I don't ever remember being so stunned.

It was so big. So huge that I couldn't get my head round the story that I had just heard. There was so much going on in that speech as well as the story. It felt as though I had been sat at this bench for hours so that my back ached, my neck was sore and my legs were stiff. But at the same time as that, it was as though I had only been sat there for a few moments.

Lord Voorhis was trying to capture my attention but I ignored him.

I wanted to sit there for a lot longer. I wanted to analyse and think about all the things that I had just heard. I wanted to weigh it all to try and find which bits were actual history. Which bits were dramatic insertions to capture the imagination of the listeners and which bits had been set aside and emphasised for the learning part of the saga.

Because it was built around learning. You could feel the lessons in the piece. I've had the benefit of some time since then to think about what I had been told as well as some time in a darkened room to sort things out. But at the time, there was just so much there. So much to take in.

It really was a lot like a spell.

One of the first thoughts that went through my head, maybe halfway through the telling of the tale, was that if the priests of the Eternal Flame had half the oratory skills that that large, bearded, hairy man had, then the church would have spread across the continent by now.

I felt like I was reeling amongst it all and that I was still under the spell of what was happening. Under an enchantment that had been woven by the tale teller. I could almost smell the salty sea air. I could feel the terror of the Skelligans as they shivered in their homes. Too close to the fire for safety but not nearly close enough for comfort. I could well imagine the grief of the assembly at the harbour as they watched this strange vessel sail through the waters. There was just so much going on there that I didn't want to break the spell yet.

But Lord Voorhis was insistent.

“Lord Frederick.”

I took a deep breath. It felt as though it was a long way back from wherever the Skald had sent me and even worse than that, I didn't really want to come back. I looked at the table behind me and saw a goblet, a quick search led me to a jug of something and I poured myself a cup of whatever it was and drank it. To this day I have no idea what it was.

“Lord Frederick?”

“Fuck me sideways.” I muttered.

“Not quite my response.” Kerrass was sat next to me. His brow was furrowed in intense concentration. His eyes were darting this way and that as he thought, furiously, about what he had just heard. He didn't seem as deeply affected as me but at the same time... I suppose that it was a professional reaction. He had been told about this vast, supernatural effect and now he was turning it over in his mind so that he could try and figure it out.

“Lord Frederick I really must insist that we move on.”

I was still ignoring him though. I wasn't being rude, not intentionally anyway. It was more that I needed room to think. To collect myself. Fatigue, hunger, sickness and the shock of being in a place utterly alien to my experiences was taking it's toll. It seemed as though I had been transported to another world, one with it's own rules that I did not understand.

“Where....” I began again. “What?...”

“Lord Frederick....”

“Leave the lad alone.” A big Skelligan had come over and seemed to be getting in the way of Lord Voorhis.

“Aye, the lad's obviously had a hellish crossing.” Another Skelligan turned up to leap to my defense.

“I just...” I stood up. “I need some air.”

There are several side doors out of the hall on the top of Kaer Trolde and one of them led me out onto this kind of courtyard place. It was oddly tranquil which was another opportunity for me to see the dichotomy in the Skelligan people. On the one hand we had the hard drinking, hard fighting, hard living warriors of Skellige. Brutal men and tough women who had carved out an existence from one of the more savage places on the continent. A place of sharp stone and storm-tossed seas. But it was balanced by a fierce sense of the beauty of life and that was nowhere more evident than in the garden at Kaer Trolde.

It was still a working place though. Large men in formidable armour stood as look out. A cold wind blew across the stone which leant the place an even stronger air of beauty carved out of wilderness.

I rushed to the wall and leant over the side, taking deep breaths until my head stopped spinning and my lungs could be cleared of the smoky atmosphere of the hall inside.

Which was when I realised that I was awfully high up and my head swam. I turned and let myself slump against the wall, my legs sliding out in front of me. I cradled my head in my hands.

“You gonna be alright?” Kerrass wondered walking up.

“Holy fucking flame.”

“It was a good story.” He agreed, I got the feeling that he was enjoying himself at my expense.

“How...?”

“How true was all of that?” Kerrass finished for me.

“Yeah.”

“A lot of it is true.” Lord Voorhis walked up. “Lord Frederick I must....”

“Look, Morvran.” Kerrass began. Lord Voorhis stiffened at the informal use of his name. “It was a shitty crossing. Freddie hasn't eaten anything, or drunk anything really in a few days and he's just sat in a stuffy, smoky hall and listened to a rather evocative piece. He might be a scholar but occasionally, he has the soul of a poet and it's hit him like a stone from a trebuchet. So you can wait for an hour or so until he's collected his wits.”

“I...” Lord Voorhis' mouth snapped shut with an audible click. “I apologise Lord Frederick. I am unused to these... circumstances.” He sighed, unclipped his scabbarded sword from his belt and sat next to me, stretching his legs out.

“Why don't you tell us what the problem is Lord Voorhis?” Kerrass began. A serving person, a man who was dressed in a simply white tunic with a plain leather belt approached with a tray of three tankards as well as a bag of bread loaves and a large bowl of soup. “Goddess but I love Skelligan beer,” Kerrass went on. Some bread was passed down to me as Kerrass handed a tankard each to Voorhis and myself before the server moved on.

“I really just....” Voorhis sighed and drained a significant amount of his tankard. “I just don't know how to deal with her. Her father was not a nice man and we spent our lives on opposite sides of a lot of political divides. It was one of the reasons we got on with each other so well. I was used to the way he thought and acted but his daughter?”

He shook his head. I had ripped off a chunk of the loaf of bread and was devouring it. You know that sensation of when your body is just sucking up the food. Your first meal with real food in it rather than trail rations after a long journey. Your first bowl of soup after recovering from illness. It's that feeling, where your body just devours what you give it and then yells at you for not giving it any more.

The bread was delicious. It was a fruit bread. Soft and nutty as well. I wondered if I could get some more.

“I just don't understand the way she thinks.” Voorhis moaned. “She's amazing at court. She has this ability to cut through the bullshit faster than anyone I've ever known. Not that she's impolite but two minutes into a debate or an audience and she already knows what's happening, what needs to be done about it and what the repercussions are. Then it's a matter of her remaining patient long enough to get the job done without offending people.

“She's good at this. Shockingly good at this. So good that we have a real possibility of making lasting peace on the continent. Leaving aside her stubborn refusal to accept courtship from anyone which, at the moment, I agree with, she's an amazing ruler. But then she also goes off on tangents. Random crazes that no-one, least of all me, understands.”

“Just to check,” I could almost feel my brain starting to work again. Fresh air and sustenance was working wonders. “But you are talking about the Empress right?”

He glared at me. “I also struggle with her more Northern sense of humour.” He warned. “A trait of hers that you seem to share Lord Frederick.”

“I've been told worse things Lord Voorhis.” I responded round a mouthful of bread. “So what the fuck is happening?”

Voorhis threw his hands up in the air. “You fucking tell me.” He hissed bitterly. “All the Skelligans will say is that “The time of the Skeleton Ship is upon them” which is the first time I've fucking heard of it. Her Imperial majesty gets told of this and then she insists on coming north. We ask her why and she tell us that she wants to board the ship.”

He went to take another drink from his tankard before realising that it was already empty, he frowned and set it aside.

“We all get here which is when I finally find out what that means. I listen to a similar story to what you've just heard which is when I find out that she essentially intends to commit suicide.”

He turned on me accusingly. “Did you know what it means?”

“What means?”

“What it means to board the Skeleton Ship?”

“Of course not.” I swallowed the last of the bread. “I didn't even hear about the Skeleton ship until after Queen Cerys had ascended to the throne and started inviting other people to the festival.”

“Some festival if even half of that was true.” Kerrass put in. He also had a piece of bread and was using it to scoop something out of a small bowl that he was shoving into his mouth. He realised that we were looking. “What?” he asked with his mouth full.

“You like Skelligan cooking as well do you?” I teased him.

He answered with a hearty belch.

“Are you two done joking around?” Lord Voorhis snapped which was when I began to realise just how close he was to losing his mind.

“How serious is this Lord Voorhis?” I asked him.

“Pretty serious.” He sighed. “She says she wants to board the Skeleton Ship. She won't say why or even why she's so obsessed with it. There's no getting away from the fact that she's been struggling since... Forgive me....Since your sister disappeared. She's had fits of temper and listlessness that I hadn't seen in her character before but frankly it's nothing compared to her predecessors. The rest of the Empire wouldn't even blink if she ordered a few beheadings but it's like she's been withdrawing from us. She's tired and has been having trouble sleeping and we knew that she was unhappy but we thought that it was normal grief. As well as all of that, being the head of state is fucking hard work. I know. But she won't delegate either. She has lost something I think and doesn't know, or doesn't want to get it back. And now she wants to do something that everyone, everyone agrees would be fatal. And she knows that.”

“And you want me to stop her.”

“I've tried everything else. Queen Cerys has talked to her. The local chief druid Ermion who she's known since childhood has tried to talk her out of it. Lord Emhyr has been written and we're hoping for a response, even if he doesn't show up himself. Her mother is here and storming around the place. But she just stands there, folds her arms and insists that she's going to go through with it.”

“And what do you think I'm going to do that's so different from everyone else?”

“I've tried everything else.”

“How serious is it?” I asked.

“She's pretty fucking serious.”

“How real is the story?” Kerrass wondered. “How much time do we have before....”

“It doesn't matter.” Lord Voorhis. “She's not kept it secret. Coming here...Ok. Skellige is an important part of the Empire. We can't afford to be strangers because if Queen Cerys decides to unleash the raiders on our shipping then she can cripple commerce. We would have to conquer Skellige properly. I've read the reports on how much that would cost us in the conquering and then in moving forward. We would have to do it, literally, island by island over hostile ground against men that know the terrain and where numbers mean almost nothing. That's not to talk about the naval cost in mounting an invasion. We did well when the Wild Hunt were doing their thing but we won't be able to do that again.

“We can turn this into a state visit. If we go to Novigrad after this and then march South we can make Toussaint by Winter and then back to the Capital by spring so she can celebrate the anniversary of her crowning in the capital.

“But in the meantime, she has no heir and the noble houses of Nilfgaard are tearing themselves apart in putting things together to name the next heir for when she does something stupid. Everyone knows that boarding the Skeleton Ship means probable death for the boarder so the entirety of the south think she's a dead woman walking. Why should they do what she's ordered if the next Emperor might be one of their own? Then....”

“Right.” I cut him off. “So politically then...”

“Politically, this could damage the Empire, which includes the North now, in such a way that we might never recover. Worse than if her father had kept power and been forced to send out the knives again. Which he was about to have to do.”

I sighed. “How certain is it that she would die if she climbed aboard the ship?”

“Lord Frederick...” His voice was a warning. This was a man on the edge.

“No, hold on. She's the lady of time and space. Powerful people are scared of her. I know this because I'm marrying one of them.”

“And those self-same people are afraid for her. Her mothers here. Lady Eilhart has been here.”

“Not the wisest person to try and talk the Empress down if I'm any judge,” Kerrass commented.

“Lady Merigold is still here.” Lord Voorhis ignored Kerrass. “No-one, knows anyone, ever, who survived going aboard that ship.”

I sighed again and rested my head on the stone of the wall.

“She will say that Legends have to come from somewhere.” I muttered.

“And she has. Many times.”

“Alright.” I said climbing to my feet. “Let's go and get yelled at. You coming Kerrass?”

“You go.” Kerrass told me. “I want to hear that story again. Get a different perspective.”

“Alright. Providing I don't get executed, I will see you later.”

“She won't execute you Freddie.” Kerrass told me.

The expression on Lord Voorhis' face was not reassuring.

As I said before. Kaer Trolde is a fascinating place. It actually takes you deep into the mountain and I only saw the very surface of it. I strongly suspect that if you go deep enough, you would discover that it would take you back down to secret levels so that even if you lay siege to the keep itself, they would still be able to feed themselves by fishing from the sea and for the important people to escape.

I was led through the back of the banqueting hall, trying to look sidelong at Lord Voorhis. I was struggling to get my brain to work but also wondering at the wisdom of that. The logical arguments had probably been used so maybe I needed to stick with the illogical and emotional arguments.

“How bad is it really?” I asked him.

He blew out a breath. “You remember that crossbow you gave her?”

“I do.”

“Yesterday she chased me out of her rooms at the point of that thing. It's not funny.”

I snorted. “It's a little funny.”

“It's not.” He was getting angry again.

“Lord Voorhis. The most powerful man in the Empire being forced out of the Empress' presence by threat of crossbow bolt. Arguably the most terrifying man on the continent and he fled from a young woman in a temper. I know she was in a temper because she could have had you thrown out by the guards. You have to admit that that image is a little funny.”

He stared at me for a long time. His eyes seeming to boggle out of his skull. Then he smirked.

“There you go.” I told him. “It is a little funny isn't it.”

A bark of laughter escaped from his mouth.

“And then you have to go and ask a relatively minor lord of the north. A younger son, that you don't know, of a house that you hadn't heard of five years previously. To come here and talk some sense into the Empress of half the known world.”

He laughed then.

“You must be fucking desperate.”

He sighed, his laughter fading. “I am desperate.”

“How long before the Skeleton Ship arrives?” I asked.

“I don't know. According to Head Druid Ermion the seas are rebelling early. The storm clouds are gathering and the sea is emptying of fish. It's colder here than it's supposed to be for this stage of early autumn. In Nilfgaard there would still be crops in the field ripening and I understand that the same is in the North but here it's getting colder. Apparently that is not unusual. The signs together suggest that the big freeze is a week away from really digging in. After that the seas will freeze and the ship will be sighted on the horizon.”

“You want to be away from here before that though right.”

“Lord Frederick, with all due respect, I didn't want to be here in the first place. The charms of the strong women who make a game of conquering men in the same way that men in the south make a game of conquering women soon wears thin.”

I felt my mouth turn upwards. “But it is fun though right?”

He sighed. “Not really. My tastes like elsewhere.”

“Really?”

“Do not pursue it Lord Frederick. But back to your original question. Being honest with each other. I will be happy if we could just guarantee that I will still have an Empress when all this is over. I've worked too hard to lose her now.”

Something in the way he said that caught at my mind after the earlier conversation about being pursued by strong women.

“Lord Voorhis, do you have a little thing for the Empress?” My sense of mischief had not been dulled yet. Alcohol, fatigue, hunger and being in a strange place seems to combine to have an interesting effect on my sense of humour.

He shook his head and stared off to one side for a moment. “It sometimes astonishes me.” he began. “It astonishes me how different you northerners are. You really do not understand how this works. She is my Empress. I love her because she is my Empress. She is the divine light of the Holy sun made manifest on the Continent and she is my Empress. Of course I love her. Do you think I would be this fucking terrified if I didn't. And I know, I know, you mean to insinuate that I love her in the way a man loves a woman but in this case, it is the same thing. She is my Empress and I love her.

“And she is alien to my understanding. She is more intelligent than just about anyone I know. She can cut through to the heart of the matter faster and better than even her father could. She can make intuitive leaps that baffle me but, at the same time, she is also as direct and brutal as any northerner can be. All of that wrapped in the skin of a beautiful young woman. Of course I love her.

“She is my Empress.”

I stared at him for a long time. “I'm sorry.” I said.

“It's alright. You do not understand. You are not Nilfgaardian. I do not mean to insult you in saying that. But it is true. You do not hold your rulers in as much reverence as we do.”

I felt my mouth begin to smile. “Do your people not conspire against each other as easy as breathing?”

“Not really. Not since the coup against Emperor Emhyr's father. That was the first time it happened really. But now, everyone can argue about who has the truest claim. But for the vast majority of Nilgaardians. They would not dream of it. She was properly annointed, enthroned and crowned. She is the Empress and she delivered the North to us, including Skellige. Her father might have conquered but she was the one who truly brought them into line. If she dies here,without naming an heir, it will mean war. A war that will, this time, swallow the world”

I nodded.

“Who else is here?”

“The lady Yennefer is here.”

I laughed. “Oh good. And you think I'm going to succeed where Yennefer has failed.”

“I hope so. If you don't then I don't know what I'm going to do.”

“No pressure then.”

His mouth twitched towards a smile again. “Absolutely none.”

We started walking again. “The most terrifying man on the face of the continent?” He asked.

“Arguably so.” I told him.

We came to a pair of huge wooden doors. Beautifully carved and ornamented, they stood as high as the corridor itself. Massively heavy looking they were bound with hinges of iron, the wood so old as to appear black. The corridor itself was surprisingly well lit. Much airier and well ventilated than I had though it would be. But regardless, two sets of guards stood next to the doors themselves. Huge men both. The one pair, Nilfgaardian soldiers in their full segmented armour. The black, featureless armour of the Imperial Guard. They had swords drawn and huge shields ready. Standing next to each man was a Skelligan warrior and where the Nilfgaardians wore black and were full, featureless figures, menacing in their anonymity, the Skelligans were bright and colourful. Massively bearded with long hair streaming down their backs. They wore large metal helms that were polished to a bright sheen that reflected the firelight from the torches. Huge shoulders, draped in fur, one I thought was bear hide, the other was from a seal if I am any judge. Hardened plates of metal wrapped in ornamented Leather made up their suits of armour, over the top of which was a woolen scarf in the An Craite colours. Huge round shields with a similarly polished centre boss, the wood of the shield covered in leather, painted, again, in the colours of the An Craite clan. In their hands were large, hook bladed axes.

Even though they were more colourful and shiny than their Nilfgaardian counterparts, the Skelligan royal guard were no less anonymous in their finery. I could not see either man's eyes, both were huge and their hair and beard colourings were not unusual enough to spark notice. Putting the two sets of guards next to each other, I could not have told you which was the more intimidating.

They say that the best guards don't need to do anything. All they have to do is to stand there and anyone who might have been contemplating attacking their charges would take one look at the guards and lose their courage. I can't answer to that. I have never spoken to any of these men on a social level. But I will admit that I was shitting myself already.

“Lord Frederick.” I looked at Lord Voorhis, “Make this happen Lord Frederick and I will...” He took a shuddering breath. “I. Will. Owe. You.” It looked as though it cost him everything he had to say that. I don't think it had really hit home to me how frightened this man was until he told me that.

A favour with the head of Imperial Confidential Agencies. I might get him to write it up so I can hang it on my wall.

“If she has me killed.” I told him, trying to keep the tone light. “Tell my family that I love them.”

“If she has you killed,” Voorhis found his humour. Possibly appreciating my attempt to lighten the humour. “Then I would strongly suspect that I will be joining you on the block.”

“Well, at least I will have company.”

Lord Voorhis nodded to the guards and one of the Nilfgaardians opened the door.

The royal chambers of Kaer Trolde were oddly disappointing. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this. It was like the kind of meeting room that Father used to keep, modern and sparse. There was a large table off to one side surrounded by chairs. A few more comfortable looking chairs were near the hearth and there was a desk as well with several more chairs arranged around the place. Shelves along the wall were full of orderly looking papers and scrolls with another set of shelves that were kept for books. Another door in the back of the room led to what I guessed would be some sleeping chambers.

There were several things that suggested that it was the chambers of the queen. First was the standing suit of the Queen's battle armour on one side. A huge, ornate and detailed piece of artistry that dazzled the eye but also looked as though it was hard worn. There were also two portrait style tapestrys. One over the fireplace and one on the opposite wall. The one over the fireplace was of the Queen herself but the other one portrayed a large bearded man. The hair and beard were red with slight hints of grey so judging by the colours that he wore, I guessed that this would be the fabled father of the Queen, Jarl Crach an Craite himself.

There was also a large two-handed axe above the fire-place. I wish I had the time to look at the room and give you a better description of the place but frankly I was too overwhelmed by the people that I saw there.

I would be a fool if I tried to pretend that I didn't know how much my life has changed since I set out and started writing about Kerrass in particular and Witchers in general. When I first set out I was a relatively minor student, younger son of a minor family that had been out of favour with the royal court of Redania for years. But every so often it is thrown into stark relief and I am left feeling dizzy by all of the things that have happened and by how far I have come.

To be clear, I am not just talking about my pending marriage, nor am I talking about my Proffesorship of Oxenfurt or my friendship with Kerrass. But suddenly, my family are in favour of not only the royal court but the Imperial court as well. So as a result I have met some of the most important figures of recent history. I have met those men and women who have shaped our world and made it into the place it is. I already knew Professor Dandelion but also his friend and business partner Zoltan Chivay. The pair of them are so known to me that it does not occur to me that they are also well aware of the most important people in the land.

Then I met the Kingslayer. That might have been taken for a fluke but then I was taken to Toussaint and I met a significant portion of the Lodge of Sorceresses, Lord Geralt and the Empress of Nilfgaard. I had other things on my mind at the time including my pending nuptials, family reunion and catastrophe so I was able to fall back on formal training. But it should never be claimed that I wasn't star struck.

Then we went on our way again.

Before we came to Skellige. Summoned by the most powerful man in the Empire and I wasn't joking when I said that he was the most terrifying man there. He gave me a problem, told me that he expected me to solve it and almost literally threw me to the wolves.

The doors opened without a sound on well-oiled hinges and I was faced with the throng. Lord Voorhis moved up next to me as I struggled to take it all in.

“Lord Frederick von Coulthard, Professor of Oxenfurt would like to discuss some matters of import with the Empress.” he intoned with all the formal vibrancy that he could muster in his voice.

The Empress sighed, almost imperceptibly before nodding. “Give us the room.” She said quietly and people started to file past us. Some looked shocked that I had the pull to have this done. Others even looked pleased to see me but most were impassive.

Who was there?

Literally the names of legend.

And they filed out of the room for me. I have never felt so small in my entire life and I have stood before an angry dragon.

One of the things that got to me was just how angry the room was. The air was almost vibrating with intense emotion and all of it turned on me. Three occupants of the room could burn me to a crisp or freeze me into a statue. Another could declare war and bring the, not inconsiderable, might of the Skelligan fleet down on merchantile shipping with a particular focus on my families goods. That's after they had me strung from the ramparts to freeze to death in the coming cold or be pecked to death by the crows.

And none of that includes the Empress herself who was almost blazing with rage.

The first to move was The High Druid Ermion. Some call him Mousesack but I notice that they never do that to his face. Ermion looks like the storybook ideal of the old, wise man. He's almost like a collection of individual features that have been thrown together. All of which would be remarkable on a person if taken by themselves but because they're all together on the same person they meld together into one overall picture. His long beard is grey and reaches easily to his navel. He strokes it when he thinks as well which adds to the almost storybook impression of him. His fingers are long and clever although they are beginning to gnarl with age. He has a long pronounced nose that makes you think of some kind of bird of prey and his eyes are dark and glitter beneath big, bushy grey eyebrows. His eyes are just as capable of being gentle with kindness, creased with laughter and terrifying in their anger.

He habitually wears a tall black hat, kept rigid by branches of wood and bits of antler that are tied to the outside of the hat and I understand that it is kind of like his badge of office as High Druid of the Skelligan circle of Druids. He is also a mage which, I understand, is not an automatic thing to happen when you're a druid. He was wearing a furred overcoat which I took to be either sheep skin or wolf fur over several heavy woollen layers of clothing, presumably to keep him warm. He wore a sash in red and black chequered pattern and similarly patterned woollen trousers under his over robe. He also had stout boots. He is getting old now and occasionally leans on a twisted staff from which dangle bits of bone, teeth and other charms which I strongly suspect are there for effect rather than any kind of magical or spiritual effect. He is a heavy set man, built to be a warrior if I am any judge, and I sometimes wonder what it was that drove him towards Druidism as a practise. I suspect that his magical talents might have something to do with it though.

I have since found him to be a man of astonishing wisdom and a breadth of knowledge that would intimidate some professors I know. He has a temper on him when he encounters stubbornness but I have found him a man of genial company.

But as I entered the royal chambers his eyes were blazing with anger, pain and something else that I could not identify. He was the first to break the tableau and stalked towards the door, brushing past me without a word.

There was another druid with him. A much shorter, heavily built man with massively muscled arms which seemed to stretch the lining of his robes. He astonished me by being clean shaven on his chin despite a pair of large sideburns. Around Skellige I was used to men being bearded thickly so to see someone clean shaven was strange. He had a soft cap on his head with flaps that could have been tied down to cover his ears. His skin was darker as well. I would have described it as being weather-beaten if I'm honest as there were huge crags in his skin and he seemed well worn. He seemed to be constantly scanning around him in the same way that soldiers do when they're in hostile territory or that sailors do when they sense a threat on the horizon. His entire body language was about deferring to Ermion though and I guessed him to be some kind of subordinate or aid to the older man's memory. He carried a sickle on his belt and the normal herbalism tools.

Another word here about druids.

All of the accusations that you might hear, about how The Church of the Eternal Fire stole a lot of their identity from other religions. How they stole festivals and made them their own, how they stole teachings and titles and lessons. All of those accusations are absolutely true.

What isn't true is that they stole those things from Kreve, or Melitele or any of the smaller cults and religions that are around the place. The place they stole those things from was the practise of Druidism.

Notice that I didn't call it the religion of Druidism although it's very close to that. I'm not an expert and so, I'm not going to claim to be an expert on what Druidism actually is. I can tell you that all of the books that you might read on the subject are almost universally rubbish. This is because Druidism is an aural tradition.

Yes, a lot like the Skelligans are. This is why the Druids have made the islands of Skellige one of their headquarters and the circle of druids on Skellige is probably the most pre-eminent organisation of druids in the North.

For those of my readers who are less familiar with what actually happens in Druidism. No, they don't sacrifice animals or take part in blood sacrifices or naked orgies. Sorry to disappoint. They are an order of men who are devoted to the preservation of what they call “The natural order”. They are kind of like the male counterpart to Melitele and Freya but what they actually do is to represent the natural world in courts and councils all over the world. They are the people that will point out when a river is being overfished and warn when that the salmon will soon learn to go somewhere else to spawn if people keep over fishing it. They warn about the deforestation and cities being built in the most fertile areas of land. They seem to spend all of their time warning people of the long term consequences of their actions but because those consequences aren't going to happen for another couple of hundred years, they keep getting brushed off as being unimportant.

At some point in the future, there may come a time when the natural order rebels and the resulting disasters will happen. We will turn to the Gods and the Kings and the rulers and say “Why did no-one warn us?” and the druids will respond with a short sharp, “We did,”

I don't know why early followers of the Eternal Flame started to steal and make use of the practises of the Eternal Flame. I can say that it wasn't really the earliest cultists. It was later when it started to expand beyond the confines of Novigrad that those corruptions started to take place and the practise of burning a Yule log, as an example, started to become a thing that followers of the Eternal Flame used to do.

But anyway, I bring this up, not to start an argument on the subject. There are many well researched and far more formal books and essays on the topic floating around. But the reason I brought this up is because the title of the Chief Druid of a Druid's circle is “Hierophant”.

I suspect that the Church of the Eternal Fire took this title when the organisation started to grow a bit more and they needed separate leaders of the church when it became implausible to run the entirety of the religion out of one place. They needed a title that the populace would respect and so they took on the title that they were already using when referring to druids.

The next two people to walk past me were Lady Yennefer, formerly of Vengerberg and she had her head together with her friend Lady Triss Merigold, advisor to the Throne of Kovir and Poviss.

I have never met Lady Merigold on a personal basis and I did not that time either. What little part of the two women's conversation I caught was that Lady Merigold was intending to gate back to Kovir and Poviss almost directly but would attempt to come back for the height of the festival. So I apologise if this comes across as being a little superficial.

To say that Lady Merigold is a beautiful woman is redundant. The same as it is for all Sorceresses really. The two of them are very different in appearance in that Lady Merigold seems a little brighter and softer. Although her cheekbones are as well defined as you might imagine, her mouth is a little more generous and her chin a little more rounded than Lady Yennefer's is. She has blue-green eyes which I understand can shift from one to the other depending on her mood but again, I can't answer for that. She was wearing her ruddy, chestnut coloured hair tied back from her face when I saw her and she wore a large, thick looking, fur lined light turquoise dress that ran from her neck down so that it swished around her ankles. She had a small pendant round her neck and some pearl ear-rings. Again, like a lot of Sorceresses I have seen, she is absurdly slim and the dress was cut to her figure in a way that left little to the imagination as to what her shape was despite there being no flesh on display. There was a slit in the dress but I caught sight of high topped boots under the skirts and I guessed that she could run, rider or even fight in that thing. The overall impression that I got from Lady Merigold was that she was worried. A bit sad and if you held a dagger to my throat then I would have guessed that she had been there to act as some kind of peace keeper. To get between hot headed tempers and do her best to calm folk down. That would certainly track with what I have heard of the woman.

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Her companion I know a little better although to call us friends would be pushing it. I sometimes wonder if Lady Yennefer has any friends really. She would be easy to feel sorry for in this regard if she wouldn't be mortally offended at the offer of pity. But she has a reputation for using her friends to get what she wants over and above their wellbeing. She would argue that she had no other choice to do other than what she had to do and maybe she is right. I have not sat down with her and gone through the events in any kind of detail. I am not her chronicler and as such it is not my place to comment or record.

I have a working relationship with Lady Yennefer as I am working with her on both the book regarding Jack and his ilk and I am also working with her on the consultations regarding founding a new Witcher School. From these two avenues I find her to be absolutely professional, if unsmiling and cheerless while she is doing so. Fiercely intelligent and utterly charming when she wants to be but there is always a palpable aura of menace about her. As though she could explode and tear your face off at any moment. I have wondered if she does this deliberately.

She's also the kind of person where you find yourself remembering her differently from what she actually looks like. She's actually a relatively small person which she makes up for by wearing higher heels and platforms in her boots. I understand that the technical term is “petite” but I wouldn't dare describe her as such. But when you think of her you imagine her as being taller and larger and much much more terrifying than she actually is in person.

We all know what she looks like. Professor Dandelion has waxed lyrical about her appearance on many different occasions. Raven dark hair, violet eyes, slim waist, pointed chin. Again, like her friend, of course she is beautiful but where Lady Merigold is beautiful like a spring morning, Lady Yennifer is beautiful like a storm cloud is beautiful. Like lightening in the sky and the shine of light on the edge of a sword.

Yes, she frightens me. But I don't think that that speaks any the less of me as I'm pretty sure she terrifies everyone she meets. Including the man with whom she shares a home with in Toussaint.

She was also wearing thick and warm clothing. Her habitual colours are black and white with the odd piece of silver jewellery. Long, thick black skirts but without a slit this time. They are more voluminous by design which adds to the feeling that she is a moving storm-cloud. She was wearing a fur lined jacket and waistcoat as well as gloves. As form fitting as her friend's clothes but the bulk was enough to make it seem less alluring somehow.

She was also shaking with barely restrained emotion. Lady Yennefer does not shout. She speaks quietly and carefully and every word can cut you like the sharpest razor blade, but her eyes were blazing. She touched my arm in passing as a greeting but I did not have time to notice if she tried to give me some form of message with her eyes.

I recognised the personal secretary to the Empress as well. It shames me a little that, at the time of writing, I can't remember his name but the entire world should be grateful that he exists and has the abilities that he does. He was once described to me as a kind of memory machine. One of those clockwork things that you can find in Gnomish shops in places like Oxenfurt and Novigrad only instead of being made and designed around motion, he is built around memory.

His job is to remember the Empress' calendar for the day, who she has appointments with and who she is meeting with at any given time. If she wants something to eat then it is he that orders the food. If she is too angry for receiving someone, or too upset or too....anything to be able to properly do her job and deal with whatever it is that's in front of her. It's this man's job to stand in front of you and say “The Empress is not receiving people at present, would you care to make an appointment.”

If the hardest job in governing the Empire is the Empress then the second hardest job is the position of private secretary. He is an immovable wall between his mistress and people that she doesn't want to see but can fade into the background in just about all other situations. It has been said that if something happened to him then the Empire would collapse and I believe it.

He is a tall man in his early twenties. His hair was retreating from his face which was leading to a pronounced widows peak. He has a sharp nose and equally sharp eyes which always seem to be focused on a point just in front of him that no-one else can see. His hair is long and he wears it in a tight braid down his back. Why he doesn't just have it cut off is beyond me. On those rare social occasions when the Empress has sent him away on the grounds that she is a firm believer that everyone (other than her) needs to get drunk every so often, he is known to be charming, modest and humorous. He can tell some hair raising stories about the things that he has seen, even in the relatively short time that he has been with the Empress, although he protects the identity of the people he's talking about with ease.

He wears a robe most days and he must have a collection of several dozen of them, all of them a kind of uniform grey. He habitually wears riding boots in case his mistress decides that she needs to go for a ride at any given time. He also wears a sword and a long fighting knife. He is rumoured to be an expert in the use of either although no-one has ever seen him practise or train. He is utterly devoted to the Empress and anyone doubting that would find it useful to know that he carries several methods with which to end his own life should anyone try and kidnap him or coerce him in any way.

His concession to the fact that he was now in colder climate was the fact that he was wearing a fur mantle around his shoulders. He checked with his mistress before he left and only moved to walk past me and out of the doors when she nodded. I know that he prides himself on showing absolutely no surprise at the situations that he finds himself in and no emotion either when he's working. He's the one that would have to examine the formal declaration of war for spelling mistakes before the Empress signs it, so this is the kind of position where such measures of calm are needed. But his movements seemed a little, crooked to me. A little hurried and abrupt. But again, I didn't have time to analyse what was happening there.

Another Sorceress walked past me. I struggle to talk about Lady Philippa Eilhart for a variety of reasons. To me she is like the boogeyman. When religious people tell you to be afraid of Sorcerers and Sorceresses, the person that they describe and tell you to be afraid of is Lady Eilhart. This is especially true in Redania where the King, and the head of the church of the Eternal Fire, hated her with unbridled passion. There were several years where you couldn't move in Redania for seeing a portrait of this woman on door-frames and fence-posts with descriptions of increasingly lavish rewards for information that would lead to the death or the capture of this one Sorceress.

Sooner or later, that kind of thing can get to you. In the same way that I was forced to overcome my in built prejudices around Elves, I was taught to hate Lady Eilhart and Sorceresses in general and needed to overcome that. Most of that was obviously false but in examining my own behaviour and the things that have happened over the years, I must admit that some of this societal conditioning has gotten through to me.

Because I am afraid of Philippa Eilhart. When my mind conjures images of terrifying magic users who will do anything, cross any line and commit despicable acts for their own purposes, the face I put on those sentiments is Lady Eilhart's. When my mind threw up my worst nightmares so that Jack could examine my greatest fears, the person that I imagined as a traitor and murderer who killed my friends and loved ones? That person was Lady Eilhart.

And it's nonsense.

In the same way that I had been trained and conditioned to distrust and look down on Elves as a race, I had been trained and conditioned to distrust and fear Lady Eilhart.

Knowing why it happened is not helpful. I am aware that King Radovid resented Lady Eilhart's stewardship over him when he was growing up. I know that he blamed Lady Eilhart for the death of his father King Vizimir, the truth of which is now impossible to prove. I know that she was blamed by many for some of the less popular decrees by Kind Radovid's father and that when he died, she headed up the regency council and proceeded to make herself more unpopular. I also know that the Head of the Church hated her because of her political status. The head of the church was jealous of the fact that she had so much sway over royalty, a position that he felt that the church, and therefore himself, should hold rather than some “upstart, disrespectful, rude, heathen Sorceress”. So she became the figurehead for Sorceress decadence that began even before King Radovid took the throne. I imagine that if you asked her about her biggest mistakes, she might even admit that one of those mistakes was to discount the threat that the Church of the Eternal Flame presented.

So I know why I feel the way I do about Lady Eilhart. I also know, from her own mouth, that this reputation is something that she has, herself, worked towards furthering. She likes being feared and finds it useful. But to be absolutely fair to her. I have not seen her doing anything sinister. I have seen her getting angry. She absolutely believes in the pre-eminence of mages and also believes that Sorceresses are better than their male counterparts. She also bitterly resents any intrusion of outside organisations in matters of magic. Matters that she sees as belonging solely to the Lodge of Sorceresses which she is the founding member of and, arguably, it's leader.

She has softened a bit since I first met her. When I first knew her I described her as looking like a statue. All cold, hard and unapproachable. Obviously she is insanely beautiful but I didn't, and don't, find her attractive. She gives the impression of a woman who has let her hair down a bit both literally and figuratively. Her formerly tight braids had been brushed out and now her hair had been piled up on top of her head in an ornate hairstyle. She is the kind of woman that doesn't do anything without a reason though and I wondered if the odd strand of hair tumbling loose was intentional. Like the small nod and smile of greeting that she offered me as she passed me on the way out.

She continues to insist on wearing the low cut dresses and bodices that Sorceresses were once famous for which displayed a, to me, excessive amount of flesh. Especially given the climate. In Lady Eilhart's case I am fully aware that this is a manipulation. She does it to distract those men that might want to talk to her as, if half the rumours are true, she generally prefers the romantic company of women to men. I also thought I could see a faint light around her which suggested that she was using a spell to keep herself warm given the cold and her.... shall we say.... reduced outfit.

I understand that I'm doing a lot of talking about the people in the room but I think it's kind of important. When people like this gather into one place, history happens. There's no getting away from that. History was happening in that room and we should let the record show who was actually there.

So let's talk about Queen Cerys of Skellige. After the Empress, the woman with the most young boy crushes on the face of the planet and like the Empress she projects an air of regality that many men would struggle to summon in the same situation. There was no mistaking her for a common member of the crowd. No mistaking her for a common Skelligan woman.

Although saying that there was such a thing as a “common” Skelligan woman is a bit of a misnomer.

But she dressed like them.

I have no doubt that she has a crown somewhere as well as the posh and ornamental armour that stood in the corner of the room on a stand. She will have a shining sword or an equally beautiful axe as well as a bow that has been carved into strange, aesthetically pleasing shapes. She will have beautiful boots and equally ornate capes that would picker her out from the crowd and I would also be willing to bet that she has a room somewhere where all of those things are stored. I suspect that this room is close to her chambers so that when the occasion dictates that she looks like the Queen that her people expect her to be, she can send her servants (the Skelligans refer to who I think of as servants, as thralls. Just another little note on the language of those islander people) to fetch the required item.

But as I say, she needs none of these things. I knew who she was the instant that I walked into the room. She wears her hair pulled back from her face with a couple of strips of leather. It is a, for the islands, a fairly standard mix between red and dark blonde although her colouring was more towards her father's red hair than her mother's blonde colourings. She has brown eyes which, at the time, were buried under furrowed brows. Apparently this is a common expression for her to be wearing as she is always thinking about what comes next and what needs to be done at any given time. She's the kind of person that's always thinking two steps ahead and I understand that her people make it their mission to try and get her to live in the moment.

She is held responsible for bringing the Skelligan isles into the modern world and is also the reason that Skellige declared an alliance with the Empire rather than allowing themselves to be conquered by it. She has made the reforms to the Skelligan economy, has taught her people to farm as well as raid but has not let up on making sure that the Skelligans rule the seas. The Skelligans were sceptical about her but more recently, I think that they are proud of their unconventional Queen.

She was wearing a Long, quilted, red arming jacket and I wondered at the fact that it was of almost exactly the right shade to match her hair. There was thick steel arm guards on each wrist and over her shoulders as well as a wide, thick leather belt around her midriff. She also wore a sash of An Craite tartan around herself and the woollen cape that seemed to be trendy in these parts as a guarding against the cold. At her side was a long, thin sword. Kind of like a sabre. And there was a long knife which the Skelligans describe as a “Dirk”.

Is she beautiful?

What a stupid question.

She is a Warrior Queen. She's another one of those women who does not care how tall you are or how strong you are. If she decides to take you down then she will take you down and be damned what you think. I think she's very attractive, if out of reach, but she doesn't fall into any of the conventions of what modern “society” think of as being beautiful. She wears no make-up and she is as weather beaten as any of her warriors. My peers would probably describe her as “Handsome” but I think that this falls short of what she actually looks like.

The Queen glanced over at The Empress. She was stood a little to one side when I walked in, her arms were folded, her head tilted to one side as though she was watching and listening carefully to everything that was happening. That would track with what I know of her character and her way of working. Eventually she seemed to decide that she wasn't going to get any kind of response. There was a difference to the way that she was watching the Empress as well.

Where other people look at the Empress with deference and respect I got a sense of something else from Queen Cerys although I couldn't tell you what it was for the life of me. When she realised that she wasn't going to get anything from the Empress she shook her head and rubbed at her fore-head before leaving. I got the sense that she appraised me as she moved past me, a glance up and down as I was assessed and much later I wondered if I was found wanting. But she moved past me and closed the door behind me so that I was left alone with the Empress.

I was still stood next to the door and I hadn't really looked anywhere other than at the Empress since I entered.

What can I say about Empress Cirilla that has not already been written or said by many. Including myself. She's the Empress and every time I think that I have a grip on what kind of person she is. What she might do or how she might behave. She runs off in a completely different direction. How she was dressed now was just a perfect example of this. She wasn't wearing some kind of ornate, Imperial dress. Nor was she wearing Imperial black formal wear. She didn't wear the outfit that she supposedly wears when she wants to ape her father. Nor did she wear any kind of armour like the Skelligans did. She was dressed in a pair of leather trousers and worn leather boots, a White shirt with an over shirt of dark red wool. She was also wearing a some fur shoulder guards and I wondered whether it was her wearing these things that had started the fashion that seemed to prevalent in these parts.

She looked different to how I was expecting her to look. When I had first seen her in Toussaint, she had looked calm and collected. She looked as though she commanded the room and everyone in it. The world bowed down to her. I have since checked back in my notes and I described her as moving with speed but without haste. As though she knew that she had things to do but at the same time, knew that everyone would wait until she arrived. She dressed, at the time, as though she did not need to tell everyone who she was. She wore simple clothing. Clothing that would have been appropriate whether she was going out on a ride or standing to debate high matters in a court room. Minimal jewellery. She had looked elegant, calm and utterly in control.

She had dominated the room in Toussaint. Nobles from all over the continent, all over the world really, had been in that room and she had looked around with her startling green eyes and every man there knew that this was not a woman that could be crossed. You might try to get one over on this woman but that, even if you thought that you had won, it would turn out that she had anticipated you. That her plans had been far more advanced than you could possibly have foreseen and that you have lost. Lost without an arrow being fired or a sword being swung.

This was not the same woman that I saw when I was shown into the royal quarters of Kaer Trolde. This woman in front of me was wild and unkempt. Not physically. You can't look particularly unkempt, dirty or untidy when you travel with a small army of maids, tailors, cobblers and all of the other mysterious things that women do to make themselves look perfect.

But she looked wild. She was distracted. Rather than the kind of focus that she used to have where her eyes would train themselves on a person and bore into them like some kind of gnomic drill. She wasn't meeting anyone's eyes. Her gaze was darting around, looking at anyone but at the person in front of her who was talking, or yelling, at her.

She was fidgeting. The utter stillness of body and mind that she had commanded before where, if you weren't careful, it would have been easy to mistake her for some kind of statue, was gone. In it's place was a nervous energy. She was playing with the edges of her clothes. Fiddling with the rings on her fingers and adjusting the belts and straps that she had around herself. She no longer looked like an Empress. She looked like a lost woman, a drowning woman who couldn't possibly find her way to shore and was now waiting for her strength to give out so that she could just get on with the business of drowning. Not that she was intending to give up fighting. But that she so desperately wanted to.

She was stood with her hands on her hips and she was glaring at me, her bright green eyes glittering at me in a way that nailed me to the floor and I finally understood what it was that had terrified Lord Voorhis so much. The Empire no longer had an Empress.

“WHAT?” She demanded.

I gave up.

I have talked about this moment before but now I have a bit more of an insight into what happens in my brain. This is the point where I get so overwhelmed by other things that my brain shuts down and just starts saying the first thing that comes to my mind.

Since the adventures with the Cult of the First born I have been trying to work on my anger problem. The overwhelming rage that I feel at any one moment regarding the loss of my sister as well as the many other problems that I see in the world, real or/and imagined. With the help of Kerrass and Ariadne I have been doing my best to take that rage and anger, focus it, change it and channel it into something useful.

Kerrass' methods have been about channelling the energy that I get from the anger into useful things. Fencing masters, including Kerrass, will teach you that the loss of temper will result in death but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't get angry. The technique is in using that anger as a focus, as a drive but never as a goad. He has been teaching me to use that energy in a fight before disposing of it afterwards in more healthy ways.

Is it working? Yes and no. When it works the way it is meant to, I become a better fighter. But when it doesn't, I become worse. I become reckless and too aggressive without paying attention to my own defences.

Ariadne on the other hand is teaching me that there is no shame in feeling anger. That there is no problem with anger or rage or upset. That it doesn't make me less of a man to weep tears of rage or of sadness. She will sit and listen to what I have to say, laugh, console and gently chide when I am being unfair about things or being unfair to myself. But she never tries to tell me that I shouldn't be angry.

I am still learning the trick to this.

I have also explored the possibility that I might, on some level, be a Baresark. During some of the time later where I had nothing to do on the islands of Skellige, I spent some time with those people that might be able to tell me more about that side of my character. I hope to go into it later on as it was an interesting episode. But what they told me is that everyone comes to it from different directions. Some people teach themselves to be a berserker whereas other people become so as a form of self-defence. But again, over and over, they told me that to be a berserker is not anything that I should be afraid of. That anyone should be afraid of. They taught me that it is like knowledge. The acquiring of knowledge in and of itself is not evil or dangerous. It is only what you do with that knowledge that can be dangerous.

But in that moment. In that room with the Empress, the woman who had once told me, ordered me in fact, to think of her as another sister. It was all just a bit too much.

Three days ago I was in Novigrad, resigned to waiting for another couple of days for one of the families merchant vessels to turn up to take us to Skellige. But then I had been picked up by one of the fastest ships on the ocean, taken to Skellige at a speed that my body did not agree with. I had been sick, dehydrated and hungry before being fed unfamiliar food and strong alcohol. Then I had been overwhelmed by the place that I was in, told that it was up to me to save the empire from disaster and ruin, been told a remarkable story that I didn't really understand and hadn't really processed yet, moved through the castle of Kaer Trolde. Been confronted with some of the most powerful people in the Empire and now the most powerful person in the Empire was yelling at me.

So the thinking part of my brain just shut down. That part of me that carefully thinks through options, consequences and long term results. It just gave up, threw it's metaphorical hands up in the air and walked away from the table.

Kerrass argues that if I could harness this and do it at will, then I would be an infinitely better spear man and fighter in general. If I could change from one state to the next, then I would be a fighter to be feared. I'm not sure I want to be able to do that though. It does run in line with the problems I had at Oxenfurt when I tried to learn to fence when my masters kept telling me that my brain kept getting in the way of my ability to fight.

But the other time it tends to come up is in those social situations. It's worked out fairly well for me so far when my body, mouth and sense of humour just start acting of their own accord without asking for permission from my brain.

It happened when I saw the corpse of Tom the Troll and I made a joke. A stupid, thoughtless joke in the face of the horror that was before me. It happened again when I started telling Ariadne, in detail, what would happen if she declared herself as the Spider Queen of Angral. It also happened when I asked Maleficent where her staff went when she transformed between her dragon form and her human form.

It happened again here.

“WHAT?” Demanded the Empress.

I felt my jaw work a few times as I tried to work out what to say but my mind had gone blank. Everything that Lord Voorhis had told me. Everything that I had come up with on the way from listening to the story, every logical argument that I had reasoned out and the brief outline of a strategy that I had formed in an effort to prevent the Empress from killing herself just leapt out of my ears and vanished.

Instead, I just stood there and gaped at her for a moment.

Then I spoke.

“Have you lost your FUCKING MIND?” I bellowed back at her. She opened her mouth to respond but wherever I was, my body was clearly not paying attention. I held up my hand. “I don't want to hear it.” I told her as I started looking around the room. I found what I was looking for off in the corner. A glass bottle with an amber looking liquid in it as well as some small leather cups.

“That looks promising.” I said aloud as I walked over to the small table. “At least that way, when you have me killed I can say that I drank from the Queen's private stash.”

I stomped over to the table, picked up one of the bottles at random and unstopped it. Sniffed it, which caught me in a conflict between how amazing it smelt but also about how the smell reached down my throat and reminded me how little I had had to eat over the last few days.

“Flame but that smells good.”

I poured myself a generous measure, considered it for a moment before some part of me decided that I was in it now and I should just enjoy the journey. I tipped my head back and drank the measure off at a swallow.

It was surprisingly smooth.

From a logical standpoint I can look back at this instance as well as the instance with Ariadne in particular and say why it works.

Sometimes.

The reason that it works is that it is the unexpected thing. The behaviour that no-one expects. Ariadne did not expect this little human upstart, which is all she though I was at the time, to stand up to her and tell her what is what and to do so in a well thought out manner.

I don't know why The Empress didn't just have me killed but I suspect it was for the same reason. She didn't expect me to start yelling at her. She probably expected some kind of logical reasoned, scholarly argument followed by a gentle play on her heart-strings. But instead she got a full frontal assault followed by an almost instantaneous withdrawal.

I poured myself another cup full, drank a bit more and topped my cup up, before turning back round to face her. I hadn't seen it before but she looked awful. Pale and tired with the huge black bags under her eyes.

“I mean seriously.” I told her. “Have your brains dribbled out of your ears? I have been wandering around the continent telling people how clever the Empress is, how good and how noble she is and about how she is the best hope for us all. Then I come here and find that you're about to throw your life away on a fucking whim.”

“It's not a whim.” She snapped back, “It's not a whim.”

“Then what the fuck is it Ciri?”

She bridled at that.

“That's, Your Majesty for such as you.” She snarled.

“No it isn't. You ordered me to call you Ciri when we're in private. You insisted on it. You even made it a decree as I recall so I'm going to call you Ciri in the here and now. It also comes with the fact that I can call you fucking stupid as well. Which you are.”

“How dare you...”

“You're seriously going to hide behind your rank with me. Seriously? You can do that with all of the other folks. You can order Queens and Sorceresses and Druids around. You can demand that they obey you and bow and scrape and call you “Imperial Majesty” but that's because they all care about things like that.”

“Are you saying that I don't.”

“Obviously not other wise you wouldn't be taking such a foolish option. Here.” I told her. I threw my belt dagger at her feet. “If you want to kill yourself, use that. I sharpen it every day so it should be good and sharp enough so that you won't feel it.”

“It won't kill me.” She told me. “Whatever's on that ship. It won't kill me.”

“Which is exactly what every other mad, selfish fucker who has ever attempted to climb aboard has ever said. “They won't kill me,” they say, “because I'm special”.”

“I am special.”

“Yes you are.” I growled. “Yes you fucking are and the reason that you are special is that if anything happens to you, the world will destroy itself and your people will drown in an ocean of blood as everyone, and I do mean everyone, will tear your Empire apart and fight over the scraps until there's no-one left.”

“I am the Lady of Time and Space.” She hissed. “And you have no idea what that means. I carry the elder blood in my veins. I can move through space and time. I have seen and done things that you could not possibly even dream of.” Her own voice was rising now. “I have spoken with people that you would consider Gods and walked through worlds where I was the only living thing. They will speak to me.”

“Or they will kill you.” I bellowed. “Or they will kill you. You are the only one that can hold this together. The only one and everyone knows it. EVERYONE knows it. I've read your list of titles. If you write them all down in the proper script of the Heraldic colleges, they actively cover more than one piece of paper. You could oust Queen Cerys if you wanted to and declare yourself Queen. The North love you because you talk like they do and because you're the heir of the Queen of Cintra. Queen Calanthe, that great martyr to the cause and you're her Grand-daughter. The South loves you because you are the daughter of that most terrifying of men, the White Flame Dancing on the Graves of his Enemies. You could hardly avoid being loved after one so feared. You are young, you are beautiful, you are a child of the great houses, you are charming and the Emperor declared that you were his heir. What with everything that has happened, the Emperor has been preparing the South for your arrival for years and now you're finally here. The one person that can combine the North and South.”

“There are others who could....”

“Who?”

“I haven't got time to...”

“Then fucking make time. I get that you've been going through this with everyone for fucking days. I understand that you are tired and you want to be left alone but who would replace you. Voorhis? Voorhis is a good man and would make a passable Emperor but the North hate and fear him and the South just hates him for not pressuring you into doing things that they want. Any of the Northern Client Kings are not strong enough. Their neighbours would descend into war as they all, and I do mean all, try to erase their defeat at the hands of Nilfgaard in the blood of their neighbours. The same will be said about any of the other noble houses of the South. Each one of them will claim that they have a better claim than the next and each one of them will go to war over it. If you die then the Entire continent will dissolve into a thousand little civil wars.”

“All of this I've heard before and none of it is convincing. First of all. I won't die. I am more powerful than those things on the boat and if they even try to stop me then I will destroy them. Second of all, I am well aware that there is a lack of clear progression so I have put clear orders in place as to what should happen in the event of anything happening to me. Thirdly, I think you're being pessimistic as to what would happen but fourthly, I have to know. I have to know that....”

“Ok, First of all.... How do you know that. I would remind you that when those dice roll on the back of the skeleton ship, people don't choke to death. They don't drown or bleed or explode. They just die. Secondly, if you disappear, either through death or by vanishing, your orders aren't worth the paper that they were written on. I give it a week, at most before someone is using them to wipe their arse with. Thirdly, I am a historian and over and over again people have proved me....”

“BUT I HAVE TO KNOW.” She all but screamed it.

“HAVE TO KNOW WHAT?” I demanded. “What could possibly be more important than the safety of your people?”

She clammed up and turned away.

I went and walked back over to where the drinks were stored. This time I selected a different bottle. The liquid inside was a deeper, more ruddy colour which actually turned out to be much lighter in texture and flavour.

“Flame curse me for a fool Ciri but help me understand. I seem to say it over and over again to people in different walks of life but, use me. I'm a historian. Why are you doing this? Why are you risking everything that so many people have risked so much to build? Many of whom paid the ultimate price to get things to a point where peace is actually a lasting possibility. You're scaring folk Ciri.”

I took a drink.

“Fucking hell. Lord Voorhis is scared and I didn't think that that was possible. He's so scared that he's scaring me. Lord Voorhis, scariest man in history after your father and now you're scaring him. How is that possible?”

She sighed and I began to groan. The Empress was coming back. I had nearly gotten through to her but then she had dodged it and her defences were going back up. I groaned inwardly and finished my drink in case I never got the chance for another one. “My turn for a kicking now I suspect.” I told myself.

I was not wrong.

“One of the first things that my father told me,” she began, “was that the interesting thing about being Emperor is never having having to explain yourself to anyone. It is still true. I do not have to explain myself to you. Not to you and not to anyone.”

“Ciri.”

“Your Majesty.” She snarled. “I am your Empress now and you will refer to me as such or so help me I will have you torn apart on the wheel.”

“YOUR MAJESTY THEN.” I screamed at her. “You owe...”

“I OWE YOU NOTHING. I DON'T OWE YOU A DAMN THING.” The walls seemed to shake with the force of her rage. Looking back I should have seen the other things in her voice as well but I was too far gone to see it.

“Ciri....”

“No. Fuck you Frederick. You've had your turn and I was pretty fucking gracious in letting you get that much in. Anyone else, anyone else including my father, would have had you drawn, castrated and quartered for talking to me the way you just have. Father would have made your death last for weeks. You dare come here and lecture me about responsibility. You dare talk to me about preserving my own state for all the people that choose to live in my empire.”

“That's...”

“BE SILENT.” She thundered, her eyes blazing. “You go running off round the country on your little errands and it seems to me that you have lost sight of your own duties. Duties that you're lucky enough to have align with your own interests. How long ago was that book supposed to be published? The one on Jack? How long has your betrothal been dragging on now. Countess de Angral would be well within her rights to throw you over in favour of the next most eligible suitor. Where's my recommendation on the new Witcher school? But instead you run around, circumventing the law, screaming at feudal lords about their duties and running off into the wilds.

“And in all of that time, you have forgotten that you answer to me. I have to tell you nothing. I will tell you nothing. I owe you nothing.”

My thinking brain was starting to come back now. I was still angry but there was the beginning of a thought process there at the very least.

“What about your subjects then?” I wondered. “Hmmm? What about them? What about the farmer that's going to be left, weeping, as he tries to keep his guts inside his own stomach? What about the knight who's had his face carved in due to the impact of a mace? What about the hundreds, the thousands of women and children who are going to be waiting for people to come home.”

“They are my people Frederick. Not yours and do not think I see what you say as anything other than the cheap, manipulative ploy that it is. Tugging on my heart-strings like that.”

She stalked up to me and suddenly I was on the defensive. I was afraid. I had trained with this woman in Toussaint and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop her if she chose to just cut my heart out with a rusty eating knife.

“What do you care Frederick? Who are you working for?” She wondered, her green eyes staring at me. They seemed to cut through my face and into the depths of me.

Her eyes were bloodshot.

“Majesty I...” I shook my head. I was wrong, there was something else going on here that I did not yet understand.

“Don't you Majesty me. I've met you on less than a handful of occasions. All of those occasions because I knew and loved your sister and she vouched for you.”

I shuddered as she said that. I'll leave it to you to guess which point set me off.

“So who do you think you are to come barging in here like you own the place? Who do you think you are to question my decisions? Who do you think you are to...”

“Majesty....” I had begun to shake. It would not be unfair to say that I was trembling.

“For the love of the Universe.” She snapped, throwing her hands up in the air. “Stop fucking talking. You've had your speeches where I've stood still and listened to you go on and on and on to the same tune as just about every fucker who has walked through my door since I arrived in Skellige. We're not that close Frederick. So who sent you? Why did Voorhis think that it was a good idea to send for you? Do you work for him?”

“May I answer?” I hissed. Despite the fact that The Empress is a little shorter than I am physically, I was feeling a little overwhelmed.

She said nothing and I took that for permission.

“Just because we're all saying the same thing, you think that we're lying to you. You make it sound like, because everyone is singing the same tune that must mean that we're all in cahoots against you. Or could it be because we're all fucking terrified. For you, about you and what will happen if this all goes the way we fear.

“You're the only one. The only one who doesn't see this ending in disaster. Let's say you don't die. What happens when the ship sails off with you still aboard? What happens when the ship simply vanishes.”

“I am the lady of time and space and...”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means that I will survive. I have to survive.”

“Why do you believe that?” I stared at her for a long moment. My trembling was subsiding a little. “Is it because you always have? Is that it?”

She drew her lips back from her teeth in a snarl but I kept going.

“There are two quotes.” I told her. “ The first is that just because something has always been correct does not mean that it will be correct tomorrow. The other quote is that “If a thing can go wrong, it will go wrong.” Kerrass has shown me that that second one is true on many different occasions. So many different occasions. So what makes you think that your importance will mean that you survive. Is it because destiny, or fate or whatever the fuck has made sure that you will survive so far? What makes you think that you will do so this time? What makes you think that Destiny, fate, the stars, the tapestry or whatever isn't done with you, doesn't need you any more? What if you're role in the world is done and now you're just like everyone else.”

“I can protect myself....” She began.

“How? You can teleport? According to the story the victims of the ship don't bleed, they don't choke, clutch their hearts or anything else that you can just teleport away from. They just die in an instant. They just stop. How do you teleport away from that?”

“I've had enough of this. I don't have to listen to...”

“Fine.” I yelled. “Fucking kill yourself then.” I turned for the door before a thought occurred and I turned. “I haven't answered your question. Why do I care? Who sent me? My sister did. Francesca sent me.”

I might as well have slapped her.

She flushed bright red with emotion. I was guessing that it was rage or shock but it could have gone either way. It was particularly shocking for her as she is naturally pale of complexion made even more so by her ash grey-blonde hair.

I was not in a much better state myself.

“My sister loved you.” I spat at her. “My sister raved about you in her letters. She said that you were a good person. That you loved life and loved your people. She was glad and proud to serve you. She was proud to be your friend and did everything in her power to help you do what you have to do. She loved you Majesty. She would have died for you.”

I brushed my own tears from my face angrily.

“Damn it.” I muttered as my rage left me abruptly. There was a chair nearby and I sat down in it as I was no longer confident that my legs would support me. I desperately wanted to be sick and my head was spinning.

“Why am I here?” I felt almost disconnected. “I was coming to Skellige to follow a lead. To speak to the druids to find out some information about who might have taken Frannie from us both. Who might have taken Frannie from the world as I think we can both agree that the world is a darker place without her. Why am I in this room? Because Lord Voorhis told me that you were intending to kill yourself.”

“I'm not going to kill myself... I'm not going to die.”

“Maybe not. But are you honestly going to tell me that you don't want it. A little bit?” I risked looking at her but she had turned away. “I'll ask you a different question then. How long has it been since you actually did any ruling, any proper governing and making decisions?”

She didn't say anything and I saw that I was right but I decided that the coffin needed another nail.

“If this thing doesn't kill you. How long before you find something else that does?”

She spun back to face me. “I do not have a death wish.”

“Really? Then why are you doing this? What could possibly be worth risking your life, the lives of your subjects north and south and the very existence of the Empire? What could be worth it?”

She looked me straight in the eyes then. Straight into them, the same trick that Ariadne has some times where she looks and feels as though she's staring straight into my soul. “Certainty.” She told me.

“Certainty about what?”

She shook her head and her face crumpled, suddenly reminding me of Francesca so much that my chest hurt as she covered her face with my hands.

“Why am I here?” I asked her. “Why did I come here and yell and scream and risk my life?”

She looked up at me questioningly.

“Yes, I risk my life.” I told her. “I am under no illusions about what would happen if you decided that I was being really offensive. No illusions at all. I would be a blot on the side of the wall. A shadow that Queen Cerys would bring guests around to see. “There is Lord Frederick the upstart,” she will say. “He pissed off the Empress and she scorched his remains into the wall.”

She sniffed but I thought I could see some humour in there somewhere.

“When I left Toussaint,” I began. “I was a lost man. Kerrass literally had to kick the shite out of me to make my brain start working again. I was desperate, flailing around in an effort to try and find something, anything to hold onto. In the middle of all of that you came to see me you remember?”

“I remember,” she whispered.

“You came to see me and you spoke about how much you cared for Francesca. You told me stories of your time together and just having that insight into her life. A part of her life that I knew nothing about, it was... special. I will never forget that. I remember thinking that the Empress of, essentially, the world had come to see me and take care of me and look after me. Me. I remember wondering why. Why would this woman come. This powerful, intelligent, charming, beautiful, mercurial woman. Why would she come and see me? You told me that you wanted to think of me as your brother. You said that you had never had a brother and from everything that Francesca had told you, if you were to have a brother then you would want it to be someone like me.”

I realised that my face was wet. Sometimes it's like this when you're working at the big questions about emotions and memories. Your body decides that it knows the answer and provides it with the things that it thinks that you need. Things like tears, tight throats, sweat, adrenaline... Sometimes it is right and knows these things before even you do.

“So you told me to think of you as a sister. There were even decrees issued to say that I was your brother, along with Emma, Sam and Mark, without the blood bond so that there was no way that I would be in the line of succession.

“Thank the Flame for that by the way.

“Emma tells me that you're involved in planning my wedding. That they've arranged dates so that you can be there at the ceremony. That you've made suggestions and had input, the same way that a sister would. I understand that you, the other members of the Lodge and some others are organising Ariadne's hen party and the mind boggles as to what a dozen Sorceresses are going to do when they get together for some girl time.”

“Especially when said girls include a Dragon, a pair of Elves and a Vampire.” She smiled, I also noticed that her cheeks were wet as well.”

“And the Empress of the known world. Let's not forget that.”

“Let's not.”

We chuckled through the tears a bit. I sudden had a flash of Voorhis, Madame Yennefer, Lady Eilhart and the rest leaning up against the door with their ears plastered to the wood, trying to listen to what was going on inside like children outside their parent's bedrooms. I had the image and laughed which meant that I had to tell the Empress about the image. She laughed for a long time.

“Goddess Freddie but I can't remember laughing that much in a while.” There were a few more tears after that.

I noticed that I had become “Freddie” again. I felt as though we were getting to the heart of the matter. Time for some truth and honesty. Similar to the outbreak of temper that had started this entire thing off. I needed to stop thinking with my brain and start talking. It was not easy.

Nor should it be.

“The hardest thing The very hardest thing about the position that I find myself in now is that I don't.... How do I treat you like a sister? How do I mock you and tease you and pick on you? All of these things are things that, as a brother, I use to hide my affection for you. How do I do that? I have no idea. To me you are the figure of legend, the figure of story and I have to reconcile that with the woman in front of me with tears streaming down her face for a reason or reasons that I cannot imagine. It was so very hard for me to try and stop thinking of you as THE EMPRESS,” I threw my arms wide to emphasise it. “To not think of you as The Lion cub of Cintra during the second Continental war when I told my sister stories of your adventures in order to get her to sleep at night. How do I reconcile the two things together?

“I'm literally a nobody. I owe Kerrass everything. Without him, would I be sat here now? I doubt it. I started writing about Witchers as a way to make my name and. hopefully, as a way to meet girls.”

“Be careful what you wish for.” She commented.

“And how. But I had no ambition for anything else and yet, here I am. Screaming at an Empress. A woman who once told me to treat her like my sister. Ok, so truth now. Honesty?”

She nodded. “Yes please.”

“I was coming here anyway. Lord Voorhis brought me here with speed so that I had to leave half my goods behind and in doing so, I have properly made myself sick. He told me what you planned to do and why it was dangerous. I felt a chill then, a dagger of fear that was driven into my heart which was when I realised that I had managed to start thinking of you as a person rather than the Empress. That I had started to think of you as my sister. And I came here and yelled in anger. I came here and pleaded in fear.

“Everything I said to you is true. Everything I told you about what will happen if we lose you or if something happens to you. All of that is true. But it's not why I don't want you to try and step aboard that Ghost Ship.”

I took a deep breath. I felt the truth coming upon me then. I had not known it when I walked into the room and it had only come to me a few moments before.

“I want to see you at my wedding.” I told her. “I want to see you standing with Emma and Mark and Sam and Laurelen too. I want to meet my adopted nephews and nieces when you have them and I want to properly interrogate the man, or woman, that you choose to be yours to make sure that they deserves you. Because honestly, he won't. But most of all...”

I felt the tears and I closed my eyes. I remembered what Tulip had said about those that we have lost never really leaving us if we remember them properly.

“Most of all.” I sobbed. “I don't want to lose another sister. Please don't.... I miss her so much and I don't want to....”

At some point her hand had covered her mouth as the tears ran down her own face.

Then she hugged me. It did not help my sense of disconnection that I was hugging the Empress of the continent, despite our tears.

We sat there for quite a while. I didn't time it.

“Flame but I feel fucking awful.” I told her. She smirked and pulled away, wiping her tears on the back of her sleeve.

“You look awful.” She told me. “When was the last time you ate something?”

“Kerrass found me some bread earlier but beyond that... It was Novigrad I think.”

“The crossing was that tough?”

“The worst sea journey I've taken. Bar none. You know you're lucky?”

“Really.” She was walking back over towards the drinks table.

“Yeah. You can just teleport anywhere you like at any point.”

“True,” She poured herself a generous measure. “Cerys is not going to thank me for the amount we're drinking.”

“I'll find a way to make it up to her. You know, after I've spent a bunch of time in a nice, cool, quiet, dark room where no-one is going to bother me for a few...you know.... days.

She handed me a cup. “Drink this, it'll put hairs on your chest.”

“Oh good, I could do with another one.”

It was a simple joke but sometimes the simplest jokes are the best ones to use to get through to people. She laughed and pulled a chair over to sit opposite me, rolling the cup between her hands, staring down into it. I don't know what she saw there but she frowned at it. Then she shook herself, like a cat waking up after a snooze.

“So did I overhear that right? What brings you to Skellige? We were expecting you a few days ago.”

“Well, you can read about the delay after I've finished writing it up. Suffice to say that I met a Unicorn.”

“A real one or a fake?” I was surprised that she didn't seem that surprised.

“Pretty sure that it was a real one. Kerrass knows her quite well.”