I am reluctant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not this time and not that instance.

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

Dammit.

I work at that, every day.

But I am not there yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That went over his head as well.

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

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

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

Or a troll.

Heh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway. I find that that’s enough procrastinating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They didn’t but the paranoia was still there.

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

The real thing started at the tenth bell in Novigrad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No not a fucking bribe.

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

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

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

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

Prick.

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

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

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

Are these things overripe and about to go rotten?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one tells the fucking gate guard anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I see you feel the same.

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

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

.

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

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

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

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

So it were weird.

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

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

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

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

Course you know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” My commander wondered.

The messenger shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s always people like that.

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

Why me?

It was my turn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he watched them.

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

I got the tale from my lad.

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

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

Never.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The daughter tried to run off.

She didn’t make it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were probably not wrong.

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

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

And he had his family to worry about.

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

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

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

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

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

And they squeal most appealingly.

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck me I’m getting poetic.

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

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

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

I really liked Novigrad.

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

Ah fuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It didn’t take me long.

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

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

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

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

At first, it looked funny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We should run.” I heard myself say. “We should run.”

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

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

They just moved so fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then came the terror.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BY FAR.

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

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

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

Also?

Fuck You.

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

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, seeing is believing and that goes both ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dirty fucking Knife Ear,” I replied and she laughed.

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know.” Chireadean sighed a little. “The thought of having servants seems rather pleasant.”

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

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

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

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

We all groaned in horror at the story.

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

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

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

I nodded to her.

“What happened?” I wondered.

“We disobeyed you,” Chireadean replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can easily imagine it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m so very sorry,” I told them.

“What for?” Padraig demanded. “What did you do?”

“I should not have sent you to… I should not have made you…”

He waved off my declarations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Chireadean, what is it?”

He sighed and looked out over the castle work site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s what I hope,” he told me. “I mean to go and look with your permission.”

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

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

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

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

We both contemplated that for a long moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I threw them a bone.

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

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

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

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

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

He nodded and turned to her.

“Well?” He demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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