. I wanted to be there. I wanted to see her and for her to see that it was me that had found her. I wanted to prove myself, in her eyes, in everyone’s eyes really. I wanted to be the hero of my own story.

“It was arrogance.” I said, “It’s easy for me to say looking back. And also, that arrogance has never gone away. I was the one that figured out how to lift the curse on sleeping beauty. I had been the one that had kept Ariadne from laying waste to that part of the North. I was the one that… Something else that has only got worse over the years.”

Father nodded when he ran out of steam.

“So I’m dead?” He checked with me.

“I’m afraid so. I was there when you gasped out your last. It was a friend of mine that pulled the sheet over your head to cover your face.”

He grinned.

“So why am I hungry?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Are you hungry?”

I considered the question as he climbed to his feet.

“I am,” I decided after a while. Surprised at my own answer.

“I don’t remember how I got here.” Father said as he went over to his bags and started to rifle through them. “But if there’s no food packed in these bags then I am severely out of character. As are you for that matter if you have been travelling in the world and you don’t have anything to eat in those bags of yours. Check, would you.”

I grinned and went to the bags. Sure enough, I found some bread and a small, leaf wrapped hunk of cheese. There were also a couple of apples in the depths of the bag that I produced triumphantly. Father did slightly better and had found a line of sausages and a hunk of bacon.

“Father?” I asked as I watched him beginning to carve up the bacon and the sausage.

“My son?”

“Tell me something, have you ever actually successfully managed to cook anything?”

He stared at the sausage that he had been in the process of mangling. “You know what?” he said. “I don’t think I ever did.”

“Always had a servant do it did you?” I teased.

“Less of your cheek, young man.”

I just laughed at him and commandeered the meat out of his hands. “Just cut some bread will you.” I told him.

He watched me for a moment, also passing over the small pot of butter that he had found before he cut and buttered some bread before watching me work. I turned and looked at him.

“I don’t suppose you know what wild garlic and rosemary looks like do you?” I asked him.

He snorted and went into the undergrowth. Away from where he had told me that he went for latrines. He came back with what I was looking for and I started to set about adding some flavour into the meat that he had provided. He settled back onto his seat and watched.

“You know something?” He told me. “You’re going to make someone a lovely wife one day.”

“Fuck off Father.” I told him, turning the sausages over carefully.

He chuckled. “When did you learn how to cook?”

I considered the question.

“I think it started in the army.” I told him. “Life in the logistics corps was a lot like being a student really. Except for the fact that there were stricter morning calls. But even though we were routinely informed that we were the most important division in the army and that without the logistics corps, the entire armed forces of Redania would collapse. Even despite all of that, we still had to live off the shittiest food and everyone looked down on us. No glory to be found in the Logistics corps is there?”

He chuckled. Missing my remaining bitterness from not being able to serve in the proper army. I mean, I know and he was right to do it. But that doesn’t leave me feeling any better.

“So we found that we had to make do with what we were given.” I told him. “Foraging teams don’t pay attention to things like wild garlic and herbs. They are after meat, butter, milk, cheese and vegetables. Things that they can store for extended periods of time. So we found that we had lots of bits of flavour and as such, we could even make an infantryman’s boots taste good.”

Father laughed at the old army joke.

“Then it just occurred to me while living in digs, that it was cheaper to cook good food than it was to try and eat out all the time. And then when I hit the road with Kerrass…. I mean, he can cook a decent steak but other than that… he’s a Witcher. He can live off things that would turn you green. Turn me green too for that matter. He sometimes jokes that they burnt the taste buds out of him when he was a trainee Witcher.”

Father laughed a bit harder at that.

“I mean,” I went on. “He can appreciate a good meal when it’s put in front of him and he certainly enjoys luxury when he can get it. But I think he feels that food is fuel and good food is a luxury that can be done without.”

“He’s not wrong.” Father commented.

“He’s not. But at the same time, if a little bit of effort, some proper seasoning and a knowledge of cooking herbs and everyday spices can make the difference between food being considered as sustenance and a meal that you enjoy eating with friends?”

I shrugged.

“An interesting philosophy.” he told me. He had also found some wooden plates and had poured some more tea while I cooked.

“Tell me about how you looked for your sister and where.”

“Well… The Lodge of Sorceress had decided that the imprinting of certain aspects of the Jack entity onto someone else was a magic that they didn’t recognise. I have since found out that it would be a form of Goetia but that would suggest that Jack himself would know something about that. And given that he didn’t, that would mean a new form, or a strange form, of Goetia that the existing mages didn’t know anything about. Therefore, strange and foreign kinds of magic were our target. We also promised Sam that we would go north and look at the Castle Kalayn to see if there was anything going on there. From that, Kerrass had a few other ideas as to where to go next, but we didn’t really talk about that at the time.”

“Tell me.”

Again. Although I was a grown-ass man. There is something primal in me that passes straight down my spine and into that primal instinct that says that i had to obey my father when he gets a specific tone.

I told him about the vault, guarded by Sally, Saffron and Pula. I wanted to spend more time on the hunt for the Knights of the Flaming Sword but truth be told, he didn’t seem to care that much. As soon as he was told that the small family of creatures were dead, he seemed to immediately lose interest.

From there it was the march north, stopping off to tell him about the adjustments that were being made to Oxenfurt docks and the next run-in with Sir Robart de Radford. I told him about the cult in the North.

He had a lot of questions

I don’t want to go over what happened in too much detail. Aftera ll, you read about it so you probably remember what happened. But he had a number of very detailed questions including some things that I really had to struggle to remember.

He was particularly interested in the outfits that the cult wore. I had to describe that the cult, especially Lord Cavill, wore animal skulls over their faces and that Lord Cavil, the leader of the cult wore a crown of antlers on his head. He seemed to find this both funny and a little offensive for reasons that I could not immediately understand. He asked why I thought that might have been, that they would use such costumes.

“After all.” He told me. “The purposes of the cult, from what you’ve said, is the promotion of the human form and spirit. From what you have said, they are literally called the cult of the First-Born Suns, so why would they choose outfits like those?”

“We had several theories.” I told him. “Most of it is psychological. They had a number of slaves that they used to use and they needed to keep those slaves in line. The easiest ways to do that was both through the many many drugs that they kept them docile with. But also, through fear. It is entirely possible that they used the combination of the two to literally force their slaves to think of them all as demonic creatures and they used whatever they could get their hands on in order to fulfil that ideal.”

Father grunted at that.

“Another theory that we had was that the woodland around that area was old and quite ancient. Therefore, there were a lot of Leshen around there. If you wanted to pretend that you were ancient, terrifying spirits that are emerging from the depths of hell in order to torment the people in those areas. Why not model yourself on the genuinely terrifying things that are out there.”

Father grunted at that as well.

“We also wondered whether or not the outfits, the weapons, the masks and the headdress were things that the cult had gotten off the being or entity that it had made contact with. We can’t be sure though and those people that know about such things have been rather… intense on preventing anyone from trying to contact the entity to follow through on that particular theory. There is, as it turns out, such a thing as too much knowledge.

“If life on the road has taught me nothing else, it is that the old saying that ‘no knowledge is evil, it is only the application of that knowledge’ is, in fact, wrong. Pursuing the knowledge that these entities would give you would involve evil acts to make contact, evil acts to pay the price of the knowledge and then evil acts to make use of that knowledge. It is not worth it and therefore, living with the mystery is preferable.”

Father considered this for a long time before nodding, a little unhappily.

“Were there any other theories?”

“Yes.” I admitted.

“Which were?” He prompted, a little sternly. Father liked people to follow through on these kinds of things. There is an old joke among teachers and philosophers where someone says, ‘Can I ask a question?’ meaning it as a prelude to asking a question that the second person might not want to answer. It’s the kind of thing where people prepare the person that the coming questioning is not going to be pleasant. The second person would look at the questioner and say ‘yes’, before walking off.

Father would not stand for that. If someone said that to him ``Can I ask a question?” he had been known to fly into a rage and tell the person that they should ‘ASK THE DAMN QUESTION ALREADY,’

I took a deep breath. “Lord Cavil was an educated man.” I said, “He was also a clever man. It is more than likely that he read about The Schattenmann and the awesome power that The Schattenmann was supposed to wield over the surrounding area. If he could borrow a certain amount of that power, even if it was just the reputation of that power, then I think he would use it. We also know that symbolism is powerful in this kind of thing and that therefore, it would not be beyond the realms of possibility that he was trying to subvert the power of the Schattenmann.”

“Explain a bit more of that.”

“It’s just a theory. But these entities… those that exist outside of our realm, our sphere if you prefer that term leftover from the Conjunction of the sphere's event. But there are a number of these entities. The Horsewoman of war, the headless horseman which, as it turns out, are different things. The Schattenmann, Jack, the Shadow, the Rumplesteldt, the Master of Mirrors. Cromm Cruarch, the crooked man of the mound and whatever power it was that the cult of the First-Born were worshipping and empowering through their rites. All of them have power and that power can be evoked. We don’t know how of course but we know it can be done.

“One of the theories about how that is done is to emulate the entity in question. Pretend to be the thing and then you get some of the power of the thing. It is one of our…” I could not help but sigh with exasperation. Exasperation that Father seemed to find amusing. “many… theories as to why the ‘Jack’ entity is so annoyed when people try to emulate him and copycat his methods and crimes.

“So it is an outside theory that what was happening was that Cavil had read or heard about The Schattenmann and was deliberately trying to steal or emulate some of that power in order to better serve his master.”

Father grunted about that.

“Of all the theories that you propose regarding that instance, that is the most worrying. Do you think it worked?”

“Nah.” I told him. “I think that the most likely scenario is the simplest one. I’ve seen that in so many of my studies and through so much of my time spent with Kerrass. The most obvious solution is the most likely. And in this case, it is by far the most likely that it was just a psychological trick that they were playing. Something to terrify the people that they were chasing and terrorising.”

“If that was the case then,” Father countered. “Why Antlers? From what you say, they set great stock about the antlers that Cavil was wearing. He had this whole apparatus about wearing it.”

“He did, in which case the stuff about the Leshen comes in. He was copying Leshen and that that particular crown belonged to one of Cavil’s predecessors and therefore, a lot of stock was set by it.”

Father grunted again, I could tell he wasn’t happy with that solution but I am familiar with that debate, it’s one of the many circular mysteries that we just don’t know the answer to and will probably never know the answer to. One question leads to the next question which leads to the next question and round and round it goes until you run out of energy.

I was saved from that debate by the fact that the sausages were finally ready. They had taken their sweet time to cook and then I looked down and suddenly, they were on the verge of being ready.

I had a brief moment where I bemoaned the lack of onions, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re out the road.

“Tell me about these ghosts that saved you?” He asked as we ate.

“Can we not wait until I’ve eaten?” I asked him. “I don’t want the sausages to get cold.”

He fixed me with a glare that I remembered all too well from the dining table of old.

“No.” I told him, raising my fork at him in an attitude of defence. “You can glare at me all you want, you can order me all you want. But I am not going to waste hot food. I am going to eat first and then I will answer all the questions that you want to ask about the subject of Cromm Cruarch, the crooked man of the mound. Not that I can answer much.”

I didn’t look at him. “I just ate, avoiding his gaze. After a while, I heard the sounds of eating coming from that side of the campfire.

Pain flared again. I blinked but I couldn’t see. All was red blackness in front of me. I tried to blink it free but discovered that my eyes wouldn’t blink. My eyes felt as though they were being held open. They felt hot, dry and they hurt.

If only that was the worst agony that I could feel. I couldn’t breath. I was choking on something hard that had been wedged down my throat. The corners of my mouth felt as though they had been torn and I could feel something running down the sides of my face. Was it blood, was it saliva? I could not possibly tell. A similar tearing feeling was happening in my backside. Agony was literally tearing me in half, splitting me in two. I could feel something groping around in my insides and as well as the agony, there was a discomfort deep in my gut as something hard felt around in the depths of my bowls.

I tried to scream but I was smothered by something, unable to breath. I couldn’t move my arms as they were weighed down by something and tied by something else. My legs as well.

I started to panic, my vision went green.

“Are you alright?” Father asked.

“What?” I was staring at the last sausage on the plate.

“Are you alright? You just seemed to… go somewhere just now?”

“I don’t…” I looked up at him as the pain receded. He seemed the same as he ever was. I suddenly felt cold and the clearing seemed somewhat darker. I reached towards the pile of firewood and added some more logs to the flame until I felt that bit warmer and the fire was leaping up to spread more light higher and further. I also fetched my blanket and wrapped it around myself while I finished my dinner.

“So you were saying.” Father prompted.

“Was I?”

“About Cromm Cruarch?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think that there is much to say. The way Kerrass talks about it was as if he was solving some kind of riddle. He solved the riddle of the man on the mound and summoned him through the ancient rites of that part of the countryside.”

I described what had happened as best as I could manage. Father asked some questions about the forms that the spectres took and we talked about it a little from there.

“So who was he?’ Father asked. “This crooked man of the mound?”

“We truly don’t know.” I answered. “And I have looked. And further than that, I have got Emma to pay other scholars to look for me while I have been on the road. The best theory that we can come up with is that many different cultures have some variation of the King that waits. Some fabled and ancient warrior that sleeps underneath a hill should the enemy that he was famous for defeating return to wreak their havoc upon the ancient warrior's homeland.

“So the theory that we have is that the entity that we had found, the Crom Cruarch was the literal interpretation of that. Some entity that had come through to fight the being that the cultists worshipped and had stayed, providing the locals with the means and the method to summon him should he be required to fight against the enemy in the future. As to who he definitely was?”

I shrugged.

“Kerrass thinks he was something similar to the woman that he worships as a Goddess. Another world’s, another sphere’s God or Goddess. Chireadean, the elf that I was travelling with and who saved our lives… He thinks that it was some kind of ancient Elven hero. But that is another one of those mysteries that we will likely never know the answer to. It is possible that if we found the answer to who, or what it was that the cult worshipped, we would find the identity of the other. But would it be worth it?”

I shrugged again.

He grunted and considered the matter for a moment before shrugging. His little hip flask came out again and we traded it back and forth.

We went on to talk about the ending of the cult in the North. How Ariadne, a vampire that I later figured out must have been Regis, and a dragon that must have been Maleficent cleaned out the cult caves on behalf of the crown. Father did stop me there.

“So your intended is friends with more than one Vampire and a dragon.”

“That can shapeshift. Yes.”

“Huh.” He frowned as he thought about this.

“Also a pair of very old, very powerful Elves.” I added.

“So when you marry her, you are going to be careful not to annoy her?”

“To the very best of my ability. There have been several instances where we have not been able to avoid upsetting each other but I suppose that we will get to those in time.”

“I suppose that we shall.” He told me.

We spoke about a couple of the leads that didn’t pan out, the final days of Aunt Kalayn and her poor, unfortunate Elven Servant. He asked me what had happened to her and he frowned when I admitted that I actually didn’t have any idea and that Chireadean would never tell me. Which was alright because I didn’t really want to know. We talked about the incident in the village of the Unicorn.

He laughed for a long time when I told him about “The demon with the yellow eyes” and thought I was rather stupid for not figuring out what that was all about. I admit that it seems foolish in retrospect but at that time and that place… I argued that I was still recovering from my time in the North and that as such, it was not unreasonable for me to still have some gaps in my ability to think.

We did go over the conversation with the Unicorn though. He was interested in the Unicorn’s perception of reality and about how the world and the universe works. I had nothing to add in that regard. I mean, I’ve had several different conversations along those lines now. Speaking with beings that think that they know the way that the world works. A lot of it matches up which is interesting but also, a lot of it could just be utter bullshit. Father seemed to be a little disappointed when I told him that but at the same time, he could not make any argument to the contrary that I couldn’t immediately strike down with some counter arguments.

It was a big moment for me. The first argument and debate that I had with my Father that I had won through a purely logical argument.

Almost enough that I record it here, but I reason that it has little value to add to the debate so instead, I will just leave it and try to be the bigger man.

Beyond that. He was very interested in the stories surrounding the Skeleton Ship. He made me go over all the myths and legends about the thing. He made me go over what Ciri had said about her journeys to other worlds and what she had seen there. The account of the sailor was very interesting to him and he asked me about what the ship had looked like, over and over and over again until eventually, I went to my pack to find a piece of paper and I drew it for him using a lump of charcoal from out of the fire. Art has never been my strongest talent but at the same time, I was quite proud of what I managed to produce at the time.

Now that I was talking about it, It occured to me that I hadn’t really thought about what had happened with the Skeleton Ship for a long time. It had soon been overtaken by later events with the Goddess and my slow climb back to health beyond that. But at the time, the question was about what we should do with the sailor, the traveller from another realm and whether we did the right thing in handing him back to the Skeleton Ship. If we did the right thing to hang the Albatross around his neck? I had not considered otherwise for quite a long time.

Father had no illusions.

“Of course it was the right thing.” He said. “There are two possibilities for you if you go to a foreign nation to escape persecution. If you are fleeing something else, then you must ask yourself if you are going to bring the wrath of that “something else’ down upon the world that took you in. Even if you have not done so deliberately. If the answer is that you are not going to bring that threat down upon you. Then you do your best to contribute everything that you can towards those people and that place that has taken you in. If, however, your presence is causing active harm to the people around you, then you should either continue your journey, drawing your enemies on after you. Or you should go back to where you came from in order to spare the lives of the innocent people that you have injured.

“And those people that you are staying with. If you hide, bringing harm on people that cannot possibly know better. Then they have every right to be angry at you. Especially if their continued presence is continuing to bring harm. You did the right thing there Freddie, do not doubt it.”

He considered for a moment.

“At the very outside, there might have been some other knowledge that you might have gained from keeping hold of him in order to interrogate him further. But what benefit towards what gain? From everything you have said, people die, either directly or as a result of the passage of the Skeleton Ship. Therefore, the life of the man that brought that down on you, versus the lives of those innocents that he is harming through his own cowardice?”

He shook his head.

“It was a hard choice, but it was the right one. Proud of you Freddie.”

I have no easy words to tell you just how much what he said meant to me. I had been longing to hear those words or words like them since… well… for as long as I can remember.

He couldn’t care less about the dynastic problems of Skellige although he was pleased that I managed to secure passage for Coulthard trading ships without possibility of them being attacked by Skelligan pirates. He was proud of me for that.

Then we talked about the Goddess. He didn’t like her. Not one little bit.

“Conflict has its place.” he said. “But the truth is that it is only through cooperation, that things are achieved. Politicians and courtiers like to say that conflict is just an extension of diplomacy but that is clearly nonsense. Diplomacy, or the proper application of it is about reducing the need for conflict. Debate is not conflict. Debate is about learning. You take on the point of view of the other person, and test it. Even she admits that. And then, if that point of view can help you grow then you graft that knowledge or that philosophy onto your own point of view and then you move forward. That is how people grow. Not just humanity either. Conflict is so rarely truly necessary that it beggars belief.

“The wars against the South were not necessary. They happened out of fear and because it was the easiest way forward. The first one was because the returning Empire found himself in charge of a nation that was so geared towards warfare that to stop it was pointless and that he was still overwhelmed by people that hated him. A nice quick war would mean that he could prune his own officer and diplomatic corps when it inevitably failed.

“The second war took place because the wounds of the first were still too deep, the end of the first war was not satisfying to anyone and maintaining peace was more difficult than simply going to war.”

“What about the third one?” I asked.

“The third one was necessary.” He said. “Sometimes, an illness gets into a crop, a disease gets into the woodland, rot gets into the barrel of fruit and then it needs to be cut out. Everyone was still so angry about everything that had come before. Sooner or later war was going to come again. Henselt wanted to come south and claim the fields and the crops of Aedirn for himself. Maeve of Lyria & Rivia wanted to go North for the same reasons. Temeria was tearing itself apart because the succession wasn’t secure and Radovid was going mad.

“War is a disease and the Kings of the North and the nobles of the South had caught it. They looked at the previous two conflicts and told themselves that if only they could be in charge then things might have been better. They all wanted that “third time's the charm” final victory that utterly destroys the opponent, War was coming and anyone with an ounce of sense could tell you that this time was going to be final and devastating.

“The Emperor knew two things. He knew that the Northern Kings were overconfident and had a taste for war now. So they were going to fight it out amongst themselves. He knew that. But he also knew that if they fought it out amongst themselves, then the already decimated Northern Realms would struggle for crops and a healthy populace as well as be united behind a single, all powerful, battle-hardened ruler. They would invade South. So he attacked first. I could even argue that he didn’t really have that much of a choice.

“Arranging for him to hand power over to a Northern “daughter” afterwards was a masterstroke. So masterful that there could even have been an argument that he planned it that way.

“War had become a disease in the wood that would have spread and rotted the trees. The irony that he used warfare to cut all of that out is not lost on me.”

I laughed at him and he gave me a look.

“What?” He demanded.

“Trust my Father.” I told him. “The only man that could argue two years worth of analysis which is spread over several shelves of books at last count. An amount that is only going to increase over time and you boil it down to one solid rant delivered in a few minutes.”

“Well…” He sniffed. “You scholarly types never say anything in a dozen words that you also say in twelve thousand. That people insist on paying you for the privilege of spouting that nonsense is one of life’s little mysteries.”

“I would point out that my several thousand words got the Coulthard family the ear of the Empress.” I pointed out. “Just a little bit of a push more and Emma is going to be named Imperial Treasurer. Last time I heard, she was practically doing the job anyway.”

“That’s not a good thing.”

“Also…” I cut him off. “I can’t help but notice a lot of plant based metaphors in your little diatribe.”

He shrugged. “I am a merchant. Most of what I deal with is in food, timber and crops. If I was a doctor I would talk about cancers and if I was a scholar, I would probably say…” He reached for the words.

“You would say,” I said for him, “That bad information can spread, infecting minds until more people believe the falsehood than believe the truth. Which is why facts must be confirmed and checked and then verified by an external examiner. Why opinion is important but it must still examine the same facts to be valid.”

“Precisely.” He said. “So this Goddess of your Witcher is wrong. Conflict should be the last possible response. After everything else has been tried. Instead, growth, the grafting of more knowledge onto your own so that you pass that down to your children who will take on new knowledge and new experiences before they pass that down to their children and so on.”

“There is an argument to say that this will make humanity homogeneous and boring.” I told him. “That it would reduce individuality and make a chaotic mess.”

“I also remember someone telling me that there is great beauty in chaos.” He told me. “But apart from anything else, her “conflict as growth” philosophy, hurt you to the point that you nearly didn’t survive.”

“It did. But I got better.”

He grunted at that.

“Tell me.” He told me.

I won’t go back through all of that again. It was a painful time in my life and if we’re being fully honest with each other. I don’t like remembering it and… well… I am kind of going through something similar at the moment. Not as bad as I was at the time but that doesn’t change the fact that I am really struggling with things right now. Once again, I refer you to the chapters that deal with my sickness and eventual recovery as that goes into more and better detail than I can really manage.

That’s not to say that I skipped over them with my father sitting in front of me though. He wouldn’t let me. I am well practised at it now though and as such, I didn’t really need much prompting.

I have found, when talking about these kinds of difficulties, when your brain decides to try and make you sick, then the difficulty is not in telling other people. Telling other people is the easiest bit. The hardest part is dealing with how other people see you.

This has happened to me multiple times now where people, often well meaning people including friends and colleagues, have asked me about how everything happened and I have told them about it and what it’s like. The little things that have contributed to my sickness and how I am dealing with them.

I swear that people have looked me in the eye and told me that they didn’t need to know that, that they didn’t want to know that. But they asked.

So what’s a man to do when people ask these things.

Father remained neutral on the subject though. He listened carefully, asking several pertinent and pointed questions. He did not judge as so many tend to, nor did he try and pity me which is the hardest thing to deal with. He just… listened.

When I was done, he shifted his weight a bit and scratched his chin.

“I think you are lucky in your woman.” He told me.

“Don’t I know it.” I replied quickly.

He smirked at that. “I’m not sure that what you did was right. I am not sure that I would have forgiven myself, even for succumbing to the whims and thoughts of a Goddess. I would have removed myself from the situation in advance I think. I would have spent the evening in the pub, had a bath and gotten an early night.”

“I didn’t know that that’s what was going to happen. As so many people have said, the life I have chosen, the path I was following was destructive by that point. I was desperately looking for Francesca. I needed to find her and I was not going to let some Goddess stand in the way. Before I stepped into that circle of flames, I would have told you that I would have paid any price for the knowledge of where my sister was or what had happened to her. I would have done anything I would have given anything.”

“From the sounds of it, you very nearly did.”

“As you say. A knight that I met in Toussaint told me that it is easy to pay for something with your life. Any idiot can do it, laying their lives on the line for a cause, a country, a crown, a flag, family, friends and loved ones. But what happens if you don’t die? What happens if you lose a limb instead and then you have to go on living for your country. What happens if you have half your guts removed or what happens if the mace mashes your face in so that instead of a mouth you have this weeping sore on the front of your face that your family and nurses must shovel nutritional goo into? What happens when your head gets so badly injured that you spend the rest of your life with the mental age of less than a child and have little to no control over your body.

“After that? All your ambitions, they are just done. Your marriage to that pretty lady that gave you her favour before you went to war? Well that’s over. If you are already married, your life has changed because now your family’s existence is about you. Your children, your parents, your friends. Everything has changed. People don’t think about that. Every idiot with a sword will say “I will give my life for… whatever cause we’re talking about but not many people completely think that kind of thing through.”

I took a deep breath.

“I was willing to pay that price.” I said, “I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but now that it has happened, I know that I am paying that price. That I am still paying that price and that more than likely, I will be paying that price for the rest of my life. And if it meant getting my sister back?”

I felt hot tears on my cheeks.

“Flame curse me to hell.” I scuffed at my cheeks angrily. “I miss her Dad. I miss you. I thought I was over it and every time I think that it’s done and that I don’t need to shed any more tears over it then more tears come. I want my sister back. I don’t mind the price, I would pay it. She was the best of us. Better than me, much better than you. I want my sister back.”

It took me a while to swallow the tears. Father took up a stick and poked the fire for a while so that he didn’t have to see, didn’t have to comment on my tears.

“She was the best of us.” He agreed after a while. “I think that the best thing I did for any of my children was when I sent her off to the Imperial Court. I thought she would be safer there than anywhere else and then…”

He shook his head. “Still.”