I waited for a little while to allow the others to get well ahead of me and watched as the inn continued to burn for a while.

This was a mistake because what happened, in reality, was that this gave the despairing time to get into my head and my heart. I knew that, instead of sitting there, I should be getting up and moving on to do something else, anything else but I just couldn’t face it.

I decided that I would let the grief and the anger and yes… I would let the despair have its way with me for an extended period. So I crouched there in the darkness, lit only by the light floating up out of the ruins of the tavern below me and I let that all hit me for a long reason.

The slightly false logic was that it would burn itself out and then let me function like a reasonable human being. Shows how much I know about this kind of thing but there you go.

So I allowed my legs to buckle underneath me and drew myself up into a ball as the wave of darkness and horror washed over me.

I was so… furious I suppose. I felt…

I couldn’t believe that this was all happening. How could this be happening? And why was it happening? I was so utterly… I don’t know what the answer was to it all. I was overwhelmed and that was part of it. I wanted to hide there in the darkness and for the rest of the world to go away.

I will not deny that I considered ending my own life. Not that I immediately had a method of doing that, as my boot knife was lost in the fight and flame only knows where my eating knife was. I supposed that I could run headlong into the fire but somehow, that was less than entirely appealing.

I went over the events leading up to this night over and over again, a thought process that was uncomfortably close to how I used to work at the issue of my sister’s disappearance, just working the problem over and over again, but it didn’t make any sense to me.

Chireadean had been right. That wasn’t Ariadne that had done that. She would never… She would never have killed Kerrass. I knew that and I felt guilty for suspecting her. I felt guilty for giving in to the old primal fears that it seemed I still had about her in the bottom of my soul.

But I also couldn’t believe that Sam could have done that either. He just wouldn’t do that kind of thing. I could agree that Sam had his demons. His latent, societal racism is not the least but…

Why would he do this? What had I done to deserve this?

That was the question that jerked me out of the situation that I was in. There was no answer to that. Or if there was… then I wouldn’t find it here.

Again, like earlier, I was suddenly calm to an extent that I found it worrying. I looked around and I saw what I was looking for. I wandered over and found a little spider’s web that was covering a nearby log. Just a harvest spider, one of those that come out in the autumn. I walked up to it and bent low over the webbing before blowing on it gently to make sure that I could speak without disturbing the spider.

“I’m sorry,” I told it. “I still love you, but I wish I understood what was happening.”

I stood then and brushed myself off before I oriented myself to the tavern and started to run north.

Then I went back and did my best to obscure the tracks that the others had left on their departure, brushing pine leaves and things over it. I still don’t know the wisdom of doing that but I hope that it made a difference.

Then I set off again.

It was oddly liberating to know that I didn’t have to worry about catching the attention of anyone else. I could just put my head down and run for it. But despite that, there was a task that I had to perform. So I jogged gently until I came to a road. One of the roads that led towards Novigrad. I jogged along that road in the direction of the city until in the distance I could see a team of horsemen coming.

It was a close thing that I had to do then. Allow them to get close enough to see me but not so close that they would catch me. I jumped over the ditch beside the road and hid behind a tree. They had spotlight lanterns that they were shining into the trees on either side of the road.

I was still wearing my dinner finery with all of its stupid noble patternings and given that there was an utter lack of camouflage, I stayed close to the road and quite naturally, they saw me.

I tried not to crow with triumph as I turned and ran into the woods.

Behind me, I could hear people yelling and shouting. Someone appealed to me that I was quite safe and had nothing to fear…

Incidentally, my missing fingers would beg to differ in that regard.

… and then I heard someone sound a horn.

The woodland around the family estate is not the primaeval forest of the Nilfgaardian Black Forest. It has been farmed for timber too much as well as being shuffled around so that we could plant orchards. Villagers kept their pigs in this woodland and it was well-ordered.

But to a horseman? That doesn’t make it any the less deadly.

Because nor was it the carefully cultivated trees of the hunting grounds that are carefully prepared to allow the passage of horsemen.

There were still hanging branches, still exposed roots that would trip a charging horse and I still intended to make use of all of those things.

And whatever else had happened, running through the trees of the Black Forest as well as the woodland of Northern Redania meant that I was experienced with this kind of thing.

And these horsemen weren’t.

It was something of a trial to keep them from giving up and falling back.

I reasoned that I needed my strength and stole an apple from one of the trees, it was bitter and not quite ripe but the sudden thought occurred that if Kerrass and I had been running through the trees at this time of the year, then Cavil would never have caught us.

I laughed at the thought.

At some point, it occurred to me to realise that I was losing my mind.

My equipment wasn’t the best for running through the trees though, and nor was I in the best shape to be doing it for long I forced myself to rest. The idea was to make them hunt me and so draw more of them after me so that Chireadean and the others could get away.

From the sounds of things behind me, they had my trail now and would catch up with me eventually. They had the advantage of horses anyway.

I was a bit disadvantaged by my boots. These were not my travelling boots and as such, were not made for running through the undergrowth. I could feel them beginning to give in areas that we didn’t want them to give but I couldn’t do anything about that.

It was warm enough so I got rid of my doublet thinking that a woollen shirt would attract the gaze far less than a rich-looking doublet and I knew that there was a farmhouse nearby. My sense of geography was pretty good for the local area and I stole a blanket from one of the lines outside the house. There was a working knife that was used to trim something, long and sharp with a slight curve and I stole that as well. I do not doubt that the people there would have helped me if I asked them but I didn’t want to endanger them if I could get away with it. So I fashioned the darker blanket into a poncho by simple virtue of tearing a hole in the middle and putting my head through it before tying it down with my belt. The knife was wickedly sharp and long enough to act as a decent dagger, even if it didn’t have a good enough point for the stabbing.

I also found a hoe and giggled. No matter how far away I got from it, no matter how much Kerrass had tried to train me out of the effort, I still ended up working with things that looked like a quarterstaff.

At some point, I must have decided that I wanted one of the bastards. I wanted to kill one of them. It was far from a logical desire but at the same time, I wanted them.

I jogged on for a bit longer and found a tree that I could climb to watch the search for a bit to see if my desire for vengeance was even remotely practical.

-

.

No, I’m not going to tell you which house it was that I stole those things from. Yes, I did steal them and no, you will not be able to…

Fuck you.

The critics are upset by this.

Yes, I can call them critics again. They are angry and are trying to be reasonable.

I wonder if Johann will be ok. He is looking at me with huge eyes. I rather think that he has given up. I cannot blame him.

.

And I have just realised that in saying that. I have given my captors more ammunition to keep me in line. Fine… you know what? That works both ways.

I am not writing another word until Johann has had some proper healing and has some proper food in him. Put that in the account fuckpigs and see if it…

What are you going to do? Torture us both some more? You just wait. You have ordered Johann to say exactly what I write. You can’t kill him or torture him too much because if he dies or becomes incapable, no one can read my shorthand. I certainly can’t work the way I do without using that shorthand so… You need us both.

You just wait, I can have Johann here saying all kinds of things that you are not going to like. Summon Laurelen back. Fuck, get Ariadne down here to…

Interesting. Fascinating as she would say. These men are terrified of…

You can hit me all you like. That’s still not going to change what I saw in your eyes you wretched pieces of human waste.

Fetch a healer and see to Johann’s back before infection sets in and he…

-

And that was the break for the day. One of the critics went off and took my ultimatum to whoever was in charge when they realised that things had gotten to that point. They came back and agreed with each other that that was it and I was informed that Johann would be properly taken care of.

I asked them what guarantees I had that that would be the case and they replied, rather stupidly, that I would have to trust them.

I told them that I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them and that was considerably less than it had been given my newly injured state.

So I was taken back to my cell and told to wait.

That was an interesting moment for me. It was the first real test since I was taken anyway, to see how my captors and whatever faction that they serve…

I write captors but we all know who we are talking about really don’t we?

… To see how much they really value me. How important these words really are. It would cost them nothing. Absolutely nothing to slit my throat and then make their own accounts. Have their story told the way that they want it to be told?

In all truth, I’m not sure that I believe the reasons that they have given as to why they haven’t done that.

But that was an interesting moment for me.

I was not afraid for myself. Not really. That part, at least, I did believe. I didn’t think that they were just going to kill me. But Johann. I was playing games with someone else’s life and although I had every faith that I would be alright and allowed to live. There was nothing to say that Johann would, and I was playing a game with his life.

It occurred to me then, in the depths of the presumed night, that this is what generals and politicians do. They risk the lives of other people for their own ends.

I hate that part of me now. I hate that I do that and I hate that I know how to do that. If I ever get out of here, I will become a hermit. Living in the far-off corners of the continent so that I will never endanger or have to confound anyone ever again.

Then again, I wonder if that would even be possible now.

Much later, food was brought. The food was, at least fairly good quality and not seeing a reason to stint myself, I ate it all and did my best to rest because I almost certainly needed my strength.

I didn’t sleep well of course. My legs are full of jittery energy. I want to dance around and run and jump and…

So I lay on my back. My left hand is tucked into something on my shirt so I don’t roll over and accidentally lie on the stumps of my fingers. They throb incessantly now. I wish I could believe that this meant that they were healing but I know enough to know that they should have stopped throbbing by now. By now, I should have moved on to itching.

Either that or they really have messed with my sense and perception of time. I wonder how long it has been since my wedding day.

I need to stop thinking of it as that. It was the Autumn Equinox.

This morning… I assume it’s morning… I was taken back to the workroom. Again, there is fresh straw on the floor and Johann was waiting for me. He looks better. Not completely cured, but better nonetheless. I think he has been allowed a bath, has had something proper to eat and he is wearing a loose shirt now. I can see the bandages around him including his back.

He thanked me and I feel awful because of it. If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. I risked his life to prove a point and to test my fragile place in the world. It turns out that if I put my foot down to exert my influence, then the chances are good that things will happen to keep me alive and enable Johann to survive. I hate it. I hate that I did that and I hope he is aware of just how awful I feel because of that.

But he looks at me with huge eyes that remind me of some kind of puppy dog as tears of gratitude form in the corners of his gaze and I feel as though I have just kicked him and he is grateful to me for stopping.

Now though, I have no excuse other than to carry on writing.

I wonder if it has been a day since I was last in this room. It feels like it, an evening meal followed by a period of sleep and then a return to work. It feels like the end of a day and the start of a new one.

But I also wonder if the effort to give me what I want is in the effort to bring me on the side. There has been much written on the mindset of a captive and over and over again it has been proven that the best way to bring a captive onside is to ingratiate them with you. To make them your friend and instil confidence in them. There is a name for it. Rapport building maybe? Is that what they are trying to do to me?

There is no solution to that question.

So I killed a man.

I picked my target from the top of my tree. They were fanning out to find signs of me. They had torches out, and lanterns and things. The thought that occurred to me was that they were trying to drive me in one direction and I scanned the opposite horizon to see if there were any other torches or signs of flames out there that might give away another group of horsemen.

There was no way of telling for sure though. Novigrad is in that direction and they burn enough fuel to illuminate the night sky.

.

I have tried to tell the critics that nothing interesting happened to me during my flight but it seems that someone has insisted. I need to recount the entire thing.

I identified some of the wings of the formation and moved my way over in that direction before climbing another tree to check my bearings. I was on the course though and I waited for the horseman to come closer. He was being cautious. He had a long spear in one hand that he was using to poke into nearby bushes and shadows and on the other hand he was carrying a torch.

I decided that I was lucky and that the holy flame was sending me a message.

When he was nice and close I jumped down and he turned, startled. I swung the hoe that I had stolen from the farm yard to make use of one of Kerrass’ oldest pieces of advice.

Poor Kerrass.

That advice was that I slammed the metal part of the hoe into the horse's mouth as hard as I could.

Sure enough, as Kerrass predicted, the horse reared and threw its rider.

Unlike Kerrass though, I did not have time to wait. The hoe broke and I had the splintered end in one hand. The rider was trying to get up. I wasn’t lucky enough that the horse fell on top of him, but I drove the jagged, splintered end of the wooden handle towards the rider’s face.

He was a big man, they all seem to be big men, guards, soldiers and riders. Something to think about there. But even despite that, the sight of a strange man coming out of the darkness and knocking him off his horse had stunned him.

Automatically, he lifted his hands to protect himself and I barrelled him over. His neck, which I had intended to cut, was well protected from the slash of my knife. I would have needed more of a point to make that work. Fortunately, though, the area around the groin was less protected.

I slashed and the hot red blood fountained into the night. Utterly ruining my clothes and the blanket that I had stolen. It never ceases to surprise me, the amount of pressure that comes out of that artery at the top of the inner thigh.

He died fairly quickly as all things are considered.

I don’t feel the least bit of guilt for that. I am entirely comfortable with calling it murder as well. The bastard, along with all of the other bastards, had it coming.

I would make some empty threats but there hardly seems any point.

I killed him and it was only afterwards that I was surprised that he had made no shout of alarm. Nor had he sounded the horn that was hanging from his belt.

I dashed into the bushes for a moment and listened to see if anyone was coming. The urge is to freeze and listen first but then it occurred that if I did that, then I would be standing in the open and listening which seemed… problematic to me. But no one had heard.

I returned to the dead man and searched him quickly. The spear was of a nice length and I kept it. A bit more made for the stabbing rather than the additional slashing blade that Kerrass had given me.

Poor Kerrass.

But it would do. There were some small rations in a bag and I took his dagger as well as his fighting knife. There was nothing in any of the other bags. A whetstone, some spare nails as cavalry always carry extra nails. Nothing to identify him.

I now had a replacement boot knife and I cannot even begin to tell you how much better I felt. It is the little things that provide us with some idea of security.

I had a brief thought about whether or not to take the horse. I approached it to see if it would even let me anywhere near me and it chose for me. Whatever else can be written about the man that I had killed, the horse was well trained and as I approached, while it was still complaining a bit, it lashed out to kick me.

I didn’t have a good opinion of the people chasing me as it was and I decided that if I did catch the horse and convince it to let me ride it, then there was a very real danger that I would escape. I needed to keep in sight of my enemy.

I took a couple of moments to make a decision but then I bent and scooped up the hunting horn before lifting it to my lips and sounding it a couple of times before suddenly stopping in the middle of a call.

I told myself that that would give them something to think about and I jogged off.

I did my best to find a hiding spot and waited to be able to listen. I wanted to see if I could learn anything about whether or not they had found Chireadean or Carys.

I didn’t know enough. I wanted to know things. I wanted to know whether they got away, even if it was at risk to me. I wanted to know what was going on at the castle and now that I am separated, I wonder if the reason that I allowed myself to be captured was so that I could find out.

One of the things that can be said about being taken prisoner and spending a lot of time locked up is that you have plenty of time for introspection.

After blowing the horn I waited in my hiding spot to see if the net would pass over me and to make sure that they took the bait. Needless to say that they did. And I jogged North. Not bothering to hide my tracks as I ran through the undergrowth. It was almost counter to the instincts that Kerrass had trained into me and sometimes I found myself having to force my way into leaving a prominent footprint or breaking off a branch or scraping my shoes on an exposed tree root or something. Strange how these things become automatic. I was automatically avoiding leaving trails. But I wanted the bastards to chase me.

And chase me they did. Their insistence on staying on horseback and wearing all of their armour counted against them. I don’t know if I’m better at this stuff now than I was when I was struggling with the visions that Jack provided for me, but I remember thinking that if I really had been thrown out of Toussaint at the point of a sword, and this was the quality of person chasing me, I would probably have done a lot better than I was afraid of doing.

A lot of stuff has happened since then of course.

Including the pursuit in the North.

As I moved, I remembered some of the wisdom that Kerrass and Rickard had told me about cavalrymen. There is a certain amount of status to being a horseback soldier. So the horse riders know this and this means that they are reluctant to get down from their living and breathing status symbol.

Heh. The critics are not happy with this line of reasoning. They seem upset and it’s making them uncomfortable. I wonder if they are feeling a bit as though I am getting uncomfortably close to the truth.

To be fair, there are other more practical reasons. Once you have got down from your horse you need to get back up into the saddle and sometimes, that is easier said than done. Also, with all of a cavalryman’s equipment, that stuff is built to be carried on horseback so a person on foot is then vulnerable to attacks from people like me who know how to take advantage of it.

There was a feeling in the air of a card player wanting to hold onto his hand of cards and not give the game away. Or that people were trying to conserve their strength so that they weren’t betraying their presence to outsiders.

I don’t know for sure what happened after that, but I suspect that someone at the castle got fed up with having to deal with all of the nonsense and started to take steps and actually use some of the resources that they had available to them.

I wish I could tell you that I was brought down by a load of horsemen. I wish I could write that I took some of the bastards down with me and that they had to really work at it to take me alive. I do think, from the feeling of my ribs, that a few of them might have taken the opportunity to stick the boot in a couple of times but… on balance… I think that I would have done the same.

My body count for that night was two, and maybe an injury or two but I wouldn’t swear to it. Small, disappointingly small.

What brought me low?

I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure that it was a spider bite.

I was hiding in a ditch somewhere by the side of a road. One of those water run-off ditches that are always filthy and kind of stink in the summer. I had laid down in it and my feet and knees were in the water. In all honesty, I was beginning to wonder what I was going to have to do with these people to get myself captured.

I mean, using myself as a decoy was all well and good but if you want people to actually chase you then sooner or later, they need to have something to chase and I was beginning to get concerned that I wasn’t being that thing for them.

I remember that I was lying there, watching a group of horsemen trot past and in my disdain and hatred, I was criticising them. If I was looking for a fugitive then I would have some of the outriders looking into the ditch by the side of the road. But these people were just riding through and letting the entire thing pass by.

I don’t want to be fair to these people. I want to hate them and tell the world that I hate them. But to be fair, I have no idea what their orders were and for all, I know they weren’t part of the search patterns.

But I was lying there, wondering if I could isolate someone else and kill them as an extra piece of bait. But then I felt a tickle on the back of my hand. I had to force myself not to move because…

Another piece of Kerrass’ wisdom, may the flame guide him home. The eye of a man is drawn more by movement than by colour or object. “Move slowly Freddie.” He would say. “Move slowly.”

-

The Critics are becoming frustrated with my lack of progress and have informed me that I am expected to finish my work sooner rather than later.

-

I felt a tickle. I didn’t even dare turn my head. I didn’t want to be taken here, lying in the ditch. When I was taken I wanted to take some of the bastards with me. I wanted to fight someone and to make them regret fucking with me and mine. And if I was lying in a ditch when they found me…

It would take time to get myself up to my feet and then some more time to get up the slope and be able to do something worthwhile. So now wasn’t the time for that.

After the tickle. I felt a sharp, stabbing kind of feeling that was incredibly painful. I mean… Apparently, the most painful experience in the world is childbirth and obviously, I have no context for that. But it was like when you catch yourself on a hooked thorn in the undergrowth. I’m thinking of a rose thorn or something that is hooked. So that when your immediate instinct is to pull but that only makes the problem worse. That kind of situation.

So it hurt, I flinched and that made the pain increase.

Shortly after that, my hand started to feel numb. Shortly after that, my arm started to feel numb and I could feel that warm numbness travelling up my arm.

I looked down then and although I don’t know for sure as my vision was beginning to swim. I am sure that I saw a spider there. It was a black, chitinous spider, about the size of my hand with a large… back and long spindly legs. I have trained myself to anthropomorphise spiders given that I am going to be marrying…

That I was going to be marrying…

Fuck…

.

I swear, I swear that I looked at that spider and it seemed to look apologetic.

My vision swam and it felt as though I was falling.

I woke up in a cell. A much less pleasant cell than the one I’m currently staying in and I woke up with the cold slap of water.

It took them more than one bucket of it as well which I am oddly proud of. I was dreaming. I have no idea what I was dreaming about but the dream violently shifted. So suddenly, the people and the creatures in my dream were drenched in water and were moving around, complaining about the shock of it.

Then the acrid smell of something that I would rather not think about arrived in my nose like a dagger being lanced up into my brain and I was dragged to wakefulness.

This did not complete the cure however and there was another moment where I could feel my head wanting to nod off and my eyes wanting to close.

Another bucket was thrown over me. Once again, the stench of acrid urine hit me in the nostrils. With the smell as though a person hasn’t drunk enough water recently.

I wanted to throw up but there was nothing there.

“Careful.” Someone said, It was a man’s voice because of course it was a man’s voice. “He’s been poisoned so it’s not his fault that he can’t wake up.”

“I’ll wake him up.” Said someone else.

“You’ll hit him so hard that he won’t wake up.” Another voice said.

“No, I won’t…” There was a sense of people turning to look at him.

“Well alright, I might but he killed Dag.”

“Dag was foolish enough to…”

“That’s enough.” Said another voice. More authoritative. “He needs to be awake and he needs to be presentable. His lordship is going to be displeased if we hurt his brother.”

I took that in and my heart sank. Now, I not only wanted to vomit, but I wanted to weep as well.

But the heart is indomitable and I still refused to believe it. Maybe Sam was being coerced in some way. Maybe there was a good explanation for whatever it was. There had to be. My Brother would never do that kind of thing, he wouldn’t. It was impossible. I loved my brother and he loved me.

There had to be a good explanation, there had to be. There had to be a logical explanation for the things that I saw there…

“What if he doesn’t comply?” A scary voice said. I was now blinking to try and get the horrible-smelling water out of my eyes. The voice was scary because it seemed less human. Calmer, flatter, less emotion in the depths of it.

In charge voice seemed to consider this.

“The plans say that he must be able to function as a man. But other than that… We have a pet healing mage now so… I suppose we can go to some lengths. But you can’t cut much off. Nothing visible and nothing that can’t be explained away as a battlefield injury.”

I opened my bleary eyes and peered at the indistinct figures in front of me. They were all big, all of them armoured and the only reason I knew which one was in charge was that another one of them was leaning in his ear and telling him something.

“I am informed…” The in-charge voice said. “That he also needs his right hand, and his face and needs to be relatively healthy. But that doesn’t say anything about his left hand or his feet. And as I say, nothing permanent.”

One of the other figures laughed as the man in charge left.

-

Do I need to go through the torture?

No, Johann, that was a question for the…

-

So they took their time to wake me up.

Now that I am down here and it has taken us a couple of days I wonder if the torture was an exertion of dominance. I wonder if it was to set up the contrast so that later when I met with… my captors, they would come off as reasonable and understanding in contrast. Same as he was last time, the presence of Father Jerome’s teachings was my companion during the process and there were several things about it that that vision noticed.

They didn’t ask me any questions.

The process was unrefined. It was definitely more a process about dominance than anything else. It was to let me know that these guards were in charge and that there was nothing that I could do to stop it.

I tried to be angry. I tried to tease them and make jokes. I tried to scream but whatever else they were, they didn’t react to any of my comments. One of them commented a couple of times that what was happening was my fault, that I deserved it and that this was his vengeance for a friend of his that I had killed.

I was beaten and I don’t know if it was here that my ribs were injured or if it was when they picked me up. I also lost a couple of teeth and bit my tongue and the insides of my mouth a couple of times.

As I have already written, I lost the little finger and the ring finger on my left hand.

In truth, it was not as painful as I thought it was going to be. They did both fingers, knuckle by knuckle with a pair of shears, similar to the ones that Mother used to use to trim her rose bushes.

In all truth, they weren’t very good at the torturing. Knowing what I know, this was the equivalent of a handshake. If the process was going to turn into real torture, or if it still might head in that direction, then the real torturer hasn’t arrived yet or is otherwise busy.

They beat me unconscious several times and I would wake up with a stinking headache to be informed that I had been healed before the entire thing started again.

It is an odd sensation to have had a rib broken, to have it healed, only to have it broken again at a future date. There is a strange kind of disconnect where your brain thinks “But that rib has already been broken?”But now it’s being broken again?

Then it just seemed to stop.

I woke up in my bed in that place that I now consider “my” cell. There was an odd kind of feeling about myself. I was in no pain but I was aware that pain was happening. I knew that there were still things going on around me that hurt but at the same time, I couldn’t feel it. But it was not the same thing as feeling numb. I didn’t feel numb.

It was almost as if parts of me had just turned off. Whatever thing it is in your body that tells you that you’re in pain, that was no longer there.

It was an intensely uncomfortable feeling.

But I woke up and found that I wasn’t bound. I checked around myself and discovered that I still had all my arms and legs but that my body didn’t want to move too quickly.

For one glorious, terrifying moment, I wondered if all of this was a dream. Glorious because it would be very easy to call this room a hospital room that I had been kept in to keep myself from going mad. But also, was it all some fever dream brought on by… I don’t know. Some kind of particularly violent street food?

The terror came from the possibility that this entire thing was brought on by the actions of some enemy. That I had been fed by hallucinogens or some other chemical. Was this a vision of the Goddess, the Schattenmann maybe or maybe it was left over from my captivity in the North?

Or maybe, and this was the real, primal fear that lurks at the bottom of all of my fears from now until the end of time. Maybe these were the images and dreams that I had been given by the beast of Amber’s crossing. That is a terror that is going to be with me from now until the day that I die I think. That day may be a lot closer than I had initially thought given all of the stuff that is going to happen.

Alas that this was not the case. I was not imagining this. It came home for me when I was in the middle of the entire process that you always go through when you wake up from some form of unconsciousness at the hands of an enemy.

You count your limbs, then, if you’re a man, you check for the presence of your genitals and then you do the other checks. You test your breathing, your face, and your eyesight and then you start checking your fingers and toes.

Of all of the parts of me that were hurting but not hurting, my missing fingers were amongst the top contenders for that. I could feel them NOT throbbing.

I took the time to examine them and saw the manner of my death as red lines were already running under the skin of my hands.

I lay back and stared at the ceiling.

I was wearing a reasonable shirt. It was clean and the blankets underneath my body were clean and tidy. They had taken the drawstrings out of the shirt at both the neck and the wrists so it hung loosely on me. I decided that I needed to piss and did so in the pot that was there for that purpose. There was no blood which meant that I wasn’t that injured internally.

Which was frankly a shock.

The floor was cold stone and the place had the look of the family dungeons.

Father had converted them into a wine cellar. If there was a need to keep prisoners then he would do so according to his feudal duties, but he always saw it as foolish to have your prisoners underneath where you are sleeping. Instead, if the castle had to keep prisoners, they were kept in one of the guardhouses and as soon as possible, they were transferred to the prisons in Oxenfurt.

I was also wearing some light trousers. However, I was barefoot.

I lay there for a while longer before a woman came to the door. She didn’t look at me and I thought that I recognised her as one of the castle servants.

She was wearing a small dress, much smaller than the kinds of clothes that Emma requires the servants to wear. The skirt was high up the thigh and low cut at the neckline. Her head had been completely shaven and she looked exhausted. It was her face that I thought I recognised but everything else was different, the way she moved, the way she behaved.

She looked like a frightened animal.

She came in with a tray of food. There was bread and a bowl of soup. The kind of soup that is almost worth calling a stew with bits of meat and vegetable floating around the liquid broth.

I tried to talk to her as she lay the food out but she flinched away from me as if she was afraid. When I persisted, it seemed that her hands started to shake, she all but let the food fall and then she ran from me. Literally ran.

She was weeping as she ran.

I felt sick.

My body had different ideas though and remembered Kerrass’ teachings that if you have the opportunity to take on food and work your strength up, then you should take that opportunity.

Then I remembered that Kerrass was dead. Odd how the brain works.

-

I keep waiting for the critics to stop me from writing or to tell me what to write. I can see them shifting their weight in some form of discomfort. Sometimes they get visibly angry, especially when I talk about the various qualities or lack of quality to the people that were chasing me. Sometimes they get uncomfortable at the fact that I am telling them truths that they don’t want to hear.

Specifically when I am calling out the attitudes of the cavalrymen. I don’t know whether the critics are infantry or cavalry but I remember them shifting their weight when what became a thing.

But they absolutely do not seem to care when it comes to things that might paint what is happening in an ugly light. When I talk about torture or interrogations or the state of the female servers that are coming and looking after us…

They just don’t care.

-

I went to throw the soup back out the door and onto whoever it was that was watching. But, I smelt the stuff and it smelt genuinely delicious. I had no idea how long it had been since I had last eaten something and before I knew it, my body was telling me that I was just going to have a mouthful and then it was almost finished.

Fuck it. I needed my strength.

And it also occurred to me that the woman that had brought it to me might be punished if I complained about anything.

I stacked the bowl and the plate neatly.

Then I went back to wait.

Being a prisoner gives you a lot of time to think. I thought about Carys and how far she had managed to get. And I thought about Chireadean and his wife. The difference between the two teams was that I was much more confident that Carys would get through. Chireadean would be slowed down by his wife. He would also, and I mean no disrespect to Chireadean but he’s a survivor. I think he would be much more willing to prioritise his wife’s safety and take his time.

Carys and Padraig were killers though.

I also tried to consider whether or not I had done everything that I could. I was now at the stage of going over the immediately past events to see if there was something that I could have done differently. I played out events backwards.

How did the thought process go?

I wondered when Ariadne had been suborned. After Chireadean had given me that feeling that Ariadne was being controlled it started to become obvious that she had been. What was impossible to be able to tell though, was when that happened.

My logical brain decided that she had been suborned when we were all waiting for the women to come down to dinner.

Why Kerrass first? Kerrass and Laurelen were the first targets.

Then I realised that such thinking was pointless. There was no way of knowing what the right way around these things was. There was no way of knowing so all I was doing was guessing.

But I couldn’t stop thinking my way around it.

Looking back I realised that I was panicking. I tried to calm my breathing and rested my head on the stone.

And that was how I was when they came for me.

They were oddly polite.

These guards were not the massive constructs that I had seen beforehand and during the hunt. These men were no critics. They were perfectly normally proportioned human guards. That did not inspire hope in me though. They were still wearing chain mail and were armed with truncheons that they held in experienced-looking grips.

And there were three of them.

And they had manacles.

I remembered Kerrass’ wisdom. Play for time. If they are going to hang you, then ask for a glass of water. Anything could happen while they are fetching you the water.

I asked them where they were taking me. They said nothing but as I say, they were not impolite. They had a strange kind of respectful boredom about them that I kind of associate with professional men around the world. They had a job to do. Thinking that I wondered if I knew any of them.

I did not.

In the end, they gave me the old ultimatum that if I didn’t do what I was told then I would be made to obey.

So I rose and allowed my hands to be bound behind me before they blindfolded me and put a sack over my head.

I don’t know why. Redundancy maybe?

They led me out. One in front I think with another one behind me. There was another one that had his hand on my shoulder, not as any kind of means of controlling me. It was more a case of making sure that I didn’t hurt myself. It was that one that would warn me in advance of steps or when I needed to jerk from side to side. He warned me of corners and the like.

The attention was impersonal and without cruelty. Their job was to take me from one place and deliver me to the next.

I counted though and they led me on a circuitous path, presumably to confuse me and turn me around. I know that it was an odd route because we turned left four times before we turned Right three times and then Left again before we turned Right once, Left three times and then Right four times.

I had to stifle the urge not to laugh.

So I was still in my Father’s castle, not some strange other place. Otherwise, why bother trying to confuse me?

After those shenanigans, they seemed to take me on a fairly straightforward route through the castle. There was a point when I realised that we were heading towards Father’s old study. The room where Edmund had died and, I assumed, the room where Emma still conducted most of her business from. It was rather suitable for purpose after all.

I don’t know what it was, something about the feel of the air maybe, or the feel of the floor underneath my feet. Most likely it was the smell in the air.

On the other hand, I could smell ash and blood.

We passed several people and more than once, my minder hauled me out of the way of someone that was jogging down the corridor in armour and we had to flatten ourselves against the wall. It was a busy feeling. Lots of people moving around and being busy.

Then we turned, moved through a door and then we were in a room where lots of people were talking. The talking ground to a halt as I stood there for a long moment. There was a signal of some kind as a lot of people left before the sack was pulled from my head and the blindfold was untied so that I could see.

For a long moment, the light dazzled me and I stood there blinking.

I must do this in stages. Even now, however far I am from these events although I have no idea how far I really am. I must break it down into its parts so that I can take it in, even remotely.

So, the place itself first.

It was my Father’s office although, at the same time, it was not my Father’s office. For the best description of the office, I can refer you to the chapters that I wrote regarding that place back when I was writing about my Father’s murder….

It would seem that the critics are not satisfied with this method and instead expect me to go into detail.

Fine.

When the office was my Father’s office, he liked it to be busy and I would also say that he liked it to be cluttered. I sometimes wonder if he did this deliberately.

The room was lined with cupboards, strongboxes, shelves, scroll cubby holes and all kinds of random things. It was a deliberately chaotic system as it was not below our competitors to utilise spies and saboteurs to get into these secrets to glean what Father was thinking or what the trading company was up to.

The shelves were deliberately different-sized and differently organised. Some appeared slovenly and some appeared disused. The strong boxes were the extravagance in the room but I knew for a fact that some of those strongboxes were kept all but empty and that others contained vital information. I also knew that Father made it a habit to regularly change the organisation of everything in the room to keep people on their toes.

He did have a desk but normally that was occupied by a scribe when Father was working. He only sat behind it when he wanted to exert his authority over some errant worker or some disobedient child. I knew that he conducted personal correspondence in his private chambers.

It was while sitting at this desk that Edmund had been murdered.

Father kept a comfortable chair next to the fire where he would sit. There was another chair opposite that visitors would sit in and you could often tell what kind of day you were going to have based on where the chairs were situated and where Father was standing or sitting. Father would sit in this chair and listen carefully to everything that he was told before he would give instruction and he would expect it to be carried out.

According to Emma he would sit there, listen to the tales and the stories and the business that everyone wanted to conduct with him. He would ask for everyone’s opinion on the matter and then he would make his choice based on what he had been told.

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There are various records that this is how the best generals in the world conduct their business and when I commented on this to Emma, she agreed that it sounded like a valid point.

There was little to no art in this room unless you count maps as art which, I may say, I occasionally do. The maps were of the individual countries of the continent with red lines and blue lines intersecting everything. The red lines were land trade routes and the blue lines were river trade routes that were carefully marked. As well as these were the various trading outposts, harbours and the markets where business could expect to be done. Not for Father the maps of cities and population centres, sites of battlefields and historical centres. I know for a fact that several castles and palaces were completely ignored regarding the construction of these maps.

Each of the maps was put into solid wooden frames that were hung on the walls so that they could easily be taken down to be examined in the minutest detail.

There were two large maps of the continent. One was just the same map that you see in just about every atlas and book regarding the continent, more accurate than most and only had the major trade routes labelled on it. The other map was, whatever else it might be, a genuine work of art.

It was a topographical map and it was designed to be laid flat and poured over. It could be placed on the floor or a table if the table was large enough and Father used it when he wanted to dominate a rival or when he was doing some large-scale strategic thinking with his closest advisors. I had seen it at work both here in Father’s office and down in the greater hall when things were being discussed. It regularly made an appearance during the war and I know that one of Radovid’s generals had demanded that the map be handed over for military purposes. Father had refused, telling the general that he too was a general and that he needed the map for logistical purposes.

The incident was one of the few where King Radovid the Just sided with Father over any of the other nobles and generals in his courts. Whatever else King Radovid the Just, might have been, he was a military genius and he knew that Father’s logistical needs were more important than some cavalry general’s ego.

Beyond that, there were rugs on the floor to keep people warm in the summer and the room had several other smaller desks where scribes worked to keep hold of whatever else was happening in the room.

Many people have commented on the absence of a conference table. Father, did have meetings but where he was allowed to sit, either at his desk or in his chair, those people that were meeting with him were expected to stand. He would regularly tell people that if people couldn’t tell you what they needed to tell you before they got tired and asked for a chair, then it wasn’t worth telling.

He made exceptions for older and injured people that needed chairs though.

It used to be said in the family that Father was like a spider sitting in the middle of his web. The trade and contracts and maps laid out around him. There might be chaos and all kinds of things going on around him but he would sit there, calmly and patiently until someone made a mistake or someone told him something that he needed to interact with and then he would strike.

Now that I make that connection with Ariadne I… I’m not sure how I feel about that. They say that you marry your parents but…

-

Fuck me dead, one of the critics just laughed.

.

I’m not sure how I feel about that.

-

After he died, Emma moved into the office on a much smaller scale. She made relatively few changes although I must confess that I haven’t visited her in the office while she was working. I do know that she has continued the practice of having two offices. The private office where she does most of her own paperwork including her correspondence and where she works when she doesn’t want to be disturbed.

Father’s old office is where she meets people for official reasons. I’m told that she likes to sit behind the desk. There are large comfortable chairs placed in front of the desk for people to sit in. She shares Father’s disdain for Conference tables but she has gone from one end of the extreme to the other. She has a circle of large, comfortable sofas and armchairs that are arranged in the centre of the room where she sits with people and they discuss things at length. In the middle of this circle, there is a large, low table that is constantly filled with jugs of water, wine, tea, coffee and all of the other things that would go with these things and there is always at least one servant in the room whose responsibility is to keep everyone’s cups and glasses well topped up and to order replacements for any of these things should they be in danger of running low.

She also keeps bottles of spirits behind her desk for those times when she wants to put people at ease.

Or off-centre.

She kept the maps and the chaotic filing system, but I notice that the maps are less taken off the wall. They are, however, fixed further down and more on eye level. There have also been a few more maps added to the collection which record the Southern parts of the Empire. I know that Emma was particularly proud of the fact that she was one of the first people to have a full map of Dorne.

The ornate, topographical map was moved to the back of the room and I had never seen it used while my sister was in charge. That’s not saying much though because I had not been home while my sister was in charge.

She had added a couple of pieces of decoration as well. She had the Coulthard family coat of arms fixed above the fireplace and she had ordered a portrait of Father to be commissioned. It was affixed to one end of the room and it portrayed Father sitting in his chair with his hands steepled together in his traditional attitude of listening intently. The effect was startling and told everyone that might have been watching that our Father was still there and was still in charge of everything.

I remember from the couple of times that I had been in there, that the curtains had been changed. They were thicker and more insulated to keep the warmth in. There were also tapestries around the room, covering the barer patches of wall and the use of bits of carpet and rug to keep the chill out of the floor was much more pervasive. It was still a place where work was done but Emma seemed to believe that she was spending a ridiculous amount of time there, therefore she wanted to be comfortable in her place of work.

I could understand the sentiment although I found it a bit too cluttered for my liking. Distraction is the enemy of work for me and I need a relatively austere workspace.

I have never been in Emma’s private study since she had taken over the trading company.

The room was now startlingly different.

There were no carpets on the floor. The picture of Father had been taken down from the wall. The curtains had been taken down and those tapestries and draperies that were there for the keeping in of warmth had been taken away.

The maps that Father had been so proud of, had been removed and the main, huge, topographical map had been placed in the middle of the room, propped on a couple of tables so that you could walk around the entire thing.

The main desk had been pushed back into a corner to make some room and there was still a chair standing behind it.

The coat of arms was still there above the fireplace, as were all of the shelves, cupboards and strong boxes that were still arranged in a chaotic pattern.

There were also the old scribe desks at the back of the room. They were still there.

The overall effect of the place was of a room in transition. It felt like a military room rather than an office. This was not a place where people worked or lived. This was a place where people argued and fought. Where fingers were pointed and words were yelled. This was a room where people grasped the hilts of their swords and gestured wildly.

The room felt cold, even though the air felt warm and muggy, the room felt… austere and unpleasant.

I didn’t like it but I suppose that that was a given.

Then I saw the people.

The first person I saw was Ariadne.

People might think that I am lying or that I am being overly dramatic or romantic but she was the first person I saw, possibly even the first thing that I saw when I blinked in the light after having my blindfold removed.

When I saw her, in that first, split heartbeat of a moment when I saw her I could see both her face and the expressionless, lifeless eyes of Kerrass as he stared up at me from the table after she had broken his neck. For a horrible moment, all I could feel was rage.

After that, my mind caught up with my eyes. She looked awful.

Awful while still, to my eyes at least, looking achingly beautiful. Maybe a little thinner than I had seen her last.

She was still dressed as she had been when the feast had been happening. She wore the same blue dress and her hair was still up in the same hairstyle, only now, her long dark hair was falling out of the style. It was tangled, caked and matted with dirt that I could not identify and along with the dark brown stains on her face, I decided that I didn’t want to identify whatever it was that was in her hair.

The dress was torn as well. The neckline had been torn down and the slit that had been made in the skirts had been lengthened considerably. There were more foreign, unpleasant and distasteful stains on the fabric.

She was utterly still. So still she reminded me of that time back when I first knew her that she was wearing an illusion and that she would occasionally forget to maintain it. So it would just stay in place meaning that we were confronted with this strange, silent, picture of a woman. She would do this while she was thinking of something or deciding what she wanted to do next.

She would later tell me that this was a sign of her weakness and that when she became stronger, she could maintain a much better, more solid illusory construct and it was this version that I had met in the gardens of Angraal all that time ago.

At first… and I must emphasise that this was an instinctual decision, I thought that this was what I was looking at. But then I looked closer.

No illusion could be this good.

She was standing just behind the desk and to the right in the surprisingly bright sunshine that was coming through the windows. The light shone in the minute hairs that were on the back of her hands that were hanging down by her side. There were small threads that were hanging from some of the torn seams that were on the sides of her dress, around the shoulders and the skirts. Small wisps of hair moved in a draft that I couldn’t otherwise see.

I could see the light shining through her eyes.

The eyes stared straight ahead. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t even seen me coming. She was a statue, an immovable thing. She reminded me of a golem.

Strange as it might seem, I felt the first flutterings of hope as I saw that. Regardless of what she thought of me, her eyes would have moved when I came into the room. That meant that she was under… control of some kind. That meant that she had not decided to kill Kerrass. Someone else had decided that for her. She was a weapon that had been fashioned to someone’s hand which meant that, in turn, she had not killed Kerrass.

The woman that I loved had not killed Kerrass.

A surge of elation shot through me. Chireadean had told me that it was foolish and I agreed with him. Ariadne has stated to me, many times, that although her interest in Kerrass is not sexual or erotic, her affection for him is almost as much as it is for me. She would not have killed him. She did not kill him. She had been ordered.

The realisation made me dizzy and almost staggered.

She was not the killer, she was not the betrayer, she was the betrayed. Someone controlled her. She was the victim, one of the victims at least. She was a weapon.

And that realisation made me feel horror and dread. Because that puts some more things in line. If she was a weapon then the first thing that she did, or was controlled to do, was to remove the only person that was there who could feasibly stand up to her.

Kerrass and then… Laurelen.

You have to remember that although all of this might have taken you an age to read… it certainly took me an age to write, it all rattled through my brain in an instant.

So, given that Ariadne was here, where was Laurelen? I looked for her.

She was sitting on a stool in the corner of the room and looked eminently more alive than Ariadne had. She was wearing a plain, colourless shift. And by shift, I mean that it was the grey of sheep’s wool. There was no dye in it whatsoever and didn’t appear to have been washed thoroughly. Where Ariadne was actively filthy with matted hair and stained clothes and skin, Laurelen looked… merely dishevelled. Her long hair was certainly tangled but at least it was clean.

Laurelen is a Sorceress and although she lacks the predatory beauty of Lady Eilhart or the stormy effects of Lady Yennefer and Lady Vigo, she is still a striking woman.

But like Ariadne, I got the feeling that she was possibly a little bit thinner than she had been when I last saw her. Her hair lacked some of the lustre that it normally had and her skin had less shine. She was… She was “peasant” clean rather than “noble” clean. That she had scrubbed herself with water but lacked any of the cosmetics or creams or soaps that she would normally use to take care of her hygiene.

There were dark shadows under her eyes which were bloodshot.

She still had the odd, dark metal collar around her neck. Made of a metal that rippled with a strange rainbow sheen that seemed to ripple as she moved.

And a guard was standing over her with an axe resting on his shoulder.

This guard looked like he might have been one of the critics and with Laurelen being the size and shape that she was, I have no doubt that that axeman could have cut her in half without really trying.

Where Ariadne was absolutely still, Laurelen was constantly fidgeting. She was pale and sweating and every so often, she would lift her hand to the collar and try to ease it away from her neck before she would give up and let her hands fall to where they were clasped in her lap.

She greeted me without words as I had the bag taken from my head. Her eyebrows lifted and for a moment, there was joy on her face. But it was only a moment before the pain and discomfort came back into her expression.

After I saw Laurelen, I saw Emma.

Emma was sitting at another desk, a smaller desk that was facing opposite Laurelen. She was writing frantically at that desk. She looked up when she was on pause while her pen scratched furiously at the document that she was working on. Fast enough that I winced at the speed. It was all too easy to predict that the quill would split or that the paper would tear. There was certainly going to be more than a fair share of ink splatter.

Like Laurelen, her expression lifted for a moment when she saw me. Then it lifted even further when she saw my condition although I could not understand what that meant. Then she glanced at Laurelen.

Laurelen nodded and Emma’s expression firmed back into a line before she frowned in concentration and she returned to work.

Emma seemed to be in a similar state to Laurelen. The same, grey-brown shift, the same scrubbed face. The same look of fatigue and the same signs of a lot of time spent weeping.

Her hair was tied back in a tail. She had knotted her own hair to do so rather than tying it back with a thong or a piece of fabric as she would normally do when she needed to do this kind of thing. She hated that and only did it in extreme circumstances because she always felt as though the hair would be too damaged afterwards to justify tying the knot.

She wasn’t as pale or sweating though.

The last person in the room that I saw was Sam.

“Hello, Freddie.” He said calmly.

There were a couple of other guards in the room as well, but I don’t remember much about them. They were men in armour. Tall, broad, with weapons and shields and they stood around and stared into space.

Sam was… different and for another long moment, an obviously false thought occurred to me. That Sam himself was being controlled in some way similar to how Ariadne was being controlled. Foolish hope flared even though I knew that this wasn’t the case. For some reason, I just knew it. Chireadean’s words were echoing in my ears.

“Your brother is a snake.” The Elf had told me.

He was leaning over the topographical map of the continent and was straightening up from that posture when I had the bag taken from my head.

He looked different in some way although I could not tell what it was until much later when I was lying in my cell trying to make sense of everything that I had seen, heard and done that day.

He still had my brother’s hair, he still dressed the same, he still had the same colour eyes and…

He was wearing the same uniform that he had been wearing the night of the Autumnal Equinox. It was the outfit of a soldier. He wore leg greaves and infantryman’s boots. A chainmail coat over the top of a padded gambeson which was dirty and streaked with the grease that they use to keep the mail from rusting. And there was a tabard over the top. The tabard was a dark crimson shade with the symbol of Redania on the front.

All of that thick padding must have been why there was no fire in the hearth at the moment. Armour can be fiercely hot at times.

He also had a sword strapped over the top and he held it at his side.

On the sword belt was another fighting Knife and an eating knife but alongside a pouch which, I assumed, was for the keeping of odds and ends, was a large, brown leather bag.

And when I saw that, I knew what had happened.

“Holy Flame Sam,” I heard myself say. “What have you done?”

He almost smiled and just for a moment, it felt as though my brother was back in the room. Once again, I was struck that the person in front of me was not my brother.

But I was wrong, this person was more of my brother than I had ever seen before. I had never seen the similarities before. But now… He reminded me of my Father. There was an attitude about him, a subdued quiet that I had not seen before. There was a confidence and a seriousness about him that I had never noticed, or if I had, I had explained it away as part of something else.

This was my brother. He looked… lighter somehow, more solid. Older certainly.

He scratched at the side of his head, another gesture from childhood.

“What have I done?” He wondered and for a while, his eyes looked haunted. “A lot Freddie. I have done a lot. And before I am done, I am going to do a lot more too in the pursuit of a North free from Southern Oppression.”

He moved to stand behind the desk, having to turn sideways so that he could fit between the corner of the desk and the walls.

“I do not doubt that you have questions.” He told me as he reached for a sheaf of paper. “And I absolutely intend to answer them for you. I know that you hate me and I cannot deny that you have good reason to do so.”

He reached into one of the drawers of the desk and pulled out a small bottle which he lifted to his lips and took a sip from before making a face.

“But know Freddie, realise, that everything I have done has happened for a reason.”

I felt myself sneer.

“For the family?” I wondered, “how cliched.”

He stared at me and laughed. “For the family? Fuck no. I don’t care about the family.”

“Then what do you care about Sam? Why did you… What have you…?”

He held his hands up to quieten me.

“We’ll get to that.” He told me before sitting down. “First though, I need you to do something for me.”

It was my turn to laugh as I stared at him.

He was serious.

“No,” I told him.

He nodded before leaning back and turning to look out the window. As though I was behaving according to expectations. He was back to reminding me of Father again.

“Nothing would make me happier.” He told me after a while and he leaned back forwards again. “Nothing would make me happier than if you were on my side on this. And we will get there, you and I. I know that you hate me. I know why and I even understand it. But first, there is something that needs to happen. And I cannot wait for you to come over to my way of thinking.”

I decided that it was time for some bravado.

“I will never come over to your way of thinking,” I told him. “You have…”

He held up his hand to forestall me. The gesture was identical to the one that Father used to use when I was trying to make a full and reasoned argument as to why Father was wrong and why I was right. It was so uncanny that I wondered if Sam had practised it in the mirror.

Before his hand lowered, he pinched the bridge of his nose and I could see that his hand was trembling.

“Yes,” he said as he squeezed his eyes tight. “Yes, you will. I will explain everything that has happened and I will show you why I have done the things that I have done. I will convince you and you will take it in. I am sure of it. The only reason that I haven’t brought you in on this sooner was that you needed to play your part. Which you have done so… admirably.”

He laughed suddenly, there was an edge of bitterness that was almost like madness at the edges of the laughter. I remembered the bag on his belt before I looked over at Ariadne staring straight ahead like a statue. Then I made the connection.

Dear Flame.

Ariadne had once commented that one of the tell-tale signs of a person that made such a bag was that they would be howling at the moon, throwing faecal matter mad.

“You’ve lost your mind,” I told him. “Sam… Sammy, we can help you, we can…”

Again with the gesture to stop me.

“No Freddie. No. I am not mad, not yet anyway although I can understand where you are getting that information from.”

“What is all of this about?”

He smiled, a little sadly. “I told you once, do you not remember? I told you about how much I desperately wanted another crack at the Nilfgaardians. One more proper battle, them against us on an equal footing.”

He stared at me for a long moment, but the memory did not occur to me and he shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter anyway. I absolutely intend to tell you what is going on and why I am doing these things, and why I have done the things that I have done. I look back over it all and although some of those actions are brutal, unpleasant and… I do not doubt, evil from a certain perspective. I have done so to right a much greater wrong and I do so on the behalf of the Northern Kingdoms that I love so dearly.”

“That sounds like a rehearsed speech,” I told him.

“That’s because it is a rehearsed speech.” He laughed like my brother. “You and Mark were always the ones that were better at making speeches. But just because it is a rehearsed speech does not make it any the less true.”

“Oh Sam…” I said. “What have you done?”

“Many, many things.” He told me. “But before we do all of that, it is time for you to do your part.”

“I will never do what…”

“Yes, yes. You said.” He sighed and smiled at me sadly. “I wish I could just ask you to do this and that you would do it. I wish that you and I could work together on this as partners and, as I say, we will get there. But there is no time. First I need you to do something for me.”

“I will not.”

He smiled. “You will, but you have not heard what I want you to do yet.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He smirked again and lifted a pile of pamphlets from the desk.

“I know that you sent your diary out to Oxenfurt in the hands of that Elven Hellcat bitch that follows you around like a lost kitten.”

The sudden venom in his voice when he was talking about Carys was startling.

“I had wanted to use you like this anyway, but now it is even more important. I need a record of the early days of this insurrection. So I want you to continue your work.”

“My work?” I was suddenly feeling stupid.

“Yes. You record history as you see it. You do not attempt to remove yourself from that history or be dispassionate about it. That emotion and your perspective lends it all a certain amount of authenticity.”

He stared at me for a moment before standing back up and walking around the desk to stand in front of me.

“What that means is, according to one of my colleagues in all of this…”

“Which one?” I demanded.

He just grinned and otherwise ignored the question.

“Which means.” He said again. “That you are one of the most reliable voices in the North. People believe you.”

“So…?”

I did consider going for him. But he was a soldier and nothing would be achieved. At most I would get my head caved in. He saw the impulse in my mind.

“So I need to use your voice.”

“To what end?” I demanded carefully. It would do no one any harm to know what was going on.

“To the end of this. In the future…”

He was restless. When he had looked at me for a long moment, he moved away to go back to re-examine the map.

“In the future.” He said after rubbing the side of his head. “The continent will look back on these days. What we say and do now will be discussed by historians and the readers of historians for decades, maybe even centuries to come. As such we must have a record of what happened. We are already working on our version of events but we want you to write another version of events so that the truth can be remembered.”

“What truth?” I demanded. “The truth that my youngest brother ruined my wedding, murdered a lot of people and has done… what was it you said? ‘Brutal, unpleasant and maybe even evil things.”

“Yes.” He told me. “Yes, that is what I have done. And I want it recorded. And I want you to record it.”

I took a moment to decide what to do. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. But the question was about how to do that.

“You do not have to hide anything?” He told me. “Tell the truth, tell what happened. We know about your movements, we know about what happened in Oxenfurt. Although we could not stop your Publisher Dorthan from getting the word out, he was soon handed over to our forces for collaboration. We also have your clerk so that we can make use of your skills to the utmost.

“We captured the Elf and her filthy lover when they came back to try and rescue other people and we caught that other Elf who stole the inn from a decent human owner. There is no one for you to protect and there are no lies that are worth telling. We just want you to write the truth.”

“And if I say no?” The question had to be asked.

“Do not say no.” He told me.

I tried to search his eyes to see if the truth or the lie was buried in the depths of those eyes. But I couldn’t tell. He was too far away for me to see it clearly.

I looked at Ariadne but she was still staring straight ahead. Unmoving.

Emma was not looking at me. Laurelen caught my eye and shook her head. But I had no idea what that meant. Was she telling me not to rebel? Was she telling me to resist? There was no way of knowing.

I missed Kerrass desperately at that moment.

“No,” I told him. “No,” I said again. “I will not do it. I will not work with you. I will not work for you. You killed my friend, my best friend in the whole world who has saved my life more times than I can count. The man that made me the person that I am today.”

He sighed and shook his head. Again there was an attitude about him that said that he was not surprised by my answer.

“Technically, the slave killed him.”

“I recognise that bag on your belt you piece of filth,” I told him. “Slave is right. She had no choice in the matter. You made her kill my best friend and then you made her enslave our sister’s love. I will not do this for you. In fact, I will not do anything you ask.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

He nodded in acceptance of the point before shaking his head sadly. Again, he moved back behind the desk but stayed standing.

“You hate me.” He told me. “As I say, I understand that and one day, you will remember this and remember that it was all happening for a reason. And then you will be sorry and you will thank the God, or the Holy Flame if you prefer, that I was the one that did what was necessary. However, for the here and now, you are assuming that what I have told you to do was a request. It was not, it was an order.”

He did not raise his voice.

I did.

“Go fuck yourself. I will take great delight in thwarting you at every turn, in every way that you can.”

He seemed to be sighing a lot.

“We have talked a lot about what we would do if we came to this impasse,” he told me. “More than one person told me that I should torture you into doing what I wanted. I see that some of them have even started that process. Believe me when I say that I will find out who that was and have them punished. But as they have found out, and as Sansum in the south discovered, torture does not work on you.”

Then he sat.

“You have often claimed in your articles that the Beast of Amber’s Crossing was one of the worst things that happened to you, but you have not seen some of the gifts that he gave you.”

“Gifts?” I spluttered in outrage.

“Certainly. It means that no matter what happens to you. No matter what magic or what event or what torture is visited upon you, you have always seen worse, you have always had worse happen to you. Then your training at the hands of Jerome means that… You are not susceptible to torture.”

He shrugged with his hands expressively.

“I do not doubt that you would break eventually, but you would then tell us what we wanted to hear, or rather you would tell us what you think we want to hear. Your mind would be broken and that would render you useless to us. You are vital… VITAL Freddie. Vital to my plans.”

“Fuck your plans,” I told him.

He ignored that.

“So you are immune to torture.” He said. “At least, immune to pain and anything else we might do to you.” He finished. “But you are woefully, naively compassionate.”

His left hand fell to his waist, below the desk and he shifted in his seat to look at Ariadne.

“You may express yourself freely and without constraint although still with the earlier orders on you.” He told her. There was an edge to his voice, a resonance that seemed to echo in my chest.

Ariadne seemed to sag in place although I didn’t see her move. She still stood stock still apart from her head which turned to look at me.

“Gods Freddie,” She whimpered. “I’m so sorry, It wasn’t me I swear that it wasn’t… He made me…”

“FEEL PAIN.” Sam hissed the words but they echoed hugely. My teeth hurt.

Ariadne’s mouth snapped shut over a scream but she couldn’t keep from whimpering. Tears rose in her eyes.

It occurred to me again that Vampires could weep.

But they were not tears of pain.

Her body seemed to spasm.

She gritted her teeth and her lips peeled back from them.

“Do not listen to him, Freddie.” She hissed. “Do not give in. Stand…”

“FEEL AGONY.” Sam hissed at her and the strange thrumming sound in the air seemed to grow.

Ariadne’s mouth opened and blood started to leak out of the corner of her mouth from where she must have bitten her tongue.

A strangled sound emerged.

“MORE.”

Her entire body shook as the ripples of agony tore up her. She was shaking with it but she still didn’t move. Her mouth hung open and a noise emerged from that mouth. It was no human sound. It was a grunt, a moan, some kind of primal thing as her body seemed to jerk around.

Then she screamed.

“I LOVE YOU.” She screamed but then she seemed to be seized by a fresh wave of pain and her head flew back and she screamed so loud that it hurt my ears.

“SILENCE,” Sam ordered and the sound cut off instantly. But the pain did not. Her body whipped about as though it was caught in some kind of wind. I watched as her left arm broke under the muscle spasm. Then her right leg twisted under her, adding fresh agony to it. Her mouth was open and her eyes locked on mine.

“Stop this Sam,” I told him, pleading really.

“Do as I ask,” his voice sounded reasonable.

Ariadne’s eyes caught mine and I could see the negative in them.

I could see the pride.

I looked at Sam and he seemed calm. Emma was hiding her face in the paperwork and Laurelen would no longer meet my eyes.

“No,” I whispered and I caught Ariadne’s eyes. At least she would know that I was there.

And then the pain just stopped.

Ariadne was breathing hard.

“Heal yourself,” Sam told her and I watched her limbs right themselves and start to reform.

“Good.” Sam said. “You see her for what she is. Just a slave, Freddie. She was born for it. Created for it. She serves. It is her lot in life and her life’s purpose. But I still need you to do what I asked.”

He turned back to Ariadne.

“No reaction.” He told her. “No emotion.”

Even as her limbs started to reknit themselves. I watched as Ariadne turned back into the statue.

I was shaking with fury. I was so angry that I was paralysed by it. I remember feeling the fire running through my veins and the only reason I didn’t attempt to murder someone is because my anger was a cold one. I could easily see what was happening and could take stock of the situation. Two guards behind me also saw just how angry I was, or were well-trained enough to be able to take that into account and had moved up to prevent the situation from getting out of hand.

I was wearing a shirt and a pair of trousers. I didn’t even have shoes on my feet. Sam was armed, armoured and for all I knew, Ariadne might have had a standing instruction to protect Sam’s person at all costs. Not only that, Sam is a trained soldier and although he has admitted, and others have agreed, that his skills have fallen off in recent years. It was also true that we all thought of him as a loving and loyal brother.

How much could be believed? How much had his skills decreased, really?

But the chances of me being able to hurt him, or rescue someone, anyone, that might be able to help were remote.

Like I could hear Jerome’s voice whenever someone deliberately causes me pain, I heard Kerrass’ voice. As clearly as if he was standing beside me.

“Time Freddie. Always play for time and wait for the proper moment.”

So I ground my teeth together and said nothing.

Sam turned to look at me.

“So what shall I do now?” It was a pretence, he was still my brother and I still knew some things. He might be different or pretending to be different, but I could still see it in his eyes. He was still a man. And what I saw in there was that he already had a plan. He knew what he was going to do next.

“I don’t know Sam,” I told him. “What are you going to do now? You have tortured the woman I love most in the entire world. She didn’t want me to bend so now what are you going to do?”

“Is she the woman you love most in the world?” Sam smiled. Again, there was a sense of sadness in his eyes.

“I don’t think so.” He went on. “Or at least, not yet. Given time, you might have. But now you will never have time. But even then there is someone else.

“Your pet Vampire even said as much once. She said that one of the weaknesses of human language is that we only have a limited supply of words for those things that are more complicated than that. The example that was given was ‘love’ itself.”

He leaned back and crossed his arms as he thought.

“What was it you wrote? That whenever you meet a woman, you automatically compare them to Emma and that in every case they have been found wanting. You declared her the most beautiful, the most talented, the most intelligent and the most charming woman that you have ever known.”

He shook his head.

“I know that she was more of a Mother to you than our own Mother was and I understand that. But I wonder why you hero-worshipped her so much. Not Mark, not Father, not me? I am self-aware enough to know that you were not interested in what I was doing but Mark? Should he not have been your hero in the family? Should he not be the person that you seem to emulate?”

He chuckled at a thought before shaking his head. He blinked furiously for a moment and shook his head violently.

“The person you love most in the whole world is Emma. She has been your hero, your parent, your supporter and your friend. Over and above anything else that anyone else can ever give you. Many factors have gone into making you the person that you are today but not least of them is a love for, and a love by your elder sister. You have been her defender and her champion in so many other ways. When she took over the family business, you stood by her when she needed to fall, giving her the confidence to keep going. You championed her disgusting love of another woman where her proper place was in providing children and sons to continue the family line.”

He didn’t raise his voice. His words were angry but he said them almost calmly as if with great remorse.

“Not your fault.” He told me before a thought occurred to him. “Nor hers really if we’re honest. Where were the parents in all of this to set her, to set you… heh… to set all of us on the right path. But I am digressing and we both have work to do.”

He interlocked his hands behind his head and leaned back before looking at Ariadne.

“Use Magic.” He told her. Again, there was a strange weight to his words that seemed to make my teeth itch. “Something visible that Freddie can see. Lightning maybe?”

Then he turned back to look me in the eye.

“Use it to torture Emma.”

“NOOOO” Laurelen screamed and hurled herself forward. The axeman that was standing over her was too fast though or had been expecting something of this type and he caught her by the arm and hurled her back against the wall. She hit her head on something and this seemed to knock the wind out of her or send her dizzy.

Ariadne ignored this and moved towards Emma who had risen from her stool, her face going pale. Other than her feet moving, Ariadne didn’t seem to move.

“Do not disturb the paperwork though.” Sam went on.

There was a pause as Ariadne seemed to consider this.

Then the Vampire lifted her hand in a strange gesture and Emma rose into the air and hung suspended.

“Please…” I said I did not believe that anything could happen. I hadn’t believed that this was going to happen until Emma started to float in the air. “Please don’t do this?”

Sam took his hands down from behind his head.

“Then do as I ask.”

Ariadne did not pause.

In my image, when a mage casts bolts of lightning at someone, they always do it with their hands. Some kind of grand, ostentatious gesture that people could see and be afraid of. That, spectacularly, failed to happen. Instead, Ariadne seemed to frown and a light came to her eyes.

Emma had not said anything yet. I think she whimpered in advance.

The lightning tore out of Ariadne’s eyes and shot into Emma’s body.

And Emma screamed. Her body, still floating in the air, spasmed and shook violently, and all the time, Emma just screamed and screamed and screamed until whatever muscles that you use to take in the air that we need to breathe just seemed to stop working.

“Stop,” Sam told Ariadne. “If we kill her, it will be over too fast.”

My eyes darted to his face at his first words. He was not looking at me. He was watching Emma writhe in pain. The right side of his lip had curled in hate when he spoke about it all being over too fast.

“How can you do this?” I demanded of Sam. “How. She’s your sister. I’m your brother, why are you doing this?”

Sam had gone back to smiling sadly.

“Because it is necessary.” He told me. “I am no pantomime villain Freddie. I am not evil for the sake of being evil. I too have read the philosophies and I am well aware that no villain thinks of himself as being a villain. I have my reasons.

“Yes, you are my brother and believe it or not, I still love you. Fiercely. I look forward to the day when we can be trusted friends again. But her?” He gestured to Emma, who was gasping for breath as she floated. I was watching for it and again, his lip curled in hate.

“She was never a sister to me.”

He nodded to Ariadne.

“Again.” He told her and the screaming began again.

I have spent some time looking back at that moment as I watched my sister being tortured. She didn’t tell me not to give in. Nor did Laurelen who was pleading with Sam to stop.

I don’t know why I didn’t give in there and then. I wish I had though.

But I have lain on my bed, staring at the flickering torchlight as it danced across my ceiling. I wondered why I didn’t stop it all then. I’ve kept myself awake wondering about that.

I don’t know the answer to that. The Macho answer is that I was still trying to resist Sam at any cost. I was trying to force him to come to his senses. But I don’t think that was true.

It might also be true that I was frozen in horror, or disbelief that this could be happening. That the sister that I cannot deny that I love was being tortured by the woman that I love romantically and want to marry so that I can tell the world how much I love her. And that she was doing so on the orders of the Brother that I loved and that I had been closest to when I was growing up.

That might be true. I don’t know though.

The truth is that in the heat of the moment, it didn’t occur to me that I could.

Again, Emma screamed so hard that she couldn’t breathe. There was blood dripping out of her mouth now from, presumably, where she had bitten something in the spasms. More blood came from her ears and her nose. Even after the power had stopped. She trembled as her limbs spasmed around her. Jerking and drumming everywhere.

“I am not going to pretend,” Sam said after a long moment where the only sounds were Laurelen whimpering and Emma gasping for breath.

“I am not going to pretend that this is your fault,” Sam told me. “I am not some idiot that is going to say that you are forcing me to do this. You could indeed stop this at any time but I am also aware that I am the one doing this. I have read those books where the villain tortures someone to do something that the villain wants and the villain argues that it is the hero’s choice, the hero’s fault that the torture is taking place.”

He shook his head before continuing to speak.

“It always occurred to me that there is a simple philosophical argument that could counter the villain's cruelty. But I’ve never figured out what it was. ‘You can stop this at any time they say to the hero. ‘It is your fault that this is happening,’ they say. But that is not what is happening here. I too could stop this at any time. I know that you know that. And if you give me what I want, I will stop.”

He nodded to Ariadne. “Again.”

-

The critics are unhappy again. They want me to go into more detail. I told them that I wasn’t going to do that. I told them that they were sick fucks for wanting me to recount the torture that my sister was suffering at the hands of my brother.

They did not laugh. Nor were they particularly offended. I even think that one of them was sympathetic to what I was saying.

But the truth is that I can barely remember what happened. My mind tries to go back to it and it just… shys away as a horse might shy away from a particularly high jump. I know that it lasted for a long time. I know that at some point, Emma was dropped to the floor and I watched her bang her head on the floor with her spasms.

I saw the blood dripping from Ariadne’s nose as she started to overextend herself magically and still Sam would not let up.

He watched as Emma was tortured and one of the few images that I have of that… however long it was, is Sam’s face, the light of the lightning reflecting off the sneer on his lips.

But eventually, it stopped.

Why didn’t I say anything? Why didn’t I stop it then when I had the chance?

The answer is that I have no idea.

Sam sighed and again rubbed his head.

“Much though I would… kind of enjoy watching Emma get tortured for a significant part of the day. I have things to do.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“I see. You are overwhelmed. That is fine and understandable.”

He found a chair that was against the wall and sat down in it.

“The truth is that Emma… The only reason that she is still alive is that you warned me. You told me that the company wouldn’t exist without her. You told me that this was the point and that is true. I wouldn’t know half of what this was all about.”

He waved about the room, taking in the drawers and the cupboards and the shelves.

“And in the time it would take to figure out, we would lose so much of it and we would lose so much more time that it would almost become pointless. And I just don’t have that kind of time.”

He must have seen the hope register in the edges of my eyes.

“Oh don’t get me wrong Freddie. There is more than enough time to do permanent, irreparable harm. We certainly have enough time that I could make you sit here and watch the sister that you love so much screaming her lungs out in agony until, eventually, her heart gives out and just stops. But I can’t do that, because I need her to disentangle the trade empire that she has built up for the family.

“And whatever else I can say about Emma, her filthy habits and her weakness. I will say that she has done an admirable job in making the family rich and powerful on that level. So you were right in saying that I needed to keep her alive. I do. I saw that when you told me about it down in Toussaint when you pointed out how much I was going to need her and that we couldn’t do this without her.”

He stood up and came towards me. I was staring at Emma who was lying on the floor, panting for air while every so often, her limbs would just give this little tremble and send her to spasming.

Gently, kindly even, he put his hand on my shoulder and I straightened to look into my brother’s eyes.

“You saved her life, Freddie, and you made my life so much easier in doing it.”

He straightened and moved away.

If I was going to do something, anything even, that was the moment that I should have done it.

“So I can’t kill her, even while I hate her.”

“Why Sam?” I wailed. “Why? What did she do? What did we do to make you…”

“Ah…” He held his hand up for silence. “All in good time. I promised that I will tell you everything and I meant it. There is a reason that I hate her. But I don’t hate you. You are my brother and I love you. In fact, you are the only person in our entire, worthless, wretched family that I feel any kind of affection at all. There is only one thing in my life that I hold above you. That I swore that I would…”

He stopped and laughed at himself.

“And there is me about to give the entire thing away. I don’t want to prejudice you or give you truths that would taint your views when it comes to recording what has happened. Suffice it to say, again, that there is a reason.

“But in the meantime, We need to address this situation. I need you to do what I require of you. You don’t want to… You want to thwart me or to be angry with me or out of some kind of… misplaced desire to delay things or something. I also know that you are susceptible to the pain in others.

“Your compassion is something to be proud of Freddie and don’t let anyone, least of all me, tell you differently. You are a compassionate man and that quality screams from every action that you take and every word that you write. It might be argued that you are compassionate to prove to yourself and to others that you are a good man. But to me, that denies the possibility. And if you do good deeds, does it matter the intent behind them?”

Something in the way that he talked about me caught my temper.

“Are you trying to convince me, or yourself of that?” I asked him.

It was meant as a barb, a verbal attack to throw him off me so that I could take the time to regroup and come up with some kind of rebuttal. But he took it as a genuine thing to consider.

“I am not sure.” He said. “It could go either way I suppose. But here, what I am doing are acts that would be considered evil, to achieve a greater good.”

“Something something, the road to hell, something something, good intentions, something,” I told him with as much sarcasm in my voice as I could manage.

He laughed, and as far as I could tell, he did so with genuine humour.

“God Freddie, I look forward to the day when you and I can work together again, openly and with an understanding between us. Together we will work towards healing the world.”

“You and I will never…” I was trying for defiance.

“Yes, yes.” He waved his hand dismissively. “But for the immediate future, I need you to write that record.”

“Fuck you,” I told him.

“Ah Freddie,” he shook his head sadly. “Not your best retort.”

He turned to look at Ariadne.

“Laurelen.” He said.

Ariadne nodded and turned to stare at the other Sorceress.

Who screamed.

“Interesting thing,” Sam said. “Dimertium, when worn by a mage, can prevent the mage from casting spells. But it doesn’t protect a person from having magic cast upon them.”

Emma had turned over on the floor to look at her lover who was shaking as if she was in the grip of some unseen fist. She thrashed about, her arms and legs snapping about, this way and that way.

“Also interestingly,” Sam told me as though we were watching a play being put on at a theatre. “I might need you alive. Ariadne is a tool that is essential to my plans and it is proven that torturing her will not work with you as she has enjoined you to resist me at every turn.”

Laurelen continued to scream. Another low voice appeared in the room as Emma moaned and started to crawl towards her wife.

“But Laurelen?” Sam continued. “Her, I can kill. She is in no way vital to my plans. Useful? Certainly, but vital? No. I can use her as an example. I can use her to show you, and Emma, what happens to those people that disobey me and work against my plans. Her, I can show you that I absolutely mean what I say and that I am not just making this up or making empty threats.”

In the thrashing about, over Laurelen’s screaming. I heard something snap and I thought I could see that one of her legs wasn’t hanging right.

Emma got to Laurelen but turned to look at Sam, her legs were still cramping and spasming so she couldn’t stand.

“Stop,” Emma wailed. “Stop, I am doing what you told me to do. I am giving you what you asked for.”

“Yes.” Sam told her, coldly. “You are.”

“You promised Sam.” She wailed, “You promised that you wouldn’t hurt her if I did what you told me to do.”

Sam shrugged.

“Any promise made to a woman isn’t worth keeping.” He told her. “And this is not about you.”

I saw it then. He wasn’t talking about torturing Laurelen. He was still torturing Emma.

And so, he was torturing me.

Emma watched as Laurelen bounced off the walls. At one point, her nose broke as it smashed into a corner of one of the shelves. Some impacts even made Sam wince. But he winced in the same way that you wince when someone lands a good blow in a bare-knuckle match.

Or when someone lays down an unknown and powerful card in Gwent.

Or you see a friend make a fool of himself with a girl.

There was laughter in the wincing.

I think that Laurelen was unconscious now as her head still thrashed around. Involuntary noises came from her mouth.

That strange, paralysis was on me again. I couldn’t move. I don’t know why. I wish I did. I wish I knew why so that I could get angry with myself about it. I wish I had done something, anything, to make Sam hurt me instead of those I hold most dear. I wish I had done something. But I didn’t, I stood there and watched.

I can’t even claim that I felt that it was my duty to see what was happening to them. To take it in.

Emma was trying to catch Laurelen, to hold her close and prevent her from hurting herself as she bashed into things. The man with the axe was openly laughing as Emma would just seem to get close to catching her lover and then Laurelen would jerk out of reach or spin. Or Emma’s limbs would start to spasm and she would fall, arms flailing.

Tears fell down Emma’s face in the agony of watching this happen to the woman that she loved.

And I did nothing.

Eventually, I broke. And as the Eternal Flame is my witness, I wish I had broken sooner.

There is a common thing that says that everyone has their price. No man is incorruptible and all that needs to happen is for a person to find that price. But it’s also true that no man, woman or person is immune to torture. All you have to do is find the right amount, or the right type, of pain to inflict on a person and that person will break.

And I broke.

And the moment was that I saw Emma’s mind break.

Flame… I wish I had broken sooner. I don’t know why I didn’t. I wish I had…”

Flame….

.

Flame preserve me and carry me home.

.

.

Emme stopped trying to hold onto Laurelen and she was trying to be with her as she suffered. She was calling out to Laurelen to be strong. To tell her that she loved her and that she was here and that it was all going to be ok.

She turned and begged Sam to stop again. She was on her knees, tears, snot and blood intermixing to run down her face and stain her teeth and her chin.

Sam ignored her.

She reached forward and grabbed his boots, tugged on his trousers to get at him.

He kicked her off like you would a disobedient dog. Not hard, just enough to dislodge her grip.

The guard was less gentle and dragged her away when she turned to watch the horror that was happening to the woman that she loved.

And then she just stopped. Her tears dried on her face and her expression went vacant. Her eyes darted this way and that for a moment, looking at nothing while she stood still.

And I heard her words clearly, even though Laurelen was screaming.

“I need to get back to work.” She said,

Then she turned and stumbled towards her desk, picked up a piece of paper, read it and dipped her quill in ink and went back to writing.

That was the thing that broke me.

“Ok stop.” I whimpered. “Stop, I’ll do what you want.”

And instantly, Laurelen’s pain vanished and she collapsed to the floor.

Instantly.

Sam didn’t try and hold it over me, he didn’t try and make me repeat it. He had my word then.

It was the trust that gets to me now. I had given my word and he trusted that I would keep it.

Flame but my brother still loves me.

Even though I hate him.

“Heal her.” Sam told Ariadne, “Heal them both. Then you may heal yourself.”

Ariadne moved over and started casting the spells. The blood was running freely down her face now. Her nose, her eyes and her ears were all bleeding from the insane amount of magic that she had just used.

When she was able to, Laurelen went to Emma and tried to get Emma to talk to her but Emma just shook her off and tried to work. Laurelen looked up and caught my eyes.

“Well…” Sam said. “Looks like Emma broke after all. Hope she’s still useful.” He raised his voice to address Laurelen. “Care for her.”

Then he turned to me.

“How could you do that?” I asked him. “How could you…” I shook my head. My voice was hoarse and my throat ached. It occurred to me that I hadn’t just been standing idly by as the women that I love were being tortured.

I had been screaming too.

There was a metallic taste at the back of my throat.

I shouted myself hoarse.

“They’re just women, Freddie.” He told me. “Useful for producing children and providing pleasure. That is all. And if you rely on women then that weakens the man as well.”

He shook his head dismissively.

“We will save the philosophical discussions on gender roles and politics for a later date.” He told me, moving back to the desk where he took out another bottle. This time a small, pottery one with a dark stopper. He drank it in a swallow.

“After all,” he went on. “You have work to do.”

“How long do I have?” I asked.

He smiled.

“No deadline. Do a good job and don’t dawdle. That’s all I ask. When you are done, I will read it and if I am satisfied then we will talk again and I will give you your answers.”

“And if you are not satisfied?”

“Nothing, you write another draft.”

“No torture of anyone.”

He laughed. “No Freddie. No torture. I would rather not do any of that anymore. But if you work hard and sincerely, with the rules and constraints that I place upon you. Then you, and those you care about are safe. You have my word.”

“Your word?” I wasn’t trying to deny him, but it was more a case of… checking I suppose.

He sighed. “I know Freddie. You have no reason to trust me. But now that I am open in front of you, you are a man. More than that, you are my brother and I love you. I will not break my word to you. Work hard and the faster you work, the faster you will get your answers and when you have your answers we can move onto the next stage of what we have to do, you and I.”

“What do we have to do?” I asked.

He just smiled.

“Check on your sister if you must but then, you have work to do.”

He left through the door behind me, Ariadne going with him.

Emma was broken. I want to talk more about that but I can’t. I really can’t. She just worked. Got up and moved to a cupboard and removed a journal on the timber output of some lumber company and then started making notes on a piece of paper.

I pleaded with her to forgive me and say something. Laurelen did too. But as far as I could tell, she didn’t even know that we were there. She just worked.

I apologised to Laurelen who looked at me with bleak eyes.

“It’s not your fault Freddie.” She told me as the tears ran down her face. “It’s not. Everyone breaks sooner or later. You were far stronger than we were.”

She literally sniggered.

“I folded like a wet piece of tissue paper when he started hurting Emma.”

I chuckled with her.

“We must laugh,” She told me, “or we will cry.”

“I should have broken sooner,” I told her. “He was… It’s my fault that…”

Tears ran down my face and Laurelen hugged me.

She hugged me. What have I done to deserve these women?

“No.” She told me firmly, grabbing my head so that she could look me in the eye. “This was not your fault. You were right to resist and no one knows what they will do until in the moment until it is upon them. You were right to resist and whether you froze or… I saw you, Freddie, when he was torturing Emma. You were frozen, you weren’t inside your own head. Much as what’s happening with…”

She sobbed and covered her mouth with her hand before, through dint of effort and, presumably, some training, she calmed herself.

“Like Emma is now, you were not at home. For a long moment, I thought that Sam had broken you and I thought the pain was going to continue.”

We stood and looked at Emma as she took blotting paper to an ink splatter.

“Will she be ok?” I wondered.

“Your brother was not lying when he said that he needs her and that is why she is still alive,” Laurelen told me. “I will care for her, Freddie. That is why I am still alive.”

I nodded.

“You have work to do,” Laurelen told me. “That is what he needs you for and that is why you are still alive.”

I nodded again, feeling stupid. Like a sulky child being sent back to do an unpleasant chore.

“Stay alive Freddie. That’s the objective now. Just stay alive.”

I nodded, unable to face her anymore, and I turned away.

“And Freddie.” She stopped me. “Don’t blame Ariadne either. She is more of a slave to his will than we are and when this is all over. She will need our love.”

I nodded again and walked away.

The guards took me to my new lodgings. It seemed that the work would not begin immediately. I wept for a long time. Food was brought. Some kind of surgeon came to look at me and eventually, I wept myself to sleep.

In the morning, I was woken with breakfast and escorted to the work room where I met Johann and the critics before I bent to work

I write these words by the grace of Queen Adda of the joint kingdoms of Temeria and Redania.

And if she is responsible. I hope that the bitch rots in hell.